But I did refer to my own (future, fortunately) expiry and the reference works. I think what you're getting at is that being dead will be the state my body is in but that being dead will will not be an experience for me. For I will not exist and therefore will have no experiences. I will not be asleep or passed out forever since I will not exist and something that is asleep or passed out must at the very least exist. And that's true enough, assuming no after-life. And yet I can talk about these things even with regard to my own case sensibly enough without running into logical problems as far as I can see.

On the other hand, if there is an after-life, then 'being asleep' might be the closest analogy. It's the big sleep. Then the trumpet sounds and we wake up. Then it's judgement day. It may or may not be piffle but it's not logically incoherent. So I submit.

I passed out once for ten minutes. When I came round, I had no idea how long I'd been out. Another time I passed out for twenty minutes, same result. The last time it could be like that, only no coming round. Of course I won't be round to tell the tale. But that doesn't mean it's a tale that can't be predicted, whether truly or falsely. It doesn't sound meaningless - it's an explanation of 'infinitely long and unconscious'.

Thank you, Rene. I see my role here as providing occasional relief from T***p and am glad it is appreciated.

One problem with Steven Pinker's conclusion is that he does not account for spiritual well-being. Knowledge, material wealth, decline in deaths from war, increasing life-expectancy - all great. But there is so much loneliness, poverty of spirit. The now unfashionable Mother Theresa noticed this about Western culture. Enlightenment is about light but not always nourishment. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/139677-the-greatest-disease-in-the-west-today-is-not-tb .

It's your topic, Rene! Subsection 6).

Did anyone hear the brilliant adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 'The Robber Bride' on BBC R4? I'm looking forward to and also dreading part 2.

"6) Whateve else you want to do even though it has nothing to do with Trump."

I think some people who claim Bowie or the Sex Pistols changed their lives in 1970's in fact continued to listen to Gilbert O'Sullivan, the Four Tops and Barbara Sreisand most of the time. Oh yes, and Gary Glitter. And Roberta Flack, Janis Ian and Jim Croce. That's Janis Ian, not Janis Joplin, btw. Go on, admit it. You know who you are.

Welcome, because the most important questions are: What kind of stuff did Shelley write? What makes you able to laugh? What did Dorothy's lion lack?

I think words get into the Oxford Eng dictionary only by being current and not by being promoted. It's not Google or Twitter. It's odd that the word isn't in Oxford when the OUP published Benatar's book, probably the most famous antinatalist of today.

"Basically, the problem is money." The problem is not money in itself. Money is a great invention because it can be used to mediate exchange between goods and services that are otherwise incomparable.The problem is people trying to get something for nothing - a project that money is able to facilitate. Tackling greed and theft is a tough proposition.

Ndoki: A man in a pub told me that Zeus is a dead cert at 25:1.

We can evaluate beliefs not only in terms of whether a person has a belief or not but also, if he has a belief, how sincerely he holds it. E.g. I believe my wife loves me and me alone - but I continually check her phone for texts from lovers. It's not a sincerely held belief. It's not actually a belief at all. In this case the behaviour is crucial to the evaluation not just of sincerity but of the existence of the belief. My saying 'I believe my wife loves only me' is not enough for the statement to qualify as a belief, even if I believe that I believe it. So I submit.

We do not know whether there are infinitely many twin primes. We can imagine the set of twin primes to be infinite. But if the set turns out to be finite, then we will have been imagining something infinite that does not exist. The gap between thought and object seems to hold for infinite beings just as much as finite ones, no?

"It seems likely to me that political squabbles would cease as people began to digest the notion that human civilization is essentially at an end, ......"


Ha ha ha! Nothing like despair and anxiety for making people forget their differences and be friendly to each other, I suppose.

I don't think Kant would oblige you to reject the award. He would merely not characterise the motivation for the act (and therefore the act itself) as a moral one. You may make yourself a cup of tea, in Kant's theory, and it is not an example of a moral act. But he's not against people drinking tea.

A traditional solution is to hold more than one competition. One for the effortless geniuses. That prize will always be won by the girl, unless another effortless genius joins the class, in which case they can battle it out. A different one for the hard-working brainiacs. You could add a third competition for the determined plodders.

One reason for holding a competition is to reward achievement through effort. If people are not going to come anywhere near winning, no matter how hard they try, then it's dispiriting for them. So you create different classes and you can get somewhere in your class. That's why they have under-12's sport, under 16's sport etc, because the best child will always lose against the best adult.

L is equivalent to L' because both are ill-formed. All ill-formed (non-propositional) statements are materially equivalent, because they are all devoid of truth value. So L and L' are both equivalent to 'the mome-raths are gyring in the wabe'. But we cannot use any of them in propositional logic.

I'm glad that reason has been dissociated from evil. That makes it so much easier to implement my plan. Mwah-hah-hah. (Strokes white cat.)

But Socrates (or Plato) was perhaps mistaken on this point. If someone's going to be wicked then I'd prefer them to be dumb as well. But if they're going to be good, then I'd prefer them also to be rational. I'd prefer them to be good, whether rational or not, than wicked, no matter what their level of rationality. So I would say that rationality and moral goodness are quite different things and they can hang together or stand apart.

Tho I'd add that some kinds of moral goodness require rationality in planning one's own actions. But no rationality requires goodness.

If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.
But somehow ’tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should,
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever, so rude to the good!
So friends, let it be our endeavour
To make each by each understood;
For few can be good, like the clever,
Or clever, so well as the good.

Elizabeth Wordsworth

It's premiss 2.

From the fact that we can imagine something, nothing follows about its existence. Imaginability and existence are logically distinct.

We would need another premiss, e.g.:

2a. Something that exists is greater than something that is merely imagined.

That's a dubious premiss. Of course, if there were a real God, then a real God would be far greater than a merely imaginary God. But if there is no real God, then the imaginary God (being the only God there is, ex hypothesi) is the greatest God of all. So 2a begs the question. And it's needed to comlete the argument.

Yes, that's what I meant. 'Minuscule' or not, the differences are arbitrarily chosen; it's the unjust discrimination that is important.

What is socially constructed is not the skin and hair colour and nose shape but the importance of these things in influencing our judgements and categorisations unjustly. This in turn focusses our attention on skin and hair colour etc. When someone says 'race is determined by culture not genetics' I think the charitable way of reading this is that the racial basis of prejudice, hatred and discrimination and thence of the study of and focus on racial differences is entirely arbitrary. If we have any charity left and I hope we do.

I think most philosophy is a grammar lesson or should be. Careless language costs thoughts.

On the topic, there is a view that both sex and gender are socially constructed and that therefore cisgenderism is as much drag and as little part of a person's essence, which does not exist, as transgenderism. I know I'm a man because I act the part. Society knows I'm a man because it was announced at my birth as my sex. The announcement was the creation of my sex, not a mere description. It's Judith Butler for anyone who wants more.

Yes, you're right that false beliefs are not *sufficient* for delusions. You can have false beliefs and not be mentally ill or deluded. My point was that false beliefs are *necessary* in order for a person to be deluded. If you think you're being followed and you *are* being followed then your belief cannot be taken for a sign of illness.


T. Clark: "So, being wrong means you're crazy? That doesn't make much sense."

I would say in the case of believing in God it does. Personally I believe in God and I'm a Christian. If it's a bunch of hokum, as some believe - a delusion, according to Dawkins - then I'd say it's a pretty crazy belief. It's often been mocked as such - the 'flying spaghetti monster' argument. It's a risk that theists take. Whether it adds up to a clinical diagnosis, I'm not qualified to say.

It is interesting that the list of symptoms does not specify that the belief is false.

Suppose someone is being followed by the secret police in a country where such things happen and where nobody dares talk about them for fear of persecution. He would probably have all the symptoms listed. But he would not have a delusion.

I would say that theism is a mental illness if there is no God. It is a kind of delusion. But if there is a God, then theism is not a mental illness: it is a recognition that there is a God. To decide whether theism is or isn't delusional we have to first agree whether there is a God or not. And that is the very point on which we cannot agree.

As an answer to the assertion that there is a God, the proposition 'theism is a mental illness' is therefore question-begging.

That's a great post, sime. Would you say the same applies to the concept 'cause' as to the concept 'addition'?

There is an interesting anti-compatibilist argument based on moral responsibility. Assume someone is morally responsible for something. Assert that if I am morally responsible for y and x causes y then I am morally responsible for x. (Note which way round this statement goes: it's not saying we are responsible for consequences; but we are responsible for antecedents of anything that we are already granted to be responsible for. If I crash the car and kill someone I'm not necessarily responsible, e.g it might have been an unavoidable accident or a pedestrian suicide. But if it's granted that I'm responsible for the death and the car crash caused the death then I responsible for the car crash - that's the premiss we need for the argument). Assume causal determinism. Then the causal chain recedes back in time beyond my birth and I am morally responsible for causal antecedents that occurred before I existed. Which is absurd. So either causal determinism is false or there is no moral responsibility as we understand it.

I think W's point was that language is a feature of a way of life and our ways of life are so different from those of lions that a common language would be impossible. Speaking animals in stories are actually people in the shape of animals.

On the other hand, if a lion were to leap at me with the words 'Food! Get ready to be eaten!' I would not be at all puzzled as to his meaning. And he would definitely still be a lion and not a person.

I think your purpose is to be an existentialist. It's the freedom, potential and coming-to-be that count. Actually being makes an object of you and pins you down. Essence is an illusion. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

Bitter Crank:

Well said. And another point. If you find the dog hesitates over whether to accept your apology then it's probably time to get other kinds of help.

Huh. Typical Aquarian thing to say.

"How about an example of a claim which is unfalsifiable, but the idea that the belief in its truth provides value is falsifiable."

Here is the unfalsifiable claim: An unbiassed coin thrown randomly is equally likely to fall heads or tails.

And here is the falsifiable hypothesis arising from that claim: If I flip this evenly weighted coin nice and high a thousand times I'll get about the same number tails as heads.

Suppose I only get three heads and 997 tails. Then the hypothesis is falsified. But the original claim is not. I would assume the coin was not thrown randomly, or I've got a possible but unlikely run of tails, or some other strange factor was at play.

No, I am unable to read. What star sign does that make me?

Liquidate the plutocracy, in other words - Bitter Crank

I went on a march in the 1980's and some anarchists behind me were chanting 'Eat the Rich' as we passed the grand hotels on Piccadilly. I turned round and asked how rich a person would have to be in order to qualify for being eaten. As it was all good humoured they laughed. But it was a serious question. We are all richer than somebody. And our riches all come from others who created that wealth. The value of money does not arise by magic but from the labour of other people making goods and providing services. We each contribute our bit but often far less than we take out. That applies even to the not very rich.

I don't think arguments from design are valid.
— Cuthbert

Do you mean 'valid', or 'true'? Because I don't readily see why all arguments from design would be a priori invalid. It could be the case that something such as an intelligence had a hand in our creation. It's just that it seem like little evidence could ever be brought forward to support this. - Akaninthos

I meant 'valid'. I was referring to the false dichotomy referred to near the start of the thread, i.e. the dichotomy between 'random' and 'designed'. Something might be neither random nor designed, e.g. a beaver's dam. To avoid that (false) dichotomy any argument for the existence of a designer-God needs to show that the universe is designed. Showing that it has form and and is non-random is not enough.

As it happens, I think there is a designer God and that, as you say, an intelligence had a hand in our creation. But that's a matter of religious faith. It does not follow in any way from the fact that the universe is ordered. It's the other way round. The ordered universe results from God's creation. And you can grant there is an ordered, non-random universe without believing in a designer God at all. The two propositions are logically distinct.

I don't think arguments from design are valid. But the problem they are trying to address is a good one. Given that there is a material universe, why isn't it just an undifferentiated soup of stuff?

OK. What's your star sign? Is it Capricorn?

"And I smell a false dichotomy. Either something is random or it is designed, the thinking goes. Well, not every non-random thing is deliberately designed. Some things are improvised. Just because you can't say "X was designed to..." does not mean that X was random."

I think that's right. A thing may be neither random nor designed: e.g. a beehive or a bird's nest. It may be designed to be random: the output of a random number generator. It may be randomly designed: an art work created by randomly flicking paint. On the one hand: random vs non-random. On the other hand: designed vs not designed. The 'argument from design' conflates the two.

"Ask as many questions about my character, as you like then make a guess. You can even have a few wrong answers. Any challengers?"

Do you live on a hillside and chase sheep? Aries. Do you use a bow and arrow? Sagittarius. Have you never? Virgo. Are you going to say my post is funny and then tell me I'm stupid? Scorpio.

It's easy when you know how.