That's even worse.

An AI does not have a capacity to do deliberative thinking, but it exercises algorithm.

But it's not a physical thing. It's an idea. — Wayfarer

Something that has a shape and measurement is a physical thing.

It is finite and complete.

Education is the key to bring about this ideal state. However, this is not abstract education. It is a practice. So, one has to live the ideal, before it is real. In a phase, it is a “fake it until you make it” mentality. — Keith

Okay, so there is a system -- called education -- that could ensure the integrity of the family relationships. But this is a domino effect that we would like to happen without fail -- beginning with the parents, they must be educated enough so that the ritual is respected, but this chain could be broken and the spiraling down leads to the dysfunction.

Edit: I realize that I have been talking about the part of urban life when we could no longer aspire for the ideal.

I think we are meandering away from the question in the OP.

The question is:

Is there any physical basis for what constitutes a 'thing' or 'object'? — noAxioms

Object, of course, here, is the "thing" that philosophical theories have been trying to explain. And if the OP's definition of "object" is a philosophical one, the answer is yes.

Yes, there is a physical basis for what constitute a thing: it has to be finite, it is complete in our conception of it, and we have a coherent idea of what this thing is.
That is why we will never call the universe a thing.
We don't call consciousness or the mind a thing, but we call the brain a thing.
We call the planets, things.
We call the trees things.
We call a triangle a mathematical object.

So, in response to :

He argues that such objects, which existed long before humans and consciousness, demonstrate that the universe has a history that is not contingent on human observation. — Wayfarer

While this is tenable and I believe in this, this is not what's being asked.

Assume we die and have eternal life. Does this last for literally for *infinity*? If it does, then it never ends - *ever*. Where then will we be 1,000,000,000,000 years from now looking ahead with still an infinite amount of time ahead of us? — jasonm

If we have an eternal life, we wouldn't have a concept of time. We would not think in terms of "time". Right now, since we can't get outside of the sense of time, we are forced to hypothesize in relation to time. That's why you say it's a scary thought.

Both scenarios are like looking into an abyss that has no end. Exactly one of those possibilities must also be true. — jasonm

No. Some OPs are not coherently written. Yours is one, sorry. I'm not trying to be rude. I am trying to say to you that your proposal in the OP is misplaced because you're writing as a mortal human, with a limited amount of time.

For me, in Confusius’ philosophy, it seems to be human is to be social. — Keith

So, I take the Analects to be answering, how to be human (live meaningfully)? It is through 仁(ren) or social connection or love (in Empedocles sense). This passage says the first place we learn 仁(ren) is in the family. — Keith

Yes, that is what I take it to be. To be human is to be social -- but it starts within the family.

[1:6] The Master said: “A young man should serve his parents at home and be respectful to elders outside his home. He should be earnest and truthful, loving all, but become intimate with his innate good-heartedness. After doing this, if he has energy to spare, he can study literature and the arts.”

[Comment] In the above-mentioned essence-function view, the development of one's proper relationship with one's parents and others around her/him is fundamental in life. Only after these things are taken care of is it proper to go off and play at whatever one likes— even if this “play” involves the serious study of some art form. — A. Charles Muller, trans

It's all good.

However, the modern, or urban, sense of human interaction (our sense of interaction) is tied with psychology and its dysfunction. The sociological interpretation of human relationships must address the dysfunctional aspects of a family or whatever group one belongs to.

I have not gone through most of the analects, so I don't know the confucian suggestion on how to address the stresses within a relationship. For now, I see confusionism as the description of an ideal human being.

Remember that to be in a relationship with other people is to give up part of your individualistic tendencies. This is, I think, where the modern sense and the confucian sense have in common. But I believe most of us are not interested in the "ideal" as much as we are in how to live if we find that our situation is not the best, or worse, abusive.

Analects.

I want to start here:

[1:2] You Zi said: “There are few who have developed themselves filially and fraternally who enjoy offending their superiors. Those who do not enjoy offending superiors are never troublemakers. The noble man concerns himself with the fundamentals. Once the fundamentals are established, the proper way appears. Are not filial piety and obedience to elders fundamental to the actualization of fundamental human goodness?”

[Comment] The word ren 仁 is perhaps the most fundamental concept in Confucian thought. It has been translated into English as “benevolence,” “altruism,” “goodness”, “humaneness” etc. It is a difficult concept to translate because it doesn't really refer to any specific type of virtue or positive endowment, but refers to an inner capacity possessed by all human beings to do good, as human beings should. It is the quality that makes humans human, and not animals. In earlier iterations of this translation I have gone through various transitions: at first I attempted to use a unified English rendering throughout the text. I then pursued a strategy of leaving untranslated, as ren. Now I am presently leaning in the direction of translating the term variously, according to the context, but at present, remnants of all three strategies remain in the text. I intend to eventually sort this out.

In the Chinese “essence-function” 體用 paradigm, ren can be understood as the innate, unmanifest source of all kinds of manifestations of virtuosity: wisdom, filial piety, reverence, courtesy, love, sincerity, etc., all of which are aspects, or functions of ren. Through one's efforts at practicing at the function of ren, one may enhance and develop one's ren, until one may be called a noble man, or even better, a “humane person” 仁人. In the Analects, to be called a “humane person” by the Master is an extremely high evaluation, rarely acknowledged for anyone.

[1-3] 子曰。巧言令色、鮮矣仁。

[1:3] The Master said: “Someone who is eloquent and maintains a contrived smile is seldom considered to be a really good person. — A. Charles Muller translation

But that might mean Bob Ross would have to stop finding a suitable partner. So, the only way to meet a suitable person is to stop looking for her (him), because she (he) will show up unexpectedly.

Hmm... is this a paradox? — javi2541997

You missed the point. Obviously, he's dismayed at the artificiality of the infrastructure for finding suitable mates. And he's dismayed at the type of people that gather in such platform. Then why go there?

No -- the "suitable partner" is not going to show up unexpectedly. The connection, while he is spending time at some place, is the unexpected one.

Why would a robot sit and look at monitors when all of the information could be processed inside a small box? A robot pilot would still have the problem of time lapse because of observation/movement delay, whereas the incorporated AI would not have anywhere near as much.

Is it just because the want people to accept the fact that there might be robots around soon or is it just that they think people are stupid? — Sir2u

On point observation!

It's marketing, I guess. AI technology is very active in the stock market. The connection of representation to the humans, probably, is what made them depict AI like the picture. Driverless vehicles, press-button services, and click-buttons e-services are around already and doing well.

Who knows maybe they're to appeal to the children.

You'll find your partner unexpectedly.

I was just thinking that knowing I was doing something I didn't want to be doing, but being unable to stop, is very interesting. — Patterner

Impulse is just that. You're not really unaware of what you're about to do -- so this is not a reflex -- but you couldn't stop the momentum.

HOW TO LIVE A FULFILLING LIFE — Truth Seeker

I find it surprising that nowhere here it is mentioned the security of a permanent place to live. Fix this one first, then move on to other things.
Maslow's theory actually explains it -- satisfy the basic needs first, then aim for the self-fulfillment.

The concept of bona fide, which is sincere intention to be fair, open, and honest in interactions, still exist in society and human interactions? — Shawn

The Olympics?

hat's not the point I am attempting to make. Let me clarify, with the sentiments of Thrasymachus, all the way back to Ancient Greece, which Socrates could not handle and Plato had no answer, then we are still witnessing his thoughts played out in the chain of history. People say we might find salvation in technology; but, just take a look at what the atomic bomb did to end the axis of evil, and even then it was utilized as a demonstration of strength or power against a foe that was on the verge of defeat. — Shawn

Hah! You've done your homework!

There was, indeed, a fair and honest interaction in carrying out the ancient wars. Believe it or not, there were messengers who would rush to the enemy's camp to deliver the itinerary of the other army. The act of war was not played out using tricks and cunning. Instead, it's brute strength and perseverance. If your army had managed to reach the agreed upon venue, it was because your soldiers were fit and determined. Maybe you used some elephants to carry the goods. Maybe you carried enough food. Maybe you studied the terrain and avoided steep mountains in favor of long distance flats. Whatever it is, both camps never used the element of surprise to trap the enemy or catch them off-guard.

At the same time, I do not want to take such intelligence for granted. — Leontiskos

This is actually a startling point.
Because, yes!, there comes a time when our intelligence undergoes a "mutation". Here I meander to some wider perception. We might have actually already lost the ability to perceive the curvature of the earth (without the aid of a device). Some philosopher said that the reason for this is our insistence on having flatness, wide space, and no height, depth, and tall columns.
I know, too much to unpack here and at the moment I cannot fully explain this idea.

I have granted your wish! I have edited the original post to include a poll. — Truth Seeker

Thank you, Master. Now I have two more!

I am to argue here that despite the merits of the aforementioned arguments, pregnancy should not be classified as a disease. — Jussi Tennilä

The problem with calling pregnancy a disease is that the word has a negative connotation. Unless we're willing to accept a societal standard that pregnancy is something to be avoided, we can't use a word that indicates it is. — Hanover

I'm glad that there is some room to argue and try to make sense of the question.

The act of analogizing a pregnancy with a disease -- which actually, on paper, looks persuasive -- is similar to the act of analogizing going-through-puberty with mental illness. Both phases of life present a condition that could be called suffering within the afflicted person. (Let's not forget that a woman who is growing a baby in the womb would have to sacrifice a lot of her calcium deposits in her bones and teeth because that is the source of the baby's development).

But we would be horrified in believing that the body of a pregnant woman is undergoing an intense beating, the way we would be horrified at saying that the growing pubertal teen's mind is inhabited by a demon (unless of course they are mentally ill).

I'm just content that the human lexicon is intelligent. And by intelligent, I mean that there is no actual confusion in what we mean. What we have, instead, in moments like this OP, is the ability to entertain a foreign object that has managed to invade our organically grown knowledge.

Eternalism/Block Universe Theory: This theory suggests that all moments in time, past, present, and future, exist simultaneously. Time is viewed as a sort of block, where every event that has ever occurred or will occur already exists, similar to how all the frames of a movie exist on a film strip. — Truth Seeker

I would say the present and future exist simultaneously or rather, the future is necessarily co-existing with the present. And this is evidenced by certain conditions in the universe that must-exist-in-order-for-the-present to exist but which also would require some time in the future to decay, thereby ensuring that some future will exist also. The law of mass conservation ensures the future, for example.

I wish you've created a poll in your OP.

I would think a philosophical position would be more than simply having the acceptance of one's social circle.. — schopenhauer1

The philosophers write for those who already have faith in philosophy. Peer reviews, , publications in books, journals and pamphlets (the old-fashioned ways). The one that could be in a position to critique another's theory or hypothesis is no other than the philosopher himself.

Remember the BROADSHEET? It was purported that Descartes plastered one on the door of the apartment of one of his academic colleagues. (I'm not sure if I'm remembering it correctly that it was Descartes).

So yeah, I mean, thankfully for sites like this, we can participate in this philosophy circle if we have the interest strong enough to do justice to the writings of the masters.

I think it's arguable that material (whatever that material might have been thought to fundamentally be) was generally, and largely still is, understood to be the fundamental stuff that constitutes what exists. Think of Aristotle's hylomorphism. — Janus

And how does that fix the view of realism? Or naive realism? They could be realists who don't believe in the tangible quality of ultimate reality.

Materialism or non-physicalism has no bearing in their view of the stuff.

And yes prayer can be a reason for things being different, because ultimately God decides the fate of a person based on the goodness of her soul. — Johnnie

Not true. Sometimes, those who are wicked are shown the right way, too. And forgiven.

It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus

So it seems that no one in the forum is retaining anything at all. Have no one discussed the presocratics? They were the first to point out the "stuff" which makes up reality. Not the trees, not the animals, not the planets -- but "stuff".

For instance, suppose I’m scheduled for some medical operation and someone says “I’ll pray that you get well quickly.” Nice. But prayer is asking God for something. Do they mean to say that God had decided I would recover slowly but, because THEY are asking, God will speed up my recovery? Do they think they are that important? Isn’t that egotism? — Art48

You're not understanding it.
A prayer is asking for a pity. Who asks for a pittance? The lowly humans. This is their way of showing humility. As in, I am no one in this world who is asking for a pity that all goes well with [insert name here]'s condition.

No one asks a king (the highest command in the land of humans) for a pity -- humans ask a king for mercy. Know the difference.

:lol:

I say this too because I notice a tendency whereby when you question Wittgenstein's ideas, the only answer that seems to be legitimate to the majority who jump on these threads is to quote another line from Wittgenstein.. As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein. — schopenhauer1

It is HOW specifically Wittgenstein is often employed. — schopenhauer1

Have you tried to make a poll on how many here actually understands the writings of Wittgenstein?

If you're not into analytics, and find it unimportant in making a view in philosophy, then Wittgenstein's is not the proper philosophy for your purpose. I have not used Wittgenstein in any of my ideas in a long time. I have increasingly sympathized with Aristotle -- back to basics. Back to our origin. It's okay to use ordinary language (here it is Wittgenstein) in explaining the world.

You could easily look up that the first piece of writing in Greek predates the first in Chinese by some 200 years.
Farming villages are not enough to establish "civilisation". — Lionino

Your argument is still deficient. Not just farming, but look into written history.

China did not unify ahead of other civilized societies -- but theirs are considered one of the oldest civilizations, if not the oldest.

The random nature of the 'quantum leap' is what caused Einstein to say that he doesn't believe God plays dice. He always maintained that quantum theory must be incomplete, as a consequence of this and other aspects of it, but I think subsequent discoveries have not favoured his objections. — Wayfarer

I think the popular idea is that the elementary particles are lurking in a kind of fuzzy cloud, awaiting measurement; when in reality, they have no definite location, and therefore no definite existence, until they’re measured. Until then there are only degrees of probability, there are not definite particles in the realistic sense generally understood. — Wayfarer

You seem to agree with that idea because you, like others, think that each existence is self-contained or self-supporting. That each unit of reality is in itself responsible for its being. And we know that's not how the universe works. The Schrodinger's thought experiment of a cat in a box with all the other components is a way to convey this idea -- the cat is not just a cat in itself: there is an idea that we're trying to judge. Is it dead or alive? And we can't answer that question by naively saying it's breathing or not breathing. We have to take into consideration whether there is radioactivity, and if there is does it break the flask containing the poison which then kills the cat.

The big bang was not witnessed in itself -- it was theorized.

The expansion of the universe was observed not by actually seeing the edges expanding. But by observing the increasing distance of the other galaxies.

You're just focusing on different aspects of the Uncertainty problem. ↪Benj96
seems to be assuming that the world itself is fundamentally stochastic, while ↪L'éléphant
seems to be saying that the uncertainty is an observer problem. In truth, the answer to the "troubling" emotion caused by the random appearance of quantum phenomena may be to do as the quantum pioneers did : accept the inherent limitations of both observer and object. — Gnomon

That's fair. To me the concept of "random" is similar to the concept of "nothing" if we really want to get to the reality. The nothing was a filler of a gap in our observation. But, as I have said before, there has always been something: when theorists talk about the beginning of the universe, they really don't mean "from nothing".

Again, I am just looking for a specific country that is a good example of his theory. — Fermin

All countries have the social contract. It's in the name "country". Look up the definition.
Unincorporated nations no longer exist.

The appearance of randomness is created by the system which analyzes, it is not a feature of the thing being analyzed. That the analyzing system does not apprehend the patterns being searched for and produces the conclusion of "random", is an indication that the system is not properly formulated for the application it is put to. — Metaphysician Undercover

I couldn't have said it better.
Randomness is not a feature of the thing being analyzed.

People are often under the impression that China is this super old civilisation like Egypt and Babylon but in fact it is barely younger than Greece. — Lionino

Sources, please.

In a way, everything is pointless. — Truth Seeker

This is a very human thing to say.

The universe does not have a "point". Existence is a given. We don't question the given, only our place in the universe. And even that question is a narcissistic notion. I say, live for the arts, the appreciation of beauty.

I don't believe all information in the universe is predictable because of heisenbergs uncertainty principle. Sure 99% of things can be non random but even if the fundamental 1% is that throws a huge spanner in the works — Benj96

I don't agree with the use of random here. Stochastic phenomena are just simply not precise (this is the word I was looking for) as an analysis. Commonly, (and I say erroneously) it is the precision upon which we judge whether something is random, or in the case of Heisenberg, uncertain. But to further judge a phenomena as undetermined is really troubling.

If randomness is born from the very fundamentals of physics (which quantum physics seems to suggest), then even if everything from that point onwards is deterministic, explicable and predictable, the underlying origin is still random and unpredictable.

In that case randomness would appear to trump the determined and explicable, the patterned. If we cannot know exactly where particles will appear or annihilate but only give a statistical wave function of the distribution of possible locations, that would entail a trickle up effect of integral chaos within the system. — Benj96

No. No one says that "random" (here I am speaking your language) occurrences are unanalyzable. The difficulty we face is with precision. All data are analyzable, but not all data can be analyzed with precision. That is the difference.

I’m a volatile one, I admit. — Mikie

Great! Know thyself.

I mean, I did add that winking emoji. — Mikie

Hah! With you, nothing is certain even with the emoji. Just so you know.

Here is a short passage:

How does the atmosphere rotate with the Earth?

Robert Matthews

Asked by: Rod Lennox, Colchester

Bound to the Earth by gravity, most of the atmosphere spins along with it as a result of friction with the ground and the viscosity or ‘stickiness’ of the different layers of air above it.

Above 200km, however, the incredibly thin atmosphere actually spins faster than the Earth. The cause of this bizarre ‘super-rotation’ effect remains unclear, but has also been detected on Venus.

Just fucking with you. — Mikie

Fair enough.

Sorry. I missed it. I was busy in another thread trying to appease the random followers.

The sun rising is not an atmospheric stability nor climate stability phenomenon. Let's not conflate the cosmological with local planetary climate trends. — Benj96

Again you missed.

I said, "examples such as". My next statement is a generalization of the way that videos like this develops. I'll explain to you the misuse of randomness: We argue in favor of randomness whenever there is a phenomena that goes out of order, unexpected, or out of place. Randomness has become the crutch for anything that falls outside of intelligibility. Instead of just saying unintelligible, we say random. You know why we say it? Because we don't like to think that everything has an explanation, that everything has an origin. Ultimately we don't like to think that there's always something, rather than nothing. There was never a point in the universe, that the nothing existed. This is what is hard to comprehend.

Sorry, but simply saying there is nothing wrong with it is not an argument. — Mikie

Lol. I was making an opinion, not an argument. Taste is always an opinion, and everyone is entitled to one. :wink:

You may enjoy Rob Amster. — AmadeusD

Thanks. This is what I could find that's co-written by Rob Amster. Yes, I like listening to that bass. I couldn't find just the instrumental.