An atheist who is "looking for God" sounds like an odd sort of atheist to me. — Terrapin Station

There are plenty of spiritual atheists, maybe they're not seeking God in name but they are seeking higher axiological and soteriological truths so in that sense they are seeking God in spirit.

What things combine to make more than the sum of their parts? Examples, please. — Harry Hindu

You've never heard of strong emergence? Some common examples of strong emergence would be consciousness, entanglement, and even the properties of water.

WHEN is twice two makes five useful or "charming"? — Harry Hindu

When things combine to make more than the sum of their parts.

Good save.

Most people would just apologize and move on but you're doubling down, so your issues seem to go beyond a general ignorance of the history of life. Go find someone else to troll, I'm not playing.

life having been totally wiped out — John

Where are you getting that from?

Are you serious?

Do you have any actual evidence to support this contention? — John

Good one.

Even then, there isn't enough money that we can take away from the obscenely rich to pull everyone out of poverty. — Harry Hindu

There's a difference between money and wealth. Wealth is the real tangible resource, money is just an abstraction. Putting a dollar value on the world's wealth is sort of asinine, the dollar is the vehicle of an inefficient, wasteful system of artificial scarcity driven by pathological greed. The dollar is the symbol of a tyrannical inequity, it's not an objective measure of the Earth's abundance.

Who do you choose to keep in poverty? Like I said, we either make everyone poor, or keep things like they are with some tweaks. — Harry Hindu

There's not enough money to make everyone rich but the wealth of the world is vast, there's more than enough for everyone to be comfortable and secure. Nobody has to be kept in poverty, mass poverty is the result of pathological avarice run amok.

The problem is that socialists seem to think that resources are infinite. How "idealistic". — Harry Hindu

The problem is that socialism depends on people not being giant A-holes, that's all that's "idealistic" about socialism. I'm not a socialist because I know people are incorrigible assholes that can't be saved from themselves, and I'm over it. Socialism is the rational way to go, unfortunately we're a race of fuckheads with fucked up priorities.

Since we're bringing in some theology, then we're all sinners. — Cuthbert

I get that it's not the way we like to think of ourselves but we are the kind of people who would crucify the son of God, and in a Jungian sense we do it every day. I'm not religious but the biblical account of human nature pretty much has us pegged.

So, the influence of human nature in general, and genetic predisposition in particular place limitations (constraints) on a person's choices. They are parameters of human freedom with reference to choice.

This is why free will, defined as the ability to do otherwise, is an illusion. — Galuchat

I don't know of any serious arguments that deny constraints or limitations, but if there is even the smallest degree of libertarian freedom then agent causation is real and there is the ability to do otherwise.

Right now, we can only afford $8/hr. — Harry Hindu

Even if that were true the obvious solution would be to cut compensation for shareholders and executives rather than working people for less than a living wage. That would be happening if people had an effective labor movement. That's how it was not so long ago, the size of the current wealth gap is unprecedented in modern history. We can afford it, we just opt to allow the obscenely rich to keep the lion's share of the surplus.

Precisely why I'm against intellectual property. We had an industrial revolution without intellectual property but all of a sudden it became indispensable to progress. Which is of course a lie. — Benkei

In many ways it has stifled progress in certain areas. It's interesting that while the 'great man theory' of history has largely been abandoned, the notion of heroic discovery and invention remains a primary pillar of our entrepreneurial system. The long list of multiple discoveries pretty well debunks the idea but I guess the market needs its myths and idols to keep it grinding.

"You do not make a discovery until a background knowledge is built up to a place where it's
almost impossible not to see the new thing, and it often happens that the new step is done
contemporaneously in two different places in the world, independently."
— a physicist Nobel laureate interviewed by Harriet Zuckerman, in Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States, 1977, p. 204.
List of multiple discoveries

But still the most *profitable* (not the best) thing for any individual is to freeload on the charitable giving of others, to take all the benefits of social cohesion and to pay none of the costs. — Cuthbert

OK, but that's still shortsighted because it's detrimental to overall well-being. Free riding can also affect your social standing and end up costing more in the long run in terms of lost opportunities or privileges due to social sanctions.

Yes, Microsoft did do away with the rather opaque command based Disk Operating System (DOS) but it also imposed another monopoly of software on PC consumers (outside of Apple). — Bitter Crank

And even aside from all the coercive bullying of consumers, competitors, and trade partners, just reaping those kinds of profits can rightly be considered fraud and theft because most of that success is due to the work and investment of others. Mark Twain summed it up nicely -
“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that."

I doubt this is true, simply because a lot of the "billion dollar" level fortunes are made with a big deal of luck. It's not impossible to make a billion dollars if you're sitting on an industry where the demand is meant to explode in the coming decades, and you're positioned such that you can capture most of it. Exploitation is really penny pinching at that level. If I make $1 billion in profit, does it really matter if I pay 50% tax or 20%? (the difference between $800 million and $500 million). Does it really matter if I pay my workers 50% more? Sure that will cut into my profits, but if I have a really strong operation it still doesn't matter. I would still be making a huge profit provided that my profit margin is big enough. — Agustino

Maybe hypothetically it's possible depending on the political economy you subscribe to, but I doubt you could provide even a single real world instance of someone acquiring a fortune of that size fair and square.

You seem to think that the world population can keep growing at the same pace and we can just make more dollars — Harry Hindu

I think that because it's true. The money supply has to expand with the economy or deflation sets in.

Yes, and that inner conflict is best described as the tension between rival choices, not between rival wills. You only have one will. — Thorongil

That tension is a conflict of the will, and will often fails, we end up doing things we will not to do or not doing things we we will to do. That's why we talk about strength of will or weakness of will, willpower etc. I don't see why the will can't be in conflict?

It's not obviously feasible, so if colonizing a planet belonging to another star is a serious suggestion, then you should suggest a feasible way to do it. That's my point. — Bitter Crank

Well that doesn't really address anything I've said. We are perfectly capable of beginning space colonization, first the inner solar system, then in the outer, and within another couple centuries we'll likely be able to begin venturing beyond the solar system into interstellar space. My point is that this is necessary to ensure our long term survival, we don't have a choice.

I'm not so sure. If I buy the t-shirt for £2.50 and give nothing to charity then I'm winning. — Cuthbert

Maybe in a very narrow sense, but ultimately you're creating problems for yourself that will end up costing you a lot more than the difference of the fair price for that shirt. There's narrow self interest and there's the bigger picture, enlightened self interest can save us a lot of trouble and it's usually win-win.

Singer's argument is that our first moral duty is to maximise welfare. If we are rich we can do this by giving to the poor. Therefore we are obliged to give. Giving is a duty not a mere virtue. — Cuthbert

Either way reducing poverty is in almost everyone's best interest. Poverty creates a lot of problems that affect all of us.

A lot of incentive comes from being able to start your own business, or rise to the top of a company, etc. And a lot of people do want to own more than the Smiths, or live in a nicer location, etc. Status is important to human beings. — Marchesk

There are other ways to achieve a high social status that don't require conspicuous consumption, it just depends on the ethos of the society. And even without the possibility of making lots of money there are still incentives for starting a business or excelling in your profession, in fact profit usually works as a perverse incentive which corrupts and distorts the process and product of most fields of work.

My point was that extreme inequality is not a necessary evil or the best we can do. I agree that human nature is an obstacle, no doubt about it.

Also, without money, how do the markets know what resources to allocate? How many widgets from factory X should be produced to be delivered to stores Y & Z? Is the government going to determine production? — Marchesk

Capitalism has enormous allocation problems of its own. In addition to being prone to a range of market failures, it produces mountains of waste and useless crap, it leads to massive inequality and poverty, and it ignores many problems that don't offer a strong profit motive(pharma r+d for orphan diseases is a good example). But it's not necessary to abandon the market mechanism, there are many types of market socialism which do rely on it.

I don't know about libertarian free will, it's open question for me. I do think that regardless of whether we have that kind of libertarian freedom we are capable of both strengthening and purifying our will through discipline and focus on the good, and that real freedom is the liberation of the will from weakness and corruption.

but I can will only one of these options at a time. I cannot will to stand up and sit down simultaneously — Thorongil

Conflicting volitions are a common experience, you can't physically stand and sit at the same time but it's perfectly possible to be internally conflicted as to which you prefer.

Are you implying it's not feasible or something? What's your point?

If all resources were divided equally among all citizens of the world, everyone would only receive about $16,000 annually, and even then most of that is tied up in commodities and property. In other words, we can make life a pain in the ass for everyone, or we can make life better for some. Which would be the greater good? — Harry Hindu

What's the source for this? It doesn't really make sense to value the total resources of the planet in terms of dollars. There's definitely enough for everyone to live comfortably, we have the technology and the resources to provide a high standard of living for every person on the planet, it's our current system of dollars and cents that creates the massive disparity. We could have a post-scarcity world now if we really wanted it, but most people prefer the zero-sum game of winners and losers because they believe it offers them the chance to become rich.

There are risks in colonizing space but it's much riskier to keep all our eggs in one basket. In order to ensure our long term survival we have to spread out and diversify.

Sure, Andrew Carnegie or Rockefeller did exploit - but only after they were already big organisations. Both Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel started as small operations. When they were small companies they simply didn't have the strength to oppress. — Agustino

Strength is relative, even as small operations they had the leverage to dictate terms to desperate people, and there's always a surplus of desperate people. Do you think the men working John D.'s oil rigs had a living wage, overtime, health insurance, worker's comp protections, pensions? No, they were overworked and underpaid, and if they got sick or hurt or just got old, they were cut loose. How many poor communities do you think Rockefeller screwed out of their land for pennies on the dollar? You don't become the richest man in the world by being fair and compassionate, you get there by cunning and ruthlessness. There is no fair and ethical way to make a billion dollars.

Our best bet is orderly devolution to a smaller population, sustainable lifestyles, and no innovation beyond our capacity to manage risks. — Bitter Crank

That would just be riding out the clock and would pretty much guarantee our extinction. The earth is ultimately a deathtrap and the longer we remain earthbound the more we run the risk of being wiped out by any of the many natural cataclysms that are certain to occur within the next millennia or so. Fortune favors the bold, better to shoot for the stars than be sitting ducks.

That we only live such a short time is aburdity — Marchesk

I guess that depends on the depth of one's self-identity. If you identify only as a specific individual then I agree that it's absurd, but if your identity encompasses wider aspects of reality then your existence is incredibly profound. I try to understand myself ultimately in terms of subjective awareness within a biological-psychological-social construct and so I'm not just this specific person at this particular time, I'm all subjective awareness in existence everywhere at all times. And it's not like a new agey "we're all one" woo fest either, it's not that we're all psychically connected to each other or we're part of a cosmic mind or anything, it's just that once you strip off culture, gender, race, and biology the only thing that remains is first person awareness. Conscious awareness is analogous to the electron, all electrons are identical, every electron has the same exact size mass and charge, they are all effectively the same electron. From that perspective my individual personal existence is only meaningful or important insofar as serves to aid in the expansion and liberation of conscious awareness itself from all arbitrary constraints and limitations which are the essence of the absurd. We can work towards that liberation on many levels - personal enlightenment, community service, political activism, etc. and the more liberation we achieve the less absurd our lives become.

Well yeah, but if we're taking anti-natalism seriously then it's something to consider.

Generally speaking, I would say that I'm on the Left when it comes to economic issues but tend towards the Right when it comes to cultural issues. — Erik

You can still be politically liberal If you're just personally conservative on culture. Being a liberal doesn't mean that certain aspects of culture aren't palatable to you or that you don't have a hard time understanding some minority issues, it just means not being culturally imperious.

Not saying I believe it, because who knows. Maybe all life goes extinct before then. — Marchesk

Yeah, given all the natural and man-made existential threats our species is confronted with, and in light of the fermi paradox, the long term survival of intelligent life might really be a matter of threading the needle. The thing we have to be aware of though when considering propositions like anti-natalism, is that life, along with all the pain and suffering that it entails, is most likely a constant feature of this universe. Life is very hard to eradicate, even after the most destructive global cataclysms it always comes roaring back. And even if this planet was permanently sterilized of all life, life would still exist elsewhere in space and time. So since the issue of suffering can't be resolved through voluntary extinction, it becomes an ethical imperative for some species or entity to thread that needle and reach something like Tippler's Omega Point and overwrite the current cruel and indifferent natural order and establish a much more benign cosmos in its place.

"We’re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we’ve not experienced since the middle ages."

It's about time. I don't see it as a regression, we've been under an ossified paradigm of official narrative, pundit consensus, and pluralistic ignorance for far too long. There's a growing awareness of the "treason of the clerks" which is forcing people to confront the fact that we never found and were never on epistemic terra firma in the first place.

Are humans just fodder for some future utopia though? — schopenhauer1

I wouldn't say fodder, human existence has some intrinsic positives, it's just not entirely an end in itself. We're an evolutionary pathway for a process with the potential to develop into something unimaginably profound.
The thing to keep in mind is that this process can't be stopped, history has demonstrated that even a mass extinction is only a temporary interruption, and the process is likely occurring on billions of worlds throughout the universe. So there's no sense in resisting it, the only rational thing to do is to embrace it, fully engage with it, and make the best of it.

They don't reckon they owe it. Singer thinks he owes his excess wealth to others just as much as you owe rent to the landlord. — Cuthbert

I take it as a hypothetical imperative. The virtue of charity is necessary for our psychological, emotional, and social well-being so in order to take care of ourselves we must genuinely care for others. We also have to be wise in our care giving or we'll end up wasting time and energy or even being taken advantage of. That's where prudence comes in, the mother of all virtues.

I'm not sure whether our world has been worth the terrible cost. — Marchesk

I think the endless possibilities are what makes it worth the going, but I agree that if this was it, if it couldn't get any better than this, then it wouldn't be worth all of the pain and suffering. But there is a very real possibility that in the not too distant future the situation could improve drastically and in the longer term it might even get good enough to justify the long bloody slog of life through the eons.

The world is a tragedy, but it's not an injustice.

"And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died."

You can't fix the world through charity, the system has to be massively reformed. The problem is people aren't interested enough in fixing the world to take the trouble to reform the system, which means that people have to be massively reformed. So really what we have is the world we deserve, and that is the definition of justice. I don't want justice, I want a better world.