Hi Meno, I’m in Izmir, which is a fair schlep down the road from Istanbul and, you might be crazy lol. Dunno, maybe I’ve watched too many horror movies with the same premise.
If I’m still around closer to Christmas maybe we’ll work something out.
I hope your grandson is playing a fishing game, and not single handedly depopulating a lake 
Arc, dear Arc,
You made me blush, which is impressive given the temperature at the moment. I nearly passed out.
The same for you and yours. I’ve missed the ilp of the 2000s too, it was a real blast.
Tab,
If we can’t learn to be smart, but must be already smart in order to learn, what is nature that it has endowed us with this already-smartness that cannot be approached/learned?
Nature must be already-smart.
i hear ya. im struggling between just walking away from them or being really mean to them. its a tough battle.
like in some cases you know that there is some decency inside the person and you tell yourself you can shake it out of them but a lot of times you really cant. but then you still want to shake them.
Yup. 
I dunno. Nature’s a bit of a broad term. Does nature have agency, can it ‘be’ anything?
Imagine walking across a snowfield on a windswept mountainside. In the lee of a rock you discover a 100% natural snowman, carved from a snowdrift by mischievous air currents and eddies, gusting over and around the rocks nearby.
The snowman blinks, wakes up, and says “Holy shit, look at all this nature.” Smart snowman. But it was formed by chance from the random interactions of forces and matter within the universal array of the possible and the probable within a finite time.
I’m not discounting that Nature could be an agent, could have created the smart snowman willfully, I’m just sticking with what seems consistant with every other observation I’ve made of the universe so far. I’ve never spoken with Nature.
Two 18 year olds inherit cars. The economy being what it is, these cars will be the only ones they’ll ever be able to own their entire lives. One inherits a really snazzy Mini. Outrageous orange with a smoky charcoal trim. Mini-owner drives really well, is considerate of other road users, reads the road conditions and alters their speed accordingly. Everyone likes the way they drive.
The other inherits a rather beaten up Ferrari. Drives like an asshole and honks the horn a lot. Everyone gives them the finger, and often.
In the city, where the speed limit is low and rigorously enforced, Mini gets from A to B efficiently and in the minimum time. Ferrari gets from A to B loudly, inefficiently and breeds chaos. Eventually though, Ferrari takes lessons from Mini, and chills the fuck out. They become equally model drivers.
One day, on the open road out in the boonies, the two cars pull up next to each other at a lonely traffic light, wave at each other through the wound-down windows of their cars.
Then the light goes green and the Ferrari leaves the Mini in the dust.
Not fair, but it is what it is.
You’re going to allow for a talking snowman & a green light in the boonies, but you’re not going to allow for breaking from the status quo—assuming it even is the status quo—?
No.
In this unlikely story, the snow man fires the starting gun, distracts the Ferrari who stops for lights in the boonies, & the Mini wins the race because this whole thing is made up.
There used to be a turtle and all kind to it/her/him? and the ice picked figure extracted it from the depths from which thought they could return from the great race, and indeed made up, they tried to return it.
But all knowing shouted indeed yes made up from practically nothing but then after that they treated it as would they with someone out of it, and placed it into a hybrrnative state. Be kind to it, for it’s out, the other said it’s in the state of cybernation, still others said nothing. Then they looked at each other strangely, realizing something there, but the harder they looked the less they saw, and one guy, the other guy the iceman, says nature may have not intended for a race like this to the finish to go on, but then they found on it a tiny note saying :”I can not quit by any means cause the state of the universe leading to an ultimate peace prevents me to do so, causing universal preturbiration, and whispers through the drifts of snow blowing into facing this inevideble eternally shining winter landscape reflecting the orange in the now bleached out carcass, that no matter what they had better now must realize that there ain’t no quitting here, for love has to triumph, and a total otherness must be presumed before the race has even began, he looked at the now crumbling map, and seen that it is no natural anomaly, but the poles have shifted them politically out of whack, and it would take 5 hours to insanely drive at legal speed to lunch in an outdoor cafe right around midnight, while drawing on an inscribed hookah with drawn out frightful inhale , while the globe so slowly fades into another new year.
Why not asks the snowman when among friends, arrived at another limited comprehension, how can travel such, where the industrial complex needs to connect the signs with both: the beginning magical participation , and subsequent failure, with the super intelligence of alternately produced contests toward the end?
Then when they all arrived, and the snowman and the iceman began to see the near impossibility of such encounter, they knew there is more to this then meets the eye, more and much more, as she danced that ancient movement requiring not only rapid movement and shifts of body, as the old ones used to, while the other, it may have been the snowman says that while in the Monterey Big Sur area smears the ocean by the towering mount of ethos, ha could feel her but must say something inert, useful, other than.
So where goeth thou next per chance, asks him her, why first from Greece to Turkey, then later to Africa next march, then either Hiroshima & Nagasaki to smell the fumes left over from the race before, or somewhere in South America probably Peru to climb misty pissue.
So they say you must have exincted toward total insolubility, and you guys are very near or simply in it without realizing, in the same sink hole that separates .
And then they go on and on talking about their families back home and how crazy it is for them to have imagined that this here whole thing is not real, and again they must isolate him ir other if will not go on leave or simply leave, and says she to all that , well stay if you must and study why the self learned man failed so utterly devastating,
Oh well, the price of nature’s doubly undermine of it’s apparent intent, blah, blah, blah
Yes you were right, and wrong at once oh how can it be at the edge of tomorrow
Then an uncinate curtain rings out a call : who are you? And it becomes the same after it melts down the snowman into the iceman comets for some cute coeds in Madison square garden to scrape their skates ,
Note to the unwary: ‘girls just gotta have fun
Welcome back my friend 
Glad to see you doing well. Get some philosophizing going at some point when you get the chance, or maybe a chess game =D>
Maybe I over-illustrated.
Ichthus, is it your pov. that everyone is born with an equal capacity for learning, for reasoning, for intellectual achievement? And that socio-cultural/experiential factors are the only variables that inhibit or promote that capacity?
Meno_, that is layers upon layers.
I’ll pick one image. The sinkhole that separates- Like sharing a getalong shirt on Inside Out day.
Fun while it lasted?
Meno.
Wow. I had to look up uncinate. Having a hooked shape.
I’m sorry. I didn’t really understand your reply.
Hey, HumAnlze, we’re you someone else before 2022? And thanks
Bob! I got that book, and it is a whopper. Thanks.
Just so we’re clear, I’m still not understanding the illustration.
but to answer your question… we are all selves because we have the basics for selfness…
… but within the basics is great variation of gifts… intellectual, spiritual, intuitional, physical, practical, so forth… we are meant to (we are individually whole when) we work as a unity with others… consensually.
There are many factors that inhibit or encourage our gifts. What is more important is that they are tuned to self=other and us=them. “Achieve” in line with the eternal, or you have achieved a siliconcastle for the tides.
Tab,
I regret you’r sorry, middle of night here fish are jumping, others sleep, can’t turn on lights, squinting, sorry for sorry, etc etc, maybe sorriest man in the world. But thanks for near invite, will let you know, but 5 hours travel time formidable , but who knows.
If it was meant to be. Is there a flight down there(from Constantinople) and how much? Never really seen anyone but a guy named Stuart here at ILP.
Anything is possible, and miracles abo und.
Yeah, but time on edge requires last to last, as confirmed to conform , as it is for ever , after.
Now a pause again would call it III for the sake of an original, desist
Ichthus - “Just so we’re clear, I’m still not understanding the illustration”
Okay. The snowman formed by wind was meant to show something seemingly complex can happen by chance ala evolution rather than nature. The talking snowman was the same principle applied to sentience and intelligence. Perhaps I was wrong to think you were holding up Nature as divine, rather than mundane.
The mini/ferrari was meant to illustrate that although both are cars, the ferrari is “innately” more powerful (or for the purposes of my argument two humans, one innately having more capacity for intelligence than the other) and though the ferrari driver can learn all the skills exemplified by the mini driver, the driver with the mini cannot match the raw power of the ferrari. ie. Someone with an high innate capacity for intelligence can learn to be socially and emotionally intelligent, but someone of a lower innate capacity cannot boost that initial deficit through learning, it is not something that can be learned. It would be like trying to learn to be taller.
Meno, flights are pretty cheap I think, and maybe about 40 minutes or so. Been a while since I flew via Istanbul. Pre pandemic.
For me it’s not so much the flying it’s the staying somewhere, plus getting horribly drunk. Can’t philosophize without a beer or seven to be honest.