Yeah I'm through talking to someone who doesn't even know the difference between "definitely" and "defiantly".

I am not convinced that it is overpopulation at fault but you are definitely right about the skyrocketing cost of living and I’m more concerned to express my sympathies for your situation than to argue about the causes of it. I’m in California where I make more than twice the median personal income for the US generally and still can’t afford to live better than a tiny trailer in a run down trailer park. My mom is on social security too and has been on and off the verge of homelessness for the past five years, and basically her entire check goes to renting a shitty bedroom in an overcrowded house in the slums and then food stamps have to cover the rest. I really hope you can find some way to manage your hardships, and more than that, that somehow we all can do something to make sure nobody like you has to anymore.

I had a shitty day at work and you seem weirdly obtuse about this topic.

You said "compelled". That suggests a degree of force I didn't insinuate, like there's some kind of obligation backed by force comparable to that of law. If all you meant was that people who are helped by religions will be more likely to do things to support them in turn, then we're in agreement.

you are not compelled but there are obvious social psychological pressures to support an organization of which you are a part. have you studied no psychology whatsoever?

nice straw man

religions provide social services. people turn to religions in part for those things. secular governments also provide those things sometimes. if they do, people have less reason to turn to religion. if they don't people have more reason to turn to religion. so religion has obvious motive to use their political influence (like everyone has political influence) to deter secular governments from providing social services.

Religions aren't competing against the state to BE the state so how many resources they have in that capacity is irrelevant. Religions want to influence the state to make it not do things that will compete with them. Completely different game.

In the sense I already described. If the state implements social programs, people have less need to turn to the church for their social support. So the church has motive to be against state social programs to preserve a reason for people to turn to themselves instead.

Religious competition against secular society is the same as its competition against other religions. Any given religion would be against any other religion having political power, and they're likewise against secular political power. The only difference here in the US at least is that there's virtually no chance of any religion besides Christianity gaining any measure of political power, while secular power is dominant and so an actual (perceived) threat to contend against.

It is widely accepted that Nazi Germany was a result of German people’s fear of loss being exploited by right-wing populists all too eager to give them a list of Others to scapegoat for all of their problems. And only slightly less accepted that something similar is happening in America today. Something similar was almost happening in America back then: the War Department even produced a video warning the public of the dangers of demagogues stirring up ethnic hatred, directly comparing the version of that happening in America at the time to what brought Hitler to power.

I agree with what you wrote, though I’m not sure why you @ed me at the end?

Subtract 3 from 0 and you get -3. Subtract -3 from 0 and you get 3. You very well can pull 3 and -3 out of 0, just as you can add (un-subtract) them back together into 0 again.

That’s why the religious right is so antisocialist. They see secular society as a competing religion. If the only social support system is religious then religions benefit. If there are alternatives then religions risk losing to the competition.

Just want to note that rationality is not synonymous with justification. Critical rationalism is anti-justificationist.

Is a refutation itself an argument? Can a successful refutation be refuted in the future?

I ask because, in the case of irrational numbers, the proof of their existence consists of a refutation of an argument that certain numeric quantities can be expressed as ratios of integers. The Pythagoreans originally insisted vehemently that every number could be expressed as a ratio of two integers, and then someone refuted that by showing that some definitely cannot. Is that refutation not set in stone now, as much as the observation of one black swan forever refutes the claim that all swans are white?

I think that in a general philosophy discussion in which anyone of any education level is welcome to participate, those with more education should just expect to have to explain things for those who don’t already know all of the background. Explaining things you already know in a clear and concise way is an important part of solidifying your own understanding of that material so this is beneficial to the “teacher” just as it is for the “student”.

Conversely though, those with less knowledge on a subject than others in the discussion should refrain from pontificating authoritatively about their unfounded opinions, and instead ask questions that might lead in the direction of the answers they think are right (or at least away from those they think ate wrong) in a Socratic way. The great thing about the Socratic method is you don’t have to just pretend to know nothing to use it: you can actually know nothing and still contribute to learning between both yourself and your interlocutors just by asking insightful questions.

Time is a four-sided simultaneous four day cube unlike the round earth one-day educated stupid the lizard people teach in schools these days.

j/k, time is actually a local entropic anisotropy in the phase space of possible worlds.

By which I mean that time is more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.

(One of these is not a joke).

Technically we are accelerating away from the center of the Earth, not toward it. If we coasted in an inertial frame (=freefall) we would end up orbiting the center of the Earth, but there’s a bunch of rock in the way pushing us off course from that path thanks to the electrostatic repulsion between the molecules that make up both it and us. That repulsion is the acceleration you feel pushing your chair into your butt right now.

Yeah, I get that in much of the world since the Cold War there is this false dichotomy between state socialism and libertarian capitalism, an ideological view intentionally pushed by statists and capitalists alike in both the US and USSR to hide the historical association of libertarianism with socialism. The original socialists were libertarian, and the original libertarians were socialist, being the same people in fact. Then Marx et al started a trend in socialism toward “temporary” statism (state capitalism in fact, the avowed form of government of both the USSR and present-day China) still ostensibly en route to a stateless communism; and later Rothbard et al misappropriated the name “libertarianism” for a radical form of capitalism contrary to all prior usage, rejecting the state without understanding how capitalism inevitably creates in effect a state, just an undemocratic state ruled dictatorially by the owning class. In effect, it becomes a modernized feudalism, or state capitalism again, what Mussolini said should have been called corporativism, if he hadn’t already popularized a different name for it: fascism.

Most people don’t own their own homes free and clear, leaving them perpetually having to bribe those with more homes than they need to live in for the right just to exist somewhere, even if they magically didn’t need to consume anything. If you don’t even own a place where you have the right to sit and starve to death in peace, you still need more money with which to buy that, to just get up to zero where you don’t owe anyone anything. Ergo, most people still need more money. Most people are born already a lifetime in debt.

The quickest way to be rich is by already having more money than you need and lending the rest at interest to those who don’t.

By comparison - as an ideal economic model to be pursued and developed - an economy structured by the people (with the people at large being its governance) in manners that select for qualities we value (as per the golden rule) to gain greatest economic power would by my appraisals be commendable. There would still be competition for capital here and, hence, to me the latter is yet a system of capitalism.

But less idealistically and more directly, in a forced choice, I'd select the "free trade" meaning of the word. Still, class division is by my appraisals not requisite for capitalism. As one example, cooperatives can - or at least could - prosper economically with a system of fair competition - if we actually lived in such a system. Here, the owners are in part or in whole the laborers. — javra

It sounds like what you favor is what is technically considered a form of market socialism. That “owners = laborers” part (and equivalently the “economy governed by the people” i.e. economic democracy part) is pretty much the definition of socialism, and likewise “owners != laborers” is the original definition of capitalism. Competition is not a requisite feature of capitalism, but of markets, which can be socialist is capital ownership is widespread and there is no owner/laborer division.

That post was in response to someone saying that people need work to keep them busy, even if they don't need the income. I agree people need the income, and this half on/half off scheme would leave them needing it even more. But if the income was somehow taken care of, this "people need work to keep them busy" thing wouldn't be a problem, because there's plenty of stuff people need help with if they don't have to be billionaires to pay people to help them with it because people are just bored and looking for projects to volunteer on.

In places where cost of living is low, sure, $25k/yr is enough to live comfortably, but most people don't live in places where cost of living is low, because places where lots of people live are in high demand and that raises cost of living substantially. If you live in California, you understand that. I lived on $25k/yr in California for a decade and couldn't even afford an apartment to myself. Now I make more than twice that and still live in the shittiest trailer park in town.

Anyway, like I said I get that it was just an example, I just wanted to be clear that 60% of people living a struggle-free life is very very far from true. Most people live in the places where lots of people live, which are consequentially expensive places, where the kind of incomes that most people make will barely let you scrape by with zero safety net, which is not at all "struggle-free".

So I’m not misunderstood, I do endorse capitalism when properly structured. — javra

To be clear, by "capitalism" do you just mean free markets, or do you mean the division of society into a class of owners and a class of laborers? The latter is the original sense of the word still in use by opponents of it despite the misleading conflation with free markets promulgated by proponents of it last century.

You could also just talk about two light clocks or any other physical systems to judge the time passage on the ship and on Earth. All processes on the ship, even elementary physical processes like light moving through a vacuum, happen as though less time has passed. A physicist on the ship would still calculate the speed of light from Maxwell's equations to be exactly the same as one on Earth, and both would measure the speed of light bouncing around their labs to agree with their calculations, but when the ship got back to Earth one would find that a light beam bouncing around their lab had bounced around a shorter distance even though both would agree that it was moving at the same speed, so the only way they can reconcile that is to say one bream of light was traveling for less time -- and sure enough, clocks and all other measurements of time on the ship would agree that less time had passed.

Evil is always evil-from-a-point-of-view. — bert1

That is not an uncontroversial claim, and typically it is people leaning more toward theism who are most likely to object to it. People who think there's a God usually also think there's an objective moral standard, and that that standard is God's standard, so on their account if God approves of toddlers getting gang-banged and the toddlers disagree, well the toddlers are just wrong.

Whatever exists that seems evil to us must be good from the point of view of an all powerful being, otherwise it wouldn't exist. No comfort there for us, but it's consistent. This entails that the theist must embrace the fact that from God's point of view, any kind of suffering is good. It's hard to love God, if loving God is even a coherent concept. — bert1

Yeah, a possible solution to the Problem of Evil, an answer to the question of "How can the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God be reconciled with the existence of evil?", has always been "What evil? I don't see any evil. Evil can't be possible, there's an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God, and he wouldn't let there be any evil so there must not be."

I think all but the most fortunate and either self-centered or ignorant people would find that pretty absurd though.

If god doesn't exist and he's a human invention then how poor was our imagination, how pathetic was our morals and how great was our ignorance that we could do no better than a god that Richard Dawkins can describe in such disgustingly vile terms. — TheMadFool

This is something I find myself thinking about whenever debating the Problem of Evil. Theists fall all over themselves to make excuses for why the world can be as shitty as it is and yet God can still somehow be all-knowing, all-powerful, and most of all all-loving. I see that and just find myself wondering why you would even care whether or not there exists a being that, for whatever excuse or other, still permits genocides and children being sold into sex slavery, never mind horrible diseases and parasites and predators that are not even human fault, and otherwise appears to have no noticeable effect on the world. What comfort is that? That you go get to live in some afterlife later... managed by the same "all-loving" being who lets this life be such shit for so many? Why would that life be any better than this one then?

I can easily imagine a God that's much better than that, but that better kind of a God clearly isn't real, whatever the case may be about the lackluster type theists try to prop up.

People paint atheists like me as hating the idea of God or something, but really I'm terribly disappointed that there doesn't appear to be one, at least not anything that would rightly be considered an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God. Sure maybe the universe as we know it is something like a simulation created by something like an alien that's all-knowing and all-powerful over what we think is reality and forever hidden from our ability to tell whether or not he's there... but why would I care, if he lets it be like this and otherwise makes himself irrelevant to us here?

The best I can hope for is that eventually enough of us will get similarly disappointed enough that there isn't such a God that we'll collectively decide to make or become one.


ETA: I'm disappointed that this thread isn't about the progress (or lack thereof) in philosophy, as the title would suggest.

The Methods of Justice
How are we to apply those criteria and decide on what to intend, what prescriptive claims to agree with? — Pfhorrest

The short answer is "deontologically", but all I mean by that is "not consequentially". Not exactly, at least. I think that the ends don't justify the means in exactly the same way that observation cannot confirm theory... but it can falsify it. Initially, any course of action is permissible, but negative consequences can rule out possible courses of action, yet still leaving infinitely many permissible ones, never positively justifying one particular course of action as the one that must be taken. Long story short, "do no harm". It may be really hard to figure out a course of action that is not ruled out by any negative consequences, but it's also really hard to find a theory that isn't ruled out by any observations: we've just got to deal with that difficulty if we want to try to do good.

Also, analogous to how logic forms sort of side-constraints on what is possible, just as a necessary consequences of the meaning of words, so too property rights form a kind of side-constraint on what is permissible as a necessary consequence of the ownership of property. But, just like the correct meaning of the words from which we derive logically necessary conclusions is itself contingent, so too the correct assignment of ownership from which we derive such rights and obligations is itself contingent. At the bottom both of them are socially constructed: words mean and people own whatever other people agree that they do. But I think that both are subject to continuity with previous agreement, barring a unanimous consensus to break with that continuity: one subset of a community can't decide to change the meaning of words or the assignment of ownership out from under others without their agreement, unless they can show that those others came to that state through similarly illegitimate non-unanimous action and they're just setting things right again.

This already exists. It's called therapy and drugs. — Lif3r

I think OP is suggesting a government program making that more available to everyone, and also more research into making more and better of it. And to that extent I agree, though the specifics of the program he proposes are questionable.

Suffering isn't a problem — Seagully

If suffering isn't a problem, then what is? Every other problem is problematic because of the suffering that it inflicts.

It's not wrong to suffer, it's not ideal, but it's not wrong. — Seagully

That sounds like you're conflating something that's bad for you with something that it is bad to do. Someone was making a similar mistake in an earlier thread about Stoicism. Saying "it would be good to alleviate people's suffering" isn't saying "it's bad of those people to suffer, they should stop doing that". In the Stoicism thread, it was confusing "you don't have to feel bad about things" (it's okay to choose not to, if you can) with "you have to not feel bad about things" (you're doing wrong by feeling bad about them, stop it).

Welcome!

I don't think expression of emotion is quite what Buddhist ethics have in mind. When they speak of 'moral dread' and 'sense of shame over moral transgressions', it is, I fear to say, rather closer to the old-fashioned sense of sin. I mean, Buddhist ethics are probably closer to traditional Christian ethics than modern secular values, even though they're based on completely different belief structures. — Wayfarer

I wasn't suggesting that that example I gave was the kind of thing Bhikkhu Bodhi meant, just that that's an example of letting shame and fear guide your actions that doesn't end up guiding them correctly, and that modern secular values don't do away with shame and fear, they just say they should apply to different things than traditional religious values do. The point is that shame and fear aren't the difference between modern and traditional ethics: both have them, and just disagree over what they're best applied to.

In the present-day world, with its secularization of all values, such notions as shame and fear of wrong are bound to appear antiquated — Bhikkhu Bodhi

I see absolutely no reason why they would. If by "secularization of values" you mean rejecting appeal to religious traditions, all that means is an openness to questioning what actually is a wrong to feel ashamed or afraid of, and what is not actually wrong at all and so unreasonable to feel ashamed or afraid of. For a not (necessarily) religious example, many men are ashamed to cry, or to ask for help, and afraid of the negative social consequences that will befall them if they do such a "shameful" thing. But there is nothing actually wrong with crying, or asking for help, and it is unreasonable for men to feel ashamed of it, and unreasonable for there to be negative social consequences for them doing so: they should feel free to do so, and others should not punish them for doing so. That's not to say that there is never cause for shame or fear of repercussions, just that that particular thing is not actually wrong, and so should not be a cause of shame or repercussions. Many "superstitions and dogmas" are like that: things long said to be wrong, that are not actually wrong. It is good, and positively philosophical, to question whether the things that are long said to be wrong actually are or aren't, and to feel shame about and to stand for repercussions for only those things that are actually wrong.

To insist is that nobody should indulge in any pleasures so long as anyone anywhere is suffering would require that everyone refrain from all pleasures until the distant day that all suffering is alleviated, resulting in a net lower level of happiness and general good across time. Since that is the absurd conclusion of saying pleasure is bad when accompanied by someone else’s suffering, we must reject that premise and instead say that everyone should seek whatever enjoyment they can wherever they can, so long as it is not causing others to suffer, but not so long as nobody else happens to be suffering. If you can manage to be happy amidst tragedies, without exacerbating them, then that is good, that increases the total good in the world.

If people didn’t need to work for survival, there’s all kind of volunteer work that could be done for some sense of purpose and something to do. And I don’t mean like soup kitchen volunteering necessarily, just doing work on creative projects for free on your own schedule just because it’s something you want to see happen and want to be a part of. And even if most people aren’t creative enough to come up with things to do themselves, a handful of creative people can easily come up with tons of things they could use help with, for which everyone else could volunteer as they like.

I have first hand experience with this in a video game fandom where I started a project that was too big for me to handle on my own and welcomed anyone else’s help with it and for decades now have “employed” dozens of volunteer creative people of all types in collaboratively creating a work of love that’s now one of the biggest things in that community.

I have a bunch of other projects that I would love to do similar things with, I just don’t know how to find the right community to help with them. My philosophy book is one of them (and I have vague aspirations that a community like this one might someday be of use in a future version of that), and I also have an absolutely enormous multipart work of fiction outlined (in 60k words just for the outline) that would take me 30 years just to novelize myself but I would ideally have a huge multi-media work of music, visual art, film, etc (the origins of the story are backstories from abandoned video game projects from over two decades ago). I could easily “employ” an army of volunteers for an entire lifetime fleshing just that project out, if there were people with the time to contribute and I had the time to manage them all. And that’s all just me, one creative person. I’ve met lots of other people with similarly big dreams that could use just as many hands realizing them.

That is the question of the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness, and you already know my answer to that: everything has some phenomenal experience or another, and the specifics of that experience vary with the function of the thing, so anything that realizes the same function as a human brain has the same experience as a human brain.

I think functionalism is more about implementing a protocol or format or even more generally a... well, a function. AIM on Windows and Mac are different realizations of the same program, for Mac x86 or PPC are likewise even though the processors are different, AIM Windows and iChat still both communicated over the same protocol, and all of those are still chat programs just like ICQ even though that’s not directly compatible with them. Human pain and octopus pain could be comparable to iChat on Mac PPC and ICQ on a vacuum tube emulation of Windows x86: they’re very different tech stacks at every level but they’re both still doing the same thing.

You did say “for example” but 60% is WAY too high. Only 25% of individuals make more than the mean individual income of about $50k/yr, while about 50% make less than half of that, under $25k/yr. Just keeping a roof over your head is a constant struggle for most people, and the vast majority have no financial safety net at all. I’m just barely in that top 25% myself and I live in the shittiest trailer park in town, still renting the land it’s parked on.