However, methods that result in the creation of basic life forms and the explanations accompanying those do not preclude, out of logical necessity, the creation of life by a God. — FreeEmotion

The problem is that it further pushes away the direct intervention by another being. This is the problematic nature of shifting goal posts by those defending the idea of us being God's creation. The more we've historically learned and explained by science, the further away any "God" as a concept gets from direct interaction with us. We're basically at a point in which God or a pantheon would be so dislocated from us that they exist outside of reality so far away that the mere scale of the universe renders us less impactful on the universe than a speck of dust. Our insignificance only exponentially magnifies by the concept of constants varying between different inflationary bubble universes. If we aren't more relevant than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a giant petri dish, and any Gods no more aware of us in their petri dish than we are of a single bacteria on our entire planet, then even with the existence of such beings, we still do not have any purpose or meaning outside of being just another speck of dust. Thus, applying meaning to us becomes equivalent of us giving the same level of meaning to a literal speck of dust on the floor.

The more we explain scientifically, the further away any God gets from us and the further away our existential purpose or meaning becomes. How far can we push away the concept of a God before we can finally summarize our existence as actually meaningless? It all looks like human arrogance and desperation for meaning. Like children who never grows up, who gets lost in the crowd of humanity always looking for their parents to come and fix their pain.

In the next ten thousand to a million years, there is no doubt that increasingly complex and elegant theories might be proposed, however the basic human act of faith in the existence of the yet unknown, be it God or be it future explanations, the acts of blind faith may continue to be committed far into the distant future. Therefore I do not think there can be a rational argument against religious faith. — FreeEmotion

Such faith comes from fear. We are desperate for comfort. It's part of our psychology, how we handle our experience as human beings being self aware. I cannot ignore the fact that we have these basic psychological drives for comfort in face of existential dread. When someone attributes these psychological drives to instead be about objective support for religious belief I question that conclusion as the actual conclusion is simply found in psychological processes that have no more value than any other psychological drive. We feel hunger, we eat, we feel a dread when being aware of our existence, we seek comfort from that dread.

That we invent elaborate illusions in order to convince ourself that this comfort is a real thing and not just a warm blanket, seems to be an integral part and consequence of our mind's pattern seeking biases driven by our strong emotions.

Makes me wonder what you think you have to contribute to a philosophy forum. — Wayfarer

What makes you say that? Questioning religious illusions and the illusions of meaning is quite a large part of philosophy, especially the last hundred or so years. And the specific contribution here is to question the circle of reasoning that so often happen when logic goes out the window in favor of an emotional need for comforting ideas and ideologies that cannot pass basic deconstruction of the argument. I have a strong conviction that it is possible to create a framework of a non-religious experience of living that is not ending up nihilistic. To form an experience rooted in scientific thinking without becoming scientism, which seem to be the usual derogatory emotional reaction whenever arguments focusing on science and scientific approaches pop up. That I attribute religious praxis and belief to grow out of an emotional need for comfort is me deconstructing faith through psychology. That doesn't necessarily mean that faith should be shunned, it simply underscores how it's a strong process that all people seem to gravitate towards and that we cannot use as a foundation for knowledge by its very nature of acting as illusions rooted in the need for existential comfort. It's basically working off the Nietzschean ideas of what happens when God is dead. If religion is gone but we still have the need for comfort, how do we get that without turning into what we see much of today; the materialistic church where identity life-styles and radicalized consumerism reign supreme. The desperate need for comfort in a world without religion requires a framework that solves this need for comfort without inventing new illusions, and its one of the hardest question to solve for philosophers who don't buy into religious convictions.

But still, I find that questioning of my contribution to the philosophy forum to be rather awkward. Like, do people need to accept your specific philosophical ideal in order to be valued as a contributor? Is not even my questioning of certain ideas a contributing factor on a philosophy forum? Sounds a bit weird to imply a lack of contribution in that way?

was the fact that your post misunderstands confuses the existential question of purpose with the functional sense of purpose assumed by physics. — Wayfarer

My point was that there is no such purpose, only the purpose as a function of the universe just as much as the purpose of electromagnetism as a function in relation to everything else.

The existential sense of purpose I'm referring to, is the kind of question philosophers and the religious ponder - is there a purpose to existence, other than pro-creating and 'passing on our genes'. — Wayfarer

And the overall conclusion I made was that there is none such thing. Because even, as I described, if there was an entity which were responsible for dice throwing the fine structure constant and other constant's from which the universe inflates into what it is, the significance of us as a species is so low it would be irrelevant to them. So there's no existential purpose to us and the only purpose that life and evolution has is by being a function as any other functions of the universe, a byproduct and result of entropic forces. A dead universal function.

That we attribute further ideas of meaning and purpose to all of this is out of existential dread and fear. We cannot cope with this sense of meaninglessness and therefor seek comfort in ideas that makes us feel special.

This is such a powerful emotion that the decline of interest in religious beliefs has instead led to people desperately trying to find meaning elsewhere. The rise of fanatical ideologies and ideas outside of religion comes from the same source of existential dread. Most people, almost all people, seem unable to grasp existence for what it is because it demands such a high level of tolerance of that existential dread.

It's like if the fire Prometheus stole was the knowledge that dismantles religious claims and that the answers that knowledge brings, tortures us as we're stuck on this rock on the coast of the black ocean. As Camus said about Sisyphus, we could apply to Prometheus.... "one must imagine Prometheus happy".

Your laugh at what I said seem to imply that you feel what I said was nonsense, but now I can't find that response anymore? Anyway, the thing you responded to is not nonsense. It's an existing scientific hypothesis about a possible purpose for evolution as part of physics itself. And it makes sense, if the universe moves towards higher entropy and it tends to gravitate towards whatever gets there the fastest, then life and evolution in itself is such a function that would fall in line with that process. If anything, it would underscore why there is life, why a chemical process would form such forms and functions.

I'm also extremely dubious of the vague notion that chemical components basically ravelled themselves into DNA and thereafter the enormous variety of living forms through something like a spontaneous chemical reaction. I'm more inclined to sympathise with Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasighe's panspermia thesis, although I'll go with the Hindu aphorism for now: life comes from life. — Wayfarer

Panspermia does not solve anything though. It would just position life appearing somewhere else. And in the state that earth was in back when life began, what would be different on another world? It all becomes a kind of circular reasoning in which the central question remains: how did life began?

With experiments and findings of chemical reactions actually forming potential sources for self-correcting structures, abiogenesis is still the most logical solution to the question. In the context of entropy, it also makes sense.

The philosophical issue comes down to one word: purpose. Any ideas of purpose, and therefore meaning, were jettisoned by early modern science, associated with the dreaded scholasticism. The only admissable kinds of causes were what the scholastics would call material and effiecient causes. So, in the Aristotelian sense, nothing happens in evolutionary theory for any reason, other than to propogate. And all behaviours are subordinated to, and explained by, that requirement. — Wayfarer

Actually, there may be some purpose to life and evolution in that life as a function increases entropy as a function based on the second law of thermodynamics. An ocean with bacteria can have up to almost 700% more efficiency than a dead ocean in entropy of the sun's energy. So it may be that life in itself is a product of the universe tending towards more efficient entropy and be an essential byproduct of this universe's laws of physics.

But what about more subtle qualities that one could argue make little sense any other way. For example the human eye by physics must be a certain shape to focus light correctly. — TiredThinker

Why does this off the shelf drone fly better than the competition? Did the designers figure out the best aerodynamics and carefully invent it for that purpose?



No, this drone was created by letting an algorithm iterate thousands of versions of the drone based on initial function parameters. In essence, they needed the function to fly balanced and well in this size and shape and the algorithm iterated it until it ended up in the most optimal shape and design.

Theres no real reason that evolution didn't come up with the design we humans have by the iterative trial and error that life gets chewed through by its environment. The requirement (the necessary function needed to survive as a species) defines the direction an evolutionary trait takes. Birds who are required to move around large areas of the globe are theorized to have built in compasses based on the ability to sense the earth's magnetic fields. We do not need such a function since we don't need to travel such distances at a short notice, but instead need to find localized positions of survival (resources in an area). It may be that our senses, our eyes, have been developed by evolution through a trial and error that ended up giving us the optimal ability to function based on the requirements and needs of our species survival. We could have been given a larger range of wavelengths to see, like infrared and UV light, but why didn't we? Maybe because a large point of our species is herd behavior and the ability to dynamically interact with other members of a tribe. So our range may be tuned through trial and error just as we developed a special part in our brain only meant to process the holistic understanding of faces.

We can go on and on about the tiniest function and form that some evolutionary thing has, but it can all be boiled down to enough time testing a function until the optimal form is achieved to function in harmony with the environment.

So, evolution is a remarkable outgrowth from our universal laws. Like seeing a spectacular rock formation that seems impossible at first sight, but when looking closer you can see how the wind, the mechanics of the ocean hitting it, the sun burning its surface over millions of years would produce such a shape.

We only attribute our awe towards how we exist as a species in the now, a naive first impression of our function and shape. But if we were to include the millions of years of trial and error that have been happening on this planet since the dawn of life, I see no more magic to it than a spectacular chemical reaction producing a remarkable end result.

As for a combination of creationism/intelligent design and evolution, the only synthesis of those two would be if there was a highly advanced being outside of our reality that basically produces test inflation bubbles in order to reach some end result. Like a highly advanced species doing research with different physical constants as starting points. Many theoretical physicists and cosmologists theorize that there may be many, if not an infinite amount of inflation universes happening all the time, all with different set of constants that solidify after the initial inflation. Ours being the famous fine structure constant 1/137 (and its decimals). If it were slightly off we might not have had the foundation for anything in our universe, matter might not have been able to form as it did and so on. But that also means that we might not even be the intended outcome of such higher beings, we might just be one of the scrap inflations they don't care about, they might not even know we exist or that any life in the universe exists. So in the end, even if we were created like that, we wouldn't have a purpose as we're just a byproduct of some other intention. And we're back again to beings trying to force feed meaning into people's hearts when there is none.

Creationism and intelligent design is based on the desperation for meaning. Changing our origin story over and over just to make sure there's always some meaning somewhere. I just see it as the desperation in front of a horror of existence that is too hard on some people's hearts.

Many, if not most people, are terrified of life, what it is, our experience of it and we all seek out comfort in face of such terror. Even the most atheistic minds, the ones who deny any idea of a creator, purpose or intention of our existence, can be utterly terrified of existence anyway.

But I would argue that the defining factor for how perceptible some are towards ideas of a creator compared to the meaninglessness of life as just an entropic function of the universe, is how strong skinned they are against existential dread. Just like some are tough enough to cope with being a soldier in a warzone and others aren't. There's nothing saying that being tough in war is equivalent to being a better person, only that this is a fact. Some are more afraid than others, but more accurately, some are better at handling fear than others. The dread of existence either force people into believing a fantasy to find comfort or they find comfort in other means.

I find comfort in decoding reality, decoding everything around me. The exploration in itself is a journey that comforts me and that experience is joyful even without any underlying meaning. I feel awe in this experience of existence, my body and mind being a product of the universe able to experience itself. I can feel my eyes tear up when seeing something beautiful in nature, not because of some divine sense of its creation, but at the beauty in its very meaninglessness still being able to produce my mind and body experiencing how time and space shaped this thing that I experience.

But such perspective requires a lot more mental energy than the comfort of a creator. A comforting end point of everything, no need to dwell on it further. And once such religious belief solidify itself in someone's core belief systems, it can lead to a lifetime of trying to convince themselves that they are right and that all the conflicting knowledge out there in the world is wrong.

The hard truth is that the facts does not care about being comforting. They are what they are. Nothing points towards a creator or intelligent design with a purpose, and if there was a creator or creators, those beings would be so far dislocated from our existence that we still end up in a meaningless and purposeless universe.

We cannot apply human values, ideas or purpose onto a system of the universe that does not have a human perspective. Evolution is not a human perspective, it is a physical system and function and it does not care about our arbitrary values applied to its process or our perspective of purpose and function, since we aren't the architects of its function. And applying a sense of some other architect outside of our human perspective and reasoning would just be filled with the same meaning and purpose as the more scientific explanation for evolution as an entropic process, basically rendering any sense of meaning and purpose irrelevant and non-existent.

you only think that because you're biased and probably evil — flannel jesus

:lol:

You seem very curious, which is only a fantastic quality to have — flannel jesus

This is also lacking today, especially online. Being curious into other people's perspective before arguing against them would solve many problems in the world today.

Do you think death threats should be legal?

I think everything should be legal. — NOS4A2

You've just underscored why it's impossible to take anything you say seriously.

Are there mindsets that can help an individual or a society easier to choose honesty? — YiRu Li

In my view, a soft Kantian ethical framework functions best. The categorical imperatives in my opinion are naive in their absolutism and centered around only the individual's responsibility, but a softer line in which you combine the first imperative on being honest and tell the truth with the epistemic responsibility of making sure each situation does not lead to harm should guide most people. Basically, always tell the truth, but always focus on being knowledgable enough to know that said truth does not in itself harm.

My friend indeed complains Eastern philosophy sounds like self-help, or maybe homework. :sweat: You can tell me how to think about this in western way. Thanks! — YiRu Li

It might be because western philosophy is more rooted in the analytical while eastern focuses more on the experiences, the phenomenological, at least that's my take on it.

The one takeaway I've got from eastern philosophy that in western philosophy seems to go missing is the power of a holistic perspective. Most sciences focus on specific areas and rarely combine everything into a holistic overview. It's mostly when such a holistic viewpoint is applied that we get breakthroughs, but it seems to get lost in the scientific and western philosophical day to day practices. Einstein's general relativity is a good example of a theory that has a holistic perspective that includes most physics up to that date.

In looking at what practical use philosophy has, I'm certain that western philosophy has a better approach on many subjects, but including the holistic approach of eastern philosophy elevates it.

Actually, I think we should ditch the whole eastern vs western concept, since it's mostly just a historical perspective on how different cultures thought about hard questions. Instead, the actual status of philosophy has merged so many approaches from so many corners of the world that the only true method is the one that takes the best approaches from all, ditch the crap, and combining it in a modern framework.

There is value to the way non-western philosophy approaches different topics that breaks free from the chains that western philosophy has in its rigid logical nature. But at the same time, western philosophy is better at universalizing concepts on solid grounds forming logical and empirical foundations. So in my opinion, using non-western traditions in exploring ideas sometimes works better and then take those concepts down to earth with western traditions to evaluate their validity as universal concepts.

What characterizes the mindset associated with honesty? Considering that individuals may occasionally engage in falsehoods, how do we conceptualize the mindset of honesty? Is 'honest' a noun or a verb? Can one still be deemed an honest person if they occasionally engage in deception? — YiRu Li

I don't look at the world in a binary way, everything is a form of gradient, statistical, or a matter of probability. You cannot be only honest or only not honest. Instead, the morality around subjects like honesty has to do with the amount of honesty you live by and in which situations you are not honest. If you are honest in all situations but those in which such honesty would hurt others or put you in danger, then that would in my book make you an honest person.

For example: If you hit a human with a hammer it makes a noise because it feels pain. Interestingly (or not) if you hit a rock with a hammer is also makes a noise. Can we conclude that the rock also feels pain, by analogy with the human? — bert1

Got damn we need to protest against the mining industry, all those hurt little rocks!!!

The way you show I did NOT present a logical argument is by showing how it is illogical, by dismantling the actually assumptions and or extrapolations therefrom. — ken2esq

I did, I pointed out the fallacies and the biases. I pointed out that you make up some arbitrary speculation based on a wrong interpretation of already defined science, and then you use your made up stuff as supporting evidence for new speculations, ending up in a mess of interconnected made up ideas that you try to communicate as a solid rational conclusion.

EVERY argument which has an opponent necessarily is viewed as an ILLOGICAL ARGUMENT by the opponent — ken2esq

Not at all, not in philosophy. I've read a lot of logical and rational reasoning on this forum that changed my views. Sometimes a lot, sometimes just as a slight tweak to my own concepts. But for this to happen, you need to have a good philosophical praxis. You do not.

You position is so absurd... — ken2esq

Maybe you shouldn't just take my word for it, but also everyone else in here.... it's your position that is absurd. This "no, it's you who's stuooopid" behavior when people point out your lack of logic and proper arguments is downright childish.

This is literally the HEART and MEAT of philosophical debate, dismantling -- in detail, with exactitude -- why the opposing view IS illogical. To claim you are free from that because the other side is somehow a priori illogical is just nonsense. — ken2esq

I dismantled it, by pointing out how your logic is faulty, your interpretation of evidence is wrong and your argument is fractured. Now, either you present a new argument that's properly put together, with avoiding biases and fallacies, which use a proper premise and conclusion structure (doesn't need to be hardcore, but at least clear points of evidence that leads to something inductive or deductive).

As I said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you've done nothing in that department and instead just continue to try and force others to accept your perspective.

The only perspective you've presented when reading your argument is that you're absolutely confused about all of it. You don't understand the science you use as a foundation and you don't know how to avoid the most common biases and fallacies.

It's like someone picked up a dictionary about philosophical terms and then tried to shoehorn them into an argument to make the appearance of being smart, or thinking they are doing high level philosophy because they believe in their idea so much that any notion of it being wrong is shattering their entire ego.
You're absolute lack of humility is a dead giveaway.

Will you blame drugs? exhaustion? brain fart? being under the control of a super-conscious organization that does not want you to see the logic of my arguments and so puts really really stupid words in your mouth? (I'm partial to the last, by the way, do not blame you but that which controls you.) — ken2esq

Why don't you go back to reddit where your rhetoric belong, if you argue like that you won't last long in here. Check the forum guidelines if you don't believe me.

Calling something "nonsensical illogic" is not a logical argument. — ken2esq

No, because you have to present a logical argument first, burden of proof is on you since you have an extraordinary claim that features misunderstandings of physics and cherry picked non-correlated parts that does not equal any of the conclusions you make. So, yes, what you are doing is nonsense, that's why I said so.

Your close-minded rejection is the OPPOSITE of philosophy and logic. — ken2esq

Philosophy is not about just thinking whatever bs you can think of. Philosophy requires a praxis of rational reasoning, which you haven't presented yet, so it's not close-minded to ask for better philosophy, it's the exact purpose of philosophy.

If all you do is demand that people accept your "theory", then you are doing nothing right. You need some philosophy 101 and then come back with a proper argument, otherwise there's no starting point for any of this.

It is quite an interesting time we live in, in which wars are fought on the premise of not killing innocents. In all of history, the only reason more soldiers were killed instead of innocents in the heat of battle was due to soldiers being more of a threat. But wars were generally about going into a land, kill as much as you can, loot their supplies and install your own power. Today, every nation has some kind of trade interest in another and any attempt at conducting war by the old strategy is met with such a global ostracization that you will cripple your own economy and the living standards of your country. You will also, by your actions, create a moral perspective and prejudice against your nation and your people in a way that can last for years.

Look at Russia and look at how much shit China got by even intel rumors of invading Taiwan. And it has created a situation in which Russians will be treated with suspicion for maybe decades.

So the question then becomes, how can you win a war by killing civilians if the amount of collateral damage, and especially if your troops kill civilians on purpose reaches such high numbers that the entire world turns against you?

There's a positive aspect to this, and it's a political and economical deterrent. You could argue that a nation like Russia will manage anyway, but the crippled culture and hate against them could drain its potency in the future. Most nations benefit from exchange of trade and experts and if they have little to none left and no new people immigrating, that will set them back on the technological and cultural stage more and more.

So today, no nation really benefits from invading and killing everyone. It's a political death sentence.

What I'm suggesting is that there is an inherent mystery to life which science hasn't come close to excavating. If anything, the light of science is illuminating depths and expanses far beyond our wildest dreams. But at some point the institution started to exist for its own sake (as institutions will do) and for some reason decided to react against this mystery, instead of embracing it. — Pantagruel

I'm not sure what you're aiming for here? You mean the institution of science? Because the mystery and the urge to decode the universe is still alive and well.

And I'm not sure how that connects to morality and ethics? Do we have problems with the materialistic lifestyle of modern life? Yes, a lot. But to say that morality can't be find among people who aren't spiritual or religious is false and can also be argued to be the opposite seen as how much violence and bad morality that exists among today's religious people compared to the non-religious. Adding to that, a belief system that replaces religion, such as the belief in material and materialistic values to bring meaning is also producing mob mentalities and deindividuation.

It just shows that the problem doesn't seem to be a lack of belief or religion, it seems to be the opposite, meaning, belief systems gets radicalized today and become more extreme, faster. The solution then is to live a skeptical life, in which only evidence and facts form the world view. To think that a person cannot feel awe and mystery about life and the universe just because they don't accept religious views and other collective belief systems, is just not true.

You fail to recognize that when we observe various phenomena we cannot explain, and people come up with various individual explanations for each of them — ken2esq

That's not how science and philosophy works, and you attempt to do claims in both here.

though the single theory has no scientific proof, its greater simplicity gives it greater credence, all else being equal. — ken2esq

No it doesn't, this is nonsensical logic.

Yes, I'm kind of leaning that way. My sense is that embracing the larger (than self) reality is tantamount to the recognition of (self) transcendent values. As I mentioned, material calculations are all well and good, except where they are plainly insufficient. We think just because we have assigned a dollar value to everything via economics, everything hence becomes computable. When, in fact, our valuations are arbitrary and often misguided. — Pantagruel

But that isn't materialism in the philosophical sense though, that's capitalism and consumerism. What you are referring to is "materialistic" rather than the philosophical "materialism".

Outside of those semantics, what you are arguing is rather that the materialistic society we live in is lacking meaning and means for morality to form on the grounds of people's actual value as human beings and instead has been replaced by a dollar value.

While that is a true assessment with support in many fields of study of society, it still does not equal an afterlife being necessary for morality and it's not really connect nihilism with the materialistic. The materialistic people does not operate on nihilism, they're rather operating out of the fear of nihilism. They've rather changed from religion, a "church of religion" to a "church of the free market". They seek meaning in the materials they acquire, they attribute arbitrary value that gets validated through the exchange of money.

It's not nihilism or a lack of belief, it's just another belief system operating on the same principles as normal religion.

True atheism has nothing to do with the materialistic. And as I mentioned, putting value into the only life that we have and thinking about our moral legacy can produce a much deeper moral thinking than believing your consciousness just continues.

You can easily apply a nihilism to such afterlife ideals as well since if there's an afterlife, then this life doesn't matter that much. These are the same principles that much of the islamic extremists operate under, enforcing a deep and soul crushing nihilism to the actions in this life, in order to reach paradise.

If people viewed their existence in this life as the only thing that will exist for them and that the moral legacy of their life will be the only thing people remember them by, then the drive for better moral behavior can increase since the life right now must be the one to be good and if all treat others well, then all will benefit from this only life.

It's the lack of correlation between a lack of an afterlife and good morals that I find is the problem here. And that the materialistic is a nihilistic behavior, when it's rather operating on another type of belief system. That the conclusion is that a lack of afterlife equals nihilism feels like ignoring an honest exploration of morality systems in atheistic lives. Because the materialistic lifestyle is not connected to atheism or a lack of belief in an afterlife. The materialistic lifestyle is a lifestyle that appears throughout society, regardless of religion.

On top of that, the attempt to build a moral system outside of religion is more practically useful than requiring religious belief for it to function. Morality focus on being guiding principles human collective behavior. If requiring a belief system, it then impose a requirement of a specific worldview without any evidence that this worldview has any validity to it. A moral system that can be true for all humans, regardless of beliefs, fantasies or atheistic ideals, should always be preferable over a system that requires specific religious ideas. And the materialistic lifestyle as opposed to the religious afterlife lifestyle has very little to do with morality and more to do with different belief systems clashing.

Everytime the word "quantum" comes up anywhere except a discussion about physics, I know for a fact whatever is coming is going to be nonsense. — Lionino

Exactly, especially when it uses a faulty interpretation and then build an entire conclusion around that faulty interpretation as a premise.

I am writing a theory of the universe that explains Fermi's paradox. The notion that we live in a conscious universe, that we are part of that conscious universe, experiencing itself, is not new or novel. — ken2esq

No, you are cherry picking concepts together and call it a theory when its not a theory or hypothesis, but wild speculation. Evidence must bind together as premises towards a conclusion, that's not what you're doing here.

No, my theory is NOT "true." Of course not. But I believe it is MORE TRUE than anything yet postulated. — ken2esq

This is called bias. You are biased towards your own belief without any actual evidence to support it. Why is your belief more true than the facts that can be extrapolated out of the latest scientific consensus?

And, yes, the WHOLE THING is a theory, based on the fact we observe things in nature that we cannot reconcile. — ken2esq

It's not a theory, you have no actual evidence, you have wild speculations or interpretations of speculations that you use as premisses for your conclusion.

This is philosophy, not a hard science. It's not physics. — ken2esq

Philosophy still requires due diligence in logic and rational reasoning. You treat philosophy like it's something that's about just wild speculation, which it's not. You still need to follow the praxis of philosophical arguments.

And since its not physics either, you have neither the logical rational reasoning of philosophy, nor the scientific rigor of physics. Then what have you other than wild speculation and nothing more?

So wherever there is quantum uncertainty, when we collapse it, we CHOOSE what it collapses into. — ken2esq

We do not choose how it collapses. I don't think you understand what the collapsing wave in quantum mechanics is about. The collapse due to observation has nothing to do with us as humans, it has more to do with the uncertainty principle and how measurement introduces forces onto the measured particles so that you inflict change that wouldn't be there when not measured.

The pseudo-religious conclusion that we as a consciousness "choose" the collapse has more to do with a misunderstanding of the physics. It's what happens when people are confused by the science and doesn't bother to actually understand it before using it as a premise in their argument.

Lastly, have you considered how all the greatest scientific leaps were scoffed when first presented? Do you really want to scoff at this because it is too much of a leap WITHOUT actually giving me one logical or evidentiary argument against it? Basically just rejecting it for novelty?!!! Really?!!! Novelty??? — ken2esq

They were scoffed at by religious people or by the community before evidence were presented. Those theories didn't magically become serious theories before they were proven. First, they were presented with careful rational reasoning, either with deduction or mathematical calculations, and then proven in experiments. So if you feel like the theory is scoffed at, then you need to do what all of them did, prove your theory right. But no, you are demanding that others prove you wrong.

You aren't doing philosophy or science at all. You scream for others to accept your wild speculations as some possibility. All while you clearly show you don't understand physics or general common philosophical praxis.

Once again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Provable axioms of morality are hard to prove as it is, so adding another layer of unproved dimension to the fold does not help humanity achieve any common ground on ethics.

All things being equal, would you rather trust the ethic of someone whose actions are premised around the belief that, when you're dead you're gone. Or someone who believes in the idea of an ongoing responsibility for deeds? — Pantagruel

Why does the ethics automatically become worse because existence isn't on going? I don't see the correlation between "dead and gone" and bad morality. It's like you argue that nihilism is the only realm of thought for materialists?

A buddhist thinker likens the passage of spirit from one form to the next like the transmission of fire between two pieces of wood. — Pantagruel

What about nirvana? If the highest goal and end is nirvana, then morality isn't structured on ongoing but to reach that state. How does that differ from "dead and gone". Couldn't morality be structured around legacy?

That you have one chance in life to achieve a moral legacy so that when you are "dead and gone" your moral choices echo through history. This would put the effort into actually doing good since you only have one chance in a short period of time to make sure the good stays after you died.

You can easily break a reincarnation morality down to focusing more on selfish gains. Doing moral actions for the sake of "promoting yourself" to a better next life. Even if it would lead to moral actions, the psychology behind it makes moral actions a selfish action rather than an action for someone else or the collective.

I would say that it's not logical to assume that "dead and gone" equals nihilism. The fact that forming morality on the ground that something doesn't continue after death makes someone value life even more. It's the only thing that exist for any life form and valuing it for what it is should be the focus.

I'd say that the idea of an afterlife makes people rather apathetic and ignorant of the ethical problems we have in this life. People treat it like some "waiting room" for whatever good existence that comes after it rather than focusing on making this life the best it is, for themselves and others.

The fact that there's pollution and destruction

The belief in "progress" that says things are always getting better. When that is getting less true every day. — Pantagruel

This is a common misconception that is historically false. Look at the actual statistics on a long time.

I think there is a cult of individuality — Pantagruel

Initiated by the neoliberal individualism which grew in popularity in the 80s and influenced most of the early millennials.

The world needs some kind of fundamental change, because every indication is that we have been on a collision course with disaster since industrialization. Technologies which should have bolstered equality have increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Something is fundamentally wrong. — Pantagruel

This isn't materialism in the philosophical sense. What you are talking about is consumerism and industrialism.

And the progression of technology isn't what's bad and wrong, it's the ideology of neoliberal free markets that produce a wasteful living in which we produce toxic waste and value short term "fixes" over long term happiness. That coupled with deifying strong personalities rather than those of good leadership who lead towards bettering ourselves and society.

The problem you are describing has nothing to do with any nihilism of a lack of an afterlife and more to do with bad systems that we've yet to get rid of.

One such thing is that people act like representative democracy is the end goal. While the world has yet to achieve democracy everywhere yet, we're still stuck in the ideological battle between old bad systems of power and modern democracies. So all deconstruction of democracy gets put aside until we've reached a global implementation of democratic principles. But democracy in itself is very fragile and easy to manipulate. We've seen this with manipulating voters through social media and how we have little to no safety nets to block anti-democratic movements to form. We essentially safeguard democratic values on the naive pretense that no one would ever want to remove it, while the door is open for anyone to vote democracy away. So instead of trying to evolve democracy to safeguard against bad actors we just naively hope that democracy survives.

So while we, on paper, have gotten rid of dictators, kings and elites in favor of democracy, we've replaced it with incompetence and manipulation.

If you're gonna talk about how society is today, I don't see how your ethical argument about an afterlife versus no afterlife fits in. Because it's not materialism as a philosophical concept, you are talking about consumerism, industrialism, individualism in opposition to religious collectivism and thought. Which is another dimension.

Reality is a dance / battle between two opposing forces, a consciousness that, by observing waves of probability, collapses them into particular reality. This is the process of creation. This I call the Particle Consciousness. On the other side is Wave Consciousness, which seeks to turn particular reality into waves, I think by blocking/destroying/hemming in the observations of the Particle Consciousness. — ken2esq

You're speculating and using your own speculation as evidence for your next points. Making your speculations eve more speculative the further the text goes on:

The fact we create reality with our EXPECTATIONS of what we will find, is a heavy responsibility. — ken2esq

This is nonsense.

Well, there is much more to this theory. — ken2esq

This isn't a theory, it is speculation, it isn't even a hypothesis.

If anyone has logic, reason, evidence, scientific studies, that refute this, I am happy to reconsider / revise. — ken2esq

Why don't you begin with logic, rational reasoning, actual scientific evidence for the actual claims because you have the burden of proof first. This way of presenting extremely incoherent speculations and then demand that others disprove them is a failure of philosophy and science. It's the exact opposite of the praxis required.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — Carl Sagan

Maybe the deleted thread wasn't holding up to the template for thread posting? While posts can vary in quality without a problem, a new thread needs to present a thesis and an argument that is clearly defined. It could be that you failed this rather than the point you were making.

Then again, I think that there are a lot of threads started that ignores this praxis, but when it comes to scientific topics, the argument quality needs to be especially well written, especially if it's about a claim that isn't wildly within consensus.

Like, a basic thing that I cannot see in your argument is if you're making a conclusion based on Reductionism or Emergentism, is it saying that the smaller parts are aware of the whole or does it functions as a Complex Adaptive System?

Because fractals are so overhyped in pseudo-science that it's being used in all sorts of different ways without any scientific rigor whatsoever. Do you have links to published papers we can look at instead of pop-science videos?

If you are talking just about "mandatory education". Then the question is what is the punishment if you don't do your "mandatory education"? Is it a fine, or then an social-worker comes to check up how you are doing. Or then you aren't allowed to have children? It seems so based on what you state here:
— ssu

So, if two people plan to get a child, they need to first apply for this evaluation (or education as you can see in my answer to Echarmion) and go through with it. If they are evaluated to be in the A category, a potential harm for a child, they cannot go through with it, and if they do, that child will go into adoption. — Christoffer

This is more Orwellian I thought. Before planning to have children, I guess a couple needs to show to the authorities that they are to be eligible to have children. So this evaluation happens when there even isn't a child! Perhaps it should be done immediately if people get married. Or just move together and are deemed to be in sexual relationship? Just in case... — ssu

You have two scenarios, one in which you plan to get a child, in that scenario you simply apply to the education, go through it and gets an ok to move on with that plan. The second is that you accidentally conceived a child, then you need to go through the education.

I see no difference in the demands on people getting pregnant today? More than the need to go through an education. Couples who get pregnant need to do checkups, need to maintain close communication with the health care to make sure the pregnancy goes well.

A mandatory education isn't an academic education that only a few people are able to achieve. It's important to understand the level this is at. The mandatory aspect is that parents are forced to be exposed to the knowledge, forced to show engagement in the topics of child care. Because if they don't care, then that is and should absolutely be a red flag for the ability to take care of children.

Why should we birth children and be naive about the necessary knowledge of taking care of them?

In tribes there's long been practices of the community being part in caring for the children being born into the community. Just as I said to Echarmion, we have built a very strange bubble around the concept of "family" in which we believe that we, as parents, know what's best when in reality there's little to support the fact that every person understands what it takes to raise a child without producing traumas and issues in their psychology. Why then not support even further and by having such education we can evaluate the capabilities of the parents, while building a ground for supporting them if they're not scoring well. As I said to him, this is more about the community, as in society, being part of making sure children does not come to harm and the ones who gets a no because they fail the education or evaluation aren't your common families, but those who are clearly not good for children, through things like addiction, active crime, alcoholism, violent tendencies or clearly bad practices.

I see no problems with this education being part of the normal preparations that parents go through today. The only difference is that instead of volontary education, it's mandatory. You have to go through it when you're becoming a parent.

Sucks to be planning for your first baby. Especially in the West that some countries try to get people to have more babies... — ssu

Yes, this is actually an apt counter point you're making. After a time in which we've been taught that the world is going to shit because we will be overpopulated, it seems that it's the opposite, that we're dropping in numbers all over the world and that this can have dire consequences as well.

The argument I'm making isn't very good in that perspective, however, I do think that we can't look at numbers alone and that the well being of individuals is too important for society as a whole and therefore we have to make sure people get the best childhood that we can achieve as a collective.

Yet just education isn't same as a license for "being fit to have children". Besides, flunking that exam and wow, I guess looking for job places will be tough after you cannot to have this license. — ssu

You still need to go through the education to "have the license". It's mandatory and if failing you can get more support to finish it through. But as I said, this isn't some high education, most of it is basic stuff, some is concepts that are easy to follow but things that I've seen people don't understand today. You'd be surprised as how many basic things that parents today don't actually know. In order to flunk the exam you need to be really unfit, but it would catch those who actually are unfit and who produce a strong risk for children's well being, regardless of their intentions.

The focus is rather to force people to expose themselves to the knowledge. So that people don't ignore it which happens when it's voluntary.

Again I have to make ask again: why the obsession with a license? A reproduction permit?

Why not a softer approach? — ssu

I already think it is soft, I think that you apply your ideas about authoritarianism onto it and imagine a far more dark scenario than I'm actually presenting. It's easy to see it as the opposite of soft with that lens, but if you look at the cogs and bolts of it it's not really that wild as a concept. Especially since there's no authority that impose ideologies onto parents, but a process that enforces the knowledge from science of child well being onto parents so that they are more aware, as well as better support to catch problems before they escalate and the ability to prevent the most extreme cases of child abuse and malpractice that gets missed because of how lose the system is today.

Already authorities intervening in cases where parents simply cannot (or will not) parent their children are dramatic and some controversial. It's a delicate matter, not some regulation of handling hazardous stuff. — ssu

Because of our culture around the concept of "family". It's controversial because we've put the value of family and the individualistic ideals before the actual care for children's well being. I see, daily, the arrogance of parents and the controversy often just stems out of that arrogance. The care and well being for children takes second place over the identity as family.

So it's a delicate matter, yes, but I couldn't care much when the foundational structure of it all is based on almost spiritual values of "family" rather than the necessity to make sure all children are well.

And the problem today is that authorities just intervene when that trauma has already been set in motion. I'm interested in preventing things, to make sure something doesn't break, I have no interest in trying to fix something that's already broken.

I would, and from my own personal experiences, support the Finnish method of the government giving free maternity package to pregnant mothers and couples and free counseling for future parents. It works, it has all the correct things and is very useful. That usefulness makes it so that people really use it. Rules and the threat of punishment isn't the only way you can inform people. And a very lousy way to try to "educate" them.

A Finnish maternity pack: — ssu

This I'm all in support of. But the problem I see is that there's a large portion in society that just don't give a fuck. It's easy for us to discuss the ins and outs of 90% of people's situation as parents, but the 10% has a major impact on society and for the individuals. 10% of children who're affected by malpractice is too much.

The unfortunate thing is that this number is probably higher, if we add in minor traumas that makes a large chunk of adults seeking therapy because of something dark from their childhood, it's not 10%, it's far more.

My point is that if we have such mandatory education we can mitigate a lot of problems that we might even miss in statistics due to only the most extreme cases being visible. But there are so many adults who I've witnessed have childhood traumas without there ever being extreme situations considered part of their childhood.

I've read about the finish maternity pack and as a Swede I'm jealous of how well Finland handles these things. Even if we're so similar up here in the north around this subject. But I still think we can add more and improve more. And I think you form somewhat of an extreme totalitarian scenario in your head around the concept I present, while it's more or less a larger extension of the support system you have in Finland.

Well, no, it will not be a child because your proposed solution is to not have the child born. So you'll have to explain who is supposed to be the subject whose rights you are protecting in this scenario. — Echarmion

This is getting down into the gritty trenches of philosophy. We already have diseases that can be tested for at the very early stage of pregnancy and inform if the right course of action is to terminate the pregnancy because the child will suffer if born. So if that is already in practice, an idea of a child that is likely to end up in harm is even less problematic to avoid. Remember, these are the few cases in which parents are utterly unfit to be parents, where there's a high likelihood of harm.

Let's say there's an 80% chance that an unborn unconceived child is likely to be harmed or live in harm during their childhood. Would you say "go ahead" or argue for that child not being conceived? Let's say that a couple who are regularly taking drugs and who zone out due to it that they can't have the focus to care for a child. There's no sign that they are willing to go to rehab and change their ways anytime soon and they don't show any knowledge of even the most basic daily care for children.

Would you argue that they should not conceive a child, or allow them to do so, knowing the likelihood of harm to the child?

Schemes like that already exist, like regular checkups for children, where failure to attend leads to an appointment with child protection services. Of course such a scheme must be set up with special care so that it does not further aggravate the situation of families under financial pressure. — Echarmion

The big problem is often that such checkups only starts after the fact. A child can be traumatized for life because of one single event and even if child protection services start to involve themselves, it's often too late because the child already has trauma.

Better then to have a system with checkups for all children born, as a common practice in order to spot dangers before anything evolve into an event that could traumatize the child. Of course, some falls through the cracks, as with all systems in society, but the aim is to mitigate and lower the probability as much as possible.

Well, sure everyone should have basic knowledge. But at the same time the amount of problems caused by simply lack of basic knowledge seems small. — Echarmion

Not really. I've heard many stories from adults who have minor traumas from their childhood, things that seem basic, but that affect their entire life after. Many patients going to therapy have traumas they didn't even realize they had but realize when getting their childhood into context through the process.

A common thing that parents on a large scale are bad at is handling the first five years of a child's life. This period is part of solidifying a lot of basic psychological traits and can also catalyze underlying mental disorders. A common mishandling is the basis for "attachment issues", in which the adult exhibit problems handling social interactions due to the parents not able to carefully handle these first years of the child's life. For instance, many parents scream at their children when they're loud, but they do not understand when they can set boundaries and when they shouldn't. So they might either never set boundaries or they set too many of them. Either way can produce a minor trauma on the child's psychology. Understanding when and where to set boundaries and when not to is one concept that is important and that many fail at on a broad scale.

In the research I've done, there's a disturbing amount of adult issues that can be traced back to these early years of life, seemingly due to very common behaviors that slip through the awareness of educated child care personell.

It's the emotional/ psychological side that's difficult, and that cannot easily be taught. Parenting is simply such a huge change to your life that you cannot really prepare for it. — Echarmion

The psychological side is greater than the physical in my opinion. And it can be taught how to mitigate such problems, it's just not mainstream enough and there's a stigma of "telling parents how to raise their children" that I personally think is pure bullshit. The arrogance of parents believing they know everything that's best for their child might be a hormonally biological drive, but it's also a cultural narcissism of parents believing themselves to be the "gods" of their children.

Rather we should accept the fact that most people are unprepared and that maybe we should losen the fanaticism on such ideals and collaborate more in society for the sake of children's physical and mental health. Both for the common good and for the sake of the individual children.

And you also touch upon the huge change in that, because of it, why not focus more on mitigating that unpreparedness? With education and support and making sure unfit parents don't harm the children that comes into this world. It is for this very reason, that we are unprepared, that I'm arguing for these concepts.

Well, that's a good plan, but one does need to consider that the knowledge here is still very much in flux. While there may be broad agreement on what the psychological needs of children are, it's much harder to tell what this means in practice. — Echarmion

Of course, but no knowledge as opposed to knowledge that exists is still relevant, and knowledge that exists still has more positive outcomes. It's basically the same with all types of knowledge. I learned things in school that would never be taught today. We can only move society based on the best knowledge we have and using the best knowledge we have is still better than no knowledge at all.

Even if it wasn't, knowing and doing is very different. It's one thing knowing in the abstract how you want to raise your child. It's quite another to actually deal with children. Parents are exposed to very strong emotions and I'm not sure how preparation for that would even look. — Echarmion

Child care personell and child psychologists usually have very simple guidelines that are still both being ignored and aren't known in the mainstream. In good fact-respecting newspapers you can sometimes see article series with child psychologists answering questions from parents that seem obvious but aren't to many people.

The problem is that we have created a culture around those strong emotions, instead of creating a better collaborative atmosphere around child care.

It may look like I'm advocating for some cold authoritarian system, but in truth, the full concept has a much stronger focus on collaborating for the sake of the child, that we structure society more away from the hard borders that families create around themselves and be more open with caring for our children as a collective.

There are plenty of examples of this around the world in which tribes and collectives raise children more as a group, more collaborative.

But the problem is that in the west especially, we've created this mythological aura around the concept of being a family as parents and children. It's part of our individualistic culture to form a family, a constitution in which we build borders against the world and we know best. This I want to blow up, because we're obviously damaging our children in ways we don't even realize. The arrogance of the individual is a problem.

Plausibly, education might improve things but I think a lot of bad parenting practices are a result of desperation. So I'd prefer first to improve the resources parents have available. This reduces the focus on the parents as the single point of failure and might be necessary to even provide the kind of time parents need for their education. — Echarmion

I agree with the resources part. I'm not opposing support for parents, but the psychology is being ignored or downplayed when, in fact, our first years in life mostly defines the well being of our entire lives. So if we can maximize the ability for parents to give the best possible life to a child during their first years, that would not only help them as individuals, it would make them as adults much better capable to handle the complexity of life.

All in all, the ones not getting approved for parenting should not be a large sum of people and they will still have the chance to change their ways and be reevaluated. While those who get approved but with caution would receive a lot of support, far greater than we have today, even in nations like Scandinavia where the support for families are much greater.

but just to note that it is totalitarian societies that would do this kind of licensing or have licenses for reproduction. And I would emphasize that we are talking about a human right.

Licensing something that is a human right is very questionable in my view. Yet there are naturally many ways that authorities by law intervene in these things. — ssu

And keeping this in mind is an absolute tenet for anyone changing the fundamentals of society. For anything related to changing the very structures of a free society, it has to be functioning within a framework of that free society and its fundamental rights. In that, I agree.

This itself is a strawman argument here. Look at what Merriam-Webster defines a license:

License: a permission granted by competent authority to engage in a business or occupation or in an activity otherwise unlawful.

Hence the activity is unlawful if you don't have the license. Yet for some reason you argue that this has to be dealt with the action of licensing the activity, not by as at the present by authorities intervening if there are problems. — ssu

The strawman is in relation to this:

But you build you argument on the idea that the license has some arbitrary totalitarian principles for deciding who's going to be a parent or not. — Christoffer

Meaning, the difference between a totalitarian system behind the license might be that they create arbitrary rules that has nothing to do with child care. Comparing that to something that evaluate the needs of the child does not have a totalitarian component, since it takes the needs of the child as the source for evaluation, not a group in authority. The ones evaluating aren't deciding arbitrarily, they decide on the grounds of well being for a child. Much like adoption agencies aren't evaluating adoption parents on the grounds of the adoption agencies preferences, but instead through the perspective of the child's well being.

Great! Lets think about that. Because the human rights start usually with a fetus that is defined to be that human (hence you cannot have an abortion on the last month of the pregnancy). I'm all for the perspective of the child.

But how that license works here?

Well, any activity, occupation etc that we get the permission to do, with the licenses, is gotten before you start the activity. So do the license applicant apply for this reproduction-license when they think they will try to get a child or simply when the mother is pregnant?

Is it then either you get the license or a) the mother does an abortion or b) the newly born child is immediately whisked away when he or she is born? — ssu

The decision of going through with the pregnancy or not is based on the choice of the parents and primarily the mother. The choice in this matter should be excluded from the equation and license system. The evaluation has to do with the potential for harm and problems for the child in the specific family constellation that is being evaluated.

So, if two people plan to get a child, they need to first apply for this evaluation (or education as you can see in my answer to Echarmion) and go through with it. If they are evaluated to be in the A category, a potential harm for a child, they cannot go through with it, and if they do, that child will go into adoption. This can be changed by them seeking help to fix their situation until they can pass in to category B, which approves them as parents but with careful overview and support by social security agencies overlooking the care of the child.

If they already expect a child, and plan to keep it, but they fall under category A, then if the situation is proven unable to change into category B, they have to adopt.

Remember, these situations are the worst case situations, when there's a provable risk for harm to a child. Like if the parents have problems with alcoholism, violent tendencies, drug abuse or cannot express even the most basic understanding of a child's needs.

And as the vast majority of parents aren't so deadly for their children, the sound and logical system is to intervene in those cases when the child is in danger. Not by have a license system that makes reproduction without the license unlawful. — ssu

The system basically makes an evaluation of every child's situation rather than as an after thought. The problem is that the cases in which a child is spotted before harm is less than the cases when a child has already been harmed and that is the problem to be adressed.

And you should too, actually, because I'm not referring to fallacies here. — ssu

The fallacies are primarily the focus on placing the system into a totalitarian framework before the details of the system is evaluated. In essence, before it has been expanded into a system functioning within a society that respect human rights. The parameters matter as an authority who decides arbitrarily based on an invented ideological framework is not the same as an authority upholding the rights for someone (in this case the child or future child). The UN is in itself a form of authority, but it upholds the concept of human rights, so authority in itself does not equal something totalitarian, it's the details of their authority and their parameters and framework that matters and define if its totalitarian or not.

And here is the question, you shouldn't try to evade here: is for the protection of children the best way to response with authorities implementing a license-system?

I simply doubt that is not the most effective way, and it would cause resentment with others than me. — ssu

A fair question and I think the previous answer to Echarmion helps to give an alternative in the concept of a mandatory education. It's actually more close to that of a driver's license in that no one is blocking you from getting a driver's license, there's no authority that stops you getting the license. But you have to go through the mandatory education on child care in order to be allowed to parent a child. Through that, the most unfit parents will of course be spotted, those who absolutely cannot function as a parent and would either require constant support in the process, or be so unfit they would not be allowed to (those extreme cases)

A mandatory education also helps mitigate problems that arise out of parents with good intentions still doing it the wrong way and harming the child unintentionally.

Just education alone could mitigate a large chunk of the problems in society. Right now we have voluntary education available, but I think at least mandatory education would save a lot of children from harm. Especially together with much better support from social security authorities, with a case handler that's constantly there for support during the first years of the child's life.

Such a mandatory education still means that those who ignore it will face consequences, but it's more of a focus on verifying that parents have been exposed to relevant knowledge than anything else.

I'd say the relevant difference is that children up for adoption already exist, and since they cannot defend their interests, their guardian has to do it.

This is in contrast to licensing future parents, because their children do not exist. We thus cannot defend this scheme with reference to the interests of the child. — Echarmion

The adopted children that already exists are still evaluated under the idea of probability of harm in the future. It becomes an irrelevant factor if they exist or not because both focus on the probability of future harm. A child that isn't born yet will still be a child and we can still evaluate if a probable child will have probable harm or not. On top of that, such evaluation will dictate if a child that is already conceived and planned to be kept, will be in the hands of harm or well being. (See my answer to SSU with the categories of evaluation).

In essence, a child's existence or not should not be relevant if the evaluation is done on potential future harm in both situations.

The question then is whether the licensing itself has any relevant effect, or whether the actual effective part of the strategy is simply to provide parents with more support and childcare up to child protection services with more resources. — Echarmion

It is primarily to give more support for the sake of children's well being, but you still need to acquire a license and those who are obviously evaluated as having problems cannot get one. For instance, if the psychological evaluation finds that one of the parents or both have violence tendencies, that can block a license.

We can also propose a license system, either as included in this, or it's own, that's basically the same as a driver's license. Meaning, you need to go through education on child care, take tests and pass it in order to become a parent.

Such a system would never block anyone to become a parent, outside of the most extreme cases, and would just push for becoming more educated in the needs of a child.

At the moment we have education for parents, but it's voluntary... make it mandatory instead. You have to pass tests that makes sure you know what it means to take care of a child and you have everything available to you for educating in the matter.

Think of it as an education degree for parenting. It's not an advanced course, but its enough to ensure that everyone becoming a parent has a knowledge foundation that is necessary to at least mitigate the risk of malpractice. As it is right now, anyone can become a parent, regardless of knowledge of child care. Which means that even among the ones who got good intentions, they can absolutely traumatize a child anyway because of a lack of fundamental knowledge.

This knowledge is also part of the increasing child psychology knowledge base, so with continuing research and science on the subject, we will continue to fine tune the well being for all children, at least mitigate the unnecessary harm that comes out of the naive pretense that all people understand what it means to handle a child over the course of many years.

That means a lot of bad things might be happening as a matter of course that we don't even recognize as "bad parenting". — Echarmion

The number of people who are unknowing and ill-equipped to take care of a child is larger than people realize. Even people who seemingly had a good childhood, might not have had one, as we've seen in statistics from adult psychology addressing childhood traumas affecting adult lives.

A mandatory education for all parents can mitigate some of that and at the same time spot unseen patterns of bad parenting by interacting with parents undergoing this education.

As a comparison with getting an education for a driver's license, we do that in order to mitigate the risk of harm by enforcing knowledge upon the driver, but the driver can still drive like a stupid person, and yet, still never cause any damage. The likelihood that a parent cause harm to child through acting stupid is much higher than that of harm for a stupid driver. Therefor, education for parents is rather more important than education for a driver's license.

Mandatory education may therefor be even more important than introducing an A category of blocking people from becoming parents. I.e everyone can become a parent, but they have to go through mandatory education about child care.

But, for the totalitarians here wanting licenses for everything, creating a family is a human right. — ssu

It's important to not make a poisoning the well or strawman here. By calling others "totalitarian" you are labeling them and isn't engaging in the philosophical argument correctly.

Creating a family is a human right, yes. But you build you argument on the idea that the license has some arbitrary totalitarian principles for deciding who's going to be a parent or not. This is a strawman since the parameters of decision has to do with evaluating the possible damage onto the child by evaluating the competence of the parent. It can also be used to evaluate if special needs are required, and functions in conjunction with more transparency and support into the child's first years in life.

If you are going to bring in human rights, then we can easily apply Right to Health into the mix in the perspective of the child. The evaluation of a parents competence to take care of a child is in direct relation to Right to Health for the child. And since the license is there to evaluate any potential harm and probabilities of harm for a child, it's only there to make sure the child does not end up in harm, either physical or mentally.

So there you have it. Parenting, having children is something like driving a car and knowing the traffic signals. What is a family, motherhood (or fatherhood) else than a danger to an infant? — ssu

This is a dishonest interpretation of the analogy by way of strawman.

The difference is that we do have those processes in society when things don't work. — ssu

This is exactly the issue that this concept tries to remedy or mitigate. When things don't work, past tense.

But usually only after they don't work. A license is different. License here is something universal: everybody has to have one. Without one, you are breaking the law. Besides, getting a license you have to prove to an authority, a total stranger, that you do have the qualifications of having children. And the idea is with a certain objective as it's a license: you pose a threat otherwise. Great approach towards your citizenry. — ssu

Why is this an issue? As a comparison, we do this for adoption parents. They have to prove to social services and go through a psychological evaluation before being approved to adopt a child. Care to explain the difference?

And lastly, assume you would have this extremely stupid arrangement of a license — ssu

"Poisoning the well" fallacy.

for something that is extremely natural and is considered a human right. — ssu

Natural does not equal anything, you are basically making the very definition of a "appeal to nature" fallacy. It is quite natural to kill someone, happens all the time in nature and in our civilisation, especially in our pre-civilized "natural" state.

A human right is, as I mentioned, also Right to Health, which, through the perspective of the child, means they have the right not to be mistreated by their parents or put in harms way by incompetence of their childcare abilities.

We also have other limiting conditions for many of the human rights Freedom of speech is considered a human right, but we still have limitations on it, making it illegal with defamation or libel, or freedom of privacy when people conduct crimes to the level that warrants surveillance in order to catch their criminal activity.

This means that human rights cannot be taken at face value, they're not binary laws, even if they're to be considered a foundation on which we build society. If you apply an absolutist approach to these rights, they (the articles) start to come into conflict with each other rather instantly.

They are principles and we form society so that they respect them but we also apply parameters that sometime limits them in order to protect other rights. Basically, some of the rights are valued higher than others. For instance, the right to health is much more foundational than the right to be a parent. In the very instance that a parent's childcare hurts a child, the right to health trumps the right to be a parent and we remove the child from these parents. It's by this logic that we can apply a license in order to make sure children does not come to harm in the first place.

Instead of doing these slippery slope fallacies you're doing when arguing against this type of parent license, look at what the intent and practice is supposed to be. Taking human rights into account, it guides the praxis of the system.

We are trying to adhere to the human right to health for the child while respecting the human right of becoming a parent. Ok, what does that mean for this type of license? Basically, it's not some totalitarian system with arbitrary rules that some people in power apply to what is needed to become a parent. It is a system of evaluating what level of competence a parent have for taking care of a child in order to defend the right to health for the child.

Will a child be at risk of damage to their physical health, mental health, and quality of life due to potential mishandling of the responsibility of childcare, based on the child's needs rooted in child psychology, their right for freedom and general well being?

These are the parameters for such a license. An evaluation of the quality of childcare that the parents are able to apply.

Basically, it's there to spot the parents who are unfit to apply the correct childcare to uphold the value of right to health for the child. With such a license and with consequent support from social security agencies evaluating the well being of the child during their first years, we can A) Find out who are very unfit for being parents, meaning, at high risk of physical damage, mental damage or both, denying them license, B) Granting a license for parents who score low having a closer support from social securities to be able to spot potential problems much faster and C) Approved and considered fit for parenting with voluntary and more open support if needed (for instance those times the environment becomes a danger without the parents being the cause).

Then what you think would be the result when statistics would show that (for example) minorities don't get the license as often as the majority does? Or that (what is actually quite likely) that poor people don't get it as often as the rich? — ssu

Level of income does not have anything to do with it. Actually, the amount of rich people being unfit as parents can be higher, as they neglect responsibilities in favor of careers and their own ego. I've witnessed families who are considered rich or upper middle class with parents who got children as "tokens", as "props" for their life styles rather than actually caring for the child. Once again you are making a slippery slope instead of engaging with the topic honestly here. You assume that statistics are some lone factor in how we evaluate and approve licenses, without there ever being a stated factor.

The approval is on a case to case basis.

And with the categories, most poor people would probably end up in category B or C, meaning higher support to make sure the child has the necessary well being regardless of environmental factors or income levels.

That there might be a higher case number of category A among poor people can be the result of the higher level of violence within families pressured by socioeconomic issues. But then again, what are you arguing for here? That the right to be a parent trumps the right to health for the child? And we also know that among these cases, the damage in childhood that children goes through, most likely rolls out the carpet for them falling into crime, addiction and other mental health problems in the future, continuing a cycle of violence for these socioeconomic groups. Blocking the downright dangerous or damaging family constellations for children while granting more category B licenses, automatically position support closer to those in need and mitigates the cycle of poverty that easily spirals out of control. Such measures can actually be part in improving the conditions of a socioeconomic group or location, reducing future crimes and building up a foundation of healthy children who grow up in far better conditions and with far better possibilities for the future.

That is a logical outcome of such a system.

Great job with your licensing on social cohesion then, because people won't think that the objective is to "protect children", but protect the society from "children of certain people". Yep, surely is quite totalitarian. — ssu

You ignore the fact that such a license system is applied as a complex system with parameters that avoids a binary and arbitrary foundation. Just like every other system in society, it isn't just "a license", but a webb of practices based around the license.

Your engagement with the concepts quickly hits a wall with the fallacy hasty generalization and fallacy of composition and basically looks like this: "because totalitarian governments have such limitations, therefore any type of limitation is totalitarian".

You are making these fallacies based on your own extreme fantasies about what such a system would imply, without engaging with the concept in a philosophical manner. No it's not automatically totalitarian, that is an emotional reaction to the concept and not an honest overview of its potential when built out as an actual infrastructure.

Changing society like proposed isn't a simplified "install license, end problems", it's large infrastructural change for social care and child care systems. It would require that a lot more tax is spent on the well being of children, out of the concept of deterministic strategies to prevent harm towards children, prevent childhood trauma and prevent future crimes that can result in such experiences for children.

Such change in resources throughout society mitigate much the needs for "after the fact" handling of crime and childhood traumas and harm. Some people with childhood trauma and damage have had their whole life being affected by it. Even among considered "balanced and psychologically healthy" adults there are childhood traumas that affect their ability to form relationships or function well in social structures.

To value right to parenting over right to health is rather backwards.

It seems near (if not totally impossible) to conceive of a reality where there is no consciousness at any point in it's development. — Benj96

Why? Isn't this just a form of human arrogance, positioning us (because we are conscious), at some center of the stage, when nothing points to our existence being in any shape or form required for the processes of the universe to develop.

Think of a universe that only had the ability to become 100 000 years old from the initial point of inflation. No life was able to form and matter and energy just became then fizzled out into nothing. With just a few changes to the composition of our universe, that would have happened because it is mathematically possible, and no life would have experienced it.

A universe that is birthed, plays out and ends all the while no one was, is, nor ever will be there to be aware of it, seems, ultimately pointless. — Benj96

So? There's nothing pointing towards out current universe having any point to it whatsoever. Just because you feel something requires a point, doesn't mean it has one. It's like when someone dies in a freak accident and people cry out "why did this happen!?" There's no why, only how.

How important should we make consciousness when we consider physics? This is sort of a hard problem question of a nuanced format. — Benj96

Not really, I'd just say that there's no importance to consciousness in regards to physics, other than physics playing a part in figuring out consciousness.

Bearing in mind that the components in physics formulas are artificial constructs made to standardise relationships for example time (seconds are invented) or space (Meters are again invented). All units of measure are invented not implicit to the universe. Therefore it seems all measurements take observation and the choices of the observer as "standard" in order to frame anything in relationships to one another. — Benj96

This is just backwards. We first observe relations and then invent concepts to measure those relations. The genius of our language of math is that it is an extrapolation of reality into a logical framework. If you have 2 apples, we've assigned a symbol and meaning to the fact there are 2 objects of the same kind in front of us. The rest of math is a similar extrapolation and that's why we talk about "discovering math" or "discovering" something in theoretical physics. There's no choice that influence reality here, math is a slave to reality and a way for us to decode reality.

The universe comes first, we're just an afterthought. When the afterthought thinks they are the prime reason and origin of everything, they become arrogant towards existence and reality.

I am wondering if there should be some type of thing you would have to complete to be able to have kids. — Lexa

This is already a thesis by Hugh LaFollette from 1980

Licensing Parents

I support the idea for a license for parents on the simple fact that we have licenses for every other thing in society that has potential to harm someone if not practiced correctly. Like a driver's license. So why should parents be able to take care of a defenseless child with the enormous risk of putting that child in harm due to malpractice, incompetents or downright bad intentions? And the objections that this would produce a totalitarian society is just not valid since we have licenses, certificate and similar for a number of other things that prevents us in society. The criticism based on "totalitarian society" primarily seems more like a slippery slope fallacy than actually engaging with the concept honestly. An inability to see the nuanced process of establishing a functioning practice of it in society, and instead just have an emotional reaction based on the idea that the majority of parents are always good for children. Fact is, the number of childhood traumas and experiences that children go though when growing up are wide spread and the amount of depression, anxiety and other mental health problems that people have as adults correlate to many of these childhood experiences. That we shouldn't have some form of education and licensing in order to make sure children receives the best possible conditions growing up seems like a no brainer really. But people are egotistical and cannot move on from the fact that their role as a parent is not some holy position that is more important than their child.

The children's well being is more important than the parent's ego and identity as a parent. If that cannot be agreed upon, then the fokus is not on the child's well being and instead on fulfilling the "achievement" of becoming a parent. In a time when the ego and individual have been bloated into more importance than the community and others, "achievements" are the norm for identity and there's no wonder that modern parents view their role as a parent more important than the well being and experience of their child, regardless of whether or not they understand this fact.

I'd like to challenge the idea that this strategy for society can only exist in a totalitarian society. That conclusion does not take into account the number of licenses and certificates that we already have and it makes a straw man out of the concept by not even engaging with the process of building a framework around the concept as a practical process in society. We already have something of this process for adoption agencies doing a thorough review of the adoption parents before they are allowed to adopt a child. So why would such parents be treated in that way and not parents getting their own child? What is the difference?

Causality does not apply at the quantum mechanical level. Whether it applies at higher aggregate levels is still up for debate. — EricH

Nothing needs to be framed in the context of this discussion. Nothing that remotely connects to free will, i.e our awareness of breaking causality through choice. Quantum randomness can break causality, it might even influence large scale events as a butterfly effect, but quantum randomness as influence on our choices would only boil down to another cause, a dice throw cause for an outcome. We aren't aware of it and it doesn't make us consciously aware of breaking from causality in choices. In conclusion, we can map out almost any choice by their causal connections in our reality and when we can't, the cause is randomness.

In the context of this discussion all we have to define our behavior in society, nature and the universe is determinism. All choices have a prior cause, all behaviors have a prior cause and the more we can understand and map out, the better we would be able to predict harmful actions and crimes in society. Therefore, a larger focus on researching preventative measures to make sure people don't end up in harm or violence should be part of a better society.

It reminds me of a concept in which society has the ability to look into the future. Let's say it's possible to change the now to influence the future. Most science fiction around such concepts works something like Minority Report, getting the criminals before the act. But what if we used such technology to just map out the consequences of people's situations so we can see if they end up in crime. It would drastically reduce crime in society by just changing small conditions in people's childhood. Only a fraction, maybe almost an insignificant number would end up in serious crime.

What is this "rock solid evidence," that no form of freedom can exist? — Count Timothy von Icarus

For starters all evidence in physics and biology. There's nothing that breaks causality and entropy in our physical reality and saying that our consciousness is somehow disconnected from this have no rational ground whatsoever. If all evidence in science points to everything, including us, in our universe being part of a deterministic causality, then the burden of proof lies on the one claiming free will exist to prove that our will is in fact detached from this fundamental system. More recently you can also check out the recent works of Robert Sapolsky who drives a very good argument based on his scientific research.

Consider this: If volition has "no effect" on behavior, i.e., it is epiphenomenal, then why did natural selection select for consciousness in the first place? If consciousness and the sensation of volition has absolutely no effect on behavioral outputs, it shouldn't be selected for. It must be an accidental byproduct. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Natural selection didn't break determinism. Just because a system becomes self-governing doesn't mean that it's parts have free will. The decisions of individuals is the result of a complex webb of causalities which leads to their decisions. All of your decisions have a cause, all your emotions have a cause, everything comes from the composition of your biology and from the environmental impact on you. Add to that all the social interactions that shape your world view, your opinions, your emotions, your culture, your politics, everything. Free will is a fundamental illusion that we can never break free from because if we did it would create such a fundamental dissonance in our cognitive function that it would drive us insane. Luckily, we do not seem able to do so. However, we can understand the concept, just like we can understand general relativity. We cannot experience time dilation, but we can understand it and measure it. Just like we can take the concept of causality and map out some parts that would help us figure out a better system of preventative actions in society to help people not ending up in harms way.

The problem is that you posit the free will cart before the horse. All processes in our brain, in our biology, in our nature and universe, are deterministic. Even if you were to include quantum randomness and how it might effect decisions in the brain, that still does not count as free will, only that there's a set of random dice throws that effect the brain. I.e randomness being just another cause. Free will requires a conscious will to do something without a previous cause and this does not exist, there is no evidence for it and there's a lot of evidence against it in everything from logical reasoning to factual evidence in physics and our biology.

There is a problem here. Reductive physicalism's claims hinge on the proposition that "there is no strong emergence in physics", that all physical change is reducible facts about "elementary" particles. This is an increasingly unpopular opinion in the sciences for several reasons.

-First, because it clashes with processed based, computational views of physics.

-Second, because it would seem to make it impossible to explain how first person experience emerges (an example of strong emergence), unless you embrace panpsychism, the view that everything, including atoms, have some level of phenomenal awareness.

-Third, you have things like Paul Davies' proof, which claim to show that the information processing capabilities of the universe are incapable of accounting for the complexity biological life unless there is strong emergence (and thus data compression). The last of these is probably the least convincing, the second probably the most.


Aside from that, the argument that "people only prefer compatibalism because it makes them feel better," makes no sense if epiphenomenalism is true. If our feelings and volitions have absolutely zero influence over our behavior, then it is simply a mistake to say that anyone's feelings have anything to do with what they do or say about anything. Feelings would be merely an accident caused by certain arrangements of feelingless molecules. But of course, such psychological arguments are so compelling precisely because they make sense in causal explanations, which should lead us to question epiphenominalism. So to, there is the problem of why our feelings should seem to sync up so very well with our actions if they actually have no direct causal interaction.

Further, the whole argument for epiphenominalism and fatalism from smallism ("everything can be explained in terms of atoms") crashes to the ground if we allow strong emergence to account for first person subjective experience. If some strong emergence is possible, why delimit it to only epiphenomnal consciousness and not a consciousness that affects behavior (in which case, organisms can be self-determining to varying degrees). Certainly, a consciousness that has causal effects makes more sense it terms for it having been widely selected for across complex organism.

Which is all to say, I find compatibalism more convincing because the evidence for strong emergence seems far more convincing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I actually fail to see the throughline in this reasoning as an argument against determinism? Regardless of processes, you must prove that you can will something without a previous cause. A process that produces a random emotion or random state of mind does not equal free will, it equals just another cause. For us to have free will, it requires us being able to choose without influence of anything. But everything you choose is the consequence of a prior cause, always.

Name a choice that people can make that does not have any prior cause.

...who had breeched the barricades and police lines and after pipe bombs had been found. Are you suggesting the actions of these undermanned police wasn't warranted? Do you think it was a legal act to break into the Capitol? — Relativist

It seems he's defending an attempt to overthrow the government and disregard democracy in order to whitewash Trump's connection to it.

Has this thread basically become his constant attempts at defending Trump and everyone else trying to get the discussion down to earth?

if compatibilism is the case, the problem you bring up is not a problem. But I do find compatibilism more compelling in general, due to problems in libertarian theories that probably aren't relevant here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I focus on what type of determinism that is most likely. Compatibilism is in my view a sign of human arrogance over the forces of reality. A form of rejection of being under control of determinism because it just feels scary or bad. So I can only adhere to the type of determinism that science supports and which seem most rationally logic for us to function by. Therefor I can't view any "if"s as anything more than wildly more speculative than that which is the most rational foundation for the argument.

Certainly crime prevention is a worthy goal. I see problems with making it the primary goal though. It seems to run into the problem Hegel points out, of treating other people as animals to be trained into proper behavior, rather than people to be lifted upwards into self-determining freedom. That is, if people are to be free, they have a right to be punished, to pay the costs of restoring right if they violate it. This doesn't mean that crime prevention, recidivism, etc. can't be part of the policy conversation, it just means that merely shaping human behavior towards ideal outcomes cannot ground justice. — Count Timothy von Icarus

All of this assumes free will exists. Self-determining freedom is faulty concept in a deterministic reality, it's a fantasy. That doesn't mean that we should treat people as animals to be trained, it's not about that. It's about making sure that people does not get damaged into becoming people perpetuating that cycle of violence as more damage.

The problem with using old philosophical concepts like this is that we have much better understanding of determinism today and how non-existent free will actually is. So whenever a concept is used that relies on a fundamentally required of truth free will in people, it falls flat. Without such free will, all we have is causality and forming society based on mitigating harm, violence and damage through preventing causal chains leading to it, is a much more rational strategy as a foundation for a better society.

So crime prevention should be the major focus, prevention of harm should be the main focus. The possible problem with such strategies however, is that people's analysis for what is harmful usually backfires. Like, banning rock music and video games in the 80s and 90s because people thought that was the causal chain to violence, while ignoring other social and societal issues that were in fact the real causes for it. Focusing on prevention of harm and violence requires deep studies with scientific rigor and hard evidence for the causal roots of events. And that's where the focus should be.

I agree on the policy ideas, but wouldn't this be beneficial even if there is some sort of acausal libertarian free will? Obviously, people's upbringing greatly effects their adult behaviors vis-a-vis criminality. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes it would, because it is a sound strategy to prevent harm. The problem is that because society is basically built on free will being true, all preventative actions to improve society are hard to fund and get support among the people.

The biggest problem installing such measures in society and focusing society from a retribution society to a preventative society is that people rarely see what has been prevented. We don't have news papers listing headlines of "Extra extra! Today, this would probably have happened if this thing hadn't been done 20 years ago! Extra Extra". No, what we see in newspapers are headlines after the fact, which triggers people's cry for justice and revenge. It's tangible and easy for people to get behind punishment, but hard to get them to support preventative measures.

If we however could inform society of how powerful determinism really is in forming and shaping our decisions, then it would be easier for people to be aware of the causality that shapes society.

This goes far beyond merely crime, it has to do with every part of society, everywhere, globally.

This doesn't entail retributivism. In a mature moral relationship, there must be "space for persons to confess their moral shortcomings and forgive the shortcomings of others." This could result in something along the lines of restorative justice.

"The goal of restorative justice is to bring together those most affected by the criminal act—the offender, the victim, and community members—in a nonadversarial process to encourage offender accountability and meet the needs of the victims to repair the harms resulting from the crime." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which is a much better strategy overall. It also follows along the line of preventative measures to make sure cycles of violence breaks and the balance restored is the balance against such cycle of violence.

Of course, there are crimes that are unable to be solved in this way. Only crimes in which the criminals are conscientious of what they've done can be restored through it. But people don't realize how often these types of strategies actually works, because most of the time the public is blinded by vengeance.

There has to be strategies for when crimes do happen. That cannot be prevented. So, restorative justice in itself is part of preventative measures since it takes into account cycles of violence.

then it would be the case that religion's authority when it comes to morality simply stems from the fact that the religion has been the recipient of divine revelations, special knowledge. Why does this revelation have authority? Because, presumably, God knows much more than us about the world, and has a better handle on justice. No "universal meaning" is required. It can be the same sort of "objective morality" we could create, just better formulated. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which is why it's easy to see how these things were such a powerful tool of power over the people. But morality needs to make sense. It needs to have an internal logic that makes sense for us humans. Some can argue that many religions have their morality rooted in iterative justice over thousands of generations, but the problem is that since religion has gone in and out as a tool of power, it's infected by things that makes it rather irrelevant as a source for moral thinking. We then have to go back to the drawing board and find actual rationality as a foundation rather than just relying on arbitrary axioms found in these religious teachings and texts.

I broadly agree with what you are saying in this post. However, I think that saying that our human nature functions as a universal objective fact, ignores genetic variation between individuals. Isn't it more realistic to think that we have human natures with, similarities, but also differences? How do you avoid creating a Procrustean bed? — wonderer1

Our "human nature" is mainly referring to those similarities. As I described we can look for similarities that exists between cultures, that transcends what we invent for ourselves in isolation.

But we also need to put those similarities in the context of history. For instance, what societies and social interactions have produced the longest form of well being for people? Because if we only look at similarities, we can find a lot of murder and war, or we can find a lot of bad strategies of handling a society that are returning throughout history. The key is, do they lead to the downfall of a society, or do they keep existing because of positive contribution? Finding what sticks and produce positive outcomes in forms like well being for the people and individuals in that society, helps inform what similarities to look for.

In order to avoid a Procrustean bed, is rather simple. Looking for the similarities between people and what gives them a sense of well being, using history as a guide to rule out bad practices and short term illusions, will inform what is in fact functioning for people as humans. The idea that we have individuality that differs so much that it produces an individuality in our biology does not exist, therefore we are more similar than we are different and the differences that exist can co-exist with such a moral system.

But the system requires the deterministic principle of society, i.e that we form society based on better understanding of the deterministic factors that form us. Because someone can find well being in killing others, it could even spiral into group think. And such thoughts can arise out of emotional needs for retribution of past events. In a deterministic society we control and mitigate the mechanisms that would produce such spirals out of control and with analysis of history on what frame of mind that can exist long term and what would collapse society, we can spot why it is immoral to produce such well being through killings.

The core tenets of it then has to do with deterministic-based society, historical studies and statistical studies on human nature and psychology. All of these combined can produce principles to live by.

What outliers and differences would not fit into that moral strategy? It's basically taking the categorical imperatives and places them in a context of human emotions aimed towards the well being of both individuals and the collective. Because most of the moral problems that exist comes from the inability to fuze Utilitarianism with Kantian ethics.

So if we form some basic tenets out of the similarities between all humans (biology) that are true regardless of cultures or historically different ideas, we have a core foundation to work from. Then use historical studies to form knowledge about what societal and sociological strategies give the most utilitarian gain for society and which last the longest (i.e does not give rise to revolutions or suppressions of some people), and frame all of it within the context of a deterministic-based society in which we focus on preventative measures and making sure causes for problems have more focus than mitigation of consequences. Both in justice and development of societal functions.

I do not propose that I have the solution here, but I believe that this is a path to explore if we are to combine aspects of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics into a better functioning system than what we have today.

This only seems to be a problem if we assume:
A. "Uncaused" libertarian free will is the only type of freedom that can make justice coherent; and
B. Punishment can't function as primarily a means of "restoring right," by taking away the benefits of immoral action (deterrence can be important too).

I don't see any problem here as far as compatibalist free will is concerned though. I don't even think "uncaused" free will ends up being coherent. If we're "freely choosing" an act then who we are "determines our action." — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are assuming a compatibilist free will as truth here. I'm saying there's no such thing. The "will to align yourself to your internal logic" which is a core part of the compatibilist framework is in itself a deterministic feature. There is no free will to being with.

But even in a purely deterministic framework, there's still room for incarcerations as preventative actions to block someone from continuing doing harm. However, people seem unable to imagine a world in which we put most effort into preventative measures, meaning, we understand that years of causes determines a person's actions and that if we make sure that our entire society aligns towards making sure all inhabitants do not end up in such causality, then we have mitigated the majority of crimes in society. The only ones who then end up in prison are those outliers with brain injuries changing their psychology, or who even though there are mitigating actions still fall between the cracks.

The problem is that people use the template of how things are in society today to inform how they process the idea of the justice system in a society more aligned by determinism as a guiding principle. So they fall into compatibilism rather than imagine the actual type of society that functions within a deterministic principle. So far, not even the best functioning societies in the world have a system that functions primarily along the lines of deterministic principles. Mostly because it is such a fundamental change to everything around us.

For instance, in a deterministically guided society we would need much better social securities. Especially for parents and their kids. Parents would need to also raise their children as part of a community and be more transparent about their family life since any problems for children need to be addressed before they manifest as psychological damage. Families would probably have a supporter who constantly council their day to day challenges and there would need to be a greater openness among neighbors and people living close to them since everyone to some degree would be part in the upbringing of the children. This prevents parents who are unfit as parents to damage their children's childhood creating a cause for their later lives in which such causes can manifest as everything from depression, anxiety, social problems, or criminal activity, murder etc.

This is just a small example of a fundamental change to society and as you can see it would require such extreme changes to our culture that it quickly begins to feel like an impossible change to society. How would we even begin to manifest such a radical change?

For starters, the idea of justice as retribution or "evening the balance" needs to be removed. While feelings of retribution are strong emotions and hard to overcome, the justice system needs to stop focusing on punishment. "Restoring the balance" can still lead to emotions of retributions and a causality chain that leads to vengeance rather than preventing harm from spiraling out of control. But when looking closely at what makes someone getting stuck in a constant loop of crime, it generally has to do with how society is unable to stop that loop or prevent it. People who continue on the track of criminal activity generally do so because there's nothing that helps them out of it, constantly creating new causes towards new crimes based on an already caused state of mind that holds them within this loop. If everything in society, from childhood to adulthood, exists to prevent people from ending up there, then the amount of criminals would drastically drop and the causality loop of retribution lowers, i.e the dominos of action, reaction, action reaction breaks or lowers so significantly that the only ones in need of incarcerations would be those who for some reason, brain injury or tremendous bad luck, still end up unable to get unstuck from a psychology of crime.

Generally, this is a total reform of society but it points towards a significant problem with how society is today. Most nations aren't even close to a form of society that actually improves the lives of its citizens. The US for instance, has a punishment mindset and such a fantasy ideal around "free will" that it's constantly on the edge of collapse. With people getting stuck in loops of crime, addiction, failing cities, homelessness and so on and so on. "Free will" is a curse onto the nation that intellectually hasn't grown to understand the significance of determinism as a guiding principle. We can probably blame "free market capitalism" for most of this since "free market" works under the guidance of the "free will" ideal. And therefore it informs how the entire system works and how it breaks people.

But there is no evidence of any meaning in the universe? Surely this has to be qualified. I find things meaningful all the time. I assume other people do to. I am in the universe; so are other people. Thus, the universe seems to produce heaps of meaning and values. The fact that an idea of some sort of universal, Platonic meaning that floats free of the world doesn't cash out doesn't mean the universe lacks meaning.

Nor is meaning precluded from being objective. A sign on a store that says "closed" objectively means the store isn't open. That is, the sign has the same meaning to anyone who can read it, even when correcting for differences between multiple perspectives. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you are mixing everything together here and produce unnecessary complexity in your understanding of my argument. Me saying "there's no meaning in the universe" relates to an objective meaning that we find in the universe. I.e something like, "there's a purpose and meaning from a "creator" who guides the universe". That is a no. That we form meaning for ourselves is the exact type of meaning that is possible. But you need to understand the specifics of my argument, otherwise you start to spin away from my actual argument into definitions of "meaning" that's not the point of my argument.

I'm focusing on the lack of universal meanings, objective meanings. Those are not what you find for yourself, those are objective. The specifics here are essential for the argument I made. And the argument had to do with how most people try to find some objective morality, i.e some rules that exist as universal truths. Such objective rules require a meaning that exists as a universal truth, a universal meaning.

Without it, which is what everything points towards, there can be no universal truths about morality other than what can be extrapolated out of what actually exists.

And my argument therefor has to do with how the only possible objective guiding principle for morality that is possible, is our biology, the science of human nature. That commonalities between cultures that have a basis in our biology, is the only objective realm we can move within if we want to find some universal moral laws for ourselves. From those we can extrapolate more complex principles as variables for a functioning society.

But we cannot use meaning that we form for ourselves as a foundation for morality because then we start to invent rules out of preferences that aren't objective. If someone find meaning in killing others due to a cause in their childhood producing such psychology, then oops, his morality is valid because his sense of meaning needs to be accounted for if we just use individual sense of meaning as a foundation.

No, we have to see what is objective and universal, our biology and human nature that has statistical significance between cultures. Those inform us of objective truths about human nature and those need to be the foundation for some extrapolated moral principles. What harms us, what gives as pleasure, what keeps us healthy and so on. Built together with deterministic principles, it would inform a society that functions better aligned with what we can defines as "good morals" and help create a good life.

I just don't agree that the parts above preclude "objective" moral standards. Somehow, the term "objective" has morphed from being the opposite of "subjective," into meaning "in itself," "noumenal," or "true." But "objective" just means "the view with biases removed." It makes no sense to talk about objectivity in a context where subjectivity is impossible or irrelevant. An objective moral statement is just one made without the biases relative to a given subject or set of subjects. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, this is a problem of language. Objective can mean externally objective, i.e objective in the eye of the universe, cold dead objectivity. But can also mean internally objective, i.e internal to us humans, unbiased as a concept to us or objective as a truth measurable by our standards.

The things that does not exist is some universal objective (externally objective) morality that has some fundamental roots in the universe external to us humans. This is the type of morals that religion tries to impose on us.

Then we have ever changing subjective morals, which comes out of the idea that there's no morality, that there's no rule book at all. This is what many think is the result out of the Nietzschean "god is dead" and the nihilism that comes out of it.

Then there's the human objective morality (internally objective), that can be extrapolated out of our biology and measurable human nature. What defines our well being and happiness for ourselves and as social creatures. And this is the only morality in which we can find hints at human universal morality, because it is based on objective facts of human nature.

An objective moral statement is just one made without the biases relative to a given subject or set of subjects. — Count Timothy von Icarus

An objective moral statement still requires a foundation for how it relates to human nature. You can say that Kant's categorical imperatives are objective moral statements since they are without biases, but they still produce problems in certain moral situations. Therefore you can't make objective moral statements just based on being unbiased towards the subjects, you need a foundational principle, and it's this foundation I'm arguing for being rooted in our biology.

Socially constructed things can be observed objectively. Good and bad are no more amorphous than terms like "Japanese" or "punk rock," and we can certainly talk about the extent to which a piece of furniture or a TV show shows "Japanese-style/influence," or which rock bands are "more punk." Is it hard to operationalize such measurements? Sure. But objective facts remain, e.g. "the Moody Blues are less punk than the Ramones or the Clash." People can disagree with that statement; that doesn't make it not objective. People can also disagree about the atomic weight of lithium or the shape of the Earth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

"Good" and "bad" can still be guided by commonalties between humans regardless of culture. And there has to be a guiding principle underneath. There's no point in discussing what is more punk or not if you don't have anything informing what "punk" actually is in the first place. Or you cannot debate the atomic weight of lithium if you don't have a definition of what "atom" means.

This is the problem with how people relate to the topic of morality. They form arguments about moral ideas without any common ground to extrapolate those morals from. And this is what I'm talking about.

If people use some external objective meaning in the universe as a guide for morality, then they are most likely forming opinions on morality out of "the voice of God" or some arbitrary invention in religion or spirituality since there isn't any such external objective meaning, and even if there was it is unknowable and therefore useless. This form is extremely prone to corruption through individuals own ideals and ideas about what they want the world to be like. So there is no common ground here.

If people instead form subjective morals based on the idea that there is no moral rulebook, i.e the nihilistic route, then that negates moral thinking all together. While possible to be true, do we want such a nihilistic world? Few do, therefore the need for moral principles remain and we are actually driven biologically away from such nihilism (which studies show in that we gravitate towards social structures and well being rather than being able to uphold any ideals of purely nihilistic existence). Nihilism can therefor not be a common ground either.

The only common ground that actually functions as a universal objective fact, is our biology, our human nature. This has to be the foundational ground that guides our moral thinking, from which we extrapolate ideas about what is "good" and "bad" for us. Only by accepting this can we start to form principles to live by and moral principles to be discussed about.

And it's this that I mean is measurable. Our human nature exists as an objective thing, and it is measurable. Anything disregarding this foundation when trying to produce moral facts fails.

How does this work? We can have a universal definition of "life" right? But life is tied to the being of living organisms. Or a universal definition of parasitism, yet that too is tied to the existence of organisms.

Is the problem that "good and bad" are part of first person experience? Or is it that they are only relative to living things? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Morality is a human invented concept that tries to set parameters around behavior and define what is good or bad for us. It can't be universal since you cannot apply morality to a rock floating in space. We can universalize a moral set of rules for humans if we can invent something that applies to all and make sense, which is what moral philosophy is all about. Kant came close, but obviously even that has flaws and the most popular battle in morality is between his categorical imperatives and utilitarianism.

I suggest that we can only define universal morality for humans based on the biology we have and what our biology needs. Our biology programs us to be self-preserving, but we also want to preserve the group. Just like we have our sex drive closely linked to the continuation of our species, so can we find more high level drives of social values that would inform us on what universalized morality we can agree on. For that we can study history, study how people in all cultures value and view actions between people and discover what commonalities exist regardless of invented concepts of religion or other biases.

But none of that can be applied between species. Aliens can only have a moral system that functions based on their biology, we cannot apply our morals to them, regardless of what Star Trek says.

Sure, but likewise, if universal morals can be found, then the universe isn't meaningless. Which one are we in? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it's a mistake to link universal meaning to morality. If we find out that there's some integral meaning to the universe and our existence, so what? It does not justify the pain or endorse the pleasure's of past human lives. We can only define morality based on what we have and what we are in the state we are in as existence now. If there was some underlying meaning to the universe that somehow should inform our morals, we would have known those morals by now, because what's the point of some universal meaning if it does not inform that meaning to the inhabitants of the universe so that the morals can be lived by? And no, religion does not inform that because we have too many conflicting religions through history and we have too much evidence of how people skew religious scripture to fit their own purposes to conclude that religion is an invention by people to explain the unexplainable in a time without science.

The only logical "meaning" the universe could have linked to morality was if this was a simulation to form morality. Meaning, all of this, this universe is a simulation with the intent to iterate towards a perfect morality system. That the lack of guidance and meaninglessness of the universe is part of the system, so that the species itself (us), form morality through trial and error. But even if that sci-fi fantasy were true it would still boil down to us having to do all the legwork and we're back at square one trying to figure out a solid moral system for all humans.

I'm not sure what determinism has to do with it. It seems to me that, for a universe to embody meaning and values, it must be determined to do so in some ways. Else how is the meaning in the universe instantiated except by chance? But I can't think of any reason why determinism should preclude universal values. We can imagine a mad scientist who spawns a toy universe that starts off chaotic yet which has a universal tendencies that will cause it to spawn life and then maximize the well being of those life forms. That would seem to be a case of values being instantiated through determinism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Determinism makes our sense of justice problematic. Much our moral thinking relies on ideas of free will. But without free will we have to understand that no one acts without a previous cause, that many people are set on rails towards immoral actions due to reasons of nature and nurture. So without free will we end up with a moral system that relies and focuses on preventing people from doing immoral actions rather than punishment for their actions.

When it comes to universal ideas of meaning, there's nothing that points to any meaning in the universe and therefore we can't talk about morality through such concepts before proving any meaning existing there in the first place. My point is that we don't have to solve those questions since there's a big chance that, due to everything we know about the universe, there's no meaning whatsoever, and because of this we're wasting time as a species trying to verify our morality out of ideas that are irrelevant to our experience here and now. To form a moral system that can be universalized between humans, we need to look at our actual experience and lives that we have, all that we are right now, nothing else. And through that we can extrapolate biological hints towards a functioning moral system for all humans. We just can't apply that to other species in the universe and forming a moral system between species has more to do with accepting the parameters of each species morality system rather than trying to impose our own onto them.

So, do you believe that the man in the OP does not have free will? At the moment, the poll is 80% does not have free will and 20% other. — Art48

No one has free will. Doesn't matter how people try to phrase things, we're not detached entities from the universe in which we exist. Everything in this universe is acting within deterministic laws, but somehow people's decisions aren't? If anything, that sounds more like human arrogance and ideals about humanity as something uniquely special in this reality. So far, all actual evidence we have point towards pure determinism while there's no actual evidence for free will at all, outside some pseudo-religious hogwash that people interpret out of trash science magazines that have no idea on how to present actual research paper conclusions without introducing speculative nonsense into the mix.

The bottom line is that if everything points towards determinism, then the burden of proof is on the one claiming there is free will to prove how human decision making is possible outside of that universal law. It doesn't matter how elaborate of an example someone tries to write out, it's not getting around the basics of it all.

Can you envision a moral system build entirely of non-emotional values? If we were to turn everyone into Mr Spock, would we still have the same variety of moral stances we now see in human culture? If our moral
systems would be different, how would they change? — Joshs

We wouldn't need to as humans philosophizing about our morality is philosophizing about ourselves. There's no point in imagining a species other than ourselves when trying to figure out morality for ourselves since a change in our species would change the foundation for our moral system.

We can do so for the sake of it or as a contrast, but it will feel as alien to us as anything else that's alien to our biology.

A moral system for a species like Vulcans would probably rely more on logical axioms rather than ranges of values. The problem is that we cannot judge that system when we're stuck in the emotionally driven biology that we exist in. So we can guess what moral system they would have, but it wouldn't make sense to us. However, if they explained it to us we would probably be able to rationally understand it, like thinking about it as a system of logical axioms, but their decisions on moral choices in their society could be so alien to us that we would think of them as immoral by our standards.

We can therefor draw a line between finding a moral system that applies to all people of humans, even between cultures, but never apply a system that applies between species as the biology and nature of a species would define the foundation of their moral system.

Through this, we could even analyze potential moral systems of animals, even if they're not conscious enough to view themselves in such mirrors. What is the moral system among lions? We can find commonalities between decisions made by many lions, but never judge their system based on our own morality. Then again, we could just decide that a moral system can only exist as a self-governing system for conscious beings, that it requires conscious self-awareness. In that sense, morality is a system only applicable to societies in which actions and consequences can be set into common principles.

So, it could be that the definition of a universal nature of morality is whatever biologically driven principles that becomes a foundation for a functioning society. If aliens form a long term functioning society, they have a moral system underneath it, however alien that system is to us. And that system is whatever principles that inform a common biological ground for the society to exist on top of and definitions for how long such a society can exist.

1. moral thinking differs between cultures and people, so it is a subjective practice, and 2. that there is nothing tangible to attach moral facts too, therefore they do not exist. The main Idea between these two ideas is that morality was created by intelligent life, therefore it is a subjective practice that doesn't have any basis. — Lexa

Moral thinking differs, but there are commonalities rooted in emotions. And we do indeed attach morality to the fact that we have emotions. We do not say it is immoral to kill because there aren't any situations in which killing is considered a good action, we do it primarily from a primal limbic system response to the fact that being killed is an extremely negative action done onto us. It has a lot of pain attached to it and the denial of someone's existence requires a damn good argument for the continued existence of the killer for justifying that killing.

Cultures move in and out of different values but we tend to base our moral values on some basic truths about the experience of being a human, and those truths are indeed facts. Otherwise, you cannot argue for why people shouldn't kill you. Why shouldn't someone kill you? I bet you can come up with reasons for why you don't want to be killed, none of those reasons are valid in of themselves, because there's no essential meaning to your existence, but they're attached to negative emotions you feel about the negation of your continued existence. So we can infer that there's something there that guides our moral thinking.

The problem with moral philosophy is that the aim always seems to be on finding an objective moral that is detached from the existence of being a human. But since morality is a concept that is deeply tied to our experience as human beings, we cannot detach ourselves and the nature of our existence from the moral theories we produce. We have to include us in these theories, or else we're not talking about human morality, but some abstract nothing.

Think of the "why?" scene in Terminator 2. "You can't go around killing people!" to which the terminator replies "Why?" over and over. That's because John Connor cannot find a definition for why it is bad. But he could have explained it through telling the Terminator that the morality of killing is tied to the experience of being a human, so he wouldn't understand the "why", but he could instead draw conclusions from understanding the facts about pain. Meaning, if he hurts another person, that person feels pain (fact), killing someone is the final conclusion of "pain" and is considered morally negative. Therefore, killing is morally bad as a concept human morality. A computer like the Terminator could draw conclusions based on this, it would probably draw utilitarianistic conclusions when trying to calculate further outcomes of killings, but it would at least find a defining idea around why killing is bad.

That is probably as close to something factually based as we could possibly come. And this can be changed to whatever culture a species have. So if we encounter an alien species with wildly different aspects of the experience of being, then morality can only be defined based on their perspective, meaning, we humans can grasp the morality of other beings by not applying our morality to them, but their morality to them. This doesn't work for different human cultures as the experience of being a human is the same between all of us. It is therefore species based.

But we can infer that there are facts about the human experience that are universal for our species and morality is tightly linked to them. One evidence of this is the very fact that we try to draw conclusions of morality when speaking about killing someone. If morality was truly nihilistic, if there was nothing there, then why would we ever even gravitate towards concepts like "killing" when talking about morality? Why not "the morality of bananas"? A nihilistic perspective on morality would equal bananas having the same level of moral relevance as "killing", but we view such a conclusion as absurd since morality has to do with our actions and consequences as humans. As such, actions and consequences have an impact on our experiences as humans, and therefore ideas on morality has a value to them as they are linked to our experience and especially emotions of being humans.

The most common argument against the existence of objective morality and moral facts besides moral differences between societies is that they aren’t tangible objects found in the universe and can’t be measured scientifically. Are there any refutations or arguments against this?- — Captain Homicide

Morals can't be universal since they're essentially tied to the being of humans. But being so, we could argue that there are commonalities in how we perceive the preservation and survivability of being a human, and that there are positive emotions and negative emotions tied to the quality of living as a human. Both to what we do and through the intentions of why we do something.

This is something that Sam Harris has tried (and failed) to do. But there's no denying that emotion plays a big part in trying to form some objective morals. It's just that they can never be a complete set of rules, but rather a range of ought not to and ought to principles.

It may be that we could invent a sort of mathematical equation of value points attached to certain actions and intentions, in which a careful examination of actions taken can measure if the moral actions of someone ended up on a negative or positive side.

But an indifferent, meaningless existence in a deterministic universe creates problems for any objective morals to be found, because they cannot be found. We need to rather invent something based on the sum of our existence and experience. And that takes an honest dedication to examining our existence without holding biases to beliefs outside of measurable emotions and universal human experiences.

I wonder if a fundamental cause of the controversies is that the concept of free will is poorly defined. — Art48

No, the reason is that people cannot cope with the fact that we don't have free will. It's an existential threat to their very experience of being. It messes with the concept of justice, the concept of agency, of identity and so on. Even for people who understand the logic of determinism it is hard to wrap their heads around the experience of it, because it feels so alien to the way our consciousness behaves.



It's not that free will is poorly defined, it's that determinism isn't well understood.