Embrace interpretation errors, lost Gospel's, forbidden text's (Spinoza's) , translation errors, religion exclusivity (King James version excludes the book of Sirach; American Standard includes same), metaphor, allegory, etc. — 3017amen

This is why I say you ain't no philosopher. Because:
- to a chicken farmer you can't say don't count your eggs
- to a mathematician you can't say "live with the erroneous answer"
- to a doctor you can't say "malpractice suits are good for you"
- to an engineer you can't say "live with the collapse of the bridge you built"
and
- to a philosopher you can't say "accept arguments that defy the law of non-contradiction."

angry commentators are going to rise to the top faster than people looking to build bridges — Coben

It's a bridge no side wishes to cross, yet wants all on the other side to cross to their side.

Anger is a better emotion to employ to deal with this situation, than peaceful negotiation. Peaceful negotiation leads to nowhere... anger leads to nowhere... except it gets rid of the frustration and venge built up. Anger, when properly dished out on unsuspecting passer-byes (by street preachers), can feel very good for the angry person.

The reason angry commentators rise to the top is that it resonates with the masses who stand behind the ideology which that angry person supports.

Everybody is angry. And we are not going to take it any more.

Mensch is human — Artemis

Hence the English proverb, "To err is human." Becase humans (Menschen) are nature's biggest mistake.

Mensch is human — Artemis

In Yiddisch, too. Rabbi Rubinstein wrote a rebuttal, little known and soon forgotten after publication, to Nietzsche, with the title "Meschugenes Ubermenschchen", which means in Enlish, translated loosely, "Loco little Overperson".

Grammarly. That is the software to clear up the snags and traps of English. I use it to smoothe out the mistakes in all my commands before uttering them to Killer. Killer is Rottweiler-Chihuahua mix.

The problem here is the person may not have enough information to have good moral judgment, — Athena

Is it necessary to draw a line between good and moral? — Athena

Case in point to question in quote 2 is the statement in point 1: If there is no line between good and moral, then the first quote becomes "The problem here is the person may not have enough information to have good good judgment," or else "The problem here is the person may not have enough information to have moral moral judgment," both of which necessarily follow the reasoning of why we need line, because both of them necessarily make no sense.

In my esteem yes, we need to draw a line, because a lot of confusion can come from saying "ethical" or "moral" when one says "good". If the two concepts are interchangeable, then we don't need two concepts, and yet there has not been a separative declararion that separates good from moral.

If Aristotle wanted us to have virtues that drive us to do good (moral) things because we strive for excellence, then how can wars be possible?

A man H, of country Hungary, is brave and wants to do good, which is to feed the people of Hungary.
A man A, of country Austria, is brave and wants to do good, which is to feed the people of Austria.
Virtuous people are good, and a good person shalt not harm another virtuous person.

Yet H will fight A.

This is how Aritstotle's (the great, the genius) model breaks down. His model of what makes one engage in moral actions is faulty.

Atheists have a lot to be angry about; after all they lack the security blanket of a sky-daddy — TheMadFool

Then why are the religious just as angry?

the security blanket of a sky-daddy who will, according to believers, set all things right in the end — TheMadFool

What if you followed every tenet of your religion, for instance, Christianity, and once in a while fantasized about your neighbours ass... and your faer daddy would condemn you for eternal suffering in hell fire for that. Would you still call him perfect and fair? The believers have more to doubt than the non-believers... the believers have the daily, the yearly, the monthly and the minute-to-minute restrictions they need to fight to keep with tooth and nail against Satan's temptations. There, you may have a miserable life, but at the end you hope to sit on the right of Jesus the Christ, except once in your 89 years of earthly life, you thought of thy neighbour's ass... bang, you end up in hell, forever to suffer in brimestone and hellfire in eternal, horrible suffering.

Maybe that's why the religious are angry. They are envious of the freedom and liberty the atheists enjoy without the confines and the yoke of prescribed restrictions by religions. I don't blame the religious for being envious of the atheists. Except... isn't envy a deadly sin?

We tend to get locked into negativity on words like liberal, socialist, communist, atheist, and the like. We need some small steps forward...and then a lurch toward them. — Frank Apisa

@3017amen, I must commend you for starting this thread. I have often ridiculed you on these pages, and I still maintain that you suck as a philosopher, but you obviously have other fortes and admirable virtues that are not philosophy-oriented, but humane, accepting, socially inclusive, empathetic and thus sympathetic. You are a psychologist in this sense more than a philosopher, and you are a peacemaker, as this thread shows.

Or maybe you are a poet. I dunno.

One virtue being the Golden rule. — 3017amen

Then there is the silver rule, and then there is the bronze rule.

Hehe. I view cannibalism as a cross between cannabis and banalism.

But I don't condone it. Apparently the mad cow disease is caused by any species eating its own. This is actually a fact, I ain't joking. Or rather, not a fact, but how I remember what may have been a fact.

Very funny. So you disagree that Corona has a higher mortality rate than the seasonal flue? — Nobeernolife

You're plain stupid. I did not say that. I agreed with you, and admired you for your superior math skills. You could't comprehend that, and therefore the proper conclusion to draw is that you're plain stupid.

Now, you may ask me how come your math skills are superior, and you're still stupid. C'mon, man, ask me already.

the mortality rate for Corona is about 2%, while that for normal influence is about 0.1%. Ergo, the Chinese Corona is about 20 more deadly. NOT the same. — Nobeernolife

Holy MacKarel, you are a genius!! Not only can you tell that .001 goes 20 times into .02, but you can also tell that .001 <> .02.

I admire you for your superior math skills. Do you have a Ph.D. in math, perchance, from some better university?

YOU claimed that women are inherently inferior in math, while at the same time insisting that all is equal. Your contradiction, not mine. Live with it, and don´t try to change the subject. — Nobeernolife

You are either mistaking me for someone else, or else you notoriously put words in the mouth of people.

You are... despicable in your building arguments.

You are... a megalomaniac, little smut of a control-freak.

What the heck is "don't try to change the subjec"? Are you some sort of authority figure? In your head, maybe. You can't tell people on this forum what to do and what to say. You don't have that power invested in you by anyone. You are completely disoriented about your role on this forum, about the nature of this forum, and about your place and function on this forum.

Your anger is futile. You are a nobody, and you'd better get used to that idea.

Praxis, please don't misquote me. There was an "if" before "secularist".

Are you a journalist? I wouldn't be surprised if you were.

Reading comprehension problems_? Your claim that education favours boys if it stresses math IMPLIES that you think girls are inferior in math. That is all I referred to,
In the event when I said education is increasingly changed to favour girls, I was not referring to math. — Nobeernolife

You were referring, I reckon, to geography and English history?

Are there any other subjects in school? It's been a long time for me, and I can't remember.

I fail to understand your point, or why you're posting here but now wanting to "end" the discussion. — IvoryBlackBishop

I don't want to end the discussion. I just wanted to end this branch:
"Who cares?"
"I care."
"Why?"
"Because."

I am all for supporting more debate in the OTHER areas of discussion.

The great thing about morals derived from God or whoever is you can be certain they're right as long as you accept their supernatural source. — Txastopher

I don't think it's their supernatural quality that is the main spring in accepting religion-driven morals, but the (believed) absolute authority of the issuer of the moral creeds.

Once a firefighter was interviewed why there were no women in our town in firefighter groups, but there are women in the police force. He replied, "because in policing you carry a Smith and Wesson, and that gives you leverage; in firefighting, you can't rely on anything but your own brute strength."

Morals as dictated by religions are helped to be accepted by the equivalent of Smith and Wesson, by the promise of heaven (perfect existence) and hell (endless suffering). Those who believe, truly, are not moral due to choices or considerations or because of the elegance of a moral-ethical argument or theory; they are moral because God means business. You behave, you go to heaven, you misbehave, you go to hell. No moral choice here. It's all the selfish consideration on the most basic of potentially false promises.

Secular morality is completely different. They act moral, if they do, because their inner self tells them to do it. They can appear to act moral by the weight of the law; the law punishes the miscreants much like God does, so there is a lot of selfish acting among secularists, too. But if a Secularist acts moral, you bet your sweet toosh that s/he is acting moral because s/he is moral.

. The problem is that in our modern societies allowing 2% of the population to die without trying to prevent it is anathema. So we will commit economic hari kari and probably still loose 2%. — Punshhh

Right. I concur. Except now I have to look up "anathema" and declare some sort of pun about it, too, to remain consistent.

Two percent or twenty can be the same deaths depending on sample size of those infected. — Monitor

Ay-vey.

it seems it would slightly HELP the world's economy (per capita)? Please correct me where wrong (I am interested, and open to the idea that I am very wrong here). It seems most of the 2% will be retired people. So it is just the sadness, trauma, and FEAR that will truly be a problem. FEAR — ZhouBoTong

I both agree and don't. There will be more mullah and goods to go around per capita; a 2% increase in a flash. The upfall is also that retired, i.e. conventionally and economically non-contributing members go out; that way the production is at a steady rate, and relative wealth will grow.

It is true that fear may induce public panic. Stores will be ransacked. No food available. Farmers refuse to truck their stuff to town. Massive starvation, manier people die from malnutrition, than from New Coronavirus. STealing, and eating other people's loved pets becomes a fashion, and cannibalism is not out either, if things get really bad.

The funeral home industry will strive. So will the doomsday prophet industry. Doomsday prophets and street preachers have been industriously preaching the end of the world, I think since the world began.

I'm getting hungry just re-reading what I've so far written. Cheers, off to the kitchen.

Two percent isn't low. I'd say flu's 0.1% is low. — Michael

I accept your answer as your opinion. Since we have not established any metrics as to what constitues low, I have no choice to accept your answer as true for you, and you have no choice but to accept that for me two percent is low.

Once we get into other discussions, such as how high a mortality rate affects the economy, education, law, (such as riots starting) and distribution of everyday necessaries, as well as spiritual upheaval, etc etc then we can talk about it more intelligently.

But two percent is not high in my esteem, as the world doubles its population every 40 years, so it is near an annual two-percent increase year-over-year. It hasn't hurt the economy, so a reduction of the same rate ought not hurt the economy either.

Why do you say it's not low? To me 50% would be high, and 80% would be high. Two percent is pittance, compared to 50% and 89%.

So, |>, do they have a table in C++ , in Java, and in all other languages, for ALL imaginable non-reducible fractions of integers? If you say "yes", then ZelebG got the better of you. (Because it would mean for a finite set of table entries to contain an infinite number of table entires.) If you say "no", then what is the language to do with it? If one such integer fraction crops up, what do the programs do? I see no alternative but for the program to go and digitize the result before proceeding.

You opened my eyes, |>, to how new programming languages work. How does a program add 1/3 and 3/7 together?

Bring them to the same denominator? Like humans?

I've been out of programming for 30 years now. You are talking, to a real, live dinosaur, |>. It's exciting, innit? Until I devour you in two bites.

Douglas, Where did ZelebG go? You see what you've done? We quibbled, and ZG took the opportunity of the moment that we weren't watching, and he ran away.

This is not true. A programming language that supports doing mathematical calculations with rational numbers will typically not force you to ever convert the rational number to a floating point number. The program can run from beginning to end using only rational numbers, and can consequently produce results with perfect precision and accuracy. (Assuming that the numbers being represented are accurately represented as rationals.) — Douglas Alan

Perfectly true. But the numbers will be thus represented as long as a program is run written in that particular programming language. If you run a different program, written in a more conventional programming language, that does not have that feature programmed into its structure, then you lose accuracy of rationals with infinite repetitions.

This argument does not invalidate mine, where I pointed out your reservation, "AT TIMES".

Maybe in the future all programs will run that way. But not at present.

I certainly don't agree that with Zelebg, but this assertion of yours is wrong. Computers can and do represent rational numbersat times with perfect accuracy. This is done by representing them as a pair of integers, rather than in a "floating point" format. — Douglas Alan

I hear what you are saying. But the emphasis is on, what you described as, AT TIMES. That is, not always.
Once you enter into a variable the value of 1/7, and you use that variable's value in calculations, you will immediately lose the perfect accuracy, as the calculations storage go on binary code representation.

Why do I care?

Because.

(This is great philosophy, innit. Let's stop this now. You can still have the last word, I won't reply to that in this mini-thread.)

But there are far more cases than with SARS and MERS. The Corona death toll is now more than those two combined. — Monitor

That is true. But the death rate is still only two percent. It can stay two percent until two percent of all infected people die. It's still two percent. The absolute number of deaths grow while it remains at two percent of all infected people as the population of infected people grow.

I don't know what is so hard to understand about "two percent". Must be the effect of North American Populist Stupid Fundamentalist Evangelist Christian Schoolboards' stupid decision to not teach anything useful in school.

↪god must be atheist
I don't know if you realize the pun you uttered.
I still don't, where is it? — Punshhh

You used the expression "decadence" for the soft, rotting core of society, which has become soft and you know, soft, like soft, yellow shit.

But "decadence" actually means in its original sense, in French, "Death, dying, the dying process".

Can any information be digitally encoded? The answer is yes, and to arbitrary given precision. — Zelebg

Actually, the answer is no. There are analogue quantities, that can't be digitized. 1/3, for instance, is impossible for a binary computer to digitize. And it will lose some information if it tries.

In triary computers, yes, 1/3 could be digitized, but 1/2 could not. You can't escape this problem with any digital system.

So your observation and stance that any information can be digitized, is totally wrong.

When do you stop being wrong, @Zelebg? Now, there is an irrefutable instance of inifinity for you.

Can any information be digitally encoded? The answer is yes, and to arbitrary given precision. — Zelebg

Well, as soon as you reduce the precision to below 100%, you lose information. You retain and pass SOME information, but not ALL information. That is the limitation of your computer screen.

It has ten thousand billion pieces of distinct pieces of information.

But a Kg (about two lbs) weight of ANY gas has over 10^23 atoms in it. Each atom is moving in a different direction, at different velocities, at different spins.

How can you even imagine that with a loss of ten billion TIMES the more information just on the NUMBER OF PIECES of atoms you can pass down any precise information?

It's like taking a human body, and taking one millionth of a millionth of its weight, and declare that you passed the information on that human body perfectly.

But that just proves that your computer screen does nothing of a true or even approximate representation of any complex object.

However, you STILL have the task on hand, to show to us, your captive readers, how this by now infamously poor representation proves that infinity is impossible.

My monitor can indeed represent any and every possible information. — Zelebg

No. The monitor has 16 million colours in 1280 times 720 pixels. That gives you a combination of 1.6*1.28*7.2*10^12 combinations. That is not infinity. It is even smaller than the number of atoms in a human body.

Your computer screen can represent any and every possible information up to a combined total of about 10^13 combinations. That is no more than ten thousand billions. That's the maximum number of uniquely different representations that a computer screen can provide

And it proves nothing, actually, of the infiniteness of the combinations possible.

Please tell me why infinity is disproven if your computer screen can represent 10^13 combinations. There has to be a logical link between the two, otherwise the proof is spoof.

Right now you have failed to provide that logical link.

That is not the answer, just refusal to accept the premise of the question, and is beside the point since the bottom resolution can be fixed to arbitrary size and precision. Say, human faces. My monitor can show every possible human face at least down to a scale and precision of an electron microscope. Therefore, there is only a finite number of unique human faces. Yes? — Zelebg

Douglas Alan raised a valid point: you are talking about the visual, he is talking about the real. You asked if anything can be depicted; yes, but not everything can be represented. And your initial premise was that infinity is thus denied. But it is not denied, only the depiction of the infinity is denied.

And that has already been established. How can you make a picture of something infinite? You can't. The picture is by definition a limited, finite area.

Thus, your claim that you can't take a picture of infinity, or can't view it on the screen, is true, but it does not deny the fact that things can be infinite.

It would be analogous to a thought. You can't see a thought, you can't depict it, but you can't deny its existence.

can my monitor represent information about every possible object or can it not. — Zelebg

In one single screen, or in a series of possibly different screen shots, of the same every possible object?

The more you examine it, the more your question seems to be watered down which can't be by good faith answered with a simple yes or no, without further clarifications established.

can my monitor represent information about every possible object or can it not. — Zelebg

To give a straight answer, no, it cannot, if the information is to be complete, exhaustive and precise.

However, information may mean "limited but pertinent knowledge" or it can also mean "scanty knowledge".

Your may want to rephrase your qestion?

Your monitor has a capacity to represent only a limited amount and thus a finite amount of different combinations. Your monitor, however, can not represent all possible combinaitons that can be otherwise present in the same area as your monitor shows or is.

But that's not my point. Even with a finite number of combinations, you can present double the amount of combinations if you add another screen or monitor. And triple it with adding a third screen. ETC.

Who cares — IvoryBlackBishop

I care.

To wit, the nationalistic, populist, bigoted Hungary has had no discovered cases of the disease yet.

which may be a sign that the preventative measures are having an effect — Echarmion

What about the cases that cropped up with no known connection to infected population. In far away places. Italy, the USA even. The virus may be spreading also outside of human-to-human contact.

This may be scary, but the fatality rate is only two percent. That is very low. We are panicing for no known reason.

↪frank And decadence. — Punshhh

I don't know if you realize the pun you uttered.

https://ipac-canada.org/coronavirus-resources.php

Preliminary calculations for the average number of infections that each infected person may go on to cause, known as R0. This is estimated to be 2.0 to 3.0 people per infected person. In comparison to seasonal flu, which usually has an R0 of around 1.3.

The World Health Organization accounced on February 24, 2020 that the fatality rate in Wuhan, China, considered the epicenter of the outbreak, is between 2% and 4%. Outside of Wuhan, it is thought to be closer to 0.7%. In a recent JAMA paper The overall case-fatality rate was 2.3%, No deaths occurred in those aged 9 years and younger, but cases in those aged 70 to 79 years had an 8% fatality rate and those aged 80 years and older had a fatality rate of 14.8%. No deaths were reported among mild and severe cases. The fatality rate was 49% among critical cases, and elevated among those with preexisting conditions: 10.5% for people with cardiovascular disease, 7.3% for diabetes, 6.3% for chronic respiratory disease, 6% for hypertension, and 5.6% for cancer.

Country Cases Deaths
China 78,824 2,778
South Korea 2,337 13
Italy 881 21
Other 705 5
Iran 388 34
Japan 228 4
Singapore 93 0
Hong Kong 94 2
US 62 0
France 57 1
Germany 48 0
Kuwait 45 0
Thailand 41 0
Taiwan 34 1
Bahrain 36 0
Malaysia 23 0
Australia 23 0
United Arab Emirates 19 0
UK 20 0
Spain 32 0
Vietnam 16 0
Canada 14 0
Macau 10 0
Switzerland 8 0
Iraq 7 0
Croatia 5 0
Israel 4 0
Oman 4 0
India 3 0
Philippines 3 1
Austria 3 0
Greece 3 0
Romania 3 0
Russia 2 0
Lebanon 2 0
Pakistan 2 0
Algeria 1 0
Afganistan 1 0
Azerbaijan 1 0
Belarus 1 0
Belgium 1 0
Brazil 1 0
Cambodia 1 0
Denmark 1 0
Finland 1 0
Georgia 1 0
Iceland 1 0
Lithuania 1 0
Mexico 1 0
North Macedonia 1 0
Norway 1 0
Nepal 1 0
Netherlands 1 0
New Zealand 1 0
Northern Ireland 1 0
Nigeria 1 0
San Marino 1 0
Sri Lanka 1 0
Egypt 1 0
Estonia 1 0
Sweden 7 0
Total 84,119 2,867