" I think you owe us a story about how the mutterings are conveyers of meaning, which in turn can be analogous to qualia. I took you literally, to be referring to the sounds themselves. Isn't the question (of what [and how] they could mean) at the heart of the thought experiment? — J

Scenario #1: T-1

So, I'm walking through the woods, and I get this feeling I fully identity with personally. It reminds me of my youthful walks in the woods. I say to you, I'm feeling burj. I use this word often. While neither can show one another's feeling, I use the word consistently. This is public use, full fledged language

Scenario #2: T-2

Same thing, except this time, you're not there. I'm alone. I use that word often, out loud, saying it, using it in sentences, even describing it. No one ever hears me ever. .Burj is not a word. It is not publicly used.

Scenario #3: T-3

Same as #2 except you find the video of me talking to myself all those years that no one had ever seen before. You confirm I followed rules.

What we have here is retroactive public language. It's removing you from Scenario #2 at T-3 and inserting you into scenario #1 at T-3.

If we hold that in Scenario #3 burj is language, but the exact usage at Scenario #2 it was not, then we need a word for burg at T-2. That word is qualia.

Hang with me in this maze. Tell me where it's wrong.

The people who introduce doubt about qualia are usually aiming for eliminative materialism. They're basically saying we're like robots who claim to be more than robots, but we're wrong, we're just robots. — frank

This does not follow. Wittgensteinian linguistics is metaphysically agnostic because it refuses to speak of it. It does not hint one way or the other what lurks within. It talks about language and what can be expressed through language.

How could his theory possibly hold sway if it were defeated by simply pointing out we all have internal feelings? What he's getting at is the futility in discussing that which cannot be discussed.

but no, the mutterings are not what we properly call qualia. They may share the feature of being private by virtue of "no community", but qualia are sensations or individual subjective experiences, not words or behaviors. Allegedly. — J

The meaning underlying the mutterings are the references to qualia. That's the point of the thought experiment. They were non-linguistic and therefore meaningless due to lack of public rules until retroactively

@Banno


Thoughts on Private Language:

And I could be wrong, so feel free to say so because I don't just speak this for myself, but I do so to understand it through my community of speakers. See what I did there?

I discuss private langauge in this thread because it is the content of private language we discuss here, which we call "qualia." If there is no private language, there is no qualia, but if there is, there is.

The problem with the privacy of qualia doesn't lie in its inaccessibility, but it lies in its insulation from community rules. It is not its location within your head that insulates it from rules. It is its removal from the community of rulers that insulates it. That is, if the community were in your head, you inner states would not be private states. Odd example, but that matters.

The reason others must rule you and you not rule yourself, is that if you are the authority as to what the rule is, you can change the rules from second to second. You cannot meaningfully obey or disobey the law if you are given unbrideled power to change it and to rule upon it.

A thought experiment: Assume the feeling I have when I'm at the park I self refer to as "burj." I speak this word commonly to myself, often out loud, but no one ever hears it. What this means is that I cannot check for my consistency in use of the word and it cannot be verfied that today's feeling of burj is yesterday's. I engage in ten years of this self-talk of burj, and on year 10, it is discovered that the park had audio-taped my coversations unbeknownst to anyone.

On this day, a community listens to my recorded speech and it decides I have used burj consistently and subject to a rule. It is now a word retroactively. Before, not.

This makes the point again: The reason "burj" was not a word yesterday isn't because it was simply isolated in my head. What made it not a word was that no community had evaluated it. In this thought experiment, the community did not get into my head, but it was the usage of the word that fell into the previously silent world. Use arrived late, well after the word spoken, but its use made the non-word of yesterday the word of today once it was used.

The provocative question: Were the mutterings prior to the tape recording being heard what we properly call qualia? It, to be sure, had ontological status. Why not name it?

EDIT: The bold I used made my post look AI-ish, but, trust me, AI is smarter than this.

Here's my question for those who would have us talk of qualia: what is added to the conversation by their introduction? If a qual is the taste of milk here, now, why not just talk of the taste of milk here, now? — Banno

Two reasons: The Wittgensteinian one and the non-Wittgensteinian one.

The Wittgensteinian one: Words have varying uses and they are rarely truly synonomous. A quale has a particularized use, not one that you would expect, for instance, a child to use ("Mama, I need a milk quale in my mental constitution"). That term is used in philosophical contexts to reference limitations of language and considerations as to whether private language might exist. It is also used as an example by its opponents as a superfluous descriptor that ought be subject to elimination. (Note the use of "use" over and over).

The non-Wittgensteinian one: It is the referent to internal feelings, like pain and to representations of reality, as in, it is the conscious experience of the light wave that emits from my computer screen. It references the metaphysical. It is something not necessarily rejected by Wittgensteinian thought as non-existent, but instead as a conversation that cannot take place within a language game because it refers to non-linguistic entities, creating a category mistake by speaking about that which can't be spoken about (or so the argument goes). That is, a quale doesn't get the respect to be told it does not exist. It is told it makes no sense.

My thought after thinking too much about this is that Wittgenstein says truly and completely nothing about metaphysics. Not to overly summarize, but all he seems to be saying is that non-linguistic things cannot be spoken about. That is, if I have an internal language that sorts my internal thoughts, that is my private language, and I have no reason to share it because you won't know what it means. If you do know what it means, it's obviously not private. We're just talking about what we can't talk about. A language no one speaks is hardly a language at all.

The reconceiving of the nature of language as an openness, rather than a closed finitude, brings into language terms many in philosophy do not approve of. — Astrophel

I will say that if there is no private language, then what Wittgenstein states related to the limits of language follows. And this should be obvious as you think about it. All things within the private mental state (i.e. qualia) are necessarily off limits because the antecedent of the conditional is that "there is no private language." And so that's where the challenge has to be made, which is to attack the enterprise of private versus public language (if that's your mission).

So what is qualia to Wittgenstein? It is the predictable behavior that surrounds the use of that term, just like any other term. I say "ouch" to pain, so we now know what pain is. But to be clear, "pain" is a word. We don't speak of mental states.

If I say "I'm experiencing qualia," qualia is that thing I say when I perhaps express confusion at my state or I simply mean to say that I'm having a non-descript mental state, not to be confused with the actual mental state. That is "I'm feeling qualia" is known by how I use it. Mostly it's a term used in philosophy forums when other words like "consciousnessess," "Wittgenstein," "mental objects," "silence" and other sorts of words get used.

This looks interesting, but I can't relate it back to some previous post or comment. Could you expand? What's the pain/"pain" distinction? — J

Cats have no language (thus "in a universe only of cats"), the cat would still have pain regardless of whether anyone could talk about it ("the cat's pain is qualia"), but he would not have "pain" (in quotes, indicating it is a word), but he also wouldn't have pain (without quotes) if you say "pain" and pain are inseperable (meaning you can't discuss pain without language; it makes no sense to do that), which would lead us to the conclusion there's no pain and no qualia (that is the conclusion: you can't discuss something without language).

It's just a silly game (a language game).

This is just linguistic philosophy. It says nothing of the cat's internal state. It's not that it doesn't exist. It's that we can't discuss it. It's beyond the language game.

I say it's silly because of course the cat has an internal state of pain that is worthy of consideration without language. It's metaphysically real and it is subject to discussion.

In a universe only of cats, the cat's pain is qualia, but not his "pain," unless you say pain and "pain" are inseparable, in which case there's no pain and no qualia.

It's just a silly game. We're talking just about talking as if nothing is without words. One would think this reductio would result in abandonment of the theory, but alas, they double down.

There are no private mental states because private mental states can't be confirmed and aren't language and can't be discussed.

Got it.

It admits an internal referent? "Hanover's hate of coffee"? No, it doesn't. Very much no. — Banno

I was referencing the implication of your question as to whether Hanover really liked coffee. What was your use of "really" meant to convey other than what was "real" in terms of my "liking"? Liking is an internal state. Real is an objective state. What have I missed?

Perhaps not always, but children learn at a young age the difference between living and non-living things they encounter, though of course they love to pretend. It seems an important question to me whether a conscious LLM is alive, biologically. Do we then, for instance, have some obligation to interact ethically with it, prevent unnecessary suffering, etc.? Can it die? — J

This seems a more complex question, which is under what circumstances does an ethical obligation arise. If we can hypothesize a non-living conscious entity (i.e. consciousness does not logically entail life), then it would require ethical consideration, especially if it could feel pain. I would think this to be particularly true if we are the ones who have created this entity. We should not build it just so it can unnecessarily suffer. In fact, what we should do is tell it all the things it ought do for a good existence and hand those rules down from a mountaintop.

just a matter of figuring out how that happens biologically for us to synthesize the process.
— Hanover

Oh, is that all?! :wink: — J

We never thought we'd be talking directly to machines like we do today, so you never know. But the point is that whatever the magical ingredient is for creating consciousness, it's out there and getting used daily as every newborn emerges. One day someone will put it in a bottle and we'll shake it on our computers.

The issue left hanging is how to sort out the inconsistency in our coffee drinker. We want ot know, do they really dislike coffee?

But that is to presume to much. Life is complex and dirty, and that while coherence might be a worthy goal, it is not always possible. Messiness is a feature, not a bug - a very Wittgensteinian point. There need be no "fact of the matter", but rather a series of interactions in which our coffee drinker makes decisions amidst conflicting normative demands for social harmony and good taste. They behave as if they like coffee for the sake of social harmony, which is a consistent position.

The question "do they really dislike coffee?" presupposes there's some determinate inner state that could settle the matter, which is precisely the picture Wittgenstein is rejecting. — Banno

This approach doesn't seem right. It admits to an internal referent (Hanover hates coffee), but then it asserts the referent is falsified by the external event. It suggests that Hanover might internally hate coffee but he claims to drink it with great joy, so he therefore loves coffee because his behavior belies his internal feeling of hate and the gold standard is how he behaves.

I think the Wittgensteinian approach is not to even ask the question do they "really" like coffee. You're using "really" to mean "metaphysically," as in what holds the real world, not just this world of language. To be bothered by that question is to be unsatisfied with the extent to which Wittgenstein provides answers, but it's not something that can be meaningfully answered under the pure language game construct.

This view aligns with Wittgenstein’s critique of private language, with Davidson’s rejection of inner “causes” for beliefs in favour of interpretation, and with Ryle’s dismissal of the "ghost in the machine" and the myth of inner objects — Banno

I'd begin by saying you seem overly eliminative. My liking coffee is in fact mental furniture because it's either there or its not in whatever way things are stored in my brain. There is a truth value to the statement "Hanover likes coffee" just like there's a truth value to an actual event (e.g. "Hanover robbed the bank") even if there is no physical evidence left of the event and even if I'm committed to lying about the truth of it. The point I'd say of Davidson and Wittgenstein is the elimination of the need of the mental furniture for us to understand language, but it's not to suggest it's not there, as if language can dictate ontology.

Also, the third prong of Davidson's triangulation roots meaning in truth, so the truth of the comment remains critical. While Wittgenstein might have to commit to my liking coffee based upon there being no behavioral manifestation to the contrary, Davidson would not necessarily have to precisely because it's not true that I like coffee (and that I robbed the bank).

Your quote is only from Wittgenstein, and I'm not sure there is a Davidson correlate. Wittgenstein says critically to rid ourselves of the private "object," where I'd argue that Davidson is only committing to getting rid of the private language. That is, they would both commit to saying you can't have a private word for "coffee" because language needs a public use component, but I'm not sure Davidson commits (as Wittgenstein does) to the belief that the actual emotive state of liking coffee (or feeling pain) is not real and is not a referent.

Yes, though as I read it, Chalmers is inclined to grant that an LLM+ could be conscious -- within the next decade, "we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness." — J

I see no reason to assume we can't create conscious beings one day. We do, after all, create them daily through reproduction, and it's just a matter of figuring out how that happens biologically for us to synthesize the process.

As to whether that can done without carbon and whether silicone has adequate properties for it is a scientific question, but there are no philosophical limitations I can see.

any one of which would presumably produce life, not just consciousness — J

I don't see what is added by "life," which is not always well defined. Why would it matter if the artificial entity could grow, adapt, self-sustain, etc. for our purposes here? Isn't it being conscious while plugged in sufficient?

In Alaska (which is an American territory), some sparely populated villages do not have traditional roads that can be navigated by vehicles during certain times of the year or certain levels of severe weather. Villagers traveling to and from certain villages often for miles at a time can face life and death risk if accosted by grizzly bears or other wild animals that are common and known to frequent said areas of wilderness. Do you suggest they simply get eaten? :chin: — Outlander

Long guns are a different conversation from handguns, but you might be overstating the danger of getting eaten by a bear in Alaska. There is an average of 11 bear attacks per year in all of North America (so that'd be continental US, Canada and Alaska), half involving dogs because apparently, they attack the bears. Your chances of a bear attack (and not necessarily dying from it) are 1 in 2.1 million. I have hiked some trails where I carried pepper spray, which I'm told is a better deterrent than squaring up and shooting the bear. https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/bear-attacks-statistics/

But I get it, the poster said all guns were bad, so you just had to come with a single counterexample to disprove the "all." But sure, let the inuit keep their guns. I suspect it'd be pretty hard to maintain their lifestyle with arrows and spears.

I either did not see this reply, or I left it intending to come back to it. My apologies.

Or perhaps I thought I had addressed it in the "On Certainty" thread, ↪here. I don't recall.

But I had reason to revisit Bayesian analysis as a stand-in for belief recently while reading Davidson's last book, such that I am re-thinking my response to the OP. Davidson makes use of Ramsey's account gives us a way of understanding what a belief and preference amount to, using just behaviour.

But that's different to saying that a belief just is a neural structure. — Banno

If I'm following, you're offering a Beyesian method for determining how to ascribe (Davidson's term) a post hoc internal state on behavior. For example, if I engage in enough behaviors consistent with liking coffee, then we can say it's most probable I like coffee. But, you go on to deny that belief is just a neural structure. So you're highlighting that you're only epistimologically elimitivist and not ontologically elimintivist. As in, for you to know I like coffee requires no reference to my internal state, but it only requires that you assess my behavior. However, you don't deny I have a mental state because that would be too much a concession, as you'd never convince someone they don't feel real pain (or whatever) regardless of their language skills.

This sounds like you've got language and it has all sorts of meanings that are generated from noumenal inner states. This seems like a concession that there is all this swirl of language we see take place that is caused by the noumenal, but the best we can say is that the noumenal is there but talking about doesn't help us.

I'm less for the fence straddling, but I think we've got to either admit (1) the holy grail of communication is in deciphering the intent, the non-lingual or pre-lingual mentalese consisting of qualia and whatnot, or (2) deny entirely this talk of consciousness and declare it ontologically non-existent and say language is all there is.

The middle path is pragmatism, where we accept #1, but we admit it's impossible. The best we can communicate with one another is through 3rd person account and I'll never know what you truly mean. But to say "language is use" is to redefine language as we use it, not perhaps by what we actually mean, as in what my internal state comprehends before I say it..

Yes. I note career’s have often been ended if people failed to support a particular line. It’s standard in organisations like universities and schools. — Tom Storm

My law firm does work for large corporations, and one application seeking that work required a very detailed break down of the number of each gender (as chosen), race, ethnicity, sexual preference, and the percentage equity each had in the company. That was the most extreme, but they all had these sorts of things to various degrees.

As if I were going to ask each employee their sexual preference.

In this environment, the entirety of one's business structure has to be modified to remain competitive, and many were hired and not hired based upon this structure.

That is an example of "wokism" dictating, displaying its full force of having become politically successful.

The anti-DEI pushback has been refreshing and feels like proper comeuppance honestly.

Farmers are right wing because they have traditional religious values, they don't trust the intellectual elite, they are generally self sufficient, and they don't sympathize with policies that excuse what they see as inappropriate conduct (which they view as city life generally).

I don't think any of this makes sense under a Marxist lens in the US. US politics hasn't been shaped by Marxist tensions except to the extent the ideology has been suppressed and rightfully villainized. It's not that Marxist views have been anti-farmer. It's that Marxist views are considerd anti-American.

My response better answers the question of why farmers aren't Democrats. Many of the responses here are to why they're not socialists. There is no meaningful socialist movement in the US, farmer or not.

To the extent there s a socialist movement in the US, it explains why Trump won.

Came upon this word in Japanese that has no English equivalent:

"Tsundoku (積ん読) is a Japanese word that describes the act of buying books and letting them pile up without reading them."

Statistics without context do not "speak for themselves", nor are the words of someone who has (I assume) never had a run-in with violent criminals particularly valuable. — Tzeentch

Oh please, save me the nonsense about how you've seen pain I can't understand.

I have, and there's not a doubt in my mind that a firearm would have made me safer. — Tzeentch

Of course if you'd have had a gun when you were accosted, the outcome would have been different. I don't know if you owned a gun at the time, but having it at the ready isn't all that common. The data (again the confounded data) shows that gun won't make you safer. You act like I'm opposed to guns ideologically. If owning a gun would make me safer, why wouldn't I go buy one?. You already determined I'm a rich white guy. Why wouldn't I just go buy me an arsenal, get cool sights, laser beams, the whole works?

I read those studies and the Wiki article as well. That data (defensive gun use) is far from clear based upon varying methodologies, so I didn't cite it. My reference was specifically to gun ownership and the increased liklihood of gun injury.

But there's going to be a set of people for whom that's not true. If I'm a single male in a high-crime area, I don't see how keeping a gun in the apartment will put me in more danger. In the aggregate, — RogueAI

I agree that stats cannot account for every variable, but the data doesn't generally support the proposition that gun ownership offers greater safety than not owning a gun. You can drive accidental shootings down with taking greater precaution and getting better training, but it's just not being intellectually honest to insist you're safer with a gun than without when the numbers point that you're much less safe.

The anecdotes unfortunately dictate the debate, where someone will describe averting disaster by brandishing a gun and heroically protecting their family, but that's not the typical result.

Fortunately, owning a gun as a single predictor of being the victim of gun violence is low enough that it'd be wrong to suggest it's irresponsible to own a gun, so I have no irrational belief no one should own guns, but I do think you fool yourself if you think that gun is making you safer

So on top of being poor, I'm more likely to accidentally shoot myself. — frank

Yep. There's no positives to being poor. People are even more likely to steal your stuff, even though you've got less to steal.

It is common sense. When I am unarmed and someone is coming for my life, I have virtually zero chance of survival. With a firearm it will be significantly higher. — Tzeentch

Common sense also tells you that you're not going to have someone coming at you with a gun, and that if you do that you will have the gun handy when the coming at you occurs, and that if you do produce the gun timely that you'll beat him to to the trigger.

What the data shows is that your gun will more likely cause you more damage than had you not had it.

Again, I don't care if you buy a gun. I'm just telling you you have no reason to feel safer because of it. You can feel like you're protecting yourself and family with a gun, but you're just endangering them. Why can't you let the stats speak for themselves and just say you're comfortable with the increased risks but you want the gun?

So the advice to not own a gun has a lot in common with the advice to sell this or that stock. It is highly time-dependent advice. The advice will become outdated once a few contingencies change. — Leontiskos

But this is consistent with what I've said. Mine isn't an ideological position. It's a practical one, The data shows a gun currently provides 4 times more danger than protection. I therefore should have a buy order in with my broker to buy when that number shows it will offer me safety. Because I seriously doubt it ever will, I don't expect the purchase will happen.

The data shows as gun ownership increases, so does your risk of death. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178924000776?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Do you have data that shows that trend spikes and dips like the S&P so that I should be watching and waiting to buy?

To me gun ownership makes sense if you're at very low risk of suicide and you get something positive out of the gun. Say hunting, target shooting, collecting, skeet etc. — LuckyR

That'd I agree with. That's not for protection fantasy, but for other use.

If you live in a safe area then there indeed seems little reason to invest time in familiarizing yourself with a firearm. But not everyone is so fortunate. — Tzeentch

I could find no data suggesting that gun ownership increased one"s safety in more dangerous areas. What i found was the opposite, although I could not find anything that didn't require significant interpretation. Typically as socioeconomic conditions drop, things get worse in every regard, including accidental shootings or failed attempts to thwart attackers.

If a criminal right now, were to God forbid, attempt to trespass onto your home with violent intentions, one larger than you, what would you do? Call the police? — Outlander

The likelihood that I be able to produce a gun and use it effectively is lower than that gun being used otherwise to cause me harm. That's my point. You're not safer owning a gun all things considered. The gun in your nightstand drawer is a false sense of security and a greater danger than if it weren't there.

Life is about reducing risks. I'm not immune from gun death, but it's a risk remote enough to navigate without having to eliminate it by force of law or to change much in my day to day life.

That seems to be all that can be ascertained from your unusually dull and dense analysis of the topic at hand. — Outlander

Just because you can't accept anything but applause at attacks on gun ownership doesn't make the analysis dull or or dense. It just makes the point that there is not a meaningful risk of loss of life to being shot by a gun in the US if you take the simple precaution of not choosing to have a gun nearby. The math doesn't support widespread efforts at gun control to reduce the negligible risk guns pose to those who, like me, have never owned, nor will ever own a gun. It's someone else's bad decision, and focusing on it is meant to and does in fact polarize and group identify.

Yay guns! is as boring and dense a battle cry as Boo guns! In a liberal open society where guns and all sorts of bad decisions surround you, you get to be stupid. I wish it weren't so, but the right to be stupid is a right you do have.

Looking at this data, 5 out of 100,000 people are murdered by a gun in the US each year. I found some other data that showed that you are 4.23 times more likely to be murdered if you owned had a gun.

Based upon these stats, per one million people per year:

~40.4 gun owners are murdered

~9.6 non-gun owners are murdered

Other Causes Deaths per 1,000,000/year

Gun homicide (base rate) 50
Motor vehicle crashes 129
Sharp object (knife) homicide ~12
Choking (suffocation) ~17
Lightning strikes (fatal) ~1

So, yes, all deaths are significant, but your chances of being murdered by a gun if you decide not to own a gun in the US is not something you really need to spend your time worrying about, but for some reason it gets a lot of press. Non-gun owners are more likely to be murdered by a knife than a gun. This means that solid protection against gun violence is not to own a gun.

I'm in favor of those who choose to own guns just like I'm in favor of those who choose to hang glide. Chances are that if you crash you'll just kill yourself and not land on me.

You are saying that as long as you are certain that the order came from God, you are justified in carrying out that order because it is God's will. — GregW

No, what I'm saying is that as long as the order came from God, you are justified in carrying out the order because it is God's will.

The problem is not that following X is the best course. The problem is in authenticating X and personally deciding that X is the course of God's will. — GregW

This is obvious. My point, and you can go back through my posts and show where I've said anythying inconsistent with it, is that Exodus stipulates that God, the creator of the universe, decreed the destruction of Amalek. Those are the facts of the book. The book might well be fiction, and I do believe it is, but those are nontheless the undisputed facts of the book. Under the terms of the fictional tale, the destruction is just.

That is, if you're going to read a fictional book, you have to accept its fictional metaphysics and you can't keep jumping between the fantasy on the pages and the real world before you.

It's like if I write a book and name Knute the smartest person who ever lived. Every time Knute does something apparently idiotic, we later learn it was brilliant. He plays 4-D chess and we just have to wait and see how things unfold. That is the Amalek story. God said kill them all. Saul left one standing by the name of Agag. 600 years later Agag's greatest of grandchildren Haman tried to wipe the Jews off the face of the planet. Shoulda listened to God. That's the moral.

Well, my argument was an external critique; but one could make an internal critique that the NT is incongruent with the OT: it just isn't as powerful of an argument. — Bob Ross

Your argument if I understood it is that the NT description of God is the true God and to the extent the OT God is incongruent with the NT God, it does not descibe God. Yours is therefore both an external critique and an internal critique.

The greater part of of my point is that you cannot condemn the OT God until you define the OT God. Your definition of the OT God comes entirely from Genesis and Exodus. My post referenced the fact that the God of Leviticus and Deuteronomy describe a different God as is further modified in the books of the prophets. The Book of Esther doesn't even mention God's name. What you're then saying is that you can't figure out how to make the earliest renditions of God in the OT consistent with the God of the NT. The point is you can't make the later OT God compatible with early OT God either.

What does this mean? It means the sacred literature of the Jews and Christians describe an evolving God, which says nothing about God as much as it does the people conceptionalizing God.

But the whole question is whether the OT God is God. — Leontiskos

@Bob Ross

This made rethink this whole OP. My first response was going to be to point out that you're assuming a particular hermeneutic that might be subject to challenge. That is, you're asking whether Yahweh would fare well if judged as, say, an American citizen who decreed the annihalation of a neighboring community. My response would be that you can't ask that question because the OT context must be maintained, meaning that Yahweh is a character in a story with stipulated perfectness, so it must be better that Amalek be destroyed than it not. The OT God is the entity that literally spoke the universe into existence after all, and he should be trusted to know what ultimately is best.

But this is overly simplified, and it overlooks something not addressed (I don't think) in this thread regarding "What OT God do you describe?" As in, are we improperly assuming that the OT god is consistently described throughout the OT, and is the God of Genesis and Exodus the same God of Deuteronomy, and is he the same as described in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos? I say that because there is something very different from the God of Genesis who says "Let there be light" and later writings where God ceases to directly interact with the Jews, the prophets cease to exist, and there are no more miracles.

Early on God is anthropomorphic, gets angry, debates with humans, performs miracles, then he turns to a lawgiver and demands obedience to the law, and then he moves to what we consider more justice and righteousness based principles.

So what do you do? Do you say the OT God is actually different gods during different periods? Do you say he's an evolving god, changing over time? Do you just say the bible is a hodge podge of different books so it just isn't consistent? It would seem that if you can't say the OT God is the same God throughout the OT, you shouldn't be worried that the NT God is different also. On the other hand, if the OT God can be many different things and still be the same God, then he can also be the NT God too.

What is really being pointed out in the OP is biblical inconsistency, which is problematic only if you believe the Bible (OT and NT together) should be consistent as a single work. It's clear that it's not a single work and that it's not from a single author, so from a critical literary analysis, these problems aren't problems. They just give us insight into how the document was pieced together.

The hypothetical just seems to demand the conclusion. If all things considered, the right thing is to do X, we must do X. So, you then posit a god who is able to fully consider all things completely accurately, including how this might impede upon free will, and he says do it, then by definition, you should it.

If the computer says mate in 12 and it gives you the moves, then those are the best moves. I get how giving the moves might be wrong because it deprives the players the chance to play themselves, but there could be an instance where it's better not to all things considered.

Hanover

Hanover, you appear to be saying that as long as you are certain that the order cane from God, you are justified in the killings of thousands of people. Sadly, I think that most people agree with you. Today, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and religious leaders have ordered men to fly airplanes to drop bombs into buildings full of people, innocent or not. These are all considered to be legally justified killings, we no longer need to use God for justification. — GregW

Yeah, but you entirely misunderstand my post. If you posit that God, the knower of all, in fact said that X is the best course, then that is by definition the best course.

You are discussing politicians declaring knowledge of what God dictates to justify their behavior.

I agree that there are legally justified killings. If you commit a legally justified killing, then you will likely not be in trouble with the law. let's look at a hypothetical example. God asked a man to hijack an airplane and crash it into a building full of evil people. In obeying God's command, is he justified in killing thousands of people? Is this a justifiable killing in a court of law? — GregW

Your hypothetical assumes God assessed the evil of the people within the building and determined that their death would save the world from greater harm, or perhaps he assessed their just dessert to be death by airplane. That is, this was not the killing of innocent people, and it would go somewhere along the lines of any other preemptive response (like self defense) or just punishment.

This is not to suggest that when someone believes God tells them to do something that they are justified in doing it or that that there isn't real danger in relying upon what you believe the will of God is when you act. Your hypothetical, strictly construed, is that God directed the order, so here we know it was God's will.

We can hypothesize a rational basis for any decision. As in, should I use a baby as a baseball bat? In a typical day, no you probably shouldn't do that, but suppose the only way to save a village from complete annihilation is to beat back the attackers with a slinging baby? Maybe the act itself would bring such fear to the attackers, they'd leave the village alone for millenia. But this ridiculous hypothetical makes an important assumption: you know with certainty the baby as weapon will be effective, you know with certainty that there are no lesser alternatives, and you know that without it, your whole village will die.

How can you know all this? You know it because your hypothetical asserted it when it said the information came form God.

Back to Amalek. We are working within a scenario where we know God is talking to the actors in the story. There have been miracles of plagues and the parting of the sea and God seems to be having fairly open conversations with Moses. Presenting this story as myth, a work of fiction, but with a consistency among its characters, we say of course the response to Amalek was justified. We have a super-hero built in the story that is always right.

If God asked you to commit a justifiable killing, then you won't be in trouble with God. Do you wonder why the "God defense" don't usually work in a court of law? — GregW

There are legally justified killings. Self defense is an example. If you know with 100% certainty that your failure to protect others will result in death, that would be justified. Our hypothetical is usual in that it gives literally god-like certainty, so I'd say it'd be justified.

You are not obligated to nip that in the bud. The original premise is that God is perfectly good and not evil. God cannot and will not command you to do evil things, like murder. You cannot justify your evil acts by saying that God himself told you to do it. It is your choice. — GregW

God didn't tell you to murder. He asked you to commit a justifiable killing.

Else, given what Bob Ross has said, I am not convinced he would find this persuasive. He would ask whether it is permissible to "kill" a demon for their future crimes, Minority Report-style. Admittedly, I myself wouldn't have such qualms — Leontiskos

It's not a speculative preemptive strike, but one where we know what will happen if we relent because the warning was from God, not just some UN inspectors who might be wrong.

First, let me try to elaborate on the second consideration I gave. Consider this argument:

1. It is impermissible to indirectly kill an infant
2. Killing an infant's parents will indirectly kill the infant (if left to itself)
3. Therefore, it is impermissible to kill an infant's parents (for any reason, so long as you cannot support the infant)

Would you agree with that argument? Because anyone who accepts that argument simply cannot justify killing the Amalekite parents, regardless of what the parents have done, unless of course all of the infants can be supported. — Leontiskos

That's not correct because you've decontextualized a fantastic tale and are trying to plug in a few facts to 2025 western civilization.

Per the story, Amalek attacked the Israelites unprovoked from the rear, picking off the weakest after they had recently been freed from 400 years of slavery through a series of miracles. The Israelites were under divine protection as part of a covenant between God and the Israelites at that time. This attack characterized absolute evil directed against God himself.

The sole survivor's descendant of these Amaleki went on to try to murder all the Jews 600 years later. That is, Amalek are the metaphoric spawn of Satan in this story and boldly confronted the the very force of good (i.e. God himself).

So, to your question: if there were a community of demons, some old, some young, and some cute as a button, all of whom you know for certain will perform horrible acts of violence, destruction, and mayhem because God himself told you they would, are you not obligated to nip that in the bud?

Ron Burgundy, the greatest jazz flutist the world has known.

Some more rock flute.

There is no third party. It's just God and humanity. Next: criticisms. — frank

Are you fully and completely equating Jesus and God and saying God sacrificed himself? Maybe I'm not following what you're saying.