Equivocation. That's the word I looked for! Thanks. There are two different meanings for "exist". Which ones? I can exist while not existing at the same time. — SoftEdgedWonder

Not much of an explanation.

he cannot be telling the truth — I love Chom-choms

Yes, the person who utters the words, "I don't exist" is lying but the reason why you came to that conclusion is because it's self-refuting or self-contradictory. See reductio ad absurdum.

No contradiction here. Just two different meanings of "to exist". — SoftEdgedWonder

Equivocation! Interesting, explain please.

for chrissake MF, there is abundant documented evidence with vast scientific consensus. Only a fool would deny it. — Wayfarer

I'll only believe in man-induced climate change if the observed global warming (rising temperatures) perfectly matches that predicted based on human-activity-related CO2 emissions.

Bollicks — Wayfarer

:lol: Where's the evidence for climate change? :chin:

How is this a paradox? — I love Chom-choms

It's self-refuting, it amounts to saying: I exist AND I don't exist, a classic contradiction!

Yes.

Yes. — SoftEdgedWonder

oh please. We haven't discovered America yet. We don't know how to kindle fires yet. We don't know if germs cause disease yet. — Wayfarer

You have zero reason to doubt climate change, other than the misinformation you've been fed.
6m — Olivier5

I'm not a climate change denier myself but it doesn't seem to enjoy the same level of certainty like, say, the existence of the sun. Nobody denies the latter but a significant number of people, scientists among them, have serious misgivings about the former. The jury's still out, I'm afraid.

Remember (to all members), climate change activists make two claims:

1. There's climate change (global warming + extreme weather).

2. Human activity is causing this.

Those are extraordinary claims. How can one species have an impact on such scales? The Sagan standard applies.

Basically, we don't know if climate change is real/not.
— TheMadFool

???? It's VERY real! — SoftEdgedWonder

I have my doubts. Firstly, is it real? Secondly, have we found its cause, are humans to blame?

That said, my point is, let's give the naysayers their due and meet them halfway by admitting we aren't sure but then they'll have to come up with a strategem to deal with this unknown. Which is the best course of action - assume climate change is real or assume climate change isn't real? Game theoretically speaking.

CO2 scrubbers

Artificial photosynthesis



Let's say climate activists haven't been able to make the case for global warming. Basically, we don't know if climate change is real/not.

Humans pride themselves as great strategists, we've even established a discipline that studies strategizing (game theory) and let's not forget to mention how much we praise good planning whether in the civilian or military sector.

What's the best gameplan for us given that we don't know the truth about climate change? Should we assume climate change is real or should we assume it isn't and act accordingly?

It seems that the whole issue of climate change is a problem in game theory. Go figure.

[Soma] Sounds like alcohol in present times — SoftEdgedWonder

You maybe onto something.

In the Vedic tradition, soma is a ritual drink of importance among the early Vedic Indo-Aryans. The Rigveda mentions it, particularly in the Soma Mandala. Gita mentions the drink in Chapter 9. It is equivalent to the Iranian haoma. — Soma

Did Aldous Huxley take a page out of Indo-Aryan culture. What if, what Huxley predicts already happened, a failed social expermient lost to history?

Like all your "paradoxes", Fool, this one too is only apparent. :yawn: — 180 Proof

:smile:

Now we wait until transhumanism lets us predict what the future holds so that we make no further mistakes in the field of transhumanism ;) — Hermeticus

Sounds like a plan! :up:

It's impossible to predict what the future holds. What now?
— TheMadFool

Not really. The future will bring chaos, barren soil, reduction of biodiversity, more pollution, suffering, fire and water, superstorms and superlightnings, stupidity, the first trillionair (in dollars), poverty at max, acid rain again, crumbling towers, and if we're lucky some exploding thermonuclear devices. It remains to be seen if a movie will be made about his era — SoftEdgedWonder

Doomsayer!

Well, I raised the novel on that other "transhumanism thread" with David Pearce (yours is the very next post). Better late than never I suppose ...
Both Brave New World's "soma" and (inversely) A Clockwork Orange's "Ludovico Technique" come to mind, but much more invasively and totalitarian.
— 180 Proof — 180 Proof

What is soma?

Soma is a drug that is handed out for free to all the citizens of the World State. In small doses, soma makes people feel good. In large doses, it creates pleasant hallucinations and a sense of timelessness. The citizens of the World State are encouraged to take soma by “hypnopaedic” sayings like “A gram is better than a damn.” When they experience strong negative emotions, citizens take a soma “holiday” to distract them from the unpleasant feelings. John sees soma as a tool of social control. He says that taking soma makes the citizens of the World State “slaves.” — Brave New World, Q & A

The Ludovico Technique

Alex is convicted of murder and sentenced to 14 years in Wandsworth Prison. His parents visit one day to inform him that Georgie has been killed in a botched robbery. Two years into his term, he has obtained a job in one of the prison chapels, playing music on the stereo to accompany the Sunday Christian services. The chaplain mistakes Alex's Bible studies for stirrings of faith; in reality, Alex is only reading Scripture for the violent or sexual passages. After his fellow cellmates blame him for beating a troublesome cellmate to death, he is chosen to undergo an experimental behaviour modification treatment called the Ludovico Technique in exchange for having the remainder of his sentence commuted. The technique is a form of aversion therapy, in which Alex is injected with nausea-inducing drugs while watching graphically violent films, eventually conditioning him to become severely ill at the mere thought of violence. As an unintended consequence, the soundtrack to one of the films, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, renders Alex unable to enjoy his beloved classical music as before. — Wikipedia

This is the paradox of psychology. It takes a human brain to realize that the human brain is an animal brain after all - trainable just like animals. The human brain is not an animal brain (the former can do things the latter can't) and yet, it is an animal brain (we can train humans just like we can train animals).

Sheldon Trains Penny



Transhumanism must deal with the paradox of hedonism formulated by Henry Sidgwick.

Paradox of hedonism:

When one pursues happiness itself, one is miserable; but, when one pursues something else, one achieves happiness. — Wikipedia

I think there's a sort of golden rule when it comes to humans and technology: Any technology will be used and abused in a way that wasn't intended.

Since transhumanism aims at the limits of human beings, there may be limitless potential there. The concept in itself is intriguing to me. With the knowledge of how to adapt an organism, it seems like the obvious next step to bring forth artificial evolutionary change rather than wait on the slow process of biological evolution.

The great concern remains with my first statement. Generally I am in support of transhumanism - but I have no doubt that somewhere down the line someone would do something awful with it. It doesn't have to be intentional either. We often misjudge the causal effect of our actions — Hermeticus

There will be byproducts, some beneficial, others harmful beyond imagination. It's impossible to predict what the future holds. What now?

Read Brave New World. — unenlightened

TheMadFool must...grunt...download...grunt...Brave New World...grunt!

I'm not sure but desensitization/habituation understood in terms of causal ineffectiveness seems relevant. I mean, we're, as per biologists, products of evolution and that to me requires a reduction in, sometimes also expansion of, the set of things that have causal import on an organism.

A few examples should help make my point. Sound is not a phenomenon viruses and bacteria need to be sensitive to and so, in a sense, they've evolved in ways that make them tune out sound (reduction in the causal field) but humans, at our scale, need sound sensing powers for survival and so we've developed ears, sound receptors (expansion of the causal field). By causal field I refer to all objects (matter/energy) that can elicit a response, produce an effect, in an organism.

In essence, the causal field is finely adjusted in terms of how important a particular, in your words, "stimulus" is for survival. Those stimuli like e.g. the gravitational pull of Saturn on our bodies that are always present and yet have no significance to our survival (astrology :chin: ) are those we become desensitized/habituated to i.e. we will no longer feel them and they lose their ability to influence our lives. Perhaps a particularly sensitive person or organism can, if it/fae tries, actually sense the gravity well of Saturn, other planets, the sun, the milky way and other galaxies; after all we are in their sphere of influence. :chin:

So, yes, we may have a fragmented picture of reality but, interestingly, our bodies are, let's just say, in the thick of everything going on, not just in your immediate vicinity, but also in the entire universe itself. We should then, in principle, be able to sense everything that's happening in the cosmos. Do we need to evolve sense organs or is the mind/brain, by itself, adequate (ESP)? I dunno, you tell me.

transcending the Darwinian shitshow — Zugzwang

:up: Not transcending it; rather steering it.

You have no idea about the impact dreams and daydreams have had on the world.
— TheMadFool

Unfortunately, letting go has had little impact. — praxis

I was talking about dreaming & daydreaming.

Mind and body are inextricably linked. — praxis

The core of Buddhism is about letting go. Transhumanism seems to be about grasping, in the form of daydreaming. — praxis

But I don't think that Aristotle meant that too much of everything is bad. If he meant that that he is stupid but we know that he is not stupid.
He probably meant that as one gets farther from the right way , they approach the extremes. So the rights way or the truth is not bad even if it is too much because the that statement doesn't apply to truth.
Same as how in Buddhism, the law of impermanence doesn't apply to the Noble Truths. If they did then Buddha's philosophy would not hold. — I love Chom-choms

See Paradox Of Self-reference.

Please explain what you mean. I don't understand. — I love Chom-choms

Too much of everything is bad.

Ergo,

Too much of too much of everything is bad is bad too.

Again, I mostly agree. Now this may be splitting hair, but I wonder if it's worth making the distinction between passively following the will of others and willingly following it. What I have in mind is the Christian notion that ought to will the will of God. This act is different than a non-agent following the will of God in a deterministic way. — Samuel Lacrampe

I agree there's a distinction to be made but look at it this way: Imagine you see a person complying with another person's instructions. Can you tell, from that alone, whether this person is doing so willingly (free) /unwillingly (not free)? No! Therein lies the rub.

I like to call Aristotle's notion of the golden mean Too Logic Of The Golden Mean. Whatever else the word "too" means, it carries a distinctly negative connotation of both deficit (too less) and surplus (too much).

However, Aristotle's Golden Mean, if applied reflexively to itself means there's such a thing as too Golden Meanish. Go figure!

That's no answer. What means getting along? No quareling or fighting? Why not? It's nice to fight once in a while. — Inplainsight

You're committing the status quo fallacy.

The core of Buddhism is about letting go. Transhumanism seems to be about grasping, in the form of daydreaming. — praxis

You have no idea about the impact dreams and daydreams have had on the world.

Also, mind remodeling isn't the same as a body makeover.

How? It seems all the more important, given how karma works, to, in this present life, take measures through good deeds to ensure our next life is as good or even better which includes getting the opportunity to learn buddhism and reacquaint ourselves with karma.
— TheMadFool
I have the impression that you think of Buddhist teachings as having the same coercive, commanding, universally binding nature as those in Christianity.

If karma is real, any ability/disability, any advantage/disadvantage we possess/experience is an effect of our actions in a past life.
No, see my post above. Hard karmic determinism is wrong view.

However, buddhism doesn't leave us without any means to remedy/improve our condition - it also informs us that we can, in this life, do good in order that our next life is better than this, the present.
— TheMadFool

Not only that, it teaches that (with some exceptions), we can attain enlightenment in this lifetime, we're not automatically doomed to work hard and wait for a future lifetime.


I maybe wrong of course but, if there's a chance factor in all this, even the best laid out plans for nirvana that span many future lives would be a waste of time. I could, god forbid, lead a life of debauchery, even order genocide and torture, in most horrible ways possible, and, by a stroke of luck, become enlightened. Nirvana, then, is nothing more than a game of die - about lucky people, not good people.
— TheMadFool
This is not what the Buddha of the Pali Canon teaches.

That you have concerns about the implications of luck and concerns about nirvana depending on luck is one thing, but what the Buddha of the Pali Canon teaches is another thing, and they should clearly be kept separate. — baker

:ok:

If a certain group is under the impression that its belief system is the right one (orthodoxa = right belief), that group will also consider it a duty/responsibility to edify others of it.
— TheMadFool
Not at all.

Rather, my intuition is that such an individual or group who is certain to have found The Truth will protect it, seek to keep it for themselves, and share it only with those who prove themselves worthy of it. — baker

Are you saying some people are unworthy of the truth, orthodoxa (right belief), which is just another way of saying some people should suffer? Whatever belief system tells you that is surely not the right one.

All I can say is that we're discussing validity, about the form of an argument and inasmuch as that matters, the conclusion follows from the premises.

So, there's no difference between an evil person and (say) a bodhisattva - the difference in their deeds, one cruel, the other kind, means nothing and even if it did, that can be easily compensated for/reduced to naught by the vagaries of chance.
— TheMadFool

I just don't understand how you come to that conclusion on the basis of what I said.

To recap - there's an element of chance in life. Buddhism is not deteminist, it doesn't say that everything that happens is determined by karma or the past. But karma nevertheless remains a prime determinant of one's experience and quality of life. As I said, it's a deep topic, I'm not claiming to be an expert in it, but can't see how you're reaching such conclusions. — Wayfarer

Well, I'm acquainted with some Tibetan monks and they have a concept of luck and they believe that it can be accumulated just like good karma by performing kind acts. In short, the lucky and the morally upright can't be distinguished from each other i.e. luck is just another way karma manifests itself in our lives or, to put it another way, there's no such thing as luck, it's all your past karma, good or bad.

Do more reading. Perhaps something like this book might be helpful, as it explains Buddhism from the point of view of philosophy. Here is the author profile.

There's also a relatively recent book specifically about karma here https://g.co/kgs/NctqCc — Wayfarer

I'll take that advice. Thanks. As you said, karma is a deep subject and I should know better than shoot my mouth off before carefully studying it.

That is what we are facing when we are engaged in some sort of discourse against, or together with, the end-of-science theorists. Rule number one -- exactitude. If science were religion, a crippling doubt because we'd forgone causality and opted instead towards probability, is unholy.

Another source of complaint is the tendency to reduce everything and anything to equation. One that could possibly fit on a surface of a thumbnail. What does it mean? Reductionism and simplification. Keep in mind that cycle theorists believe in social sciences. And rightly so. What's good for the goose is good for the gander is false! — Caldwell

:up: I just read a book a coupla weeks ago and below is a quote from it,

Archaeological digs of settlements dating back to Neolithic times have revealed a disproportionately high density of heel bones of sheep or other animals among the shattered pottery and flints that are usually found in sites that humans once inhabited. These bones are in fact ancestors of my casino dice. When thrown, these bones naturally land on one of four sides. Often there are letters or numbers carved into the bones. Rather than gambling, these early dice are thought to have been used for divination. And this connection between the outcome of a roll of a dice and the will of the gods is one that has persisted for centuries. Knowledge of how the dice would land was believed to be something that transcended human understanding. It's outcome was in the lap of gods. — Marcus du Sautoy (What we cannot know)

Science has always been about a clockwork, deterministic, universe and, from what I can gather, its main selling point is the precision (to the 10th decimal place I'm told) of its predictions. Science, if it could speak, is telling us, "surely, if my predictions are that precise, I couldn't be wrong."

We enter the era of quantum physics and science loses that ability - forget about how accurate science can be about what'll happen, it can't even tell us what'll happen. This - indeterminacy - is the spanner in the works of science.

I suppose, as Marcus du Sautoy (see quote above) writes in his book, Quantum Mechanics opens a door through which a lot of what's been classified as woo-woo (religion, mysticism, to name a few) can make their way into scientific territory and set up house.

Coming to equations, I don't mind it; in fact, it's fascinating that all the complex phenomena we see around us can be expressed in such succinct mathematical statements. It's not reductionist or simplification, it's more of a synopsis, objects and events summarized to the bare essentials. What we say in so many words in natural language is, in mathematical language, one or two, max, lines of equations.

I compare transhumanism to buddhism. Both are on the same page - abolition of suffering - but their methodologies are poles apart - buddhism is about remodeling the mind to deal with the issue and transhumanism aims to solve the problem by modifying the body.

Anyone who's acquainted with buddhism will make the connection. I'd even go so far as to say that transhumanism is buddhism adapted to science in general and technology in particular. If buddhism makes sense, it does, transhumanism does too.

Was this meant to refute something that I have previously said? Otherwise, I agree with that description of free will. I would just add that you also have the ability to say yes to the will of others, if that is also your will. — Samuel Lacrampe

Affirmation (yes) is what inanimate, non-free, objects do. They follow (comply with) the laws of nature - falling, flowing, breaking, etc. - and our will too - moving to wherever we wish and staying put until we decide to move them elsewhere.

Animals to some extent but humans for certain are notoriously rebellious; not to say we don't obey rules/laws but we can, if we so desire, resist/defy any and all regulations, only fear keeping us in line as it were. Negation (no) then is what free will is about.

People who aren't karmically predisposed to worry about karma don't lose sleep over karma, so the above concern is moot. — baker

How? It seems all the more important, given how karma works, to, in this present life, take measures through good deeds to ensure our next life is as good or even better which includes getting the opportunity to learn buddhism and reacquaint ourselves with karma.

However, I sense from this post of yours and from some others that your concern is about something else as well. It seems you hold that "all men were created equal" and when you consider that Buddhism doesn't hold such a belief in the equality of all men (or humans), this causes you unease. Is this so? — baker

If karma is real, any ability/disability, any advantage/disadvantage we possess/experience is an effect of our actions in a past life. We have to come to terms with that at the soonest. However, buddhism doesn't leave us without any means to remedy/improve our condition - it also informs us that we can, in this life, do good in order that our next life is better than this, the present.

:roll: Read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. — 180 Proof

:ok:

Religion is dope to help some cope. — James Riley

Nicely put! :up:

[...] A low frequency of recidivism, on the other hand, would mean we can override our "programming."
— TheMadFool
Indeed, I think that may work. The following assumptions would have to be true:
1. The inclination for recidivism would always or almost always have to be present.
2. If free will exists, many criminals would freely choose to not repeat the crimes.

we can compare humans with artificial entities
— TheMadFool
That sounds correct. The robot would have to be virtually the same as the human subject in every way - e.g. same memories, inclinations, situation, etc. - minus free will.

Hopefully there exist arguments on free will that don't rely on waiting on this level of technology haha. — Samuel Lacrampe

The ability to negate/say no to is the key to freedom and thus, by extension, also free will. To comply/agree/say yes to means one has surrendered to forces beyond oneself and to the will of others, basically losing one's autonomy.

Why should orthodoxy entail a religious responsibility to convert people? — baker

If a certain group is under the impression that its belief system is the right one (orthodoxa = right belief), that group will also consider it a duty/responsibility to edify others of it.

What makes it impossible that 3 is false? — Metaphysician Undercover

1. If P then Q
2. P
Ergo,
3. Q — TheMadFool

3 has to be true; no possible world exists where 1 and 2 are true with 4 false.

As for temporal aspects of sufficient and necessary conditions and causality, we can forgo discussion on them for they muddy the waters.

Of course. If you think that Nirvāṇa can be won by some contrivance then you are indeed wasting your time, and indeed many of these discussion are likely the same.

Let’s just point out that the whole purpose of the Buddhist path is not gaining something - Nirvāṇa is not like ‘winning the jackpot’ or having everything go your way. Consider what the Buddha gained by setting out on his path - nothing whatever. Instead he gave up a comfortable living, wife and child in exchange for a begging bowl. In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha says ‘I have attained supreme enlightenment, and gained nothing by it.’ It’s a hard saying, but true. — Wayfarer

So, there's no difference between an evil person and (say) a bodhisattva - the difference in their deeds, one cruel, the other kind, means nothing and even if it did, that can be easily compensated for/reduced to naught by the vagaries of chance. The buddha then wasn't a good guy, he was just one helluva lucky dude. Something's off, no? You're contradicting the law of karma but you already knew that.

What do you mean by getting along? — Robotictac

If you have to ask that question, maybe I should be getting along.