My opinions on this are fairly controversial, but as I said, the vast majority of people aren't ready to let kids decide whether they want to drink and get tattoos and have sex — Terrapin Station

These are not the consent issues that concern me they are about endorsement of wider society and politics.

Anyhow I would strongly disputes that parents are making rational decisions for their offspring.

However I mentioned the Nazi/Communist example that you can't assume a child is Nazi, a communist, Christian. Hindu or atheist just because they were born into this environment.

I think consent is an existential problem when you realise people did not consent to most of their circumstances.

We could argue that consent should be an issue earlier than it is, but then we need to be prepared for allowing kids to make their own decisions about all of that sort of stuff. A lot of people aren't prepared to allow that. — Terrapin Station

I am talking about a complete lack of consent until someones explicitly gives consent there is no aspect of life someone has consented to until they give consent.

I have to use the kidnap analogy here. Someone who is kidnapped has clearly not consented to anything and they are no considered to have any obligation their kidnapper.

The kidnap scenario undermines consent although it does not completely prevent it. But I see no justification to turn around to someone and tell them how they should feel about life or their existence. It is for them to decide.

Well, typically we don't consider kids to be capable of consent until they're older--until they've gone through puberty, or until they've reached adulthood, etc — Terrapin Station

At some stage a person will be able to exhibit rational consent.

A very young child already withdraws its consent for a lot of things.

They often say no and can experience harm and desire boundaries. Also there is no reason to believes that the parents are capable of being a reasonable parent and the grounds to judge this problematic. It isn't children that voted for the Nazi's etc.

I think peoples analysis of childhood here is very unrealistic.

I don't see any reason why the parents don't have the right to make the decision that a child will be born. — T Clark

There are lots of things that should or could deter a parent from having a child. Are you seriously claiming anyone anywhere in any circumstances is somehow entitled to have a child.

No one has natural rights. The only reason people can have children is because no one prevents them and nature allows it.
Someone could easily kill someone else and nature won't intervene (see genocides) the fact that you can do something naturally does not invest it with any legitimacy.

In civilized countries parents have limited rights over their children unless they agree to treat them a certain way. Thousands of children are taken of there parents each year. A man addicted to drugs and his two partners in my city had all 8 of their children taken away at birth.

However I am not talking about this but the lack of consent after birth to the circumstances of life and social politics etc.

Your position seems very arrogant assuming parent are adequately bringing their children into a just and rational political situation.

I just doesn't make sense to ask for consent to live of a newborn baby. — Wallows

I am not discussing that.I am discussing the fact that none can automatically be considered to have consented any aspect of life and society.

The issue is a lack of a social contract that has been signed by anyone accepting any social norms or common moralities and philosophies.

prepared to take responsibility for its own existence — Possibility

This is impossible because no one is responsible for their existence because their parents are.

Consent is an issue for things that are capable of granting or withholding consent.

It can't be an issue for things that are not capable of granting or withholding consent. — Terrapin Station

I am not talking about that. I am talking about the fact that after we start to exist we have not consented to the social or political order etc.

We know that once a human is born and grows they will be capable of withholding consent. You do not need to wait until someone is born to assess a capacity for consent because we know they will value consent based on the current members of our species experiences.

The welfare of the unborn can be and clearly is an issue this his been exploited in eugenics programs and climate change arguments etc..

However here I am discussing the lack of consent that arises once someone is born until they explicitly give consent at some stage.

Your English is great.

I know consent to be born is impossible. I think that makes creating someone else very problematic because you cannot claim they exist through their own wishes and desires. It creates a kind of imposition.

However here I am talking about how you can be considered to have consented to anything after you start to exist just because you started to exist.

For example being born in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia does not mean you agreed to be a communist or Nazi.

Wherever you are born does not mean you agree with or consent to societal or family norms in that place.

Yet people are treated as if they have somehow signed a social contract and agree with their societies or families norms.

I agree, but what particular duties are entailed by this special responsibility? — Relativist

I think a simple acknowledgement is vital. A change in mindset. A proper apportioning of responsibility.

I am not sure I understand this thread, however it seems to me that weak and strong are not unambiguous terms.

Being well adapted is another matter. Humans are not well adapted to living in the sea so we are weak if we classified ourselves as a sea creature.

It seems easy enough to manipulate the environment to change which group of persons is weak.

If humans relied only on brute force we would not have the humanities,science and technology.

Are you afraid of death? — Frank Apisa

Like any rational person.

You would actually FORCE someone to stay alive who does not want to stay alive? — Frank Apisa

Life is based on force.No one asks to be born. Life isn't consensual. If you want to be consistent you should be an antinatalist.

There are people with depression who agree to have very invasive treatments and sometimes they work

There are lots of suspicious aspect to this story anyway. Why couldn't her parents prevent her being abused?

I think killing people after abuse and failed interventions is deplorable. Especially at such a young age.

Personally. I struggle every day to cope with PTSD from childhood abuse. I had bad parents grew up in a religious cult and was bullied most of the time in school etc and have had depression and anxiety my entire adult life. There is a lot of extra help that the state could offer me other than euthanasia.

In this scenario I could bully someone or exploit and abuse them til they desired death and you would finish the job by helping them kill themselves.

Mind boggling and bizarre.

They could have sedated her and given her stomache peg and fed her that way.

They could have forced her to stay alive for a few years trying out all manner of neurological treatments and psychotherapies to make her life desirable to her.

It is easy to win The Survival of the Fittest, just buy a gun and shoot loads of people.

I don't consider murder to be an illegal killing but and immoral killing which this definitely was.

This is a claim made by John Angell James in his book "Being Born again" from 1834.

"You have Broken God's law ; you have acted as an enemy to him, and made him your enemy. If you had committed only one single act of transgression, your situation would be alarming. One sin would have subjected you to the sentence of his law, and exposed you to his displeasure: but you have committed sins more in number and greater in magnitude than you know or can conceive of. Your whole life has been one continued course of sin: you have, as relates to God, done nothing but sin. Your transgressions have sent up to heaven a cry for vengeance. You are actually under the curse of the almighty."

You could call this the total depravity view of man.

I find this sentiment very disturbing. James seems to be trying to put total blame on an individual and mans nature for whatever happens to them and to suggest any fate we have is deserved and God is not to blame.

However he doesn't actually say what the sins are we are supposed to have committed.

Brooks suggests this explains the ferocity of many of the debates, or brawls, between different ideological profiles in today's America. More here. — Wayfarer

It seems there is an on going battle to distribute blame. I think psychopaths can flourish in this environment by appropriating the narrative to their own interest. More emotionally vulnerable people will become depressed and anxious.

But it seems a more sophisticated narrative would be to look more at mitigation and rational explanations. But also I do think a false just world theory allows people to justify bad things and justify their own position. Some people will dress up a false just world hypothesis as a rational explanation.

The first thing that should be noted is that there is no mention of original sin in the creation story. The first mention of sin occurs in Genesis 4 when God says to Cain: — Fooloso4

But I think being cast out of the Garden of Eden is equivalent to it.

There is some contradiction and subtly in the bible but mainstream religion or fundamentalists latch on to particular verse. I don't think sophistication and subtly is how religion reaches the masses.

I think Ecclesiates is the Book of the bible that is most nuanced and realistic about the human predicament but as far as I can see not widely embraced in mainstream Christianity. For example it was never discussed in a a bible reading in the churches I grew up in.

The problem I always had is it is this: just how is that supposed to work ontologically? How, ontologically, does Adam and/or Eve doing something get passed on to us? — Terrapin Station

I think the narrative is probably purely psychological. But I think the problem is that this kind of narrative has been latched onto throughout history and false justifications and moralities are being based on it.

I think the idea that reality is just may be comforting regardless of whether or not it is.

In the bible it says contradictory things about whether people should be punished for other peoples sins. Contradiction in the bible to me makes it incoherent when taken literally.

"I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." Exodus 20:5 , Deuteronomy 5:9

"The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him". Ezekiel 18:20

I think being cast out of the Garden of Eden is the equivalent of the original sin. The basic concept though is that humans are to blame for the state of nature.

I believe it is an early manifestation of the psychological just world theory. Rather than accept that nature is cruel and arbitrary the narrative is that we are actually more in control of outcomes then we actually are.

Well, in that case, anyone's belief about the afterlife is not evidence for the afterlife. — NKBJ

That is not a claim I have made. We are clearly not going to agree on what constitutes good evidence.

I mean, I could play that silly game too and interpret: — NKBJ

It is not my fault that you gave a poor example to make a claim.

Why can't you come up with something that we can all agree is implausible?

I don't see why mythical dragons are implausible anyway. They are only a dinosaur/reptile like creature that lays eggs. Even given the principle of charity I don't find your example compelling.

In which case it would, and always would have, extended beyond just your belief. — NKBJ

I have been talking about mental states and whether they have to extend into the external world.

Whether or not a mental state is accurate or an illusion or just a false belief is a classical philosophical problem.

I don't think you can just assume mental states have a relationship to some kind of metaphysically secure external reality. We are not obliged to make metaphysical commitments about the nature of our mental states.

So that's just a purposeful fallacy of equivocation — NKBJ

It is your problem that you were ambiguous. If you want to give an example of something absurd you probably should check that it doesn't exist.

You illustrated the problem of trying to think of something absurd when such a rich variety of strange phenomena already exist.

You and S seem to be making the assumption that we all agree on what is absurd.

I didn't say they are absurd, I said they are extraordinary, because ordinarily people don't make such claims — NKBJ

So what was your inaccurate diversion on Dragon eggs about?

You do realize that if rebirth doesn't extend beyond my personal belief in it, then it's not real? — NKBJ

That doesn't follow. Science itself is usually based on theories some of which turn out to be true. You can have an accurate belief that can be later validated by public or personal evidence.

You can have private mental states that are just in your mind like a headache that no one else has access to. You don't have to prove to someone one else that your mental states exist or are valid.

I am talking about private experiences and not personal beliefs anyway.

However we do have the phenomena of memory. We remember tons of things that happened in the past and no longer exist except in our memories and beliefs.

Sure, things are relative. We should all spend more time thinking about how extraordinary it is that we exist in this vast, cold, amazing universe.

And yet, it's just blatantly ridiculous to claim you can't tell the difference between claims of eating cornflakes and of eating dragon eggs. That's just being disingenuous on your part. Don't pretend things cause you want to make your argument stick. — NKBJ

Your example is flawed because dragon eggs do exist. Komodo dragons lay eggs.

Trying to make something sound implausible is a silly tactic in my opinion. Reality is stranger than fiction. The internet, telephones and helicopters would have seemed implausible in the past.

The problem with trying to make something sound implausible is that you have to use words based on phenomena that do exist.

Nevertheless like I said not all afterlife claims are fantastical they can be quite mundane. You are begging the questioning by already assuming afterlife claims are going to be absurd.

Additionally, the claim that you had a vision of a past life, if true and not a delusion, simultaneously makes a claim about the way the world outside of your mind is and works, thus making it not purely a mental phenomenon — NKBJ

It does not follow that a claim about a mental state entails a claim about what we consider to be the external world. There have always been thinkers that view consciousness as primary.

The afterlife could refer to another dimension or purely mental realm but anyway, as it is, we do not know what the relationship between mind and a material or external world is.

No claims about mental states content make assertions about brain mechanisms which is what is being correlated with mental states. If I say I have a headache I am not saying anything specific or technical about the workings of my brain.

There's a different set of evidentiary expectations for ordinary events and extraordinary ones. — NKBJ

What makes you claim something is an extraordinary event? Existence itself is extraordinary.
Maybe you mean common mundane events.

If we saw ghosts floating around every day that would be considered an ordinary event. The problem is you cannot see other peoples experiences so they cannot provide the same kind of evidence required in science.

Logical positivist A J Ayer had a near death experience. (Which contrasts with the sterile nature of that philosophy.)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Ayer

"In 1988, one year before his death, Ayer wrote an article entitled, "What I saw when I was dead",[15] describing an unusual near-death experience. Of the experience, Ayer first said that it "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death ... will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be."[16] However, a few days later he revised this, saying "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief""

You genuinely believe that I did that with no good reason? — S

What was the good reason?

There are many different types of pre-life, after death, near death accounts etc I wouldn't lump them altogether. Near death experiences tend to be taken seriously but theorists tend to try and explain in terms of types of neural/biochemical activity.

Like, if someone claims to have seen a murder happen. Sure, the police will investigate, but when not a single shred of corroborating evidence turns up, they'll stop and probably assume the witness was mistaken somehow. — NKBJ

The problem is that you can't provide corroborating evidence for private mental events.

A pre-life or afterlife account is usually only observed by the individual and is not a report of publicly observable phenomenon.

I am skeptical of afterlife claims myself but I don't reject them outright because I don;'t reject personal testimony without strong reason and I know how difficult it is to convince people of personal and mental events in the case of historical abuse and mental illness.

Also I think the mysterious nature of consciousness and the mental offers significant scope for afterlife possibility.

You initially said

Yes, because there isn't a shred of credible evidence in its favour. Only fools take seriously such presumed possibilities — S

You started your "debate" being completely dismissive with no good reason. You already dismissed all the claims made in this area without a specific reason using no case as an example.

Then you brought in science disproving the flat earth as your example of credible evidence.

Then you said

An example of incredible evidence would be some chump just pointing out that some people say some stuff about supposed extraordinary events which could easily be made up, and there being no way of knowing the claim to be true. — S

Most personal experiences we have had or have cannot be proven to be true. We can make up anything. Plausible lies are still lies. If I lie and say I had cornflakes for breakfast that sounds credible but it is only credible if I am not lying.

It is a big struggle in the area of mental health and cognitive disorders to overcome prejudices, the idea people are making things up or exaggerating. I don't think anyone can be an arbiter on the absurdity of personal claims. I think you have to have well argued reasons to reject these claims.

You don't have to believe any claims if you don't want to but personal belief does not relate to whether something is a fact.

Initially You claimed you needed credible evidence and then used scientific evidence as a source of credible evidence and personal testimony as made up stuff.

As far as I am aware you have not used an example of credible evidence that could include personal testimony.

I think the reason we find some personal testimony compelling is because of current norms and from analogy to ones own experience. But this involves bias

The earth was known to be round for thousands of years based on observations by clever thinkers. It didn't need a truck load of scientific evidence. You used they example of a much ridiculed claim in a discussion about afterlife claims which is a case of "poisoning the well" or guilt by association.

Democritus posited an atomic theory of matter thousands of years before any evidence could validate it.

Personal testimony is NOT certain evidence. That's why there's currently a lot of debate about how much eye witness testimony should count in courts. — NKBJ

I wasn't using certain in that sense of the word. I meant it in the sense of some but not all.

Personal testimony can be fallible but that does not make it all false, logically. We rely on successful inter human communication to get through life.

There is a wealth of scientific evidence that has been amassed to make the claim that Earth is not flat credible — S

Why do you need "scientific" evidence to prove the earth is not flat? If you travel around the globe on a boat you will find it is not flat. Why does evidence have to be classed as "Scientific"?

This is a problem because hidden mental states are not the kind of things science can validate.

To demand that evidence be scientific is ignoring the limitations of the scientific methodology. The prejudice comes because people accept a lot of claims without evidence such is if I told you I had cornflakes for breakfast or that I dreamed I was flying a plane. They only start to reject personal testimony when they don't like the content.

At the extreme are the consciousness deniers who have decided all conscious states are problematic and try to eliminate them.

I find it completely fascistic when people refuse to except certain evidence based on what is essentially ad hominem about personal testimony and accusations of delusion and lying.

People tend to ask for evidence based on prejudice.

No, it's a judgement, but values have nothing to do with it. An example of credible evidence would be the science supporting the claim that Earth isn't flat. An example of incredible evidence would be some chump just pointing out that some people say some stuff about supposed extraordinary events which could easily be made up, and there being no way of knowing the claim to be true. — S

Values have everything to do with it. The idea your beliefs have nothing to do with your values is simply derisible.

Science does not prove the earth is not flat, evidence does. You do not need science to validate claims. How often in a conversation do you demand people validate a claim with science. Never?

People cannot prove the claims they make about the contents of their experience nor can science.

You have made such a simplistic and facile notion of evidence that only trivial claims could past muster.

It is clear that your notion of evidence is maximally bias and prejudice.

No properties can be detached from the material stuff/relations/processes in question. That was the point — Terrapin Station

I am not sure what you mean. We do not see consciousness in a brain yet we know we are conscious. I am not sure what properties you have found that relate to consciousness that could not be detached?

It seems your position must rely on something like the idea that neurons are identical to mental experiences. Which I find implausible because brains and experiences do not share any properties.

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. So when a body is destroyed the same amount of energy remains in other forms. So it depends on what one claims is being lost on death. For a materialist that would have to be something like functionality. But I do not view consciousness as a function.

Wow. No. Didn't they teach you this distinction in school? First person is when you are the thing in question. Third person is when it's something other than yourself. — Terrapin Station

You are always present in your experiences.

The third person is a Literary device.

We simple have no access to anyone else's immediate mental states other than speculation through analogy and interpretation through language.

CDs aren't different than the physical item that you slot into your computer. So you're confusing yourself by not having that part clear. — Terrapin Station

The issue is not about whether something is physical or not but about whether (A) can be detached from (B.)

People can mistake what is transmitted into an object, for that object.