*The Greeks of Plato's time did not have a concept of Will separate from that of knowing. That only arrives on the scene with the Stoics.

SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.

Socrates did not know, how to not to know.

The answer to the question "What Is Value?" needs to focus on Intrinsic Value. Utility is only extrinsic value. Something is useful only if it leads to something (intrinsically) value*.

Another is that, at the bottom of all experiences is an emptiness that must be filled yet again. This is often equated to the suffering described in Buddhism. It is a striving that is never yielding, yet we must find contents to content us and entertain us. Why create this problem of survival on one hand and finding the best way to fill our time on the other in the first place? All this energy running about again and again. How about let sleeping dogs lie? No need to make people put energy forth to maintain themselves.

If there are a need for goods, that means we are lacking those goods to begin with. So we need to find goods as we go about life to fulfill the cup that perpetually needs to be filled, to be emptied yet again (the emptiness at the bottom of endeavors) to be fulfilled yet again. It is an absurdity.

Why create the problem of finding goods in the first place, if no problem needs to be given in the first place?

I'm curious about how participants here factor a starting point into their own philosophical position(s)

The goods one experiences in life- the relationships, the learning, the aesthetic pleasures (including humor), the physical pleasures, the pleasures of engaging in highly stimulating physical/mental activities (or flow activities), and achievement, though they might make life a bit more of a consolation, are not worth the structural and contingent suffering involved.

But the upsides outweigh the downsides.

But "utility" is not a good definition. I could value useless things...

Is it necessary to know the truth?

What does it mean to say that something is physical or not?

Do people need an ideology?

But I cannot commit fully to them in the sense that I completely let them inform my thoughts and feelings about the world, because I recognize that we are all just humans, nobody really knows better than anybody else. Rather, I have my own thoughts and feelings about the world, and these philosophies correspond with many of them. But there are certain things that cause me distress, anxiety, and what I would call frequent miniature existential crises. I often come back to questioning what I'm doing with my life, why different things happen, what the meaning of my life is, what the meaning of anything is, why the universe exists at all, whether there is any objective morality, whether anything we do matters in any real way, whether life is even worth living, etc.

A question on the meaning of existence

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

I have watched a pet cat do something that, it seems to me, required a lot of all kinds of mental capacity. (It had learned how to open a door.

How do birds "share these sensations, these feelings"?

However, one thing that seems to be a property of all immoral acts is the harm done, that is, harm without good reason.

What is the difference between "bird knowledge" and "dog knowledge"?

the Earth appears to be motionless with a rising and setting sun. Our language reflects that appearance. But we know the Earth rotates around its axis every 24 hours, creating the appearance.

The derivatives contracts should thrust bitcoin more squarely into the realm of regulators, banks and institutional investors. In addition to the contracts at Cboe and CME, which will start trading Dec. 18, Cantor Fitzgerald LP won approval from regulators to trade binary options, and LedgerX, a startup exchange, already trades bitcoin options.

Rather than updating bitcoin's underlying software (which has proven to be a messy process), Lightning essentially adds an extra layer to the tech, one where transactions can be made more cheaply and quickly, but with, hypothetically, the same security backing of the blockchain.

The bird doesn't "know" that it's beautiful in the way that we "know" that (and of course, there's the problem of whether beauty can be epistemically apprehended in the first place). But putting that question aside, our unique, subjective apprehension of the bird's beauty is an experience of the bird that only occurs via our human conciousness. From our human vantage point, the bird is beautiful: not just the the colors of the plumage, but the physical way the bird flits, flies, and the songs that it sings. The bird is acting on instinct; the bird doesn't control it's physical appearance the way a beautiful man or woman does; the bird doesn't sing for the pleasure of song itself; the bird has no mirror in which to observe it's own beauty, both literally and figuratively (figuratively in the sense that conciousness is a mirror in which we reflect on ourselves). The bird has none of that. But we possess a view unique to us; The very sense-experience and abstract concepts that create our apprehension of the bird as beautiful are the things that are exclusive to our human conciousness.

Perhaps our experience of trouts and turkeys is a false one, even though it's useful. Trouts, turkey, tables, stars, human beings, etc are not really wholes. Only subatomic particles are.

We can supplement Humean causation with a Darwinian one where constant conjunction produces reproductive success in organisms that expect the conjunction to continue in the future.

Yes, by "ontologically" I mean what some thing/X actually (as in, in actuality) or really (as in, in reality) is.

How can we get AI to be safe

That doesn't really clear things up for me. What is the difference between "form" and "matter" ontologically?

Aristotle famously contends that every physical object is a compound of matter and form. This doctrine has been dubbed “hylomorphism”...While the basic idea of hylomorphism is easy to grasp, much remains unclear beneath the surface. Aristotle introduces matter and form, in the Physics, to account for changes in the natural world, where he is particularly interested in explaining how substances come into existence even though, as he maintains, there is no generation ex nihilo, that is that nothing comes from nothing. In this connection, he develops a general hylomorphic framework, which he then extends by putting it to work in a variety of contexts. For example, he deploys it in his Metaphysics, where he argues that form is what unifies some matter into a single object, the compound of the two; he appeals to it in his De Anima, by treating soul and body as a special case of form and matter and by analyzing perception as the reception of form without matter; and he suggests in the Politics that a constitution is the form of a polis and the citizens its matter, partly on the grounds that the constitution serves to unify the body politic.

But either way, ontologically, form and matter are not different things.

They sound like two distinct things in the way you're claiming.