• How did the standard of good and evil come to be
    When you say good and evil, do you refer to a metaphysical concept of good and evil, i.e. things being objectively good or bad, or do you mean what we believe to be good or evil?
  • Scattered Thoughts on Living
    This is too much like me... all of it. My entire life I've been searching for another soul who can understand even a fraction of my hyper-intellectualized and debilitating perception of the world and the people around me and then you come along, describing it in shocking detail. This is like finding my own, real-life Treatise on the Steppenwolf, if you've read any Hesse.
  • Causality, Determination and such stuff.
    Little thought experiment: let's say you had a save and reload function with which you could save and reload certain moments in time and space with the exact same conditions as when you had first saved them. You are an independent observer of a Galton box like the one above and the observer effect is not in play in our experiment. Given only one save and infinite reloads, could you, as a passive observer, accurately predict the outcome of the ball in infinitely many trials and definitively say that every single trial will have the same result? In that infinity, is there any margin for error?

    I suppose this is a variation of Laplace's demon, which has been mentioned farther up in this thread, but it's something I've considered since my early teen years, minus the specific example of the Galton box. In other words, is the universe a function, where variable y is the only possible outcome of x, or is it a nonfunction, where two or more outcomes y1, y2,...yn are possible given a single input x? Are quantum states completely and ideally random or are they dependent, where the first would theoretically change outcomes and the second would not?
  • Culture wars and Military Industrial Complex
    Your lauded system of education pre-1958 can't have been that good because it produced a generation of people willing to design, implement, vote for, and otherwise allow the very system you now decry.
    What of the external stimuli that allowed such a system to be created by its constituents? Surely it wasn't merely the gilded education system of the post-war boom that pushed American society from the good old days to the living hell it is now? And your argument holds the implication that there ever was a 'good ol' days'. Most famously, Emmet Till was lynched in 1955, McCarthyism ended the year before that, and people lived in constant fear of nuclear annihilation.
    I suppose the idea I'm trying to forward is that living in what our parents & grandparents most definitely saw as a hellscape caused them to want to try to create a utopian society, or at least one safe from Soviet and racial threats (those being the most obvious in my mind). And that society, which was designed to survive the Cold War, brought on its own set of issues.