How would the optimists respond to this:

Improving metrics of quality of life in recent history reflect increasing prosperity.
Population has increased in parallel with these metrics.
Increasing or even maintaining prosperity for the current population has required and will require putting large amounts of carbon in the air
This carbon, in the near term, is projected with our best predictive ability, to cause near-term side effects which will dramatically reduce prosperity.

Therefore, whether we stop putting carbon in the air, or continue to do so, prosperity can be expected to decline dramatically.
Therefore, improving metrics, which reflect increasing prosperity, can be expected to have no predictive power, even in the near term.

I just did your thought experiment, and I disagree. — Hanover

I would suggest you are fortunate enough to have never experienced major depression. For me, if I experienced just my worst state all the time, never mind 10x, and there was no hope of relief, I would absolutely end my life.

Even assuming suffering negates the value of life, which I don't — Hanover

Imagine the worst depressive episode of your life. Multiply it by 10, and make it unremitting, over the course of your entire life. Such a life has no value: certainly none to the liver of that life.

The only people here who have underwent a large scale catastrophe of the potential magnitude of the coming crisis are people who have lived through wars and natural disasters. I suspect they are in the vast minority here. In my life the national dislocations I've undergone are 9/11, Trump, and Covid. Pretty small fry in the scheme of things. Other than that, I've only experieced personal tragedies. If I were to die now, these would be my personal "worsts". I wonder if the majority of us have the conceptual framework to properly conceive true calamity.

"Morality" isn't very well suited to decide the future of the species. — Bitter Crank

I wouldn't suggest that it is. But I think the question should be of great relevance to individuals who want to avoid the regret of seeing their progency enter maturity into a living hell.

Good point, no doubt I would be posing the same question to the philosophical discussion newsletter of the day.

Still, climate change is more of a "when", as opposed to nuclear armageddon's "if".

We need that, but for polluters — Kenosha Kid

Where the hell is the left wing QAnon for the polluters and the policymakers who subsidize and legislate for them, in exchange for their "speech"?

They might have some kooky, woo ideas, but boy would I take them.

If covid is a dress rehearsal for the climate crisis, I don't like how its turning out. How many people have to be killed and mutilated before Trump and the right wing are exposed for the frauds they are? After turning the US into a cesspit of death and disease, nonetheless the motherfucker nearly won again. Similarly, how hot does it have to get, how much death destruction and displacement does there need to be? Covid suggests, *quite* a lot indeed.

Look into Steven Pinkers work, all these things are better than ever. — DingoJones

If all these metrics are predicated on an unsustainable trajectory leading directly to catastrophe, summing them up doesn't quite help.

Unfortunately that project {fixing the mess we've made} is going to take more than one generation to complete. So if we (the hip and cool ones) — Isaac

You are imposing this burden on your "hip and cool" kids. For whom the problem may well be irredeemable by the time they are adults. What are you doing now to address the problem, while there, maybe, is a sliver of time left to perhaps avoid the worst of it? If nothing, it is nonsense to expect your "hip and cool" kids to contribute any more.

Obviously it depends on how bad climate catastrophe will be — ChatteringMonkey

The future is unknowable. But according to our best predictive efforts, it will be quite bad indeed.

How confident are you in your assessment that climate change is just one adversity among others? Would you stake your life on it? Another's?

Though from the pov of the real world, you are just dense.

From the pov of your binary universe, where the alternative is either carbon neutral or no better than the current, your point is irrefutable.

refute my logic — Roger Gregoire

To be fair the pickings are slim here.

've found that a better question is to ask how the thing in itself is different from the thing. — Banno

The thing might refer to either or both of the thing-in-itself and its subjective manifestations. The thing-in-itself explicitly excludes all subjective manifestations.

I was responding to

-Consciousness: the set of things an agent is aware of
-Conscious subjective experience: a set of all mental images created by the brain that an agent is aware of. This term will be abbreviated as CSE. — Hello Human

What consciousness is not a "CSE"?

What I don't like about this attack on capitalism is that it seems to imply that a leftist approach to life would have been carbon neutral. — frank

It would not. But a leftist approach government is democracy, which would be responsive to people's actual interests, like, you know, having a future.

Instead, we have the government of capitalism: oligarchy, serving only money and the monied.

There is no actual, legitimate debate. Which is more important, your freedom to not wear a mask and not get vaccinated, or my freedom to not get a lethal or mutilating infection from you?
The only exception is the very rare corner cases of people who legitimately cannot do either, or kids in the case of the vaccine.

The actual "freedom" under debate is the freedom to display tokens of allegiance to Der Clownen Fürher. Such displays, to such a baleful lord, must come at a price.

I believe in our universe an infinite ocean would inescapably collapse into a black hole

what do they stand for, at bottom? — Xtrix

I think they have been incredibly consistent.

They stand for, at bottom, no less than the complete destruction of the United States. Just look at some of their recent accomplishments:

* They actively made Covid as destructive and painful for us as they possibly could have
By first hoaxing, to politicizing masks, to politicizing vaccines, to legislating against any mandates, they have successfully brought the most powerful and resourced country to its knees with this virus. They are directly responsible for dozens of 9/11s worth of excess deaths.

* They facilitated and covered for the ransack of the Capitol, in order to end democracy.
Let that indisputable sentence sink in. And those most unpatriotic of all goons had the nerve to wave their stupid flags and bald eagles.

* They punished and humiliated the nation with Trump
Had they just flown a cargo jet full of manure and literally taken a dump on lady liberty's face, America would not have suffered 1/100th the humiliation and loss of face in the world than we did with 4 years or Trump. While crying about us being global laughingstocks, they simultaneously made us into one.

* They revel in, and don't just do nothing, they actively accelerate the climate catastrophe
What more effective way to bring down a nation than to bring down the whole planet with it?

They are the autophages gobbling up the dying cells of American empire.

There are 3 kinds of "color blindness". Only one of them qualifies as any kind of virtue.

1. Failure, feigned or not, to perceive phenotypic differences between groupings: skin tone, facial features, and hair primarily. This is either disingenuousness or a perceptual or cognitive defect.

2. A disinclination or conscious refusal to make unwarranted associations with the perceptions of 1.

3. A failure, feigned or not, to apprehend the reality and the consequences of a societal and historical ~2. This failure can happen due to :

• Obliviousness/stupidity
• A desire to maintain ~2's hierarchy and perquisites by hiding ~2.
• An internalization of ~2 so that the resulting hierarchy and perquisites appear to be the natural order of things, not a product of ~2.
• Any/all of the above

@NOS4A2 partakes of the ignominious 3, while defensively (and disingenuously) pretending virtuous participation in 2.

I used to think so, now I think not.

When the times when I'm wasted, my consciousness should be "less" — RogueAI

I like this argument. Although in my case, at least, the two are linked. When I am drunk and/or high, not only is my degree of consciousness higher, my intelligence generally is too.

There is clearly a relationship between the two. At least, if the brain is stimulated so that consciousness increases, that stimulation can also apply to intelligence. In my view, conscious thought is built on a foundation of internal phenomenal perception. Therefore if that internal perception is amplified, conscious thought should be as well.

I think the best counterexample might be autism. Autism is primarily a perceptual disorder, where perceptions are believed to be subjectively amplified vs. the neurotypical. Rather than increase intelligence, this amplification can interfere with it, especially developmentally. If the baby spends all its time preoccupied with perceptions, often negatively so, it has little room to develop higher order cognition. And when that window closes, its closed forever.

Here we've taken away the ability to measure a human reaction and still made a determination. — Cheshire

The counterargument here is that values ultimately rest on the human, and (probably) animal. They do not have independent existence.

Could an object be beautiful if no one considered it so? Clearly not. So with value.

Fake acct., I was trying to post an extra story in the story contest, haha.

It's strange to me; if I was watching this event I wouldn't be thinking about the people that would never see it or the painter. I believe I would consider the act immoral based on the direct injury to the object. I think a momentary faux personhood by virtue of it's ability to possess and deliver meaning would be the subject of harm. — Cheshire

Same.

I think the axiom I proposed is too narrow. Harming reservoirs of value is bad. Not just humans are reservoirs of values. Animals are, and the environment, and paintings.

In your answer to number 2, you dropped the painter. I was wondering why. — Cheshire

I guess I felt it is effectively destroyed for him, since he will never see it.

If I can show that an immoral act can be against an object; then I've demonstrated an objective morality is more likely to exist? — Cheshire

Sounds like a different meaning of "objective".

I don't think its a matter of equivocation. The great philosopher Rumsfeld analyzed this one adequately. There are three types of questions:

1. Those we have asked and know the answer.
2. Those we have asked and do not know the answer.
3. Those we have never considered asking.

Meno considers 1 and 3, but omits 2.

What absolute is being aimed at? I deliberately phrased the question "how voluntary are emotions", not "are emotions voluntary".

Breathing is somewhat voluntary. You can exercise control, but within strict limits, and this is not the default state. By default the autonomic system is in control. The body (as distingushed from the brain), does not control breathing, it effectuates it.

Why make room for constructs which don't exist. Evil isn't "just psychology", it is a pattern which pervades the human condition. It is eternal, but only to the extent that humanity is eternal. Outside the human context it is nothing.

Evil is privileging one's own material/emotional/ideological interests to the point where doing harm to others in order to meet them is a matter of indifference. One is evil to the extent that one behaves in this way, and evil acts are evil to the degree in which they meet this template. It is malignant selfishness.

Note that sadism is just one variety of evil: the joy the sadist gets from harming is more important to him than the harm he commits. The tempermentally sadistic who refrains from doing harm is not evil.

This trait certainly exists, but there is no metaphysical dimension of evil which goes beyond it.

central committee sock/stooge — skyblack

What you lack in wit, you more than make up for in incomprehensibility.

What do you believe as the causes for emotions? — Corvus

I believe they arise from brain states. They are a perceptual dimension no different than the five senses. But what they are perceiving is internal.

If we know about the causes, nature, and more accurate definitions of emotions, perhaps, we could understand emotions better, and answers to the OP could emerge naturally? — Corvus

Or, we can examine what is phenomenologically right in front of our noses.

How could we tell — Wayfarer

It does seem strictly unknowable, like some kind of uncertainty principle of bullshit.

The last "metanarritive" to fall is the future. This knowledge is now pervasive. Is this late stage postmodernism, or are we now in some new, eschatological condition?

generates random samples of pomo pseudo-text: — Wayfarer

There MUST be published papers written with this thing.

[reply="skyblack;569147"
If only you knew what a joke you've been!

Shoo, joke.

As I see it the meta-narratives only "fell" among a select group of academics. Outside of that "circle jerk" the meta-narrative of modernism is alive and kicking hard. — Janus

But these things rot from the head down. Scientism, secularism, humanism all began with the intellectual elites. But postmodernism is way past that stage. You only have to look at the last four years in America to see the mainstreaming of postmodernism in plain sight.

Or did the postmodernists actually cause the thing they said was already happening? — Kenosha Kid

I don't think they caused it, but I think they quickly embodied to a parodical degree what they described: discourses on Truth revealing themselves to be, and devolving into, language games.

one largely untethered from its metanarrative (communism) and instead tethered to a judicious choice of allegiance — Kenosha Kid

Communism untethered to a metanarritive?

In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unliveable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. — William Lane Craig

Well, this one didn't age well .

:lol: :lol: :lol:
Calm down tough guy!

The parallel here with thinking is that we can try to think what we want to think, but unpleasant thoughts can intrude in spite of our efforts, as is the case with ptsd, depression and anxiety. — Joshs

This is why I wouldn't says that thinking is *perfectly* voluntary, only that we have substantial voluntary control over it, in a way we lack with our emotions.