I think it does, but I'm curious what other people think. I'm getting out a little beyond my skis!

Well, then you're agnostic!

If by agnostic your mean p=0.5 (as you said in your OP), I would disagree that it is reasonable to think that there is a 50 percent chance that we will have alien contact in the next 10 years. — PhilosophyRunner

Well, what about ten thousand years?

To try to put it succintly, it's reasonable to be agnostic about alien contact ten years from now, but not ten minutes from now. But I can't see what's driving that intuition. Is it (k), background knowledge, bleeding through into the Bayesian calculus?

Kripke, at a very young age, developed a formal semantics for modal logic, presenting a completeness theorem. — Banno

Anecdote: I took philosophy at UCLA and had Donald Kalish as my logic professor. He told an interesting story about how he and a partner were all ready to give a talk on a paper on logic only to find out this 16 year old kid, Kripke, had beaten them to the punch.

I'm assuming that the probability of contact increases with time — Agent Smith

You can't assume this! In order to assume it, you would have to know that aliens, in fact, exist, and will contact us at some point in the future.

Here's my problem if we can't assign a value for Pr(E/H): any hypothesis about alien contact in future time t we have to be agnostic about. Will aliens contact us in ten thousand years? Maybe. In a thousand years? Maybe. 10 years? Maybe. The next ten seconds. Maybe? The ten microseconds. Maybe???

We've reached an absurdity.

Yeah, but what it Pr(E/h)?

We know from ourselves that our universe is a consciousness-bearing universe. — ucarr

I don't dispute this, but others will, so I think that proving this should be your starting point.

:up:

I thought denazification was the reason.

Trump seems to have stepped in it having dinner with an avowed white-nationalist holocaust denier.

:up:

I too wonder how the immaterial can interact with the material. What is your response if the theist who believes in souls interacting with bodies shrugs and says "God makes the interaction possible. Somehow."? Is the immaterial interacting with material even logically possible, though?

Oh, no one is interested in my bakery theory of consciousness. — Bartricks

Poking bread doesn't change my consciousness, but poking my brain does. To the extent that bread does affect my consciousness (e.g., the conscious state of tasting bread when I eat it), the reaction goes like this: substance capable of producing sensation (e.g., bread), then brain state, then conscious state, with the brain being a necessary condition for consciousness, but bread not. That's how I would answer your bread objection that as a materialist. Bread is nether a necessary nor sufficient condition for consciousness. Brains are.

I didn't predict a "blue wave", just the complete absence of a red one. I thought the Dems would hold the House – close but no cigar. — 180 Proof

Very close. I'm very pleased with how the Dems did.

:100:

"The odd" is that you don't give up ground for free when at war. Period. — Tzeentch

You do if you think you can't hold it.

No. However, it's your position on "consciousness" that's at issue, Rogue, so let's get back to that. Non-anecdotal evidence that you or anyone else or anything at all is "conscious" — 180 Proof

People act in a way that is consistent with them having consciousness. For example, they react to pain by drawing their hand away, they react to greed by screwing each other over for money, etc. But this consistency can only be had by the presupposition that I am conscious. And we're back to square one: I am conscious.

Not non-anecdotal evidence; besides, that's what a "zombie" would say.[/quote]

Your position is that consciousness is a "folk" term, that will eventually be replaced by a scientific objective understanding of brains. Is that correct?

why assume there is conscious stuff at all? — 180 Proof

Because I am conscious.

I think the idea that a certain combination of matter combined with an electric current can produce consciousness is absurd. I also think the panpsychist's solution of supposing everything has consciousness is unwieldy. Occam's Razor seems to hold here: why assume there's nonconscious stuff at all? Problem solved.

Right, but what's the endgame? America can fund a proxy war for quite awhile, but we have notoriously short attention spans. And who's going to fund the Ukrainian rebuilding effort???

Ukraine is riding high, so is now the time to deal? The U.S. and EU peoples won't back a proxy war forever. Already you're hearing grumbling from the Democratic progressive wing. Given Ukraine's successes recently, but also their long-term dependence on ephemeral foreign aid, what kind of realistic deal would they go for? Would they demand half a trillion in reparations for the damage the Russians have caused? What territories would they cede?

But Barticks is right about this.

J.J. Thomson effectively demolished the case for forced pregnancy in cases of rape.

Just a question, and I am sure there is a ready answer; and then, I will be on my way, satisfied that the world is the world. Would someone please tell my why, when I greet my uncle Sidney, I am not "greeting" exclusively (!) systems of neuronal activity?
Troubled sleep over this. — Constance

Consciousness cannot be reduced to systems of neuronal activity. Physicalism claims that if you take a certain amount of non-conscious stuff, assemble it in a certain way, run some current through it, voila! consciousness. This is a fairy tale.

Both parties in America are getting tired of the war. Ukraine is going to have to wrap it up in the next 6-12 months.

You're right. It was to denazify a country run by a Jew. That makes much more sense.

:up:

Maybe we can end this without blowing the world up.

NATO flirting with Ukraine is what started all of this. — Tzeentch

No, it isn't. Putin tried for the easy land grab and it's blown up in his face.

The problem is you can never get "inside" the black box and verify if it is conscious or not.

Are you claiming the Russian army has been competent???

Now negotiations are even further away, given the decree signed by Zelensky. As things stand, this cannot end up going well. — Manuel

Why can't it end with Russia being driven from Ukraine? Do you think it's a foregone conclusion they'll use nukes?

MacArthur wanted to use nukes in Korea. Thank God he got cashiered. It must have been tempting though, at Chosin.

But I ask you, what country with nukes, would willingly accept humiliation in the battlefield? — Manuel

America has been humiliated on the battlefield without resorting to nukes. We've lost entire wars without nuking anyone.

Is Putin financing any of this with his vast amounts of wealth? His net worth is supposedly in the hundreds of billions.

This isn’t meant to be witty— it’s just clearly true. Goes to show how important the 2014 and 2016 elections really were. We’ll be living with the consequences for the next 30 years. — Xtrix

I blame young people. If they had turned out in halfway decent numbers for Clinton, the Supreme Court would look much different.