Yes, but it's hard to believe them when they say there's nothing it's 'like' to experience being us, unless they are philosophical zombies.

I think it's far more likely they know what it's "like", but they're convinced it has to be an illusion on other grounds, so they argue that there is no actual subjective experience. — Marchesk

Of course, and the exact same argument has been used against atheists. "I can't believe they don't really feel the presence of God, they're convinced it's just their conscience or something but they do really feel it"

Dennett understands what Chalmers is saying and vice versa. They just don't agree. — Marchesk

I might just get this available as a keyboard short-cut to save time... I'm not suggesting that the arguments in either camp are impossible to understand, or meaningless in themselves. I'm suggesting that the sentence "argument X is wrong" is meaningless because of the failure to agree on the meaning of 'wrong' in this context.

can current civilization be inspired by anything at all from tribal cultures? — 0 thru 9

Child-rearing.

If I could pick a single thing, it would not be respect for their environment, their respect for autonomy or even egalitarianism, all of which I consider very important to healthy societies, but their approach to child-rearing outstrips them all by miles in my opinion in terms of it's impact on the health of a culture.

(Spoiler alert - that's the conclusion Jared Diamond comes to as well)

Still unsure what the components of 'Western Civilization' are, and if it is distinct from the equally confused concept of 'White Civilization'. — Maw

I don't think you can separate the two. There seems to me to be only one of two possible scenarios; either sub-concious racism exists or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we might as well abandon all positive discrimination, role-model development, media depiction issue etc because they all rely on combating sub-concious racism. Not to mention the fact that we'd have to come up with some other explanation for the countless psychological experiments which have demonstrated the phenomenon.

If, on the other hand, we're going to accept the concept of sub-concious racism, then how can we ignore the impact of the glaringly obvious fact that all of the races involved in the development of "Western Civilisation" are white and all the races involved in alternative civilisations are non-white?

As I said, I'm not interested in your story-telling. I have absolutely no doubt at all that you can construct a reasonable story from the evidence that's available to support your notion of the peace-loving, justice seeking, freedom seekers that is white western civilisation and the backwards, violent communist spoiler of innovation that are hunter-gathers (who, I'm sure just happen to be entirely non-white and that's just a complete coincidence).

The issue is that you are confusing you ability to come up with an explanation, with an argument that it actually is the case. The fact that you can interpret the evidence the way you do does not in any way prove that that is in fact the meaning of the evidence. It's pointless you keep saying "It stands to reason", "This is reasonable...", "a more successful strategy might be...", "hunter-gatherer cultures may have indeed been...", "competition over resources is as likely an explanation as any.". "If...", "Would be..., "Could..." etc.etc.. I'm not doubting your ability to come up with possible scenarios, I'm arguing that you cannot say they are necessarily the case simply because you can come up with them.

It stands to reason that some groups will have engaged in more violence prior to western influence, and some will have engaged in less — VagabondSpectre

No it doesn't. What factors are preventing it from being the case that all hunter-gatherer groups engaged in less violence prior to western contact. Or, for that matter that all hunter-gatherer groups engaged on more violence prior to western contact. We have no clear evidence of levels of violence prior to western contact other than the third-hand reports of anthropologists relating what village elders have told them, and bone fragments from a very limited number of buried remains. No conclusion "stands to reason" at all on the basis of such scant evidence.

environmental conditions can have drastic and disparate effects on simple social structures — VagabondSpectre

This seems to be your new line of attack, but I see scant evidence supporting it. There is no evidence that I'm aware of permanent settlements for 99% of human prehistory, a time when we lived through some of the most dramatic environmental upheavals the world has seen. So far you've only presented the evidence of a single author speculating that inter-tribal conflict may have been greater when resources were differently distributed. You seem to have taken this single data point and wildly speculated that the whole social structure will have changed without any evidence at all to support this theory.

Well at least you didn't point me toward Howard Zinn — VagabondSpectre

And that would have been a problem because...? Oh yes, because his view is definitely and demonstrably wrong without a shadow of a doubt. I'm sure the McCarthy investigations into his Anti-Americanism had absolutely no influence on the conclusions his critics drew.

Resource availability/scarcity affects so many aspects of possible and optimal survival strategies that they are beyond counting. From the perspective of thermodynamics, the more scarce energy is, the fewer possible courses of action are available which will yield a positive return. Energy economy and upward efficiency on return (not wasting energy) become very important for success along with careful resource management practices (to not overtax or squander the few renewable resources that are available). In the context of jungle and savanna hunter-gatherers who live in somewhat harsh bush environments with a low upward limit on resource availability per acre per year, having a peaceful and war-free society (the kind that leaderless egalitarianism upholds) can wind up saving a ton of potentially lost and wasted energy in unnecessary warfare. If the environment was less harsh and more bountiful, then instead of moving from place to place once resources are depleted, a more successful strategy might be to claim a rich area and settle down permanently. Many factors play a role in what cultural and survival strategies are possible and popular, but the factor of resource scarcity really should not be underestimated, and is evidently crucial for sustaining many traditional hunter-gatherer cultures. — VagabondSpectre

This entire section is nothing but idle speculation with no evidence to back it up. Read something, anything, about what we can infer of human social structure from past environments. There is not a single example of a group "...claim[ing] a rich area and settl[ing] down permanently" until about 9200 years ago at most. In fact, a recent study by Philip Edwards at La Trobe University has pushed the date further forward still. It is an undisputed fact that our ancestors were nomadic throughout whatever environmental change they were exposed to and in absolutely every environment they encountered.

The stability of indigenous ways of life are dependent on steady state environments. — VagabondSpectre

Again, the evidence contradicts this. There is a long-ranging stability in the types of paleo-archeological finds throughout environments and environmental changes. In fact paleo-archaeologists even use consistent cultural markers as a means of tracking the migration of groups as the move from one continent to another. Your idea that the environment itself has a far -reaching effect on the type of society adopted is simply without evidential support. It effects levels of conflict, birth rates, death rates and migration. There is no evidence that it affects social structure or culture at that scale.

a crisis in suicide rates concentrated in one or two demographics should not be used to hastily generalize the overall mental health and therefore happiness of the rest of the population. — VagabondSpectre

Actually, in the UK, the highest suicide rates are in the 40-54 ages, with another smaller peak at 30-34, and there is only a 15 point variation across all ages from 15 to 90. Suicide is the leading cause of death for males all the way from 5 to 50

even the poor of western societies have more practical freedom and rights than HG people — VagabondSpectre

Where are you getting this from? In what way have the poor of Western societies got more practical freedom than Hunter-gathers? If they have any freedom, then why the hell have they chosen to live in the slums they do?

in the west we're less likely to die from violence of any kind. — VagabondSpectre

Another example of having your cake and eating it. In the west apparently, we're far less likely to die from injury due to the marvels of modern medicine. Someone with a simple piecing fracture might have died in Hunter-gatherer society, but would have suffered nothing more than a brief hospital visit in western culture. And yet, when comparing cultural attitudes, you completely ignore the evidence you just used and claim that hunter=gatherers are just as violent because they're more likely to die from violence. Do you not see the bias? How violent do you think our society would look of every fracture counted as a death from violence? We're less likely to die from violence because we have good medicine, meaning we're less likely to die from injuries caused by violence. You've no evidence at all that the culture is less violent.

However, when you look at statistics for violence itself, an estimated 12.5% of US children experience confirmed child maltreatment

It's possible that skeptical American coroners are pushing down the suicide numbers in America, but the clumping possibility is why I asked for per capita suicide rates to begin with and not potentially misleading statements like how can the west be more happy if suicide is the leading cause of death. — VagabondSpectre

I'm not sure what difference this would make. The per capita suicide rate in the US is 9.1, but 11.9 in Europe where it is calculated differently. At the moment the evidence we have from palaeoanthropology and the reports of anthropologists and tribal elders is that the suicide rate in pre-contact tribes is zero (or close to it). To my knowledge, there have been no palaeoanthropological finds where the cause of death has been attributed to suicide, there have been no ethnographical accounts which mention prevalent suicide and the quotes I gave you all point to fact that it was virtually unheard of.

Whether or not the west will be able to continue existing is a bit of a complex subject, but at least until the end of oil (30-50 years) or unless rapid climate change occurs, we'll be doing fine. If we can develop a battery that can outperform a tank of gasoline then oil won't even be an issue and perhaps the climate could recover. The extraction of energy resources from third world countries would no longer be required, and given the right advancements in materials and construction, countries like China might no longer rely on imported materials. Energy and infrastructure developments (I.E, mobile/automated electric construction) could solve agriculture and food exploitation issues as well. Maybe these are pie in the sky ideas, but the problems western societies (and humanity as a whole) are facing are being given more and more consideration every day. — VagabondSpectre

As I said way back, we're comparing hunter-gatherer societies to what the west actually is, not some utopian dream of what it could be.

The examples provided to bolster this claim that such debates are meaningless are inadequate. They do not offer an example of a meaningless debate. Rather, they offer an example of two sides working from different frameworks(talking past one another). It does not follow that such a debate is meaningless. When it is the case that two are arguing from different frameworks, then it is the case that both sides are employing meaningful, but different linguistic frameworks. They very well could be said to be arguing about different things despite using the same name. The frameworks are nevertheless meaningful. So, it is not the case that the debate is meaningless. — creativesoul

I'm not seeing the link you're making here. You seem to jump from saying the frameworks are meaningful (which I can agree with) to saying that the debates are therefore meaningful, and I don't see any argument which got you from the one proposition to the other. How are you reaching the conclusion that because the frameworks are meaningful, debating between two different ones must also be meaningful?

Doesn't explanatory power hold value equal to verification/falsification? — creativesoul

Absolutely, I'd venture to say that for most people it holds more value, since most people leave the verification to professional scientists. But almost anything can be explained in almost any way, given sufficient imagination. I could quite easily construct a coherent explanation for all events in the world using an imaginary pantheon of Gods I just made up. Or I could come up with some New Age woo to explain everything, use quantum physics to construct some weird reality (god knows it's weird enough to allow almost anything). Any of these might have enormous value to me, but it would be meaningless to try and convince you they were right, or that yours was wrong. What measure would I use to do so?

I would say that they understand the meaning of the word just fine. What other's disagree with is not the meaning of "consciousness" -- it's well explicated — Moliere

From the SEP;

The words “conscious” and “consciousness” are umbrella terms that cover a wide variety of mental phenomena. Both are used with a diversity of meanings, and the adjective “conscious” is heterogeneous in its range, being applied both to whole organisms—creature consciousness—and to particular mental states and processes—state consciousness — Rosenthal 1986, Gennaro 1995, Carruthers 2000.

We could go on like this forever, but I'm fairly certain that the meaning of the term consciousness is not agreed on, that's the point. Nagel thinks there's something it's "like" to be us and calls this consciousness, others disagree that there is something it is 'like' to experience being us and equate consciousness directly with awareness. In what way could one of these definitions possibly be wrong? Yet they can't both be right.

To say "Nietzsche believed that the height of humanity was achieved through socialism" is just plainly false. Or to say, "Plato argued that the mind is a blank slate upon which our empirical senses impinges" is also plainly false. — Moliere

These are not interpretations of propositions, these are historical facts about the positions broadly held. As I said, I'm not suggesting that nothing outside of hard science has any vague truth value, I'm saying there is a gradation at one end of which is empirical science and at the other some of the more obscure metaphysics and religion. At some point on this gradation it becomes meaningless to debate the matters (and by debate, I mean attempt to show your interlocutor is wrong). I cannot even pinpoint exactly where that line is, but then I cannot pinpoint exactly how many grains of sand are required for it to be a 'pile'. So, the fact that saying "Plato argued that the mind is a blank slate upon which our empirical senses impinges" would be wrong, does not undermine the assertion that any individual propositions of Plato's could be interpreted in any grammatically correct way and no-one could say which interpretation was more 'right', by any measure.

I'd just say there's a difference between verification and meaning, as well as verification and falsehood -- so there is no conflict in saying that certain statements are not verifiable yet are either meaningful, or true, or false. — Moliere

Again, you seem to be missing the point, perhaps my writing is not as clear as I'd like to think, but I did write it in a single bolded sentence so I'm not sure why the message isn't getting home - I'm not saying that the beliefs themselves are meaningless, I'm saying that debating them is.. A non-verifiable statement could be packed with meaning, it could be the most meaningful thing ever said, but if it is non-verifiable, then to say it is right or wrong is meaningless, to say it is better or worse is meaningless, without first agreeing what 'better' would consist of. Using a word in a sentence your meaning of which is not the same as the meaning for the person to whom you are communicating is almost literally meaningless. It's practically the definition of the word.

Because consciousness is the feeliness of the world -- that it feels like something. Awareness is another aspect of the mind people tend to use "conscious" for, but it's not what's being talked about. — Moliere

It's not waht's being talked about by those who think that's what conciousness is. It is what's being talked about by those who don't. Read a few passages about conciousness by Paul Churchland and see how many times he mentions the 'feeliness' of the world. I guarantee it will be none (unless to dismiss it), because that's not what conciousness is for him.

My suspicion is that the words will mean -- they are not nonsense -- and that the meaningfulness of the debate will be similar to the 5th postulate: It will be relative to a philosophical attitude, a community, a set of beliefs, or some such. So what is important to some is not important to others, and vice versa, primarily because of other beliefs that are being held as true or at least viewed as desirable to retain. — Moliere

Basically I take a kind of Ramsey-Quine synthesis, which I think answers this point. All scientific theories are in the form of Ramsey sentences. "There are things called electrons which...[the rest of particle physics]", or "There is a relation between humans and their environment which...[the rest of human ecology" etc. Quine then goes on to say that metaphysics is like a science, in that it uses the same techniques on less empirical problems, but to a gradually decreasing degree until it starts becoming meaningless. The sentences become more and more fantastical and relate less and less to the real world, until they are nothing but stories. again, just to drive this point home, that doesn't make them meaningless. In fact I think stories to explain how we exist in the world are of absolutely vital importance and meaning. But it does make trying to argue that one story is better than another meaningless, it does mean that slavishly following someone else's story on the presumption that you can't develop your own meaningless. In short it makes most of the activity of modern metaphysics meaningless.

I think we've reached the point arrived at in just about every debate of this sort where we've exhausted the actual evidence and our positions rely on supposition from which there is no traction without the will to.

Your claim is that the excess violence is a really bad thing and was probably as bad outside of colonial pressure. I put less of an emphasis on non-violence as a measure of a society (though still important) and believe the indications are that it would have been much lower outside of pressure from western civilisation. We cannot resolve this difference by resort to evidence because none exists. You don't agree with my theory, I don't agree with yours.

You want a society where one person can excel at the expense of the other. I don't. That's an ethical position and again, not one that can be resolved by further recourse to evidence. No amount of evidence that the Hadza fiercely maintain egalitarianism by pulling down those who seek to rise up is going to convince me of anything because I don't believe they're wrong to do so.

Likewise with your proposition that "Human groups have been suffering territory issues since time immemorial." You're speculating that resource availability has a massive influence on societal structure to the extent that hunter-gatherer social dynamics might have been as violent or unhealthy in the past as a result of natural variation as they are now as a result of the pressure from western civilisation. I could point you in the direction of evidence that this is not the case (Jared Diamond would be a good approachable start), but that would be pointless, because by this point in speculation, there will be enough evidence to the contrary for you to believe whatever you want to believe.

Population growth eventually puts a strain on resources, which inevitably leads to competition and aggression. — VagabondSpectre

Again, you're speculating. I have no doubt you can find evidence to support this claim, so I'm not even going to ask you to. I would have equally ease putting my hands on evidence to refute this claim. I'm thinking particularly of a paper I read recently on resource manipulation in Zebra fish and the way in which it affected aggression, then relating this to studies of Aborigonal Australians. The upshot was that resource availability does not affect the balance between aggression/cooperation in the way you think. When resources are scarce ther'e more value in cooperating because aggression leads to fighting which is more energy consuming than cooperative hunting. Likewise when resources are rich, there's little point in hoarding them. The conclusion was that competition arose only when resources we abundant enough to supply the energy for fighting, but scarce enough to be worth fighting for. To meet this criteria, they needed to be time-stable (ie continually available) which meant no nomadism. Hence the author's postulated this as a reason why all nomadic hunter-gatherers were egalitarian. I could try to dig out the article if you like, but at the moment I'm convinced the effort would be wasted. I have no doubt at all that you could find an article contradicting it, it's only a theory after all. If you don't want to believe it, I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince you.

Overall physical health is something that the west performs better in than anywhere else. Longer lifespans and lower child mortality rates does really say it all. — VagabondSpectre

Same again here. Your assertion that physical health is measured only (or even best) by lifespan and child mortality is just that, an assertion. There's nothing wrong with your position, but it's not debatable, there's no point further discussing it. You think it is, I don't I prefer to think about the health of the individual through their life. Ten years of good health is worth more to me than twenty of poor health. I'd rather spend 40 years a fit and able person enjoying an active life than spend 60 years an overweight layabout kept alive by drugs. But if you'd rather the latter, I can't argue with that, it's just a preference.

It does not actually follow that if suicide rates are lower a society is more happy; reasons for suicide can extend beyond the presence of happiness; the suicide of some doesn't necessarily represent widespread unhappiness in the overall population; living in the bush in and of itself may alter the nature and perception of suicide (you can disappear and never be seen from again and nobody would know what happened; being depressed for an extended period of time in the bush could increase the likelihood of accidental death or failure to subsist, thereby reducing the possibility of suicide, etc...). — VagabondSpectre

I don't want to labour this point excessively, but I do want to di justice to your post by answering each point, so...Again, this is just your speculative opinion, and you could be right, but you could also be wrong. I think suicide is a good measure of the happiness of a society. You can't prove it isn't, only present an alternative view. You might speculate that hunter-gatherers committed suicide in less recognisable ways, and I can't argue with that except to say that they might equally not have done so.

If any of the citations you've provided speak of suicide I apologize for missing it, if so and otherwise, can you direct me to any reliable data assessing mental health statistics in hunter-gatherer societies? — VagabondSpectre

I really don't understand this comment. I cited three quotes which speak specifically of suicide, you can't possibly have missed it. But again, we're back to the same problem. Because you don't want to hear that suicide isn't a problem in hunter-gatherer societies, my sources aren't good enough for you, you want widespread data, you want stratified surveys. When you wanted to find evidence of mistreatment in tribes the say-so of a single anthropologist from a single tribe was enough for you to base your entire worldview on. You'll find what you want to find. The evidence is sufficiently scant and vague for you to do that. My sources, by the way, are papers I happen to have here in the office, I don't know of any online versions. Again, I could try and track them down if you like, but I get the feeling the effort would be wasted. If the only thing that's going to convince you of the low suicide rates in hunter-gatherer tribes is some kind of universal stratified sample which somehow also takes into account unexplained disappearances, or any other possible misconception of term, then I don't have anything for you. Just try applying that standard to your other claims.

The west is decidedly better at enduring and achieving change; we've downright mastered it. — VagabondSpectre

More opinion. The meaning of 'better' is the very thing we're discussing here.

This is just factually inaccurate. Suicide is not the leading cause of death for any age group, at least in America (the most readily available statistics): — VagabondSpectre

By this point I've given up on this exchange of evidence, but the difference is in the degree of speculation the coroner puts into the 'unintentional harm' category, which is often a judgement call. It also depends on the degree of 'clumping' one applies to other diseases (the more of those you lump together, the more significant they will be). We do things slightly differently in England, hence the stats are different. But again, you'll just pick whichever version proves whatever it is you already want to believe so the excersice is pointless.

At least some of the Yanomami violence is inherent to its culture, and an increase of violence in response to uncertainty and competition seems to be a component of that culture. — VagabondSpectre

See... How can you possibly know this? Putting aside the fact that the Yanomami are actually agriculturalist and so outside the scope of this discussion, also putting aside the fact that their reputation for fierceness comes almost entirely from Napoleon Chagnon, a single anthropologist whose agenda has since been widely discredited.
Aside from those two things, you can't possibly know what they were like pre contact.

I'm actually examining the first examples I encountered by following the google search you've linked it me to. — VagabondSpectre

The Lomas article spends three pages on describing the successful non-violent means hunter-gatherers use to settle disputes without violence, it cautioned against drawing conclusions about ancient hunter-gatherers from modern examples because of the effects of colonisation. You completely ignored the non-violent methods, completely ignored the warning about extrapolation, and simply concluded that egalitarianism is and always was maintained by violence. That's the cherry-picking I'm talking about.

Regarding pillaging/unsustainability, etc., we're on the path toward stable technology and renewable energy, and it's not as if every non-western nation has been thoroughly pillaged in order to pay the west's bill. The west does also produce wealth and could plausibly continue existing without exploiting third world nations. — VagabondSpectre

No it isn't, yes it has, and no it couldn't. I think we're pretty clear on what each other's opinions are on this matter. Do you have any evidence to bring to bear, or shall we just agree to differ?

I want to make it clear that I'm not saying you are wrong to conclude that Western civilisations are 'better' than hunter-gatherers. I think you are absolutely wrong about some of your pre-concieved notions about hunter-gatherers, and I've tried to present evidence to combat them, but that doesn't really matter, because it doesn't change anything. If you want to believe the western civilisation is best you will have no trouble constructing a story with accompanying evidence to support that view. What I object to is any suggestion that the alternative claim (that hunter-gatherers are 'better' than western civilisation) can some how be 'disproven'. This is where any vitriol comes from (for which I apologise, by the way). I consider it really bad form to construct a plausible (but by no means necessary or sufficient) story about 'betterness' and the use it to combat another equally plausible (but by no means necessary or sufficient) story.

By all means, present your case, but I don't think it's right to use your case to try and prove someone else's wrong. Lack of a correspondence with the evidence proves a theory wrong. The mere existence of an alternative does not.

Come on! Unicorns aren't hard to understand, anymore than drgaons or wizards are. They're just fictional creations. That doesn't make them meaningless. — Marchesk

I didn't say Unicorns are meaningless. We're going round in circles here. It is the debate about them that is meaningless. Not the question, not the answers to the question, not the terms themselves, the debate (in the form that metaphysical debates are currently held).

The thing that is meaningless is the statement "the claim that unicorns have pink tails is wrong". We can all understand what unicorns are - they are fictional beasts a bit like a horse with a single horn. We can all understand what the question "what colour are unicorn's tails?" means - it means, if I were to look at a unicorn's tail, what sensation of colour would I experience". We can all understand what the answer "Unicorn's tails are pink" means - we can conjure up an image of a unicorn with a pink tail and your image would not be too dissimilar from mine. What we can't make sense of is what the word 'wrong' means in that proposition.

What does it mean to be 'wrong' about the tail colour of a fictional beast whose tail colour is not specified in any of the mythological traditions which gave rise to the widespread agreement about it's horse-likeness and its single horn?

Now an Invisible Pink Unicorn has an inherent contradiction in what sort of thing it's supposed to be, so that falls under the umbrella of incoherency, which was the point of the term (to parody incoherent religious concepts). Just like a four sided triangle is an incoherent concept. But a triangle in a time travel story isn't incoherent, it's just part of a fictional story. — Marchesk

An invisible pink unicorn is not incoherent at all. It could be invisible to most people, therefore justifying the adjective, but to those to whom it is visible, it appears pink. Or maybe it thinks it's pink and we're going to define the colour of a thing by what it thinks it is because we're being solopsistic about it. It might be that it is pink in the sense of the the 'thing-as-it-is', but we can only ever perceive it as invisible because of the limits of our senses. Maybe it's pink in some light conditions that do not currently exist and so we could never falsify it.... I could go on. Metaphysics is easy.

Your four-sided triangle might be incoherent, but that's because the properties of a triangle are widely agreed upon, and one of them it that it doesn't have four sides. There's no-one in the world seriously claiming that triangles have four sides, for that very reason.

The idea that some metaphysical propositions can be rejected because they are incoherent, or inconsistent, or self-contradictory, is just a lack of lateral thinking on the part of the proponent. Give it enough time and someone will be able to find a way to make it coherent again. Have they achieved anything by doing this? yes, I think they probably have, they've made their story more valuable to themselves because it is more robust. That's the value of such discussions. We're they wrong in the first place because they were incoherent? well obviously not, minor tweak in expression and they're back to being coherent again, nothing about the fundamental truth value of the proposition changes.

Is that somehow different from saying that consciousness is an illusion? And don't they understand the meaning of the word in responding like this? — Moliere

Not very different, no, but that's the point. They think they understand the 'meaning' of the word, but others disagree. Conciousness is a noun, its meaning is its correct referent (in some form), so how can a debate have meaning when one side is using the word 'conciousness' to refer to a thing the properties of which the other side do not agree with. It's like changing the atheist/theist debate from "does God exist or not?" to "what are the properties of God?" by saying that both sides know the meaning of the word 'God' and can therefore have a meaningful conversation about the properties of the thing. It's perfectly possible - we could say that one of the properties of God is non-existence - but that's just not how normal people talk and I don't see how it gets us anywhere to set up this artificial manner of discourse without good reason. The normal way for atheists to talk about God is to say that no such thing exists, not to discuss its properties (one of which is non-existence). So there are these two groups with conciousness, those who believe that conciousness is just an illusion, nothing more than an artefact of mental processes, and those who think explaining its properties is the most important question of humanity. To say that the one group can have a meaningful conversation with the other simply on the grounds that they both make grammatically correct use of the word 'conciousness' is stretching normal discourse really far for no good reason.

What metric do you use to determine that a child has learned how to speak? Is there really some set of criteria you apply, or do you just understand the words being said? — Moliere

Whether their use of words communicates the message they intended. The words have a purpose, they must communicate some message to other language users otherwise they fail. This is not the case with the interpretation of philosophical propositions. One cannot say that my interpretation of some proposition is wrong, because the interpreting a proposition never had a stated purpose by which mine could be measured. That's the point. Philosophy is constantly trying to have its cake and eat it. It wants to be as vague and aesthetic as possible when people like Carnap try to attack it for lacking verification, but then when it comes down to preserving the hierarchy of the 'big' philosophers, the professors and the students, it clams up again into pretending that there's definitely something solid and verifiable, something one can definitely be 'wrong' about.

Surely it's possible to be misunderstood. If you said consciousness was awareness, for instance, then in the debate on conscioussness you'd be using the term incorrectly. — Moliere

In what way? If I made the claim that conciousness was awareness, maybe on the basis that I'm claiming that an awareness of awareness is indistinguishable in neurological terms from an awareness of anything else and I'm an eliminative materialist about the mind, then how could I be using the term 'incorrectly'

Just because there is the possibility that someone doesn't understand a term, but only the grammar, doesn't mean that everyone using said term is in the same situation.

Consider the 5th postulate of geometry. The same would hold there. All that one would have to do is append a "not" in the appropriate place, and yet could get by without understanding the 5th postulate of geometry. — Moliere

Yes, but if one were to refute the fifth postulate just by saying "no it doesn't", everyone would disagree with them. That's the difference. The fifth postulate has consequences, claiming it to be false simply by restating it with the word 'doesn't' instead of 'does' would mean that all of geometry would have to change because I can draw two straight lines crossing another and they will meet on the side with the smaller angles. I've no doubt there are clever mathematical constructs and ways out of this (perhaps non-eucledean geometry?) but there is sufficient widespread agreement to make the terms meaningful. This is not the case with most metaphysical propositions.

I like now & then to quote Ramsey:

I think we realize too little how often our arguments are of the form:-- A.: "I went to Grantchester this afternoon." B: "No I didn't." — Srap Tasmaner

That one is going on my list, thanks. Note (as I suspect you already have) that that quote comes not only from Ramsey talking about what isn't a discussion (presumably why you felt it pertinent), but also from talking about how most discussions claiming to be about Philosophy (in this case Ethics) are actually about psychology, which I think is also pertinent to the discussion about what has meaning...but then I would, wouldn't I?

I'd say as long as both sides can articulate the other's then the propositions that two people are using to debate have meaning. So in the case of consciousness I can say what it would mean to believe in property dualism, eliminative materialism, epiphenomenalism, and panpsychism -- I know what the propositions are, and I know why I would argue for or against each of these. — Moliere

I'd argue that you don't. Being able to repeat the propositions and deriving any meaning from them are not the same thing.

if two people arguing understand one another, and can articulate each other's position -- then it's just true that the debate is not nonsense. — Moliere

Again, I'd ask what measure you're using to determine that the two people actually understand each other. Presumably, there has to be some metric, otherwise it would not be possible to misunderstand. The whole system of university education in philosophy would be pointless (a conclusion I'm inclined to agree with), there would be no sense to the term "you haven't understood X's position", and yet these are the mainstay of philosophical debate.

consciousness is the fact that the world feels like something. Pizza tastes like pizza, and not nothing, or carrots. Brahms has a certain quality of sound. We experience the world and experiences feels like something. — Moliere

Except for those who don't agree, like Churchland, Dennett, Rosenburg for whom conciousness is not that and we a re deluded into thinking that the world feels like something.

To be wrong in the debate would be to take a false position. So an eliminative materialist will commonly say that such feeling is an illusion of the mind, or some such. If consciousness is an illusion of the mind, has no reality outside of this, then we'd say that all the sorts of beliefs that attempt to explain consciousness are false. — Moliere

I'm not getting from this what you think 'wrong' is. You've just given a synonym 'false'. What actually is 'wrong/false'?

If two people can disagree while being able to explicate the position of who they disagree with then that's a good indicator that the terms are being used the same. — Moliere

I can disagree with your statement that "Unicorns have pink tails" by simply stating that "Unicorns have blue tails". At no point does my ability to do this indicate anything about my understanding of you use of the term 'Unicorn', all I did was construct a grammatically correct sentence with the term in it. All I needed to do that was to understand if the term was a noun or a verb, I don't need to understand anything of what you actually meant by it.

Better already exists as a comparison in language. There's no problem saying that MJ or LJ are better than the average player. You will get consensus on that. And better here means superior statistics, MVP awards and all-star selections, championships, and a general recognition of rare ability while watching a player play the game. — Marchesk

Right, so there's no debate, the one with the most of those things is better.

And so then people are free to choose what criteria they wish to use.

This isn't a matter of better being meaningless, it's rather imprecise and opinionated. — Marchesk

That's fine where there's some fuzzy, vague definition, almost all words are a bit fuzzy around the edges when you examine them. But in your example here your talking about real things (awards, championships etc). As I mentioned before, from Quine, it's the degree of fuzziness which makes propositions increasingly meaningless. There's no cut off point we can point to in the same way as no one can say how many grains of sand make a 'pile', but at some point the words become too vaguely defined for sentences containing them to carry any meaning.

The Hadza happen to be semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, and so are Eskimo, but if I've not addressed hunter-gatherers specifically enough then it's your fault for not naming a specific group with which I can do an apples to apples comparison with a contemporary western society. — VagabondSpectre

Or you could have actually shown an interest in why we might have such divergent opinions instead of scrabbling for every example you could find of just how nasty the backwards natives can really be.

Living in an egalitarian environment isn't the same as having more freedom or being free from coercion or being free from violence, it more or less means that no individual has extra power or authority. The Hadza abide and enforce their own cultural institutions through third-party punishment where the most common means of preemptively resolving a possibly violent conflict is for a band to split and form separate camps. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, So my claim that they are more egalitarian than western civilisations stands. My claim wasn't that they were less violent than western civilisations (although there's not a significant difference). The Hadza have equality of rights even for children, each individual has an equal say and conflicts are usually resolved peacefully, how's that a bad thing? Yes, there's coercion, sometimes quite strong, violent coercion, but how's that any different to western civilisation, in what way are we more free?

You generally require a group to survive in regions such as the Hadza occupy, and survival necessitates daily hunting and foraging, which makes all individuals beholden to the norms of Hadza groups. — VagabondSpectre

In the west, we all need land in some form (either directly growing crops or for housing), all land is in private ownership so we are all beholden to the economic system to purchase in some form the land we need. I'm still not seeing the difference here. Be required to co-operate altruistically with your group, or be required to earn money in whatever economic system is prevalent in your country. I know which I'd prefer.

The fact that the Hadza have a territory large enough to permit the splitting of groups is a necessary environmental reality which allows for the violence avoidance of group-splitting in the first place. Resource scarcity or overpopulation which could threaten this mechanic might lead to catastrophe. — VagabondSpectre

This is a very salient point and something people like the Hadza have been suffering from since the 19th Century, as have virtually every tribal community forced to the very edges of hospitable land. Think about that next time you presume that levels of violence in modern hunter-gatherers reflect the levels of violence they lived with before the colonisation of western civilisation.

it is indeed a myth that hunter-gatherers are completely free from the ubiquitous human problems of violence and injustice — VagabondSpectre

At what point did I say that hunter-gatherer societies were completely free from violence and injustice? You're attacking a straw man. The point raised, a point you vehemently defended, was that western culture was much better than hunter-gatherer culture, no-one even mentioned the idea that hunter-gatherer culture was somehow completely immune from violence.

That being said, from your own source which you have completely cherry-picked for the data you want (still trying to convince me you're not biased?);

"It is widely debated what the ultimate causes of conflict are within hunter-gatherer societies, but it has been well established that conflict and violence escalate as the shift from foraging practices toward pastoralism and agriculture subsistence increases."

"Egalitarian societies appear to have less intra-group conflict compared to socially stratified societies."

"Self-proclaimed leaders are not tolerated and are often ostracized by the group."

"...hunter-gatherers rely on informal methods of social control such as gossip, shunning, ridicule, ostracism, and public debating which lead to group consensus. These methods of conflict management are extremely effective at ensuring that quarrels and violence are avoided, or, if they should arise, they are dealt with swiftly within the group to return the group back to the status quo."

And most importantly, as I have mentioned;

"...care must be taken to not make the common assumption that these modern groups are representative of past hunter-gatherers."

But you seem to have conveniently ignored all that, together with the three pages the author spends explaining hunter-gatherer's primarily non-violent means of conflict resolution to hone in on the report on on single anthropologist reporting a level of violence over access to women in a tribe whose population dynamic has been devastated by the very western civilisation you're trying to claim is better.

I recommend reading the article by William Lomas as it very directly addresses the issue we seem to be having: I'm not adhering to the old school primitive savage stereotype that portrays all hunter-gatherers as violent and backward; I'm rebuking the newer stereotype that portrays all hunter-gatherer society as better than western culture by virtue of innate peace and harmony with nature, or in terms of degrees of freedom or freedom from coercion. — VagabondSpectre

I'd already read the Lomas article, and if you want to rebuke the notion that hunter-gatherers are innately peaceful and harmonious, I suggest you find someone who thinks that hunter-gatherer societies are innately peaceful and harmonious, and stop straw-manning my argument that they are more egalitarian, more healthy and have a lower suicide rate, and that these things are indicators of a successful civilisation.

78% (pg. 21) of Hadza die from illness and disease though, and they live shorter lives on average. — VagabondSpectre

Again, you're arguing against a point I didn't make. Are you suggesting I think that the Hadza do not suffer from any illness? I quite clearly listed the illnesses they do not suffer from and instead of just admitting that, you come up with some completely unrelated statistic. What percentage of Westerners die from illness and disease, do you think it's less than 78%?

And I refer you back to the comment of Lomas;

"...care must be taken to not make the common assumption that these modern groups are representative of past hunter-gatherers."

The people being studied nowadays have generally had some form of contact with Europeans, bring diseases they've never encountered before, and are living in some of the harshest environments on earth. If you could just set your bias aside for five minutes, how do you think the pressure from western civilisation, conflict with loggers and farmers, marginalisation to the lands not even rugged pioneers will farm...how do think all that is going to affect their health?

The Hadza, the !Kung, and Eskimo groups are three examples of nomadic hunter-gatherers which are far from perfect and statistically live less long, die more often due to violence, and have significantly higher child mortality rates, and the two latter groups additionally practice infanticide. — VagabondSpectre

None of which are the claims that I made.

Suicide and suicide trends aren't necessarily a measure of a civilization's merits. But also, citation please. — VagabondSpectre

Suicides were not unheard of in Arctic communities prior to sedentarisation; elderly or infirm members of the community would occasionally take their own lives in times of food shortage. However, suicide among young, healthy, productive individuals was unheard of. NAHO 2005; Bjerregaard et al 2004; Shephard and Rode 1996

In British Columbia, groups [of tribal peoples] with strong links to their land and culture reported no suicides, while those with no continuity to their land and culture reported rates up to 10 times the national average. Chandler and Lalonde (in press)

Guarani communities in which suicide has been a terrible problem have reported no suicides since returning to their land to live in their traditional ways. CIMI 2001

It appears that mental illness was present in Australian Aboriginal culture prior to European colonization of Australia but was, most likely, a relatively rare occurrence. The much greater prevalence of mental illness and suicide in the current Aboriginal population is a reflection of the significant disruption to Aboriginal society and has a strong context of social and emotional deprivation. Psychological disorders of Aboriginal Australians - Journal of Metal Health.

In a study of 2000 Kaluli aborigines from Papua New Guinea, only one marginal case of clinical depression was found.

Personally, I think suicide is a very good measure of a civilisation's merits, How are you interpreting the fact that our children are more likely to kill themselves than die of any other cause as a measure of success?

Many Amazonian groups practice tribal warfare involving stark levels of violence (surprise attacks in villages involving the beating, rape, and murder; torture). The Yanomami people for instance dabble in agriculture, so perhaps you wouldn't accept them as an example of an imperfect hunter-gatherer group? Western presence in the Amazon region may be one of the root causes of exacerbated violence among the Yanomami (by causing resource scarcity and anxiety among groups mainly), but it also shows how fragile indigenous societal systems can actually be. When the Hadza people inevitably face enough loss of livable territory that allows them to avoid conflict by moving away (or some other crisis which forces settlement such as population growth) then they too will experience rising levels of inter and intra-group violence as their existing conflict resolution mechanisms are strained or no longer function. — VagabondSpectre

Unbelievable, you're trying to blame the hunter-gatherers (agriculturalists) for the violence brought on directly by western colonial dominance. Basically your argument here seems to be that western culture is better because it can bully other cultures into having to fight each other for land. What kind of metric is that for success?

There's some ambiguity in the term "western world" but I thought that we were referring to first world nations who have adopted contemporary western technology and standards, where food, medicine, and education are actually guaranteed human rights. We can indeed sustain these things given our steady technological improvements, and one day they might be available in every nation... — VagabondSpectre

As I said, there is no point continuing if you keep comparing a completely imaginary utopian scenario of western civilisation (ignoring the pillage it reaps on the third world to sustain it and the environmental un-sustainability) to the very worst cases you can find of hunter-gatherers.

So what I’m saying is that by concentrating on the aspects of metaphysics that recognisably relate to the Aristotelian tradition, then you do have at least a ‘domain of discourse’ within which their might be rational discussion. — Wayfarer

My mistake, I misinterpreted your use of the term 'concentrate'.

So, would it not then be true to say that the discourse is only rational to those who agree with the terminology and metric of sucess within that field? So, stating that universals have such and such properties would be meaningful to someone invested in the argument, but saying to a materialist that an Aristotlean metaphysical proposition "proves" that materialism is wrong must be meaningless, because the Aristotlean and the materialist do not agree on the meaning of the terms 'prove' and 'wrong' so how can they have meaningful discussion using them?

According to our western moral and medical prowess, a young girl being married off deprives her of sexual freedom, presents a real threat to her physical, sexual, and mental health, and denies her opportunities for education and independence. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, because we're so concerned about their mental health that in 2015 suicide was the most common cause of death among 5-19 year olds and the NHS in England treats over 250,000 children with severe mental health problems at any one time with about 60% having suffered some traumatic event.

How are you interpreting a skyrocketing suicide rate as indicating that we are providing children with a better life?

This is becoming ridiculous. I'm not about to dedicate half my mornings to giving you a crash course in anthropology when I'm not even convinced you have any interest in the subject beyond what it has on offer to support your cultural biases.

In summary;

1. Your citations and examples are not drawn from nomadic hunter-gatherers, they are drawn from indigenous tribes, there's a difference. Many indigenous tribes are agriculturalists or pastoralists. I'm talking about the lifestyles of nomadic hunter-gatherers. My claims in that regard are;

Hunter-gatherers have more egalitarian forms of government than western civilisations. Each individual has more autonomy and is less likely to be forced into anything they don't want to do.

They have lower rates of suicide than western civilisations which I take to be about the clearest measure of whether the people are happy or not.

They do not exploit their children, force them into marriages, commit war crimes, have sadistic leaders, torture people, kill anyone for ritualistic or superstitious reasons, nor waste their time on non-productive activities to the extent Western civilisations do.

They are not facing starvation, working all the time to get food, struggling to feed everybody any more than western civilisations.

They do not suffer from industrial diseases, heart disease, cancer, or any of the top ten causes of death to the extent Western cultures do.

If you wish to combat any of those claims you would need an example from a nomadic hunter-gatherer Community and evidence that it occurred more frequently than in Western civilisation, preferably from more than one source to eliminate bias.

2. You have used the terms "backwards", "bored" you and accomplishing nothing". You've exaggerated negative traits without any attempt to quantify their frequency. You've made negative presumption about both lifestyle and motive without evidence.
These are pejorative terms and actions for cultural traits which you show little understanding of or willingness to understand. You've taken the first negative description that comes along and generalised it at least to the extent that you feel capable of concluding it occurs more than it does in Western civilisation. At the very least that is an uncomfortable degree of bias in favour of your own culture, at worst it is racism.

3. Modern medicine, electricity, running water, and education do not all come standard in the west. They are denied to huge swathes of the population, cannot be sustained using the technology we have. What planet are you living on where you think running water modern medicine and electricity are 'standard' benefits? Have you ever been to a third world country?

John was wrong about the color of the tie. — StreetlightX

No, I maintain the "the colour of the tie" is simply an ambiguous property and therefore can be in multiple states (both green and blue). There is a linguistic convention about which of those states one reports when asked "what is the colour of this tie" without any caveats. I could ask the question "what is the colour of this tie under this light?" and be easily understood. The correct answer would be different to the answer to the question "what is the colour of this tie under natural light?" and yet both questions refer to the single property 'the colour of this tie'.

Its like asking "what is the speed of this car?" the answer is different depending on how much fuel is being allowed into the engine.

If a sentence yields unintuitive epistemological consequences one should first look to see if the fault lies with the sentence. This is basic Wittgenstein.

"What's the best way to get from Paris to London?"

"Well, you should take the train to Marseille, then along to Cannes and finally knit your way back through the Jura until you get to Calais, Dover then London"

"But that would take me ages!"

"Sorry, by 'best' I thought you meant most pleasant, evidently you meant quickest"

How does the interlocutor's knowledge of the most pleasant or the quickest way to London change at all in that exchange? All that changes is their understanding of the meaning of the word 'best', in that context,specifically to which of those two knowledge items it refers.

Yes, but only because he was wrong about the meaning of the word colour in this context. Think about it, if he genuinely was asked about the colour of the tie simpliciter without any ambiguity about the meaning of the words then his answer would have been exactly the same as his answer to the question "how would you describe a normal-sighted person's sensation of colour when exposed to this tie under natural light?", because that's what "what colour is this tie?" actually means. But his answer to that question would have been "I don't know" (having never seen the tie under natural light). So it is his understanding of the meaning of the question which is wrong, not his knowledge of the tie's of colour.

No, John knows two things about the tie, its colour under the electric shop light and it's colour under natural light, both of which he is right about.

It's not what else I'd have him do, it's what he's not doing. He's not in any way implying that John's knowledge about the colour of the tie is wrong because he merely describes it. It is the speech act that Bob is correcting, so where does the contention that knowledge is not description arise from?

But one knows or does not know the color of the tie. — StreetlightX

Yes, but only if we define 'colour' as "that sense most people get on seeing the object under natural light". All Bob is doing is correcting John on his use of the word 'colour' in that context. Obviously 'colour' can't refer to our private meaning (the sense we happen to get of it at any one time) otherwise we'd be into private languages.

Is its colour not a property?

Really, how? One can know of an object more than one of its properties. When we are asked as a witness to "describe the thief", we do not talk about his internal anger or his two-leggedness despite the fact that these are two things we 'know' about the thief. We also know that in context, those two properties are not fit for discourse, the first because it is transient, the second because it is non-specifying. It doesn't alter their knowledge status, I still 'know' the theif has two legs, it's just not appropriate for me to declare that in this particular discourse.

The example you gave is only different if you accept the tie's colour as a single property, but I see no reason why anyone would do that. There are two properties - its colour under natural light and its colour under electric light. It's merely linguistic convention that when the lighting is unspecified, we're to presume it's natural light.

There's no normative knowledge claim here that I can see. Bob is telling John how to describe the tie entirely contextually (in his language use), the normative claim is about language use, it's not about John's knowledge of the tie's colour, John knows two things about the tie's colour; that is appears blue under electric light and that it appears green under natural light. The normative claim is not about which constitutes knowledge, but about which is appropriate to use in discourse.

So, I seem to be missing something here. The tie seems green in natural light, it seems blue under electric light, the shopkeeper tells the assistant that the correct use of colour language is to use the term which is appropriate under natural light.

These just seem like three knowledge as description claims.

1. The colour of tie under electric light is blue (a description of the state under electric light)
2. The colour of the tie under natural light is green (second-hand knowledge, but a description nonetheless as it describes how the tie would look under natural light)
3. The common choice of which colour term to use in discourse so that we understand each other is the one which describes it under natural light (a description of the way colour terms are applied)

So what am I missing here?

I don't think that a shared metric for deciding what answer is superior is required for a meaningful debate. That would make a debate end, but many debates do not end and yet are still meaningful. Agreement is not the basis of meaning, nor does there need to be some metric for statements to be meaningful. — Moliere

So what is the basis then. What makes a debate about the colour of unicorn's tails meaningless, but a debate about universals meaningful?

some people like a higher degree of decidability, and some people don't care either way. — Moliere

Again, I'm not talking about preferences, people can debate whatever they want, but in order to follow through your argument about preferences you'd have to sacrifice the use of the term meaningful altogether, after all, what could possibly qualify as meaningless if it's all just preference about decidability. Are you saying there's no such thing as a meaningless debate?

In the debate on consciousness it is understood what it means to be wrong. Further, "consciousness" is clearly defined. — Moliere

Really, so what is it to be wrong in such a debate and what is the definition of conciousness which is universally agreed on?

But just because I'm not interested in some debate that does not then mean that everyone over there interested in it is speaking gobbledeegoop. — Moliere

No, but if you want to reserve the ability to define some conversations as meaningless (gobbledegook), then you need some measure of meaningfulness, so what is your measure if it's not shared agreement on terms?

It seems to be arguing something like 'religion relies on faith, metaphysics is like religion, therefore we can't say anything objective about metaphysics'. But by concentrating on particular aspects of the Aristotelian tradition of metaphysics - and, after all, the term 'metaphysics' was invented specifically in relation to Aristotle's works - it is possible to at least converse meaningfully about specific metaphysical ideas and doctrines, as I am attempting to do with the discussion about the ontological status of numbers and universals. I think there is a central theme in that discussion, about metaphysics generally, which has considerable consequences for culture and philosophy. — Wayfarer

I honestly haven't a clue what this means, with my Christianity example I quite clearly stated that it is meaningful to the Christian because of the shared metric of correspondence with the words in the bible. It has nothing whatsoever to do with faith. It might well have been a discussion among Civil War re-enactors, whose metric is whether the idea corresponds with what actually happened in the Civil War.

But now I'm starting to see your position relying on a mystical faith after all. "...by concentrating on particular aspects of the Aristotelian tradition of metaphysics...it is possible to at least converse meaningfully about specific metaphysical ideas and doctrines" - All we have to do is 'concentrate' on them and their truth will be revealed to us? Sounds more like divine revelation than discourse.

The reason many positivists have such an aversion to metaphysics, is because if mathematical platonism is true, then their preferred philosophical model of naturalism and/or materialism is not. — Wayfarer

Aside from your unwarranted denigration of the motives of positivists (maybe they're just trying to find the truth like everyone else?), mathematical platonism in some form has been investigated for more than 2000 years, even in specific modern form for several decades, and no one has managed to prove it true yet, I don't think they're exactly quaking in their boots about the prospect.

Does superstring theory, or colliding 11 dimension branes in the multiverse count as a meaningful scientific debate? I think so, on a theoretical grounds, but some have said it's pure metaphysics and shouldn't be in science. — Marchesk

As I said, I agree with Quine that it is not a simple case of things being either meaningful or not, some are more meaningful than others depending largely on the extent of agreement about metrics and terms. In Physics, there is widespread agreement on metrics (correspondence with empirical evidence, or with mathematical axioms) and widespread agreement on the meaning of terms, so most discussion in that field are meaningful, even though, with a current lack of empirical evidence or even falsifiability, they may well be metaphysical.

There is a consensus that both players are all-time greats at basketball, but there isn't a consensus as what counts as being greater between the two (which often means the best ever).

And yet there are many discussions on this. What happens is that the Lebron James supporters will list criteria that supports their claim that Lebron is better, and reasons why Jordan is not. And the Jordan supporters will do the same.

This isn't because they don't understand each other, it's because they don't agree. Similar to political debates where a conservative and a liberal will base their arguments on their political persuasion. They can usually understand each other, but they don't agree on the politics of the other side's position. — Marchesk

Yes, and such debates are meaningless. If the two sides do not agree on the meaning of the term 'better', then how is it different to debating which player is the most 'flibertyjibit' - another term which neither side agree the meaning of, yet we would easily see the sentence Michael Jordan is the most flibertijibit player as being nonsense.

focusing only on those words is cherry picking, and does not account for the words we judge as being "easy to define" through the Socratic Method. — Samuel Lacrampe

No, I'm quite happy to admit that there are words we find easy to define, but I doubt many of them find their definition through the Socratic method. Most find their definition through a combination of factors, but mainly common usage.

Most words judged as hard to define have resulted in more agreements than disagreements. E.g. The definition of 'knowing' as: 'justify' + 'true' + 'belief', is mostly agreed upon; and those who dispute this definition nevertheless agree that it is close to the mark, as the exceptions found were rare. — Samuel Lacrampe

Knowledge as justified true belief has been in doubt since Gettier but the point of my argument is not about consensus, it's about how we justify the process. So what if lot's of people agree, how does that make the one who doesn't more wrong, and if it doesn't automatically make him more wrong, then what method are you going to put forward to convince him otherwise. He's already heard the arguments and still does not agree, what then?

(1) As far as I know, it is the best method we have. — Samuel Lacrampe

I don't dispute this - it doesn't make the method meaningful or pointed though.

(2) Even if we do not reach a perfect definition, the method gets us closer to it. — Samuel Lacrampe

I simply don't agree, just look at the Phil Papers survey on philosophical positions, most are split almost 50/50, we are no closer to agreement now than when the Socratic method was first proposed.

(3) When we do not reach a perfect definition, it is still that very method that allows us to know that. — Samuel Lacrampe

Again, I don't agree, we can use simple empiricism to see that we don't agree, read the words of two philosophers on the subject and infer from your understanding of their different meanings that they don't agree.

The thing is you can accuse political debates of having this problem. Does that mean the issues being debated lack meaning? — Marchesk

To the extent that you can accuse political debates of having the same problem then, yes, I would say they were meaningless, but to save me writing the whole thing out again, would you mind me referring you to my answer to the Moliere with respect to the sciences. It covers exactly the pint you're making here about areas other than metaphysics which may suffer from this problem. I would argue in both the cases that you highlight there is sufficient shared metric to make the debate meaningful - ecomonic stability, GDP, international security in the case of politics. Correspondence with the evidence in the second case.

Looks like this is where we disagree anyways, — Moliere

Firstly, I don't quite get from the rest of what you've written exactly where we do disagree. Are you saying that you do find the debate meaningful for some reason that does not require a shared metric, or that my conclusion that there's no shared metric is mistaken?

I don't think you'll find your standard of meaningful debate outside of philosophy, though. It's just how human beings are -- they become attached to certain positions and argue for them. Scientific theory changes not so much because of pure rational debate, though that is a part of science, but also because stubborn old codgers who love their ideas die, and the young aren't attached to them. — Moliere

So this comes back to what I think I've mentioned before, but I'll repeat for clarity. The point Quine was making in Two Dogmas was not that Carnap was wrong (despite this being the common lay interpretation), only that he drew a sharp dividing line where Quine saw a gradation. So with science, you may say that there's no definitive shared metric, and you'd be right, but the correlation of some theoretical proposition with empirical measurements is sufficiently shared and just specific enough to allow meaningful debate. It's not so shared that people like Kuhn can't highlight its reliance on paradigm, but they're shared enough.

So what is it to have a meaningful debate, then? And by "meaning" are you talking about linguistic meaning (which the use of "nonsense" or "senseless", two terms that I think are different, seems to imply) or are you talking about meaning in the sense of the point of it all, the reason why a debate would take place? — Moliere

I think both definitions share the same features. There is meaning to a proposition of the type "phenomenon X is caused by/explained by Y for reasons a, b and c". The meaning is the story such a proposition tells for one looking for just such a story. But propositions of the sort "proposition X is wrong because a, b and c" is meaningless because there is no accompanying definition of wrong which the reader is bound to agree with. I might as well say proposition X is 'vgarstenfad' because a, b and c". That would also be nonsense because you'd have no idea what 'vgarstenfad' means nor any reason to accept any definition of the word I might give.

So in that sense I do think there's an argument for saying that such propositions are meaningless in your first sense, but it is in the second sense that my interest lies.

Your insistence on talking about philosophers instead of philosophizing about the topic at hand begs the question: Is the topic so hard for you that it is pointless to explore it for yourself without appealing to other's opinion? — Samuel Lacrampe

I think you may be missing the point of what I'm trying to say in this thread, so I will try again. My argument is this (note the absence of any appeal to any philosopher, this is my argument, though many others have made it before me);

P1. The words we are struggling to define have been in use for thousands of years.
P2. The method of Socratic dialect has been around, and been used to determine the meaning of these words for thousands of years.
P3. There is little or no agreement on the meaning of these words.
P4. (By inference) A method which has been practiced for thousands of years but has failed to work probably doesn't work.
C1. The Socratic dialect method does not work for establishing the meaning of disputable terms.

The fact that philosopher dispute meaning is evidence for that proposition, it is not necessary for the proposition to determine what they say or analyse their ideas, it is sufficient to say that they have been involved in the Socratic method collectively for thousands of years and yet still disagree with each other as much as they ever did.

Now I take it that if we can detail not just our own beliefs but the beliefs of others, and others can do the same for us, then that demonstrates that what people are saying is meaningful -- it's not just a nonsense that an individual has come up with. — Moliere

I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coherent sense, and derive meaning from, the question, or an answer offered is not sufficient to make the debate meaningful. To make the debate meaningful it is also necessary that some methods can demonstrably determine which of the competing answers has the greater merit by some metric agreed on by the contributors. Now since the contributors to the broader metaphysical debate include almost everyone, then almost everyone must agree on the metric in order for the debate to be meaningful held in that way.

Consider a discussion about the technicalities of the eucharist. Within the Christian Church, it would be a meaningful discussion because all agree that the coherence with the words in the bible is the metric by which ideas are measured. But include a Muslim, or an atheist in the debate and it becomes meaningless, how are the Christian and the atheist going to analyse the ideas in any joint way?

So it is with metaphysics, there is no agreement among the participants in the discussion about what it is that measures 'rightness'. Even attempts to do so like coherence, consistency, simplicity are all far too vague to achieve anything. Virtually every metaphysical proposition ever written is thought by some to be coherent, consistent and simple (enough). It's just too easy to meet these criteria and most philosophers are clever enough to do so.

So before I actually look at Chalmers' arguments in detail (which I will try to get round to, but I was expecting a paragraph, not few chapters!), I'd like to ask what metric you'd measure sucess by. If I were to present a killer argument which defeated everything Chalmers had to say, how would you know I'd done so?

So your argument is an appeal to authority. — Samuel Lacrampe

No, the exact opposite, it's an appeal to the fact that multiple 'authorities' continue to exist despite 2000 years of Socratic dialect.

The fact is a lot of philosophers have used the method in their philosophy: Aristotle, Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Peter Kreeft. — Samuel Lacrampe

Yes, but they have clearly achieved absolutely nothing by it, otherwise there would not continue to be a lot of equally intelligent philosophers who disagree with them. I've yet to hear your account of that fact. If Socratic dialogue actually clarifies definitions, then what is the cause of its utter failure to do so for any metaphysical term in ordinary language despite 2000 years of trying?

Do you disagree that concepts have essential properties? — Samuel Lacrampe

Yes. Clearly the concept of 'meaning' does not have essential properties, if it did we could have elucidated them by now and the vast range of propositions about mean which continue to be held by perfectly intelligent people is testament to the fact that we have not.

Do you disagree that the essential properties of the concept 'triangle' are 'flat surface' + '3 straight sides'? Do you disagree we know this because we cannot falsify the hypothesis by coming up with an example of the concept which does not contain these properties? — Samuel Lacrampe

What is a three-sided shape on a non-euclidean surface then?

Yes, I thought I'd answered that one already. The question may be meaningful in an aesthetic sense, the answers might be meaningful to those who adopt them in an axiological sense, but the debate, the presumption that some sentences can demonstrate the value of one answer above another, is meaningless. It's not the value of my conceptualism that matters here, it's the fact that I can easily and coherently express it, no less than any other theory can be easily and coherently expressed by any competent language user. So what do we do now? Continue to express them at each other ad infinitum?

Can you imagine a unicorn? Yes? But unicorns don't exist, so how is it you can imagine one? Maybe everything you image actually exist in some form, but that rather does away with the point of distinguishing that which exists from that which does not.

So let's presume you can imagine things which don't exist. You can imagine an ideal dog. The ideal dog doesn't exist, but that doesn't prevent you from imagining it as above. Your ideal dog wont be the same as my ideal dog, so it's definitely not an object of objective existence. They'll be very similar, because they serve similar purposes and have been learnt similar ways, but not the same.

So now all the functions you ascribe to universals can be satisfactorily ascribed to a comparison to your ideal dog, which we've just established does not exist.

Is there any feature of our universalism in language that you're having trouble ascribing to an imagined ideal?

The only thing I've said is backwards are reasons for infanticide. — VagabondSpectre

Right, so from which ethnography have you obtained your knowledge about the reasons for infanticide? Which ethnography describes sadistic leaders? Which describes war crimes? Once you have your citations, compare them to the weight of ethnographies showing absolutely nothing of the sort, then come back and we'll talk about your claim that the generalisations are not racist.

we also have more reliable diets on average (freedom from starvation and food insecurity). — VagabondSpectre

I can't debate with you if you're just going to make stuff up in support of your argument. I've provided you with ample evidence that hunter gatherer diets were both nutritious and reasonably secure (both things absent from at least a quarter of the modern population), yet you keep just presuming, without any evidence at all, that hunter-gatherers were permanently on the brink of starvation. Where is your evidence for this?

I imagine hunter-gatherer children generally didn't die of malnutrition and starvation but instead actual infanticide, and for reasons other than just food insecurity. — VagabondSpectre

So I'm to debate against your imagination?

How much time do you spend obtaining and processing your food? Is your house, computer, and internet a necessity? Would you give it all up if only you had a primitive Eden? — VagabondSpectre

My house is a necessity, yes. I'd probably die from exposure fairly quickly without it, and I work a 24hr week to pay the rent. And yes, I would quite happily give it all up to live in a primitive Eden, as the thousands of tribal peoples fighting for their land and traditional way of life rather than 'development' are doing right this moment.

Granted, the Hadza, have 2 hour work days, and the rest of the time they sit around gambling in boredom (metal arrow heads, knives, honey and such), with nothing else to bother accomplishing. — VagabondSpectre

Which ethnographies have you read from which to draw the conclusion that the Hadza are bored and achieve nothing worthwhile with their spare time. What efforts have you made to obtain a balanced account? For someone trying to convince me you're not racist you seem to be doing an awfully good job of sounding like one.

Pointing out that leaders of small groups can wind up being sadistic is not racist. — VagabondSpectre

So, if in a debate about the merits of white and blacks I just "pointed out" that some black people are sadistic, that wouldn't be racist? Afterall, some black people are sadistic, do you want specific examples?

Cultural practices which exploit the innocent exist among some indigenous peoples and it's not racist to point this out. — VagabondSpectre

This I would like some examples of, preferably from a reasonably wide range of anthropologists so as to avoid bias.

The west doesn't guarantee it either, but it does better on average. — VagabondSpectre

Wow, so you've added up some kind of quantitative equivalent of Justice, comfort and freedom from the thousands of tribes across the world, plus all the paleoanthropological data, and compared it to the same metric gathered from all Western civilisations? Impressive work for someone who didn't even have their basic information right a few hours ago.

Seems like a false dichotomy. I would prefer not to die of exposure because that's the cultural and therefore justified norm. I'll take a hospice over a tent in the woods any-day. How about you? — VagabondSpectre

Tent in the woods, thanks. I guess we're all different, quel surprise. So what was the justification for the West imposing it's culture on everyone else whether they want it or not again? The original comment you made said that we treated our prisoners better than the Hadza treated their elderly. I pointed out that vast numbers of Hadza elderly voluntarily choose to die rather than be in settled accommodation, let alone a prison cell. You're imposing your own culturally generated world view on others who do not share it.

You've decided to impugn my character instead of addressing my point that bushmen cannot afford to care for their elderly like we can, and while we could always do better than we currently do, we sure beat the pants off a tent in the woods. — VagabondSpectre

No, I've directly addressed your point. Actual bushmen who are given the actual choice of a 'tent in the woods' (without geriatric care) or a house in the settlement (with the sort of medical care most of the world have access to) voluntarily kill themselves. They make their choice in just about the most clear way anyone can. Your cultural values place more on prolonging life than on freedom and dignity, their cultural values are the opposite, but instead of accepting cultural differences, you presume they're all 'backwards'. I've generously termed this cultural bias, but it's basically racism.

Here's a quote from the article you cited. "Girls are around 14 years old before they begin regular food gathering and water- and wood-collecting. This is in spite of the fact that they may be married before this age. Boys are 16 years old or over before they begin serious hunting. Children do amazingly little work.” — VagabondSpectre

Firstly again, you're confusing your own cultural bias for objective judgement. Who are you to say when adulthood begins? Because we postpone it to 18 or 20 that makes it right for every culture in the world to do the same? Secondly, again, you've selected just one ethnography to condemn the whole way of life, ignoring the contrary data, and ignoring, even in your own evidence, the key word "begin". Are you suggesting that in the west children do not "begin" to work at age 14-16? No paperounds, no shop work, no household chores?

is WWF saying that we've taken out a loan on another half a planet? — VagabondSpectre

Yes, that's almost exactly what they're saying. The lifestyle you are using for comparison cannot be sustained, the nutritional security, medicine, technology, police forces that you laud are all bought at the cost of half the world living in relative poverty and no future for your great-grandchildren.

If you want to really engage in a comparison of hunter-gatherer lifestyle with modern Western lifestyle in a realistic way you'll need to;

1. Drop the cultural bias and take people's preferences on their words and actions. The vast majority of tribal people offered 'development' freely are choosing to fight for their traditional way of life instead. You might not prefer it, they do.

2. Compare hunter-gatherer lifestyles with a sustainable average Western one, not the unsustainable lifestyle of the richest 10%, and not some optimistic techno-utopia that you've no sound reason to believe will ever happen.

Then we can have a meaningful discussion about the relative merits.

You're basically saying archeology and anthropology are hopeless endeavors because we don't have perfectly representative remnants. — VagabondSpectre

No, I'm saying that damning an entire section of humanity on the basis of a few bones is unwarranted. What if the early people involved tended to bury or care within the cave for those who died prematurely, but those who lived what they considered their natural term simply walked out into the wilderness (a practice we know exists in modern tribes). All the remains we work on would be the violent or early deaths and this would skew the results. I'm not saying we have enough evidence to show this was the case, I'm saying we need to be cautious in interpreting results when we have a considerable bias already.

At first I thought you believed traditional ways of life are just the bee's knees, but now I see you think it's racist to say western civilization is somehow better than any other civilization.

Is that correct? — VagabondSpectre

Yes, basically the presentation of a way of life created almost entirely by white people as being some kind of pinnacle of civilisation whilst presenting all the remnant tribal peoples (who just happen to be almost entirely non-white) as backwards, violent, superstitious animals scraping a living from the dirt, who need to 'educated' out of their uncivilised ways, is just racist colonialism.

Should we take from this that being Leo Tolstoy or being rich and famous constitutes a disaster? If he did commit suicide, does that mean his life was objectively a disaster or not worth living or that the lives of his servants were more worthwhile? — VagabondSpectre

Tolstoy may well have had clinical depression and so his suicide would hev been nothing more than a tragic result of his illness and nothing whatsoever to do with him, his life or his environment. I want to make that abundantly clear. For the sake of this argument, absent of any biological mechanism, we cannot simply presume that genetically inherited clinical depression is on the rise, so the suicides I'm talking about are those resulting from a brain that is not genetically predisposed to low serotonin.

If I had to make a serious guess as to why suicide rates are increasing, I would say it has to do with a rise in emotional and mental stress, and/or a reduction in forces which have previously mitigated suicide. Working in a cubicle is almost certainly less emotionally healthy than hunting or working your own farm (and can seem bereft of the kind of existential pat on the back traditional living can provide), but in the end the boons of centralized economies and long distance trading means working in cubicles leads to fewer of our children starving or suffering malnutrition. — VagabondSpectre

Without the cities we wouldn't have the medical and human capital that makes that possible, and our massively increased average lifespans and low infant mortality rates are testament to this — VagabondSpectre

Perhaps if they had property rights, established farms and infrastructure (along with the ensuing inequalities), there would have been a place for her to be cared for. — VagabondSpectre

This seems to me to be the bulk of your argument, apart from a few technical mistakes which I will pick up on later, you seem to be saying that, yes, hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian, ate a more nutritious diet, were less stressed, and less prone to kill themselves or die from industrial diseases, but it's worth losing all that because we live longer, have lower infant mortality rates, and can hoard more stuff than we actually need if we want to. So;

Firstly, that's not your call to make and Western Civilisation is nothing if not all consuming. If some group of people made that call and decided they wanted to take the advantages you list over the disadvantages you admit to, then good luck to them, I'm not about to claim that I have such prophetic abilities that I know what path is best for humanity. But that's not how it goes is it. Those people who want those advantages gain them by destroying utterly anyone who makes a different choice. Rather than try to speak for the people who are destroyed in the name of 'Civilisation', I'll let then speak for themselves.

“What kind of development is this when the people lead shorter lives than before? They catch HIV/AIDS. Our children are beaten in school and won’t go. Some become prostitutes. We are not allowed to hunt. They fight because they are bored and get drunk. They are starting to commit suicide. We never saw this before. Is this “development”?” — Roy Sesana of the Botswana Bushmen

“We are against the type of development the government is proposing. I think some non-Indians’ idea of “progress” is crazy! They come with these aggressive ideas of progress and impose them on us, human beings, especially on indigenous peoples who are the most oppressed of all. For us, this is not progress at all.” — Olimpio, of the Guajajara tribe in the Brazilian Amazon

‘Mining will only destroy nature. It will only destroy the streams and the rivers and kill the fish and kill the environment – and kill us. And bring in diseases which never existed in our land.’ ‘We are not poor or primitive. We Yanomami are very rich. Rich in our culture, our
language and our land. We don’t need money or possessions. What we need is respect: respect for our culture and respect for our land rights.’ — Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami

It's like having a gun cocked against our heads — Guarani-Kaiowa, Brazil

We are committing suicide because we have no land — Unnamed Guarani, Brazil

‘My father said that before the whites [came] we had hardly any illnesses. In 1984 my father died of a lung infection. At the time of [the building of the road] everyone got flu and measles and everyone died’

"We have been in long lilim long before the companies came in… in the past our life was peaceful, it was so easy to obtain food. You could even catch the fish using your bare hands – we only needed to look below the pebbles and rocks or in some hiding holes in the river. The people are frequently sick. They are hungry. They develop all sorts of stomach pains. They suffer from headaches. Children will cry when they are hungry. Several people including children also suffer from skin diseases, caused by the polluted river. Upper patah used to be so clean.’ — Ngot laing, 53, chief of long lilim community

‘When i was a child life was easier because there was forest, enough food and we made farinha [manioc flour] and fished. We made our own sugar from the forest bees. I was born in amambai and it was an indigenous village then. I think things are much worse now. We are surrounded by ranchers here. They have fenced us in and they won’t let us in to hunt armadillos and partridges. They won’t even let us look for medicinal plants on the farms. The time when we used to get honey from the bees is over because there is no forest left. There is nothing for the indian now. He has to look for everything in the town now. So that’s why the young are committing suicide because they think the future will be worse’ — Adolfin Nelson, limão verde, 1996

‘First they make us destitute by taking away our land, our hunting and our way of life. Then they say we are nothing because we are destitute.’ — Jumanda Gakelebone, Gana Bushman, Botswana

Secondly, that's the point I made earlier (although you may not have read my earlier posts). You seem to presume that the disadvantages are necessary to gain the advantages. Are they? On what grounds?

So, to the technical errors.

This is a link to a google scholar search, so I'm not sure which paper you're referencing. — VagabondSpectre

First mine. Apologies, I copied my bookmark, not the paper. I'll leave it how it is though because actually you get a wider view of different academic opinions this way.

working in cubicles leads to fewer of our children starving or suffering malnutrition. — VagabondSpectre

There is virtually no evidence at all that children starve or are malnourished in tribal societies outside of the pressures caused directly by development. None of the rigourous ethnographies from early contact report starvation or malnutrition, this is simply not true.

...before they had to spend all their time hunting, foraging, and processing. — VagabondSpectre

The Hadza you refer to work an average 14 hour week obtaining all their food and necessities, and they live in a bloody desert! The idea that hunter-gatherers are working every hour under the sun to just about scrape enough food to live is again simply untrue, not even in the harsh environments they have been pushed to by early farming, we can only imagine how little time must have been spent hunting in the rich environments later taken by early agrarian societies.

It is quite relevant to point out that infanticide and violence are inherent in some non-western ways of life. — VagabondSpectre

That's not what you said though is it? You said "Small groups can have sadistic charismatic leaders who do noting but exploit. Small groups experience intra/inter-group violence and warfare, with the only convention against total injustice (war-crimes) being tradition if you're lucky (though tradition can support injustice just as easily)...Disease and early natural death affect non-western societies much more than the west, owing to lack of medicinal understanding and low living standards. Infanticide is a word not heard often heard these days, but minimalist tribes and groups of all orders have practiced infanticide for all sorts of backwards reasons (security, superstition, legacy)". That's not just "pointing out", that violence and infanticide are inherent in tribal communities, that judging them, 'sadisitc', 'exploit', 'war-crimes', 'low living standards', 'backwards reasons'. That's what's racist.

in some ways we treat the lowest members of our society (criminals) better than they can afford to treat their most beloved. — VagabondSpectre

Again, this is just showing your, let's generously call it cultural bias, rather than racism. You simply presume that because you would rather be alive at 70 (even if in a prison cell with no freedom at all) that everyone would also make that choice, so you scoff at cultural differences like geriatricide. If you found evidence of the elderly being murdered, being offered the choice of a shorter life in the wild or a longer life cooped up in a cell and them taking the latter, then you'd have a point. In reality, Bushman elders have one of the highest suicide rates in the geographic are when they are forcibly settled. If they prefer a longer life in a cell to a shorter one in the wild, how do you explain the sky-rocketing suicide rates?

I'll demonstrate that it stands to reason with the following: — VagabondSpectre

What has a graph going back to 1820 showing how many people attend school and can read and write got to do with anything we've been talking about?

Not being deprived of education generally means not being engaged in labour of some kind, and it also tends to absolve them (especially girls) of an economic/cultural/traditional need to marry at what we consider to be an extremely young age. — VagabondSpectre

So, you're just completely ignoring the evidence I gave you that hunter-gatherer children are not forced to do anything at all, let alone labour, and the average age of childbirth among the Awa, for example, is 22.

We don't need another half a planet, we just need to not run out of oil before we can diversify away from it. — VagabondSpectre

"By 2012, the equivalent of 1.6 Earths was needed to provide the natural resources and services humanity consumed in one year." - WWF Living Planet Report. We absolutely do need 1 and a half earths to sustain our lifestyle. So where's the other half an earth coming from? I admire your optimism, I really do, but where is all this progress?

The bones themselves tell us about the age of the deceased (and in numbers, their average lifespan), and the condition of the bones can tell us about causes of death like violence or child-birth (and in numbers average cause of death). — VagabondSpectre

No, because the entire sample is biased in favour of bones left in places where they were either buried or otherwise preserved from the elements. This represents a specific sub-section of all deaths of unknown significance. We cannot extrapolate the cause of all deaths from a subset of deaths which we know is not a stratified sample.

We know from anthropological research that on the whole, ancient tribal life was rife with early demise and hardship. It would be exhausting to present every applicable metric to actually prove my point, so perhaps you could point out a non-western civilization which fares better than our own in a specific metric of your choosing? — VagabondSpectre

I see, you can't come up with an example to prove your claims so you ask me to. If I were to make the claim that, overall, black people were more violent than whites and then refuse to provide any evidence but simply say "you prove they're not" how seriously would you take my argument?. I'm nonetheless happy to provide some examples.

Metric 1 - Suicide. The leading cause of death in young men of most Western societies, in the top ten causes of death among virtually all age groups. So rare among hunter-gatherers that most don't even have a word for it in their language.

Metric 2 - Equality. Here is a link to a paper describing the way hunter-gatherers are predominantly egalitarian, it not necessarily the best example just one I happened to have the link to, but it gets the point across.

Metric 3 - Health. Here is a meta study bringing together much of the data demonstrating the catastrophic effect on health brought about by a move to subsistence farming (the state of at least 25% of the current world population).

What I can't beat western societies on is lifespan, infant mortality, death in childbirth, and death in war. I'm not claiming hunter-gatherers live in some kind of utopia, but this idea of some violent backward savage is borderline racist (not you, the view your espousing).

the average child is less likely to die early or be exploited than in the past. — VagabondSpectre

Proof

We're making moves to bring a universal end to the exploitation of children; things are getting better. — VagabondSpectre

Again, I'm not suggesting that things are not getting better, I'm arguing that the concept of things having been only progressively worse in the past is false. Things got worse and are now getting slowly better again (in some areas). No children are exploited in the vast majority of hunter-gather societies, they are left entirely to the own devices and have the freedom to do exactly as they choose. See here

We're currently at a place where injustice has been reduced more than ever before — VagabondSpectre

Again, this is without proof. I've provided evidence for the egalitarianism in Hunter-gather societies, are you suggesting that all the authors contained within the entire meta study were simply making it up?

Things could get worse and then maybe we can call the whole thing a disaster, but until then I think we're performing passably. — VagabondSpectre

Well, you have very low standards, and a poor grasp of maths. If using one and a half of the world's sustainable resources is passable, then how do you propose we continue? Where's the other half a planet we need?

I have made no presumptive assertions. nomadic hunter-gatherer communities are not exempt from bad leadership, disease, famine, hardship (inducing infanticide), warfare, etc...

Warfare and bad leadership being equal (it depends on the time and place), disease, famine, hardship, infanticide, and premature death are all things that occur less frequently in the western world (and on average in the world of today) than any other society and globally at any other time. We have greatly extended lifespans thanks to medicine which can keep us alive through afflictions, and thanks to better living conditions which is an added health bonus. — VagabondSpectre

You've just repeated the same assertions without any evidence. Repeating a thing doesn't make it any more true. You do realise your graph only goes back to 1550? Modern humans first evolved about 200,000 years before then. Your graph is missing a bit.