bad and beneficial can go together. Colón had "bad" intentions, today we would call him entepreneur or something worse; but the consequences of the process had some very good outcomes, such as civilizing a whole continent where human sacrifice was still practiced to appease demons or where Science was three millennia behind the Old World.

Democrats, like the Left in Europe, gave up reason and civilization to survive. In Europe, the only flourishing left-wing parties are those against the very idea of Western civilization, and a strong reliance on identity politics and angry ethnicities. They live on massive influx of immigrants, who get help in return for NOT integrating; Muslims (because Muslim votes are easy to secure through buying imams) and young people who weren´t allowed to mature well and seek desperately some vital ground by becoming an incarnation of some "oppressed" tribe.

The problem with renouncing to a national and democratic vision and embracing tribalism, is that the Democratic Party can no longer produce rational candidates or candidates with light skin and Christian or post-Christian background. That is why Clinton did not win: she did not have the support of Democrat voters because her skin was too pale and she was too rational, despite her efforts to show otherwise that ended up taking a real toll on her mind. Her votes were really anti-Trump votes, they did not vote for her.

Democrats can only now produce tribal candidates, which is not the way to win a national election where you need to charm citizens of all colours and trades.

"I am afraid Bill Gates is misled when he pushes for education for computer technology over education for being humans living in human communities" Indeed Athena. This is the main shortcoming of the philantropic tradition. An individual wants to donate in the direction of what he or she knows best and understand; which is not necessarily what is needed. It is good that rich people donate; but those donations can not be a diversion of money from rational social and environmental investment.

I understand that sponsorship and philantropy in (still) English-speaking countries is important, with a religious justification, and opposed to giving all the money to politicians. But there is a better way, which is to allow citizens to decide what to do with the funds. Very often, much less money, but managed through democratic and professional filters is more efficient and useful than obscene quantities pushed into what the philantropist think it is best. Contrary to what religion teaches us, is not "intention" what counts, but the real outcome.
I learnt this in my youth, as a volunteer for a development NGO associated to the Catholic Church. I also taught in schools for a decade and we also had to manage a budget.

Fortunately, Bill Gates donates to so many things that he gets it right sometimes too, asking for strategies and projects worth funding, not letting his personality get in the way.

I would like to know what "a free will act" is really like. What are the conditions for an act to be truly free?I can not think of motions without causes. Yes, there is also pure chance, like the pure chance of Reality existing in the first place; but that is not free-will either, is luck. What do you mean by a free will act? It might be that I don´t understand free will at all

the moral factor in how we deal with antisocial behaviour is very important. Some acts are minimized or even considered fair by reason of different versions of "society made me do so". Left-wing thinking, as it is derived from Catholic and Jewish thought, is abundant in these arguments. In Spain at least, it´s not only the Left, but the Conservatives too who buy and sell this reasoning: gipsies are poor because they are discriminated, not because most of them refuse to study even in Primary and only 2 out of 100 goes to University (which is free in Spain under a level of rent); murderers had a poor upbringing; violent rioters were pushed by capitalism to behave like beasts; and so on. Curiously enough, these justifications do not apply to corrupt politicians or rich bankers, that are super-free and unconditioned so that they can take all the blame.
I think this has to stop. Last week the horrible kidnap, rape, torture and killing of a young beautiful Spanish teacher was committed by a man who was a serial killer but was not in prison. Most parties follow the Progressive view that even monsters like this guy (or his twin brother, also a rapist and killer himself) can not be kept in jail permanently, not even to keep innocent people safe, not even if it is obvious that this gipsy man can not improve or refrain from commiting crimes and even his family wants him in jail. Feminists, that are very powerful in the Parliament, are strongly against life sentences in Spain, and they blame a patriarcal education or insufficient indoctrination in early years in feminist ideology for the development of these human monsters. It all goes back to the morality argument and the stupid debate about "who´s to blame", and the Catholic idea that everybody can be saved if they are announced the good gospel.

"If there is any comfort to be taken in this future existence or yours, it is that it was always to be as such and there was nothing you could have done to prevent it." Yes Rank Amateur, but even more so. If we live in a deterministic world, one in which you can expect the aspirin to relieve your pain just because you swallowed it, it´s not just that your bad choices or unlucky days were unavoidable. It goes beyond that: it means that you do not exist in a universe were those events did not happen. You could not exist in the reality where you don´t say a stupid thing at that girl; because the causal chains leading up to that bad move did not begin when you went into the pub, or when you were born, but when the Big Bang happened or even before that. You are the guy that we get in the universe where 14 millions people were killed in the Nazi camps, and even if only one of them had been spared, say poor Anna Frank, you would not be here at all, because the causal network creating those historical events is the very same that gives you and me.

What do you think? Is my reasoning sound?

If a dog attacks people, it is put into a cage, deprived of its freedom; it might be even sacrificed for failing to respect the rights of humans. The dog is not to blame; it has no free will and only acts upon instinct and experiences. But it is still caged so as to avoid harm.
With people is no different in a deterministic universe as the one we seem to inhabit and rely on when we go to the doctor, put something in the oven or kiss our soulmate. People are not guilty of their actions, that in truth just happens to them; but they are still responsible. They are responsible because what they are, their rights, their salary, their love relationships can not be separated from what they do, including what they do wrong. So to claim ownership for the good stuff, the bad stuff needs to be accepted too. So we are not to blame, but we are to be held responsible. We are self-aware causal chains, and society needs to take us as a whole.

In Spain we have the same people, but they aren´t even scientists; they are writers of novels, and artists of any kind. And chefs. When we see this mistake so prominent in these celebs, we have the opportunity of learning not to do it ourselves. I have this vice too, I too tend to think that I know better. Because sometimes is true, I tend to expect to be right all the time, even in fields I know nothing about. Give me two wikipedia articles about Cuban snails, and I will explain a biologist the best way to save the species from extinction. Does it happen to any of you?

In a computer program to develop new designs via I.A. algorithms, what is nature and what is nurture? For example, if I need a new design for a car tyre that is the most efficient in rainy and hot conditions, is "nature" or "nurture" that did the job?

"If the idea is that we should have equal outcomes for all, you can't achieve that by just taking children from their parents and letting the State raise them as one. You'd have to genetically engineer humans AND let the State raise them as one" Yes Harry Hindu, and we still need to add a third factor to make true equality possible: a never-ending repression to prevent differentiation and specialization to emerge naturally, as it is a mathematical quality of our universe that when elements interact they tend to form systems of differentiated parts.
So equality as totalitarian (socialist, fascist, feminist, islamist...) movements understand it, requires a strong and endless violence on the DNA, minds, and behaviour of people.

Okay, so my take on your question is: the universe is too full of information and relationships for us to understand, to represent in our minds. So we know something when we learn to take some links into consideration and ignore all the rest.Knowing and defining is not so much about taking in, but about leaving out. With this in mind, thinking about a person is necessarily reductionistic, because you are building "a mental wall" around some phenomena to think of them as separate from others and become super-aware of what they have in common. It´s all a mental trick, it´s not realistic. But it is very convenient, because it allows us to focus our energy, to guide our behaviour. A person is really in my view, the symbolic avatar that our tens of trillions of cells, bacteria, protozoids etc use to communicate with other pluricellular colonies with similar interests, that have their own personae ("masks") or avatars to chat with our avatar. A person is an entity of the level of reality, or complexity, that is also inhabitated by dogs or blackbirds or vacuum cleaners; but not by bacteria or the Moon. The Moon communicates with entities in her level in their particular way, basically through gravity and radiation. Bacteria communicate with other bacteria with their chemical and electrical signs. Personae themselves are symbolical creatures (they are avatars or images) so they communicate with each other using symbols and meanings. Our personal or symbolic or "spiritual" self, is an ongoing update on past records of the states the colony have been going through so far; not direct medical and physical descriptions, but the symbolic or poetic record that was made for the persona files.
The purpose of the avatar is to deal with the macrocosmos level of the cellular system in a way that is conducive to the survival of the colony and the survival of other similar colonies. If the avatar had not other avatars to communicate and work with, it would lose its purpose; that is why lonely ladies adopt cats and why saints in the desert had so many imaginary friends. If you upload your mind into a computer before you die, your persona or soul dies with the body anyway, and the upload is just a record of the last state of the symbolic function of that poor body. It can be used to make a digital creature, that I guess will seek desperately for a body to be attached to, so as to avoid extinction or dilution. But it´s not you, so you don´t need to care about that program and its troubles.

The Guardian is biased because it offers a simplistic, manichean, super-racist, anti-west, pro-feminist, pro-globalist view of the world; and their reports are heavily filtered by those human algorithms. It´s a parody newspaper at best. Sorry but that´s the objective truth, and what I think or I am does not change the fact.
We are all biased, that´s why we need each other, but ask yourself if you´re just putting too much from you when you guess how I am; after all you don´t know me. It is possible that I´m not like you portrait me?

I think the nurture VS nature axis is very little useful, and false even; since nature and nurture aren´t really separate worlds but two aspects of the same phenomenon. For example, you can say that people in West Africa usually show phenotypes with very dark skin, strong bodies, high fertility in women...but these traits, with a strong genetic make-up, are in turn the consequence of cultural and experiential phenomena: These tribes are like that because historically chose to live in certain places and through certain means, and if their ancestors had decided to develop a civilization their bodies would change a lot. Notice in this respect, how Indian populations in South America are gaining stature in respect to their grandparents, because they are eating differently and living differently; also their fertility is affected. In Spain, men have gained 12.5 cms in 100 years, which is remarkable in my opinion, and it affects how genes for being tall are selected by women (less, as there are many more tall men). There is no "nature" traits that are not conditioned by cultural choices, and there are no "nurture" elements that are free from genetic influence. Plus 99% of DNA in our bodies was never in our mum´s egg or our dad´s spermatozoid, but it is in our bacteria and other creatures in us.

yes, that argument is silly. The guy was determined to make it though, so here it is

What Wittgenstein could we read if we haven´t read with Wittgenstein yet? Reading is a dialogue with intellectuals, and you can not bear an intellectual for too long; I agree with emancipate that we have to be more relaxed in our readings. What I do is to use an ebook, and keep a number of books in it to pick one each time

Anyway, I thought you meant Einstein, the grey parrot; but there´s no need, just take another healthy parrot and instruct him from birth to talk and discuss current affairs

it does not matter, as you can not possibly do that. You would have to clone their entire life and world of influences, from what they read, to what they ate! A person with same DNA is not the same person. Not even the same body.

It matters a lot TWI. Because our society is based on the free-will assumption; in fact this belief is very disfunctional as it promotes violence and conflict.

Because you have such a strong thinking machine, you need to work on the punctuation of your comments to give us some break, mate.
Perhaps Kant was a mason and wanted to preserve the beliefs of his sect; with a boundless divine realm and a sublunar, cyclic, machine like material plane.
It´s a good one that Reality has an acausal "beginning", which means, mind you, that all of reality past, present and future is not caused ultimately by anything. However, we need to be humble and use what we know about the manifest world; and the way it communicates with itself is always deterministic so far. Besides, Kant doesn´t seem to know how a free-will that is not determined by causality or chance would work. How does that work? how can an entity have "free" thoughts without cause or luck as agents?

intellectual consistency is something I had to un-learnt in the first year of my teaching career; from then on it was "whatever works". All state-run schools should have that motto in big golden letters at the hall. On the other hand, you are not inconsistent, because an agnostic does not reject the existence of God, agnosticism is really skepticism.

This universe is special because you are in it, lupac

I like the quote from Revelation. It´s a pity only this Revelation book was preserved, because I´ve known it was a whole popular genre in Judaism, early Christianism and other literary cults. Enoch is also in that genre I think

to try to understand better the world. By chatting with intelligent people you figure out things. For example, I´d really like to have my notion that we live in a deterministic universe challenged with arguments I can understand and make sense of.
Also because I got expelled from all my previous forums for, well having thoughts of my own and not just be a PC sheep.

I understand that for people who know a lot more and are already prepared for bigger fails, some patience is required with members that are still doing small logic and vocabulary mistakes.

you don´t have to agree, it´s very established science; we learn by doing things to solve mental or physical problems, and react to the feedback. Like A.I., that is why they call it Artificial Intelligence. In good teaching, educators provide the students with opportunities to fail; but failing in a way that they can understand so that they can get it right.

you have to check your sex life; if your sex life is good, you don´t need a psychiatrist. It is that simple, but people elaborate because they think too high of themselves.

As for the "it´s in the mind of the author" it´s an idle, or too practical answer in my opinion. It´s like saying: where is the videogame? in the computer. The real question is where Clark Kent and Superman (that for me are different persons) are ontologically speaking. I´d rather say they exist in a meta-physical plane. In Spain we had a philosopher, Gustavo Bueno, that studied these things deeply, and elaborated the doctrine of Philosophical Materialism. I need to read something from the guy, as he´s supposed to be one of the best philosophers in XX-XXI Europe.

that is how we learn everything

they exist on a metaphysical plane, that is, the secundary or psychic dimension emerged from the physical one. In imagination that is, like when I had sex with Ana and then I woke up and turned out it was all in a metaphysical plane.

Number2018, it is not a conspiracy theory, unfortunately. This is the link to the meeting Soros-Puppet president. Soros new base in Barcelona, capital of Catalonia. This is the leader of the main opposition party, in Parliament, denouncing that the Puppet is supporting the coup d´etat instead of fighting it.

An assault on democracy doesn´t need to be quick and shocking, as in Latinoamerica. Sometimes seizing power takes years. Last time in Spain took five years, from 76 to 1981. This happens when the rebels are not the stronger side and need to slowly erode the pillars of the State and Democracy, instead of just occupying the Parliament that is bound to fail. Separatists in Spain, that are fascist in origin (Basque separatism closer to Hitler, and Catalonian separatists closer to Mussolini); extreme left that is sponsored by Venezuela and Iran (some say that China but I can´t confirm), and a group of very corrupt parties are all together in a front for a new Republic. A Republic more like Venezuela or fascist Italia than like the U.S or France, that´s the catch.

unenlightened, I did not think you were an idiot. We are not supposed to know about all matters in the universe; for example, I do not know what pedal you have to step on to brake the car, or the name of the character in Game of Thrones with white hair and dark eyebrows.
I thought your ecology background was poor because you were over-emphasising cooperation, as feminists who don´t even know who Lynn Margulis was do. Perhaps I misunderstood you.

Terrapin Station, you can not "not be pro-borders", unless you advocate a pre-borders situation, in which towns built thick walls around them and woodlands had to be chopped down for safety. But that was not a border-less scenario, but an situation in which each town made its own precarious borders because frontiers were not protected. Borders, or filtering and separating, is essential to anything alive, from a protozoid to a planet and all things in between.

"Sometimes cooperation is necessary, sometimes conflict is necessary. There is no doubt that both strategies work when used at the appropriate time"., Yes Harry Hindu, but then if fighting is not the only option, it means that there is a more general principle at work, and war is not the the cornerstone of life or society.

This is very obvious to me but it´s not evident at all for darwinism, feminism, islam, socialism, LGTB activism and other movements, that consider war/struggle/jihad more than just a way of dealing with problems. In these ideologies, conflict and struggle is central and holy, as it is considered the very mechanism of evolution and progress.
It´s a metaphysical tenet that produces, naturally, confrontation and victimization of others not as a last resort, but as a first resort.
I wonder if there is an alternative cosmovision out there where war is not the basis for human relationships, whether they are personal, social or international. Please do not even mention Christianism, as Christianism has the Apocalyptic Conflict of Good and Evil as the main theme just like the rest; only difference is that it advocates absolute surrender to your enemies (at least Catholicism).

From other countries is difficult to understand what is going on, as happens people who don´t understand Brexit. Is not a separatist region against the rest of Spain; little more than half of Catalonia oppose independence, despite 40 years of wild indoctrination; and the most voted party there is against referendum.

What is really happening, is that separatists (ethnic totalitarians) and extreme left (globalist totalitarians) have allied to impose a new regime in Spain, with the help of Soros, and other donors. They put their votes together, all left and fascist (they are fascist, it´s not name-calling) separatist movements, to throw the president out and put a new, very weak and easy to manage, new president. The man said he would call elections right away, but he lied of course. A month later he had a secret meeting with Soros in the presidential palace. No journalist has asked him about it.

The only party opposing the Coup is really Vox. Vox is NOT fascist, or extreme right, as the media portrait them. There are real extreme right parties in Spain, but they never get more than a few thousands votes and they are not racist. Vox is a spin off of the centre-right party, with people who thought that enough was enough with widespread corruption. They are liberal, pro-democracy, pro-constitution and pro-defending borders that are now wide open and literally in control of mafias. The former party and Ciudadanos, supposedly the centre-right, do not really do anything at all, just talking, but especially PP have been supporting the Coup until the evictment.

I have always voted left or extreme left, but now if new elections are called, I will vote Vox no doubt. I´m not a capitalist liberal or Catholic, but I think ideology is a luxury when your country is at such great risk of civil war. People in Spain that aren´t pro-war and pro-separatism, think that only Vox can help. I wish there were more parties on the side of union and Constitution; but it´s only the King, the Judiciary, and Vox (and millions of people).

what do you propose we do in Europe to avoid Civil War? Is there any particular thought you would try to communicate to us if you had a last tv ad of the year opportunity?

You need to work out your biological metaphor better. If Dutch elm disease could not survive the death of the elm, there would be no dead elms by Dutch elm disease. And cooperation is not all that we can see in nature; males do not cooperate to get to copulate with the females, and cats do not cooperate to preserve diversity of bird fauna. I think you need to study more ecology if you want to ground your position on how life works. It´s what I´d do

What I do is to actually ask the person if I may, if I should give them a gift before I do. I don´t like people forcing presents on me, and I don´t like to that to others either, I think it is rude and not very kind. If the gift is for the kids, I also inquire what gift exactly they will like. There´s still room for meaning and originality and you get it right many more times.

OKAY this is my take on your issue:

Gifts are favours the giver receives. Unlike stuff we ask from others, gifts are not requested, so the favour is really done by the person accepting them, and goes to the person giving the present. This favour you do to the giver includes making good use of the article/action, or going to the shop yourself to get a replacement.

When we give, we communicate; giving is a strong communicate act. Communication is passing a little of yourself to another person or entity (it is usually a bidirectional action), a part of what you are is now also in the another person. In barbaric countries with obscene fertility rates, they even use real daughters and sons as gifts between families to make this "communication" as explicit and consequential as possible.

Children should get much less toys and gifts. They should have a chest with their stuff, and not a room with their stuff. Grown-ups´ social needs of communication and sharing can be fulfilled without treating the kid like he was the reincarnation of Osiris. Children need less toys and more play. That is also a gift you can give them.

the lower layers of the atmosphere in the locality. As for the real causal agent, the Universe and its entropy.

nothing about science would change? please explain that, it is hard to reconcile with the history of Science. I guess you mean that the underlying physical reality does not change; but the same can be said of religion. Where is the eternal heaven defended by Science before John Dee and Tycho Brahe (the guys that studied for the first time a supernova)? Where will "factual" darwinistic evolution be in 20 years?

For me the real question is whether an entirely (religious) belief-free Science is even possible, given that Science needs to suppose an order and underlying unity to all that it is. So at least for practical reasons, Science assumes that Reality is not really random but interconnected and law-abiding. This is truly a religious mindset. Consider how religion comes from religio, religare, "link again", and carries the meaning of establishing symbolic bridges in (social, personal, natural) reality.

For the same reasons, a scientist can not work either within the metanarrative about the Universe inspired by a book cult. A scientist can not suppose that it´s all a God-best-selling-author´s cheap tale, because again that leads to a natural world that makes no real sense and it´s ultimately just fancy.

So a scientist can not be an Atheist in his lab, and he can not be Christian, Muslim, Feminist... A religious and open-minded approach is a must for a scientist who wants to contribute to basic science and not just to engineering and technology.

I don´t think our thoughts can generate emotions in someone else; because we always need the colaboration of an environment, including the "receptor" of the communication himself to make it happen. But if other agents are included, then it is no longer "our" thought", but the thought of a whole system, receptor included as an active participant. Unless we are a free god who is outside the Universe but can affect a receptor: then I guess such entity could be called the cause of individual feelings. Otherwise, we do not cause thoughts or feelings stricto sensu, not even our own.