• How do I know I'm going to stay dead?
    By understanding the meaning of 'dead' you can know that once you die you're going to stay dead.
  • Individualism vs. Collectivism
    How does one go about balancing the needs of the individual vs. the collective? . . . — Nick Sousa

    What's the assumed problem? Collectives as well as individuals thrive on shared infrastructure, shared built environments, division of knowledge and labour, shared cultural or sports facilities, shared languages and so on. What is it that should be balanced? Tax rates?
  • the limits of science.
    Science, by its very definition, is radically limited in its scope of authority.

    Science can only report observations, but can never assume to know anything about when, what, where, and why. . . . The things of meaning in the life are outside the realm of science.     — taylordonbarrett

    So you find the authority of science offensive. Should we care about that?
  • Religious experience has rendered atheism null and void to me
    ↪mcdoodle

    I also find people like Dennett, Dawkins & Co. somewhat insensitive. But I don't think that their dismissal of religion is a dismissal of spiritual experiences. Neither religion nor art have a monopoly on spiritual experiences, they occur in many different domains: e.g. sports, sciences or in one's relation to other people, animals, or other things.
  • How Many Different Harms Can You Name?
    It's easy to name harms, harder to say whether they are actual. Some people find the mere presence or absence of others harmful, or a reality which exists independently of their beliefs or statements.
  • How would you describe consciousness?
    ↪Babbeus

    Your questioning of 'brain' is unwarranted, I write 'biological', recall, and brains are literally biological. You can't get more precise than that. Electronic devices are called "brains" metaphorically under the assumption that they would share behavioural or functional characteristics with biological brains. But that assumption is controversial, and the 'brains' in 'electronic brains' is far more imprecise since we don't know whether electronic devices could be conscious at all. We know, without doubt, that literal brains can be conscious.
  • How would you describe consciousness?
    Consciousness is a biological phenomenon, it arises from conditions of satisfaction such as a brain and things to be conscious of. So, I would describe it as such.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    The TRUE objectification of women occurs when you only see them as nothing more than a singular representation of some wider political group ("women"). . . . — dukkha
    That's a good point.

    One might add that when you see a woman you see the woman, not a portrait. Unless she's acting in a theatre she represents neither a portrayal of herself, nor of other women.

    Yet some people seem to think that all they see would be representational, or a social construction, and thus engage in political campaigns to re-construct it their way. Hence the rhetoric about objectification.
  • Why are we seeking enlightenment? What is it?
    ↪Benjamin Dovano


    During the historical era called The Enlightenment, which led to the industrial and scientific revolutions, more people began to rely on the explanatory power of reason than on traditions based on superstition, magical thinking, or other undeserved authorities. But the word Enlightenment is used in many different senses, and seeking all of them makes no sense.
  • An argument that an infinite past is impossible
    . . .(just like Spinal Tap's amps!) — apokrisis
    :D
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Nagase

    Libel is a legal term, recall, not a constitution of harm. Courts of law investigate whether a case of alleged libel is unlawful. You don't get to determine that libel would constitute harm.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Nagase

    Why do you rephrase what is open to read? I've said none of those things. Your argument is clearly unsound, and the above is an informal fallacy (loaded question).
  • Life without paradox
    ↪MonfortS26

    Clarity of thought is possible. Some have a talent for thinking or seeing things clearly, seemingly without much effort, while others need a lot of time, practice, or get stuck in meaningless loops of thought. One might also be good at thinking clearly in one context but lousy at it in other contexts. Most people think less clearly under the influence of alcohol or pot, others need coffee to be able to think at all, Allegedly Rudolph Carnap (the austrian philosopher) didn't drink coffee even because he didn't want it to mess with his mind.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    I don't see how I'm using your statement "selectively" in my argument. . . . — Nagase

    It is open to read in my post (e.g. "Granted that some.. portrayals are unfair or misleading...") that here I'm not primarily concerned with the right or wrong of portrayals but the relation in the assumption that one could be diminished or objectified by them. In social constructionism, for instance, it is assumed (incorrectly) that our reality would be constructed by they ways we portray it.

    You omit what is said in my post, and instead misuse one of it sentences in a related but different context, libel, which concerns the right and wrong of portrayals. The shift of context makes the sentence appear ironic or irrational, which seems to be your primary concern. But your argument isn't sound, just vengeful sophistry disguised as "logic".
  • Living with the noumenon
    I agree it's a limit for possible knowledge, but not that 'it is a thing stripped of properties'; that would be 'nothing'. — Wayfarer

    That's Kant's distinction between appearance and thing, a thing without apperances. Only mystics or those in favour of the two-worlds-interpretation of the distinction claim they'd know that the thing would be unknowable, yet somehow real in a world beyond our world.
  • Living with the noumenon
    . . Presumably. . . . . there is something existing beyond sensory experience and the intellect. . . — Punshhh
    Sure, what one thinks of exists beyond the thought, what one experiences exists beyond the experience; anything one points at exists beyond the finger :) But you don't get to point at the unpointable, speak of the unspeakable, think the unthinkable etc..

    We can speak, or think, of 'everything', 'every thing', 'anything' etc., so the very idea of something unspeakable is obviously false.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Nagase

    I don't deny the validity of your conclusion, but it ain't sound. It is selective and misleading, because my statement, which is selectively used in your argument, is not directed at those who find libel unfair but at those who believe that an unfair portrayal could somehow objectify or diminish what it portrays. It takes magical thinking, social constructionism, or the like, to believe that a mere utterance or depiction could diminish or objectify what it portrays. But one does not have to be a social constructionist to find portrayals unfair or draft libel laws against them.
  • Living with the noumenon
    What quandry? Kant's thing in itself is not a real thing but a definition of a limit for possible knowledge: i.e. a thing stripped of every property, so there is simply nothing left to know about it hence "impossible" to know in a trivial sense.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Nagase

    Really? Or is that just postmodern "irony"?
  • The Nature of The Individual's Responsibility to the Group or Society
    Some responsibilities come with formal agreements, such as contracts of employment or marriage. Others arise from informal agreements, often for practical reasons, such as being friendly in a shared environment where being unfriendly would provoke protest, punishment etc. But also from a personal point of view, as when one feels responsibility to care for one's friends, or lover; which might be mutually practical, or something which arises individually, regardless of agreement, in particular when you love somebody. A parent's responsibility for his or her children seems biologically motivated, whereas my responsibility for my cat arises from the fact that I like the bugger and her company.
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    ↪Hanover

    Porn is public, more now than ever before. Previous attempts to limit its presence are motivated by sex being considered taboo, not primarily by how women are portrayed (those attempts didnt 'exclude female friendly porn).
  • Media and the Objectification of Women
    The seditious rhetoric published by some feminists or gender theorists seems based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of description or portrayal.

    Granted that the way in which a person or group is publicly portrayed in media can be unfair or misleading. But unfair or misleading portrayals neither diminish nor objectify anything literally.

    Only social constructionists, or the like, would believe such nonsense; because for them there is no truth beyond our public interaction with words or pictures. As if injustice against women would be caused by how they're portrayed in public.

    But to show a breast, for instance, is a way to identify a portrayed person as a woman, like wide shoulders can identify men. Neither is thereby diminished into an object.
  • Inventing the Future
    A guaranteed income sufficient for shelter, food, and basic health care would be great. A modern civilized society should be able to afford it, like it can afford infrastructure for transportation which enables all to travel, meet, and generate businesses, culture, intellectual life, sports, crafts, inventions, sciences etc.
  • Is asceticism insulting?
    Is the ascetic justified in their actions? Can they really say that what they are doing is "better" than what everyone else is doing? — darthbarracuda

    I think you should question the insulted, not the ascetic.

    The ascetic has typically made a deliberate choice to live an ascetic life, and people live ascetic lives for many different reasons. For example, health issues, poverty, or beliefs about ecology or sustainability (e.g. urban minimalists, or back-to-nature romantics), or as part of some religious or spiritual ritual, to satisfy a curiosity on what it's like to live an ascetic life and so on.

    But to feel insulted seems less deliberate and more irrational, for the mere fact that you exist, or your demise even, can be insulting to an envious, strong-willed, childish or mad person.

    Moreover, we ought to assume that the ascetic are justified in their actions, or else we would violate the principle of charity, for no-one is deliberately irrational.
  • Is beauty in the object or in the eye of the observer? Or is it something else?
    Is beauty in the object or in the eye of the observer? . . . — Benjamin Dovano
    Like many other properties beauty is identified and re-identified in many different places. It has no location like an object, nor does it exist in the eye or brain of the observer. Beauty wouldn't exist without the experience, nor would it be experienced without objects or events possessing the property which causes the experience. This opens for the possibility that objects or events can possess beauty as a property without necessarily being experienced as beautiful. It could take a while, or some knowledge, before one discovers it.
  • Qualia
    you're in the realm of subjectivity, not objectivity. — Terrapin Station

    Subjectivity is a domain in the realm of objectivity.
  • Qualia
    . . . 'qualia' comprise an aspect of experience - it is the experience of seeing red. . . — Wayfarer

    What it's like to see red is the experience. It is hardly an aspect of itself but things that reflect or emit light.
  • Religious experience has rendered atheism null and void to me
    no amount of well-conceived and consistent argument would detract from that. I now know God exists. It's a certainty in my eyes. And there can be no alternate understanding for me any more. — colin

    That's not certainty. That's a single-minded assertion no matter what.

    In other words, you don't care about whether God exists or not, for if you did, then you would at least bother to investigate and argue for that your experience is, indeed, an experience of God, and not something else (e.g. a synaptic screw-up).
  • Would you like to live forever? If so, why ?
    Why do we see it so scary and terrifying though? — Benjamin Dovano
    Because it kills us ;) Far more scary and terrifying is the idea of birth.
  • Any purpose in seeking utopia?
    ↪Barry Etheridge

    To discuss its possibility under the assumption that it would be impossible is circular nonsense. Moreover, utopia is a place, not a state of mind. The possibility that one may argue or feel dissatisfied, in any place, has little to do with the possibility to find or construct a desirable place.

    A desirable place does not have to be desirable for everyone at the same time. It might take some experience, effort, some knowledge etc. to get to understand that it is desirable. A place which is desirable for most people who know and understand something about human nature and societies might qualify as utopia. A place in which no-one argues and everyone is perpetually satisfied is indeed no place, it does not exist. But utopia is a place, and possible as such to find or construct.
  • Any purpose in seeking utopia?
    Only under the false assumption that it would be impossible to find or construct a highly desirable place. I think utopia is both possible, and purposeful to seek.
  • Is there anything sacred in life?
    Perhaps secularization contains some seeds for its own destruction, or at least its minimization. — Bitter Crank

    In a secular society more people get to use their own will to power, which, I suppose, could make the secular society less stable as there might be more candidates for power than in a theocracy in which more people obey the will of some other power.
  • Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate. Really?
    No, my ears are sensitive!
  • Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate. Really?
    Dylan is great when he is silent :)
  • Is there anything sacred in life?
    ↪John

    Anagrammatic, or simply a mistake because the two words look alike :)

    I was also thinking about another word, 'sanctuary': it's longer than 'sacred' or 'scared', but its meaning seems closely related. For example, when sacred places or churches are used as sanctuaries by the scared, or when symbols, rituals, or simply thoughts about something sacred, say Mother Mary, are used as consolation.

    The scared seek inviolability and consolation by the sacred.
  • Is there anything sacred in life?
    ↪John

    Heh, yeah, scared and dyslexic :p
  • What should motivate political views?
    Someone who views inequality as wrong might understand why it matters to him when too much inequality makes a society more violent and insecure compared to societies in which people are more equal. Hence the moral or political view that inequality is wrong, which in turn motivates him and like minded to not only have the view but act and support public movements for the reduction of inequality.
  • Is there anything sacred in life?
    c) Money
    d) Fame
  • Is there anything sacred in life?
    ↪Benjamin Dovano

    It seems that there are at least two different senses in which the word 'scared' is used, and that there are at least two different answers to the question "What is sacred?".

    In one sense the word is used for things made sacred, such as cultural, religious, or political symbols. For example, famous art works, saints, flags. In another sense the word is used for things we discover as deserving our veneration regardless of whether it satisfies a function in some cultural, religious, or political context. For example, something beautiful, graceful, strong, skilfully made, good, or someone being alive after some terrible ordeal. For some people life, a starry sky, or a friend may deserve veneration, and they are then sacred, because of what they are, as ends in themselves, not means for something else. In this sense discovery is sacred like beauty is sacred.

    One and the same object may be sacred and deserve our veneration in one sense but not in the other. For example, a work of art might be sacred in some cultural tradition simply because it was made famous, yet without being sacred in the other sense, say, because it's neither good, beautiful nor skilfully made (the art world is full of people who believe that all would be a social construction). However, one may find a colour or a spiritual experience as sacred and deserving veneration regardless of whether anyone else finds it as such.
  • Can "life" have a "meaning"?
    ↪hypericin

    You can assign life any ""meaning"", but its true meanings are found, typically by living it. We assign words to the meanings we find, such as 'satisfaction', 'goodness', 'procreation', 'power', 'understanding' and so on.
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