Whatever evaluative context you choose to specify e.g. ethics, aesthetics, economics, religion, engineering / building trades, etc the answer to "what is good?" will vary accordingly.

???

I don't see any hard problem — T Clark

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Not faith, confidence. Could I be wrong? Of course. — T Clark

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Reread my first post on this thread where I respond to Moore specifically (i.e. the open-question argument). As I point out, in ethics I think "defining good" is besides the point.

Yeah I think you are right, though I would say that a post-scarcity economy is necessary for a single world order but not sufficient — PhilosophyRunner

This is why I refer to it as an (optimal) effect of a (beneficial) Technological Singularity which, for me, is the sufficient condition for 'world governance'. Primates like us are mostly wired for – territoriality and forming dominance hierarchies – tribal eusociality, and so monopolistic social arrangements, as you've pointed out, are inexorably subject to moral hazards because of our atavisms. 'Human-level A.I.' (or more advanced) will not be constrained by primate glands and reproductive drives; provided we can engineer 'philanthropic A.I.'; it can govern us and all other planetary systems as an integrated whole. :nerd:

:lol: Typical willfully pathetic misreading just to evade the inconvenient questions raised in what I wrote. Yeah, okay, Happy New Year to you too, Gnomon. :sparkle:

Is it that "Sally is good" because you prefer her or do you "prefer Sally" because she is good? :chin:

"I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion." ~Spinoza

Stick with @busycuttingthecrap since I'm not patient enough to spoon feed you anymore that I already have. So you don't agree with my interpretation of the early Western philosophical tradition? Okay, suit yourself, but stop whining dogmatically at me about it.

What meaning isn't?

Ok. :roll:

(I still live in the stone age and use CDs/CD players almost exclusively). — busycuttingcrap

:clap: :100: Yep, can't shake my attachment to CDs & DVDs (the way I shook off vinyl and tape over thirty years ago).

So, what is good? — Shawn

Answering this question depends on a specific evaluative context.

G.E. Moore, in his Principia Ethica has claimed that good is a simple and indefinable.

This might not be true of bad. For instance: I think we know what is bad for our species (i.e. harmful, deprivative, abject, traumatic) to intentionally do to ourselves or one another either by action or inaction (e.g. Confucius, Hillel the Elder, Epicurus ... Philippa Foot).

The emphasis on chance comes about when one tries explaining that evolution is not teleological. That gets twisted to the idea that evolution is nothing but chance. — Banno

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And of course its fun to speculate and imagine, beyond what can currently be established, just so long as we're clear that's what we're doing — busycuttingcrap

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The other notable thing, which I believe is what 180 is highlighting, is this development of breaking away from understanding the world primarily in religious terms, and even in some instances of providing explicit critique of existing religious traditions or ideas, providing an alternative way of looking at the world that would eventually develop into what we now recognize as science, naturalism, atheism, and so forth. — busycuttingcrap

Exactly. :up:

@Mikie seems to have missed (or deliberately misread) this point.

Ok.

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Just being able to string words together in question format doesn't imply an answer is wanting. — Isaac

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If it can't be known by science, how can it be known. How do you know it?... You don't. — T Clark

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Understanding before happiness ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/768538

In hindsight, at least in the Western tradition, philosophy concerns – began with – critiques of religion (i.e. magical thinking)
— 180 Proof

Why do you say this? I see little evidence for it. — Mikie

Read "the Presocratics", Plato's early-middle Socratic Dialogues, Aristotle, Epicurus, Sextus Empiricus, Lucretius, Epictetus ...

As I've said previously

For me, it's understanding (then² happiness, then³ knowledge); — 180 Proof

... or "happiness before truth", which is not necessarily to the exclusion of "truth".

Do you make a distinction between reasonable and rational? — TheMadMan

My rule of thumb: rational is inferential (algorithmic) and reasonable contextual (adaptive), they are complementary but do not entail one another.

I like 180 Proof's stance on the issue - stick to the facts, reject all claims inconsistent with the facts, speculate at your own risk! Construct a weltanschauung as free of woo-woo as possible. Alas, easier said than done! — Agent Smith

It's difficult, mi amigo, only to the degree one lacks scientific and historical literacies, applied numeracy, intellectual integrity (i.e. humility to admit "I/we don't know") and, last but not least (as per Einstein), imagination. :fire:

Don't hold your breath, amigo. :smirk:

I think this dilemma comes down to "Which is most reasonable to prioritize: happiness, knowledge or understanding? and which is least reasonable?" For me, it's understanding (then² happiness, then³ knowledge); so I'd take "the red pill" understanding that it merely presents an alternative possible version of what "the blue pill" presents: a higher level of "systems of control" (i.e. that the Matrix¹ is (always) nested within a larger, more complex, Matrix⁰ ... sort of like strange-looping Matryoshka dolls) because this insight is the one thing that the vanilla "blue pill" cannot provide – in fact, is designed to occlude.

Global "one world" government will have to wait until the advent of an irreversible Technological Singularity that brings about a sustainable Post-Scarcity economy. (NB: Iain M. Banks dramatizes this political-economic speculation in his acclaimed Culture series of space opera novels.)

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@Agent Smith :yawn:

My position [Enformationism, BothAnd, Meta-Physics] is a kind of Deism, specifically PanEnDeism. — Gnomon

So, by this concept, nature – the universe / multiverse – is merely the physical aspect of a greater, non-physical entity (deity, creator, process) aka "Enformer" ... and yet, Gnomon, there is not any evidence for or sound argument demonstrating that in order for nature to be intelligible, and explicable, nature requires a non-physical entity ("Enformer") of which to be a part. I do not discern any substantive differences between (neo-Aristotlean) "Enformationism" and (neo'-Thomistic) "Intelligent Design", but I remain open to being persuaded to reconsider this unfavorable comparison.

if you ask "how did the universe came to be?", atheists reply "it's just a fluke". — Agent Smith

A creator is merely a personification of "a fluke", no? And Occan's Razor reminds us that we can do without the added personification (à la Laplace).

Otherwise, the universe might not have "come to be" at all but rather eternally transforms (e.g. A. Guth) from one 'configuration of physical constants' into another (e.g. R. Penrose's 'conformal cyclic universes') whereby, occasionally, sentient metacognitive agents evolve and interpret their universes in perspectival terms (e.g. a personified fluke aka "creator").

When asked, Smith, the most reasonable answer, it seems to me, is "All that we know is that the observable universe is here and that we can only measure the age of its currently observable state to be about 13.81 billion years old; that's all we know so far, anything else today – chance or creator – is fiction." Now as for the fiction I prefer when I'm in more speculative mood, it's akin to pandeism – there is no creator because it suicidally (by chance?) blew itself up and the debris became (by chance?) the universe. Works for me without being inconsistent with any of the most precisely known physical facts.

To my mind "the hard problem of consciousness" is only "hard" for (Cartesian) philosophers because their aporia is actually still only an underdetermined scientific problem.

Happy New Year! :death: :flower:

Giant Steps, 1960 (37:03)
John Coltrane & co.

Ten days shy of the song's release four decades ago, it's still great!

"New Year's Day" (5:36)
War, 1983
U2

Happy 2023, TPF! :death: :flower:

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Given the suddenness of the scenario, I'd prefer to hold up in my apartment listening (mostly) to jazz with enough bottled water, canned food stuffs, batteries & enough opium to spend the rest of my days – some weeks or more – chasing the dragon off the cliff into oblivion. :death: :flower:

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Duality is the fragmentation of the One into the many. — TheMadMan

And what if "the one" is an illusion, merely a simplifying abstraction from "the many", just an indexical of "this one" or "not that one"? :chin:

@Andrew4Handel Maybe stop starting threads about issues you can't wrap your tiny brain around. — Benkei

:pray: Fuck yes!

I believe in God because it is a beautiful idea. — Gregory

Understood. I disbelieve in "God" because it's nothing but "a beautiful idea" (like utopia ... paradise ... heaven ...) :death: :flower:

From a philosophical perspective though, my interest is universal & cosmic. And modern Cosmology has confirmed the intuition of the ancients, that the Cosmos is distinguished from Chaos in that it is precisely enformed : apparently structured to serve some overall purpose. I don't know what that ultimate goal might be, but the physics of the universe seems to be finely tuned to distinguish organization (Enformy) from dis-organization (Entropy). — Gnomon

Contrary to the pseudo-"philosophical perspective" above: as the universe develops from minimum disorder to maximum disorder on a (non-constant) gradient, any 'order' is a temporary, dissipative phase-state of disorder. The asymmetric direction of cosmological development does not indicate a "purpose" any more than an avalanche down a mountainside indicates its "purpose". To quote a Nobel laureate theoretical physicist:

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. — Steven Weinberg

Another esteemed, particle physicist and philosopher Victor J Stenger dismisses teleological pseudo-science like "Enformationism"...

The universe is not fine-tuned to us; we are fine-tuned to our particular universe. — The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning (2011)

We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that requires a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the event...Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God. — God: The Failed Hypothesis (2007)

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I'm confident you won't agree but, IME, as a passion, or existential commitment, "hope" (i.e. magical / wishful / group thinking ~ make believe) is so much easier than courage (i.e. defiantly joyful living) in the face of adversity (facticity). Disbelief is, and has always been, defiant and never easy conformity like "belief in gods/God". After all, it's the crutch of religion that, in the medium-to-long-term, cripples "the human spirit" (i.e. catastrophizes our histories), even as its homilies pacify our near-term anxieties. To put away childish things for good once childhood ends, Gregory, takes (metaphysical) courage. :fire:

(NB: "Religious martyrs", by most sympathetic accounts, have always exhibited many acute symptoms of psychosis and are much more compulsively delusional than hopeful or courageous.)

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It's a rare person who can escape the need for metanarratives as a bulwark against fears of anonymity and meaninglessness. Perhaps the belief in the progress of science is a secular variant, but at least it pays off now and again. :wink: — Tom Storm

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That is to say there's a reason. — Agent Smith

"A reason" for what? I don't see a connection to what I wrote in reponse to the OP.