I think it comes down to our own mortality, our impossible lust for a life that cannot continue, our inability to confront the void headon, as at least some of us must on our deathbed. Socrates seems to have had a peaceful death, unless you too believe he despaired at the very end in his very last words.

Here is what I asked darthbarracuda:

575
↪darthbarracuda

Suppose that you have two possible actions, A1 and A2, and the worst outcome associated with A1 is at least as good as the best outcome associated with A2; suppose also that in at least one state of the world, A1's outcome is strictly better than A2's. Let us say in that case that A1 superdominates A2. Then rationality seems to require you to perform A1.[1]
SEP

Maybe you can point out irrational part of this.

I think it's a valid argument.

I don't interpret the prodigal son parable that way. What do you think the father would have said if his son demanded his help, and say the reinstatement of his position in the family? I think any Father who has not seen their son in a long period of time may be filled with compassion at now seeing him, but it is the son's contrition that causes the Father to celebrate his return in my opinion.

Ok, I've got it. But don't you think the earnest belief in God's Goodness, carries greater utility in it than a belief in oblivion.

As far as the prodigal son is concerned, he was truly contrite (note that he too was pragmatic about his options away from home) and that is why his father accepts him. Aletheist previously pointed out intellectual grasp of this wager alone is not enough, it has to have existential force which deathbeds tend to bring out, God's forgiveness is predicated on a true act of contrition, at least based on my background.

The main reason for that is that there is no way to know what the outcomes of each alternative action will be let alone whether they would be good or otherwise.

Not sure I follow this. The "outcomes of each alternative action" is death. Only A1's death come with a hope.

The prodigal son is celebrated upon his return. His brother didn't like this because he was always true to the family. The father explains:

But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”

Luke 15:11-32

The decision process is there, I think, maybe not quite as Pascal posed it, but something with force enough to enable them to change their life held beliefs.

I don't know, but Christ did forgive the theif.

Suppose that you have two possible actions, A1 and A2, and the worst outcome associated with A1 is at least as good as the best outcome associated with A2; suppose also that in at least one state of the world, A1's outcome is strictly better than A2's. Let us say in that case that A1 superdominates A2. Then rationality seems to require you to perform A1.[1]

SEP

Maybe you can point out irrational part of this.

There is something to loose from believing in an irrational and unreasonable god.

You loose the assurance that you will get to experience the bliss you are talking about.

There is no 'assurance" at stake, I wager what I choose to believe, which can be right or wrong, true or false. If I am right whoopee, if I am wrong I am still dead. My choice to believe in God places me in his hands, he forgives me for my sins, he becomes my relief from the mental anguish of my imminent oblivion. What he is as he is, if he is, makes no difference to me at this point, because my options are limited. My belief in salvation has greater utility than any other logical argument given my situation.

Thanks, it sounds like you have already made your choice.

Sorry it's late for me, but I think you may you have the miss application of the word "loose" with the word "lose" tks.

Ok, couple of things. You have to make a decision, evidence is lacking it always has been lacking, but clearly you have considered the choice: if there is a god, and you confess then eternal bliss, if no god, no great loss. How can you miss? Come on.

Which has the most probability, which is pragmatically the best? Which do you believe in?

Well but remember you are on your deathbed, so perhaps even if you have convinced yourself in the past that you don't believe in god, as Wallace Stevens apparently did, you change your mind in light of a greater utility in that belief. Or do you M-Theory. what do you do?

If the world is the way it is for no particular reason(s), even if the world is absolutely contingent, it still is the way it is and we still talk the same world, and in the similar ways even though we may be on opposite sides of it. So yes " any given individual's life is also a more or less arbitrary construction.", yet we all have a definite history, leave a trail that others can follow...Sartre wants us to accept responsibility for what we decide, what we make of our self and we can only do that if we are free to choose.

Well I thought whatever is, is and by virtue of this claim we describe it.

Do you think some names are descriptive, they carry along their own history/meaning which is already in language as spoken. If so then what is entailed by a name is not significantly different from what I am calling an essence?

Or is it different, that names are not synonymous with descriptions, that it is all quite arbitrary, depending contingent circumstances.

"The task of philosophy is to find the most perfect formulation for truth, perceived in intuition, and to synthesize formulae. These carry conviction by the light which shines out from them, rather than by demonstration or conclusions." – Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act

Ive been a creative artist most of my life and I can't say i recognise the intuitonist and the logical approach as mutually contradictory. Creativity involves pattern-making and pattern recognition. It helps to free up from preconceptions, but then, that requires some learned quality, the ability to discriminate. Only bad artists use no logic at all.

A creative act must be creative about something, similar to how a craftsman produces something functional, beautiful and perhaps even different from what others have produced. The way from conception to inception is through technique, which can be learned patterns, dialogues, narratives, and logical methodology. The craftsman overlays his own style (which is normative) on what he produces.

I think the creative character is expressed in the work. Inspired works stand out "by the light which shines out from them" we reflectively/intuitively sense their beauty physically and mentally. It stops us and enables us to conceive of new possibilities, by illuminating something which was not apparent, which was not there before. The work inspires us.

I think creativity has material and compositional limits, 'syntactical limitations'. By syntactical I mean that, what we know provides the logical, material ground for the structure for what is built onto it, what it sublates. Progress is built on the past. Creativity deals within its own limitations. I am not sure if there have been any 'out of the blue' creative acts, conceptions not somehow related to prior conceptions.

Delete

Perhaps essence involves the combination of logical understandings with sympathetic intuitions/memories of what & how some thing is. A functional or generative definition, providing a dynamic cognitive and sensate(intensive) history of what and how some thing differentiates it from other things.

Perhaps - thus he [Socrates] should have asked himself - what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled?
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche disagreed with Plato/Socratic emphasis on the Apollonian, he thought we are comprised of both Apollonian and Dionysian forces, each forming the limit of the other and each necessarily present and equal in a healthy person.

Descartes is known for his coordinate system regardless of his other philosophical achievements.

The invention of Cartesian coordinates in the 17th century by René Descartes (Latinized name: Cartesius) revolutionized mathematics by providing the first systematic link between Euclidean geometry and algebra

Wikipedia

Hard theological determinism (or 'predestination') seems to be a logical consequence of God's omnipotence. For how could anything fall outside the causal control of an omnipotent being? There's simply no room in reality for any other causal agents besides God.

Suppose God exists outside of time and causality in eternity, and suppose that all history, everything which has happened from beginning to end is a memory for him. It has already happened for him, therefore for him to change it would impinge on his omnipotence His memories, similar to ours can't change or effect what has happened. Our freedom of action is not compromised by God if he is taken as in this sense.

I think establishment politicians here and in the EU would like us to continue our anti-Russian sanctions stance with the Russia. But much of the history about Russian/American/Nato actions can be read from a number of different viewpoints. The US conservative ideology has pictured Russia as part of the 'axis of evil' for a long, very long time.

Yet, it's the US that is most feared around the world. (Gallop 2014), I don't think our ideology toward Russia has changed much since Kennedy. Tump is a deal maker, and on a pragmatic basis I suspect he and Putin will get along well....the morality of their proposed actions will require careful attention. Public Opinion still rules politics, even though it seems harder and harder to figure out what the public at large thinks.

The FBI has now agreed that the US Election was hacked by the Russians, and Obama says Putin played a role. Whatever that means. But it does not matter because while HRC won the popular vote & she lost the election. The GOP were better strategists, they got the votes where they counted.

The devastation Assad has leveled against his own people in Syria is criminal. Russia's aid keeps him in power, he would not be in power without their presence. Of course Russia get a permanent Naval Base on the Mediterranean for its efforts. I think Trump was right in his estimation that we have been strategically beaten in this conflict. The tragic loss of innocent life and the number of people displaced by this war is shameful.

For now that debate looks set to rumble on. But it will not be decided on a whim. The decision will be driven by the chemistry and the protocells. If it turns out that one of the scenarios is missing a key chemical, or contains something that destroys protocells, it will be ruled out.
This means that, for the first time in history, we have the beginnings of a comprehensive explanation for how life began.

The basic conditions are in the process becoming outlined, the boundaries, the sufficient and necessary conditions with which, and without which any comprehensive theory (or any theory) must start. How contingent events and facts, possibilities can combine to become sufficient and necessary processes encompassing what we mean when we say a 'comprehensive explanation'.

BC

↪Mongrel The only good Orc is a dead Orc.

My sentiments exactly.

God

A: I said, "I have a dog."

If one knew everything about my dog, one would knoFw all sorts of things about how she relates to aspects of the universe... that she likes tennis balls, that she weighs 15 lbs, how far she is from Neptune, and so on. These are truths entailed by A. Is that right?

That's sort of making use of Leibniz's complete individual concept.

Your question about the dog lead me off in another direction (for a minute).

Do you think there are other types of entailment besides logical? I think entailment works within a Hegelian dialectic. A dialectical movement which preserves and negates both premises and in doing so generates a synthesis which is negatively determined. I guess what is entailed must be part of the synthesis.

Hegel dialectic has three moments:
1) understanding of the subject, its definition, what it means.
2) It cancels, negates and preserves 1) in a moment of self-sublation
3) the moment in which a new unity is grasped, the synthesis.

I also thought about entailment that might be involved in genealogical arguments, but these arguments are, it seems to me, to me more speculative reconstructions of history, which offer alternate explanations and suggest new possibilities. I not sure but don't think anything like logical or dialectical entailments are involved.

Do you think entailment is sense dependent or reference dependent. Sense dependent is epistemological and reference dependent is ontological. If you cannot understand a concept (A) without understanding another concept (B), then the concept (A) is sense dependent and a question of knowledge. If concept (A) cannot be without a concept (B) it is reference dependent, and a ontological issue. So, is entailment epistemological?

[as an aside, around midnight I feel like Yoda]

What is given could have always been otherwise. What does bringing other worlds into this context add? Must the positing of an absolutely contingent world entail the possibility of an absolutely necessary world?

I have been thinking about contingency recently, how the only necessary notion is that everything is contingent. If p is given, then it must necessarily entails -p, as a contingent possibility. That's how I understand entailment.

The law is the law, it is on the books. Religious blasphemy is against the law in Indonesia and it is strictly enforced.

Australia and many other other 'secular' countries have hate speech laws, which stop abusive speech with civil and criminal penalties. I mention Australia because the conservative government had planned to amend Section 18 C of the Act, which prohibits offending someone on the basis of race, color or ethnicity. I read that the government shelved those plans at the insistence of Muslim leaders in the interests of forging closer community cooperation against extremists.

The basic issue is not between religion and government but freedom of speech versus the state's right to prohibit certain types of speech. Many countries have laws that prohibit hate speech. The USA has no hate speech laws, virtually all speech is allowed (with a few of exceptions). The question becomes one of what is required for civic order & human dignity in my opinion.

Two weeks ago a man was shot to death trying to help a woman being beaten in the middle of a parking lot outside a KMart (?). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/11/28/a-good-samaritan-helped-a-woman-who-was-being-beaten-in-a-parking-lot-now-hes-dead/?utm_term=.218a807346ff

'To thine own self be true'. The only thing Polonius said that I liked.

I like Tom Bombadil. He's not one of the main characters, but does save the group from the barrow-wight. He is kinda of an enigma, impervious to the power of the ring and able to see Frodo even when Frodo has the ring on. Perhaps a character that Tolkien planned to develop in other stories. I think that he and other writers see paths/possibilities open up while they are writing stories, paths they leave open for another occasion.

Tolkien address this character:

I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war.

Old Tom didn't make it onto the silver screen, his character was not deemed intergral to the plot. I didn't go crazy over the movie.

There is reason to think that Socrates was guilty as charged. He was charged with corrupting the youth of the city and looking at two his two famous students Alcibiades & Critias, it not surprising the city thought this strange penniless pain in the butt homeboy was a corrupting influence. Socrates was also charged with impiety. Maybe his continually pointing out of the moral weakness of others in Athenian society had graded the nerves of the more aristocratic families long enough. We also know that Anytus, one of those who brought suit, had a son was also a student of Socrates, which probably didn't sit well with Anytus.
A good brief summary here:
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/socrates/socratesaccount.html

Germany is in the position of having no choice but to integrate the 1.2 million refugees (1/6/16 WPost) it took in last year. While there is an apparent clash of clash of cultures, Germany has a very proficient culture with a plan.

The following is from:
"Cities and refugees: The German experience" Brookings Institute study 9/16/16
https://www.brookings.edu/research/cities-and-refugees-the-german-experience/
1) they distributed the refugees according to tax and national funding parameters which is a predictable and efficiency system deviations from the assigned quota norm are minimal.
2)the cities where the majority of the refugees were relocate to have to varying extents their own issues of housing, labor, and all the civic issues prior to arrival of there people. In some cities the situation is now acute.
3)the current framework for allocating funding and expenditures across federal, state, and city governments imposes uneven burdens on city-states and large cities and the government is in process or rectifying these allocations and giving cities a seat in on Federal decisions that will have a direct effect on them.
4)cities such as Hamburg and Berlin have shown a remarkable ability to innovate in the face of crisis. Innovations have included an expanded role of civil society, the use of technology to engage community participation, and the rapid building of non-traditional housing.

In the words of Nigel Farage its "Too late. The horse has bolted." The debate of Left versus Right is over. The government has decided to integrate this population, to make it its own, which will take time.


Aren't politicians a type of walking archetype...we call them representatives? Instead of the collective unconscious, they reflect the choice of the collective conscious?

Also doesn't Being face Non-Being in some sort of dialectic as Agamben suggests, and the synthesis of the dialectic is Becoming, but maybe the phrase 'Being vs Essence' is more about the Cogito (ego=essence).

If being precedes essence then becoming must be non-cognitive in some sense, perhaps as valuation a claim on being?

Monet's Water Lilies
Picasso's Guernica

Both are necessary for art, I think.

RIP....he sounds amazing even while chewing gum!

"It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive." Political correctness gone awry.


"Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics."

Everything is aesthetically artifactual; in practice the surface (the mystery, the spell of the work) of the work belies the power play (the politic) beneath its appearance. Engaged art versus engaging art, not art for art's sake, but art for society's sake.