but just to note that it is totalitarian societies that would do this kind of licensing or have licenses for reproduction. And I would emphasize that we are talking about a human right.

Licensing something that is a human right is very questionable in my view. Yet there are naturally many ways that authorities by law intervene in these things. — ssu

And keeping this in mind is an absolute tenet for anyone changing the fundamentals of society. For anything related to changing the very structures of a free society, it has to be functioning within a framework of that free society and its fundamental rights. In that, I agree.

This itself is a strawman argument here. Look at what Merriam-Webster defines a license:

License: a permission granted by competent authority to engage in a business or occupation or in an activity otherwise unlawful.

Hence the activity is unlawful if you don't have the license. Yet for some reason you argue that this has to be dealt with the action of licensing the activity, not by as at the present by authorities intervening if there are problems. — ssu

The strawman is in relation to this:

But you build you argument on the idea that the license has some arbitrary totalitarian principles for deciding who's going to be a parent or not. — Christoffer

Meaning, the difference between a totalitarian system behind the license might be that they create arbitrary rules that has nothing to do with child care. Comparing that to something that evaluate the needs of the child does not have a totalitarian component, since it takes the needs of the child as the source for evaluation, not a group in authority. The ones evaluating aren't deciding arbitrarily, they decide on the grounds of well being for a child. Much like adoption agencies aren't evaluating adoption parents on the grounds of the adoption agencies preferences, but instead through the perspective of the child's well being.

Great! Lets think about that. Because the human rights start usually with a fetus that is defined to be that human (hence you cannot have an abortion on the last month of the pregnancy). I'm all for the perspective of the child.

But how that license works here?

Well, any activity, occupation etc that we get the permission to do, with the licenses, is gotten before you start the activity. So do the license applicant apply for this reproduction-license when they think they will try to get a child or simply when the mother is pregnant?

Is it then either you get the license or a) the mother does an abortion or b) the newly born child is immediately whisked away when he or she is born? — ssu

The decision of going through with the pregnancy or not is based on the choice of the parents and primarily the mother. The choice in this matter should be excluded from the equation and license system. The evaluation has to do with the potential for harm and problems for the child in the specific family constellation that is being evaluated.

So, if two people plan to get a child, they need to first apply for this evaluation (or education as you can see in my answer to Echarmion) and go through with it. If they are evaluated to be in the A category, a potential harm for a child, they cannot go through with it, and if they do, that child will go into adoption. This can be changed by them seeking help to fix their situation until they can pass in to category B, which approves them as parents but with careful overview and support by social security agencies overlooking the care of the child.

If they already expect a child, and plan to keep it, but they fall under category A, then if the situation is proven unable to change into category B, they have to adopt.

Remember, these situations are the worst case situations, when there's a provable risk for harm to a child. Like if the parents have problems with alcoholism, violent tendencies, drug abuse or cannot express even the most basic understanding of a child's needs.

And as the vast majority of parents aren't so deadly for their children, the sound and logical system is to intervene in those cases when the child is in danger. Not by have a license system that makes reproduction without the license unlawful. — ssu

The system basically makes an evaluation of every child's situation rather than as an after thought. The problem is that the cases in which a child is spotted before harm is less than the cases when a child has already been harmed and that is the problem to be adressed.

And you should too, actually, because I'm not referring to fallacies here. — ssu

The fallacies are primarily the focus on placing the system into a totalitarian framework before the details of the system is evaluated. In essence, before it has been expanded into a system functioning within a society that respect human rights. The parameters matter as an authority who decides arbitrarily based on an invented ideological framework is not the same as an authority upholding the rights for someone (in this case the child or future child). The UN is in itself a form of authority, but it upholds the concept of human rights, so authority in itself does not equal something totalitarian, it's the details of their authority and their parameters and framework that matters and define if its totalitarian or not.

And here is the question, you shouldn't try to evade here: is for the protection of children the best way to response with authorities implementing a license-system?

I simply doubt that is not the most effective way, and it would cause resentment with others than me. — ssu

A fair question and I think the previous answer to Echarmion helps to give an alternative in the concept of a mandatory education. It's actually more close to that of a driver's license in that no one is blocking you from getting a driver's license, there's no authority that stops you getting the license. But you have to go through the mandatory education on child care in order to be allowed to parent a child. Through that, the most unfit parents will of course be spotted, those who absolutely cannot function as a parent and would either require constant support in the process, or be so unfit they would not be allowed to (those extreme cases)

A mandatory education also helps mitigate problems that arise out of parents with good intentions still doing it the wrong way and harming the child unintentionally.

Just education alone could mitigate a large chunk of the problems in society. Right now we have voluntary education available, but I think at least mandatory education would save a lot of children from harm. Especially together with much better support from social security authorities, with a case handler that's constantly there for support during the first years of the child's life.

Such a mandatory education still means that those who ignore it will face consequences, but it's more of a focus on verifying that parents have been exposed to relevant knowledge than anything else.

I'd say the relevant difference is that children up for adoption already exist, and since they cannot defend their interests, their guardian has to do it.

This is in contrast to licensing future parents, because their children do not exist. We thus cannot defend this scheme with reference to the interests of the child. — Echarmion

The adopted children that already exists are still evaluated under the idea of probability of harm in the future. It becomes an irrelevant factor if they exist or not because both focus on the probability of future harm. A child that isn't born yet will still be a child and we can still evaluate if a probable child will have probable harm or not. On top of that, such evaluation will dictate if a child that is already conceived and planned to be kept, will be in the hands of harm or well being. (See my answer to SSU with the categories of evaluation).

In essence, a child's existence or not should not be relevant if the evaluation is done on potential future harm in both situations.

The question then is whether the licensing itself has any relevant effect, or whether the actual effective part of the strategy is simply to provide parents with more support and childcare up to child protection services with more resources. — Echarmion

It is primarily to give more support for the sake of children's well being, but you still need to acquire a license and those who are obviously evaluated as having problems cannot get one. For instance, if the psychological evaluation finds that one of the parents or both have violence tendencies, that can block a license.

We can also propose a license system, either as included in this, or it's own, that's basically the same as a driver's license. Meaning, you need to go through education on child care, take tests and pass it in order to become a parent.

Such a system would never block anyone to become a parent, outside of the most extreme cases, and would just push for becoming more educated in the needs of a child.

At the moment we have education for parents, but it's voluntary... make it mandatory instead. You have to pass tests that makes sure you know what it means to take care of a child and you have everything available to you for educating in the matter.

Think of it as an education degree for parenting. It's not an advanced course, but its enough to ensure that everyone becoming a parent has a knowledge foundation that is necessary to at least mitigate the risk of malpractice. As it is right now, anyone can become a parent, regardless of knowledge of child care. Which means that even among the ones who got good intentions, they can absolutely traumatize a child anyway because of a lack of fundamental knowledge.

This knowledge is also part of the increasing child psychology knowledge base, so with continuing research and science on the subject, we will continue to fine tune the well being for all children, at least mitigate the unnecessary harm that comes out of the naive pretense that all people understand what it means to handle a child over the course of many years.

That means a lot of bad things might be happening as a matter of course that we don't even recognize as "bad parenting". — Echarmion

The number of people who are unknowing and ill-equipped to take care of a child is larger than people realize. Even people who seemingly had a good childhood, might not have had one, as we've seen in statistics from adult psychology addressing childhood traumas affecting adult lives.

A mandatory education for all parents can mitigate some of that and at the same time spot unseen patterns of bad parenting by interacting with parents undergoing this education.

As a comparison with getting an education for a driver's license, we do that in order to mitigate the risk of harm by enforcing knowledge upon the driver, but the driver can still drive like a stupid person, and yet, still never cause any damage. The likelihood that a parent cause harm to child through acting stupid is much higher than that of harm for a stupid driver. Therefor, education for parents is rather more important than education for a driver's license.

Mandatory education may therefor be even more important than introducing an A category of blocking people from becoming parents. I.e everyone can become a parent, but they have to go through mandatory education about child care.

But, for the totalitarians here wanting licenses for everything, creating a family is a human right. — ssu

It's important to not make a poisoning the well or strawman here. By calling others "totalitarian" you are labeling them and isn't engaging in the philosophical argument correctly.

Creating a family is a human right, yes. But you build you argument on the idea that the license has some arbitrary totalitarian principles for deciding who's going to be a parent or not. This is a strawman since the parameters of decision has to do with evaluating the possible damage onto the child by evaluating the competence of the parent. It can also be used to evaluate if special needs are required, and functions in conjunction with more transparency and support into the child's first years in life.

If you are going to bring in human rights, then we can easily apply Right to Health into the mix in the perspective of the child. The evaluation of a parents competence to take care of a child is in direct relation to Right to Health for the child. And since the license is there to evaluate any potential harm and probabilities of harm for a child, it's only there to make sure the child does not end up in harm, either physical or mentally.

So there you have it. Parenting, having children is something like driving a car and knowing the traffic signals. What is a family, motherhood (or fatherhood) else than a danger to an infant? — ssu

This is a dishonest interpretation of the analogy by way of strawman.

The difference is that we do have those processes in society when things don't work. — ssu

This is exactly the issue that this concept tries to remedy or mitigate. When things don't work, past tense.

But usually only after they don't work. A license is different. License here is something universal: everybody has to have one. Without one, you are breaking the law. Besides, getting a license you have to prove to an authority, a total stranger, that you do have the qualifications of having children. And the idea is with a certain objective as it's a license: you pose a threat otherwise. Great approach towards your citizenry. — ssu

Why is this an issue? As a comparison, we do this for adoption parents. They have to prove to social services and go through a psychological evaluation before being approved to adopt a child. Care to explain the difference?

And lastly, assume you would have this extremely stupid arrangement of a license — ssu

"Poisoning the well" fallacy.

for something that is extremely natural and is considered a human right. — ssu

Natural does not equal anything, you are basically making the very definition of a "appeal to nature" fallacy. It is quite natural to kill someone, happens all the time in nature and in our civilisation, especially in our pre-civilized "natural" state.

A human right is, as I mentioned, also Right to Health, which, through the perspective of the child, means they have the right not to be mistreated by their parents or put in harms way by incompetence of their childcare abilities.

We also have other limiting conditions for many of the human rights Freedom of speech is considered a human right, but we still have limitations on it, making it illegal with defamation or libel, or freedom of privacy when people conduct crimes to the level that warrants surveillance in order to catch their criminal activity.

This means that human rights cannot be taken at face value, they're not binary laws, even if they're to be considered a foundation on which we build society. If you apply an absolutist approach to these rights, they (the articles) start to come into conflict with each other rather instantly.

They are principles and we form society so that they respect them but we also apply parameters that sometime limits them in order to protect other rights. Basically, some of the rights are valued higher than others. For instance, the right to health is much more foundational than the right to be a parent. In the very instance that a parent's childcare hurts a child, the right to health trumps the right to be a parent and we remove the child from these parents. It's by this logic that we can apply a license in order to make sure children does not come to harm in the first place.

Instead of doing these slippery slope fallacies you're doing when arguing against this type of parent license, look at what the intent and practice is supposed to be. Taking human rights into account, it guides the praxis of the system.

We are trying to adhere to the human right to health for the child while respecting the human right of becoming a parent. Ok, what does that mean for this type of license? Basically, it's not some totalitarian system with arbitrary rules that some people in power apply to what is needed to become a parent. It is a system of evaluating what level of competence a parent have for taking care of a child in order to defend the right to health for the child.

Will a child be at risk of damage to their physical health, mental health, and quality of life due to potential mishandling of the responsibility of childcare, based on the child's needs rooted in child psychology, their right for freedom and general well being?

These are the parameters for such a license. An evaluation of the quality of childcare that the parents are able to apply.

Basically, it's there to spot the parents who are unfit to apply the correct childcare to uphold the value of right to health for the child. With such a license and with consequent support from social security agencies evaluating the well being of the child during their first years, we can A) Find out who are very unfit for being parents, meaning, at high risk of physical damage, mental damage or both, denying them license, B) Granting a license for parents who score low having a closer support from social securities to be able to spot potential problems much faster and C) Approved and considered fit for parenting with voluntary and more open support if needed (for instance those times the environment becomes a danger without the parents being the cause).

Then what you think would be the result when statistics would show that (for example) minorities don't get the license as often as the majority does? Or that (what is actually quite likely) that poor people don't get it as often as the rich? — ssu

Level of income does not have anything to do with it. Actually, the amount of rich people being unfit as parents can be higher, as they neglect responsibilities in favor of careers and their own ego. I've witnessed families who are considered rich or upper middle class with parents who got children as "tokens", as "props" for their life styles rather than actually caring for the child. Once again you are making a slippery slope instead of engaging with the topic honestly here. You assume that statistics are some lone factor in how we evaluate and approve licenses, without there ever being a stated factor.

The approval is on a case to case basis.

And with the categories, most poor people would probably end up in category B or C, meaning higher support to make sure the child has the necessary well being regardless of environmental factors or income levels.

That there might be a higher case number of category A among poor people can be the result of the higher level of violence within families pressured by socioeconomic issues. But then again, what are you arguing for here? That the right to be a parent trumps the right to health for the child? And we also know that among these cases, the damage in childhood that children goes through, most likely rolls out the carpet for them falling into crime, addiction and other mental health problems in the future, continuing a cycle of violence for these socioeconomic groups. Blocking the downright dangerous or damaging family constellations for children while granting more category B licenses, automatically position support closer to those in need and mitigates the cycle of poverty that easily spirals out of control. Such measures can actually be part in improving the conditions of a socioeconomic group or location, reducing future crimes and building up a foundation of healthy children who grow up in far better conditions and with far better possibilities for the future.

That is a logical outcome of such a system.

Great job with your licensing on social cohesion then, because people won't think that the objective is to "protect children", but protect the society from "children of certain people". Yep, surely is quite totalitarian. — ssu

You ignore the fact that such a license system is applied as a complex system with parameters that avoids a binary and arbitrary foundation. Just like every other system in society, it isn't just "a license", but a webb of practices based around the license.

Your engagement with the concepts quickly hits a wall with the fallacy hasty generalization and fallacy of composition and basically looks like this: "because totalitarian governments have such limitations, therefore any type of limitation is totalitarian".

You are making these fallacies based on your own extreme fantasies about what such a system would imply, without engaging with the concept in a philosophical manner. No it's not automatically totalitarian, that is an emotional reaction to the concept and not an honest overview of its potential when built out as an actual infrastructure.

Changing society like proposed isn't a simplified "install license, end problems", it's large infrastructural change for social care and child care systems. It would require that a lot more tax is spent on the well being of children, out of the concept of deterministic strategies to prevent harm towards children, prevent childhood trauma and prevent future crimes that can result in such experiences for children.

Such change in resources throughout society mitigate much the needs for "after the fact" handling of crime and childhood traumas and harm. Some people with childhood trauma and damage have had their whole life being affected by it. Even among considered "balanced and psychologically healthy" adults there are childhood traumas that affect their ability to form relationships or function well in social structures.

To value right to parenting over right to health is rather backwards.

It seems near (if not totally impossible) to conceive of a reality where there is no consciousness at any point in it's development. — Benj96

Why? Isn't this just a form of human arrogance, positioning us (because we are conscious), at some center of the stage, when nothing points to our existence being in any shape or form required for the processes of the universe to develop.

Think of a universe that only had the ability to become 100 000 years old from the initial point of inflation. No life was able to form and matter and energy just became then fizzled out into nothing. With just a few changes to the composition of our universe, that would have happened because it is mathematically possible, and no life would have experienced it.

A universe that is birthed, plays out and ends all the while no one was, is, nor ever will be there to be aware of it, seems, ultimately pointless. — Benj96

So? There's nothing pointing towards out current universe having any point to it whatsoever. Just because you feel something requires a point, doesn't mean it has one. It's like when someone dies in a freak accident and people cry out "why did this happen!?" There's no why, only how.

How important should we make consciousness when we consider physics? This is sort of a hard problem question of a nuanced format. — Benj96

Not really, I'd just say that there's no importance to consciousness in regards to physics, other than physics playing a part in figuring out consciousness.

Bearing in mind that the components in physics formulas are artificial constructs made to standardise relationships for example time (seconds are invented) or space (Meters are again invented). All units of measure are invented not implicit to the universe. Therefore it seems all measurements take observation and the choices of the observer as "standard" in order to frame anything in relationships to one another. — Benj96

This is just backwards. We first observe relations and then invent concepts to measure those relations. The genius of our language of math is that it is an extrapolation of reality into a logical framework. If you have 2 apples, we've assigned a symbol and meaning to the fact there are 2 objects of the same kind in front of us. The rest of math is a similar extrapolation and that's why we talk about "discovering math" or "discovering" something in theoretical physics. There's no choice that influence reality here, math is a slave to reality and a way for us to decode reality.

The universe comes first, we're just an afterthought. When the afterthought thinks they are the prime reason and origin of everything, they become arrogant towards existence and reality.

I am wondering if there should be some type of thing you would have to complete to be able to have kids. — Lexa

This is already a thesis by Hugh LaFollette from 1980

Licensing Parents

I support the idea for a license for parents on the simple fact that we have licenses for every other thing in society that has potential to harm someone if not practiced correctly. Like a driver's license. So why should parents be able to take care of a defenseless child with the enormous risk of putting that child in harm due to malpractice, incompetents or downright bad intentions? And the objections that this would produce a totalitarian society is just not valid since we have licenses, certificate and similar for a number of other things that prevents us in society. The criticism based on "totalitarian society" primarily seems more like a slippery slope fallacy than actually engaging with the concept honestly. An inability to see the nuanced process of establishing a functioning practice of it in society, and instead just have an emotional reaction based on the idea that the majority of parents are always good for children. Fact is, the number of childhood traumas and experiences that children go though when growing up are wide spread and the amount of depression, anxiety and other mental health problems that people have as adults correlate to many of these childhood experiences. That we shouldn't have some form of education and licensing in order to make sure children receives the best possible conditions growing up seems like a no brainer really. But people are egotistical and cannot move on from the fact that their role as a parent is not some holy position that is more important than their child.

The children's well being is more important than the parent's ego and identity as a parent. If that cannot be agreed upon, then the fokus is not on the child's well being and instead on fulfilling the "achievement" of becoming a parent. In a time when the ego and individual have been bloated into more importance than the community and others, "achievements" are the norm for identity and there's no wonder that modern parents view their role as a parent more important than the well being and experience of their child, regardless of whether or not they understand this fact.

I'd like to challenge the idea that this strategy for society can only exist in a totalitarian society. That conclusion does not take into account the number of licenses and certificates that we already have and it makes a straw man out of the concept by not even engaging with the process of building a framework around the concept as a practical process in society. We already have something of this process for adoption agencies doing a thorough review of the adoption parents before they are allowed to adopt a child. So why would such parents be treated in that way and not parents getting their own child? What is the difference?

Causality does not apply at the quantum mechanical level. Whether it applies at higher aggregate levels is still up for debate. — EricH

Nothing needs to be framed in the context of this discussion. Nothing that remotely connects to free will, i.e our awareness of breaking causality through choice. Quantum randomness can break causality, it might even influence large scale events as a butterfly effect, but quantum randomness as influence on our choices would only boil down to another cause, a dice throw cause for an outcome. We aren't aware of it and it doesn't make us consciously aware of breaking from causality in choices. In conclusion, we can map out almost any choice by their causal connections in our reality and when we can't, the cause is randomness.

In the context of this discussion all we have to define our behavior in society, nature and the universe is determinism. All choices have a prior cause, all behaviors have a prior cause and the more we can understand and map out, the better we would be able to predict harmful actions and crimes in society. Therefore, a larger focus on researching preventative measures to make sure people don't end up in harm or violence should be part of a better society.

It reminds me of a concept in which society has the ability to look into the future. Let's say it's possible to change the now to influence the future. Most science fiction around such concepts works something like Minority Report, getting the criminals before the act. But what if we used such technology to just map out the consequences of people's situations so we can see if they end up in crime. It would drastically reduce crime in society by just changing small conditions in people's childhood. Only a fraction, maybe almost an insignificant number would end up in serious crime.

What is this "rock solid evidence," that no form of freedom can exist? — Count Timothy von Icarus

For starters all evidence in physics and biology. There's nothing that breaks causality and entropy in our physical reality and saying that our consciousness is somehow disconnected from this have no rational ground whatsoever. If all evidence in science points to everything, including us, in our universe being part of a deterministic causality, then the burden of proof lies on the one claiming free will exist to prove that our will is in fact detached from this fundamental system. More recently you can also check out the recent works of Robert Sapolsky who drives a very good argument based on his scientific research.

Consider this: If volition has "no effect" on behavior, i.e., it is epiphenomenal, then why did natural selection select for consciousness in the first place? If consciousness and the sensation of volition has absolutely no effect on behavioral outputs, it shouldn't be selected for. It must be an accidental byproduct. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Natural selection didn't break determinism. Just because a system becomes self-governing doesn't mean that it's parts have free will. The decisions of individuals is the result of a complex webb of causalities which leads to their decisions. All of your decisions have a cause, all your emotions have a cause, everything comes from the composition of your biology and from the environmental impact on you. Add to that all the social interactions that shape your world view, your opinions, your emotions, your culture, your politics, everything. Free will is a fundamental illusion that we can never break free from because if we did it would create such a fundamental dissonance in our cognitive function that it would drive us insane. Luckily, we do not seem able to do so. However, we can understand the concept, just like we can understand general relativity. We cannot experience time dilation, but we can understand it and measure it. Just like we can take the concept of causality and map out some parts that would help us figure out a better system of preventative actions in society to help people not ending up in harms way.

The problem is that you posit the free will cart before the horse. All processes in our brain, in our biology, in our nature and universe, are deterministic. Even if you were to include quantum randomness and how it might effect decisions in the brain, that still does not count as free will, only that there's a set of random dice throws that effect the brain. I.e randomness being just another cause. Free will requires a conscious will to do something without a previous cause and this does not exist, there is no evidence for it and there's a lot of evidence against it in everything from logical reasoning to factual evidence in physics and our biology.

There is a problem here. Reductive physicalism's claims hinge on the proposition that "there is no strong emergence in physics", that all physical change is reducible facts about "elementary" particles. This is an increasingly unpopular opinion in the sciences for several reasons.

-First, because it clashes with processed based, computational views of physics.

-Second, because it would seem to make it impossible to explain how first person experience emerges (an example of strong emergence), unless you embrace panpsychism, the view that everything, including atoms, have some level of phenomenal awareness.

-Third, you have things like Paul Davies' proof, which claim to show that the information processing capabilities of the universe are incapable of accounting for the complexity biological life unless there is strong emergence (and thus data compression). The last of these is probably the least convincing, the second probably the most.


Aside from that, the argument that "people only prefer compatibalism because it makes them feel better," makes no sense if epiphenomenalism is true. If our feelings and volitions have absolutely zero influence over our behavior, then it is simply a mistake to say that anyone's feelings have anything to do with what they do or say about anything. Feelings would be merely an accident caused by certain arrangements of feelingless molecules. But of course, such psychological arguments are so compelling precisely because they make sense in causal explanations, which should lead us to question epiphenominalism. So to, there is the problem of why our feelings should seem to sync up so very well with our actions if they actually have no direct causal interaction.

Further, the whole argument for epiphenominalism and fatalism from smallism ("everything can be explained in terms of atoms") crashes to the ground if we allow strong emergence to account for first person subjective experience. If some strong emergence is possible, why delimit it to only epiphenomnal consciousness and not a consciousness that affects behavior (in which case, organisms can be self-determining to varying degrees). Certainly, a consciousness that has causal effects makes more sense it terms for it having been widely selected for across complex organism.

Which is all to say, I find compatibalism more convincing because the evidence for strong emergence seems far more convincing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I actually fail to see the throughline in this reasoning as an argument against determinism? Regardless of processes, you must prove that you can will something without a previous cause. A process that produces a random emotion or random state of mind does not equal free will, it equals just another cause. For us to have free will, it requires us being able to choose without influence of anything. But everything you choose is the consequence of a prior cause, always.

Name a choice that people can make that does not have any prior cause.

...who had breeched the barricades and police lines and after pipe bombs had been found. Are you suggesting the actions of these undermanned police wasn't warranted? Do you think it was a legal act to break into the Capitol? — Relativist

It seems he's defending an attempt to overthrow the government and disregard democracy in order to whitewash Trump's connection to it.

Has this thread basically become his constant attempts at defending Trump and everyone else trying to get the discussion down to earth?

if compatibilism is the case, the problem you bring up is not a problem. But I do find compatibilism more compelling in general, due to problems in libertarian theories that probably aren't relevant here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I focus on what type of determinism that is most likely. Compatibilism is in my view a sign of human arrogance over the forces of reality. A form of rejection of being under control of determinism because it just feels scary or bad. So I can only adhere to the type of determinism that science supports and which seem most rationally logic for us to function by. Therefor I can't view any "if"s as anything more than wildly more speculative than that which is the most rational foundation for the argument.

Certainly crime prevention is a worthy goal. I see problems with making it the primary goal though. It seems to run into the problem Hegel points out, of treating other people as animals to be trained into proper behavior, rather than people to be lifted upwards into self-determining freedom. That is, if people are to be free, they have a right to be punished, to pay the costs of restoring right if they violate it. This doesn't mean that crime prevention, recidivism, etc. can't be part of the policy conversation, it just means that merely shaping human behavior towards ideal outcomes cannot ground justice. — Count Timothy von Icarus

All of this assumes free will exists. Self-determining freedom is faulty concept in a deterministic reality, it's a fantasy. That doesn't mean that we should treat people as animals to be trained, it's not about that. It's about making sure that people does not get damaged into becoming people perpetuating that cycle of violence as more damage.

The problem with using old philosophical concepts like this is that we have much better understanding of determinism today and how non-existent free will actually is. So whenever a concept is used that relies on a fundamentally required of truth free will in people, it falls flat. Without such free will, all we have is causality and forming society based on mitigating harm, violence and damage through preventing causal chains leading to it, is a much more rational strategy as a foundation for a better society.

So crime prevention should be the major focus, prevention of harm should be the main focus. The possible problem with such strategies however, is that people's analysis for what is harmful usually backfires. Like, banning rock music and video games in the 80s and 90s because people thought that was the causal chain to violence, while ignoring other social and societal issues that were in fact the real causes for it. Focusing on prevention of harm and violence requires deep studies with scientific rigor and hard evidence for the causal roots of events. And that's where the focus should be.

I agree on the policy ideas, but wouldn't this be beneficial even if there is some sort of acausal libertarian free will? Obviously, people's upbringing greatly effects their adult behaviors vis-a-vis criminality. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes it would, because it is a sound strategy to prevent harm. The problem is that because society is basically built on free will being true, all preventative actions to improve society are hard to fund and get support among the people.

The biggest problem installing such measures in society and focusing society from a retribution society to a preventative society is that people rarely see what has been prevented. We don't have news papers listing headlines of "Extra extra! Today, this would probably have happened if this thing hadn't been done 20 years ago! Extra Extra". No, what we see in newspapers are headlines after the fact, which triggers people's cry for justice and revenge. It's tangible and easy for people to get behind punishment, but hard to get them to support preventative measures.

If we however could inform society of how powerful determinism really is in forming and shaping our decisions, then it would be easier for people to be aware of the causality that shapes society.

This goes far beyond merely crime, it has to do with every part of society, everywhere, globally.

This doesn't entail retributivism. In a mature moral relationship, there must be "space for persons to confess their moral shortcomings and forgive the shortcomings of others." This could result in something along the lines of restorative justice.

"The goal of restorative justice is to bring together those most affected by the criminal act—the offender, the victim, and community members—in a nonadversarial process to encourage offender accountability and meet the needs of the victims to repair the harms resulting from the crime." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which is a much better strategy overall. It also follows along the line of preventative measures to make sure cycles of violence breaks and the balance restored is the balance against such cycle of violence.

Of course, there are crimes that are unable to be solved in this way. Only crimes in which the criminals are conscientious of what they've done can be restored through it. But people don't realize how often these types of strategies actually works, because most of the time the public is blinded by vengeance.

There has to be strategies for when crimes do happen. That cannot be prevented. So, restorative justice in itself is part of preventative measures since it takes into account cycles of violence.

then it would be the case that religion's authority when it comes to morality simply stems from the fact that the religion has been the recipient of divine revelations, special knowledge. Why does this revelation have authority? Because, presumably, God knows much more than us about the world, and has a better handle on justice. No "universal meaning" is required. It can be the same sort of "objective morality" we could create, just better formulated. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which is why it's easy to see how these things were such a powerful tool of power over the people. But morality needs to make sense. It needs to have an internal logic that makes sense for us humans. Some can argue that many religions have their morality rooted in iterative justice over thousands of generations, but the problem is that since religion has gone in and out as a tool of power, it's infected by things that makes it rather irrelevant as a source for moral thinking. We then have to go back to the drawing board and find actual rationality as a foundation rather than just relying on arbitrary axioms found in these religious teachings and texts.

I broadly agree with what you are saying in this post. However, I think that saying that our human nature functions as a universal objective fact, ignores genetic variation between individuals. Isn't it more realistic to think that we have human natures with, similarities, but also differences? How do you avoid creating a Procrustean bed? — wonderer1

Our "human nature" is mainly referring to those similarities. As I described we can look for similarities that exists between cultures, that transcends what we invent for ourselves in isolation.

But we also need to put those similarities in the context of history. For instance, what societies and social interactions have produced the longest form of well being for people? Because if we only look at similarities, we can find a lot of murder and war, or we can find a lot of bad strategies of handling a society that are returning throughout history. The key is, do they lead to the downfall of a society, or do they keep existing because of positive contribution? Finding what sticks and produce positive outcomes in forms like well being for the people and individuals in that society, helps inform what similarities to look for.

In order to avoid a Procrustean bed, is rather simple. Looking for the similarities between people and what gives them a sense of well being, using history as a guide to rule out bad practices and short term illusions, will inform what is in fact functioning for people as humans. The idea that we have individuality that differs so much that it produces an individuality in our biology does not exist, therefore we are more similar than we are different and the differences that exist can co-exist with such a moral system.

But the system requires the deterministic principle of society, i.e that we form society based on better understanding of the deterministic factors that form us. Because someone can find well being in killing others, it could even spiral into group think. And such thoughts can arise out of emotional needs for retribution of past events. In a deterministic society we control and mitigate the mechanisms that would produce such spirals out of control and with analysis of history on what frame of mind that can exist long term and what would collapse society, we can spot why it is immoral to produce such well being through killings.

The core tenets of it then has to do with deterministic-based society, historical studies and statistical studies on human nature and psychology. All of these combined can produce principles to live by.

What outliers and differences would not fit into that moral strategy? It's basically taking the categorical imperatives and places them in a context of human emotions aimed towards the well being of both individuals and the collective. Because most of the moral problems that exist comes from the inability to fuze Utilitarianism with Kantian ethics.

So if we form some basic tenets out of the similarities between all humans (biology) that are true regardless of cultures or historically different ideas, we have a core foundation to work from. Then use historical studies to form knowledge about what societal and sociological strategies give the most utilitarian gain for society and which last the longest (i.e does not give rise to revolutions or suppressions of some people), and frame all of it within the context of a deterministic-based society in which we focus on preventative measures and making sure causes for problems have more focus than mitigation of consequences. Both in justice and development of societal functions.

I do not propose that I have the solution here, but I believe that this is a path to explore if we are to combine aspects of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics into a better functioning system than what we have today.

This only seems to be a problem if we assume:
A. "Uncaused" libertarian free will is the only type of freedom that can make justice coherent; and
B. Punishment can't function as primarily a means of "restoring right," by taking away the benefits of immoral action (deterrence can be important too).

I don't see any problem here as far as compatibalist free will is concerned though. I don't even think "uncaused" free will ends up being coherent. If we're "freely choosing" an act then who we are "determines our action." — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are assuming a compatibilist free will as truth here. I'm saying there's no such thing. The "will to align yourself to your internal logic" which is a core part of the compatibilist framework is in itself a deterministic feature. There is no free will to being with.

But even in a purely deterministic framework, there's still room for incarcerations as preventative actions to block someone from continuing doing harm. However, people seem unable to imagine a world in which we put most effort into preventative measures, meaning, we understand that years of causes determines a person's actions and that if we make sure that our entire society aligns towards making sure all inhabitants do not end up in such causality, then we have mitigated the majority of crimes in society. The only ones who then end up in prison are those outliers with brain injuries changing their psychology, or who even though there are mitigating actions still fall between the cracks.

The problem is that people use the template of how things are in society today to inform how they process the idea of the justice system in a society more aligned by determinism as a guiding principle. So they fall into compatibilism rather than imagine the actual type of society that functions within a deterministic principle. So far, not even the best functioning societies in the world have a system that functions primarily along the lines of deterministic principles. Mostly because it is such a fundamental change to everything around us.

For instance, in a deterministically guided society we would need much better social securities. Especially for parents and their kids. Parents would need to also raise their children as part of a community and be more transparent about their family life since any problems for children need to be addressed before they manifest as psychological damage. Families would probably have a supporter who constantly council their day to day challenges and there would need to be a greater openness among neighbors and people living close to them since everyone to some degree would be part in the upbringing of the children. This prevents parents who are unfit as parents to damage their children's childhood creating a cause for their later lives in which such causes can manifest as everything from depression, anxiety, social problems, or criminal activity, murder etc.

This is just a small example of a fundamental change to society and as you can see it would require such extreme changes to our culture that it quickly begins to feel like an impossible change to society. How would we even begin to manifest such a radical change?

For starters, the idea of justice as retribution or "evening the balance" needs to be removed. While feelings of retribution are strong emotions and hard to overcome, the justice system needs to stop focusing on punishment. "Restoring the balance" can still lead to emotions of retributions and a causality chain that leads to vengeance rather than preventing harm from spiraling out of control. But when looking closely at what makes someone getting stuck in a constant loop of crime, it generally has to do with how society is unable to stop that loop or prevent it. People who continue on the track of criminal activity generally do so because there's nothing that helps them out of it, constantly creating new causes towards new crimes based on an already caused state of mind that holds them within this loop. If everything in society, from childhood to adulthood, exists to prevent people from ending up there, then the amount of criminals would drastically drop and the causality loop of retribution lowers, i.e the dominos of action, reaction, action reaction breaks or lowers so significantly that the only ones in need of incarcerations would be those who for some reason, brain injury or tremendous bad luck, still end up unable to get unstuck from a psychology of crime.

Generally, this is a total reform of society but it points towards a significant problem with how society is today. Most nations aren't even close to a form of society that actually improves the lives of its citizens. The US for instance, has a punishment mindset and such a fantasy ideal around "free will" that it's constantly on the edge of collapse. With people getting stuck in loops of crime, addiction, failing cities, homelessness and so on and so on. "Free will" is a curse onto the nation that intellectually hasn't grown to understand the significance of determinism as a guiding principle. We can probably blame "free market capitalism" for most of this since "free market" works under the guidance of the "free will" ideal. And therefore it informs how the entire system works and how it breaks people.

But there is no evidence of any meaning in the universe? Surely this has to be qualified. I find things meaningful all the time. I assume other people do to. I am in the universe; so are other people. Thus, the universe seems to produce heaps of meaning and values. The fact that an idea of some sort of universal, Platonic meaning that floats free of the world doesn't cash out doesn't mean the universe lacks meaning.

Nor is meaning precluded from being objective. A sign on a store that says "closed" objectively means the store isn't open. That is, the sign has the same meaning to anyone who can read it, even when correcting for differences between multiple perspectives. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you are mixing everything together here and produce unnecessary complexity in your understanding of my argument. Me saying "there's no meaning in the universe" relates to an objective meaning that we find in the universe. I.e something like, "there's a purpose and meaning from a "creator" who guides the universe". That is a no. That we form meaning for ourselves is the exact type of meaning that is possible. But you need to understand the specifics of my argument, otherwise you start to spin away from my actual argument into definitions of "meaning" that's not the point of my argument.

I'm focusing on the lack of universal meanings, objective meanings. Those are not what you find for yourself, those are objective. The specifics here are essential for the argument I made. And the argument had to do with how most people try to find some objective morality, i.e some rules that exist as universal truths. Such objective rules require a meaning that exists as a universal truth, a universal meaning.

Without it, which is what everything points towards, there can be no universal truths about morality other than what can be extrapolated out of what actually exists.

And my argument therefor has to do with how the only possible objective guiding principle for morality that is possible, is our biology, the science of human nature. That commonalities between cultures that have a basis in our biology, is the only objective realm we can move within if we want to find some universal moral laws for ourselves. From those we can extrapolate more complex principles as variables for a functioning society.

But we cannot use meaning that we form for ourselves as a foundation for morality because then we start to invent rules out of preferences that aren't objective. If someone find meaning in killing others due to a cause in their childhood producing such psychology, then oops, his morality is valid because his sense of meaning needs to be accounted for if we just use individual sense of meaning as a foundation.

No, we have to see what is objective and universal, our biology and human nature that has statistical significance between cultures. Those inform us of objective truths about human nature and those need to be the foundation for some extrapolated moral principles. What harms us, what gives as pleasure, what keeps us healthy and so on. Built together with deterministic principles, it would inform a society that functions better aligned with what we can defines as "good morals" and help create a good life.

I just don't agree that the parts above preclude "objective" moral standards. Somehow, the term "objective" has morphed from being the opposite of "subjective," into meaning "in itself," "noumenal," or "true." But "objective" just means "the view with biases removed." It makes no sense to talk about objectivity in a context where subjectivity is impossible or irrelevant. An objective moral statement is just one made without the biases relative to a given subject or set of subjects. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, this is a problem of language. Objective can mean externally objective, i.e objective in the eye of the universe, cold dead objectivity. But can also mean internally objective, i.e internal to us humans, unbiased as a concept to us or objective as a truth measurable by our standards.

The things that does not exist is some universal objective (externally objective) morality that has some fundamental roots in the universe external to us humans. This is the type of morals that religion tries to impose on us.

Then we have ever changing subjective morals, which comes out of the idea that there's no morality, that there's no rule book at all. This is what many think is the result out of the Nietzschean "god is dead" and the nihilism that comes out of it.

Then there's the human objective morality (internally objective), that can be extrapolated out of our biology and measurable human nature. What defines our well being and happiness for ourselves and as social creatures. And this is the only morality in which we can find hints at human universal morality, because it is based on objective facts of human nature.

An objective moral statement is just one made without the biases relative to a given subject or set of subjects. — Count Timothy von Icarus

An objective moral statement still requires a foundation for how it relates to human nature. You can say that Kant's categorical imperatives are objective moral statements since they are without biases, but they still produce problems in certain moral situations. Therefore you can't make objective moral statements just based on being unbiased towards the subjects, you need a foundational principle, and it's this foundation I'm arguing for being rooted in our biology.

Socially constructed things can be observed objectively. Good and bad are no more amorphous than terms like "Japanese" or "punk rock," and we can certainly talk about the extent to which a piece of furniture or a TV show shows "Japanese-style/influence," or which rock bands are "more punk." Is it hard to operationalize such measurements? Sure. But objective facts remain, e.g. "the Moody Blues are less punk than the Ramones or the Clash." People can disagree with that statement; that doesn't make it not objective. People can also disagree about the atomic weight of lithium or the shape of the Earth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

"Good" and "bad" can still be guided by commonalties between humans regardless of culture. And there has to be a guiding principle underneath. There's no point in discussing what is more punk or not if you don't have anything informing what "punk" actually is in the first place. Or you cannot debate the atomic weight of lithium if you don't have a definition of what "atom" means.

This is the problem with how people relate to the topic of morality. They form arguments about moral ideas without any common ground to extrapolate those morals from. And this is what I'm talking about.

If people use some external objective meaning in the universe as a guide for morality, then they are most likely forming opinions on morality out of "the voice of God" or some arbitrary invention in religion or spirituality since there isn't any such external objective meaning, and even if there was it is unknowable and therefore useless. This form is extremely prone to corruption through individuals own ideals and ideas about what they want the world to be like. So there is no common ground here.

If people instead form subjective morals based on the idea that there is no moral rulebook, i.e the nihilistic route, then that negates moral thinking all together. While possible to be true, do we want such a nihilistic world? Few do, therefore the need for moral principles remain and we are actually driven biologically away from such nihilism (which studies show in that we gravitate towards social structures and well being rather than being able to uphold any ideals of purely nihilistic existence). Nihilism can therefor not be a common ground either.

The only common ground that actually functions as a universal objective fact, is our biology, our human nature. This has to be the foundational ground that guides our moral thinking, from which we extrapolate ideas about what is "good" and "bad" for us. Only by accepting this can we start to form principles to live by and moral principles to be discussed about.

And it's this that I mean is measurable. Our human nature exists as an objective thing, and it is measurable. Anything disregarding this foundation when trying to produce moral facts fails.

How does this work? We can have a universal definition of "life" right? But life is tied to the being of living organisms. Or a universal definition of parasitism, yet that too is tied to the existence of organisms.

Is the problem that "good and bad" are part of first person experience? Or is it that they are only relative to living things? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Morality is a human invented concept that tries to set parameters around behavior and define what is good or bad for us. It can't be universal since you cannot apply morality to a rock floating in space. We can universalize a moral set of rules for humans if we can invent something that applies to all and make sense, which is what moral philosophy is all about. Kant came close, but obviously even that has flaws and the most popular battle in morality is between his categorical imperatives and utilitarianism.

I suggest that we can only define universal morality for humans based on the biology we have and what our biology needs. Our biology programs us to be self-preserving, but we also want to preserve the group. Just like we have our sex drive closely linked to the continuation of our species, so can we find more high level drives of social values that would inform us on what universalized morality we can agree on. For that we can study history, study how people in all cultures value and view actions between people and discover what commonalities exist regardless of invented concepts of religion or other biases.

But none of that can be applied between species. Aliens can only have a moral system that functions based on their biology, we cannot apply our morals to them, regardless of what Star Trek says.

Sure, but likewise, if universal morals can be found, then the universe isn't meaningless. Which one are we in? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it's a mistake to link universal meaning to morality. If we find out that there's some integral meaning to the universe and our existence, so what? It does not justify the pain or endorse the pleasure's of past human lives. We can only define morality based on what we have and what we are in the state we are in as existence now. If there was some underlying meaning to the universe that somehow should inform our morals, we would have known those morals by now, because what's the point of some universal meaning if it does not inform that meaning to the inhabitants of the universe so that the morals can be lived by? And no, religion does not inform that because we have too many conflicting religions through history and we have too much evidence of how people skew religious scripture to fit their own purposes to conclude that religion is an invention by people to explain the unexplainable in a time without science.

The only logical "meaning" the universe could have linked to morality was if this was a simulation to form morality. Meaning, all of this, this universe is a simulation with the intent to iterate towards a perfect morality system. That the lack of guidance and meaninglessness of the universe is part of the system, so that the species itself (us), form morality through trial and error. But even if that sci-fi fantasy were true it would still boil down to us having to do all the legwork and we're back at square one trying to figure out a solid moral system for all humans.

I'm not sure what determinism has to do with it. It seems to me that, for a universe to embody meaning and values, it must be determined to do so in some ways. Else how is the meaning in the universe instantiated except by chance? But I can't think of any reason why determinism should preclude universal values. We can imagine a mad scientist who spawns a toy universe that starts off chaotic yet which has a universal tendencies that will cause it to spawn life and then maximize the well being of those life forms. That would seem to be a case of values being instantiated through determinism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Determinism makes our sense of justice problematic. Much our moral thinking relies on ideas of free will. But without free will we have to understand that no one acts without a previous cause, that many people are set on rails towards immoral actions due to reasons of nature and nurture. So without free will we end up with a moral system that relies and focuses on preventing people from doing immoral actions rather than punishment for their actions.

When it comes to universal ideas of meaning, there's nothing that points to any meaning in the universe and therefore we can't talk about morality through such concepts before proving any meaning existing there in the first place. My point is that we don't have to solve those questions since there's a big chance that, due to everything we know about the universe, there's no meaning whatsoever, and because of this we're wasting time as a species trying to verify our morality out of ideas that are irrelevant to our experience here and now. To form a moral system that can be universalized between humans, we need to look at our actual experience and lives that we have, all that we are right now, nothing else. And through that we can extrapolate biological hints towards a functioning moral system for all humans. We just can't apply that to other species in the universe and forming a moral system between species has more to do with accepting the parameters of each species morality system rather than trying to impose our own onto them.

So, do you believe that the man in the OP does not have free will? At the moment, the poll is 80% does not have free will and 20% other. — Art48

No one has free will. Doesn't matter how people try to phrase things, we're not detached entities from the universe in which we exist. Everything in this universe is acting within deterministic laws, but somehow people's decisions aren't? If anything, that sounds more like human arrogance and ideals about humanity as something uniquely special in this reality. So far, all actual evidence we have point towards pure determinism while there's no actual evidence for free will at all, outside some pseudo-religious hogwash that people interpret out of trash science magazines that have no idea on how to present actual research paper conclusions without introducing speculative nonsense into the mix.

The bottom line is that if everything points towards determinism, then the burden of proof is on the one claiming there is free will to prove how human decision making is possible outside of that universal law. It doesn't matter how elaborate of an example someone tries to write out, it's not getting around the basics of it all.

Can you envision a moral system build entirely of non-emotional values? If we were to turn everyone into Mr Spock, would we still have the same variety of moral stances we now see in human culture? If our moral
systems would be different, how would they change? — Joshs

We wouldn't need to as humans philosophizing about our morality is philosophizing about ourselves. There's no point in imagining a species other than ourselves when trying to figure out morality for ourselves since a change in our species would change the foundation for our moral system.

We can do so for the sake of it or as a contrast, but it will feel as alien to us as anything else that's alien to our biology.

A moral system for a species like Vulcans would probably rely more on logical axioms rather than ranges of values. The problem is that we cannot judge that system when we're stuck in the emotionally driven biology that we exist in. So we can guess what moral system they would have, but it wouldn't make sense to us. However, if they explained it to us we would probably be able to rationally understand it, like thinking about it as a system of logical axioms, but their decisions on moral choices in their society could be so alien to us that we would think of them as immoral by our standards.

We can therefor draw a line between finding a moral system that applies to all people of humans, even between cultures, but never apply a system that applies between species as the biology and nature of a species would define the foundation of their moral system.

Through this, we could even analyze potential moral systems of animals, even if they're not conscious enough to view themselves in such mirrors. What is the moral system among lions? We can find commonalities between decisions made by many lions, but never judge their system based on our own morality. Then again, we could just decide that a moral system can only exist as a self-governing system for conscious beings, that it requires conscious self-awareness. In that sense, morality is a system only applicable to societies in which actions and consequences can be set into common principles.

So, it could be that the definition of a universal nature of morality is whatever biologically driven principles that becomes a foundation for a functioning society. If aliens form a long term functioning society, they have a moral system underneath it, however alien that system is to us. And that system is whatever principles that inform a common biological ground for the society to exist on top of and definitions for how long such a society can exist.

1. moral thinking differs between cultures and people, so it is a subjective practice, and 2. that there is nothing tangible to attach moral facts too, therefore they do not exist. The main Idea between these two ideas is that morality was created by intelligent life, therefore it is a subjective practice that doesn't have any basis. — Lexa

Moral thinking differs, but there are commonalities rooted in emotions. And we do indeed attach morality to the fact that we have emotions. We do not say it is immoral to kill because there aren't any situations in which killing is considered a good action, we do it primarily from a primal limbic system response to the fact that being killed is an extremely negative action done onto us. It has a lot of pain attached to it and the denial of someone's existence requires a damn good argument for the continued existence of the killer for justifying that killing.

Cultures move in and out of different values but we tend to base our moral values on some basic truths about the experience of being a human, and those truths are indeed facts. Otherwise, you cannot argue for why people shouldn't kill you. Why shouldn't someone kill you? I bet you can come up with reasons for why you don't want to be killed, none of those reasons are valid in of themselves, because there's no essential meaning to your existence, but they're attached to negative emotions you feel about the negation of your continued existence. So we can infer that there's something there that guides our moral thinking.

The problem with moral philosophy is that the aim always seems to be on finding an objective moral that is detached from the existence of being a human. But since morality is a concept that is deeply tied to our experience as human beings, we cannot detach ourselves and the nature of our existence from the moral theories we produce. We have to include us in these theories, or else we're not talking about human morality, but some abstract nothing.

Think of the "why?" scene in Terminator 2. "You can't go around killing people!" to which the terminator replies "Why?" over and over. That's because John Connor cannot find a definition for why it is bad. But he could have explained it through telling the Terminator that the morality of killing is tied to the experience of being a human, so he wouldn't understand the "why", but he could instead draw conclusions from understanding the facts about pain. Meaning, if he hurts another person, that person feels pain (fact), killing someone is the final conclusion of "pain" and is considered morally negative. Therefore, killing is morally bad as a concept human morality. A computer like the Terminator could draw conclusions based on this, it would probably draw utilitarianistic conclusions when trying to calculate further outcomes of killings, but it would at least find a defining idea around why killing is bad.

That is probably as close to something factually based as we could possibly come. And this can be changed to whatever culture a species have. So if we encounter an alien species with wildly different aspects of the experience of being, then morality can only be defined based on their perspective, meaning, we humans can grasp the morality of other beings by not applying our morality to them, but their morality to them. This doesn't work for different human cultures as the experience of being a human is the same between all of us. It is therefore species based.

But we can infer that there are facts about the human experience that are universal for our species and morality is tightly linked to them. One evidence of this is the very fact that we try to draw conclusions of morality when speaking about killing someone. If morality was truly nihilistic, if there was nothing there, then why would we ever even gravitate towards concepts like "killing" when talking about morality? Why not "the morality of bananas"? A nihilistic perspective on morality would equal bananas having the same level of moral relevance as "killing", but we view such a conclusion as absurd since morality has to do with our actions and consequences as humans. As such, actions and consequences have an impact on our experiences as humans, and therefore ideas on morality has a value to them as they are linked to our experience and especially emotions of being humans.

The most common argument against the existence of objective morality and moral facts besides moral differences between societies is that they aren’t tangible objects found in the universe and can’t be measured scientifically. Are there any refutations or arguments against this?- — Captain Homicide

Morals can't be universal since they're essentially tied to the being of humans. But being so, we could argue that there are commonalities in how we perceive the preservation and survivability of being a human, and that there are positive emotions and negative emotions tied to the quality of living as a human. Both to what we do and through the intentions of why we do something.

This is something that Sam Harris has tried (and failed) to do. But there's no denying that emotion plays a big part in trying to form some objective morals. It's just that they can never be a complete set of rules, but rather a range of ought not to and ought to principles.

It may be that we could invent a sort of mathematical equation of value points attached to certain actions and intentions, in which a careful examination of actions taken can measure if the moral actions of someone ended up on a negative or positive side.

But an indifferent, meaningless existence in a deterministic universe creates problems for any objective morals to be found, because they cannot be found. We need to rather invent something based on the sum of our existence and experience. And that takes an honest dedication to examining our existence without holding biases to beliefs outside of measurable emotions and universal human experiences.

I wonder if a fundamental cause of the controversies is that the concept of free will is poorly defined. — Art48

No, the reason is that people cannot cope with the fact that we don't have free will. It's an existential threat to their very experience of being. It messes with the concept of justice, the concept of agency, of identity and so on. Even for people who understand the logic of determinism it is hard to wrap their heads around the experience of it, because it feels so alien to the way our consciousness behaves.



It's not that free will is poorly defined, it's that determinism isn't well understood.

understand the first principles of philosophy so that I fight different theories while on solid ground. — T4YLOR

Are you interested in fighting someone's theories or are you interested in learning new perspectives? A core tenet of philosophy is the ability to be unbiased and engage in philosophical discourse, which would require of you to never use your beliefs as evidence or premises of an argument, rather, only be guided by your beliefs but engage honestly with the discourse. If doing so, you may need to go down paths of questioning yourself, your beliefs and values. Not in order to give up on them, but to honestly balance your perspectives with their opposites in pursuit of truths that can be universalized rather than holding on to ones existing only for yourself.

The best definition I have heard is someone doing the exact same thing in identical circumstances and expecting a different outcome.

This is why human stupidity has its benefits. Sometimes something different does happen. — I like sushi

I don't think it has to do with stupidity at all. It's mostly on the same level as some plaque saying "Carpe Diem", a pop culture psychology meme.

It's rather the opposite, as I said with biases. Stupidity is doing the same thing in changing circumstances and outcomes, demanding reality to fit the bias.

How would you define it? — Matias

Stupidity is extreme bias. Bias towards a specific thing that overtakes the ability to critically judge it in context. Bias towards emotion, bias towards an ideal, an idea, a method, practice etc.

The opposite is to be able to see past the bias, see further context, see alternatives, engage in the ability to weigh different perspectives choosing rationally rather than emotionally, or even being able to choose emotionally as opposed to cold rationality if that has a moral rationality to it.

However things gets boiled down, extreme bias is pretty much at the core of stupidity.

Why do you think other adults require your brand of protection, unless you thought they were children? — NOS4A2

This is just nonsense and ignorant of what I wrote. Arguments for improving a democratic system that push for more rights for the people and better protection against corrupt politicians that abuse their power is treating the people like children?

You advise taking their weapons and then turn around and suggest protecting them from the people who are going to take their weapons. If you want to protect them from the state and totalitarianism, let them keep their weapons and instead take the weapons away from the state. — NOS4A2

Other nations seems to be just fine without the need to arm citizens to the extent the US is doing, and the US has the highest rate of gun violence as well as accidents involving home-owned firearms so the facts stack up against you on this. Second amendment advocators mostly just function like religious evangelists, disregarding every sound argument and actual evidence in favor of made up scenarios for when to use the weapons as why they're needed, all while the actual use of these weapons are rather killing American citizens like a nationwide corpse factory.

It's also funny that you advocate for these weapons as defense against a potential totalitarian government, but don't want to change democracy to have better tools to fight corruption and remove people who abuse their seat of power. In your world it seems that there's no problems going on, but you still need that Kevlar, M4 rifle and akimbo Glocks to protect against the government. It seems it's rather you who can't seem to spot their dissonance here. Who do you think is more likely to create a totalitarian government, the corrupt power abusers, or a more typical representative democracy with redundancy that removes anyone who abuses their power?

I don’t care about any screed that proposes treating adults like children and limiting their most basic rights so Christoffer can feel a little safer. — NOS4A2

Didn't write anything like that, my proposal was changes to the system to protect people even more, especially from corrupt politicians, and refining the system to be better at self-governing against such corruption and abusers of power. I don't know in what world you live in where that kind of proposal equals whatever nonsense you're interpreting it as. The thing that you don't care about is actually understanding what other's write. Which looks more like evangelism than participating in a discussion. So it's hard to take you seriously because of that. I've talked to marketing chatbots that are more able to understand what I'm writing.

I'm sure there are places that have less corruption than the U.S. I'm not sure their system would work for a country as large and diverse as the U.S. It also amuses me when Europeans trash the U.S. while living under the umbrella of protection we've provided for their whole lifetimes. — RogueAI

The protection you talk about does not cover every nation and that also has more to do with military strategies than the stability of any democracy. The fact that other democracies have a lower corruption-index has more to do with redundancy and responsibility and it's easier to get rid of abusers of power. There's also not such a high concentration of power towards just a small portion or single individual and the other institutions are very independent from the government leading to them being better at addressing potential issues with the people in power. And just think of the EU, able to collaborate between such a diversity of nations that individually at their core has a great variety of different political strategies and values, but still able to stabilize as a greater union. That tells a lot about the stability of the system and that's also not a small size.

The bigger question is, do you think it is better to have a president that consolidates so much power or to have less such consolidated power and focus on representatives of the people ruling as a group?

It's also easy to turn things around and point out that the US alone wouldn't survive much on the world stage, it needs its allies just as much as they need the US. It's easy to get lost in the size of the US and forget the capabilities of other nations. Just think about the Swedish little sub who single handedly took down a US Aircraft Carrier. What others don't have in numbers they make up in tech and strategies. So I think you need to adjust your idea of how important the US is, even if it is the most important military ally.

Which democracies did you have in mind? — RogueAI

You can look at places like Scandinavia and Europe to find democracies that have less corruption than the US.

Lovers of wisdom should have no fear of information they do not like. — NOS4A2

Lies and disinformation is not the same as information "you do not like".

Trashing it and replacing it with one Christoffer likes. — NOS4A2

You obviously didn't read what I wrote, ignored or doesn't care. You're just a dishonest interlocutor you twist things to fit your narrative. Why should anyone care about your opinions when you ignore what people write and just make up whatever strawman you can think of?

Do you mean other democracies that were rescued by America at some point in their past? — RogueAI

You think that's all the democracies that exist in the world, the US and then all that's been "rescued"? No others?

The American system certainly has staying power- 200+years and counting. — RogueAI

Does not equal the system perfect or better than other democracies with far less corruption and problems. It is also a system that works when people uphold a certain level of professionality in their purpose as politicians. But when the halls of power gets overrun by narcissistic abusers of power, it is clear there's problems with the system not self-cleaning itself from such abusers.

The lesson of the fascist movement that led to WW2 is a moral lesson, which has been forgotten. — unenlightened

Your logic is that when someone brings up problems with the US democracy to immediately link that to an argument for fascism? Or did you mean that as an agreement about the cleanup?

Cringe. Now we’re to learn about “Democracy” from people who suggest trashing a constitution and censoring information they don’t like. — NOS4A2

Replacing and updating is not equivalent of "trashing". Try again without the strawman.

How do you reasonably debate or convince people otherwise when they willingly vote for someone who wants to suspend the Constitution -- the very document that secures their right to vote in the first place? — GRWelsh

By creating the replacement and working for replacing the constitution rather than removal. That way, the replacement constitution can be worked on by everyone from politicians, to philosophers, researchers and the people, and be fine tuned to include better rights and better protections than it has now, and especially get rid of the awful second amendment which is just arming idiots killing each other. If the aim is to create a peaceful and good society, then anything that arms people just creates ticking time bombs. A constitution should aim for the protection of the people, by giving them rights and tools to stand up against government injustices, but also including a removal of the means to which people can hurt each other with weapons. The only issue with taking away weapons from the people is if the state gets more power to hurt the people, which could lead to totalitarianism, so the core rights need to include variety of ways in which the people have power over the government and not just the government over the people.

On top of this, there should be a clear focus on representative democracy in the form of representatives. Reshape politics into being less about the individuals in power and more focused being the people's democratic voice. Right now, especially in the US, a president is essentially a form of king that's being elected. While not within the exact level of autocratic power, they still have more power than a democratic system should allow. On top of that we have all the emerging issues with the supreme court, with the easily corrupted congress backed up by capitalist lobbyists in every corner who skew decisions into being more about helping these capitalists instead of making good decisions for the people. And get rid of the stupid electoral system that's so overly complicated that you don't even have to be corrupted since the system itself seems to be able to skew an election into something other than the people's actual choice.

The US democracy needs a cleanup and be reshaped and simplified by looking at what worked and what didn't in the past.

Remove systems that aren't helping the speed and clarity of running the nation. Lower the focus on individuals in government and increase the focus on representative systems. Have a redundancy through independent institutions that review the seats of power and block any attempts of corruption. Produce a functioning bureaucracy that can spot irregularities in procedurs so that abuse of power gets shot down directly. Anyone who abuses his/her power or acts with corruption gets removed immediately, with no drawn out processes or trials, and when in doubt the review happens outside of the a halls of power without them able to screw the system during the process.

With a less focus on the people and individuals in power, there won't be a problem to remove them quickly and replace them. The focus would be on representing the voice of the people and work for them. With a heavier focus on using research to find solutions to problems in society, rather than making decisions based on some arbitrary delusion by a single person who marketed themselves on hyperbole simplicities to a gullible population.

The thing that stands in the way of this is the delusional idea of US hegemony, which makes people believe that the US system is perfect and in no need of a change. It's so ingrained that the people who are in most need of help from the government are the very people voting on politicians who would do nothing to help them. It's this delusion that's eating the US away, slowly killing society by fooling the people that the government exists as if chosen by God.

Regardless, Trump is leading in many polls. — Wayfarer

It is very telling of how bad the US democracy is built if Trump is sentenced and he still wins an election. The US democratic system is just a patch work of stupidity compared to other developed nations with functioning democracies. Like rolling out the red carpet for corruption and no one seems to care enough to do anything radical to change it. The delusional idea that the US system is the best things can get and that any problem is due to something else or someone else. The US needs an overhaul of it's entire system. Throw the constitution in the trash and draw up a new one with up to date ideals. If Trump gets sentenced to jail and win the election and people won't do anything other than write "how could this happen?" on their social media accounts, then that's a clear sign that the US will end up in the gutter in the long run.

The problem with the assumption that people are pushed around by “narratives” is that it should be just as easy to push them in the opposite direction through the very same methods. — NOS4A2

That implies that the methods are neutral, which they aren't. And it says a lot about the people using the methods.

And narratives are all around us, everyone is following a narrative of some sort, it's not about produced narratives for the purpose of manipulation. A narrative can also be a moral code, it can be the values guiding someone's daily life. But, in the purpose I'm speaking of, it's manufactured, just like manufactured realities in commercials and ads forming a fiction that they hope customers will follow by buying their product, so to does the manufactured reality of political campaigns form the world view of the voters. To the point that they fight over fictional realities that confuse actual reality even further, making it extra hard for researched truth to become mainstream.

both of which the reactionary and incompetent experts told us would happen under the Trump regime — NOS4A2

This ignores the fact that change doesn't just happen directly. It's easy to make the counter argument that the entire ensemble of Trumps, Bannons, Johnsons etc. over the course of the past years have built up the foundation for what is now happening. How can you be so sure that your narrative is the correct one when all you support it by is your own opinion on it? Maybe the past years have been inching towards all of this, with the a catalyst of a pandemic pushing it even faster, and that the current politicians are just trying to mitigate the damage that is going on?

Whenever I see debates between polarized sides I see the same broken arguments. One side blames the current dominating political narrative, whatever it may be, as something that is the root of the problems in the world while the other says that it's the result of the past years of the opposite political narrative. And whenever the political landscape flips, we hear the same arguments flipped between the sides of the debate.

I'm tired of hearing it, it has no foundation in reality, it has no foundation in the complexities of all moving parts and it is just keeping us in the manipulated narratives people are slaves to.

Sure, but that doesn't imply the narrative needs to be cynically exploited to steer the stupid masses to enlightened goals. — Echarmion

No, that's not what I meant. If narratives are something that we can never be without, then the narratives to shape the world by should always be the most honest, the most carefully thought through and which includes as much liberty for the people as possible. It should be based on common grounds of moral thinking and ecological health for both humans and the environment.

If such narratives are used, then the people will find good paths for themselves and society over time without any force.

However, the problem today is that narratives are not only fractured into thousands of different narratives, most of them are invented lies by those with power over the powerless. Our world consist of stories that push inaccuracies, fake news, opinions as facts, blatant brainwashing etc.

Is it cynical to argue for dismantling this chaos and form better common grounds for all, not in someone's name, but by ideas that people generally share as basic ideals of good, hidden underneath all of these false narratives that cloud people's core values?

It's not this that's cynical, it's the world that's cynical for thinking this is impossible.

There's no way to insulate democracy from the demos. A democracy that's immune to it's self-dissolution is kind of an oxymoron. German has an "eternity clause" in its constitution, stating that certain parts (like the basic democratic constitution) can not be altered under any circumstances. But obviously the constitution is ultimately just a "scrap of paper". Such a clause only works so long as the paper retains legitimacy

Which is why I think the more important institutions are the soft, cultural ones. — Echarmion

The soft cultural ones also only works as long as that's the social contract to protect it.

What I meant with protecting democracy is rather to make sure the eye is on the ball. Actions that block demagogues from taking power. Forcing them to focus on issues and forcing them to have actually functioning plans, both in financial structure and scope. Even in the most functioning democracies, the parties who take power more often than not throw their promises out the window whenever they've got into seats of power. There's no repercussions on this and they play the long game with people forgetting that they broke the promises made. On top of that, debates and rallies have politicians just spew out insults and ad hominems against their opponents.

Here's one single thing that can be written into as a kind of law of democracy in order to improve it over night. Candidates and parties cannot use ad hominems and are not allowed to form rallies on inaccuracies. After using too many documented ad hominems and inaccuracies with facts, they are not allowed to be voted on. This would force politicians to be more careful in their politics, they would have to focus on actual issues and the facts surrounding those issues. They can also not get support on the grounds of attacking the opponent's character. I know the US would improve a lot since it seems the US modern politics is basically built upon these character attacks and invented realities through false statements.

My point is that we don't need to have it written into law that democracies cannot be changed, but we need to be able to fine-tune non-functioning and easily corruptible democracies to function better and be more robust against corruption and people abusing power.

There's a lot that could be done.

How would that actually work though? Electoral politics inherently draws certain personalities. It's seems more useful to work around that than try to somehow make the process as impersonal as possible. — Echarmion

Why? Why focus on personalities and people's emotions about these politicians personas? Why is that preferable to focusing on the actual issues in society and possible solutions to them? If some people start to lack interest in politics because it's not as "fun" as when someone like Trump do his shenanigans, and because of that choose not to vote, then that's better than forcing people who have no insight or knowledge into a subject to vote.

This focus on maximizing the amount of voters as an idea for a functioning democracy, without regard for how well those votes are knowledgeable in the questions they are voting for, is just such a backwards ideal for what democracy is.

I respect someone who does not vote if they don't know what they're voting on, that is telling me that this person understands their current limits of knowledge and if they spent more time learning about the topics they would have a better foundation for voting. Pushing people to vote by manipulating them with false narratives and emotional arguments is just as bad as blocking people from voting all together.

Democracy should be about informing people on the issues in society and possible solutions, with facts and honesty so that the people can vote for what they feel is the solution closest to their own values in life. Anything else is manipulation that's corrupting the system and forming another strategy of control over the people rather than giving people the democratic control over society.

Some interests groups are definetly powerful and their particular interests have a noticeable effect on policy. It's not simply something as abstract as society in general. — Echarmion

And these people are the ones in actual power. Not in the "illuminati"-level conspiracy type, but their money fuels politicians manipulation of the public. Society gets shaped by their intentions and the public does not necessarily know what their aim is.

That's part of why democracy needs to be fine-tuned away from these systems and be free from hidden influences by practices and consequences for those who abuse their power. Like, why not block all inflow of funds from lobbyists and count it all as bribery? Have a neutral institute that functions on effective bureaucracy to constantly review and investigate politicians in power and if caught, they're out effected immediately.

The protection of politicians, especially in the US, is in a way it's own level of corruption. There's no wonder that the US isn't high on lists about low corruption governments.

Isn't that what we're already trying and failing to do? No-one has a recipe for getting "the right people" into the job, and I think this is ultimately a fool's errand. The problem isn't really that the politicians are uniquely bad, it's that they're exposed to pressures and temptations that lead to bad decisions. — Echarmion

We only fail that because we play lose with the freedoms that people in power have. The bar set on what a competent politician is, is set so low that overgrown children like Trump reaches the highest office.

The recipe is to first evaluate different democracies around the world and see which one's have good fail safes against corruption and incompetence. And if we have much stricter rules about ad hominem rhetoric and a demand on accuracy in facts, statements and follow-ups on promises, then that would drive a lot of demagogues away either by not being able to drive their agenda or being excluded from taking part by their own incompetence.

It's like, everyone needs to get a driver's license in order to drive a car, otherwise it's not safe for others in society. But we have no real demands on politicians having a certain level of competence for driving an entire nation?

More people need to be involved in the nitty-gritty of local politics, so they have an understanding of how they work, broaden the pool of possible candidates and are aware of how to effectively advocate for themselves.

A popular movement need not be populist. Populism is a particular perversion of the popular. — Echarmion

But this is exactly what doesn't work, because in our modern world we have created a society that is so distracted by irrelevant noise from everywhere that people have no interest in politics.

We cheer the fact that just slightly over half of the population go to vote, and mostly because of extreme marketing on emotionally heighten ad hominem arguments and inaccurate exaggerations on topics actually not related to many of those who vote.

How in the world would you get people more interested in politics on the actual grounds of the boring day to day work of politics? No one cares, they want to live their lives and not think too much.

If we can only get people to vote by tricking them with emotional arguments, then don't. Do the proper thing and inform people about issues, about solutions to those issues, give people the option to learn for free about what each politician running wants to do, let people choose to participate on honest grounds without manipulation.

If some people choose not to vote, then don't force them. But don't block them from learning about who to vote for if they want to and let them have accurate information rather than dishonest manipulation.

We need less marketing in democracies, and more information. There's a clear difference between the two. Marketing leads to populism and demagogues, informing leads to less populism and demagogues.

It requires a restructure of the entire democratic process. It requires new laws and constitutional principles to restrict manipulation and push accurate information, but it would definitely improve the stability of a democracy.

It's been 30 years since the SU collapsed and capitalism is running rampant. How much longer will that take? — Echarmion

We're only just now starting to see the consequences of the neoliberal free market that was pushed in the 80's. Why do you think we see so many young people on the left picking up Marx ideas to criticize capitalism? People who opt out from the job market by choice? And why do you think the opposite side of young neoliberals forming almost cult like behaviors around stock market strategies and "how to maximize your efficiency"-influencers?

These polarizing signs shows the contours of a collapsing structure. An increasing critique and an increasing enforcement. Both desperate on each end with less focus on a balanced system in the middle. Something will eventually break.

So your solution is to somehow conjure up a population of proper philosophers? How would that work? — Echarmion

Philosophical discourse doesn't mean philosophers, it means a higher quality of discourse as opposed to the emotional battles of online debates.

One way to inspire such things would be to educate people on why it is preferable, why such discourse is more effective through not reaching who's right and who's wrong, but reaching a higher enlightened state after each discourse, with the aim of both sides reaching higher knowledge together rather than trying to bash an opinion into the skull of the other.

Schools don't do this, parents don't do this, society doesn't do this. People learn to fight for their ideals, not to inspire others by their ideals. And we teach each other to value your ego in a battle against the world rather than you being part of a world.

And with the online algorithms pushing people more into fights than into discussions and proper discourse, we have this radicalization machine making it even harder to get people to realize the futility of a fast battle compared to the slow but healthy progression of philosophical discourse.

Convenience is king in the fast moving world and the social media giants are very adept at offering it. — Echarmion

They're not offering anything valid, they have a system that uses addictive systems to trick people into their platform being the best.

Like, just compare having a discussion on Facebook and this place, which one is more effective for the purpose of discussion? The odd and clumsy format of writing, the non-existing formatting options, the inability to quote properly... so why are people more inclined to discuss on Facebook? Because its addictiveness keeps them there longer. But the system in itself is lackluster to say the least.

These platforms have actively studied psychology and formed their systems based on what triggers our primal brain to interact with it. And it works best with children and teenagers, still developing their brains. It's easier because you, as the platform, can influence how their brains develop and more easily keep them hooked to the system, just like drugs have a higher addictiveness on younger people than older. Same principles.

To popularize a social media hub that does not have these addictive systems require an effort on the user and the common user is lazy and uninterested and will more often than not choose the drug over the sallad.

So it's not convenience really, it's a sort of getting the entire world into rehab and then get them on board a consequently less flashy alternative.

How? I have no idea really. Only if the functionality and lack of ads is better than the others and people reach a point of being more fed up with the old hubs cluttered reality and feel that a less flashy but more clean and functioning alternative is preferable.

But I have little hope that people choose the healthy over unhealthy until they face their own mortality.

Without a popular systematic critique I don't see how we get enough of a movement going to decisively shift away from the current domination by big platforms. — Echarmion

And this requires knowledge, wisdom, experts and facts to be preferable rather than our current narrative of anti-intellectualism. Systematic critique requires people to see past the day to day reality they live within, to see the borders of their common existence, and that requires knowledge, wisdom and experts to be popular again rather than clowns like Trump.

Well we'd need to generate the impetus for such a shift somehow. I don't think there's an alternative to building a movement to provide that.

Wikipedia was lucky in that it came up early, before a monetised alternative took root. With social media, we do not have that luxury. — Echarmion

Yes, and the irony is that if we were to create a platform, funded by nations in a UN type constellation, in order to push back on state-funded corruption and manipulation on that platform, people will think it's even more corrupt compared to the blatant corporation control that current platforms and state-owned platforms like TikTok have on us right now.

People are so ingrained into the false narratives of the world that they trust the liars and distrust the honest.

It's not a counter argument. I'm highlighting the arrogant and elitist way you speak about people that don't view the world in terms that you do. — Benkei

Fair enough, but maybe my mind didn't even think about that in my second language of writing in a post where my intention was to make my point as clear as possible and not make the post longer than it had to be. It's funny that semantics trigger you into ignoring my overall point and instead you just rage as an attack dog at "how elitist" I am, while ignoring the holistic perspective of my writing which clearly has a much more inclusive idea about these radicalized people as victims of manipulative abuse by people in power.

But the problem with how you frame this is that the people I talk about does not see the world clearly, that's the entire point of radicalization, to force a point of view that is exaggerated and sometimes downright false. I'm not talking about people who feel betrayed by Democrats and want change in how the government treats them and their lives, that's a point of view that I respect since it comes from an honest place and correct democratic usage of the system. But can you honestly just sum up these radicalized people's opinions as "because they don't view the world in terms that you do"? When these opinions are clearly a mashup of conspiracy nonsense, racism, triggered hate built up by hate speeches from populist politicians and so on?

What you seem to do is actively ignoring what I'm actually talking about and just invent your own idea in order to just trigger some arbitrary side-onflict. If I talk about Trumpism and the radicalized right wing, then I'm not really talking about the common Republican voter now am I?

So while I get your point and can change the overall grammar of my writing, it just feels like you are cherry picking stuff to initiate conflict and that's just low hanging fruit. Let me test doing the same, just to make the point clearer: "Your argument about that specific sentence just shows you the unfair way you treat people who doesn't use English as their first language, ignoring that some choice of words and grammar may not have the same attached value in other countries compared to yours and scolding others based on your own perspective of these words and your own higher knowledge of the language just comes off as elitist against others."

If you need to remark on how something is written, just remark on the problem clearly instead of using a grammatical source in order to dismiss the entire argument and intentionally ignore the specificity of it. It's like "guilt by association" but with grammar.

The point I wanted to make is that the people concerned still have agency. Part of the solution involves creating a new mainstream where the energy that these people currently expend on "conspiracy activism" is turned towards actually positive goals. — Echarmion

I agree, although this point is somewhat self-contradictory in that you say people have agency, but then point out that we need a new mainstream that can steer them in a new direction. Meaning, people do not have agency, they are determined by directions of society. Which is what I say when I talk about narratives. The narratives that shape our perception of reality defines the choices made and if the perception of reality is skewed by power hungry narcissists and we fail to protect democracy from such people because we are lazy and naive, then they dictate the narratives steering society, not people with better intentions for humanity.

We can never be free of narratives, they're part of the human condition. We can only focus on forming better narratives that focus on bettering ourselves, improving our well being and progress humanity into a better future for all, if we want that to happen.

I think part of the issue is that democracy was already well on the way of becoming a "system of control", because the democratic political institutions were being impoverished and starved. — Echarmion

The problem with the degeneration of democracy is that society have handled democracy in a sloppy and naive way. Instead of installing institutions that self-control democracy so that it never corrupts society from the core values of democracy, we just let society constantly balance on a knife's edge so that a nation could vote away democracy all together if they've successfully been manipulated enough.

As long as democracy focus on voting on specific people and not ideas and solutions, we will always have a corrupt system as we are rather focusing on personality traits and theatrics rather than actual decisions for society.

I think that the combination of capitalism and democracy have created this self-perpetual machine in which we have power hungry people who care nothing for society, only manage to take decisions for society because capitalism demands it, or else people will revolt.

Basically, no one's at the steering wheel. No vision exist, no ideas are being formed by knowledgeable people and instead society just flows by itself. That would have been good, if not for all the destructive messes it also generates.

So the solution probably involves reinvigorating democratic politics. Which means grassroots activism, political involvement beyond the ballot box via vehicles like unions etc. We could probably look at how e.g. Steve Bannon creates his political movement and take some cues from that. — Echarmion

That's only generated more populist movements with people using the speed of online marketing to manipulate themselves into power fast before anyone notice the problems they pull with them.

The solution is to fine tune the democratic system so that populist narcissists and people only interested in power gets replaced by people working for the needs of society more than pushing their own names and egos. If we had systems that removed people in power more easily when they abuse their power, and if politicians were forced to act more in-line with how the core democratic values of being "the people's voice" in politics, that would force democratic politics into being more focused on solving societal problems and help people rather than putting all energy into the illusion of helping or improving.

Ever since the project of Marxism had definitely collapsed — Echarmion

I don't think it collapsed, I think that the critique of capitalism is alive and healthy and with how extreme the difference between the rich and poor through the catalyst of neoliberalism has become I think we'll see more of it as time goes on. There's definitely gonna be pushes for more Marxist ideas through a Hegelian slave/master analysis going forward. The problem is that the polarized masses of left/right people who are uneducated on the actual concepts of criticism against capitalism just forms another part of the radicalized population who are stuck in a loop of non-solutions in society, battling out amateur interpretations and not actually doing proper philosophical discourse on that matter.

Yes, we'd need to break the monopolisation of our internet spaces, and turn them into public goods. This will require a break with capitalist ideology, which unfortunately has been almost unopposed for decades now. So first the groundwork would have to be laid to make a critique of capitalism no longer the realm of fringe theorists or extremists. It would really help to have better online spaces for that. It's a real catch-22. — Echarmion

Exactly, criticism of capitalism is not really an ideology for any left or right leaning movement, it's part of the discourse to solve problems in society. Anyone who says capitalism is the root of all problems or that capitalism is the root to all solutions don't know what they're talking about and stand in the way of actual discourse for solutions and the progression of ideas on how we better society for all.

One solution for the online sphere is to create a new space that is considered better than the rest. I've seen this happen with things like computer software. When all major corporations produce subscription based software that they constantly increase the subscription price on while slowing down on innovation and progress, people get fed up by it and as soon as something that's open source reaches a point where it actually competes with the paid options, people start to move over to it and the corporations lose money. Even if they later put money into innovation, they hardly get the users back since the trust is lost and people don't want to be stuck in a system of manipulation by the companies who mostly put on a smiley face and dance the marketing dance to form the illusion of comfort with their software.

People don't trust these megacorps, people don't trust Facebook or TikTok, they only tolerate them because there's no wide spread alternative. If an alternative grows and their promise and delivery matches and outcompete the others, that can shift society. It's basically playing by the rules of the free market game, but with open source solutions that democratize spaces away from destructive algorithms.

Think of Wikipedia. It's been tested and found out to be more generally trustworthy for the purpose of sources of knowledge than many established and paid for sources, regardless of what people believe is the case. And because it's widely used, widely known and "open source", there's no destructive algorithms to be found. It's focused on being a good function and a good part of our online experience.

If we can generate better social media spaces that focus on having a similar good reputation, that doesn't have a big business behind it, that doesn't have a tech guru front figure wanting to reshape the world based on their skewed point of view, and that focus on gathering people on positive grounds with algorithms pushing back at destructive actions and behaviors, and being free of ulterior capitalistic motives... then that might save us from these radicalization machines.

But it demands an effort to create something that first and foremost can compete on the free market and deliver a better experience than all the others. Maybe if nations around the world were to have a fund for it. In which democratic nations fund the development and management of such an online space based on principles like the UN, a united space that cannot be corrupted by a single nation or corporation, in which there's no other focus than having a space for all to gather in, free from market movements and the manipulation of the people in favor of the people in power or narratives of nations.

One could dream.

I don't think it's very accurate to consider them "slaves" though. — Echarmion

We are all slaves to narratives. To say otherwise is to be blind towards biases. The key is how well we know our shackles and how well we can act against them. But in a world in which marketing and ideology rules the way we operate, we are all slaves to some kind of narrative.

The core problem is however that some are more susceptible to these narratives than others, it can be due to low education making it hard for them to see the framework of narratives that higher educations provide, or it could be due to high susceptibility of emotional manipulation making it impossible to find rational grounding.

A "slave" in this regard is better thought of as the level of subjugation to a ruling property, either a person or organisation in power, an ideal or a narrative. The problem is that if language keeps getting in the way of making my point, then it becomes impossible to communicate ideas. It's better to look at the holistic overview of the point being made, rather than getting lost in semantics of words.

We have somewhat of a problem today with how single words have become so loaded that any holistic point gets lost due to people just taking aim at singular words, like "these people" or "slaves", without looking at the grander context.

Two things are important to keep in mind: that however wrong the theories, the Trumpian kind of extremism takes up real feelings of alienation and catastrophic breakdown. These feelings aren't particular to Trump supporters. Second, plenty of topics are viable for conspiracy mongering because most everyone is in denial about them to some extent, so this denial is merely rerouted. — Echarmion

Of course, and that's the basics of the root problem I'm talking about. How do we solve the root of the problem? How do we give guidance to help battle such feelings and such dread in people while fighting off the ones who want to use these people just to gain democratic power through their votes without actually caring for them at all?

Because these powerful people and organizations in power aren't trying to gain supporters to help them, they are manipulating people through radicalization in order to gain power for themselves. In Trump's case it may even be that it's for something as basic and childish as feeding his personal narcissism rather than some actual long form power play to shape society in his own image, even if others around him support him in order to gain such power.

I'm not taking a particular aim at the random Trump voter, I'm taking an aim at how people in power have created a manipulative radicalization machinery that takes advantage of people who haven't the tools to easily spot this kind of manipulation. If we are all slaves to narratives, all slaves to biases and we live in a time when the internet has become a weaponized manipulation machine that effectively made democracy into almost a tool of control over people rather than push liberty and freedom, then the root of the problem is getting these people off the drug of radicalization and manipulation and fighting against people of power who want to utilize online strategies to manipulate themselves into having more autocratic power.

But instead, everyone polarize themselves into arguing over the symptoms. Trump is only one figure in all of this, there are Trump-like people in power all over the world and the threat to democracy isn't their specific shenanigans, but the underlying manipulation of people making democracy into a system of control.

I think the online sphere acts more as a catalyst than as the source of the problem. Social Media in particular has hugely reshaped out culture and our beliefs. But it is not in and of itself the source of the feelings that the conspiracies are a response to. That source is a crisis of western ideology. The new information environment has enabled a radical retreat into a fantasy world that supplies our longing for community, self-actualisation and self-absolution as a response. — Echarmion

Yes, but social media and the online sphere is a radicalization machine. It's built upon pushing negatives and destructive arguments to the front while pushing back on everything else. The algorithms are built for this because it drives the businesses of the big tech corps. They don't care about the consequences, the consequences are only cared for when rules and regulations are put on them to change and then they market themselves as caring about people's mental health as an afterthought. It's all within their narrative of control for their sector. But the algorithms are still putting people onto the online battleground and it radicalizes people into groups that in turn echo-chamber themselves into radicalized soldiers for these causes, pushing their hostility further and further until some of them storm the capitol, kill someone else, alienating themselves from friends and relatives, joining extremist groups, voting on despots and so on.

The damage to humanity that this is doing cannot be overstated and while we have existential problems outside of the online sphere, we are moving into a Baudrillardian desert of the real in which people cannot see the difference between the reality online and the reality outside.

The way to solve the existential problems is primarily to communicate, talk, discuss and meet people. It's the hard coded nature of survival that drives solutions and progression of ideas to better ourselves. But the online sphere is such a powerful manipulative algorithmic machine that you cannot take aim at those core issues while the algorithms skew reality and polarize people into arbitrary topics.

The counter culture that would help humanity to better ourselves is to fight against the system that radicalize ourselves into oblivion. We need a better internet, we need a better system not based on these privatized giants who doesn't care if the world burns as long as they gain massive wealth on the users.

Imagine a Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or whatever, that doesn't have ads, doesn't have algorithms based on optimizing for these ads and instead have algorithms that focus not on pushing conflicts, but pushing productive dialogue and good manners towards each other. It would need to be handled in the way of something like Wikipedia and it would need to be a place where people actually want to be, it would need to be the main place for the world to be on... and I'm not sure how that can be done when the world is so mentally fractured as it is today, and so in shackles by the megacorps owning all platforms while populist politicians gain support from these capitalists as they gain power from less regulation and rules while the megacorps can skew the population into democratically push back against movements trying to enforce more regulations onto them.

It's a loosing game if people don't wake up to these facts on their own.

because you don't agree with them? — Benkei

This is the problem with your counter argument. It's not about disagreement, it's about what functions as a foundation for knowledge and opinions. If they are slaves to the wave of misinformation and disinformation that makes them radicalized into things like Trumpism and right wing extremism, then that's not about "not agreeing with them", that's about radicalization into some form of extremism.

I could say "radicalized people" instead if that makes the point clearer. And the point being is that some people are more susceptible to such radicalization than others.

That there's a spectrum of abilities among the population to be able to understand complex information and act in good strategy of handling that information and not form radicalized ideas instead, is just a fact on human cognition and psychology. There's a difference between not agreeing on strategies for reaching solutions to societal problems, and ignoring actual facts and instead replace them with, essentially, fiction, which is how radicalized people functions.

Is it inaccurate to say that these radicalized people are anti-intellectuals? When they are more often than not actively acting out anti-expert, anti-academic, anti-anyone who uses knowledge and complex information to form solutions and answers to problems? A core tenet of their rhetoric is the dismissal of anyone who are part of groups essential for building a knowledge base in the world. And I'm not talking about politicians and other populists on the other side here, I'm talking about scientists, philosophers, writers and further thinkers who are only trying to figure out the complexity of the world. The radicalized people I'm talking about are actively hostile against them and that is why I call them anti-intellectuals. Because they've been radicalized into such anti-intellectualism by people like Trump, who in his language spreads hostility towards intellectuals to a point where some of his followers send death threats.

So, it's not about agreement or non-agreement between people, it's about how some people are being manipulated by misinformation and disinformation into either lacking any functioning substance of knowledge or being manipulated into beliefs that are actively hurting society and in the end themselves the most.

What you are doing is to actively misunderstand my argument based on a preconceived notion that you may have encountered with others in these types of discussions. When I say "these people", you immediately jump into the populistic mindset of war between two sides, disregarding actually understanding the point I'm making here. Unable to realize that I'm talking about these people more as victims of manipulation than enemies to be fought.

What's to be fought is the manipulation, the radicalization, the misinformation and disinformation. The strategies of wealthy people, lobbyists, politicians and power hungry despots to manipulate society into fighting each other instead of fighting problems in the world. The absolute ruthless hunt for voters, by any means necessary, skewing democracy into a degenerate shell of what it's supposed to be.

To return to the last point in my previous post...

"The problem isn't really Trump or his followers, it's how we operate in a world in which this online sphere of influence produces new Trumps all over the place. How do we fix the source of the problem?"

Please take off the populist hat and understand the point I'm making here.

Your fellow citizens and possible neighbours. — Benkei

Your point being? It seems you didn't care to understand the point I'm making. We can criticize them for this behavior, but their behavior and handling of knowledge and information might be impossible for them to have honest introspection around. How do we fix the problem of populism for the people who are slaves to it?

He seems on the edge — Wayfarer

The best outcome to push back against Trumpism and the degeneracy of these people would be if he completely and openly loses it and acts out his mental breakdown in front of cameras and the world to see in such an embarrassing moment that there's no possible way to spin it into something positive, even for them.

It would probably also be the only way to save Republicans from their growing cancer of anti-intellectual capitalists since I think it would be hard for any of them to support Trump after something like that as it would stain their own status in politics.

Even so, I think Trump is done. The real issue is how to defeat the anti-intellectual movement globally. The degeneracy of knowledge and wisdom among a large portion of the population who's unable to handle the overload of information that modern internet is washing over them. With AI pushing the capabilities of misinformation even further, these people will unable to operate as normal human beings since they do not have the capability to understand how to separate misinformation/disinformation and real information.

It's hard enough to evaluate real information from slightly (and traditionally normally) politically skewed information from unbiased information, but with an ocean of just pure crap floating around online I think it's almost impossible for some people to know how to handle it.

The problem isn't really Trump or his followers, it's how we operate in a world in which this online sphere of influence produces new Trumps all over the place. How do we fix the source of the problem?

The world has gotten so good today that even among the problems we are currently facing, people are still arguing about irrelevant bullshit rather than taking a cold hard shower and dealing with the problems at hand.

I would say that we've had a short time of relative peace in the world from beginning of the 90s until arguably the start of the pandemic. In which threats to the entire world declined and we saw the rise of films like Armageddon and other disaster movies come into popularity showing how the world collaborated against a common threat. "The end" was fictionalized and trivialized and most people started to think that we're all heading into absolute bliss.

Because of this, we have generations like millennials and younger who's grown up in a time without massive global problems that constantly haunt the sanity of people.

So now, the tides have turned with both a pandemic, wars and economic turmoil and we have two and half generations of people up to their 40s believing the world will end because a few minor (compared to earlier times) events stirred up the status quo.

I would say that what is going on right now has a major positive component in that this "peace time" has made people intellectually lazy and unable to listen to reason and events that shake things up like this demands of people to examine their ideals and ideas much closer as there's actual consequences for once and not just fictionalized disasters.

Since people have forgotten how the machine works, we needed a wrench in the machinery so people can relearn how things work and find the problems. Otherwise we will have many generations in power who are totally unfit to handle this world.

That's a pretty close analogue. Is it harmless? It's not philosophy, not metaphysics, and not physics. — Banno

Yes, there's an epistemic problem to all of this. I'm somewhat knowledgeable about the implications for a number of theories in relativity physics, quantum physics and cosmology. But I do not have extensive knowledge of the math that connects them and their interlinking qualities.

At the same time, physicists and researchers usually work in a "locked in" fashion, in which they spend years focusing on a specific condition to either figure out as theoretical or form tests around established theories. So while they have a dense understanding of a specific part, there's less of a holistic point of view.

And on top of that, what is "outside" our universal bubble might only be possible to form emergent speculations about, since our theories and tests are locked into a universal bubble with defined laws and dimensions. If we lose dimensions or dimensions expand or change outside our universe, how can we form even a basis of a concept other than making creative extrapolations?

It's the same reason why we haven't been able to fully understand the inside of a black hole. The "edge" of our universe is referred to in a similar manner of event horizon, in which the laws and physics of our experienced reality breaks down.

So I think it is important to underline that any form of speculation about what was before the big bang, or what is outside of this universal bubble, is speculation. However rooted these speculations are in existing science, no one can fully claim a theory more valid than another as long as the effort put into it respects what we do know about this universal bubble.

It's also important to remember that creativity has always been part of theoretical physics. Many theories didn't start out as math calculations, they started out as creative reflections on observations and their implications. Einstein imagined a falling man and the relation between falling within a gravitational pull and being in zero gravity and how there's no difference. These weren't math calculations, they were creative concepts that had a rational and logical component that informed a path to conduct further study.

Applying that framework to this, I can never claim truth or validity in the concepts I've written down. But I can be creative, I can inspire new ideas for those who knows the math. Some of it may be nonsense, but some might trigger further thoughts. As long as non-physicists and philosophers understand that what they propose are highly speculative, then that's a good pillar to rest creative ideas upon. To inspire further questions, not to believe they give answers or that others think they are giving answers, but to ignite creative thinking that can inform paths.

What are the basic ideas that formed what I wrote?

The Higgs field slows energy and generate mass. Without the Higgs field, energy would not change over time since there's no friction for said energy to change into mass. So, the question that arise is, where does this Higgs field exist if the spacetime requires the existence of the Higgs field? Without spacetime there's no position, so there wouldn't be any position or point in time where energy would slow down if the position and time is generated out of the very event of slowing down energy within this field.

So if the problem is something from nothing. Then what about the opposite? Instead of nothing, which is essentially infinite in its absolute nothingness and rationally impossible to form anything, what if there's an absolute something? What, based on our understanding of our universe and reality, is the most absolute? That would be infinite energy. Massless energy that is infinitely absolute. A possible idea for how that could be is if there are no dimensions. Then a set of energy that exists without dimensions would exist in on itself, timeless, spaceless, as a feedback loop without beginning or end and no time to change. And within infinity of such zero dimensionality, there would be both infinite room for and lack of room for something to be. Then it's not impossible to imagine why our universe came from en infinitely small point as with no dimensions, size would not matter. And with the inflation of our universe, the big bang, from an infinitely dense point, it immediately started acting as energy slowing down and forming mass. So what is the Higgs field? What if our universe is wrongly defined as something from nothing, and should rather be thought of as a dimensionless Higgs field bubble, and by its dimensionless existence it slows down energy that infinite energy into the emergent reality that is our universal bubble?

This is creative writing and creative thinking that emerges out of the implications of the concepts we already know about. They're not answers, they are meant to inspire new pathways of thought and that's my limit in my ability to contribute to this scientific topic.

Essentially science has always worked best when acting as a pendulum. Swinging into speculation, creativity, fantasy, and then swinging back into verification, testing, research and calculation, to then swing back into creativity, then back into testing.

The most common traits that scientists who make breakthroughs have is that they are also highly creative, while those who are stuck working on the same thing all their life without any breakthroughs are usually never creative and usually act locked down by the conventions of what's already known. Like a writer who's always questioning his own ideas, always scrapping them because they won't fit into a pre-decided ideal.

I will add speculations.

In zero dimensions there would be no where or when. So a when and a where can only be defined and begin when the four dimensions exist and can be.

Therefore, whatever expansion that exist within this universe, it expands into "nothing", and with nothing comes no space, no where and when.

This could possibly mean that we are expanding "into ourselves", as an expansion into no dimensions mean that those particles and universal laws have no direction, no where and when to expand into.

It might be that because of this non-dimensionality that we are "moving into", it becomes a feedback loop that can only move particles at the edge of our universe back into our universe since it's the only space and time position for a particle to exist in.

Speculatory, this may be part of the quantum weirdness that we experience; that the influx of looped particles/energy in this feedback, interfere with the particles actually there. It could then support why a singularity happened in the first place, either because it has always happened as a feedback loop, or that within this feedback loop, a special event, an extremely unlikely quantum event, intensified the feedback so much (like a mic/speaker sound feedback), that looped particles and regular particles fuses together, like matter and antimatter, and initiate a big bang.

So that at certain quantum states the universe basically "resets" itself. It could happen right after the big bang, or it could take billions of billions of years, it could happen the next second, or it happened a second ago with this universe being improbably close in causal probability to the universe that was existing before this one but that didn't last past this specific point. Infinite.

Of course, this is extremely speculatory and close to "fan fiction" writing of the nature of reality and the universe. But possibly the only non-paradoxical solutions to our reality and existence "beginning" anywhere in something that doesn't have "anywheres" or "beginnings", is if our reality feedbacks and loops into itself.

It may be that we are living within an ontological paradox consisting of variables that in a very specific condition resets itself and begins anew.

If not that, and with further speculation, it might be that we are an actual, literal bubble of a universe. Since energy and matter are one and the same, it may be that there's a dimensionless pure energy, a feedbacked energy that is fundamentally infinite, and from our perspective exists outside of our reality and universe. We know that light is the absolute speed limit for us, so maybe light is the point at which matter reaches the edge of the universe and our reality, and returns to this existence of infinite energy. When this energy slows down, it forms into matter and our dimensions, a form of lag of energy. And what do we know that "lags" energy? The Higgs field. It is part of why matter exists at all.

Could it then, in this scenario, be that we have infinite energy forming bubbles of Higgs fields that slows down energy trapped by the field, and in turn forming matter. And when these bubbles form, they form like inflations of energy slowing down and becoming matter. If that energy is infinite, due to a dimensionless energy not having a beginning, end or position, then there is an infinite possibility of events like inflations of this slowed energy occurring, and they would therefor occur constantly as there's not time.

All of this is unprovable with what we know in science right now. But just think of how the confirmation of the Higgs field opened up new possible hypotheses closer to validity. We don't know how close we are to new understandings of the universe, but it has only been a few years since the confirmation of the Higgs field, and just this year we confirmed gravitational waves.

So the time for all current theoretical physicists to adapt to new standards, work together and produce new theories haven't been long at all based on these confirmations being so recent. There might be theories right now being formulated and calculated based on these confirmations that we will hear about in just a few years.

For me, personally, I find this extremely exciting. That there's been confirmations of so many, "thought to be impossible to confirm"-theories means that new theoretical breakthroughs are more probable to occur than they've been for a long time now.

Before conceiving a P-Zombie we must prove that the opposite, in lack of a better term, conscious human, is in itself not a P-Zombie. In a deterministic sense, we are just machines of causal events, and if so, our qualia may only be an emergent illusion, an "afterthought". In that situation we are essentially a P-Zombie and our qualia is a separate emergent factor.

If you have a P-Zombie that has a separated experience not in direct relation to the function of the P-Zombie's automation as a system, then you have a P-Zombie and a qualia experience as two separate things.

So how can we prove a conscious human with proposed qualia, is in fact not already a P-Zombie at the first stage of function, in essence an autonomous machine that is "leaking qualia" as a byproduct?