Surely our acceptance of the idea that information cannot exceed the speed of light is not the result of pure induction, it is the prediction of Einstein's theories, which are universally accepted by scientists today. It's untrue to say we've arrived at this realisation simply by measuring the speed of flow of our information. This might show light-speed is not exceded, but could not prove why. And without formal proof how can we claim it's impossible ? Don't we infact define as scientifically impossible any act which defies our laws of science? In his time Newton would have called much of what Einstein proposed scientifically impossible, but that just shows how our understanding, and thus our definiton of the scientifically possible, evolves.

People experience different kinds of speech when alone.
For myself, the readiness to punish myself sounds like me when talking to myself but it has its own spirit. The spirit is not enough not me to allow me to pass it off as some other being, as is done in the fashion of demons and autonomously performed actions of habit.
On the other hand, I never taught this spirit what to do. Why does it know where are all the things that hurt people are located? — Valentinus

It's your subconscious either directly, or more subtly (via emotional triggers) influencing your conscious mind's thoughts. Your mind is like an iceberg, the 90% underwater is the subconscious. Animals only have that - ie no conscious mind. The subconscious stores all information you consciously give it, and as it is based on instinctive animal fears and desires, it feeds back the opinions you have taught it (often via emotions) to prompt you to conscious survival-based action. If it's prompting you to punish yourself you must over time have given it a low opinion of your self. Every time you say 'I'm weak' it remembers, and if a test of strength comes along in your life it says 'Hang on, you're weak - best to run away'. So really, you did teach it what to do. Time to change tack?

Interesting. I take it that the goal of Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and others is to quiet down the mind and focus on the awareness part or listening part. Do you know where I can read more about this? I am quite interested in this view of matters or taking this perspective. — Wallows

Yes, that's it. You will have heard of mindfullness, this is much the same thing without the philosophical baggage if that's more to your taste. Meditation is the route to quietening down your mind. 'The Power of Now' is a good starter; and Thich Nhat Hanh's books on mindfullness. For Zen I recommend Charlotte Joko Beck's books. Good luck!

If the voice in your head is you, then who is the one listening to it? — Wallows

The voice is your mind (whether consciously or subconciously prompted) 'thinking' out loud. The listener is your awareness, which is separate. The label 'you' is too vague to be pinned to one or the other. In Zen there is no 'self' or 'you' separate from your mind functions - of which these are two.

↪Tim3003
One acts based on results only in teleological ethics, not in deontic ethics.


Kant's maxim isn't bereft of consequential thinking because, although lying is proscribed, preventing the murderer from entering your domain isn't. You may defend yourself, and your own. This is anticipatory in nature, thus giving regard to possibilities, i.e., consequences. — gloaming

Wrong quote. Someone else said that, not me!

Why are we not sharing the belief that democracy is about being well informed and empowered to make the best possible decisions? — Athena


Because modern democracy just isn't like that any more, it's all image and 'spin'. Countries with smaller populations without religious divides do still have meaningful democracies but they are usually socialist. Capitalism is the enemy of meaningful democracy. — Jamesk

Agreed. In trumpeting the importance of the education of the voter so as to 'improve' the outcome of elections we miss the point that ordinary people do not want to be 'educated' on such a subject. They consider it their right to be ignorant, but vote all the same. I'm British, and the appalling result of the Brexit referendum has highlighted this. People who want to leave the EU basically don't like foreigners threatening their neighbourhoods (by talking in foreign languages, and working hard). They also don't want those nasty foreigners in Brussels 'telling us what to do' (although ask them to cite one example of a law pased in Brussles which has enraged them, and they can't). Many people vote on simplistic fears about threats to their sense of self and national identity. And the Vote Leave politians who unexpectedly won the referendum realised how to exploit those fears by peddling half-truths and gross simplifications to a willing audience who hadn't the wit the find out the facts for themselves. Unfortunately many people vote for simplistic emotional priorities rather than rational assessments of reality. Trump's win evidences this too. And there is much nationalistic feeling simmering in the other countries of western Europe. Perhaps globalism is part of the cause, perhaps the 2008 Crash. The bigger the world seems to get, the more fearful people feel about their own cherished corner of it.

So, I think the idea of an enlightened democracy is receding from realisation. As someone said earlier, the problem of climate change is one which democracy clearly cannot handle - perhaps because it's global, certainly because the time-scales involved are beyond most peoples' imaginations.

After the Brexit referendum result, I theorised that in future elections all voting should be done on-line, and before being allowed to vote every voter should answer a short multiple-choice quiz on the main issues of the election. If they could not get the answers right they would be excluded from voting. I suppose that is one way of forcing voters to at least a basic level of knowledge, but would it ever be accepted? I very much doubt it..

I had actually thought of starting a new thread about Democracy being broken. But this one seems on much the same subject..

We can also tell the difference between past, present and future so there must be something special about 'now' so the concepts of past and future have meaning. Some sort of positional cursor that regular eternalism/relativity does not incorporate must exist. — Devans99

I think this again is a circular argument. The past and the future may exist as concepts within that of time in our minds, but they have no concrete reality outside our minds - and that's even if time does exist.

An interesting idea is that of the man with no memory. For him the past does not exist. he simply experiences a continual present. So if none of us had any memories, would the past exist at all? Likewise the future, assuming we had no imagination to picture what it might hold? It seems to me hard to argue that the past exists outside our minds when it is not perceivable in the world or available for us to 'travel' to.

Shouldn't he judge that the liar who intents to save his friend as moral, and the truth teller who intents to kill his friend as immoral? — Happiness

Yes. An act must be judged moral or immoral by its consequences, not by universal tropes like 'lying is wrong'. The core of morality surely is that we have a choice in all our actions, and must weigh up the consequences both ways before deciding. Blindly following a trope abnegates this responsibility and makes us no better than robots.

Is information lost when going from the fourth dimension to the third dimension? — Wallows

I'm basically asking if you can describe n dimensions in n-1 dimensions. Does this apply from going from n to n-k dimensions also or is 1 to 1 correspondence only applicable/maintained for/to a single lower dimension? — Wallows

Lets consider if information is lost when going from 3 dimensions to 2. Can a printed map accurately represent the earth's surface? Surely the answer is no. I don't think it's valid to stipulate using a hollogram to re-display the map information in 3d. I'm assuming the question is whether we can learn as much from the 2d map as we could from a model globe which would be the 3d equivalent of the map.

Who says the temporal continuum needs to contain instants? Likewise who says that the spatial continuum needs to be pointy? Perhaps the continuum has no fundamental level at all, no unit with which all other quantities are multiples of.

If that is the case, then the idea of "now" as a snapshot moment in time is mistaken and the passage of time as a succession of said moments (not unlike a succession of strips on a piece of film) is also confused. This is what you seem to implicitly assume in the your argument. Just as objects may be distant from one another without any fundamental length, events simply come and go continuously without any fundamental duration. — Mr Bee

I agree. The concept of 'now' presupposes that time exists; and now separates the past from the future - two more meaningless concepts without that of time itself.

Einstein said that space-time is one 'thing' I think and that the 2 cannot be separated. So, since we don't doubt space exists, can we doubt time does too? One thing that fascinates me is that time only flows one way (so far as we know) - whereas movement in space can go back and forth. I considered once whether time could flow just as well backwards, but concluded it couldn't, because the laws of cause and effect wouldn't work in reverse. So surely time must exist, but what it's made of must be similar to what space is made of. And I think space must have some physical form because it is warped by mass so that passing light beams are curved by it. How does the light beam know to travel in a curve?

Do they? Specifically, what I'm wondering is if our emotions are associated only with our subconscious minds? You state this as though it's a fact, but I don't think this is a fact that we know, but maybe wishful thinking? Maybe I'm wrong, do you know this to be so? — Pattern-chaser

If you suddenly see a car crash close by you feel an emotion (or two) - maybe shock, fear, concern - whatever. You don't consciously decide to have those emotions, they arise from the reaction your subconscious has to the sensory information it receives through your eyes and ears. If this is not so, where else (and how) can such an externally driven emotion come from?

Yes, by following the Zen path, there are changes we can achieve, and maybe we should. But 'taking charge' of our emotions, as you suggest, is this really possible, or do you just wish it was? — Pattern-chaser

Have you seen Star Wars? There is much in common between the Jedi training and Zen based mindfullness! From my own experience of mindfullness meditation I can testify that it does work (I still can't levitate objects though!). I suggest reading Charlotte Joko Beck, an excellent Zen teacher and writer, if you want to find out more.

I think this is a question of psychology rather than philosophy. Emotional reactions to events come from the subconscious mind. But the subconscious mind is simply parroting back what your conscious mind has told it in the past. So if you suddenly feel jealous of a spouse it is because somewhere back down the line you have (or think you have) observed evidence of the possibility. So before acting on the emotional urge it's best to try to remember what might have caused it. Of course, this applies if you're emotionally healthy. If not, and you suffer from low self-esteem, your unconscious may simply be taking the opportunity to remind you of how weak and worthless you are, by identifying a scenario (the spouse's infidelity) which would add evidence to that view. Here it's far harder to realise that and so to question the emotional reaction - you need the strength, consciously, to understand what your subconscious is up to. But if you have that, you probably don't have problems with low self-esteem.

Zen practice is about breaking this unthinking submission to what comes out of the subconscious. It's about realising the 'self', which your subconscious always feels is under attack, doesn't really exist. Once you stop feeding the subconscious with negativity - based on your conscious experience of your 'self's' actions in the world, it stops feeding back the fear-based emotional reactions to new events, or at least scales them down. We are emotion-based, but we can influence whether those emotions come to us as advice or commands. This practice isn't easy, which I suppose is why so few do it or are capable of doing it.

I don't think these are issues of morality, but simply of tactful behaviour with regard to personal relationships. The answers one comes to will depend on the individual personalities of those concerned - what causes offence to one relative might be of no matter to another. We have free will to choose our own priorities in these situations, and hence to teach those to our children. To ask for some ethical guide to make such decisions seems an abnegation of responsibility as an adult.

Keats said: "Truth is beauty, beauty truth. That's all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know." I think he was right, although he couldn't know why. What we see as beautiful attracts us, ugliness repels us. The reason is simple; evolutionary necessity. Clearly, beauty in a person matches what we as individuals need to produce and raise children. More abstractly: what defines a beautiful day? Most would agree it is sunshine, warmth, a pleasant comfortable open location. By contrast an ugly day would be dark, cold, wet, in a hostile - perhaps confined location. It's easy to see how these extremes match with our necessities for survival. Cold, dark, wet - all good for sudden death via predators, pneumonia, damage to shelter etc. Whereas sunshine, calm, open countryside - good for safety and helpful to grow our crops, build shelter and so on. Keats can't have been too hot on Darwinism, but I'm sure he'd have seen in it the truth he instinctively knew.

There is no such thing as certainty. Can we be certain the sun will rise tomorrow? No. You have to live life based on probability. Most of your fears are 1000 to 1 shots - or 1000000 to 1. Your knowledge may be subjective and open to illusion, but you have to trust that if you havent heard about any demons creating oncoming cars, and nor has anyone else you know, you're pretty safe in accepting the evidence of your senses. And as over the years your experience grows you can become more confident of your intuitive judgement about life's vents.

Those of us who are slaves to consumerism are constantly in a state of wanting because like any addiction, it offers no long-term satisfaction, only a temporary high. The same is true for wealth, status, fame - indeed any quality by which we attempt to 'improve' our future and thus our view of (and others' views of) our selves. Read some Zen: you may see that the key to contentent is in realising that you are perfect as you are - here and now - and have nothing to gain by chasing these empty thrills.

In Darwinist terms, and for an advanced society like ours, life is good, death is evil. As pain tends to towards death it is bad; and happiness, being life-affirming, is good. 'Good' here means good for the social group, not necessarily for the individual concerned. This line of reasoning gets quite interesting when you consider acts of self-sacrifice - eg heroism, or criminality like murder. You can work out a numerical coefficient of the 'goodness' of an act, and one for the 'eviliness' of an act, and so grade criminals - and saints!

"All art is quite useless," as Oscar Wilde said. So, 'art' must justify its existance despite this. A work of art shows us something exceptional of the mind of its creator, something fascinating about what it is to be human - something we could not see alone; and it is something which brings joy and awe to the act of seeing it. I do not do drugs, but I know well the mind-expansion I feel when contemplating great art..

My aim for this discussion was the genesis of consciousness: And clearly one of the problems with discussing consciousness is in defining what exactly it is. We all have our own slightly different shade of grey here. I am going to state my definition: it is the understanding and acceptance of the concept 'I think, therefore I am'.

As I see it, this concept is impossible to grasp without the language via which it is stated. I mean, that without the 5-word phrase (or another similar phrase) the concept is ungraspable. Try it: I think it is impossible to differentiate between the 'I-subject' who is speaking the words, and the 'I-object' who 'is' - ie my 'self'. I can imagine 'me' - the 'I-subject'. But the 'I-object' - ie my 'self' as separate from the 'I-subject' - is meaningless and ungraspable without a language label to differentiate it from the 'I-subject'.

So, I submit, language does not simply label ideas we already have, it allows us to construct abstract ideas and thus meta-ideas, which without it are impossible. As another example: before Einstein, the concept of a black hole did not exist, it was not 'there' in our minds and awaiting a label. Once he had proposed the concept he demonstrated it could be understood using existing language and physics, so the rest of us could add it to our concept lists.

"I agree with @Harry Hindu in that language is just ascribed to what we already believe and know.
Language is just a way to express the ideas and conceptions that you already have. It is not that a person learns the words ‘I’ and ‘You’ and then suddenly knows that he/she exists. The awareness of self and existence is not reliant upon the knowledge of arbitrary sounds and symbols."

I can't agree with the premise that language simply labels what we already know from experience. It does do that, but my point is that in developing a sophisticated vocabulary we become able to go far beyond this simple labelling. And the limit of the experiential labelling falls below what I am calling consciousness. Going back to my dog. She knows that there is a 'me', ruled by survival instincts, and that there are 'others' who may be threats or (hopefully) in my case allies in her quest to survive. She may even understand being 'alive' rather than dead having reference to other animals. Granted she has no words for these concepts, but with such basic concepts words are unnecessary - or maybe she has specific barks? But does she have a self?
Perhaps your boy Ildefonso brought up without learning language developed his own inner form of language to handle complex concepts? He sounds bright enough to have done that. Surely most human languages share most of their concepts, so the self created via 'I am', can be functionally the same as that coming from 'Je suis'.. If they didn't it would be far more difficult for us to learn and use several at once. And Ildefonso's inner language probaly mapped quite well onto what he wa later taught.
Does language only express concepts we already have? I think few could learn and hold subtle concepts from philosophy, maths and physics in their head - indeed any concepts not readily imaginable - before learning the words to describe them. Perhaps those few are the geniuses who first invented them.

I'm an atheist, and I have a moral/ethical code. I think it comes partly from education and social acceptance, but partly through our genetic inheritance. As an advanced species we have evolved the ability to live in complex social groups. These can only survive with inbuilt codes of ethics, so surely these have evolved alongside our other mental abilites. If they hadn't we'd still be beating eachother over the head and stealing eachother's hunk of meat to feed our family. I have considered what form an evolved ethical framework would take, and it comes down to the simple axiom "death is evil, life is good". A death of a member of the tribe is usally bad for its continued survival rather than good. And likewise a birth or continued life is good. Okay this is a gross over-simplification, but hopefully you can see how a moral code which aids a tribe's survival can start. Clearly the same code does not apply to members of other tribes - hence racism, xenophobia and all those deep-rooted instincts which today we see as unhelpful. But the bottom line is ethics has an evolutionary basis.

The question 'Do numbers exist?' needs to be made more precise. I take it that by 'exist' we mean exist in the natural world, outside of man's imagination. So does the number '2' exist outside of my mind(and the minds of other people)? No.

If I have an orange, and beside it I have another orange. What I have is an orange and an orange. The concept of '2' oranges is one I apply. The '2' does not exist outside my mind in the real world. If you say it does, where is it? Show me it. There is no '2' in the objective world, only matter and energy. It's easier to see that '0' does not exist, but '2' is no different. Thus Maths is invented. It is a spectacularly accurate tool for describing the laws of nature, but it is created by us just as any other language is.