What you don't understand is that just with US and Russia, the 'all-out' nuclear war looks dramatically different than during the Cold War. — ssu

There is no meaningful difference between 2,000 nukes landing on a country and 20,000 nukes landing on a country.

Even a handful of nukes on key transportation hubs would disrupt the human food supply chain leading to social and political chaos in short order. How many days of food do you have in your house right now? How many days? Complacency depends entirely on the blind faith that we'll always be able to reliably replenish those supplies. Once that faith is broken, chaos begins to flourish.

A single small nuke in Washington DC would wipe out the heart of the US national government, paving the way for geo-political instability all over the world. The fact that we have most key federal agencies all bunched up together in one place, making a perfect high value target, is yet another example of intellectual elites not being of above average intelligence.

Again, your point is...

Our game of nuclear Russian roulette has worked out so far, so why worry?

- You don't understand that so long as we have nukes it's only a matter of time until the one bad day arrives. There's nothing about human history to suggest a longstanding pattern of all out fight to the death violence that is thousands of years old is now over.

- You don't understand that the very real possibility of unintentional launches renders everything you said above irrelevant. As example, consider nuclear energy reactors. Most of the time nuclear energy reactors work fine, but sometimes they blow up, because human beings are, and always will be, imperfect managers of complex technology, any technology. This matters a LOT when discussing any technology where failure is not an option.

- You don't understand the crucial difference between threats like climate change which are very real, but not imminent direct threats to civilization itself. If you want to make comparisons, you should be talking about civilization crushing threats like incoming giant asteroids which might arrive out of the blue with little warning.

There are a million problems in the world and always have been. We've always overcome these problems because civilization remained in tact. As example, WWII was a massive calamity but we recovered from it because enough of civilization (primarily the Western Hemisphere) remained up and running.

You're confusing this longstanding pattern of mistake and recovery with events which bring the entire system down, thus ending the pattern of mistake and recovery, at least for centuries to come.

If you had a loaded gun in your mouth which could go off at any moment that becomes your immediate number one priority concern. Simple, simple, simple. You'd instantly get it without me having to type 12 billion words.

But to philosophers nuclear weapons are not real life, but instead an entertaining abstraction, just another pile of fuel for the parlor game.

This sub-sub-thread is going nowhere. — Pattern-chaser

It's going nowhere because my honorable fellow members along with the intellectual elites and most of the rest of society all insist that it not go anywhere.

Again, this illustrates that philosophers are not of above average intelligence, as they are taking the same approach as pretty much everyone else, ignore the threat, sweep it under the rug etc. I wouldn't say that philosophers are of less than average intelligence, but instead that it seems reasonable to have higher expectations of philosophers given that with their degrees and jobs etc they seem to be claiming to be experts on the use of reason.

If you're run out of things to say on the topic that's because you haven't given the subject very much thought, an obstacle which could be overcome with further discussion. There's plenty more that could be said which would be of a philosophical (and not political) nature. As example, see this thread which attempts to explore our relationship with knowledge.

I don't mind you calling this a sub-sub thread, but really we are on topic. The OP asked if philosophers are of above average intelligence, and I am replying to that question by making a case as to why they are not.

However, I would happily state that my fellow members here on the forum are more intelligent than the average professional academic philosophers, who seem impossible to engage on this topic at all, preferring I suppose to hide behind an "above it all" defense. Some of you have done your job of challenging my thesis. You've failed, but you have tried, and I thank you for that.

The great weaknesses in my thesis is that I keep trying to address the issue of nuclear weapons with reason, in spite of a mountain of evidence that suggests we aren't capable of reasoning our way out of the nuclear threat at this time. To degree I am frustrated it's my own fault for ignoring the evidence and stubbornly engaging in a wishful thinking fantasy.

If it's true that we can't reason our way out of this threat at this time, then sooner or later a bomb is going to go off and some city will be erased. That will likely be a pivotal moment. What is now an abstraction will become an in our face flesh and blood reality. I don't claim to know how we will react to that moment of truth. It may bring us to our senses, or it may drive us in to further madness.

If it's true that we can't reason our way out of this threat at this time, then a single city terrorist type event may be our best hope. At least then we'd have an opportunity to wake up and learn. Without such a limited wake up event then it seems we'll keep playing Russian roulette game until the day the chamber comes up full.

No, I'll observe that nukes are one of a number of existential threats. — Pattern-chaser

Yes, and by doing so successfully sweep all those threats under the rug where they can remain intellectual abstractions which won't impact us emotionally. Thus, we won't do anything about it. Thus, it will likely happen. You're doing a good job of articulating the group consensus which is the real threat.

Yes, a global nuclear war could start without warning, but it probably won't. — Pattern-chaser

There's a consistent longstanding pattern in human history where things go along pretty well for awhile, and then every so often we go bat shit crazy and start killing each other with wild abandon using any and every tool available. I would agree that nukes have sobered the great powers so far, but it's not credible to propose that a consistent longstanding pattern thousands of years old is now obsolete.

Our relationship with nuclear weapons is like playing a game of Russian roulette. Every day that passes is another pull of the trigger. You guys (and most of the rest of the culture including the intellectual elites) are arguing, "Hey, it's working out fine so far, so stop being hysterical."

The problem that philosophers in particular are having (the very people whose job it should be to destroy a blatantly false group consensus) is that we/they are incapable of looking at things simply and directly. Nuclear weapons are a gun in all of our mouths. A gun that could go off at any moment. A gun held by some of the least moral people on Earth. That's all there is to it. All these attempts to complicate the issue so as to demonstrate how clever we are just muddy the water.

I choose to spend my retirement philosophising, not digging a deep bunker in the garden. — Pattern-chaser

The thing is, you're NOT philosophizing. That's my whole point. And you're not alone, even the professional philosophers of highest stature are not philosophizing either, that is, they are not following reason where ever it leads. They and we are following reason where we want to go, to a parlor game which demonstrates our cleverness, which is not actually reason at all, but rather an emotional agenda.

Thus, my point again that philosophy does not involve above average intelligence. Imagine the philosophy professor who enters the classroom and sees that all his students have guns in their mouths. The professor decides the appropriate response is to proceed to give his lecture on what Socrates said about what Plato said about something almost nobody cares about at all.

This is what professional philosophers are doing. While the fate of modern civilization hangs in the balance on the edge of wobbling knife blade. This is not above average intelligence, but a form of madness.

Either way, there are a number of serious - species-threatening or world-threatening - things that we might chose to be concerned about. — Pattern-chaser

Yes, if one were incapable of ranking threats in order of importance, by scale and potential immediate impact, then one could get lost in an endless ocean of potential problems, the end result of which would likely be that one paid little real attention to any of them.

That's what is happening here. You will list other problems in an attempt to sweep nukes under the rug, and once you feel you have accomplished that you will ignore both nukes and all the other problems you insist on listing. This is a very normal human pattern called "rationalization".

Usually we can get away with rationalizing and will muddle through somehow. What you're NOT getting is that such a sloppy system doesn't work when applied to technologies of such enormous scale, where one mistake equals game over.

Pertinently, a nuclear attack isn't imminent. — S

We have no way of knowing that. You're persistently making the same mistake pretty much the entire culture is making.

1) You're completely ignoring the threat of unintentional launches, a threat which I've attempted to document in other threads, evidence which you (and most of the rest of the culture too) have deliberately ignored.

2) You're assuming that we have full control of the nuclear weapons machinery. Such an assumption requires a willful ignoring of the history of humanity, where FUBAR has run rampant in countless situations.

3) You're assuming that a nuclear attack would be the result of a rational calculation, but then the mere existence of nuclear weapons proves convincingly that we are often not capable of rational calculations.

4) You're assuming that no leader will conclude that they are smarter than everyone else and can game the system and win, a pattern which has repeated itself countless times throughout human history.

My mistake is in assuming that all of the above can be cured through a process of reason. There is little evidence to support such an assumption, so I do agree I am guilty of wishful thinking fantasy.

What's going to happen instead is that the willful blindness articulated in this thread and across the culture will continue until it is blasted away by a real world detonation. We're going to have to see the million dead bodies rotting away in a flattened city to get this.

Hopefully it will be just one city, and that will be sufficient to wake us up. Or, it may instead just push us ever deeper in to denial. I have no idea on how that will play out.

To see a part is not to suffer an illusion, it is just to see a part of reality and not the whole. — Dfpolis

It's an illusion in the sense that we tend to confuse it with the whole. For example, when we look at the world with our eyes we typically think of that as observing reality. So we conclude things like, if there was a god we should be able to see it, and not seeing it is evidence of something.

Thought, to the degree that it can think anything it wants without motivation, is always in danger of triviality, which cannot simply be corrected for by providing more facts and better resources. It is this internal and intrinsic danger of thought that Deleuze dubbed ‘stupidity’: far from being a lack of intelligence, stupidity is a condition inherent to the very structure of all thought, even of the most intelligent: — StreetlightX

I think you're on the right track in shifting the focus to the nature of thought. I'm not fond of the words "stupidity" and "triviality" as they seem to take us back towards the content of thought, but I really like a focus on "conditions inherent to the very structure of all thought".

Moreover, if attention is not properly paid to this inherent structure of thought, much of what we say and think will not merely be wrong, but much worse - transcendentally stupid. — StreetlightX

Yes. Here's an example of how not paying attention to the nature of thought can cause us to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

For thousands of years people have been trying to find the philosophy that will bring unity and peace. Some of these philosophies have been religious like Christianity, while others have been secular like Marxism. That is, the search for unity and peace has typically (but not always) taken place within the content of thought.

And it has never worked. As example, both Christianity and Marxism have been plagued with internal division and conflict. In fact, every ideology that's ever been invented seems to inevitably subdivide in to warring internal factions. The universality of this phenomena is a very useful clue trying to tell us that the peace and unity we're looking for can not be found in philosophies, in the content of thought.

If we see that a process of conceptual division is a "condition inherent to the very structure of all thought" it should become clear that we're never going to find unity using a medium that operates by a process of division.

But, if we fail to examine the nature of thought, we will likely continue riding the eternal hamster wheel of philosophy in the pointless search for the "one true way" ideas that will deliver us from conflict.

I would rephrase this statement...

"stupidity is a condition inherent to the very structure of all thought, even of the most intelligent"

to this....

"division is a condition inherent to the very structure of all thought, even of the most intelligent"

Imho, the word "stupidity" is too closely tied to the content of thought to be useful here.

Why assume that this reality we perceive stands a chance of being an illusion? — BrianW

Perhaps it would be better to say that we see only a tiny fragment of reality, and so the image we have of reality does not accurately represent reality, and is thus a form of illusion.

So, really, to be clear, what you're talking about is only the potential consequences, not the actual situation we're in. That is, if there's a nuclear attack, then these would be the consequences. — S

So, really, to be clear, what I'm really talking about is that we philosophers are morons with a rich fantasy life. As example, my fantasy is that typing all this over and over again is going to ever accomplish anything.

But people, thousands and thousands every day do die already from the preventable causes I mentioned. They dont die today from nuclear weapons. My point stands. — Blue Lux

Your point is irrelevant to the subject I'm discussing, the collapse of civilization.

Your point is however indeed relevant to my claim that philosophers in particular, and the larger public too, are largely incapable of simple common sense reasoning on this particular topic. Thus, no, we philosopher types, amateur and pro, are not of above average intelligence. We are average at best, and maybe on this particular topic below average due to an incurable need to complicate everything so as to demonstrate our awesome laser sharp logic, and other similar fantasy poses.

I refuse to think about any problem due to the existence of other problems.

Thanks to all for the ongoing commentary, and responses to my posts.

Do you have to be of above average intelligence to engage seriously with philosophy? — Andrew4Handel

It seems how we answer this would have a lot to do with how we measure intelligence. If for example we were to measure intelligence by one's ability to create orderly polished presentations of intellectual arguments in print, then philosophers could fairly labeled as being of above average intelligence, for their ability in this arena exceeds most of us.

In my posts I'm measuring intelligence more in the way that nature defines it, in our ability to survive. This measuring stick is not appropriate for many or most species, but it is for humans because without our intelligence we wouldn't last long.

In today's world especially, modern civilization is essential for most of our survival. In the past many or most humans could live off of the land, but today all the average human knows about how to get food is the ability to swipe a credit card at the grocery store. Most people have maybe a week's worth of food in their house and once that's gone, or rather once they begin to fear it will be gone, civilization begins to unravel, chaos begins to rule, and masses begin to die.

There are many problems in the world, and many threats to civilization. That is surely true. But there is no preventable threat to civilization which compares to the threat presented by nukes in terms of scale and immediacy. Nothing else can convert the modern world in to chaos in less than an hour.

Thus, I'm reasoning that our relationship with nuclear weapons is a reasonable standard by which we might measure our intelligence. Using that standard, I see no evidence that philosophers are any more intelligent than the population at large. So I vote no to a theory that philosophers are of above average intelligence. Instead, I suggest that philosophers are like plumbers, talented at very specific operations which should not be confused with global intelligence.

As far as nuke go, philosophers arrive at the topic with a serious liability, a need to complicate everything. For some topics this bias may be an asset, but when one has a gun in one's mouth, one is facing a ruthlessly simple equation. Clarity is the essential ingredient in such situations, not cleverness.

If you think this is the first time in history in which the future of man has been at risk, you are mistaken. — Blue Lux

I didn't make this point.

Nuclear war is a problem, but I am not sure any of the most powerful countries are ready to blow themselves up and enter into a global thermonuclear war. — Blue Lux

Here you (along with almost everyone else) are counting on two fantasies.

1) People are rational.
2) There won't be any mistakes.

Was it rational for Hitler to invade the Soviet Union (a much larger country) against the advice of his generals when he had already won most of Europe? No, it wasn't rational, but Hitler was a high stakes gambler addicted to the next role of the dice.

Can we count on there not being any mistakes which unintentionally trigger a nuclear exchange? No, we can't. I've already offered a number of examples in other threads, and you can educate yourself in detail on this subject by watching the documentary Countdown To Zero.

People have not been this stupid yet, — Blue Lux

Um, a few generations ago they burned most of Europe to the ground, a stupid pattern repeated over and over again for thousands of years. You're basically arguing we should rely on a shortage of stupidity which has never existed.

Instead of nuclear war you should be talking about the opioid epidemic, heart disease, emphysema, diabetes, certain cancers, etc., which are in huge ways preventable, although not 100% preventable for everyone. — Blue Lux

All these things fall in the category of manageable threats. I'm referring instead to a threat which could end our ability to manage anything, a game over event. As example, if I have heart disease maybe I can manage that with diet, exercise and drugs etc. If I put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger that's the end of me managing anything. See the difference?

If you want to focus on some sort of 'hair-trigger' then focus on the problems that already exist. — Blue Lux

Thousands of nuclear weapons sit in their silos on hair trigger alert ready to erase modern civilization at the push of a button. This situation has existed since the Kennedy administration, perhaps earlier. It exists now, right now, and the missiles could start arcing over the poles at literally any moment.

The problem you're having is that I'm just some anonymous nobody on a little net forum so you can't believe me, or even your own reason, over basically the entire culture. I'm sympathetic to that problem, but the simple reality is that our culture, including the vast majority of the intellectual elites, are irrational morons. I'm sorry, but there's no other way to describe people who are bored by a huge gun in their mouth.

I get why people don't want to see this. I don't want to see it either. It's a staring in to the abyss experience that few would welcome. But there it is, like it or not. This is where reason can take us, to the perception of reality. Those who can't handle the view might consider abandoning philosophy in favor of tennis.

To be hopefully more helpful....

If you don't yet know about the following site it may prove useful to you. It's a group blog of philosophy academics and students.

https://blog.apaonline.org/

Hi Ole,

With all due respect, I don't understand why this is the case. I am curious as to why would I need to make such a case, as I don't see how that is relevant at all to my question. — Ole Marius Nesset

Well, if you couldn't make a case as to why you should pursue a degree in philosophy that would remove the need for question, achieving relevance that way.

If the professors didn't require you to make a written case as to why you should join their program, that might give you reason to question whether you have chose the right philosophy department, which if not, might also remove the need for the question.

You don't need to elaborate further to me, or to us, or to anybody else except... Yourself. You haven't made a convincing, or even interesting, case here as to why you should seek a philosophy degree, but it may very well be that you could make a good case if you wished to. You don't seem to feel need to make that case, which as a person going in to the case making business could possibly be problematic.

My case is that I'm attempting to leap over a near infinite number of details and reach for the bottom line. Only you can be the judge of whether such an effort is worthwhile to you.

In any case, good luck to you!

But this topic offers the brain-in-a-vat scenario as an example of a speculation that is possible, but comes without any evidence. And it asks: how should we deal with such speculations, logically? — Pattern-chaser

I'm unsure of the continuing purpose of the thread honestly.

If someone proposes spending a million dollars to study the brain-in-vat possibility and they have no evidence, their proposal is dismissed promptly.

If someone just wishes to explore such a theory out of intellectual interest we should do so in as open minded a manner as possible, keeping in mind that much of today's scientific consensus was at one time within the realm of crackpot theory.

Not sure why it needs to be more complicated than that.

've recently started on my bachelor's degree in philosophy — Ole Marius Nesset

Why?

Before you and everyone else dives in to the details of various arguments etc, it might be wise to first make the case for why you are seeking a BA in philosophy. You'd don't need to justify the goal to us of course, but how about writing an article to yourself laying out the arguments for why you are seeking this degree?

Ideally, you would have been required to write such an article already in order to gain admittance to the philosophy department. If that wasn't the case, that might be cause for some caution.

It is absolutely not a half triggered gun pointed at my head. — Blue Lux

Hair trigger.

I have other more pressing matters in my life. — Blue Lux

It's not about you. It's about the billions of people who created what we enjoy. It's about the billions of people alive today who would lose what's been created. It's about the future generations who would live in violent squalor, and curse us as the stupidest human beings who ever lived every single day of their short sad existence.

I'm not sure that God is a being of infinite ability. Is he able to sin? Can he make a stone so big He can't lift it? And isn't He limited by His promises (to never wipe out mankind again, to send His son to die as a sacrifice for mankind, etc...)? Can he make squared-circles, or both exist and not exist? All this seems to me to limit God and leave Him still vulnerable to paradoxes/conflicts. — Empedocles

You're proposing that a God, should one exist, would be bound by the rules of human reason. Human reason is the poorly implemented ability of a single half insane species on one planet in one of billions of galaxies. You're essentially proposing human reason to be a god of sorts, a factor above all else.

The descriptor "supernatural" means "above nature". Above the laws of nature. Above human beings. Above whatever rules human beings create. Above everything everywhere.

Such an illogical insistence that gods would be subservient to the rules of human reason is a very common problem which plagues most discussions of gods.

Christians generally do not believe in a God of infinite ability — tim wood

Ok, what is it that limits God's ability?

In any case the point stands. Trying to analyze some intelligence so large that it can create galaxies with something so small as human reason can be a fun game, but that's all it is. It's a fool's errand if we take it seriously.

You're not going to get very far attacking a supposed whole of philosophy. — Blue Lux

You're right, because philosophers (along with most of the rest of us) aren't rational enough to focus on a hair trigger gun aimed at their heads.

Meaning no disrespect to you personally, for I have no beef with you, what you've just expressed is the corrupt idiot group consensus, which no amount of education seems able to cure.

It's always the same blah blah blah. Philosophers have already done it, they are the elites, whatever it is they must already know it, don't think we know any better than they do etc etc etc. That's just blind authority worship, not rational thought.

I’ve been thinking that hell is incompatible with the existence of the Judeo-Christian God. — Empedocles

Nothing would be incompatible, illogical or impossible etc. with a being of infinite ability.

I’ve been thinking that hell is incompatible with the existence of the Judeo-Christian God. I’m open to being wrong and am looking forward to your objections. — Empedocles

It may help to consider that hell can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Bible writers were attempting to teach profound topics to masses of largely uneducated simple people. I suspect stories were often used to engage an audience and reach them on their level, without perhaps meaning to describe literal facts. Heaven and hell may be descriptions of psychological states, and not references to literal locations.

I think what often happens in religion is that somebody with a rare talent will have a deep insight, and then once the message is passed on to folks of more ordinary ability the message gets downgraded in to memorized chanted concepts that become a dogma.

We might remember that religion is not science, but is better compared to art. A play on the stage, a painting, a novel can all be interpreted in a variety of ways, and that's what makes them rich and interesting.

There's certainly a large amount of religious influence "baked-in" to western culture (along with a lot of other stuff) and even deeper than that is our hardwiring for altruism and cooperation. One level builds on another. — Baden

Yes, and what keeps it going is that love (ie. morality) works on both the personal and social level.

And fully disentangling all that in order to discover "the" cause of our ethical orientations isn't possible. — Baden

Well, "the" cause of morality may simply be that it works. You know, in evolution lots of things are randomly tried, and that which works is what is kept.

So, what I'd take from your point is more confirmation that the theist/atheist distinction with regard to morality is fairly hopeless in reflecting anything apart from a personal narrative. — Baden

I would say, like you, that morality is built in to us as a social species. It has however been theists who have been the most persistent salesmen of morality. Morality needs selling because placing someone else above ourselves is counter intuitive. To be clear, I'm not asserting theists are more moral, only that theism has been the leading marketing team. Salesmen don't always themselves buy the product they are selling.

The fact is what what you tell yourself about what you believe with regard to God probably has little effect on your sense of morality, which runs much deeper, and is likely to be largely settled when you are too young to even appreciate the meaning of religious belief. — Baden

I agree with this, but...

There is something to be said for the influence of marketing. The Catholic Church dominated western culture for 1,000 years (1,000 years!) to a degree unimaginable today, and this highly moralistic religion relentlessly pounded away at selling it's moral theories. There is a degree to which we are all Catholics to some degree, even if we hate that religion. To some degree, we hate child raping priests based on what the culture at large absorbed from the moral sermons of child raping priests.

So yes, we buy in to these moral systems when we are too young to choose, but those systems have been deliberately sold to the culture at large. And yes, what we personally feel about God is probably not a determining factor in our own morality, but the God idea has been central to the Judeo-Christian marketing campaign.

Second, the internet is full of complaints. I don't think there ever existed a person that never complained. — Posty McPostface

To correct the record, I've never complained, which is why I'm sick and tired of all these other people who are complaining day after day after day.

Members can change their screen name, but they have to request it, and can't do it on the fly. — StreetlightX

Thank you!

Known to many of us here: HItchen's razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." — tim wood

Hitchens was asserting, without credible evidence, that something as small as the rules of human reason would be binding upon something the infinite scale of gods. To be more precise, he wasn't asserting that so much as just assuming it to be an obvious given, as a matter of faith.

Given that everything Hitchens had to say on the subject of gods was built upon a lack of evidence, what he was saying can be dismissed without evidence too. Hitchens was hard selling a theory without evidence, and it seems relevant to observe how so many ardent reasonists fully embraced what he was selling with enthusiasm.

What this suggests is that many or most of us aren't actually interested in the validity of various theories at all, but rather in striking some kind of emotion generated pose.

Others above have commented that those in depression suffer from low motivation, and thus meet any constructive plan with a lack of enthusiasm. Can drugs address the low energy problem? Hookers? :smile: Something else?

Does it make sense that the low energy obstacle must be addressed before there is much point in talking about any kind of constructive plan?

I'm not fond of the view that everybody is stupid. — Bitter Crank

It seems a successful life requires some balance in how we are intelligent. As example, our culture is brilliant at technology, but idiots when it comes to seeing where our technology is taking us. The problem is perhaps less that we are stupid, and more that our abilities are out of balance. If we were both less brilliant and less stupid, we'd be in better shape. All things in moderation etc.

Philosophers generally do not acknowledge the enormous sway emotions have over how and what we think. They like to picture themselves as rational beings, unswayed by irrational emotion. Fools. — Bitter Crank

Bitter Crank hits the nail on the head, as he so often does.

I want to analyze why disidentification didn't work for my depression. — Posty McPostface

analyze = thought
disidentification = thought
depression = thought

You're trying to cure alcoholism with a bottle of scotch, so to speak.

I don't see how you can dissociate from that feeling of bleakness or apathy. — Posty McPostface

1) Bleakness and apathy = thought.

2) Turn down volume of thought.

3) The intensity of bleakness and apathy are reduced.

I think the risk of nuclear war is relevant to a thread about the intelligence of philosophers--or anybody else--because the justification for nuclear weapons comes from a deep pool of very bright scientists, politicians, philosophers, strategists, etc. — Bitter Crank

Thank you. You said it better than I did.

Yes, if plumbers and cocktail waitresses aren't focused on nuclear weapons, that's not too interesting. But when intellectual and cultural elites, especially those like professional philosophers who are presumably experts on the art of reason, also show little interest we're entering different territory.

But anyway, having accused pretty much everyone of not being able to reason, I feel an obligation to publicly upgrade my own reasoning.

Imagine that our grandma is 85 years old and ailing, but she's at peace because she believes she'll soon be in heaven with Jesus. All of us would have enough sense and compassion to not rock that boat, even if we believed the Christian story is a bunch of hooey.

Seen clearly, the rest of us are in a situation not so different than grandma. We're all trying to get through life as best we can, and we're all a lot closer to our own personal demise than we like to think. Like grandma and her Jesus, we want to go through what time we have left with a story that helps us get through with minimum suffering.

And for the culture at large, including the elites, that story generally is that everything is basically under control and that the progress of the last 500 years will continue. Sure there will be bumps in the road, but we'll get past them as we always have, so says the comforting story.

And then some annoying butthead typoholic comes along and tries to force reality on us, spoiling the cozy fantasy story party. What an ass, he probably argues with his grandma about Jesus too.

If I was as rational as I demand everyone else should be, I would sit down and be quiet, and not disturb the fantasy story our culture clearly needs to get through the day. If I was rational, I would calmly accept the obvious reality that we are too stupid as a species to survive, just as I calmly accept that grandma's time to depart is upon us.

I've been writing about this for years. I have pretty much no evidence it's ever to ever accomplish anything. Rational people are supposed to listen to the evidence, right? Hopefully I will someday before my own time comes become an intelligent enough of a philosopher to realize that philosophy is just an entertaining parlor game, and I'm taking it way too seriously.

Hey, if everyone else is going to enjoy a fantasy story, I deserve to have one too, right? :smile:

Let's observe how S has completely ignored all the real world evidence presented above. This is just what I'm talking about.

I'm assuming that S is an intelligent well educated person. He may have taken philosophy classes, or even be an academic. Perhaps he has a Nobel Prize!

Makes no difference at all. Philosophy is worthless for things that really matter.

No, I don't have to. I haven't claimed or implied that I know that any particular event will or won't happen later today, and I don't need to. That's an unreasonable thing to demand in response to my objection. If I claim that being struck by lightning is an imminent threat, and that the pressing nature of it is such that it's akin to someone holding a gun to your head, and you object that my claim is misleading, then would you have the burden of having to explain how you know that I won't be struck by lightning later today? No, of course not. That's an argument from ignorance, an informal fallacy. It's possible that I'll be struck by lightning, and you haven't denied that possibility. Lots of things are possible. That both misses the point and tries to shift the burden of proof.

Moreover, people have of course been struck by lightning before, and it has happened way more times then we've been on the verge of a nuclear war, so, in that sense, it's way more of an immediate threat. But you'd still be right to object that my claims are misleading. Being struck by lightning is not an imminent threat. I have gone my whole life without being struck by lightning. So have most others. That's not lucky, that's average and to be expected. It would be unreasonable to resort to extreme measures against being struck by lightning, as though it were an imminent threat, as though it could happen any minute now if I don't do something drastic right now to prevent it from happening, and as though I'm being held hostage by an armed criminal. — S

Blah, blah, blah, blah etc etc etc.

If I was holding a gun to your head you would have no problem at all seeing that as the highest priority issue.

But when it comes to a gun to the head of civilization, like a good philosopher you try to turn it in to some abstract, complex, sophisticated, analysis that displays your laser sharp reasoning etc, etc. The problem here is that this is not some abstract, complex, sophisticated issue like you want it to be.

It is instead ruthlessly simple....

1) Gun...
2) To our heads...
3) Important!

Simple! Can be explained to a child of ten in a few minutes.

Point of the nuclear tirade being...

We can't correlate philosophy with global intelligence. Philosophers are instead, like pretty much everybody else, intelligent at a particular set of activities, which don't necessarily have much to do with reason.

It was a joke. — Bitter Crank

WTF!!! You're calling me a joke??? :smile:

To educate yourself, watch the excellent documentary Countdown To Zero.

Available on YouTube for $3. (May still be on Netflix, not sure.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FNoY5jnm04

And then there was the time somebody mistakenly put a training tape in the NORAD computer, and for a few precious minutes the highest levels of government thought they were witnessing an incoming first strike.

And then there was the time the Air Force accidently dropped a live nuke on South Carolina, and all the failsafe devices malfunctioned except the very last one.

And then there was the time that Americans notified the Russians they would be launching a research satellite from northern Europe. Except that, ooops, the person they notified forgot to pass the info up the chain of command. So when the research missile went up the Russians thought they were witnessing the opening salvo of a first strike. The generals brought the nuclear football to Yeltsin and told him he had to launch. Luckily for humanity, the usually drunk Yeltsin was somewhat sober that day and he declined to launch right then, and told the generals to go back and confirm.

On and on it goes.