Good response. I can get behind that. I don't think natural rights exist on their own, but they're a desirable ideal to aim for based on, "the most fundamental drives and values that nearly all humans hold", to quote you.

I am hoping they China lead the world to understand that an amalgam between the benefits capitalism has to offer and the benefits socialism has to offer...is the best way to go. — Frank Apisa

Seems like the worst of both worlds. No thanks. China is authoritarian and highly conformist. If you're a Chinese minority, expect forced reeducation. If you criticize the government, expect jail time and a forced apology.

Northern Europe presents a much better balance.

But this comes back to what we mean by 'exist' in relation to numbers in a Platonic sense. What does 'exist' mean? — EnPassant

I don't know, but it's difficult to say that math is entirely made-up when it's so useful in scientific theories. Quantities of things exist, so does topography and function.

Not in the slightest - perhaps the central tenant of anarchist politics is mutual aid and communal organization, and perhaps the central cry of all leftist politics is: 'organize!' — StreetlightX

The problem here is what to do with the people who don't agree. Say I'm a farmer or business owner and you want to organize the community such that my capital is now the community's so I stop exploiting my workers. But I don't want that. So I get together with my other farmer or business friends and arm ourselves.

Now what are you going to do? Organize a larger armed force to overcome mine and take my capital away? Maybe you can convince my workers to strike long enough for me to give in, but what if I don't? Eventually that capital needs to be put to use, particularly if it's something like a farm.

Someone mentioned church. Let's say the community is rather zealous about their faith. But I'm not. Am I now compelled to observe the faith? Or is it just a happy coincidence that anarchists will not be zealots? Because there have certainly been communities in the past who were, and forced their members to comply.

And we can do that for anything a community organizes around. It seems to depend on the community being willing to respect the rights of its members. What if the community is racist or sexist? What if they don't like worshiping Allah or reading libertarian texts?

That's just disgusting. I wonder how many British tax payers were aware of this prior to 2015?

The question here is What does 'real' mean when we are talking about (what seem to be) abstractions? What does 'exist' mean in the context of numbers existing? — EnPassant

Setting side those never ending debates, what does it mean for a constructionist to be able to offer a proof for any conjecture involving an infinite sequence, such as any number greater than two is the sum of two primes?

In mathematics infinity is a set, such as Aleph Null, not a process. Infinity is not 'the biggest number' it is all numbers, together. — EnPassant

So how does a constructionist handle such a number? Do they deny that the set of all numbers is properly mathematical?

You're kidding, right? — TheMadFool

We are talking about alien invasions and Tom Cruise movies, so ...

Same goes with the Trump comment.

Yes, but doesn't it strike you as odd to sing praises about a, well, disease - something we were presumably trying to eradicate before the aliens showed up. Imagine what would've transpired after the aliens died. — TheMadFool

We'd come to appreciate the little buggers, and would be happy for Covid-19 getting us ready for the next round of invasion.

Plus, if we could, in a way, make friends with diseases, what does that tell you about human-human friendship? — TheMadFool

Depends on whether you voted for Trump or not, bro.

It was just ordinary bacteria and viruses that did the aliens in. Humans had already gained immunity from all the past deaths.

From the moment the invaders arrived, breathed our air, ate and drank, they were doomed. They were undone, destroyed, after all of man's weapons and devices had failed, by the tiniest creatures that God in his wisdom put upon this earth. By the toll of a billion deaths, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet's infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challenges. For neither do men live nor die in vain. — IMDB

Of course Morgan Freemen does the narration at the beginning and end of the Tom Cruise movie.

Anther way to approach it that the rule "For every number, you can add one. to make a bigger number" is not generating all the numbers, but only the integers. We can find infinity by calculating 1 divided by 3 — Banno

Sure, but then you have the problem of how the .333 repeats forever. It can't already exist on the pain of Platonism, nor can it be generated by a rule.

It seems like you're having to step outside the rule to add something. And what is that? The idea of the rule repeating forever.

So then "infinity" means a rule that never ends, but can't be generated.

So the rule is that for every number, one can add one. The rule only generates one new number. One has to see the rule in a different way in order to understand infinity: imagine a number bigger than any number the rule could generate.. — Banno

We can do that, but does that work for construction? You're saying imagine a number bigger than any number the rule can construct.

But there's no such thing as a constructed sequence that doesn't end.

Aliens we could potentially unite against in a military fight. A disease is a different matter.

Interesting though that in the War of the Worlds it was disease that stopped the invading Martians.

But can be thought of as correlating with linear time, each step separated from the next by a short period of time. — jgill

Wouldn't that require time to be discrete?

Where do you think our sense of infinity comes from? It comes from us, i.e., finite beings, we create the concepts using finite signs. We extrapolate based on the continuation of 1,2,3.. that it goes on ad infinitum. There's no mystery here. — Sam26

However, since nobody is constructing the sequence ad infinitum, it can't be said to go on forever. So the question becomes how a constructionist can justify a concept of infinity if it's never constructed. Otherwise, one is granting the Platoniist's argument that the sequence already exists.

So in what sense does it mean to say that 1,2,3... goes on ad infinitum?

The speaker then goes on to say that diseases that can become pandemic would be very similar to an alien invasion since the entire globe is under siege if such events occur. The current coronavirus pandemic then should, if the video had a grain of truth in it, serve as uniting force for the world. — TheMadFool

If that were true, it would have happened already, since this isn't the first pandemic.

And the slave revolts making it a ludicrously costly investment. — fdrake

That too. Did you know France demanded that Haiti pay them 150 million francs for Haiti's successful revolution as compensation? How is a small country with a new government supposed to thrive with such massive debt? I wish someone strong enough at the time could have told France to fuck off.

how would you instead persuade a slaver or slave-owner that they violating natural rights? — VagabondSpectre

It would be difficult without force to do so, as history shows. But you would need to convince them that the slaves were human just as much as the slave owners. Maybe force isn't always necessary, since the British slave trade was eventually abolished by those who opposed it in Parliament.

The Gospel of Judas portrays Judas as the only one understanding the teachings of Jesus, and by betraying him, Judas was freeing Jesus from the flesh so he could return to the true Father.

A really interesting possibility that the biblical scholar Margaret Barker raises is that Gnosticism has it's roots in the pre-Jewish religion of Israel, and that it wasn't just importing the ideas of other religions into early Christianity.

The Gnostics and Paul have been misunderstood as incorporating pagan beliefs, instead of further evolving ideas already available in Jewish beliefs. It's the monotheists who deviated (reformed) the older religion.

I took what I think is the majority view. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

The majority view is the view that prevailed later on. It's not the one the earliest Christians held, most likely.

But also pleasantly surprised with those who simply see it as a short-hand or derivative of social arrangements. — StreetlightX

Social arrangements can and have denied people rights, which doesn't make sense if it's just a shorthand. At best, you get a relativism between social arrangements, where we can say slavery denied rights according to our modern arrangement, but not at the time.

Which makes the abolitionist case difficult, unless we just say they preferred a different arrangement. But they thought they were making a moral argument, which is people shouldn't be treated like cattle, regardless of what society says.

Strictly speaking natural rights seem to depend on the needs and wants of the people who make them up. — VagabondSpectre

That can be used to justify slavery or any form of oppression. The issue is that the needs and wants of the people who make them up are not necessarily the same needs and wants of other people.

That might be historically true, but if we want natural rights to be something more than what those in power need and want, then it to ought to apply to everyone. For example, because you're human, you should have the right to determine your own life, and not be the property of someone else. And thus slavery was a violation of natural rights, no matter how the people at the time, or any time, rationalized it.

Maybe Jesus and the Jewish sect he belonged to believed Yahweh was the son of El Elyon. Judaism wasn't a monolith back then as there were different sects. Nor had it always been strictly monotheistic. The angels were sons of God Most High, and each nation had its own god, Yahweh being Israel's. But that fell out favor at some point when Yahweh and El were merged into the one God of Judaism.

However, that doesn't mean some Jews didn't still hold on to the older beliefs. We have the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Qumran community. 1st Enoch is very much into angels, and Enoch is transformed into the angel Metatron after he ascends through the heavens. Here we learn that the sons of God who had children with the daughters of men prior to the flood were the Watcher angels.

In the Jewish-Christian Ascension of Isaiah, Jesus descends from the seventh heaven, taking on the form of an angel for each heaven before becoming human.

And here's an interesting quote from Paul:

5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, [and] being made in the likeness of men. 8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. — Philippians 2:6-11

So Jesus preexisted as the "form of God", which could be understood as a begotten son of the Most High (Father). Note that Paul mentions those who are in heaven. That would include the other angels. But Yahweh is the special or chosen angel. Maybe the highest and firstborn Archangel through whom God created the cosmos. That would also make Yahweh the Logos of Philo and the Gospel of John, which could be linked to the ancient divine Wisdom tradition.

Yahweh also was had a secret name, and was often referred to by The Name. Christians thought that was Jesus.

Sure. And on the other hand, does it seem that Trump is driven by the welfare of his voter base? — Pantagruel

No, but luckily Trump is held in check by other branches of government and the Constitution. Despite all his bluster, he can only do so much.

And one could argue his voter base gets what they voted for.

In fact, America could dramatically increase its overall productivity...if it limited the number of people who are allowed to work.

EVERYONE should be provided with "enough"...and "enough" should be defined as the kind of life one could live if earning $50,000 to $60,000 per year. — Frank Apisa

Sounds fantastic, but can this be afforded? $50K times the number of adults in the US (rounded down to 200 million) is 10 trillion dollars.

The second part of this is that you're paying people not to work, unless they want to. Question is whether the economy can be productive enough to support the taxation needed to provide everyone with that $50-60K a year.

see prioritizing social welfare - establishing a baseline of core human values that supersede monetization - as the focus. Freedom can take care of itself as long as we start to take care of each other. — Pantagruel

One could argue the various communist countries have attempted this approach, and have noticeably failed on the freedom front. I'm skeptical that freedom can take care of itself, because there are always those would like to have power, or deny it to others. That's why rights have to be explicitly protected.

the exercise of force and coordination of power are the conditions of, and not constraints upon, the exercise of freedom. — StreetlightX

Sounds like doublespeak without specifying what sort of exercise and coordination, and why it's necessary. Any group in power is going to be exercising force and coordinating their power. It's how they rule. But what sort of exercise and coordination results in a free society?

I'm guessing anarchists will disagree with this, and libertarians will limit it to a minimum of protecting rights. For the rest of us, what does this mean?

There is no comparable evidence of Jesus. — Ciceronianus the White

That's true, but Paul wrote as if Jesus was a real person in the 50s AD, and he mentions meeting with Peter and James, Jesus's brother. Mythicists argue that Paul was referring to a divine being, not an earthly human, and that James was only Jesus's brother in the faith. But there was the Jurasalem sect who survived for centuries, known as the Ebionites. They considered Jesus to be a regular human being who was also chosen by God to be the Jewish messiah, and taught his followers to obey all of the Torah. And that is traced back to James and Peter.

We know from Paul's legitimate letters in the NT (seven of them), and the writer of Acts, that Paul had disputes with the Jurasalem Church over whether Gentile converts had to be circumcised and some other issues related to following the law.

Josephus also wrote about John the Baptist, and there's evidence from the Gospels that Jesus was probably a disciple of his at one point.

I think the existence of the Ebionites makes it harder to believe the mythicist account, where Jesus starts off as an archangel crucified in the firmament by demons, since it's pretty clear they didn't believe that. My guess is that there was a real Jesus of which a little bit can be known from Paul and the Gospels, but there was also Son of Man myth that he was combined with dating back to the Qumran writings, like the Book of Enoch. Or Paul imported Philo's Platonic teachings into his revealed gospel, since he didn't know Jesus while he was alive. Or a combination of all three and maybe more elements. Religion is syncretic and it evolves over time. There are usually different sects fighting over the true faith.

It's also important to note that the Ebionites considered Paul to be a first rank heretic.

Not to my knowledge. But I'm not sure that absence of evidence in this case can be taken to provide evidence of absence. — jkg20

Reminds of that interesting NY Times article a few years back about how philosophers in general have failed to take the latter Wittgenstein's arguments seriously enough. Whether he was right or wrong, his position warranted serious investigation.

I'll admit that I tend to dismiss him out of hand because I just can't believe that substantial philosophical arguments are mostly just language on holiday.

That's true. My question is have there been substantial philosophical debates settled by demonstrating that the issue was a misuse of language? Certainly some people have been convinced this is the case, at least for some issues. But shouldn't that be logically provable for everyone? Or is that also a matter of linguistic debate?

I'm sure Dennett or Chalmers or whoever have made mistakes in their arguments, and misused words. But that doesn't mean the issue itself is resolved. If it is, I'd be curious to see examples.

@Luke,@Snakes Alive,@jkg20
Let's take an example from a real life incident that remains a mystery. The Dyatlov Pass is where nine Russian ski-hikers died during a 1959 winter trek in the Ural mountains. There are 70 some theories, and bunch of books on Amazon you can read on the case. The original investigation concluded that some unknown compelling force was responsible. The lead investigator, interviewed decades later, said that "fire orbs" were involved, but the higher ups wanted to shut down the investigation.

Something real did happen to those hikers. But the evidence is insufficient to decide which theory proposed so far, or even category of theory, is correct. So the debate continues on for those who remain interested, like with Jack the Ripper or other famous unsolved cases.

So what does that have to do with philosophy? It's an example where the ongoing debate is not one of language, and it won't be solved by analyzing terms used in the debate.

don't think so. There could well be systematic reasons why some conceptual disputes cant get cleared up, because we lack the cognitive ability to understand — Snakes Alive

Cognitive closure is one possibility that McGinn has put forward for difficult philosophical problems. But it's not a very popular position, because it smacks of "mysterianism", and if you can ask a question, you should have the means to answer it, in principle. A dog doesn't understand relativity because it can't grasp the concepts. A dog can't even ask questions about it. Or so the counter argument goes.

In any case you seem to allow that analysis of language use can be a useful tool at least at the beginning of a debate. — Snakes Alive

Sure, I'm not saying it's not useful or not important to philosophy. I'm expressing my skepticism that most philosophical debates are really about language misuse, and thus can be resolved by proper linguistic analysis. Or at least not the long-standing metaphysical ones, because those have been expressed in so many ways across cultures and different languages. You would think that if the realism/idealism debate was fundamentally a language mistake, then somebody would have pointed that out long ago, dissolving the matter.

But if a tool can be used, it can be used well or badly. I'm not saying this is the case, but perhaps Chalmers and Dennett did not use those tools effectively at the outset. The only way we could ascertain that they did or did not, would be to go back to what they say and apply those tools once again. — jkg20

But popular debates usually have a long history with people coming at them from many different angles. We could go back and say, well Chalmers messed up here using that terminology, and Dennett failed to understand the argument there, and so on. But what about Nagel, Frank, etc? They all present their own arguments and starting points.

Well, consensus amongst dissenting parties doesn't guarantee anything and some of the most well known philsophers are renowned for changing their minds after many years. — jkg20

If there can't even be a consensus on whether getting clear about language resolves philosophical disputes, then why suppose it does?

Well, I would start by asking both Chalmers and Dennett what they mean by "qualia", after all, clever as they undoubtedly are, they are not immune to conceptual confusion and this might be revealed when we push them to express what they mean. — jkg20

If it were just the two of them creating a new thread on here, sure. But it's been an ongoing debate among many philosophers for several decades now. So if it were just a conceptual confusion, you would think someone would have pointed that out by now, and all the rest of the philosophers engaged in the debate would have been like, "Oh yeah! How did I not see that? Moving along ...".

But that doesn't happen. So either Witty diagnosed some really deep and difficult problem with philosophy. One that's hard to root out. Or his approach doesn't work for long standing and well known disputes, because maybe they're about something more than proper use of language.

The thing is that it's not like professional philosophers don't know about Wittgenstein, or Carnap or Sextus. And the other thing is that determining how correct Witty was depends, at least in part, on analyzing his language use. And there is some disagreement over that.

But maybe philosophers are just a cursed lot who love to argue.

Well, your position is not too far away from Wittgenstein's then. He was pretty clear that once you make the questions you are asking clear, either they will turn out to be addressable by science, or they will rest philosophical ones. — jkg20

Alright, that sounds reasonable. But let's take the hard problem debate. It's not known whether science can resolve it. Philosophers like Chalmers argue science can't. Sow here does that leave the debate? Should we dismiss it as meaningless? But what if I find it meaningful and understand what's being argued? I know where Dennett and Chalmers disagree, and it's not over the meaning of qualia. It's over whether qualia exist.

No, it makes the debate dependent on them. — Luke

Sure, in a sense you're right. But in another, this is missing the point, because debates are usually about things and not the words themselves. Or at least they start out that way.

Which is ironic, because we're now debating word usage. Which seems to happen too often in these philosophical disputes. But let's agree. Debates depend on word usage. Okay, so how does that answer the realism/idealism question?

Because if I want to know whether the world is ideal or real, defining the terms doesn't answer the question. It just leaves a puzzle.

But pehaps your point is that philosophy itself is futile. — jkg20

I think it's worth being able to explore the questions raised. Humans are prone to wax philosophical anyway. But maybe finding resolution is a matter for science, where science can provide answers. At least we're not still stuck with the five elements of Aristotle or ancient atomism.

Even though we have to use it? — Luke

We also have to use our bodies. Does that make the world dependent on our hands, eyes, brains? Then again, this is philosophy and Berkeley thought things were dependent on being perceived.

I would say no, science shows us the world doesn't depend on us. QM and Covid-19 don't care what words we use.

But surely "debates such as realism/idealism" do "depend on our language usage". If we are going to debate e.g. "the nature of the world", then we have to do it using language, no? — Luke

If we're going to debate anything, we have to use language. That doesn't mean the thing being debated is dependent on language. Analyzing the language usage of "social distance" and "flattening the curve" isn't going to tell us how long to continue to doing both, for example. That's a matter for the epidemiology of Covid-19 and health care capacity balanced against economic concerns.

Nor would analyzing he terminology of QM tell us the proper interpretation for the measurement problem. It would only help us understand what's being debated.