I care for the future and I think idiots and morons preventing progressive ideas that will be norms and standards of the future is a futile mockery of humanity. I don't wish for immortality for fear of death, but would like to live long enough to witness what we will become.

I have hope humanity grows up, but right now, too many morons rule parts of our world. Let them die, by old age or stupidity, then the world of tomorrow belongs to the people who have gone past the ignorance of the past.

I have no sympathy for the bullshit of the current. It collapses in on itself and then I'll just eat popcorn and wait for the next show.

No one actually thinks about hundreds and thousands of years into the future. For most people, it's just masturbation to dive into such fantasies. A dream, something unreal. But for those who actually care about the future of humanity, it's hard not to despise the trivial behavior of humanity right now.

In the perspective of millennia before us, how trivial everyone becomes.

If someone lives by themselves, isolated with limited to no interaction with other people, they can refuse and have freedom of choice to get or not to get the vaccine as it won't affect herd immunity.

If, however, someone is living in close proximity with other people, i.e in cities and more saturated communities, they cannot. By placing yourself in a crowded area, you will have a mandatory responsibility for other people's well-being. If you are a risk by just existing and taking part in social and other interactions within a society, you will have a demand on you to lower that risk. You cannot demand to be part of a large crowd of people if you are at risk of infecting them without knowing it. Therefore you have to take the vaccine, it's not a choice.

You already made the choice by settling in a crowded area.

However, the vaccine for COVID-19 is actually not preventing the spreading of the virus. It prevents you from getting seriously and mortally ill.

Face masks protect others.
Vaccine protects yourself.

So in this case it doesn't matter if you get the vaccine or not. Maybe a little as we've seen a slight lowering of the spread due to the vaccine. So there might be some effect, but it's generally for protecting yourself. This means that if you refuse the vaccine you are at risk of becoming seriously sick.

So, if you are at the risk of dying, refuse the vaccine, and become a strain on medical personal, then maybe we can see it as putting yourself at an unneeded risk, and as a consequence, you take the place of someone who actually needed that care.


However we twist and turn it, vaccines help fight the suffering and in some ways block the spread. It is immoral to refuse the vaccine if you live in crowded areas, but it's even more immoral to get the vaccine and then just live recklessly without regard of the risk of spreading anyway.

The moral action to do, if you live in a city especially, is to get the vaccine but still follow the precautions CDC and similar organizations around the world have put out.

Refusing will risk other people, but mostly yourself, but even if you get seriously sick or even die you will block other people who actually needed medical care but couldn't because you didn't get the vaccine and became ill.

The risks of the vaccine are statistically low and most people pushing the seriousness of these risks don't have the necessary knowledge to analyze statistics or follow biased opinions with little care for actual reality.

Not sure your analogy changes anything or clarifies anything. The general point he makes is that in a society where everyone follows Kantian ethics, we would not have any murders, because everyone follows this moral thinking. It's too absolute. The same goes for utilitarianism, it's too absolute to work in practice.

Morality is a tier list. You can take a moral act and divide it into fractions of more or less acceptable. A brutal sledgehammer murder of an infant can with some certainty be positioned as an absolute immoral killing. But kill someone who is just about to do it is not. This tier of different variations is easy to sense within a human's capability of empathy. We can absolutely figure out if something is considered justified or not justified and in turn where on the moral tier of killing it ends up. It also guides us to sense what is right or wrong.

The domino effect of this also informs how to process attempts at influencing someone to kill. We are then able to spot the justifications and methods used by someone to influence someone else to kill.

The problem in ethics rarely has to do with figuring out what is a moral or immoral act. More often than not it mostly attempts at inventing thought experiments that put moral thinking into paradoxes through thought experiments. But such paradoxes are not possible to apply to actions, and judging someone's moral act by how paradoxical the event was is not how we process ethics in real life.

The traditional Kantian thought experiment of the murderer asking you if your friend is in your house so he can murder him and the act of lying can make the murderer by chance find your friend is filled with so many variables to the act of lying and murder that it is impossible to apply to any real scenario.

What makes something immoral is if we act with destructive biases, extreme selfishness, lack of empathy, randomness in choice etc. It's how we process morality that defines if something is immoral or moral. How we process each situation before a choice. We cannot be judged for the consequences of a choice since it requires knowing the future, we can only act upon what we know.

This is why I am fond of the idea of epistemic responsibility. To rate morality based on how much thought has gone into a choice. A person who evaluates, to the limit of his ability, what the consequences of a choice are going to be. If epistemic responsibility has been taken and an unbiased, empathic choice with low selfishness has been taken, and the act is justified to cause as little harm as possible. That's the only act a human can accomplish that can be considered highly moral. All attempts at simplifying a moral choice down to either Kantian absolutes or utilitarian math fail because of this need to simplify ethics into an ideal.

People should try playing these types of games. Many people go around thinking they are morally perfect, but when playing a game where winning means utilizing concepts like slavery, occupation and terror it might put the assumptions of morality the player have into a thought experiment.

It's more or less like reading a story about an SS soldier's perspective and justifications, you don't do that to agree, but to broaden understanding and testing your own moral values.

If people won't dissect their own moral values, their ideas, and only shield themselves by ignoring everything around them that is in a collision course with those ideals, then how do you truly know yourself?

Why am I not surprised? Feels like deja vu all over again.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-un/un-rights-chief-bachelet-says-israeli-strikes-on-gaza-may-be-war-crimes-idUSKCN2D80YQ

Apologists of Israeli actions during this current conflict and the decade-old occupation rarely pass the veil of ignorance when forming arguments.

The responsible way to do this is to actively question your own knowledge. When doing so, the facts presented about the conflict, as it is today, becomes clear. Anything else is bias and denial.

My feeling is that the tolerance towards posts and threads that aren't even close to having philosophical quality has increased. Which means the kind of evangelical religious stuff, racist apologist low-quality posts, ad hominems, and BS posts that destroys any quality focus on a specific topic just keeps going. When I first looked for a forum like this and found this forum, it felt like a place that got rid of the usual internet idiots and morons in favor of a better quality discussion for complex topics. But it feels like since my initial experience, the tolerance of idiots and morons has gone up and it's close to impossible to see a discussion that doesn't just let some rabid idiot go on a crusade.

If I were to recommend moderators to improve on one thing, it would be to clean up the place. There are far better places for evangelical nuts, racist apologists, and people who don't even know what philosophy is. 4Chan-like forums and Reddit threads dedicated to that kind of stuff, instead of clogging up this place.

I'm surprised at the level of black and white fallacies being posted here. This is a philosophy forum and the biases and fallacies going on in this thread just make this whole forum look like garbage. Why is it that whenever someone criticizes Israel's killings of children, civilians, using banned white phosphorus attacks, the apartheid control, and the extreme magnitude of kills compared to what Palestinian rockets manages to do, all the Israel military apologists just screams "so you support the rocket killings by Hamas, huh??"

Never seen such fucking low-level discussion in a place dedicated to rational thought. Maybe 4-chan kind of forums is a better intellectual level for some in here. I thought this was a place to have a higher level of discussion, but I guess I was wrong about that.

Didn't Israel use white phosphorus attacks on civillians a few years back? Not only is killing civilians by targeting civilian targets a war crime, but the use of white phosphorus is also a war crime even against military targets.

Anyone defending the tactics and behavior of Israel against the Palestinian people either doesn't know anything of what is going on, or they are extremely biased to the western anti-Islam narrative and won't dare to comment in fear of being called an antisemite.

Not being able to criticize a nation's behavior in this way is the reason the conflict keeps going. If the world were to ignore the self-victimizing behavior of Israel and the black and white fallacy-driven apologists of Israel's behavior against Palestine, then Israel would be pressured out of its blatant crimes as a nation.

Maybe the media and people could pay a little more attention to actually asking and visit Palestine in order to get a balanced side to the whole conflict, instead of automatically just accept the Israel perspective first and maybe change that opinion later in the rare occasion there's blatant proof, like the white phosphorus attacks.

In conclusion, there's no denying the crimes Israel is doing here, there's no denying the unbalance of this conflict. The Palestinian people are extremely pressured and controlled by Israel that there's no wonder some shoot homemade rockets. You don't have to condone or condemn these actions in order to understand why it happens. People rarely ask the question "why" something is going on, only that it "is" going on. If we were to start with knowing why some Palestinians shoot home-made rockets into Israel and understand that it comes from a source of desperation, we would see the causal line of events.

If Israel keeps taking land, evicting Palestinians to build luxury homes, control the movement and freedom of the Palestinian people, harass, assault, and even kill Palestinians through their totalitarian control of them, then how can desperate acts of violence by the Palestinian people be a surprise to anyone?

And how can anyone even say that Israel is the one defending itself? How seriously skewed is the logical thinking if that is the conclusion to anything? Palestine acts in desperation, they want freedom and to be their own nation. Israel denies that to them. Even though there is a portion of people who rage religious battle about key land areas and parts of Jerusalem, most inhabitants just want to live in peace. But they are denied that.

It's like if Canada all of a sudden shut down all airports in the USA, no one in the USA is able to move around as they please, they need to have special IDs, they can't leave the country unless being put through months of paperwork and can only do so by traveling to Canada's airports. All while risk being shot or assaulted on the border by "reasons". All imports and exports are prohibited and controlled by rations and sometimes Canada cuts the power grid. If any citizen of the USA were to speak up or try to fight this thing by building their own weapons, the retaliation is to bomb major civilian city targets with white phosphorus causing massive civilian casualties with globally banned weapons of war. All while the rest of the world turns a blind eye because they have trade agreements and good diplomatic bonds with Canada while thinking the USA just have a lot of people who might be terrorists under a degenerate religion.

That allegory should really show how skewed this whole thing is. There's no denying the fact that Israel is in the wrong here. There's no tangible argument for defending Israel's actions. There really is no debate once people abandon their biases and fallacies and look at the facts. Period.

Mind is to brain as digestion is to guts. Digestion is not a single state of the gut, but what the gut does from teeth to arse hole. Digestion is not the very same thing as gut; mind is not the very same thing as brain. Mind is what the brain does. — Banno

The irony of this is that we have neuron connectors outside of the brain down at the gut level, which means a mind that's dislocated from the gut of that body might change into a different mental state. Our guts shape much of who we are as "part" of the mind. So calling someone an asshole might even be literal in some cases :rofl:

Other than that I think you are spot on with your allegory.

The mind is not a single entity, not singular nor "many". It's a result, a consequence of all processes going on. The problem is that we try to "view" our own mind from the outside, get a sense of where it is, but we can't because it is like viewing the inside of our own eyes. We can't invert our vision inwards to see how our vision works and even if we could we would only see details of what makes our eyes work, never grasp the entirety of it in a visual perceptive state.

I always find that talking about mind and perception works best in allegories of computers. In this case, think about a computer with all its components. We can examine each one of them, we know what the graphics card does, we know the power supply, the hard drives, processor, RAM, motherboard etc. But when we turn on the computer, there's this "magic" happening. We can see movies, play games, write philosophy posts online. What we see on the screen is the "mind". It is a consequence of all components working together, but we cannot find "where it is", we can only view it as a result of the components working. And if I were to rip out a RAM board or block the cooling fans, the computer will "get sick", it will not function well, even die completely. If I hit the hard drive with a hammer, I might see blocks of bad code corrupting the "mind" I see on the screen, but I don't know exactly why just that code gets corrupted, or why a part of the "mind" degrades while something else doesn't.

Thinking about our minds in the same way, we can both see how the brain works but not be certain of how the mind relates to all those functions. We just know that the mind and perception are a result of those components.

Our mind cannot view itself, because the mind is not something that can be viewed as a single entity. We have to think about it as a flow of consequence from our components functioning together. Our perception and rational reflection of this process get interrupted in a feedback loop of reacting to the thought of reacting.

We cannot view the inside of our own vision, but we know it is a result of the components linked to vision; the mind is just a bigger version of that same concept and because it's exponentially more complex as such a concept, we have a harder time grasping all of it.

Do atheists actively not want God to exist? — Georgios Bakalis

I would love for a just and good god to exist, I don't actively want there to be no god, I just interpret reality as good as it can be interpreted. But what I would want or what I think would be nice to exist has nothing to do with it really. As an atheist, you take reality for what it is, no more no less. Why give credit or blame to something that there's no proof of existence when we can arrive at conclusions much more rational and close to the truth by actually analyzing reality around us? It's not only nicer to actually know something, it's also more practical for human needs and wants.

So, I don't really want there to be or not to be a god, the question is really phrased wrong since it assumes there is a binary way of living with either wanting there to be or not to be. The third option is to not even think about it like that, just accept reality around as it is, in itself. There's no lack of beauty or lack of explanations for horrific things by ignoring the idea of a god. Reality and the universe is enough as it is.

So a death in this plane of existence would be analogous to removing a grain of sand from a mountain of sand? Theoretically speaking of course. — Steve Leard

Pretty much.

The problem is that the many worlds scenario, in scientific rationality, would mean that any event in the entire bubble of reality that we are in, in the entire universe, can split into two possible worlds. So any sub-atomic particle in the entire universe that moves in any direction means that another world has this particle move in another direction. By just calculating this in our head, there is an infinite number of worlds where the only thing different between them is one particle, in one part of the universe, moving in another direction than our own. So to have other worlds where we live other types of lives, are alive or dead etc. are notions that are so absurdly astronomical as differences that it's impossible to really find any relevance to them. It would be impossible to find them really.

Philosophy is the foundational questioning that ideas are built upon. Much of moral philosophy and modern politics are based upon philosophical ideas, questions and solutions. Philosophy is playing the long game, it shapes society over time.

In terms of the short run, like during this pandemic, there are numerous moral philosophers who help hospitals with how to judge who's getting treatment when capacity is over the limit. These kinds of hard questions rarely work without any kind of moral philosophy groundwork.

The problem with science is that all areas are niched. It's a spearhead that is focused directly at a small area that is then applied to fit into a whole. But you cannot get a full picture, analysis of the consequences, putting together the pieces and how they relate to totally other areas of existence. Take for example the nuclear bomb. It was developed by scientists, scientists utilized the splitting to make power plants, but no scientists truly analyze the consequences of any of it, other than a small remark here and there. It's philosophers who analyzed the post-bomb state of the world, who informed about the consequences and guidelines that are pretty much in place today that prevent total annihilation.

Philosophy questions and informs, science examines, then philosophy once again questions and informs and the cycle continues. Anyone saying science has made philosophy irrelevant doesn't seem to understand what philosophy is or how it works in academia.

Just a quick interjection... this statement suggests to me two things: (1) a non-repetitive robot is conscious, (2) a non-repetitive robot is incredibly difficult to build. Both 1 and 2 are dubious. — InPitzotl

Without context, yes, but a non-repetitive robot, in this case, is about non-repetition in adaptive behavior, meaning, it doesn't randomly repeat different things. It doesn't randomly repeat after each similar input, but based on the experience of past outputs, deliberately acts differently because of it. It reflects upon past outputs as reactions to the input and doesn't repeat the same output again, but instead adjusts the output based on new experiences and knowledge. Robots today can do this, but always in a quantifiable way, we can always see the iterations, even version them. But when a P-zombie robot mimics a human to the point we cannot measure it being different from a human, it is already to the point conscious that it cannot be a P-zombie.

A non-repetitive behavior does not equal consciousness, but adjustable behavior over time that leads to deliberate non-repetitive behavior that is unquantifiable over time, should be on the same level as consciousness in a human.

The point being, that in order for this behavior to take form of a perfect mimic of a human, it requires the same internal life that a human has, otherwise the behavior will be repetitive or so different it cannot be a mimic of a human, it would act totally different as seen in complex AI experiments.

In order to make a P-zombie, it requires a complexity of internal processes that by the time it reaches that level it is no longer a P-zombie, but another human, or consciouss replica of a human.

But the question is, what if there was a chatbot that passed the Turing test? — SolarWind

This is why Ex Machina is a good philosophical case study. The whole premise is that a chatbot can accurately be made to fool the Turing test, but the real test is to study a robot you know is a robot and determine if it is conscious or not.

We could argue that complex consciousness and choices out of it is just a form of synthesis between different inputs. The robot sees coffee for the first time, use data that informs that coffee is good, smiles and takes a sip, input taste, combines that taste with a recorded input from the past when a similar taste as coffee was tasted but spiked with extreme acidity, concludes that coffee is not good - reaction to tasting coffee is: "I just remembered, I don't like coffee".

Such a reaction might seem like a very complex reaction to tasting coffee. A reaction that includes memory, ability to be wrong in the first decision to taste something seemingly tasting good, The structure of this reaction sounds like how we perceive memory, but there's no indication of the experience being as we experience it.

However, the causal line of such internal processing of reactions and choices becomes an infinite web that by the time it creates a foolproof system, the complexity becomes the same as normal consciousness. It cannot, therefore, be less complex than consciousness and still pass as consciousness. By mimicking consciousness, it already has become conscious.

We have AI systems today that actually does this type of synthesis. All those "art by AI" images that are AI's taking images and creating something new, do this and without input as to how it should combine them. But it's not doing so in a way that is a reaction to an emotional request. If you ask it to paint a house that feels like a morning in spring when you have just fallen in love, it cannot create an interpretation of that request and even if it is more complex as a system and does so, it will do different versions every time you request it, or won't be able to change after a time of meditation on the nature of love.

A P-zombie does not survive the ship of Theseus, since it cannot adapt its behavior after a time of experience without having a consciousness that can process that time and experience. A P-Zombie is fixed in time and will always fail to simulate as long as it lacks consciousness.

Ava smiles in a scene when she is alone, no one observing her, reacting to nature. Why is she smiling?

Behavior can't exist without consciousness and P-zombies can't exist without behavior.

That is the right question. And the answer is: We can't know, because we don't have a bridge from the third-person perspective to the first-person perspective. Quite simply, both possibilities are conceivable. Likewise, p-zombies are also conceivable. — SolarWind

But we can make conclusions in third person, through studying the choices of the subject. Ava can't make choices that adapt over time without having a consciousness. Adaptive behavior requires internal processing and emotional awareness, otherwise, we get repetitive behavior that is easily spotted as having no internal thought behind them.

All that remains, that is the similarity principle. The more similar something is to us, the more likely we are to assume the first-person perspective. But the similarity principle is not a law of nature like others. — SolarWind

That requires us to attribute something to us that we assuming is missing in the subject. If the subject displays all the actions and behaviors that require the same foundation as our own behavior, it is the same as us. If they don't, they won't act as us.

If you copy my body into a robot form that is programmed to act entirely as I do based on a behavioral prediction algorithm of me. It will mimic me in the first minute, then start repeating itself while I adapt and change my behavior pattern. Without consciousness, without any internal mental processing of experiences, both emotionally and systematically, the P-zombie would not be able to behave as me at all, because we can't separate behavior from consciousness.

P-zombies require they can uphold the illusion of being a human over the course of time. But even the most complex P-zombie robot would not be able to sustain such an illusion for long. So by observing choices and behavioral changes, it would be possible to spot a lack of consciousness or not, and if not, they aren't P-zombies by that definition, because they can't be.

Can a P-zombie make choices? If it is acting the same as a normal human, it needs to make choices, as humans make choices all the time even based on reactions to events and variations on reactions to events over time. We form choices based on our internal processing of our experience, not by the experience itself. If someone struck us, we react, but react differently based on our current mental state that is in turn based on us having processed different experiences.

So, I would say that P-zombies aren't possible if simulating a human is the primary function, since a simulation that reacts in the exact same way all the time, regardless of time, is not indistinguishable from a human. In order to perfectly mimic a human, it needs to adapt and process experience, which in turn requires an internal mental state that goes against the concept of a P-zombie.

So, the requirement of a P-zombie to exist is the thing that makes a P-zombie not possible to exist or it becomes just another human, and in being that, it is not a P-zombie, just another human. A P-zombie cannot act as a human without the thing that informs our acts. A person cannot act or even simulate complex actions without having a consciousness that processes the reasons for an act.

Case point, does Ava in Ex Machina have consciousness? Without the ability to internally adapt and change behavior, she would be stuck in a feedback loop of choices that are easily predictable, thus not act like a human.

So how can we scientifically explain consciouness? — alphahimself

Yes, but not yet.

1. What is ultimate reality to you? God? Matter? Something else?

2. Is truth absolute or relative? Are at least some truths absolute? Where do these come from?

3. Are moral values absolute or relative? Are at least some moral values absolute? If so, where do these absolute moral values come from?

4. How would you answer the three great philosophical questions of life: Where did we come from? Why are we here? and Where are we going? — jjstet

1. Reality bound by physics and its rules - With me experiencing it through my limited senses and brain processing it. Everything else is outside of our reality and can't be observed or measured from us or methods of us.

2. Truth is absolute if the facts of that truth are not filtered through opinions. How we form truths is based on language and the collectively decided meaning of that language to mean the same to all involved with stating that truth.

3. Relative. Humans have formed a narrative by which we live by. Nothing of our emotional experiences of reality can be formed as absolute truths, so no truths of moral can be formed. If going by the psychology of ourselves, the inductive conclusion can be formed that we have some basic moral values of well-being that are very common in every culture and place in time, but exceptions exist that go against it. So we can only form moral values as being high in probability, meaning, we can find moral values that guide us through that they are the most common in people based on our emotional nature. Most don't kill because most don't like killing others - a common moral value that's guided by our actual experience. Only through narratives in culture can the act of killing start to go against the initial state of not liking it.

So the only absolutes we can find are themselves relative but can be found through probability. But these basic ones cannot form answers to complex moral questions, where things get so relative that we cannot use just probability to find answers.

4. We are the product of universal extreme randomness forming complexity. Just like the chaos of atoms in a cloud can form the shape of a cat, it is indeed chaos in the right structure that forms something we experience as something more. As humans are pattern-seeking animals, we must act against our pattern-seeking instincts to see reality for what it is; entropic chaos that enables a chance at complexity.

We are not here for anything, we simply just are. Don't fall into the pattern-seeking trap creating narratives that aren't there.

We are going into the future and speculations are fiction more or less based in educated predictions. A personal hope is that we expand into the universe and become a truly universal civilization or entity. But statistics point to oblivion before any of that has come to pass, either by self-destruction or losing all attributes of being human, becoming something else, either through evolution or self-evolutionary augmentation and manipulation.

I'm being more general in the matter. Historically, the west have gotten more free of government oppression by religion, but only due to capitalist interests dominating power rather than specific individuals using religion. While the west has people using capitalism to gain power, the middle-east has kept using religion.

So, we are all oppressed in some way, some more than others, we just don't see western oppressive behaviors clearly since we live in the system and might even be part of that system. The level of suffering must also be balanced to the way it is portrayed in media and the common narrative. It's hard to know the level of oppression if the narrative is never truly objective, but subjective in media and enforced by echo chambers in the public.

Many in the middle-east find themselves oppressed more by western society invading through culture than their own government and religion does.

So how do we balance perspectives and narratives to form a truly objective overview of oppression in the world? Singular examples of oppression like Kenosha Kid mentioned are real, but singular, they form a singular perspective. So if someone form examples from western society of oppression, we get another singular perspective.

The idea I proposed is to back up and view oppression as a concept first, before talking specifics of how different nations, religions, and cultures act upon their own people.

There are no difference between them other than what people attribute to them by being outside viewers. Not able to separate different types of observations we attribute oppression to one and choice to the other. While the truth is that both are indoctrinated in faith and oppressed by the doctrines of society. The same as people being against Minaret songs but ok with church bells. People in western society are fine with what they are used to and attribute less oppression to what's existed for long in our culture, while calling other cultures oppressed based on being outsiders observing them.

Truth is, oppression is not felt by Muslims in the same way as we think they "should" and we are blind to the invisible oppression we enforce within our own cultural norms. Many don't get annoyed by church bells and nuns, but would get annoyed by Minaret songs and Niqabs. Many don't see how society and Christian religion indoctrinate people into these positions, but clearly see how Muslim nations oppress and indoctrinate their people. It's easy to see systems from the outside than spot the systems we live in.

The many conflicts and problems we spot in Muslim nations almost always have more to do with people in power using religion to oppress and control. The problems are always means of power, not the religion itself. Religion is a powerful tool to control people far more effectively than anything else.

So the more interesting question is; If we remove systems of power, what would become of religion? How does practice, rituals and ways of living look if religion as a means of power is changed to being a religion with pure choice. Meaning, no one force religion on anyone, not their children, not a stranger, not the people.

Before saying these people have a "choice" or define the differences between the two by a scale of "feeling" oppressed, we must break down how people are formed into making either a choice to be, indoctrinated or forced to be something.

All of us are products of a deterministic society, nature and nurture where even nature is formed by the nurture of past people. So to define differences we need to detach ourselves from the shackles of this determinism in order to purely objectively observe the nature of being and understand that there are no differences between the two, it's only a narrative we've formed to be comfortable in existence.

I still wouldn’t try to change a law if it was wrong, I don’t have time to change the world it’s just not worth the time. I suppose I still have trust in my society, maybe if I lived somewhere where the laws were making my life miserable — Maya

But we can't create an empathic morality theory based on the status quo of one country. You also have to keep in mind that laws change all the time, nothing of that is static. If a government all of a sudden change laws into something that is not good for the people, that would need to be overthrown by the people. Otherwise, you are advocating for a totalitarian regime in which you would follow any leader who put into play any type of law.

You need a viewpoint on morality that is forming justice and laws, not that is coming out of it. That's the whole purpose of ethics; how we form society based on a set of philosophical moral guidelines.

You just weigh it, pros and cons of a decision. I personally wouldn’t break the law because I’d feel so bad of the consequences, the punishment of society, like society’s being mean to you, would be too much to bear. — Maya

What if there were laws that needed to be broken to expose a broken system? How does one live in a society that, for example, have totalitarian laws and keep empathic morality? Like the recent laws in China which can put people in prison for life just for speaking out against oppressive politics. Breaking that law would be considered fine by most people. But if you are raised in that society, you and others around you might view those laws and justice as the status quo. Therefore you accept that breaking a law that forbids something most other people in the world would consider a human right, would make you feel bad.

So how do you combine empathic morality with a justice system that doesn't equal to true empathic values and human rights? If breaking the law is a good thing, but makes you feel bad, how does that combine with your ability to value pros and cons of that choice?

The right thing to do is what makes us feel good, without breaking the law — Maya

You advocate for morality out of empathy. This requires however that the laws and justice is created out of empathic ideals as well, otherwise, empathic morality will end up in conflict with laws and justice.

That is what is questioned by the Del Santo article. — Banno

Problem is that it's inaccessible to non-members. But I see your point. The abstract points to an attempt at solving the bridging problem.

But I was mainly objecting to the conclusion you made "The notion that the universe is determined fails."
Which only makes sense if there was a high probability of large consequences of random operation, which doesn't really exist in our reality. We only conclude something like that based on what we yet cannot measure or do with physics. So at best it's a low probability conclusion that it fails, but more likely that we can measure the existence of it, but not yet understand it.

Sure. The present conversation is not about quantum randomness. It's about indeterminacy in classical physics. — Banno

Maybe I fail to see how they are not connected? Randomness in causality physics only exists when we have a lack of ability to measure all possible parameters. The only randomness that exist which breaks determinism is at a quantum level, a level that is incompatible with reality and therefore can't be counted as part of it, just like we don't count the breakdown of spacetime in a black hole as part of our reality, but instead exist outside it.

So if our reality is measured with classical physics, determinism is not broken. If we lack the ability to spot errors, that doesn't mean determinism breaks, only that our tools did.

In context, I mean that quantum randomness doesn't affect classical physics since classical physics deals with large determined sizes. Quantum randomness boils down to predictability as soon as the scale of the system is above that of scales required for random operation. I.e we have a random system that defines the properties of an object and those properties don't change since the probability of them being broken is so low it could be considered infinitely improbable. Classical physics can't define this randomness since classical physics breaks down at those scales, but that doesn't mean they can't measure deterministic outcomes if the ability to measure is powerful enough, since classical physics calculate the actual reality of our universe. Quantum randomness is outside of this reality since it exists on a scale where our reality does not work and cannot work because of it.

It's the same as with black holes. Spacetime breaks down within it and while we can measure, calculate, and speculate about the reality within a black hole, it is impossible to define it with measurements of our reality. Inside a black hole, there's unreality. The same goes for quantum randomness, it is outside reality. Both the black hole and quantum randomness affect reality, but they both become deterministic when "entering" our reality in the form of causal events.

But of course no one could determine the final resting place of the ball. Even the smallest error in the initial positions will be magnified until it throws out the calculations. — Banno

How is this premise concluded with the conclusion below?

The notion that the universe is determined fails. — Banno

Just because we cannot measure all parameters necessary for predicting the future, doesn't mean that all parameters aren't there to determine the outcome.

We can argue for quantum randomness affecting the larger scaled world, but it is probabilistic and the probable outcomes become infinitely more deterministic as soon as we leave a planck scale. Saying that something is random when we don't have enough ability to calculate all parameters doesn't mean it is random.

And if we include ourselves into the equation, we are far too big in scale to be free of deterministic randomness.

Take the idea of a quantum dice. The illusion we have is that if we make choices based on this, we are neither free nor determined, but actually acting out of randomness. However, this is also an illusion since the quantum randomness gets determined by measuring it. So surrounding parameters still determine the outcome, combined with the apparent choice of throwing the dice and making choices based on an outcome.

The likely truth of the universe is that it's based on probability on a scale so small that the order created out of it becomes deterministic.

I.e the universe as perceived and measurable for definitions on how it works becomes deterministic and anything outside of that is neither perceivable nor measurable. It becomes rather a reality vs unreality. To describe our universe is to describe it with and through reality. Any attempt to describe it through unreality fails to be relevant as it's not part of reality both in perception and in terms of ability to be measured.

What are we then talking about when talking about quantum randomness if we can't talk about it, perceive or measure it without destroying it into a deterministic reality? Unreality is unable to be compatible with reality, we cannot define it and it cannot define reality. Therefore quantum randomness can be concluded to exist through math, but it cannot be part of reality as it's not a component of what makes up the universe, it's outside of it.

You say you want proof but I'm not sure that exists, it's a nearly impossible thing to prove. We don't record what your political positions were before and after taking a course at a university. We can only note that universities are not apolitical. — Judaka

So, how is your objection then valid? The example of communism ignores everything else that went on with society, but pretty much blames the rise of it on universities' lack of neutrality. So you first don't have a clear example and no evidence of there even being ideological shifts between first and last year of candidates.

So how is this objection really of quality value?

You ask "what evidence do you have that it can produce ideological shifts" but within communism you have clear examples of world-famous communist leaders who picked up their ideological leanings at university. — Judaka

Ignoring everything else that went down during these times, communism or rather marxism was a radical theory at the time and it was applied to something that didn't even match up with what Marx and Engels talked about. All these people tried to force marxism into system when Marx and Engels proposed them to be a consequence of capitalism. The theories were popular because they were part of the discourse, not some ideological indoctrination thing happening outside of the lecture halls as you put this forward.

So how is these historical events evidence for how universities function today and in what way do it even remotely affect the idea of politician education and license? The link is very thin here and I'm asking for a little better clarification of what the actual consequences would be for the licensed politicians in the end.

if you forced future leaders to go to universities which debate political theories such as communism then it increases the likelihood of them being influenced by those theories. — Judaka

So, if you have a balanced education that neutrally goes through capitalism and marxism there's a risk that some of them find marxism intriguing?

Do you realize what you are actually saying here? That it's better that we keep people in the dark about political theories because if people learn about all of that they might find some ideas that are considered taboo in this neoliberal world we currently live in to be more interesting than the status quo. Seriously?

Bring all knowledge, all theories and facts into light, discuss them critically and if that leads to some educated people finding something more aligned with themselves than what they believed before that knowledge, that is not the kind of indoctrination you are talking about and that is nothing but anti-intellectualism out of fearmongering the left and marxism.

It is not the nail in the coffin for your suggestions and honestly I am not really trying to prove anything. — Judaka

The nail in the coffin is that when people learn knowledge about political theories they might learn marxism and therefore it leads to communist takeover? You object by specifically point out that people might learn some, in your opinion, "bad knowledge" that could change how they view the world after education.

Knowledge is knowledge. I could argue that knowledge is always better than no knowledge.

p1 Broad knowledge always leads to more informed conclusions.
p2 Informed conclusions always lead to a higher probability of positive outcomes than uninformed ones.

Therefore, broad knowledge is always better than no knowledge when making conclusions and taking decisions.

How does that fit with the comparison of politicians today and the ones in epistemic democracy? Politicians today can be uneducated and have very little knowledge while practicing parliamentary actions. How is that better than them also having a politician education as a foundation? Because they risk learning something in university that they might like? And because of that risk, it's the nail in coffin of the idea of education for politicians?

How about the current practice of representative democracy? Where we can have neo-nazis dressed in suits taking power because they were indoctrinated into that by the alt-right and there are nothing to prevent uneducated ideas to infiltrate parliament? How is the risk of influence as it is now better than how it would be if we risk getting influenced by having more and broader knowledge of political ideas, ideologies and theories?

You must explain why learning more about political theory and ideologies risks indoctrinating into bad politics while at the same time point out how the current system is better keeping bad politics out of power when the logic of knowledge points to the contrary?

Otherwise, the only thing I can see you making an argument for is that people shouldn't learn stuff about political theories because that can lead to them liking something else than they previously did.

How is that logical as an objection against epistemic democracy in any way? It's more of an argument for anti-intellectualism.

Really, that's my "line of logic"? But I never said anything like that. Isn't that what we call a strawman? — Judaka

Tu quoquo. You explained your logic behind it, but it still doesn't hold up. Previously I had to guess, that is not equal to a strawman.

It's an outrageous interpretation of my argument. I'm not fearmongering communism and I even went out of my way to specify as such. — Judaka

But they might learn about communism in their education and therefore bad politicians? Circling back to your nail in the coffin. So I take back my guess about your conclusion, because it's not fearmongering the left, it's fearmongering the idea of education as education can lead to knowledge that is considered "bad".

There is no "bad knowledge", there's only knowledge. "Bad knowledge" is essentially biased ideas and biased ideas are a feature much closer to the uneducated than the educated. Epistemic democracy is much lower in risking bad politics entering parliament than the opposite, just through logic alone.

You choose instead to put words in my mouth and interpret my arguments in ways that undermine them, so I will not respond to whatever you may comment further. — Judaka

No, I'm scrutinizing your objections in order to see if there's any valid criticism that has any sound foundation, but so far I haven't remotely been convinced by the reasoning you give here. That's what philosophy is. You can't just say an opinion that is ill-supported with fallacious arguments about how people might learn "too much" during their education and risk learning stuff like communism and therefore conclude that epistemic democracy is bad or worse than the status quo. It's surface-level opinion in the same class as the infamous Michael Gove quote that the people have "had enough of experts".

I've had enough of demagogues in politics.

You bring up fallacy arguments so much lol. Most of your responses are really just you theorising about the ways in which you think my arguments might go without actually finding that out first. — Judaka

That's why I ask for clarification since you don't give one, all I have is the outlines of your objections.

Was this my argument? That fact is only important to you, why should I care? — Judaka

You connect political imbalance within universities to form a conclusion that it would create biased politicians. If that is not the case, what is your point with universities' political imbalance? Clarify

It's not even just about the "knowledge taught", even if the classes were totally apolitical. When you say political candidates must spend 3-6 years at a university and universities aren't apolitical places, it has an impact on the candidates. — Judaka

And we still have educated people on all sides of politics, what evidence do you have that education at universities produces a shift in political ideology? How can you differentiate that to normal ideological shifts in society at the same time? That university has an impact on candidates outside of the education itself is true because it's true throughout the life of a person to change according to the environment. But you are very specific about what type of change we are talking about so you need to prove that with much better scrutiny.

That people change is not the same as change in a way negative to one's initial ideology. And even if someone changes ideologically, how do you know that is because of the university outside of education and not out of the reason more knowledge puts more perspective on political questions? If the latter, that is a good outcome for the individual. Having more perspective gives better insight in the good and bad of each ideological position you can be in.

The spread of communism and its relationship with universities is extensive, that's half of the story of the 20th-century spread of communism. Look at Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Lenin and many others. The point here isn't to say "US will become communist if political licence" but that you cannot treat universities as being apolitical. — Judaka

How is this in any way linked to what I'm proposing? How is this not a Reductio ad absurdum? Or guilt by association through the fact that they had universities and so do we, therefore extreme consequence?

This is in no way evidence for negative consequences of a politician education and license. Why would this be in any difference to how doctors go through medical education? Would that result in them being politically biased towards health care and practice? What about lawyers and law school? There are plenty of areas of expertise that require neutrality.

This objection just sounds like fearing ideological indoctrination rather than a sound critique of the required education to practice parliamentary duties. You have to prove actual consequences outside of historical accounts that really has little to do with solely university reasons alone for their rise.

The irony here is that it seems your argument has more ideological reasons than rational ones. The example of the rise of communism in universities, without nuance to the fact that there was more happening in society than just what happened in those universities, and the fact that your entire line of logic here is: [The old rise of communism was because communism in universities] > [Universities are not good for learning]

What if the education was part of the state instead and separated from any faculty or candidates of current universities and that these universities focus entirely on the education of politicians? With clear standards for education guidelines and review of political neutrality. Would that be better? Since I'm proposing a fundamental change in democratic practice it could easily be a part of that change.

STRAW MAN? I've written like 2k words on your thread, you know what I think about the individual components which have all been addressed. I haven't made any slippery slope arguments. — Judaka

Still, you sum up my premise about education to be bad because it produces indoctrinated politicians because communism started in universities. I ask for clear evidence for any indoctrinated ideologies as consequences in people who went to universities, but all you do is point to the rise of communism as if that proves against the need for education.

Writing 2k words that repeat the same objections without deeper clarifications and inclusion of futher points mean little if it doesn't clearly prove my points wrong here. Assumptions and fearmongering communism are not valid support of the objections you've made. That is why this keeps going.

I am done, please stop replying to me. — Judaka

You only have the choice of not continuing the discussion, not that your objections are the final words of a discussion.

Universities don't try to ensure equal representation in their courses or of their lecturers in political persuasions, why wouldn't there be an imbalance? Universities have always been involved in politics and university students have always been interested in politics. Especially in the arts where people are encouraged to think about these kinds of ideas. I don't want to respond to your obsession with fallacies that have nothing to do with what I said. — Judaka

So in what way is the current system better than what I propose? In what way do you mean that their education, in terms of primarily economics and philosophy would lead to political biases? What kind of biases are you talking about here? Out of the proposed risk of universities having imbalanced representation, how can you conclude the amount at which current universities have imbalanced representation and to which amount it changes the outcome of their education, and specifically the outcome within the areas of education I proposed?

So far you seem to argue: "some universities have an imbalance in political positions, therefore politician education distorts the neutrality of parliament."
Disregarding the fact that people don't get a politician license after learning a political ideology, but instead, already have a foundational ideology. The education isn't there to reprogram and even if there was a political imbalance at the university, that doesn't change the education taught in these areas of knowledge. Students can today absolutely call out if the knowledge taught has a political bias instead of neutrality and if they have a specific political ideology, the education won't interfere with that.

You still need to prove the correlation between university political imbalance to the education taught and the consequences of that education. The objection can't just be "Some universities have political imbalance - Therefore a political license will be biased".

It's barely different, barely addresses any of the problems and you don't take any of the potential problems it could cause seriously. Populism works not because of politicians but because of voters, I don't know how much of an issue populism is. Populism comes about because people feel disenfranchised and failed by democracy in the first place. — Judaka

By saying it's barley different you effectively straw man the entire idea or ignore portions of my argument, like the Dual Process effect on parliamentary members. And the problems you raise are still too weak and closer to slippery slope ideas of the consequences.

Populism may have been the wrong wording here as, like you say, it has more to do with the people than politicians. What I mean is demagogical politicians and the populist result among the people. Epistemic Democracy helps reduce the demagogical nature of today's representative democracies.

Essentially,

At the moment, demagogical politics is all over nations like Britain and US. A change in political praxis and higher dialectic quality is needed to combat these things from happening. The challenge is to change it without blocking democratic voices in society, meaning, the risk of an elite or specific ideology taking over. While there are many changes that can be done to the representative democracy that exists today, my thesis is that we need to change some fundamental parts of how representative democracy works in order to reduce demagogical politics from rising and populism taking over public discourse.

Is Camus right in his idea about Philosophical suicide and that the atheist path is the authentic one? Is belief in a religion or some secular ideology a type of avoiding asking life's fundamental questions. It's a refusal to acknowledge that the world is meaningless and indifferent yet humans continually try to find meaning. My view is that Camus's solution would not work for many people including those who are religious. Their belief whether God exists or not provides them with a sense of meaning and purpose in life and to tell them that their belief is philosophical suicide seems rather arrogant I think — Ross Campbell

Ignorance is bliss you mean? Because that's what the sense of meaning in religion gives you. You are ignoring to think about the world and life authentically and without filters in order to feel content with a meaning that has been given to you by others, not yourself.

Yes, this is the philosophy degree -> better politician determinism I asked about before. You've obviously derived this ab initio from the superiority of philosophy that you perceive, and I don't deny that philosophy teaches good things like scepticism. I do deny that the output of that is good sceptics or good politicians, in the same way that a medical degree is not a thing that generally yields good gynaecologists. — Kenosha Kid

Skepticism is only part of it and I'll quote what I wrote about the psychological aspect.

For the education part of the argument, I'd add the psychological Dual Process Theory to the mix. Popularized by Daniel Kahneman it speaks of the two systems our brain is using to make decisions, where system 1 acts on impulse and system 2 acts through reflectability. Why I bring up these is because studies have shown that through experience and training you can improve the speed of system 2 which is slower and often overlooked when making decisions. The act of doing philosophy, training in philosophy can in itself improve the use and speed of system 2, reducing the biases you have when making decisions and forming conclusions.

So with education in, primarily, philosophy, you will not only give knowledge in deductive and inductive methods of dialectics, but you will also improve the use of system 2 compared to without education the overuse of system 1. — Christoffer

I don't feel you're even trying to make a compelling argument for the education you've suggested and instead you're just saying that some form of education would be preferable for you. — Judaka

Fair enough.

For the education part of the argument, I'd add the psychological Dual Process Theory to the mix. Popularized by Daniel Kahneman it speaks of the two systems our brain is using to make decisions, where system 1 acts on impulse and system 2 acts through reflectability. Why I bring up these is because studies have shown that through experience and training you can improve the speed of system 2 which is slower and often overlooked when making decisions. The act of doing philosophy, training in philosophy can in itself improve the use and speed of system 2, reducing the biases you have when making decisions and forming conclusions.

So with education in, primarily, philosophy, you will not only give knowledge in deductive and inductive methods of dialectics, but you will also improve the use of system 2 compared to without education the overuse of system 1.

Just look at universities today, they are far from politically impartial, many are famous for their political leanings. Who teaches the licence, what kind of thinker does it produce and does it restrict the types of politicians that can be elected. — Judaka

For this objection to be valid you need to prove that universities today produce biased educated people and that they are in fact acting with those imprinted biases after education is over. The objection that universities are politically impartial is often used in a fallacious way to argue that education is broken and nothing good can come out of it or at least nothing that fits your biases about the world is taught within them. So this objection is pretty weak for arguing against the need for politics based-education of politicians.

As I've said a few times now, I just don't have any confidence in your proposals to be implemented fairly. — Judaka

Is this system fairer than how regular representative democracy system is now in most parts of the world? Why is the current system fairer? Education, in order to be a licensed decision-maker, does not mean you are less rooted in ideological opinions, but it creates better praxis of parliament and less populistic ideals. Is it fairer that by people's choice we vote in specific names into parliament, but the majority of people in parliament actually voting on decisions are people who get put there by the parties and in so doing the people have no control of those agents? Either we get people to vote on all members of parliamentary seats or we demand better praxis and knowledge of the people making decisions.

I haven't been sold on why the fact-checker is necessary and I am concerned that politicians can be silenced or forced to reword their arguments based on the fact-checkers opinions about biases or fallacies. — Judaka

In what way would a fact-checker be biased or have fallacies? The fact-checkers only purpose is to spot factual errors, fallacies and biases. If the fact-checker points out a bias that isn't a bias, a fallacy that isn't a fallacy or corrects on facts with their own factual errors, those things can be objected against. You could also object that the fact-checker didn't spot a bias or fallacy in someone else's argument. But we already have a speaker seat in parliament and that speaker has the job to be unbiased and impartial to the debates in parliament. This is extending the toolset to improve the quality of debates.

To say that it can lead to silencing politicians is to do a slippery slope and in so too simplified as an objection to the praxis of this parliament position.

Just as you accused me of using a fallacy, who's right on that? It's dangerous because if the fact-checker is being uncharitable with people or parties he doesn't like or if he's just incompetent then that's going to be a huge problem. — Judaka

Let's take that last fallacy as an example. How do I conclude that it is? You say that the fact-checker leads to silencing? Wouldn't that also be the same if you apply it to the speakers role in parliament today? What is the difference? Why does the fact-checker lead to silencing and how do you conclude this without jumping to the conclusion that the fact-checker has power beyond their actual role? And ignoring any possibility of objection to the fact-checker if they conduct a weak support for calling out a fallacy or bias. You assume absolute power to fit your conclusion that they will have so over politicians debating, but there's no premise that says they have absolute power so saying "it leads to silencing" and unfair practice based on the fact-checkers biases becomes a slippery slope fallacy. If you examine your own counter-argument right here, isn't it clearly a fallacy in your reasoning?

Fallacies and biases are pretty straight forward in their meaning and spotting these help to fine-tune a dialectic past emotional opinions and system 1 type arguments. If the fact-checker is incompetent, that will instantly show when he is unable to underline why something is a fallacy or a bias. Malpractice or incompetence leads to termination of that position, just like if a doctor is incompetent they won't be able to continue practice medicine.

Your counter-arguments assumes a lot of extremes that either already should exist within parliaments right now or they are deliberate simplifications of my premises.

Fair enough. I'm trying to countervail the tendency of those in this thread who treat it as primarily an academic or even philosophical movement of some kind. A confusion - itself confused - of a distinction between postmodernity and post-structuralism, a la Wheatley. — StreetlightX

Ok, gotcha.

The point is that it itself is largely a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon. — StreetlightX

Yes, agreeing with you. But you said "as it should in any discussion of postmodernism", which sounds a bit dismissal of the depth of postmodernism outside aesthetic and cultural impacts.

I mean, deconstructing reality, language etc. can be applied to more than just culture and aesthetics, right? Just wondering how to interpret the conclusion you made?

It's not about what it should be. It's about what it is - and that people need to understand what they are talking about before blabbing on about 'subjective truth' or whatever other wrongheaded trash they associate with postmodernism. — StreetlightX

Yes, agreed, but do you propose that culture and aesthetics is the only thing that it is?

You be mistaking postmodernism with Post Structralism — Wheatley

Postmodernism is closely in connection with poststructuralism.

? I'm not sure what I said implied I was talking about 'some conclusions easily dismissive'. To call something aesthetic or cultural is not at all to dismiss it. If anything to say so is to note it's far broader reach than some academic backwater movement. — StreetlightX

Maybe I read your comment as if postmodernism should only be about culture and aesthetics?
The irony of this is interpreting and deconstructing what that sentence meant :wink:

...to aesthetics and culture - as it should in any discussion of postmodernism. — StreetlightX