"Something from nothing" at the start of the universe is problem inherent in our understanding of linear time, whether you agree with Berkelean idealism or not. Theists often cite it as proof of god, because it seems impossible and attributing the impossible to god makes sense to them. But while they're wrong about it proving god, you can't use it to disprove god either. The universe's beginning simply doesn't make sense to our normal way of thinking, we can only conclude that it doesn't work like the rest of time, not whether there could or couldn't be a god involved.

As an audio drama creator, I can state definitively that radio plays are not meant to be "an aural assault on the eardrums." You can only assault someone's ears if they have other senses remaining. Radio drama is about stimulating the imagination to create visuals using the appropriate minimum of suggestive sound that suggests without over-prescribing.

Aural assault is partly simply an extension of what action movies have been progressively doing, and what theaters have been doing to deafen the last couple generations.

But Marvel/DC is, of course, an extension of comic books. Comic books play things to exaggerated extremes, and when translated to TV or movies that naturally includes exaggerated sound.

It's true of 99% of post-1930 movies that you'll get more out of listening to it with your eyes closed than watching it with your ears plugged and captions off.

Simple grammar, spelling, paragraph, formatting and length checks can spot most morons. That's what we used to use, a certain number of such mistakes would cause the post to report itself to the moderators. Factoring in the age of the account and the number of posts they make per day helps too.

Given the state of AI language processing today, if you can write code that actually understands posts well enough to identify the types of arguments/fallacies being made the majority of the time, you'll be wealthy beyond your dreams.

Consciousness can be a fundamental property of the universe, but only if you reduce consciousness to an essentially meaningless property which only takes on meaning when associated with the complex interactive patterns of brains. In which case, you're really just playing with words. And at any rate your argument doesn't follow.

Life is a completely separate issue from consciousness, as easily proved by hitting yourself on the head -- or experiencing a dreamless sleep tonight. And life is not defined by combination of atoms using DNA/RNA, life is defined as "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death."

You want to absorb all the hefty ongoing legal fees when Porat sues me for illegally replicating the data of the site I sold? I wouldn't like to do it anyway though, it was clear I'd long since lost interest in posting about philosophy and it was time to move on.

This is Philosophy Forums as far as I'm concerned. It was created by PF mods to be the refugee site. Pretty much everyone who wanted to continue posting moved here. The membership turnover has been less here than in an average 5 year period on old PF I think, so this might be more PF than PF would've been by now. A resurrection of the old site would just be an eerie ghost town, a nice archive like the wayback machine, but the people wouldn't reappear and wouldn't be the same if they did. Heck, a significant percentage of the old PF's members have died now after 20 years. You can't go back to the past.

The first internet forum I regularly posted on and moderated at actually tried it. After they sold and then the new owner eventually closed it down many years later, the original owner resurrected the site and emailed all the old members from the glory days to invite us back. It kind of looked alive for a week or two, then you could tell it was a zombie and it was put back out of its misery after a little bit.

But if you want to buy philosophyforums.com it's down from the previous $50K to a mere $10.5K: https://auctions.godaddy.com/trpItemListing.aspx?domain=philosophyforums.com . That may not include the data rights though, be sure to ask. At any rate, I'd recommend you just redirect it here.

I do wonder how many corporately controlled private platforms you have to rely on in order for your business to function — StreetlightX

Eh, none are essential and 99% of what I use is open source. But how is that important? The big bad evil corporations have to rely on an ecosystem too, they tend to be less independent than a small timer because their needs are so much greater.

the structural impoverishment of vast swathes of the Earth under capitalism. — StreetlightX

Yeah, you can really see how capitalism has made everyone so much poorer than before and they just keep on plummeting. And the USSR grew so much faster, so that's the ticket to better results:



Not that those numbers really matter. Once you make enough money to cover your needs, likely around $10K/yr with no subsidies in an average market, more money doesn't make you happier -- increased control of your life does. And capitalism is the system most capable of generating the revenue to subsidize everyone to that level.

There are factory workers making your shoes who do not have the luxury of refusing to work for someone else. — StreetlightX

Under communism, they literally have no choice but to work for someone else. Work is obligatory under that system, and knowing that the shoe factory is a collective doesn't make them feel any better about having to meet quota.

Capitalism at least provides options. The factory worker can go try something else without getting permission from anyone. The factory worker can learn to code and be their own boss, as many people in impoverished countries have done. The factory worker can invent a new job that didn't exist before. It won't be easy for most, but there's no system under which it is.

you either own capital, or are a worker. — StreetlightX

Lots of us these days are online sole proprietorships. I work for myself doing what I choose when I choose to. I own my means of production, but it has no resale value.

I'm also classified as in poverty and live in low income housing. Which I don't mind at all, frankly. Owning things beyond basic needs is unimportant. (I've been middle class before, and the only thing I miss about it is having a dishwasher. But that doesn't keep me up at night.) Having control over your own life is important. I would refuse to work for somebody else for a billion dollars a year, if quitting was not an option.

Unfortunately, communism doesn't give people any more control over their lives -- it just moves the power over you to a collective and shuffles around irrelevant pieces of paper called money.

When it comes to the specific issue of guns as self-defense, a technological solution would be ideal: the invention of non-lethal devices that can incapacitate an intruder (particularly at a distance), without the drawbacks of current options like tasers or pepper spray.

But in the present, your best bet might to be persuade self-defense gun owners to move to the currently existing non-lethal options. That could be accomplished by making those options easier to acquire, or emphasizing/enhancing the legal peril one faces on shooting an intruder. Or simply by raising awareness of the other options and offering training in their use. There can also be emphasis on family safety and how much more likely a gun is to result in someone in your family dying than other options.

Personally I'd rather the federal role, if any, be only to support states which strongly desire to reduce the appeal of guns. Trying to convince Texans to give up their guns will only produce a harmful backlash and make them fight the efforts of other states. Gun control should only be pursued in places with a culture amenable to it.

"Genetic psych type" is nonsense. Their quiz questions are about your present personality, not your genes. Personalities change drastically through life, and even more drastically through different childhood upbringings.

It's not like astrology, because it actually parrots back what you tell it instead of inventing randomly. You're asked a bunch of questions about your personality, and you get back a vague summary of your personality. You can do the same thing just by someone asking you questions about yourself and summarizing what they've heard at the end.

Of course, in reality there are 7.75 billion personalities instead of 16. That doesn't mean it can't be useful to define 16 types for the purpose of effective communication. Nobody wants to listen to your entire life story unless you're very important to them, so you can use 4 letters as a handy shortcut to convey some of your personality traits. This enables people to behave in certain ways around you that you may prefer, or to see blatant incompatibilities and avoid you quicker. That's how language works: it takes complex realities and gives you vague semi-accurate ways to reference them quickly in a way others can extract some degree of meaning from and take action on.

But if you find all 16 generic summaries far too misleading about you for your comfort, the obvious choice is to stop telling people you are one of them. Perhaps you can make up your own relatively efficient description of yourself, or perhaps you'll just have to make people get to know you.

And if you think there's deep insights about yourself to be learned from a personality summary, then you're doing it wrong.

Evil can be unifying, in fact it can be the only thing capable of holding a nation together sometimes (the Taliban, Hussein, Gadaffi could unite their nations in a way others with better intentions couldn't).

For example one could argue that Stalin was wise, achieving his ends (power, rapid industrialization, control of eastern Europe, worldwide spread of communism) through carefully devised cruel methods.

I'd say wisdom is the accumulated ability to learn from experience and mistakes. The wise person has become capable of self-criticism and has used that tool long enough to limit their future mistakes or recognize and correct them quicker.

This could be used for evil, if evil happens to be their personal goal which they're sincere about.

I'm defining health as a matter of... health. Living longer, having fewer diseases, being happier, not being in the dungeon getting flogged. The same ways everyone everywhere has defined health forever.

noun
the state of being free from illness or injury.
"he was restored to health"
a person's mental or physical condition.
"a state of physical, mental and social well-being"

If like the original poster you're making the claim that being well-adjusted to society isn't better for your healthy than being maladjusted, then it's up to you to elucidate this strange theory of yours by which getting on the bad side of society is somehow going to make you healthier. Perhaps you could start by showing the statistics of how unhappy people live longer and revolutionaries outlive homemakers.

One thing is certain: your like or dislike of conformists or nonconformists is utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand.

A global skeptical hypothesis is something which we have no evidence for or against. It's kind of misleading to ask whether it's known to be untrue, because it hasn't really entered into the domain of things you can know are or aren't true yet. Put simply, there's no point talking about it until you have an idea of what evidence for and against would look like.

If you don't live in the real world, then you have no clue how much detail is normal, easy, necessary, etc. Universe simulators with our level of detail could be a dime a dozen at the corner store. But it's equally possible that the only thing being simulated is what you're thinking about at this very second, which is pretty simple and happens to include a belief that you've existed more than a second and that you're living in a complex universe that you're believing isn't simulated (and your belief is true, in that said universe doesn't actually need to be simulated because it doesn't exist).

I hope you don't think war is about being healthy.

It seems like some of you have decided to try to redefine "healthy" to mean "whatever I think should be done", and just war is the ultimate proof of how wrong that attitude is.

Every society humans have ever put into action for more than 5 seconds has been profoundly sick. Only a miserable fool refuses to adjust to the inevitability of things being as they've always been. Said tortured fool will have greater odds of achieving some minor fleeting positive changes than a well-adjusted person, and well-adjusted people may cheer them on from the sidelines -- but degree of change achieved is not a measure of health. The complacent person who accepts things as they are lives a longer and more enjoyable life which is clearly healthier than the martyr of the latest revolution.

Is it possible to imagine it not being possible to imagine? Sure, as long as you're not pedantic and getting into pointless arguments about the meanings of the words you use to answer the question. You spent 13.8 billion years experiencing oblivion. You know what nothing is, and your inability to describe the experience of it is the perfect description of it.

Can you think about one of your thoughts? Can you use your own body to move your own body? Seems easy. Why? Because these things -- your mind, your thoughts, your body -- are not undifferentiated atomic objects. You can use parts of them of them on other parts of them. You can use your current state of mind to think about what was your state of mind a minute ago, much like you can use your leg muscles to lift your foot. If you couldn't think about other parts/states of your mind, you couldn't be said to have self-awareness -- you'd be some lower animal only able to react to experience without reflection.

And you can also use your mind to ponder a generalized notion of "the human mind" by abstracting from your own experiences. First you abstract from your current mind to a generalized concept of your mind as it generally is across time, and then outward from that to the things all human minds in general seem to have in common. That gets you into the whole other problem of how we know whether other minds exist and dualism vs. monism, and issues of conveying internal states with language, of course.

"Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the common sense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer.” - Wittgenstein

^ That's what it boils down to. Philosophy is about understanding why things you already knew are the case. Epistemology makes you think you know nothing, but then you use it to figure out how you know what you already knew. Metaphysics makes you think the universe of experience can't be the true reality, but then you work out a metaphysical system that explains how our commonsense reality is what matters after all. Ethics makes you think distinguishing right from wrong is impossible, but then you use it to rationalize the moral judgement you were already making.

In the process, you gain an understanding of yourself and how your mind works. And you relieve yourself of the fear that everything is horribly wrong.

I respond to it by asking "What is nothing?"

As far as I can see, we derive a concept of "nothing" in three ways. First, as a limit of reduction: keep taking away half of something and eventually we call what remains nothing. But this is a sort of Zeno's paradox where we could go on doing it forever, so it doesn't show that "nothing" is an actual thing, just a helpful concept we invent. Second, by logical exclusion or math: anything logically impossible is nothing, 2-2 is nothing... again, just useful placeholder concepts that act as scaffolding for our thoughts, and not things we actually encounter. Third, to mean the lack of a particular object or objects: "nothing in the fridge" doesn't really mean every particle and even the quantum foam disappears in there.

In summary, we have something rather than nothing because nothing doesn't exist. (Could've figured that out by the definition, I suppose.)

I graciously request that all the donations earmarked to me for my non-contributions to this site be sent to the state of Oklahoma, which clearly needs it more.

I like many rich people. I can't stand people whose overriding motivation in life is simply to be rich, though -- regardless of whether they're rich, middle class or poor. Since lying cheating and stealing are very effective money-making strategies, as are more subtle abuses of employees, naturally there are a lot of rich people who are terrible people.

The main difference between the forums is your punctuation habits would've triggered the automated illiteracy detector there, presenting you with a stark choice to reform or die at the hands of modbot.

The implicit assumption in these types of thought experiments is that what we would choose to do is always ethically pure.

But surely there are times when we would choose to do an ethically wrong thing in order to save someone. Just because we can imagine a scenario where we might want to murder an innocent person (say, a chance to shoot Hitler's mother before he's born) doesn't mean we can't assert that the murder of an innocent person is still morally wrong. Likewise, we can say lying is morally wrong but still choose to lie to prevent a tragedy. It's a sort of self-sacrifice in that you accept moral guilt and shame (a small amount for a lie, a large amount for a murder) in order to save others. If we tried to redefine it to always be blameless then it would no longer be a sacrifice.

Ethics is an element of deciding what to do, but it's not the complete determinant. There are other values. They often contradict. A human being has to decide which is most important to them.

The little scraps of history one can still dig up (and which prove Hanover's account to be the pure unbiased truth): http://web.archive.org/web/20020320005403/http://www.philosophyforums.com/

Fortunately the most popular thread was preserved: http://web.archive.org/web/20080317184743/http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/gassendi1-temp-ban-14586.html

Possibly I can put the rest of the threads back online when it all becomes public domain, 70 years after the last poster dies.

The men claiming the leadership of the male gender are the worst men to be found. They teach other men to be brutal and corrupt, and that influences even the better-natured men to act like jerks. Their main claim – that they owe it to the male gender to keep women down – is a pack of lies. — Ilya B Shambat

Anybody who just goes out and claims to be a leader of all men without evidence is going to be an arrogant prick, obviously. This is not a case of the rest of us "allowing" them, we disagree with them regularly. We're never going to out-shout them, because they're shouty people by definition.

What would happen if all the calm, rational, decent, empathetic men got up, shoved these self-proclaimed leaders off the podium of life and shouted our own leadership claim to the crowds below? Answer: there'd be no more calm, rational, decent, empathetic men left.

Should people like me be registered predators even if we abide by the law regardless of our nature? — THX1138

If they abide by the law, then they're not like you. You admitted to raping someone and attempting to rape someone else just in that post, as well as to conducting a highly inappropriate conversation with a minor for whom you were in a trusted position, for the purpose of your gratification. You are the living argument for registration, so that you're not allowed to tutor again.

Of course, it's impossible to register people for their law-breaking until they've actually been caught and convicted.

And in boxing, the fundamental segregation between weight classes confers advantages on the skinny. So?

Philosophy is not the only way to be a thinker, just the most pompous.

On average, women tend to prefer collaborative problem solving. On average, philosophers are windbags who talk past each other making mountains out of molehills and trying to verbally beat each other up.

And of course, there's a sort of natural selection involved where we only get to see the loudest blowhards because they've out-shouted the rest. There are tons of people who are doing philosophy but aren't competing the public arena of it or aren't noticed by the media because they're not being controversial enough to draw attention.

Of course black holes are differentiated by tests and evidence. We discover or verify new things about them, like for example Hawking radiation, from observation. We've verified and falsified all sorts of theories about them. They are among the most constantly studied objects in the universe.

If you're going to say we only observe their effects and not the black holes themselves, the same is true of everything else in the universe (we observe how the chair interacts with photons, not the chair in itself).

Big business is just a lot of people. Often a business is dysfunctional throughout, but even when it's running perfectly it's expressing the decisions of human beings. Those human beings are typically taking the actions they think will get them more money, not what they think is best for the company.

What's best for the individual is sometimes good for the business, but often not. If you're retiring in 6 months, or you're a CEO who plans to jump ship in 6 months, you may not care about 10 years from now. If you own stock and you want to sell it, you may want to recklessly inflate short term profits even it means corporate bankruptcy down the road. Or if you're a lower level employee, you may just jump through the hoops to tick the performance review boxes when you know what the company really needs is someone to risk their position in order to fix problems in the corporate structure or direction.

Total Recall is essentially a global skeptical hypothesis. Every global skeptical hypothesis is fundamentally the same in form. While you can't disprove it, you can show that the situation it describes breaks all processes of reason so that you no longer have justification for believing or disbelieving anything (since anything could've been an implanted memory and there's no way to distinguish).

If a scenario renders all knowledge claims void, then it's fair to say that it's irrational to believe in the scenario -- because believing in it would make reason inaccessible.

Except, of course, if you're actually Quaid living in the movie. In his case, his reality has already broken down repeatedly, so he has a rational basis to believe that he no longer has any rational way to evaluate whether knowledge claims are valid. Sucks to be him.

You have the right to change your mind about who you want to be. If not being that person depresses you to the point of suicide, I suggest invoking that right to change your goal.

On the other hand, many people enjoy having a difficult goal they know they'll probably never achieve, because it serves as a motivator and guide for their life. Their goal is for the purpose of enjoying the process, and if they actually achieved it they'd probably be very sad about having nothing more to do with life. And frankly, that does seem a lot sadder -- once you've become who you want to be in life, what more purpose is there for hanging around?

If you'd rather just live without looking for answers on how to live, then certainly famine, greed and sex instincts will dominate life. If you'd rather go beyond the stone age, then that came about and continues to come about thanks to all the people who are looking vigorously for answers to anything and everything.

Why don't we use animals to build large structures today? Because they don't have opposable thumbs and are quite hard to train into construction workers anyway. And you certainly don't want a frightened ox perching on a precarious narrow platform hundreds of feet in the air next to your workers and fragile materials.

The only part of the process where animals would really make sense is transporting from the quarry to the construction site. In Egypt, that shipment used the Nile. Turns out using a boat is a lot easier than domesticating fish and training them to do the job. You could say animals would be useful from the water's edge to the pyramid, but that was probably too short of a distance to bother introducing such a complication when you already have to have lots of human workers on hand. We still have people transporting many heavy construction loads manually for short distances today where we could be using machines or animals.

Also, from my googling, it looks like donkeys were the only available beasts of burden. But they were used on farms, not sure if they were used for any sort of transportation.

According to https://www.livescience.com/32616-how-were-the-egyptian-pyramids-built-.html they did import animals to the pyramid construction sites... to feed the workers.

This all comes down to how you define sophisticated thoughts, so you need to answer this question first: Does a human raised by wolves have a human level of sophisticated thought?

For me, "sophisticated thought" means the kind of abstract representational thinking that can only be done in a sophisticated language that allows expressing such things. If you have no complex language, you can't ponder questions like the ones raised by this thread because you have no framework with which to conceptualize them. And to invent your own complex internal language with no outside help would require a seriously superhuman brain.

The remaining question, then, is simply whether there are any animal languages that allow the same sorts of abstract representational thinking as human languages. That's an empirical question, for which the current answer is a cautious "no current strong evidence, but we're not sure yet."

(Memes, I think, are irrelevant. Memes are interesting on a sociological level, but no different from other thought on a personal cognition level, and any sophistication in them is a function of language.)

Distortion was generously hosting PF on his server for years, which of course ended with the sale. I'm not in contact with him anymore though.

Sorry to say July makes you a bit of a latecomer. :b The site took off pretty good in April and May. 2002 was my lucky SEO year, had 2 websites magically become loved by google then and none since.

Archive.org is frustratingly incomplete, but they did very well at archiving the debate forum thanks to the slow-moving nature of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20120618151541/http://forums.philosophyforums.com:80/debates
I wish I could help them improve their archive since they're the one entity that can get away with it, but I don't have it in html format and they don't accept such submissions anyway. You could try one of these tools to download what they do have though: https://superuser.com/questions/828907/how-to-download-a-website-from-the-archive-org-wayback-machine

It's a statistical certainty that a few of PF's first 100 members are dead after 17 years, but I'd be happy to join the séance.

I cannot deliberately facilitate access to things I don't own the rights to, judges see through that kind of thing.

I did provide a "download all your own posts as a text file" facility on PF and encouraged everyone to make use of it while PF was on buggy life support, but it's too late to use that now.

PF had ~50,000 members and ~1.3 million posts. It's sad that the new owner killed that completely. Unfortunately, there's no way I can share any old backups with anyone because it would put both me and the recipient at risk of lawsuit from the owner. I wouldn't put it past him to sue over data he'll never use if he thinks the lawsuit is his chance to monetize it, and I for one am not willing to live in perpetual fear of a lawsuit.

Porat is, amusingly, still trying to sell the dead domain for $50,000: https://auctions.godaddy.com/trpItemListing.aspx?domain=philosophyforums.com

As for me, I hadn't really been posting philosophy content for the last 5 or 10 years of PF either so that's why I don't come here much -- just not that interested anymore. I've still been doing the same stuff, working on my PHP scripts, plus those audio dramas.

Anyway, hi Spaces! According to http://web.archive.org/web/20020402092502/http://www.philosophyforums.com:80/member.php?action=list mokoolo was member #7, but you were somewhere in the first year I remember.

ModBot's shouts are human-operated by someone who won a bet with me many years back. I shall not reveal who, but it's not me.

By the way I've just started up a new site about possible future developments/events/technologies which might interest some of you. It updates daily, I've got the first 60 articles picked out already.

^ For empty domains that may never have had any content or search engine ranking, those are extreme rip-off prices too. thephilosophyforum.com is at least as good a domain name as any of those, and I suspect you guys didn't pay thousands for it.