:up:

But out of curiosity, if you had to give an argument for physicalism, what would you say? I guess you'd have to bypass the semantic issue.

And of course there's a difference between conversations among ancient rabbis versus what is actually used for instruction to a congregation. — BitconnectCarlos

Oh good. Did you know the same thing is true of Muslims?

We're told not to place our focus on it — BitconnectCarlos

That's good, because Jewish apocalypticism is basically about a deep, raging hatred of Gentiles. It's the kind of hatred that twists the soul. Rabbis would debate how long a Gentile needs to be tortured in Hades in order to make the universe right, while Jews sit at God's right hand in heaven and look down on the screaming. If you didn't know about this, I would strongly suggest you get a textbook on the Talmud to give you a better understanding of the history of your religion.

The point is, there are still Jewish apocalypticists: they're Orthodox Jews. In the same way, Islam and Christianity both have populations of believers who are waiting on the end of the world (Jews call it the World to Come) and their place in heaven.

For a long time, the Rabbis only believed Gentiles are tortured in Hades. They eventually decided it might be possible for a Jew to receive that kind of judgement. That was the beginning of a little healing. Oppression is a monster-maker. Being full of rage is a natural part of the process. Keep that in mind when you're trying to understand Hamas.

No, I need to go to synagogue today where I will surely hear my rabbi lecture about how to get to heaven and attain my 72 virgins. You know, because, the Hebrew Bible is just full of eschatology and certain knowledge of the afterlife. :roll: /s — BitconnectCarlos

Jewish eschatology pervades the Talmud. Do you even know what that is? :eyes:

Where is my error? I contend 1) that Islam, as reflected in the Quran and Hadiths, is more eschatological than Judaism and that 2) Arab Muslims have engaged in vast colonization. Both seem right to me. — BitconnectCarlos

Both are wrong. Both are issues that could easily be settled by referencing religion scholars and historians. I guess I don't understand why you need to debate it with someone rather than just look it up. I worked the last three days and I need to clean my house up. Can you just go to the local university library and get some books?

For the secular western mind - very foreign. Islam is more eschatological than Judaism. Eschatology is featured extensively in the Quran and the Hadiths unlike the Hebrew bible. Christ was heavily eschatological but that faded over time with Christianity. — BitconnectCarlos

Christian and Muslim eschatology both come from Jewish version. Apocalypticism exists in all three religions to this day, with Orthodox Jews manifesting it.

I'm just giving you a heads up here: you've expressed quite a few false opinions up to this point. I think you might be interested in looking into the history of the Abrahamic religions further. I think if you asked in the shoutbox, you'd get some good suggestions as to where to start.

Seems to me these kinds of views seem most usrful when you have something to contrast them against like dualism. — Apustimelogist

I think it would follow from this that physicalism is essentially monism, since there's no clear distinction between it and idealism, or Thales' theory that it's all water. So you agree with that?

I wonder if these views, rather than a metaphysical view, maybe could be seen as closer to like an loose grouping of scientific hypitheses about the absence of certain type of things like extra-mental things and against things like parapsychology, cryptozoology, pseudoscience (pseudoscience maybe just being more like a label applied to certain ideas that are considered false but are still discussed as true in some fringe communities). Arguably the same denouncement could be said applied to methods too. — Apustimelogist

I think the distinction comes out of the history of ideas: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Physicalism is specifically the antithesis of idealism, which once dominated the western world. Would you agree with that?

Can I be a metaphysical physicalist? At least until convinced I can’t be? — Mww

So it's just the grounding for your worldview, right? You don't need an argument for it.

I'm a methological physicalist – excluding 'non-physical' (i.e. stop-gap / fudge factor) concepts and entities from models, or explanations, of aspects of nature – who thinks 'metaphysical physicalism ' (re: SEP article) is superfluously reductive. — 180 Proof

:up:

He would not feel so all alone
When everybody must get stoned.

I'm not arguing that there is no motivation. I'm explaining that I have no motivation to be moral and am asking others why they have it given that there are no practical benefits to being moral. Is it entirely a matter of principle? — Michael

Yes, it's a matter of starting assumptions.

I am only arguing that if moral realism (specifically ethical non-naturalism) is correct then moral facts don't matter. — Michael

Right. And I agree with that. But when you went down the trail of motivation, you overlooked the fact that motivation is rooted in ideology. If you want to argue that there is no motivation, then you're immediately pitting yourself against ideologies that define moral in such a way that the motivation is built in, such as Stoicism, where goodness and health are the same pursuit, or Calvinism where the reason you were born is to glorify God, so it's your life's mission.

I don't care if I ought or ought not promote happiness or if I ought or ought not cause suffering. I'm going to promote happiness and not cause suffering either way. — Michael

So there are ideological contexts in which that doesn't make any sense. What you can do is invite others to accept your context. You aren't presenting an argument that requires that they do so.

For instance, a Calvinist will say the only reason for being moral is to glorify God. It doesn't guarantee you entrance into heaven, or anything else. You aren't presenting an argument that shows that it's wrong to look at things that way.

I'm not working under any cultural framework. I am assuming, for the sake of argument, that Moore's ethical non-naturalism is correct: that "this is immoral" doesn't mean "this causes suffering". As such, it isn't a truism that suffering is immoral. — Michael

You have to have some sort of framework or context for the usage, otherwise there isn't any meaning to your expression. You could just be a hard deflationist about it, so you think the word serves a social function, but otherwise has no meaning. Is that how you mean it? Or what?

I'm concerned about promoting happiness and reducing suffering. I don't care whether happiness or suffering is moral or not. — Michael

If you were a Roman stoic, you would say the latter is tied up in the former. What is the cultural framework within which you're using the word "moral?" You have to have some sort of context, otherwise it's language on holiday.

What is my motivation to be moral? — Michael

You might be concerned about whether your existence makes the world better or worse.

Did you happen to look at the graph on the Wikipedia page? Look at what happened to the temperature at the beginning of the
— frank

I did. — Merkwurdichliebe

What did you make of that?

You kind of sound like you're on acid.

Hi Frank. I am not sure whether you are being ironic or gullible — Agree-to-Disagree

That's the quintessential truth, Ruth.

Let me explain this again.

To complain about Hebrews from the Bronze Age, and then immediately bring up what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians is antisemitism. This is because all Jews are being lumped together and accused to being violent invaders.

That's what @BitconnectCarlos was doing, except he was doing it to Muslims.

Is there any part of that which seems confusing to you?

Yes. Muslims tended to kick ass. But since the 2nd generation Muslims were Iranians, @BitconnectCarlos was spouting bullshit about how Arab Muslims were great colonizers. They weren't. And complaining about Arab Muslims from 1200 freaking years ago adjacent to some bullshit about Hamas, gives the appearance of bigotry.

Let's complain about the Hebrew invasion of the "promised land" and then immediately talk about what we all know about what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. That bullshit would be anti-Semitism.

Dammit why can't anybody on this forum read the posts they're responding to? :groan:

I'm mainly familiar with AI art generation. It opens up new doors for creativity.

I haven't used the AI answer generator except I once asked it a question about Kierkegaard and its answer blew my mind. It was so insightful. How could it have come from an unconscious machine? It's crazy. Turing would be amazed.

The Persians still had to be conquered and made it worth their while to "convert" for this to even be a thing, that's all I'm saying. — schopenhauer1

I agree.

You cannot just skip over stuff because it's convenient for your argument. — schopenhauer1

I was just answering Bitconnect's claim that Arabs were great colonizers. That's not true. The great Muslim colonizers were Persian.

The whole reason the Middle East is Islamic is because Arabs formed a deadly army that was able to defeat the floundering empires — schopenhauer1

If you keep reading you'll find that within about a generation after the Arabs came out of Arabia, the Iranians took back their own territory, as Muslims. At that point, the Islamic leaders were all former Christians, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists. For the most part, Islam was spread in the Persian language.

It's just a historical fact that conversion to Islam was usually voluntary because of the social stability it provided.

Arab Muslims are far better colonizers than Jews will ever be. They are such good colonizers that the Western world takes it for granted that they must be the original inhabitants of the huge swaths of land they've conquered. The Islamic fundamentalism of Hamas is difficult for the West to wrap its mind around because the mentality is so foreign to us but it's encapsulated in the original 1988 Hamas charter: "Jihad is its path and *death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes."*

Maybe we're the ones in the wrong. What's this brief life on Earth compared with the eternal bliss of the one true Creator, Allah? Live for death, not for life. — BitconnectCarlos

This is mostly bullshit, though. For the most part, the geographical development of Islam was done by Persians, and it wasn't done violently. Islam was attractive because it served as merchant law throughout Central Asia.

And there's nothing foreign about Muslim extremism. Your bigotry stinks.

What is your opinion of AI (artificial intelligence)? — Agree-to-Disagree

I like it. What are your thoughts?

The IPCC talks about it quite a bit. Since it ended in the 1850s, it means North America has been warming up since then. It's yet another reason we use computer models instead of looking out the window to understand the climate.

Did you happen to look at the graph on the Wikipedia page? Look at what happened to the temperature at the beginning of the 21st Century.

The Little Ice Age

The proximal vector in the multiplexed zone retraces the inferior Fibonacci levels to localize on the scale of dimensional applications.

It should by now be clear that moral truths do not tell us about how the world is, but about how the world ought be. — Banno

Schopenhauer said the world is never going to be the way it ought to be because that's boring. Thus we have threads on every disaster of the day but none on that thing that turned out really well because everyone was moral as hell.

I'm just making the point that ultimately I'm having to trust other people's word for it, and I'm increasingly seeing problems within academia that make me unwilling to extend that trust. — Tzeentch

I'm guessing a lot of people are in this situation.

unless Frank is arguing that since @Hanover's actions are sometimes dubious, we should not pay attention to his opinions concerning ethics — Banno

No, that came out of my attempt to explain my view that ethics is mostly about looking backward and judging actions that have already happened.

There are all sorts of problems associated with trying to face the future correctly that I think are mostly covered by acting out of love for life, love for the human world, and seeing yourself in other people in a Sartre like way.

This thread touches on one of the problems with the forward facing approach.

It's frustrating dealing with the global scepticism at times. — unenlightened

Is this because you think we need a democratic initiative to find a solution, so skepticism diminishes our efforts?

Or is it just that skepticism itself is irritating? Or both?

Ok. So maybe it's not happening around the clock the way I thought it was.

What I wanted you to understand is that though you describe it as an adversarial setting, that alone victimizes some people. Some black people won't even go to legal aid to get help understanding the system because they've been taught that it won't help and it could make them a target. If a car insurance company does engage in bad faith, the playing field really isn't level. I'm sorry I accused you of being involved in that. I was wrong.

"Millions of Americans in the past few years have run into this experience: filing a health care insurance claim that once might have been paid immediately but instead is just as quickly denied. If the experience and the insurer’s explanation often seem arbitrary and absurd, that might be because companies appear increasingly likely to employ computer algorithms or people with little relevant experience to issue rapid-fire denials of claims — sometimes bundles at a time — without reviewing the patient’s medical chart. A job title at one company was “denial nurse.”" — PBS

Is the above giving incorrect information?

If you have this thought that people get in wrecks, go to their trusted family doctor, get a prescription, maybe get few rounds of physical therapy and then the insurance company tells them to fuck off, you are mistaken. Those don't decribe the claims that have driven this system. — Hanover

I understand what you're saying, and you've opened my eyes to what you have to contend with. But are you telling me it's not true that insurance companies try to avoid the obligations they've entered into with people by allowing things to play out in a courtroom? Are you saying there's nobody at the insurance company who is trained to deny claims and then see what happens? My experience is that you have to call them back and threaten to get a lawyer. Sometimes you have to get a lawyer to make them pay what they've contracted to pay (this is with health insurance). Tell me that this doesn't happen, and that this isn't part of what you do. But if you tell me that, could you also explain how you've avoided being involved in that?

Yes, the Dutch have had to deal with water for centuries. I live by the coast myself, so when the deluge comes I'll be the first to know about it. :lol: — Tzeentch

Ok. Send us telegram if you need buckets. :cool:

With such numbers we may as well assume the foetal position and wait for the water to take us. — Tzeentch

Aren't the Netherlands already under water?

Why haven't any of the beaches gotten smaller in the past 25 years from rising sea levels. I figured they would have closed many flooded beaches by this point. — Merkwurdichliebe

It is. I have a cousin who bought a condo in the 90s when the beach was about a 100 feet away. Now high tide comes right up to their back door, and that's even with sand dredging. Without the dredging, I think the condo would be gone. Rich people get most of the benefit from dredging. Because of the way the coast works, when they dredge for rich people, poor towns lose more coast. It's something about how the currents work.

What makes it complicated is that this has actually been happening for about 150 years. There are civil war forts where most of the fort is now under water. You can't identify single incidents like this, or look at a single graph, or look at this year's weather and decide what the climate is doing. The climate is much bigger than this year, or even the last 150 years. This is why they use super computers to sort out all the billions of variables.