Hume said that it was possible for events to not have causes. — Dusty of Sky

"We can never demonstrate the necessity of a cause to every new existence, without shewing at the same time the impossibility there is, that anything can ever begin to exist without some productive principle" (Treatise of Human Nature, Book1, Part 3, Section 3) — Dusty of Sky

As you can see, Hume didn't say anything of the sort. His thesis is that we can never demonstrate the existence of a cause. Again, Hume wrote about human understanding - how we come to know, whether we can know - not about the nature of things. He didn't actually have much to say about metaphysics and ontology, he was mainly concerned with epistemology.

We could guess that the initial method of reproduction was reproduction through cell division — Bitter Crank

There is an even more basic method of reproduction, and that is what a lot of origin of life research focuses on: self-replicating molecules, which are fascinating yet entirely "mechanical" (or in this case chemical) things. Going up the scale there are more complex self-replicating systems, which still don't require anything as complex and anthropomorphic as desires and intentions to work.

Origin of life (OOL) is a fascinating field of study. If you have an interest, there's lots of material that you can read, from short online articles to entire books.

Hume's beliefs about causation are antiquated. He didn't consider that there might actually exist natural law. — Relativist

On the contrary, Hume appeared to support the notion of a necessary connection between events in nature. All that he said about uncertainty and probability had to do with our knowledge of those connections, as others have pointed out.

Context and history do matter; the phrase "all men are created equal" is too ambiguous otherwise. You can speculate all day what it means to be "equal" without getting anywhere.

That's not to say that the framers of the American constitution had a very sharp and robust meaning in mind. But they were writing these words for a quite specific purpose and within a certain tradition of thought as regards natural human rights and the principles of governance that were well known at the time.

You don't think AI comes close to human intelligence? — Unseen

No. You don't even need to develop AI in order to have a computer that can solve certain problems as well as or better than people can - that's what calculating devices were developed for in the first place, starting with slide rules and mechanical adding machines and on to modern "non-intelligent" computer programs that do all sorts of calculations, data manipulations and decision-making orders of magnitude faster and better than people can. But none of them approach the complexity or the functionality of human intelligence.

Most AIs aren't even intended to emulate the way people think; the goal instead, as with "non-intelligent" programs, is to solve specific problems by any means. And even with the most advanced research programs that do have the goal of eventually creating something approaching human intelligence, there is no agreement as to whether they are on the right path.

The point I was making wasn't "haha, some people are blondes and some are brunettes, therefore inequality". I agree, that would be stupid. The question I was trying to raise was whether all people are of equal value. That's why I used the examples of Abraham Lincoln and the Sandy Hook shooter. — Dusty of Sky

It is stupid. Again, I have to ask, do you have any idea about the context and the history of the phrase? Any idea at all? If you don't then the obvious thing would be to find out before attempting to philosophize. Post the question in Questions if you don't know how to use Google.

Science doesn't even know what consciousness is or how it's produced, so science isn't much help. — Unseen

That's another glib statement that doesn't help the discussion. Sure, science doesn't know everything there is to know about consciousness, but who does? I don't think laymen or philosophers are more privileged than cognitive scientists in this respect.

Meanwhile you are asking a scientific question when you are wondering why consciousness evolved and what fitness advantages it might have offered. (Or rather you are not asking but already presuming to know the answer, without offering any reasons for it other than sheer incredulity.)

Meanwhile, we can see that AI is developing rapidly with no hint that intelligent devices have experiences of any sort, so it seems that consciousness isn't a function of intelligence. — Unseen

Your conclusion doesn't follow. What we fancifully call "artificial intelligence" does not come anywhere close to emulating human intelligence, so why would you expect it to have comparable experiences? And how would you know whether an AI is having a subjective experience? Just because we create it doesn't mean we know all about it.

Humans behave as evolutionary forces molded us, but being conscious of what we're doing, experiencing it, seems gratuitous. — Unseen

Just exactly WHY are humans (and higher animals as well) conscious at all? It seems totally unnecessary and seems to have no survival value, either. — Unseen

But is it really? How would you know without a detailed study of the role that conscious experiences play in our functioning now and in our evolutionary past? Such rhetorical questions are too glibly thrown around in philosophical discussions that are far removed from their proper scientific context. And it's not like scientists haven't taken a crack at answering them.

many old-timers tell me the hay-day of online forums was i the mid/late 90’s — I like sushi

As an old-timer, I concur.

You are still talking about "democracy" as if it was synonymous with "the best form of government." If you remove what makes democracy a democracy, you may or may not end up with a better form of government, but what you won't have is a democracy.

I have exactly NOT done what YOU ACCUSE me of which is blind prejudice. Nowhere have I said 'black people should not vote because they are black' or anything to the effect. — thedeadidea

Where have I done this?

You don't understand what "democracy" means, do you? As @StreetlightX points out, the sine qua non of democracy is that the governed have a say in how they are governed. You are saying, in essence, "I want democracy without all that democracy stuff." If you don't like democracy, then say so.

It's funny how words acquire such stable positive or negative connotations that people forget about their meaning and remember only the connotation. It's like someone saying "I am not a racist, I just hate niggers."

But would this argument have the same force if applied to, say, wheels? Would we be surprised - or not - that aliens also have wheels? And would this mean that wheels (the quintessential 'invention') are therefore discovered? Do wheels have 'objective reality'? — StreetlightX

For a long time there prevailed a sense of a metaphysical or a logical necessity of our mathematical constructs. Pythagoreans, for example, went so far as to put numbers at the center of their metaphysics. Closer to our time, logicists hoped to give traditional mathematics an a priori foundation. Recently though these notions have come under attack and have been significantly weakened if not altogether defeated. But there may be a sense in which the privileged status of certain mathematical structures can be recovered. If so, then when mathematicians describe those structures, it can be said that they are making a discovery, in the same sense in which explorers and scientists - and yes, inventors - make discoveries.

A wheel is a device that is well-suited to a very specific set of constraints: the constraints of physics, scale, local environment, etc. And when something that has such specific objective constraints is produced, we are justified in calling it a discovery. Likewise, evolution discovers adaptations (albeit through a blind process of trial and error) - it does not invent them in an act of pure creativity, because nearly all such inventions are doomed to fail in the face of objective environmental constraints.

So, if an intelligent culture completely independent from ours happens to create the same concepts out of the infinite quantity of possible logical games, that would be a strong indication that there is some meaning in these concepts that is not related to logical games. — Mephist

Surely, we don't need the example of another civilization independently "discovering" mathematics to assure ourselves of the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in describing the natural world (as Eugene Wigner famously put it)? I think our own example provides plenty of evidence of that. The question is, how far can we take that conclusion? When we develop mathematical theories and construct mathematical models to explain the regularities in our observations, do we thereby discover some objective truth about nature?

The popular wisdom says that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. Philosophy supplies a forceful counterargument to that sentiment: the best philosophy is all about asking good questions - the corollary of which is that there are inept, stupid questions. And yours is a prime example.

I suppose that if you came from a background where you never encountered the phrase "all people are created equal," and you then encountered it outside of any context, then your confusion would be understandable. But I am pretty sure that that is not the case with you. And so I enjoin you to think about that context, and think well next time before you post an new topic on this forum.

You should be careful about how you ask this question. What mathematics are we talking about? Viewed from the most general perspective, mathematics is a logical game. You set up some rules and then you use those rules to construct abstract structures and prove theorems about them. There is an infinite variability of such games; the enterprise as such does not dictate to you which rules you should select and what you should construct from them, so there is nothing preexisting for you to discover.

If, however, you are talking about the mathematics that we historically developed (and you are likely thinking about Euclidean geometry and 18th-early 20th century algebra, calculus and statistics, as that is what we mostly study at school and what is most widely used in the sciences), that is a very different question. You mention different axiomatizations of numbers, but you don't question the concept of a number itself, because it seems very natural and indispensable (at least to a contemporary person with some education) to think in terms of numbers. You can construct different axiomatizations of numbers in terms of more primitive concepts, such as sets, but the concept of a number is pretty much assumed beforehand: we know what properties we want that entity to have, we have the requirements. Likewise with lines and other geometrical entities.

But why did we choose numbers and geometrical objects for our mathematical exploration? Stepping back to an abstract remote once again, they are nothing but mathematical constructs - a drop in an infinite sea of such constructs. There is no a priori reason to favor those concepts over any other. So the reason will not be found in the abstract enterprise of mathematics, but in the world that we inhabit, and perhaps in the contingencies of our cognitive and cultural evolution. It is difficult to speculate about inhabitants of other planets, but if they are what we usually imagine them to be, that is to say, cognitively quite similar to us and, of course, sharing the same universe with us, then it is not unreasonable to suppose, as you did, that they would converge on the same or very similar concepts of numbers and geometrical objects as we did - and then, of course, they could not fail, as long as they have the mental capacity for it, to prove all the same theorems about those mathematical entities: how could they not if they have presupposed essentially the same properties?

The general idea here is that there is a world, and there is non-existence. Prior to ones birth into the world, one was in a state of non-existence, and was somehow plucked or pulled out of that state into being. — Inyenzi

It is an error in thought to mistake these worldly concepts for actual things or states (which is what we do when we talk about coming from nothing, or not existing in any sense prior to our birth). — Inyenzi

It is a mistake all right, but who actually makes that mistake? When I say that I did not exist prior to my birth, I do not necessarily commit myself to such a self-contradictory notion as existing in a state of nonexistence - that is just your uncharitable interpretation.

I think the OP is suggesting an argument against presentism (only that which exists now has genuine existence): It would not make sense to care about something that does not exist. Caring about something is having a relation with that thing. But if there exists are relation, how can one of its subjects not exist?

I am totally in favor of adding a hidden elite forum where only Jake can post, and henceforth restricting him to posting in that forum.

You chose an extremely unfortunate framing for your topic. For one thing, it falls victim to Cunningham's Law: as you can see, everyone who responds to your post focuses on its most obviously wrong or controversial aspect (no need to restate what that is). Plus, it's ostensibly about infinity, so a certain obsessive moron is going to have a field day (or more, depending on how long this thread floats on the front page).

But the more philosophically interesting and problematic issue with your OP has nothing to do with its physical premise. Rather, it is the unstated and unexamined assumption that personal identity supervenes on nothing other than the person's instantaneous physical substrate. At first glance, that might seem like a required assumption for a physicalist or a monist, but things aren't as straightforward as that. Consider forgery, for instance. Is there any difference between an original painting and a perfect replica? Or between a government-issued banknote and a perfectly executed fake? Chances are that, whatever your metaphysical commitments, you would still say that a replica is a replica and a forged note is a forged note - they are not even equivalent to the original, let alone being one and the same with the original.

That's because authenticity - and thus identity - of a painting or a banknote is more than its instantaneous physical properties; it is also its diachronic properties - its provenance (at least that's one possible interpretation). So why should we blithely assume that the sufficient conditions for being a particular person is having a particular physical composition associated with that person and nothing else? Note, I am not even denying this premise, I am just pointing out that it cannot be assumed without argument or even mention.

My advice to you is to shift focus away from the questionable framing, which is just plausible enough to distract people from the philosophical meat of the question. Consider how your predecessors have handled the matter. For example, you may want to look into the prodigious literature on Davidson's Swampman or various teleportation/replication thought experiments.

In other words, it's an objective moral goal of the universe ("ought") enforced by natural selection, which is a fact ("is"). Thus, from this point, the "ought" realm is bridged to the "is" realm. — Chris Liu

You say "in other words," but what you write then in no way follows from what came before. First, you make this bizarre attribution of moral agency to the universe without explaining how the universe could be a moral agent. Second, you do nothing to meet Hume's challenge - you just double down on your assertion that an ought follows from an is. And finally, you still have to make the leap from the alleged moral goal of the universe (?!) to that of an individual person living in that universe.

You are confusing being agnostic with being an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. The difference is that someone who is purely agnostic tends to take a neutral stand regarding whether or not God exists, because they do not want to take either side of the argument when they don't know either way. — Maureen

The original meaning of agnostic - a term coined by Henry "Darwin's Bulldog" Huxley - is precisely as you say: someone whose position is that they don't know (as opposed to gnostics who do). Of course, Huxley had a lot more to say on the subject than just repeating his thesis over and over and disparaging anyone who might disagree as stubborn, stupid or dishonest.

There has been an interest in "naturalizing" religion - explaining its emergence and perdurance (@Bitter Crank) as a natural phenomenon - going back at least to the late 19th century. Among the earliest and still continuing efforts are anthropological theories, especially ones that cast religion as a social adaptation, which is probably what your author tries to do as well. Later on cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists joined in.

At some point a split emerged between "adaptationists" - those who, like Harrari, explain religion as a useful adaptation - and "spandrelists" - those who view it as a byproduct of other developments, in itself adaptationally neutral at best. Among the latter are Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, Robert McCauley, E. T. Lawson, Harvey Whitehouse - most are cognitive scientists, although the best-known "spandrelists" happen to be evolutionary biologists who are not really experts in this particular field - Richard Dawkins, who went so far as to call religion "a virus of the mind" and Steven Gould, who offered the spandrel metaphor (an architectural element that is not usually build for its own sake).

Adaptationist theories are advanced by anthropologists and some evolutionary biologists, such as Joseph Bulbulia, Richard Sosis, D. S. Wilson. I find some of the anthropological research such as that of Sosis and Bulbulia, particularly interesting, since it does not just offer tendentious interpretations, but subjects the hypothesis to an empirical test.

A statement is either true or false. If it is true that 'there is no objective truth' then that seems like a contradiction. — curiousnewbie

"No statements are true" would be a self-contradictory statement. "There is no objective truth" or "No statements are objectively true" is not obviously self-contradictory, because the subject is qualified with "objectively" - whatever that means.

tl;dr: Why is that that not everyone is an agnostic like myself? Those people must be stubborn or stupid.

What is meant by "materialist"? Usually when people use that word they mean "causal reductionism". — i aM

There is no one thing that is meant by "materialism." "Materialism" is a rather dated term, more often used in derogative contexts nowadays, with "physicalism" and "naturalism" being more favored by proponents, but there is no one meaning for those terms either. If you set yourself the task of nailing down these terms once and for all, you will almost certainly fail. It's better to examine specific claims and positions than to argue over isms.

Darwin's discovery of evolution — Chris Liu

So every life should strive for ever better form of continuation in order to achieve the goal of perdure, forever. That's the only meaning of life, if any. — Chris Liu

What philosophical tradition these thoughts are related or belongs to?
Has anyone proposed similar ideas to the public? Who if yes?
What flaws do you see in this essay? — Chris Liu

Broadly speaking, as pointed out, what you are trying to do is to deduce the meaning of life from a description of its natural history and dynamics - an ought from an is. Hume argued persuasively that the is-ought gap is unbridgeable (this is sometimes referred to as Hume's law), and his argument has impressed many since, but not everyone. Some, like the pop-philosopher Sam Harris, simply don't know better, but as naturalistic philosophy has become more popular in the latter half of the 20th century there have been conscious attempts at eroding the walls between nature and those domains that have traditionally been thought to be separate: epistemology and axiology (value and ethics) - and, for that matter, eroding the walls between epistemology and axiology as well.

If you want to learn more about this, look into naturalized epistemology and ethics.

Thanks for the reply, my confusion arose after reading the following on the deductive reasoning page of wikipedia.
"Deductive reasoning goes in the same direction as that of the conditionals, and links premises with conclusions. If all premises are true, the terms are clear, and the rules of deductive logic are followed, then the conclusion reached is necessarily true". — Hume1739

"Necessarily" is used here informally, as an amplification. This should not be confused with necessity in modal logic (which does not figure in this context). All this means is that given the truth of the premises the conclusion of a valid argument cannot be anything but true. This doesn't make the conclusion unconditionally necessary - the italicized condition still applies.

I was responding directly to your own summary of your position. If you think that summary was inadequate, you could try again, instead of shooting the messenger.

Perhaps we can talk about 'the medical model' - behaviour understood as illness. — unenlightened

Perhaps. That would be an improvement over criticizing "the biological neuro-physical materialist objective approach" because it did not reduce all questions of medicine and psychology to simple, bite-sized physical explanations like bug, gene or chemical deficiency.

There is no bug, no gene, no chemical deficiency, no physical property at all that unequivocally marks out any psychological illness — unenlightened

the biological neuro-physical materialist objective approach has not been successful — unenlightened

So your complaint is that mental illnesses are not reducible to simple underlying physical causes? That's what makes psychology and psychiatry "unscientific" in your assessment?

So, I say all that to say is am I wrong for thinking this way meaning, are there some really disturbed individuals that tend to gravitate these types of discussion boards? — Anaxagoras

Your opening post doesn't necessarily describe "really disturbed individuals" - it applies to a much wider range of people who are not skilled at writing and expressing their thoughts, or just don't put much effort into their posts.

If I'm reading something that is hard to follow and the focus of what their writing is seems to go in all directions with no direction, I'd chalk this up as maybe the individual would not have a firm grip on the basics of writing. — Anaxagoras

Yes, exactly.

But as to your question, that has been my observation as well. To put it crudely, a forum with "philosophy" in its title tends to attract the loons in more than average numbers.

It's my best guess. — coolguy8472

Some people? What do you think? What are your reasons? Isn't this why you opened a discussion on a philosophy forum?

Double and triple hearsay is a persuasive enough topic for courts to at least discuss the issue before rejecting the idea of it being valid persuasive evidence. — coolguy8472

Look up what "hearsay" means. "Double hearsay" would be something like "My cousin heard from her hairdresser that X won the lottery." Your case is completely different.

My guess is that that in a lottery where the odds are 1 in a billion:
P(Person 1 won the lottery given they claimed "I won the lottery, my friend saw the ticket and can confirm") = 1%
P(Person 2 won the lottery given they claimed "I won the lottery, my friend saw the ticket and can confirm") = 1.01% — coolguy8472

Unless this really is a completely random guess, can you give any reason for your numbers, or for the difference between them? What does make the second uncorroborated claim more probable (however slightly) than the first uncorroborated claim?

You may think that you are supporting the OP by claiming that 2+2 equals 4 by definition, but you are actually doing the opposite. If it is nothing more than a definition, then it is just an arbitrary convention, like naming. 2+2 could just as soon equal 5, if we agreed to define it that way.

In a way, this is true. Of course, no one literally defines the result of 2+2 - it can be rather easily proven from the axioms of arithmetic - but the axioms of arithmetic are themselves conventional in the sense that there is no completely a priori justification for adopting them. Indeed, there are any number of alternative algebras, some of which have been found to be useful or at least interesting.

However, there must be a good reason for why conventional arithmetic is so important for us - and that could be a topic for a philosophical discussion, except that the OP doesn't seem to be interested in such a discussion.

Make of this what you will — tim wood

I am at a loss as to what to make of your thread. The topic that you coyly avoid naming is Is 2 + 2 = 4 universally true? - which, of course, poses the exact same question as you do here. What was the point of duplication?

Is this going to be another endless thread where loose terms like "absolute" are introduced but never explained, and then people proceed to talk past each other ad nauseum?

The nutters are out if force today. I blame Mercury in retrograde!

Not sure what this means. How to interpret ≡? — Ulrik

It just means equality here. I wrote ≡ to emphasize that the equality holds unconditionally.

For example, in the standard arithmetic p×1 = p for any p other than 0. This equality is axiomatic. But in an alternative algebra it could be axiomatically true that p×q = p for any p and q. In this algebra

a + (bc) = a + b = (a + b)(a + b)

The sad thing with Brexit is that, as with Trump in the US, a massively skewed opinion on this forum is not representative of opinions among the general public. UK citizens are still closely divided over the issue, and polarization is such as hasn't been seen on any issue in recent times - perhaps the closest comparison would be Jacobite conflicts three hundred years ago, except that divisions then were more in line with preexisting regional and religious divisions, whereas now the Brexit controversy is tearing apart colleagues, friends and families.

What I am suggesting is that "2+2=4" or any other correct mathematical expression like it where two expressions on opposite sides of an equals sign are in fact equal is perhaps regardable as an instance of this law. — petrichor

I think the question at issue is whether it is a fact. As others have explained, it doesn't have to be. It depends on your starting assumptions.

Let's define nothingness as the conjunctions of negations of any possibly or actually existing things: ~p1 & ~p2 & ~p3 & .... From that definition is follows trivially that no object can exist out of nothingness. — Pippen

So, dispensing with the unnecessary formalism, what you have stated is that if nothing can possibly exist, then there isn't a possibility of anything existing.

Color me impressed.