People are born everyday and they will one day die and cause grief to those they left behind.
— empathy

This too is not altogether true. There are people who pass through the lives of others and leave a lot more in the long term than just grief. — Brett

True, this is. My aunt left me a trust fund which was beyond and over and above the grief I ought to have experienced with her passing, but did not.

And my uncle, my aunt's husband, who died 20 years prior, left me five pairs of nylon socks (male) size 8. That was all he could muster for me, in order to leave something, since grief was not one of them.

Is it even ethical to have children and bring them to the suffering of life in the world without them being able to consent to it? — empathy

This is a difficult conundrum. If the babies later when they can communicate complex thoughts properly, decide they ought not to have been born, it's not possible to retroactively fulfill their wishes and demands to not be born. At the time of birth, or during the first trimester, the baby has no concept of life, and is not able to communicate anything, yet that's when the abortion of the life ought to occur.

Indeed you asked a valid and invalid question.

By the way, you can catch the bird, you just can't keep it as a pet. — TogetherTurtle

Well... as far as I'm concerned, a blue bird of happiness in the hand is worth more than two blue birds of happiness in the bush.

I wonder how many times this Cioran guy ever got re-invited to dinner parties by people he knew.

There's an element of control in all the pessimists. — csalisbury

I think we all have an element of control. (Cn, seventy-fourth element in the Periodic Table.) And those who truly don't, wish they had it.

"One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other." — removedmembershiptx

I am fluent in two languages. Does it mean I've got two fathers? What about a mother? any mother? This is a genetic nightmare. Little wonder I can't communicate with my own species.

Jeez. Having two Y chromosomes and no X.

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

He is actually right. I slept, in my twenties, 16 hours three or four times, and I'm telling you, I was halfway to returning to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself. To the last letter. Ah, the power of this man's insight... he reads me as if I were a book.


Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
Explanation: too much sexual connotation sewn onto consciousness. I have my opinion, but it can't be printed.

"I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope."
—Cioran — Baden

When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. So I protect my nothing with fierce resilience to reason, happiness and gladness of life.

“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?” — schopenhauer1

On top of that, they'd be too late in doing it, so it's all gone to pieces. Best is to be blessed with an infectious sense of pessimism... spread the good cheer of doom, defeat and despair around.

Toute exégèse est profanation. — Cioran

I assume this means, "All juicy sex is profanity."

Version 1.0.
"I wish I had some... I wouldn't be so pessimistic any more."

Version 2.0.
"I wish my wife had some... I woudn't be so pessimistic any more."

“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.

Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.” — schopenhauer1

Version 1.0.
But best of all, best to be a woman. (I, God Must Be Atheist, did not say this. Cicorian did.)

Version 2.0.
The Kingdom of Consciousness is one below the Kingdom of animals, which is lead by the Lion King; which is below the kingdom of insects, lead by the tapeworm; which is below the Kingdom of Plants, which is lead by the Freesbee.

"It is impossible to be judged by someone who has suffered less than we have. And as each one believes himself to be an unrecognized Job..." — Matias

Version 1.0.
1. God cannot judge us. He suffers none.
2. Second part is a sentence fragment... meaningless.

Version 2.0.
1. All judges appointed to courts must have undergone painful electrical torture, water-boarding, sitting in solitary confinement with a glass of water every day for seventy-seven days, and be flogged by cruel jail keepers; they also must be raped by some very well-endowed horny inmates.
2. Some people are so lucky as to believe in themselves.

Version 3.0.
1. Judges are incompetent fools who should be replaced by hardened, crack-cocaine dependent, bank robbers and rapists.
2. Each has an identity crisis, because they believe they are carpentry, lion-taming, electical repairs, telephone line installing, etc. In other words, people don't recognize themselves any more, they each think they are a job.

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” — schopenhauer1

This means that to try to finish projects on deadline is a losing proposition, as you will always miss your deadline.

But what about the big picture, a poll of judgements, or of individual thresholds? What if the tail end of such a distribution (of thresholds) reaches back to a single grain? — bongo fury

That I don't know.

Verrry interesting. For now I would like to add only, that the driving force in an anarchistic society is also pragmatism, but it happens without social cohesion beyond the nuclear family unit. Each to his own. The goal of every individual is to pragmatically obtain and secure what one and one's family needs and wants, with no regard to other families.

So the three types of societies you drew up the difference is scope of pragmatism. In anarchy, every unit is equal, and selfish. In an altruistic society (such as European, Canadian and Australian democracies) the resources and social structures that evolved allows all units to look out as much for themselves as for all other units. In totalitarianism, there is only one beneficiary, ultimately, the king (or henchman, or strongman, or head of state, or whatever you want to call him or her.) Here, pragmatism serves only the king, all other people are worth shit. The scope of pragmatism is over all society, but benefitting only one. In altruism, scope is all society, benefitting all. In anarchy, scope is family-wide, but not beyond, benefitting the family only.

Thanks Wallows. I appreciate you appreciating it.
— Brett

But, it's true in that philosophers should restrict themselves to descriptive measures, normative measures are best left to science and the like. Unless, we get some ubermensch or something. — Wallows

Brett and Wallows, I wish to take this opportunity to congratulate you both on your occasion of revealing just how great the two of you are, reflected in the attitude with which you answered the question of the topic.

For me, what I learned from philosophy is quite different, and not as noble, and characteristically not as outstandingly ethical and humble as the expressed learned wisdom the two of you gained.

My learning from philosophy FORUMS is that there are too many goons, schizophrenics, trolls, religious fanatics, and plain stupid people, all of whom take themselves very seriously, in fact, dead seriously; and at first it is not very easy to distinguish between a glib idiot and a glib genius. The cat comes out of the bag, eventually.

And I am even less noble than the two of you, for I don't consider myself one of the lot that I described here above.

Of course please note that this I learned from participating on FORUMS; this is not what I learned from philosophy. I did not learn from philosophy much factual or trivial knowledge; even when it comes to theories. I learned, instead, an ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak; to recognize well-put arguments, and to recognize poorly put arguments. To recognize fallacious reasoning and no-reason reasoning.

I also learned a few interesting theories, mainly through the recounts and analysis of the classic minds' theories and ideas. I learned to like and adore Hume, almost on a personal level, and certainly on a professional level; and learned to dislike Kant. I learned to admire Sartre and learned to almost worship Descartes, for their contributions to human and philosophical insights.

We don't know what becomes of our consciousness when we die. Zilch knowledge. Lots of faith and belief, but knowledge? None.

A person who suffers in this life therefore weighs his or her options: I don't know what happens in the afterlife. This life is pretty miserable. Am I better off dead, or better off going on living?

The question answered decides the further course of action. If the person decides that his or her perception of afterlife is better than going on living, s/he will kill him/herself.

Notwithstanding the above, there is a greater hurdle to pass for all suicides: the actual act, and the actual process. That in and by itself is scary, and most attempts don't end up in death, because the person recoils from the act. Again, it is the amount of suffering (and a bit of fortune / misfortue) that decides whether one can pass through this higher bar, the actual act.

That makes sense but the definition of "heap" in this case would be private and others will probably disagree with you. — TheMadFool

You're absolutely right. That's why I made no bones about it, and did not declare that my proposition is the ultimate answer. I came out straight away and said under what circumstances my opinion holds.

Can you explain further? My problem is how can a bunch of lies (multiple corroborative observations each by itself not-true/false) add up to the truth (objectivity)? — TheMadFool

All lies about facts contain an element of truth.

If a mind is capable of distilling the common elements in the lies, then chances are that the mind is touching on the truth.

This is the process what I tried to expound on in the only discussion I started so far on the forums, to show that the cave images in Plato's/Socrates' "Republic" can be assembled into Forms. My idea encountered dismal reception by the populus on this forum.

This is also how science works. A hundred people take measurements of a length of rope. They each come up with slightly different values. Therefore they don't just draw a consensus of how long the rope is, by computing the average length measured; they state a mean, and a deviance. For instance, they may say that the length of the rope is 5 feet, plus or minus three inches. That means that out of 100 measurements, approx. 66 will be between 4'9" and 5'3".

Exact numbers only exist for mathematicians. To a physicist, every measurement is expressed as it falls in a range.

I have an article to publish. Is this still a going concern? Curious.

A heap is what I call a heap; a non-heap is what I call a non-heap. The transition is therefore up to me, since the ultimate judge for me who decides between heaps and non-heaps is myself. At least I, for one, accept this judge's judgement.

The rest follows automatically.

To wit, my criteria for a heap is for it to look like a heap. To have the shape of a heap. That can be achieved by no fewer than 4 sand elements (if they form a tetrahedron) but they don't necessarily form it, so minimum 4 grains of sand can or can not form a heap. Similarly, any number of sand more than four in number can form a heap or a non-heap. Three or fewer can only form a non-heap.

To summarize, the harder problem is that human phenomenal concepts do not reveal whether our material makeup or the functional role our neurobiology plays is responsible for consciousness. As such, we have no philosophical justification for saying whether a functional isomorph made up of different material such as the android Data from Star Trek is conscious. Even more confusing, we have no way of telling whether a "mere" functional isomorph is conscious, where "mere" means functional in terms of human folk psychology only, and not in the actual neural functions. — Marchesk

This is one fancy way to say what everyone else has been saying: we don't know how consciousness connects to our bodies.

As Mark Twain said,"Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it." Everyone says we know nothing about how consciousness connects to the body, yet huge tombs and voluminous opinions have been written about it.

If one morning you wake up feeling dumpy and stupid, just write an article in a philosophy forum and talk about how much you don't know about consciousness, you will feel better. The more you write about this thing that you don't know, the smarter you'll feel.

- study about Christian forgiveness.
- study about Buddhist need-not-want-not.
- study about the divine providence and heavenly justice
- anger consumes those who are angry; it is more damaging than fear or than worry.
- there are only two ways to get rid of vengeful anger: to retaliate or to forgive.
- you have weighed your options, and you decided to not retaliate.
- so your only option is to forgive if you want to live again

In a dream or in solipsism I do not own or experience another person's consciousness with whom I'm conversing. It maybe imaginary, but I have no control over another person's consciousness, and I don't experience it. While I experience my own.

This may be taken that the imaginary or dreamt person's consciousness either does not exist, or else it is a function of mine, but it is not under the control of mine.

This is difficult to imagine, that I don't have a control over some function that I fully own. But it is the bread-and-butter for solipsism.

Therefore private language does not exist in solipsism, even if the only person who speaks it or understands it is myself, that is, only one person. Because the language I use in dreams or in solipsism still communicates with an entity that is not under my control, therefore on some level it's a separate entity from me. And therefore language is practiced by more than one entity.

Hypothetically, if you were to create or live in a new nation, what would you expect to be your basic freedoms? What would you expect to be obligated to do? What would you expect not to be able to do? — TogetherTurtle

1, Freedom to eliminate waste.
2. Freedom to inhale air at any given time (provided it's necessary.)
3. Freedom to pursue the blue bird of happiness (restrictions apply: you may not catch it. You are only allowed to pursue it.)
4. Freedom to wear five pairs of shoes at the same time on either of your feet.
5. Freedom to assemble little electric cars that come in a kit.
6. Freedom from religion.
7. Freedom to attend school
8. Freedom from needing to learn Calculus and French Irregular verbs.
9. Freedom to establish personal boundaries, personal restrictions, and place control on others.
10.Freedom to sew up buttons when one falls off.

You came to a brilliant conclusion: Ethics is the values placed on behaviour judged for a behaviour's effect for the detriment or for the continued sustenance of culture.

Why can't you go with this? I fully support this.

In fine, it is better to describe ethics as distinct from culture, as to do with behaviour that appears to cause damage or otherwise as against innocuous behaviour as culture. — RW Standing

If I read this right, it makes tons of sense to me. However, there are too many "as"-es that obscure my language skills in trying to parse this sentence.

Please re-write this sentence in more precise English. The way I read it, it shows brilliant insight, but I may be misreading it... I can't tell from here what it says, what with the unnecessarily unusual constructs you use in it.

I am sorry, but that's precisely what you said. Over and over again. There is no denying it -- the entire conversation is there to stand witness to it.

I was able and willing to engage with your arguments, until you insisted on nature being unnatural. There is no point in going on with this, since you so vehemently kept on defending your thesis of nature being unnatural.

I wholly agree that this conversation was a complete waste of time for both of us.

There is nothing left to say. If someone says nature behaves unnaturally, AND he insists it's true, then there is nothing left that you can say to him.

You call BB unnatural because you know very little about it, and what you know is not factual, but imaginary fantasy. All the matter in the universe was not packed into a single point. All the matter in the KNOWN universe was packed into a thimble-sized volume. This is possible and not unnatural.

And by definition anything that happens in nature is natural. Calling events in nature unnatural, I maintain, is an unnatural response. By definition, by reason.

You know very little about physics, I gleaned that from your posts.

And again, calling a natural process unnatural is plain silly.

I have an idea that it could have been some sort of astrophysical device/bomb that caused the BB. Something computed the requirements for a life supporting universe and designed a device that would achieve that. IMO this is no more far fetched than multiple universes, CCC and the rest of the stuff that passes for cosmology. — Devans99

It could have been anything. We don't know what happened there. Scientists tell you what they know. They can't tell you something they don't know. Only the religious, those who believe in the supernatural, those who practice Voodoo, and those who are superstitious can tell you what they don't know, and they are quite eager to do so at any given time.

The facts of the BB are: unnaturally low entropy and an unnatural expansion of space itself. That the expansion is speeding up rather than slowing also seems unnatural. It is also an unnatural singleton (natural events come always come in pluralities - the BB is a suspicious looking singleton). Nature if left to itself finds its way to equilibrium. The BB is the polar opposite of equilibrium. The expansion of space seems engineered to keep us out of a gravitational equilibrium. — Devans99

Whatever. It happened. And it's unnatural to call natural events unnatural.

I told my religious uncle, who is a very smart Jew, before the Hadron collider spit the tiny amount of matter out of our three-dimensional universe, won't this destroy the universe altogether? He replied something to the fact, that no worries, nothing that hasn't already happened can happen.

It's not enough to "know" that God is the cause of it all - we would like to know exactly what he caused. — Relativist

It's for him to know, and for us to find out. Hehe. If he handed it to us on a silver platter, a lot of research scientists could no longer drive a Porsche. And we don't want that, do we.

The "God hypothesis" simply asserts that God is the most fundamental level, but provides no insight into how physical structures emerge at ANY level. — Relativist

I think it does. Several incredibly stupid insights: the Earth is 6000 years old, give or take a thousand years. Man ate from the tree of knowledge so he was condemned to have sex. Man has free will. Bad things are attributed to Satan, who was created by god, but somehow or other it's not god's fault ETC.

What if mathematical models point to the universe being a creation? That's the way the BB looks at the moment. If this stays the case, we just give up on science and cosmology? Or do we try to use science to investigate the creator?

We have at the moment, a ludicrous situation in cosmology; people are jumping though hoops to find away around the fine tuning argument - far fetched models like multiple universes that flaunt Occam's Razor, common sense, causality etc...

Science should address reality even if it is a reality that atheist scientists find unpalatable. — Devans99

Leading scientists have ALWAYS addressed issues that had been unpalatable.

Starting with Socrates, whom the town elders and other judges condemned to death on the charge of his being an atheist; continuing with Galileo, who was promised extreme and excrutiating pain by Church officials and suffering a slow and very paingful death unless he withdrew his teachings; continuing to Darwin and the environmentalists, who are despised by the American religious.

What if mathematical models point to the universe as being a creation? That model has not been established, advocated or believed in, other than the exterme fundamental religion-followers. So it's a big "WHAT-IF", so big, that it's not worth considering (but only by the religious who are rooting for god.)

BB does not look what DEVANS claims it looks; only uneducated, ignorant, scientifically not educated religious people would agree with his claim of BB's looks.

Oh, I forgot the scape goats. Every revolution needs a scape goat. Jews were that of the Nazis; the Czar, his family and the aristocrtacy / clergy were that of the Bolsheviks. Why don't we decide, by nation-wide, general elections, whether to make left-turning drainage in our toilet bowls our scape goat, or else the integral of the probability distribution of the Standard or Bell curve.

When talk comes around to Monopoly, I primarily think of the Parkers Borthers game.

To shake up the oligarchical system of the USA, be it politics or other influential institution, I think we should start a good ole' fashioned Marxist-Leninist Bolshevik revolution. People already got their guns... all you need is a genius organizational and theoretical leader like Marx, and a superb tactical and strategizing generalized military general like Lenin. And a populist politician like Hitler who can turn the masses to his cause and get the people to pledge blind devotion to him through thick and thin.

There, your recipe to end the Monopoly / oligarchy / democracy in one swell woop.

Dfpolis, your style sucks in the best of thinkers at first, but later they realize you are trolling and they abandon you and responding to your posts in dismay.

Dfpolis, your argumenting style resembles to me more and more the style that Logic used to use on a slightly different website. That style is learned, with impeccable grammar, clear though complex, while the content is either entirely nonsensical or self-contradictory

A clear similarity that you both use is to hide behind jargon when cornered. There are other similarities, such as not getting emotional. Everyone gets emotional when under a lot of fire. Except BOTs and those participants who 1. have nothing at stake because 2. they know themselves they are not putting forth their own sweet convictions although 3. they don't play the devil's advocate either, but instead 4. are trolling in haute vogue for whatever their reason is.

"How could an AI discover its true nature if it exists inside a virtual reality?"

Deine Sorge möcht' ich haben. :razz:

Still. Where does god enter the picture? Just because something is not explained, (the finite to his self) AND assuming an explanation is possible, it does not necessarily follow that there is someone or something that can and will explain it.
— god must be atheist

I think you are confusing the two meanings (verbal and effective) of "explanation" I distinguished. the proof deals with what makes things so, not with our articulation fo what makes things so. Things work in a certain way whether or not anyone tells us they do. — Dfpolis

My criticism stands both ways. Both if you consider explanation verbal, and if you consider explanation effective.

You more and more resemble someone I know from another site. He makes claims out of the blue, and he says it so that it is hard to notice he is saying falsehoods.