If we drop Bitter Crank into the Democratic Republic of Congo his fear will guide his reason in a spectacular way.

The question is what does he know about the place he has found himself in and will that help him get to where he wants to go.

Knowledge and instinct are complimentary if and when they work together well.

Why isn't it immoral for parents to impose identity on their children then? They're just another form of coercion. It seems this is far more crucial to the future ability to consent to contracts than a birth certificate and a social security number.

Evil carries with it a dangerous sense of absolute judgement, a word once used by ideological or theocratic tyrants to mark their enemies as targets. It once might have rendered heightened emotional feelings of intense disgust and resentment in those obeying the will of these authority figures.

The word evil is a bit anachronistic.

Selfishness in the service of conserving the self is a necessary part (biological motivation) by which societies are constructed and maintained. Reciprocal altruism is driven by selfishness.

What about the Allegory of the Ship, what with the steering wheel and the way finding and the division of labor.

Whether you sail for God or the nation, or a nation under God, for the captain chasing the white whale on the Sophia, or with your humble friend the Victorian Naturalist, Arwin, it doesn't change the science and adventure of way finding and the body of organization it requires.

No amount of wishful thinking is going to change the ending to Moby Dick...

Everything else is worth doing.

Maybe someone is making a wages versus salary distinction.

Getting grades is on a per assignment point-based system so it resembles working for a wage more than it does a salary.

Toward a History of Philosophy by Jose Ortega y Gasset (page 71)

Tell me what Pascal's 'imperative of stupidity' is when you find out.

Daniel Dennett warns against promoting the denial of free on the grounds that it has behavioral ramifications. If we invoke determinism as a justification for bad acts, in alignment with our secret wishes, confirmation bias is at play. What might be the societal effects if the average person did not believe in free will?

Does fear of punishment deter people from committing crimes? Yes.

Does positive reinforcement (socially conferred rewards) promote types of behavior? Yes.

There are likely societal situations were the fear of punishment is exaggerated to a point were it actually interferes with an average kind of agency. If I thought I was going to burn in hell for all eternity because of some small transgression in my past ( reinforced by parental fear mongering and threats) degrees of agency might be diminished, until it is overcome by some revolutionary crisis or not.

I think the human condition doesn't really allow us to really "specialize" (which I believe is merely a buzz word/propaganda of the industrial age, which like the term "Work smarter, not harder" since thinking harder is in itself more work requiring you to work harder) to make us think that working a 9 to 5 job will provide us with an opportunity to have a better life than if we try to work and think for ourselves. — Declemets

Actually we are rewarded for useful specialization in an industrial society. I may be able to be an architect of sorts but I cannot design a skyscraper without heavy investment in my education. Though maybe intelligent design software is right around the corner for a lot of really skilled professions, by which we just punch in desired features and boom! you've got blue prints ready to submit to the contractors.

We might be entering a postindustrial DIY age based on the widespread use of artificial intelligences, which will free more of us from the heavy investment in specialization.

____________________

Maybe discussing the legal rights of children ought to be, or the way we treat children, is a way to proceed.

Question: Are children the property of their parents?

What are the ramifications of ownership and the freedoms afforded to private lives of families in rearing their children? The treatment of children by their parents is quite diverse. Some kinds of normal treatment would be termed "abuse" from a different point of view (spanking?).

If we look back to the first industrial revolution, children were treated very poorly because they didn't have the ability to defend themselves. They were treated as slave labor.

Normal parental neglect might have a major influence on the adaptive traits a child will carry into adulthood but there is no considerable legal overreach into the minutiae of rearing children. There might be a continuum of degrees agency (fitness within society) for adults depending upon key experiences during crucial phases of development.

Before we proceed with debating whether fictional automatons should be given human rights maybe we should do some research into the best way to raise a kid.

If we are automatons already, we should understand what makes us good automatons rather than bad ones.

Maybe automatons (artificial intelligences) could correct the actions of parents which serve to undermine the social fitness of their children.

This idea stems from the story of Pinnochio. He is a child but must learn to become an adult. He is an automaton that must learn to become something else.

Everything happens for a reason.

Everything that happens, happens.

Life has gone through a process to adapt to most stuff that happens in service of generational continuity, thus our calibrated emotional response to better or worse conditions.

One might say that all the deaths (extinctions) that happened in the course of our evolution, happened for a reason.

Just like:

Peacock tails happened for a reason.

Osso Bucco happened for a reason.

Ebola happened for a reason.

Whose or which reason did they happen for?

Please don't say God.

Which reason did he(it) happen for?

Just listened to Psychology of the Flood (Jordan Peterson Lecture)

Brilliant talk.

This is how life began. Memes replicating in a thread over many millions of years blindly corroborating to swim against the flow of entropy.

There are some features of this replication you can't break, unless you are a hacker of sorts.

"The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it." ~ Mark Twain

A tumble bug often lands in a pile of shit twice, unless it is the shit of Heraclitus (diarrhea).

Questions and stances embedded in the OP stated for the sake of brevity:

Do humans posses a capacity of autonomy regarding morally relevant decisions?

What is the difference between moral knowledge that is acquired intellectually (or culturally transmitted) and moral knowledge that is the result of experience?

Claim: Experience yields a greater degree of autonomy compared with theory because one understands why something is bad rather than accepting someone else's word.

Generally the exercise of autonomy, as exercising choice between many options and being able to tell good ones from bad ones, increases with experience. But we are leaving out intelligence. Someone who is very dumb but has loads of experience may not have much agency as someone who is very smart but lacks much life experience.
________________

I gave the example last time. A person who is told not to touch a hot stove because it burns will not learn the significance of such advice until that person has touched a hot stove.

A soldier who drills everyday with a patriotic view toward fighting in war may have a radically different view once war is experienced. I listened to adult sibling describe her brother as he had been before and after an experience in war and it brought me to tears. If it afforded her brother any greater moral autonomy beyond the "truth" of what war entails versus its myths I'm unsure. Some naive choices (if you can call them that) have grave consequences. He may be fit to give advice to more naive individuals, to increase the idea that there are other options open to young men.

In highschool I witnessed a pig slaughter and butchery. They stuck a knife in it's throat and let it bleed for quite a while. I put my hand into the warm chest cavity and felt the organs. I had made up my mind that I was not going to eat its meat out of sheer disgust. The gamey smell of guts and singed hair was enough. Later I attended the cooking process and the smell changed completely (frying pork skin and fat) and my appetite was stimulated. There is the fact that such an experience is encoded in my memory when I think about the hidden processes which I'm apt to ignore. If the consequences of my choices are hidden, then the first-hand experience with any of those processes will inform my choices.

I was sifting through this trash heap with CasKev and all I could find that I liked was a sparkly sequin.

Also, there is something (an agent) hunting us on the trash heap (I hear it over the ridge), so get ready to defend yourself.

Someone post directions to a trash heap worth sifting through so we can get outta here.

Sapientia was peeing into the wind (always here to lighten the mood with his antics, or is he trying to lure the thing over the ridge by scent marking).

Jordan Peterson distances himself from Campbell, since the latter became somewhat of a new-age guru.

Whereas Campbell says 'walk through the gates past the threshold guardians to follow your bliss'.

Peterson says, ' train first in the old ways before you walk through the gates past the threshold guardians to follow your bliss'. Christianity is a guide to becoming fit. Christianity embodies the preferred values by which you should conduct your life.

If you 'follow your bliss' willy nilly it might lead into the mouth of chaos, like a baby bird who was just eaten by a cat as it left the nest. Stay paranoid, work-hard, bootstrap, or we might end up like Venezuela.

But might that not be what you are secretly wishing for: catastrophe and death (or the risk of catastrophe and death).

Culture is broken and the life waters have left the cistern. Go out and get some by traveling across the borders of the known.

Edit: Deleted my post.

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism. — Dennett on Rapoport's Rules

The comments competed for attention, like Daniel Dennett's memes, and one now reads: 'whether it is wise to explore what is given or to start anew'.

When in Xia do as the Xians do.

The Xians inherit an uncomfortable chair from their elders which is the only chair they are allowed to sit in by law until a certain age. After a period of seven sitting revolutions the chair is abandoned and put in a glass case, to be gifted to the closest of kin who haven't yet been inducted into the sitting period of PainOhw. Older Xians pride themselves on keeping very comfortable chairs for their age appropriate guests. From an outsider's point of view, Xian chairs have become an cultural obsession. Those who have not completed the ritual of PainOh age are discouraged from sitting at all in the houses of their elder peers, unless an uncomfortable chair is present.

Young Xians are known to proclaim outloud, as they sit in their uncomfortable chairs, 'this chair is surprisingly comfortable'.

Sounds like Jordan Peterson.

Ok. Given the simplicity of example I think I understand why.

Between two people set to find solutions to diverse sets of problems, the one who acquires working solutions quicker on average is likely engaging algorithms with less steps and therefore generally more intelligent.

Please do translate for us.

If one computer runs slower than the other but again takes the same number of steps, they're still equally intelligent. — Efram

So if a computer takes 10,000 years to finish its procedure rather than 1 second, all else being equal, they're still equally intelligent? Imagine how many more computations the latter can make while the former is still calculating problem 1.

This wouldn't apply to humans in a competitive scenario. We'd always call the faster person more intelligent, even if all the procedural steps were the same.

I accept your distinction about unfalsifiable claims.

Why would you assume that you know how your lucky shirt works?

Maybe your lucky shirt just increases the probability you will win by 1%. Could you scientifically verify that your lucky shirt increases the probability that you will win by 1%?

Maybe your lucky shirt is solar powered and the sun went behind the clouds at the most crucial moment.

Maybe your lucky shirt is paired with unlucky shoes but you were ignorant about all the unlucky variables.

If it is robot that looks and acts human than it wouldn't be an issue unless someone realizes they are not human, but if they are nothing like a human they I imagine it is a given that it will be a problem until the people they interact with get..acclimated to them as well as the sentient being themselves gets acclimated to human beings. — dclemets

This thought has occurred to me many times in relation to my failures as a thinker and or communicator as indicated by the phenomena of reciprocity in the forum. I don't really engage anyone on a personal level and my mind therefore pictures me as an alien, a foreign entity, a homunculus playing at being a thinker. Pinnochio is yet to become a real boy.

If for instance there was somekind of objective measure of agency instituted here (whether that just was a belief of free will, or a measure of brain function) I might not pass. Someone who is terribly ugly though might find real freedom here in being disconnected from the selection pressures of being seen.

It recalls the movie Gattaca. The condition of biological perpetuity necessitates brutal (or not so brutal) discriminations across a wide diversity of specialized domains (species adapted to specific niches). We are buffeted by the facts and specialized agents of considerable power (all too obvious forces) in the world.

It reminds me of Jordan Peterson's meme about open and closed borders as applying across domains of practice.

Edit:

Suppose that one of us here in the forum is actually an artificial homunculus (AI language program) being tested by Google. Paul used to have modbot (chatterbot) in the old forum, which was like playful marionette to inject humor into the thread. Sometimes Paul spoke through modbot and sometimes Paul let modbot speak on its own, unless I'm mistaken (that was my impression).

Some people didn't know what modbot was and that was a bit hilarious.

I think it would be really interesting if we couldn't tell the difference between human agents and non-human agents a part via this forum.

Deciding to do any act for whatever cited reason is magical.

This thread will be the cause of me planting a Calotropis in the lower garden, so I can attract Monarch butterflies. Any butterfly may spark a vision of the chaos of indeterminable casual chains, crisscrossing like neurons in a network.

To be scientific using a Popperian meme: this thread will not be the actual cause (nor will it won't be) of me planting a Calotropis in the lower garden because the hypothesis (that it did) is unfalsifiable.

The problem is that I can at any moment be seized by the absurdity of life.

Imagine a being sitting at a computer (?) somewhat incapacitated by the illusion of his or her choices. What ought I to do at any moment (tell me, command me, provide me a God that screams "thou shalt")?

Somewhere Wosret said something about specialization and it is trying to weigh into this post right now.

If specialization is called for, we have to abandon all routes that distract us from that aim. Suppose I've been tasked with building a bridge across a body of water by a certain date or otherwise I'll be killed. If I indeed am motivated to avoid death (and the threat is real) I'll drop everything that I'm doing here and set to work on trying to get that bridge built (according to whatever specifications are demanded of me).

If nothing is demanded of me and my desires are disordered, well then... I think I'll just fart around here. I'm free to be mediocre. Hurrah!

What if I had to pass a difficult test to get into the forum. Uh Oh!

Also if ideas are ever believed to be the origin of a cause and effect, like the idea of the Butter Fly Effect, then maybe they also lead to big (or negligible) outcomes via biological mechanisms.

Is the idea of the Butterfly Effect subject to its own effects (what are those effects objectively measured)? I mean this in the sense of memes passing from one mind to the next.

A more relevant analogue of the Butter Fly Effect is to be found in how organisms evolve by natural selection.

A small event (gene mutation) that codes for an adaptive trait has effects that continue far into the future.

Trees and vegetation do influence the weather, so tiny accidental events do have far reaching casual effects via biological mechanisms.

But it shows this desire to encroach on everything with evolutionary motives. — Andrew

Why isn't this just an extension of what everyone is doing in this forum, full of selective pressures on the "proper" way of doing things. Obviously the ability to reason well has benefits for whatever reasons are the "good" reasons. I also have to be able to write in English. I also have to have access to the internet and a relatively recent computing device. Lucky me (except for the glaring "bad" traits). I have to conform to necessary rules.

If life is a bowl of sausage is it better to not look behind the curtain to see how they are made? Only the sausage makers should be allowed back there (a different species of being).

On one side of the fictional future is an intimidating tower of powerful authors (tools used to control human nature which are (un)justly distributed and ultimately leashed to instinctual effects) while on the other side is a pit of postmodern despair, insensibility and madness.

And this is all bullshit because you can go take a walk (unless you don't have functioning legs). There is nothing here yet to determine when you can and cannot take a walk.

Is there?

What specific creature is the target of our concern: Harry, Andrew, Wayfarer, Reformed Thespian? Whose concern is "our" concern?

I think the Buddhist spandrel of "dependent arising" is fit to reproduce in the corner of a postmodern cathedral.

"When this is, that is
This arising, that arises
When this is not, that is not
This ceasing, that ceases."

Where is the moderating agent who didn't appear who would have saved us all this trouble (either Jesus or Baden will do).

Am I passing the Turing test?

Types of posters who are welcome here:

Those with a genuine interest in / curiosity about philosophy and the ability to express this in an intelligent way, and those who are willing to give their interlocutors a fair reading and not make unwarranted assumptions about their intentions (i.e. intelligent, interested and charitable posters).

Types of posters who are not welcome here:

Evangelists: Those who must convince everyone that their religion, ideology, political persuasion, or philosophical theory is the only one worth having.

Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them.

Advertisers, spammers: Instant deletion of post followed by ban.

Trolls: You know who you are. You won't last long — Baden: PF Guidlines

What is the point of reproducing? — Andrew

Depends on how and why you do it.

There might be a point somewhere in the room while your doing it but it's a matter of perspective.

It could be the point of a Samurai sword, or the point of a needle, the point of your nose, the point of your prick, the point of your intellect, the point of your gorgeous face, or a numerical point in your bank savings.

Non-reversing mirrors do reverse the image as if you were turning around to meet your duplicate. Reversing mirrors don't reverse the image.

Already getting nauseous about perspective.

But then in your duplicate's world the semantics of the word "right" might be reversed. He'd simply be using a foreign dialect of English, which is true on his cultural side of the divide .

Everything on the other side of whatever side your on is could be affected by whatever the mysterious rules are.

The reflection of the image of the self,

The echo of the sound of the self,

All occurring in the absence of an embodied community.

More so, when a body never meets a body and it becomes normal... what then?

Narcissus poeticus which grows in Greece, has a fragrance that has been described as intoxicating. — Wikipedia: Narcissus (plant)

I get the same problem when I reach out to try and touch all those porn stars. I hit a flat screen.

Now we need a memetic complement to that last Dawkins quote.

"They came into being with language. Look for them floating loose in a sea of data ; they have cavalier freedom (if worms have it). Now they swarm inside the neural networks of mankind."

I am a meme editing agent.

Take the underlying principles of religious belief and apply them to prevailing materialistic views. — Nobel Dust

I'm not sure what these principles are in your view. Everyone talks about this stuff as if the details are obvious. Maybe this is evidence of epistemic hubris (something religious beliefs and behaviors can be criticized of).

Is epistemic hubris a principle of religious belief? It is a charge leveled against religion (or theory) on the basis of trying to conserve tradition (or sell a theory), from an outside view. Faith conserves itself, whereas any scientific doxa that supports and guides prevailing theory changes in the pursuit of testing hypotheses.

Is not this assertion that "we cannot know" itself a dogma with affirmations and denials? Is not this itself a statement of knowledge? Is "we cannot know with certainty" not itself an assertion of KNOWLEDGE (a dogmatic assertion) as THE WAY to interpret Scripture? Whether conscious of it or not, this is what is called "double-talk" and those who believe this are doing the very thing they claim to despise, even in the very speaking of it. Its like Oprah stating on national television that it is arrogant to think Jesus is the only way, and then turning around and telling us the ONLY WAY is to believe that all religions lead to the same God. Is this not itself an arrogant claim ... a claim which must have a bird's eye view of knowledge to state it with such certainty. — John Hendryx: Reformation Theology (blog)

Intuition may as well be a kind of informal or non-explicit logic. Dan Dennett says it's a process of attaining an answer without knowing how you got it. All of our current attempts at formal logic depend on automatic processes of which we are unaware.

The exceptional and seemingly effortless calculating skills of Daniel Tammet and other savants might well be called a form of intuition.

Emotions, intuition and logic are all features our working biology that make us human.

We already struggle to adapt to the changing environmental (selection) pressures of life. The problem with an AI overlord is whether or not we are willing to let something else make decisions for us (world shaping processes are always going on without our input anyway, or are a part of our short-sighted self-serving democratic decisions ).

Some human group will tell us that such an AI is the way to go but there will be no consensus. Conspiracy theories will reign and radical mistrust along tribal lines will win out (given our political reality at the moment).

To calm your Cartesian anxiety:

"The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42." ~Douglas Adams

"On page 42 of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker discovers he is a prisoner of the vampire. And on the same page of Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein reveals he is able to create life." ~Anonymous

Stay tuned for the sequel to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. An AI program named Mary Shelly will give birth another AI program that will retell the story of Frankenstein. You will no longer go to the cinema or read a book for this new mandatory telling. You'll preform in the cinema for an otherworldly set of authors. Don't worry, it will be a choose your own adventure version (unless you unluckily enough to encounter page phase 42).

On page 42 you must commit to some regretful or promising mistake. You might be imprisoned by a monster or have given birth to one (or 42).

(Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Douglas Adams and Daniel Dennett, by marriage of neural happenstance)

(The strangeness of this post is principally the effect of psychological compensation and other mostly predetermined stuff.)

On the Cartesian Anxiety of Our Times and What Faith Can Offer

Charles Pope is seriously NOT helping.

Superstition as a definition requires belief in supernatural phenomena but sorting out what kind of false beliefs fit into that box might not be so easy.

When a baseball player chooses to wear a certain lucky hat or a pair of socks, or preform a pre-game ritual, anthropologists might term such behavior as superstitious. Such behavior might be going on everywhere, among everyone, but couched in contemporarily acceptable terms.

I like the idea of thought contagion (memes) to explain the spread of beliefs. Other truth-testing processes provide us with the tools to assess the truth value of whatever behavior, phenomena or claim is being made. I'm a white belt wizard still in this dojo of mixed mental arts.

(This is a NOT a Wiccan forum) <------- Is this a true belief?

I've had a momentary vision where you are all wearing pointy hats and writing runes in a magic mirror and the runes are causing things to happen.