• The Concept of Religion
    The other problem is the recurring one in humanities, whereby there are gray areas in definitions, wherein an occurrence can be said or can be unsaid to belong to the set that is defined, or not to belong to the set that is defined. Examples: "how many straws must lie on top of each other to form a haystack?" (Answer: none, haystacks are made of hay, not of straws. A Strawman.)
  • The Concept of Religion
    Refers to "organized belief in a weltanschauung with one or more deities who wield supernatural powers"?

    (I did not read the article. My bad.)

    I don't mind getting shot down, because it was I who did not read the article.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    All the demons from Dante's Hell perhaps... — Olivier5

    No...no...something more sinister...more nefarious. Like Western journalist who cover the Ukrainian crisis.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Municipal workers cover the statue of the Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri with sandbags to protect it from shelling in Kyiv. — Olivier5

    Looking at the picture, I imagined that there is someone under the flat stone that they REALLY did not want to get loose.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    If Russia remains in Ukraine for the next 10 years, murdering its citizens, destroying its infrastructure, and (further) killing it's economy, — StreetlightX

    I highly doubt this will happen. Russia, if it gets the lands it claims, will withdraw, and the war will be over.

    Of course, neither you or I can tell the future. But there are some indications... and reasonable conjectures.

    I won't bet with you, because we are anonymous participants on this forum, but my take is that if the ukraine gives the lands up, the war will be over.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    You can win the battle, but lose the war. But there is no indication why Russian would spend 15-20 years to subdue the Ukraine. Russia's concern is to get those lands back... once it's ratified, they will have no more aggressive tendencies, since they reached their goal.

    That's what Baden calls victory. I don't know how that could escalate into a twenty-year war. Nobody has more claims, nobody has an issue with the other, aside from vengeance and bitterness.

    On the other hand, it is a major international disaster for Russia. They won the war against the Ukraine, but the reverberations of this drastically aggressive move will hurt Russia for some time to come.
  • Mad Fool Turing Test
    ↪EugeneW
    Where did you learn all this? Who was your teacher? What gives you certainty about this definition? Why did you accept this definition? Was this the only definition you were given?

    Definition of god by EugeneW:

    Well, not like your avatar. And by definition, they are no atheists. Heaven just looks like the universe. All creatures developed in it have a godlike counterpart. Virus gods, mamba gods, homonid gods, take your pick. What if they got bored of making love and hate eternally? They decided to create a copy of heaven. A collective enterprise. Now they just watch us. Themselves. Only, we lack the power of creation. — EugeneW
  • Mad Fool Turing Test
    A bit? Totally! Do you deny the gods? — EugeneW

    Depends. Define god.
  • Mad Fool Turing Test
    ↪EugeneW
    Believe me. I know. — EugeneW

    I am sorry... with all due respect I don't believe you. I can't believe falsehoods.

    Your knowledge that you claimed there is based on faith. And everything based on faith is believable, but only if one wants to. If a person chooses not to believe something based on faith, he or she has the perfect philosophical right to that.

    In other words, if you can't prove a point of faith in other means (empirical or a priori) then it remains a point of faith, which is either accepted or not, but those who accept it can't force the acceptance on others, and those who don't accept it, can't force the non-acceptance on others either.

    I think it would be less hair-raising for you to be active on a religious site than here on a philosophy site.
  • Philosopher = Strange Identity
    ↪Agent Smith
    :grin:
  • Mad Fool Turing Test
    ↪EugeneW
    Well, you can believe that, but you can't KNOW that. You are deceiving yourself by claiming knowledge where knowledge does not exist.

    Aren't you a bit religious? I am only asking because it's the religious type that vehemently denies consciousness in beings when it's not god-given. It's a religious philosophy, all right, and there is nothing wrong with it, at all. It's just you can't claim knowledge where you can claim faith and belief. If you don't know that, well, then you are not broad-minded enough.

    And it's mostly the religious who accuse atheists of not being broad-minded.
  • What is a philosopher?
    You're being excessively "logical". When logic goes beyond common sense, it becomes trivial — Yohan

    You may be right... but logic can't be wrong if it's right. Can somebody be "excessively" right? No. Can something not fly if it has wings? Yes. Can something not have wings if it has wings? No. So I don't stand corrected; you must admit that I made no logical mistakes.

    How you judge the end result of logical arguments is beyond my ability to influence. So you can call this trivial, and I have no argument against that.
  • What is a philosopher?
    Robots don't act. They pretend — EugeneW

    Are you nuts? Robots don't pretend. It requires a mind to pretend. And you can't kill something that is not alive... you can destroy them maybe?

    I don't know, but I think that contrary to your opinion, dildoes are VERY useful robots. You just have to learn how to use them.
  • What is a philosopher?
    What’s the point of being a scientist? — Xtrix

    Is this an honest question, Xtrix? Are you really incapable of answering this question yourself? If you are, then why are you asking this? And if you are not, then what are you doing on a philosophy website?
  • What is a philosopher?
    ↪Yohan
    I think the natural state of a human being is philosophical.
    — Yohan

    I don’t think that’s true at all. I think many questions (usually considered philosophical) are very human, very universal — but as I said earlier, not everyone who thinks is a thinker.
    — Xtrix
    Ok not everyone is a thinker.
    All birds have wings, but not all birds are flyers.     — Yohan

    Wrong logic. All birds have wings, therefore all birds are winged animals. This is a correct conclusion.

    Not everyone who thinks is a thinker.
    Again, the wrong logic. The very action of thinking is what defines the actor as a thinker.

    ??? Whence do you suck these false statements out of, Xtrix? Are you by any chance the same user who goes under the name of Bartricks? You certainly sound like him or her.
  • What is a philosopher?
    Just act! — EugeneW

    That's too easy. Even a robot with no mind can do that, and much better too, than a philosopher.
  • What is a philosopher?
    As a retired mathematician, my profession is defined a bit more specifically, citing "using extensive knowledge of mathematics" to solve problems, etc. — jgill

    Funny thing that your quote definitely excludes mathematics as a branch of philosophy, in effect declaring by omission that math is not philosophy. Whilethemore math IS an inquiry into a branch of philosophy. The logic component of philosophy, to be pedantic.
  • Mad Fool Turing Test
    What I am trying to say is that the problem of other minds categorically excludes the possibility of ever knowing whether an AI that passes the Turing test is a program that possesses consciousness or else a program does not possess consciousness. We will never know, because we are incapable of knowing that, and therefore we are not to be the judge of that.
  • Mad Fool Turing Test
    The problem of other minds? — Agent Smith

    Yes, combined with the notion of whether AI can be a mind or no mind or never mind.
  • Mad Fool Turing Test
    People like this also overestimate the significance of the Turing Test. Passing the test doesn't confer personhood. — Daemon

    It's true, if you like. No argument against it. But the challenge remains: a non-person to give the impression of a person. If the non-person succeeds, the Turing test is a success.

    AI may be a simple computer program, or it may be a conscious being. That is another unanswerable proposition. Because, for all intents and purposes, I am the only person in the Universe whose identity, whose self, whose conscious I can directly sense. There is nothing in the universe to tell me that other people are also people, or other people are AI machines that pass the Turing test in all possible ways.
  • Philosopher = Strange Identity
    The richness of Relativity extended far beyond Einstein's credence — ucarr

    Another typical example how a man's reach must extend his overbite.
  • Philosopher = Strange Identity
    Onnthe contrary, gamblers, like lovers, play to lose – to keep the games going. The action erection is everything, that's the jones! — 180 Proof
  • Philosopher = Strange Identity
    ↪ucarr

    Philosopher = Stange Identity

    I liked this opening post, for it says something. It sticks its neck out, and says, "there is no achievement possible in philosophy if you equate finding the truth as the achievement of a philosopher."

    Neatly packaged, as well.

    But my most favorite part is the misspelling of Strange in the thread title. It's like printing a whole bunch of twenty dollar bills on your computer at home, leaving the W out of Twenty.

    In Canada, in the tri-city of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge, false Canadian dollars were circulating for a short while, back in the nineties. The bills had the word "Twenty Canadian Dollars" spelled in Chinese characters. Nobody gave a hoot. Much like the quarter denomination of coins in Canada comes with weird fucking embossments, people thought that this was a governmental initiative of diversification efforts, and the money was accepted as legal tender.
  • Is everything random, or are at least some things logical?
    ↪180 Proof
    Yes, thanks. I hid behind the veil of ignorance, but I think it's out of the ordinary that I confessed to doing that without any prodding to confess.

    Not to say that I am heroically stupid. Dogma is for the ignorant, always has been. But there are hardly any dogmatists who view themselves as dogmatists.

    My dogma is determinism, inasmuch as I believe every change is caused, and there is no change uncaused. If this is true, then true or absolute unpredictability is impossible. Theoretically speaking. I had to make a choice where to stand, I took the dogmatist stand on believing that our world is deterministic.
  • Is everything random, or are at least some things logical?
    Whatever is random (e.g. noise, quantum fluctuations, radioactive decay, evolutionary genetic mutations, Kolmogorov randomness) is, in fact, universally unpredictable. — 180 Proof

    Evolutionary genetic mutations are only random for human understanding. The chemical changes that are mutations are predictable (since they are chemical changes) and can be explained after the fact. Their effect on the changes of the structure or functioning of the superstructure, or of the organism, is also predictable, inasmuch as it is repeatable and accurately reflecting the same superstructure changes in the offspring of two similar organism pairs when the same DNA change occurs in both.

    Radioactive decay is not random inasmuch as its rate is highly accurately predictable. I understand that the individual decaying elements can't be pointed out before they undergo the change.
    ---
    I claim ignorance, and validly so, about noise, quantum fluctuations, and Kolmogorov randomness. I would like to think that there are probably causational, theoretically explicable functionalities to these movements, and there are completely non-predictable ones, such as picking the atoms whose nuclei will undergo change in radioactivity. In our macrophysical world everything is causational; it seems in the microphysical (quantum) world that is not true. I can't address that issue, as my knowledge is insufficient to have proper insight on that part of your argument.

    Naturally I capitulate to your reasoning now, because I can't know whether what I am rejecting is true or not. Just remember, that, for instance, in an electron cloud around the nucleus we don't know where the electron is at any given instant (if electrons exist in the first place), but we know that all electron clouds in separate instances of a given element are identical in a given state of excitement.

    One must be careful claiming randomness; when we say "where is the electron", we ask the wrong question, and claim randomness illogically, because the electron is distributed in the entire cloud, according to some probability function, and the electron as a unit never exists in a corporation anywhere in the cloud.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    That the new religion is science — EugeneW

    That is only true from the perspective of a truly uneducated person.

    If you agree that belief requires no proof, and that relgious faith is a form of belief;
    And if you agree (which you can't, seeing you have no education in science) that scientific teachings are not a matter of belief but a matter of knowledge based on evidence;
    Then and only then you must agree that science is not religion; neither new, nor old religion, since religion is based on faith, and science is based on knowledge.

    But since you don't know anything scientific, you look at it from the outside, and you don't understand it; therefore to you the body of science appears to be a body of faith. But it is not. The body of science is a body of accumulated knowledge.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    That the new religion is science. By law you must learn that Book on school. — EugeneW

    but what you say does not follow from what you claim. Time to go to bed, and come back tomorrow.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    Where can you buy that motor? — EugeneW

    Yeah, I want one, too. I walked into the local dildo shop but they said come back next week, the shipment is late from China, due to Covid.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    Gott schnuppert die Unterwäsche von Mädchen — lll

    I think EugeneW used Dutch, not Deutsch.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    Almost all natural so-called primitive societies have been wiped out of existence. — EugeneW

    By the missionaries, and by the industrialists of the nineteenth century.

    Your point is???
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    Indeed! To fuck up the planet, society, and personal relations. — EugeneW

    You think the religious wars, the Autodafe, the impending torture of Galileo, the child mortality, the birth mortality of mothers, the starvation, the plague, was not fucking up the planet and personal relationships?

    Hey, the Great Flood, was that not due to fucking up the planet and the breakdown of personal relationships?

    What you say is the fault of atheism, is actually not, if you think about it. It is the fault of human nature, and not atheism nor theism.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    I don't care about atheists. As long as they don't wanna establish an atheocracy. But they did, goddamnit! — EugeneW

    Logic, reasoning power and the general education of most people in the Westernized cultures have helped a bit, don't you think?

    Whereas religion was spread with terror, fear, torture and the threat of death. At least the Christian religion was spread that way in Europe back 2000-1500 years ago.

    Please also consider that no apostates exist because they were forced at knife point to leave their religion. As per the inner conviction of belief in god nobody abandons their belief unless they can't but abandon it.

    What I am saying is that atheocracy is getting established for at this point in history that is the sensible thing to do. People go for evidence; while there is no evidence that there is no god, there is plenty of evidence that the universe can and does function without any interference by any god or gods. THIS is the reason that atheocracy is gaining popularity, not some perverse, diabolical or else personal vendetta against god or against religious people.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    Nicely put. — Tom Storm

    thanks.
  • Is everything random, or are at least some things logical?
    ↪180 Proof
    I stand corrected. You used the physics meaning of chaos; I understood that you used the common English meaning of chaos.

    In the physics meaning, "behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions."

    So please notice the operative word "appear". A chaotic system is not random; it only appears to be random.

    After my admitting my mistake, and properly seeing what you meant (thanks for the reference to point out my mistake!) please explain what you mean with this, after I said that unpredictability is a human disability, and randomness is a human construct for those events that can't be predicted:

    Random —> unpredictable; however, unpredictable –/–> random (e.g. chaotic systems). — 180 Proof

    please remember: I think everything is predictable, but not by humans; and things that humans call random are predictable too, but not by humans. How does your formula improve or contradict my claim?
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    I hear two birds outside chirping. A dove has started cooring. "Morning has broken, like the first morning". The dog yawns and cries at the bed like a small child. The bed squeeks and love calls. "Love, you make some coffee?" That's proof enough for me. — EugeneW

    It's CONVINCING enough for you, but philosophically it's not proof. Proof on the philosophical level is universal. If it's proof for you, then it's not proof for everyone. Therefore it's not universal. Therefore it's not philosophical. So I would humbly like to ask you to not use the word proof when in conversation about philosophy unless you mean a philosophical proof. Thanks.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    for the benefit of III:

    God belief is completely valid. IT'S A BELIEF. It purports no knowledge. Atheism, ditto, but the opposite.

    Any arguments against beliefs that they should be supported by evidence is invalid. You can't demand evidence for something that is not knowledge.

    This goes for both theists and atheists. It is futile to try to convince someone to discontinue his or her BELIEF.     — god must be atheist
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    The fact that the universe, in its eternal infinity, exists. — EugeneW

    It would be a proof of god's existence if that were the only valid explanation. But other valid explanations exist, and they are not any less or more valid than the other. Therefore the only thing you can claim is that the infinite space and matter in it have existed forever; but the cause of their existence is not necessarily god, AND it is not necessarily the lack of god. Either beliefs are possible, therefore either beliefs are valid AS BELEIFS but not as knowledge.
  • Is everything random, or are at least some things logical?
    Random —> unpredictable; however, unpredictable –/–> random

    (e.g. chaotic systems).     — 180 Proof

    Chaotic systems don't exist. We just don't know what happens in chaotic systems.

    And I don't follow this:
    Random —> unpredictable; however, unpredictable –/–> random — 180 Proof
    If you are able to explain in clear, precise, grammatically correct Englsih, and lacking in ad-hoc unconventional logical symbols, then please do. If you are incapable of writing without CAPITALIZING, italicizing, bolding and underscoring for lack of ability to express yourself in proper English, then please don't bother. I won't read your gibberish.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    I was writing that finally some wise words in a quiet piece of water in a boiling ocean had arrived. Then you posted again — EugeneW

    sorry to have preemted you. I was getting frustrated. Please understand.
  • The Invalidity of Atheism
    In fact they are eternal. But too dumb to come into existence. — EugeneW

    We agree on that.
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