You seem to have completely missed the fact that marriage is a civil contract and that breach of said contract is therefore a tort and not a crime. Nobody is advocating the vacation of vows and promises by wishing to maintain this eminently sensible distinction which has applied in the vast majority of the world's legal systems for centuries.

One should perhaps remember that in Semitic law which is the basis of Torah and Islamic Law only a woman can commit adultery as the law's original purpose is to ensure the purity of family lines and particularly ensure that the father of a child is known beyond doubt. I assume that you are not suggesting that it would have been better to retain such a law rather than make it a matter for the civil courts?

Math is our most precise measure of arriving at truth. — saw038

Pretty certain that this was blown out of the water by Deep Thought's answer to the question about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Humans are not the only ones who have sentience. — darthbarracuda

This is only true for a particular definition of sentience which you have carefully kept hidden. There simply is no evidence that any species other than humans is sentient according to that definition and in fact you have acknowledged this is in your comments on the question of why it is acceptable for animals to behave in certain ways towards humans but not for humans to act in the same way towards animals. You really can't have your cake and eat it. Either the sentience of animals is identical or so close to identical as makes no difference to that of humans in which case they should be afforded the identical moral and legal protection or it is not and there can be no rational objection to their being treated as the food that nature made them.

The problem with electing for the former is one of infinite regress. If species Z so resembles humans that it is afforded human 'rights' (I very consciously apply the inverted commas here but that's for another thread I suspect), then if species Y resembles Z it must also be afforded them. And if species X resembles Y ..... and so it goes on. Where and how do you draw the line? Or do you simply declare every living thing (including plants with their rudimentary sentience) off limits and starve to death?

This is the crux of the matter. The moral argument for vegetarianism ends up effectively proposing that it it is better to starve to death than eat meat (doubly so for vegans), sociopathy by any other name. Doesn't exactly scream 'morally superior' to me!

I am pointing out that, because of our intelligence, we are able to transcend beyond what our intelligence was originally meant for. — darthbarracuda

Yes indeed but you are not arguing that we can, you are arguing that we must and in certain ways prescribed by your particular understanding of the world which, I have to say is only flimsily supported at best by science or to put it more precisely the very intelligence in question. This is special pleading not rational argument.

That's exactly what killing other animals for no reason is: murder. Since when did we have the right to decide how long a creature lives? Since when did we have the right to own another sentient? — darthbarracuda

Well firstly, it's not for no reason if it's either to eat or protect ourselves. And secondly it cannot be murder. Murder is and always has been a forensic legal term with an exact definition which does not apply to any non-human (which for the purpose includes unborn foetuses, incidentally). No amount of propaganda will change that.

Since when did we have the right to decide how long a creature lives? — darthbarracuda

Since when did we not have the right? It is assumed in all the major moral and religious codes in history and prohibited by none of the world's legal systems.

if one says Truth, they mean what is actual, whereas truth would refer to perhaps a subjectively accepted reality that may not be actual. — Hanover

If one says "truth" it cannot have a capital letter, Shirley!

Anyway, fascinating as this orthographical diversion may be, I think the real point is that even if one accepts that a capital letter makes a distinction it's all a bit pointless if nobody knows exactly what the distinction is. Sadly the poster chose not to deal with the implied question but the literal one so we are none the wiser.

What in nature does 'Yoda' or 'Dalek' or 'sublime' or indeed 'philosophy' represent?

Huh? How can a statement forming part of the exposition of the argument of a notional third party (in this case an extreme determinist) be a supposition on my part?

Do it because you love it and for no other reason. Do it because you'll regret it if you don't. Don't do it with some future aim in mind. Nothing could spoil the experience more!

Being the most intelligent organisms on the planet, we ought to use this intelligence for the benefit of all sentients, not to subjugate them. Avoid speciesism. — darthbarracuda

That doesn't follow at all. Intelligence does not equate to morality. Indeed one could reasonably argue that they are utterly opposed in this case. Intelligence is after all basically a measure of the degree to which a species can manipulate and best exploit its environment for its own benefit. It is no accident that a significant proportion of the most intelligent species known to us are carnivores. The hunt both benefits from and enhances intelligence. You impose this supposed duty on humans to benefit other species because they are like us yet fail to follow through the logic that if they are like us they should also be bound by the same duty. If the sentience of a tiger is so close to our own why is it okay in your understanding for a tiger to kill me but not for me to kill a tiger? And just how sentient does a creature have to be or do you simply see them as all equal?

If, by the way, you are cryptically arguing your way toward the moral superiority of vegetarianism, as it certainly seems, then I think it would be fairer to all if you exposed that to more focused scrutiny.

But you don't need 'imaginary' friends (unlike pianos and cars) to be moral surely? Not thinking bad things about them, not planning elaborate methods of murdering them when you return from said wilderness, praying for them and so on are surely moral acts which you can perfectly well do with regard to actual friends while in the wilderness? Isn't that exactly how the first hermits and monks justified their existence?

Not that we know of but what's that got to do with the price of bread?

I wonder if people like that would also say that playing the piano and driving a car are fundamentally socially mediated activities (because you couldn't do them if you were alone in the wilderness). — Mongrel

An odd reference since the incapacity has nothing to do with the isolation and everything to do with the absence of physical objects. In reality, of course, pianists very often rehearse without the instrument and learner drivers frequently do the same without the presence of an actual vehicle, and could just as easily do so alone in the wilderness as in the presence of others at home or on a train. Indeed they might very well prefer to do so!

The Hippocratic Oath is an altruistic expression of moral duty. — jorndoe

No, really it's not. It's not altruistic in that it is designed to provide protection for both patient and physician and you might very well argue that it is the latter which is the prime beneficiary. And it has nothing to do with moral duty. It is an ethical code. Although it may intersect with morality it is principally a statement of professional standards. Unlike moral imperatives, its provisions have no universal application. It has force only when you become a 'registered' physician and only for as long as you remain one. It does not only prohibit certain actions but licences others that would have no moral justification outside the context of medical practice.

There are clear and important distinctions between morality, ethics, and law. Failure to maintain them in discussion will usually lead to muddied water if not total derailment (much like mixed metaphors! :s )

Hundreds of attempts at constructing a biography of Jesus were written post-Enlightenment by Deists and mainstream theologians alike. The skewering given to these efforts by Albert Schweitzer's The Quest For The Historical Jesus put a rather abrupt stop to all of that nonsense, at least in academic study.

The death and resurrection were imported from older "mystery cults." — Hoo

You state that as a fact which it is not. The weight of modern scholarship is very much against you on this point.

I think it obvious that life is basically impossible without faith. Every time you go into a shop, for example, you demonstrate faith that staff won't leap over the counter and start throwing stock at you, demand a bribe before they serve you, or strip naked and ask you to look at their mole and tell them whether it looks a bit angry. What's more the chances are that even if they did do one of those things it wouldn't stop you entering another shop at a later date with exactly the same faith. Our every interaction with others demands a degree of faith for it not to become impossible.

Someone's been watching too many post-apocalyptic movies!

The great thing about having done a class in child-psychology is that you learn to trust absolutely nothing said by child psychologists! This, I would suggest, is an opportune moment to practice that very handy power!

They refer to the "newly-invented" hydrophone. It was invented more than 100 years ago. — Martian Visitor

No they don't. It clearly says it's a new type of hydrophone.

Just because two wars have been given the official designation 'World' doesn't mean that they are so in fact. One could just as easily argue that there have been no world wars given that there were just as many if not more non-combatants as combatants. Or that there have been tens if not hundreds of them as great armies under the likes of Alexander, the Romans, and the Mongols swept across vast areas of the world. On the whole I think I'd go for just one that began with history millennia ago and is still rolling on today.

That being true I personally think that nuclear war actually grows less likely every day. If anyone was going to use nuclear weapons again there have been many, many opportunities since 1945 to do so with reasonable justification. With the growing risk of instant destruction as the weapons themselves have gotten more powerful and the ever decreasing tolerance of civilian casualties in hostilities it would be literally madness to step over that line.

I think I'm not saying that. The problem with the resurrection is exactly the same as with every other event in the life of Jesus, namely that we simply cannot reach beyond the early Christian experience of a living Christ. That's why I was careful to use the word ahistorical about the Gospel accounts. The Gospel writers had absolutely no interest in whether the stories carried in the traditions of their churches were accurate accounts of actual events. They did not waste time on fact checking. Their only interest is in how the stories illustrate, expand, and authenticate their immanent experience of God the Son who had died for their sins and was now alive.

The resurrection of Christ is in every sense real for the Gospel writers in the present moment and that is what they are writing about. For them the crucifixion and resurrection is a new contemporary event every day reinforced by the constant revisiting in the Eucharist and Baptisms. It is therefore fruitless to go to the Gospels in search of verification of actual events which happened (or didn't) as much as 90 years into the writers' past. In every sense the resurrection is beyond the reach of historical investigation. It is. if you like, the Schrodinger's Cat of history in a box that can never be opened.

Well, here's the thing. That there was a string of events that convinced the immediate disciples beyond any doubt that the man they had seen crucified was alive is beyond doubt. It is very probable that the first of those events was the discovery of an empty tomb but as the former Bishop of Durham (only recently sadly departed) so memorably pointed out if that's all there was to it Christianity would have been stillborn.

However it is also obvious that the account of those events given in the gospels are, probably quite deliberately ahistorical. That is to say that the resurrected Christ transcends mundane categories. He can be touched by Thomas yet he appears and disappears in ways that suggest something other than corporeality.. He is recognisably the man Jesus in some stories yet he goes completely unrecognised by disciples on the road to Emmaus. So it is never really clear whether the Gospel writers themselves actually believed the resurrection to be physical. Their accounts are never intended to be factual in the usual sense of the world though they do describe real experiential encounters with the living Christ.

So if the question is a base 'did the Resurrection happen?' the answer is yes, no, well possibly, and maybe not. As a purely historical question 'did x happen?' it is simply undecidable. Whichever of the options you present one chooses it can only be a matter of speculation and personal bias.

Your conclusion it seems to me holds good only for the most extreme version of representational theories, ie. those which posit that our perceptions are totally unrelated to what's out there. I have never proposed any such thing. Indeed I'm not sure how anyone could realistically hold such a view and not go bonkers!

You're really going to have to redefine your terms. The two options you present us with are not in any way mutually exclusive in their present form.

This is one idea that has troubled me for some time - what is the subject matter of philosophy? — darthbarracuda

You worry too much and should definitely get out more!

What does a philosopher study? — darthbarracuda

Other philosophers mostly!

Do you believe that you can accurately know what the ruler says? — Terrapin Station

Oooh, sneaky! Liking your work!

But actually, probably not if we're being that analytical about it. For pragmatic purposes, however, one has to assume that the brain's distortion of reality is at least consistent to the point that the same degree of modulation is in operation on every line measured by the same ruler.

If you're actually asking the deeper question "Is there any such thing as accurate measurement?" then it's going to be a long night!

And? You obtain that information using standard research methods other than sight. In the most basic line length illusions for example you simply get out a ruler and measure the lines or in the case of false convergence you measure the angles. But the really significant thing is that armed with the knowledge of the equal length of the lines you still cannot unsee the illusion. You cannot see equal lines even when you know that they are equal.

I knew you'd say that but it is of course you that don't get it. If we see things directly there are no illusions. The only reason that optical illusions work is that the brain overrides the evidence of our eyes to impose its own expectations upon the image. So powerful is this effect that it is impossible to unsee the illusion even when we have full knowledge that it is an illusion. It's not a case of our vision sometimes letting us down through a lack of information. The brain simply does not allow us to see what is there and substitutes its own 'reality' for it.

Because the order of thought is a linear, bit-by-bit series — saw038

Is it?

But we have not progressed far from our supposedly unconscious relations in the biosphere. — Punshhh

Tough crowd. I would have thought that as a member of a philosophy forum you would have to admit that it is far enough to be a pretty big gulf. There are two huge advances which your membership demonstrates every day in remote communication (writing and then other forms of recording and transmission) and meta-cognition (the ability to think about thinking) and certainly demand attention. Existential angst may be a strange thing to advance as an .. er .. advance but it does demonstrate a complexity far beyond anything that dolphins who may (or may not!) have developed a rudimentary grammar evidence. We may one day be able to translate into dolphin but the topics of the conversation are going to be extremely limited. I can't imagine that it will include Platonic Idealism or Kantian Metaphysics!

The brain does not fabricate a rectangular picture of an object explained away as invisible. — jkop

Except that is exactly what happens in one of the most famous optical illusions. We simply do not see an exact map of the photons received at the retina. Apart from the fact that the very structure of the eye makes that impossible (not least because there's a hole in the retina) we know that the information sent to the visual cortex is heavily manipulated, most obviously in the resolving of two different images into a single one (you seem to have conveniently forgotten that we have two eyes in conflict at the reception end).

The famous yellow cast problem faced by photographers gives more than adequate evidence that the colours we see are adjusted constantly by the brain according to the time of day. We know that people whose languages do not distinguish particular colours cannot see those colours as distinct without considerable effort. Again from photography we know that parallax issues are straightened out. From the famous shrinking room illusion which is just as effective in 3D as in 2D we know that the apparent size of objects is often completely a matter of cognitive process.

The evidence is overwhelming that what we see is a heavily edited version of the images falling on our retinas and that our vision is impressionistic at best. It bears as much relation to reality as it needs to allow us to move around and manipulate objects without falling over too often and no more. The brain is always the dominant partner in the sensor, signal, display loop to the extent that it can literally make us see things that are not there. That is the inescapable conclusion of a vast wealth of experimental evidence, believe it or not!

You wish. But to also revolve around other things wont make 'The earth revolves around the sun' false. — jkop

It most certainly does. The earth revolves around its axis. It orbits the sun!

I didn't. You apparently have. I'll let you sort it out.

We do of course know that the visual cortex can and does operate without photons because we have visual dreams and hallucinations. We can also see pure black even though it releases no photons in our direction at all. What you seem reluctant to admit is that what we see is a construct bearing little or no resemblance to what is actually sending photons toward us. Why you should be so reluctant to accept what every neuro-scientist accepts as a matter of course, I have no idea.

How can relativity, of which one consequence is time dilation, be time symmetric?

I'll believe it when they give their first Powerpoint presentation! (The dolphins, that is. I assume the scientists have been doing it since they were knee high to sea anemones!)

Do you think that a robot, programmed with all kinds of image recognition algorithms, sees anything? — tom

Depends what you mean by 'see', doesn't it? In so far as it receives enough information via computational analysis of the input to make informed decisions or direct action towards an object, you'd have to say yes. If seeing involves aesthetic evaluation and emotional effect then probably not.

And just as I'm talking about this, I see ...

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality in Quanta

Which part of receptor (eye) in combination with signal interpreter (in this case the cerebrum) did I fail to clarify? You would be just as blind if the connection of two perfectly functional eyes to the brain was severed as you would if somebody glued those eyes shut.

Seeing light "as it really is" is to see light without an assumed intermediate representation. — jkop

Which of course is completely impossible. You don't see light. You respond to an electrical signal transmitted from a receptor in your eye which obviously isn't light at all. If you believe that that is 'seeing light' as you describe it then a television screen sees light, an oscilloscope sees light, heck, even a loudspeaker attached to a detector 'sees' light. We do not ever see 'what is there'. We only ever see the translation made by the particular receptor and 'display' combination it affects. This should be apparent the first time you realise that everything we see that's not a light source in itself is effectively a negative, translated from the light rejected by an object, and a wholly incomplete one at that since we have no power to at all to 'see' but a tiny proportion of the wavelengths arriving.

There is a very real sense in which human vision is not seeing at all! Everything you see 'out there' is actually entirely 'in here' (he says pointing to his brain)!