you are quite right that if your premise is that God exists, then the existence of atheists is quite an extraordinary thing. Given the perfection of the world is such that god is, for you , undeniable, denying god must call for an extraordinary irrationality. — Banno

This is a reductio ad absurdum from your argument.

The move to necessitate the miraculous from the mundane leads us naturally to assume the errors of your premises.

Banno said: "If God exists, His brilliance, His presence, ought be so all-encompasing as to be utterly undeniable." — Henri

Well, that's a reversal of your own argument about atheist. By the same principle that would warrant the acceptation of your statement, you should accept his.

You want to be able to freely deny God however you like, and publicly so, but when time comes for some accountability, for some examination of your thoughts, then all of a sudden let's talk definitions because atheists in fact are not hard, they are soft, etc. Build some spine, man. — Henri

This is not an argument. This is an insult.

Are those definitions of a soft-atheist good enough? — Henri

No, because they do not constitute an argument.

That kind of an atheist is part of my OP. He or she still doesn't believe that God exists, regardless of how open they are to change their minds sometime in the future. Today their minds aren't changed and they don't believe or think that God exists.

I say they came to that conclusion through unreasonable thought process. — Henri

That is not an argument, that is an opinion,

Anyway, I don't really have to share my experience with you. Whatever I would share here would probably go to waste, so I am not going to do it. — Henri

Then what are you doing here?

But, again, this thread is not about proving that God exists. — Henri

It's not about having a philosophical debate either, apparently.

So, can you list some atheist arguments?

That's true, I didn't give examples in OP. — Henri

And, by the end of this post, you still haven't provided an example. Only more contentless ad hominem affirmations.

It's people like you who gives us philosophers a bad reputation. Shame! Shaaaaaame!

But any argument for atheism is unreasonable. As evidenced by this thread. Not that this particular evidence was needed. — Henri

This post, and the thread's OP exemplifies what I understand to be low quality posting.

what is the meaning (of life) then? — krishnamurti

To maintain "a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network"

-Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 89.

58% may be a bit harsh. On the other hand, 65% would be generous.

Listen to what your evaluator said. Less exposition, simpler sentence structures, and spend more time on each core philosophical concepts needed for the argument.

Dang. Once again, I have trouble understanding your big words. Could you provide an example of what you call 'non-relational aspects of an object'? — Samuel Lacrampe

A colour realist, someone who would say that "the rose is red" states a true fact about the object rose, would very likely say that a colour is a non-relational property of its object. On the other hand, a relationalist would say something to the effect that a colour is a property of an object to be seen as such under certain circumstances.

Now, the thing is, everyone is free to choose when and where they draw the line when it comes to properties. For example, a lot of people would say that objects don't have negative properties. It makes a sort of sense, because of parsimony, because once you start admitting negative properties then you must admit that almost everything as an infinite amount of properties. If my hand has the properties of not having more than 6 fingers, then it has the properties of not having more than 7, 8, 9, ... n fingers. And as such, someone could say that because temporal and spatial properties are intrinsically relational (or at least, it is very intuitive to admit that they are), then they are not really properties of the object itself.

The container has a time and place, but not the information. — Samuel Lacrampe

Why not? Understanding happens in a time and a space.

According to this, 2.27 percent of mass shooters (which I assume is what you mean by "rampage") are women.

Your claim checks out. — Michael

Thank you so much for putting the effort into it. (Y)
So, I'm sure anyone should realize that 97.73/2.27 shows that, in some meaningful way, gender is at play here.

I've been reading the work of the Invisible Committee recently, and they put this in stark and beautiful terms — StreetlightX

They certainly have a way to hit you where it hurts :

"There is no “environmental catastrophe.” The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop—they don’t have an “environment;” they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places. It’s only us, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hour—the ones who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on television—only we get to have an environment. And there’s no one but us to witness our own annihilation, as if it were just a simple change of scenery, to get indignant about the latest progress of the disaster, to patiently compile its encyclopedia."

Why? — Benkei

Because meaningful relations between the constituency and its representatives are otherwise reduced to voting and 2 minutes addresses before the Parliement. We live in a time of professional politicians. We therefore needs professionnals to engage them meaningfully to express our interests.

A thing: a,b,c...

A predicate: F,G,H...

A fact: Fa, Ga, Hb

Facts are not things. — Banno

You could replace "thing" with "variable" and the question still stands.
However, you could resolve it by simply saying that "thing" is purely an objectual demonstrative.
Everything is a thing!

The point is that it not always men, and that I forgot about maybe the most infamous one where the shooter was a woman. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

The point is null if it's trying to base itself on heavy outliers. No one in their right mind dispute the possibility that women commits a gun rampage. They have all the required parts for it after all. What no one in their right mind should dispute is that the absolute discrepancy between the tendency to commit gun rampages is a relevant factor in the analysis of the phenomenon.

Corporations include multinational entities. — creativesoul

It is yet illegal for multinationals to donate money to political parties in the States (and most legislatures).
Legal personhood is a fiction which has mostly for effect to allow the corporation's agents to act legally only under the name of the corporation. This was already possible, with the agents of a corporation being protected before by the entrepreneurial veil, which could however be lifted in certain circumstances of high-level malfeasance.

Corporate personhood is a lobbying issue, and because lobbying has a terrible reputation, corporate personhood is seen as a terrible thing. Of course, this is based mostly on sentiment, because lobbyism is indispensible in the type of states we all live in nowadays.

Our universe is filled with multiplicity because each of those things has distinct properties. Since no two physical objects can occupy the same space at the same time, all physical objects have at least different x, y, x positions at time t. — Samuel Lacrampe

Yes and no, because that would depend on what form your ontology allows properties to take. I could argue toward a very desolate ontology, where only non-relational aspects of an object can be allowed to be attributed the state of properties of that object. That would rid us of any spatial and temporal incongruities in our ontology, but I think that it would have a lot more negative effects than positive ones. It would force us to move to attribution of object as a category up the scale from individualisation to systematisation, which would be very counter-intuitive. Myself, I've always taken a more pragmatic view of property attribution, and therefore my ontology is quite literally limitless. It's not Meinong's jungle, but its not far either. I'd argue in the same sense as you, but rather viewing temporal and spatial properties of information as yet another indication that information is physical. Datum informs also the processor from their occurences in space and time, and therefore in no actual way does Epp applies in a meaningful way to both individualised occurences of "Montréal is in Québec" and "Montréal is in Québec".

it's always men... — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Dollars to doughnut, you won't find 5 female shooters in a hundred gun rampages.

This will be my last post. I leave it to neutral observers to judge whether I have been fair, clear, and consistent, — Thorongil

There is one principle of politics that apply to every debates and arguments : Whoever leaves the negociation table first is always wrong.

Anyways, what you claim directly conflicts what Wayfarer has posted in the previous thread on the subject. I'll repost it here.

" The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns. ...Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. ...Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people. ... Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States."

"If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries."

"A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. ...countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings."

" America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership."

"...American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process."

Second, as I have already pointed out, the gun violence is not perpetrated by those who are lawfully making use of their right to bear firearms, so in no way does it follow that the mere right to legally purchase them means greater gun homicides. — Thorongil

Then you are blind and cannot be made to see. The proliferation of weapons in the States is the only variable that explains why you suffer so many more gun rampages than any other country in the world.

And no,

Those are rare, and it hasn't prevented mass killings in countries that have stricter gun control, unless you believe death by a gun is somehow worse than death by other means. — Thorongil

These are not rare by any fucking definition of the word. They happen every other fucking week. And if you check, the States are miles ahead of any other country in terms of mass shootings per capita.

Step 2: Proof that info is one thing in two separate containers.
P2.1: The law of identity says that if "two" things have the exact same properties, then they are one and the same thing.
P2.2: Information A, separate from its container, is identical in container B and container C.
C2: Information A in both containers is one and the same, as opposed to being mere duplicates. — Samuel Lacrampe

Thank you for the well thought out reply. I could go through each propositions of part 2 and 3, but honestly, I think P2.1 leaves enough of an opening for me to try and go for a quick kill.

Regarding P2.1 : Epp means each thing is identical to itself. You equivocate here if you push this to means that objects with identical properties are the same object. This is much above the level of foundational premises where Epp is located. And it happens to be false, because we happen to be in a universe filled with multiplicity.

I fell on this looking up the legality of conceiled knives under Canadian law. I think the reasoning might help see how a judge could consider both the social impacts of weapon carrying and the right of a person to defend themselves. So I'll post it.

"The usual internet explanation of Canadian knife laws leaves out the fact that in 2011, the judicial understanding of the offense carrying a concealed weapon changed in a very important way.

There are three basic ways that the existence of a weapon is established for the offense, and the one most likely to catch a good-natured but unaware person involves the following consideration: are you carrying [a knife] designed to be used to cause death or injury or for the purpose of threatening or intimidating anyone. It is the application of this part of the offense that changed.

The case can be found here. Anyone contemplating carrying a knife in public in the way described above should read it.

For those who want a quick summary: In determining whether something fits into the above-noted definition of a weapon, the Court must now only undertake an objective analysis by asking itself:

Is the object's design such that it could be readily usable to cause death or injury to any person or to threaten or intimidate any person?

In all of the circumstances, would the carrying of the concealed object cause the reasonable person to fear for his own safety or for the public safety, if he were aware of the presence of the object?

In the case I linked to, the knife was described as follows:

The steel knife is approximately twelve inches in length; its blade is approximately seven inches long. On the blade are the words "U.S.A. SABER." The lower part of the blade is sharply honed. Part of the top part of the knife is serrated and other part has five ridges. This is clearly a combat knife and not a simple hunting knife.

The accused was convicted.

Consider what a karambit is, what it looks like, how it's marketed, and what conclusions a fifty or sixty year old Judge would come to when considering the above two questions.

In considering the above, the court made the following comment which may be helpful:

It is recognized that the second half of this bipartite test [question 2] is contextual and that, in deciding this question, the court is called upon to conduct a holistic analysis. That may be difficult, but it seems to me that it is what is required in order to give effect to Parliament's intention. In conducting this analysis, the court must be ever mindful of Parliament's purpose in enacting this section, that is, firstly, minimizing the furtive carrying of objects that pose a real threat to public safety, and secondly, that would cause justifiable alarm in members of the public contributing to general paranoia.

Such an analysis will take place against the backdrop of the object being both carried and concealed, as both of these factors are elements of the offence. It will require the court to look at the characteristics of the object itself. It seems to me that the reasonable person would consider the carrying of a jackknife in a pocket (the typical way of transporting a jackknife) to be innocuous. Similarly, a butter knife would be viewed as non-threatening. A large skinning knife would be more worrisome. In my view, the definition would capture virtually all prohibited weapons. Other factors will also be relevant, including the locale where the object is being carried. The reasonable person would surely be more concerned where the object is imported into a public venue such as a bar than if the object is carried by a person engaged in a solitary activity.*" "

Lifted from https://www.reddit.com/r/knives/comments/3kskpk/karambit_knife_illegal_or_legal_in_canada/

The question thus becomes: why should that mean abolishing the right to own firearms? — Thorongil

Because the corollary to allowing guns to spread in the manner they have in the USA is the epidemic of gun rampages that plagues you, and might I add, only you.

You have to let this sink in. The corollary to you claiming that the current state-of-affairs in the States is acceptable because it is founded in an inalienable right is that you find it acceptable that kids get shot every other week because that is also founded in that same inalienable right.

I get that sometimes people don't feel safe in certain streets. That happens to me too sometimes. That's what a karambit, a dog, a mace or a black belt is for. It's not a reason to start carrying a gun to the grocery store.

A gun is an adequate and in many cases the most effective means of protecting one's life — Thorongil

Still less effective than drones, land mines, railguns, nerve gas, lazersharks, honeytraps, etc...

My point still stands that the claim he made, without qualification, isn't obviously true. I have no problem granting such statistics either, as I said, for they don't refute my argument. — Thorongil

Except that they do. I don't get how you don't get this. Replace all guns in the States by blades, leaving everything else the same, and there will be less deaths as a result. That is the only conclusion that these stats can compel you to reach.

This is way too simplistic. Do you assert it as a statistical claim? — Thorongil

Except that's a provable claim. Hostpital admittance for stab wounds show that you are about 60-80% likely to survive a stab wound, depending where you are stabbed, while the offshot is about 40% survival chances for bullet wounds.

No, this is entirely serious. Phosphorus burns are absolutely monstrous, and it's almost impossible to stop white phosphor from spreading, so you'll likely end up with debilitating burns everywhere on your body.

I'd rather die than be turned into useless bacon.

Your examples are ridiculous. None of them make any sense as effective means of self-defense. — Thorongil

That's what you think. I can assure you that a phosphorus grenade will be a shitload more effective in deterring anyone who knows what it can do than any form of firearm. You happen to have a chance of surviving getting shot. Not sure you'd even want to survive a heavy phosphorus burn.

I never said one needed to kill someone with a gun to prevent a robbery. It's irritating having to repeat myself so often, but as I have said several times, defensive gun uses often don't involve firing a shot. — Thorongil

You have to be willing to kill. Otherwise you just bought a gun that someone might steal and use against you. A gun is useless if it's not backed by the willingness to fire.

You have no proof of that. This is just an appeal to extremes. — Thorongil

Proof of what? That fear is an effective tool of dissuasion? Bloddy hell, that's what your argument rests upon too!

I have the natural right to defend my life and property. — Thorongil

No, you do not have a natural right to defend your property. Or at least, that natural right is not recognized in the vast majority of modern legislature, where killing someone attempting to rob you is going to land you very quickly in jail.

Firearms are one proper means of defending my life and property. — Thorongil

So is nerve gas, phosphore grenades and impaling the heads of your enemies on spikes in front of your driveway. In fact, one could argue that there is little better than a little terrorism in order to guarantee one's safety.

Yeah, but what if the Brits decide to invade? You clearly won't be able to defend yourself with anything short of heavy artillery. Therefore, it is an inalienable natural right to own heavy artillery.

The (obvious, might I add) solution is to move to a place where home invasions are so uncommon that they do not register as valid reasons to alter your behavior. And if you still fell unsafe, because you're a big soft softy, then you should get a dog.

You are confusing media hype with actual computer science. That is exactly the point I'm making. Calling a classical program an "emergent algorithm" does not falsify the principles and laws of computer science. Calling it something it's not does have the benefit of drawing in credulous reporters and their readers, including you. — fishfry

This is entirely wrong and ignorant of the science at hand. And while I'm not a computer engineer, I do some pentesting in my free time, and know enough about distributed botnets to know that this is blatently wrong. Emergent algorithms are a class of algorithms that has been developped for the last 2 decades at least. It includes cellular automata, neural nets, swarm optimization, cluster formation, etc.

Take Chang and Perrig on emergent algorithms regarding cluster formation : "A
class of localized algorithms that are particularly promising are emergent algorithms. Emergent algorithms have the additional characteristic that the individual agents (i.e., the sensor nodes in the case of distributed sensor networks) only encode simple local behaviors and do not explicitly coordinate on a global scale. Through repeated interaction and feedback at the individual level, global properties emerge in the system as a whole.
Emergent behaviors are being studied extensivelyin biological, physical and social systems - such systems are often collectively termed complex adaptive sys-tems. Examples include ant colonies, ecosystems, and stock markets.
It is possible that emergent algorithms have the potential to be more flexible than non-emergent
localized algorithms, which are constrained by the fact that a complex global property may be difficult
to directly encode in a program that can act only upon local information."

Where, in that argument, do you see mention of materiality? There's none. What you have done is distinguished between two things, saying they aren't the same. They could still be made of the same stuff.

This is what I mean by saying that your argument doesn't weight in one way or another.

To put this another way, algorithms do not have emergent properties. — fishfry

Yeah. Ok. I was reading your post with a bit of a raised eyebrow, but this is the part where I know you are just pulling this crap out of your ass. Neural nets are an actual examples of emergent algorithms (that's literally how they are called!).

The question is, what can an AI think about the source of its existence? Can it understand that it was created by a creator? — Henri

Why would an AI dedicate resources to a question which is not relevant to it's operation?

And the creator's existence could not become a relevant factor unless we posit the AI to be fairly identical with a conscious agent.

sexual harassment is being taken more seriously and legal departments have come to realize that a zero tolerance policy is the only way for a business to safely govern itself — ProbablyTrue

The idea that only a minority of males can function in a zero-tolerance environment is kinda de la merde, tho.

I actually think that a smaller guerrilla force with less powerful weaponry can hold its own and even defeat stronger militaries, for the outcome of a war has as much if not more to do with the morale on either side as it does with advanced firepower. The U.S. has learned this the hard way in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. — Thorongil

Ukraine has shown us that privately owned tanks can make a hell of a difference in low-intensity conflicts.

Did you click on and read the link that defines clinical addiction? IF 11% of 183.3 million is more than 20 million, how is that a low percentage to you? — TimeLine

That's not how them stats works, tho.

Then you have a misunderstanding of what ethics is - in other words you have politicized your ethics. The two aren't the same. It's unethical to be gluttonous, but we're not going to make a criminal charge of it. — Agustino

Only because we live in times of plenty.
If you push the conditions, almost everything we tolerate could become of such importance that we would consider reasonnable to no longer be tolerant of it.
Such as the last man on an Earth filled with women refusing to reproduce because he happens to like dudes.

So you are saying that if there is a physical obstacle, like distance between the message and the recipient, which prevents the receiving of information, then info must be physical; because if it wasn't, then there could not be any physical obstacles. — Samuel Lacrampe

Well, that's not really the point I'm making, but I think this could be a great initial path of inquiry if you start again the interrogation taking for starting point the assumption that information is physical. If we exclude error in data-processing, can we find non-physical obstacles to communication beween two properly-primed processors? None come to mind easily.

I'm rather taking the more defensive position that the argument brought forth initially, the distinction between potential causes, does not actually weight in one way or another. I'm also criticizing the recourse to higher-level form of communication to treat information ontologically. Looking, feeling and hearing are all forms of information treatment which precedes the attribution of meaning in any epistemologically relevant way and the series of distinction between objectivity/subjectivity that necessarily comes muddle the analysis.

But this is not necessarily the case, because the physical container could simply act as a cause to the existence of the information, as opposed to being the information itself. — Samuel Lacrampe

What is the explanatory power of such a theory? Imagine two agents trying to communicate information from one to another. Unfortunately, despite all their best intentions and efforts, they fail. Agent B never understands whatever it is that Agent A wanted to say. So how does this ontology helps us? Can you explain in terms of the information and the information alone why B couldn't get A, without ever bringing up the container? It doesn't strike me as possible. However, the opposite does seem possible. I believe an explanation in terms of the physical treatment of the input, it's association with an index of common 'experiences' (in other terms, another piece of pre-processed information) would be able to explain away the situation.

I.e, the physical container is the efficient cause of information, not the formal cause. And a cause is a separate thing from its effect; therefore if this is true, then the container is a different thing than the information it causes to exist. — Samuel Lacrampe

You could reframe this in terms of an emergentist account of the informational property of matter. I think, all in all, this is all that the application of aristotelean metaphysics can lead to, on this subject. Again, this does not really support your argument. It can as well support the idea that information is material as the idea that it isn't.

Depends on the perks level of your kickstarter.