Comments

  • Hume's Failed Attack on Newton's Law of Cause and Effect


    I do hear myself.

    Hume is correct because he rightly identifies causal relations to be a feature of existing states, rather than being formed out of concepts of laws we imagine. "Laws" only function to describe when states are acting that way.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    I'm not sure I would say abstract here. Abstraction brings to talking about some similarity between existing things. Sort of liking talking about the fact your two books and two forks are similar. While not strictly inaccurate, it's true these things share meaning, it's not the angle I was wanting to come form.

    Rather than trying to talk about how some things might be similar, I was going for a recognition of a necessary truth itself. Instead of trying to talk about how your books and forks shared the meaning of two, I had in mind adressing two itself. The necessary meaning, true regardless of what exists.

    Whether God amounts to a necessary metaphysical truth depends on which notion of God you are talking about. Some gods or Gods are empirical , beings who act within the world, who could possibly exist or not.

    Other notions of God are metaphysical, supposing a necessity which has no empirical presence or existence.

    Most religous accounts are some incohrent confusion of the two.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    Nope, just the opposite.

    Metaphysics deals in logical distinctions of necessity. Properly reasoned, metaphysics involves what we can be sure of, without making reference to a supporting empirical context. Indeed, if we try to reason about metaphysics empirically, we just end up with nonsense statements.

    I know God is not ineffable because that would mean God was meaningless and absent. It would suppose a God which even lacked the distinction of being God. A God in which there was no God because concepts and statements about God would not pick out anything.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century




    It worse than unsupported, the claim is incoherent.

    If God is knownto genderless, electromagnetic consciousness, God is certainly not ineffable. Amen knows precise things about God.
  • Hume's Failed Attack on Newton's Law of Cause and Effect


    Hume has something stronger in mind. It isn't just that laws of cause and effect aren't observable, but rather that there are no laws of cause and effect.

    Since any causal relationship is nothing more than an appearance of some states together, no appeal can be made to an outside governing law. The states consitute what is there/define the causal relationship. A law of cause and effect cannot function because there is always just the states doing their relationship. As such, the states can always override any law might assert governs what are possible causal outcomes.

    For exmaple, if there occurs a state of a ball which floats up when released, our insistence the ball must fall down by a law of gravity has no power at all.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    Valentinus' point was existence precedes essence. This precludes the accounts you giving because neither an essence of God nor an essence of mystery can be an account of that which exists.

    If we are to give an account of an existence, say the human who feels love, it can only be done in terms of existence. What does the loving human entail? The existence of a human who loves. That's how it occurs. There is no other account to give. It cannot be accounted for by God nor mystery.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    I don't think so, at least not in this abstracted sense. I like living and so am afraid of many things which might act to end my life (e.g. lack of water, guns pointed at me, etc.), but this strikes me as a little different than fear of being dead.

    To ask if I fear being dead, that I no longer exist at some point or another, doesn't have much of an effect on me. The world was fine without me for many billions of years, it will get on fine without me for billions more. To think I must be so integral to the functioning of existence is quite the hubris.

    I do think you've hit on why people engage in the sort of nihilism of your argument. If one recognises mortality to their existence, the only way to overcome it is to not exist at all. If it's all just really God or the mystery, then an impossible cure is on offer for mortal existence. We can trick ourselves into thinking because we are really the constant of God, we have no mortality to face.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    I'm saying your position is a nihilism.

    Faced with our lives, you assert they must be meaningless, that only a greater being or mysterious force could define who we are, our meaning, needs and goals. You take a postion in which we are nowhere at all, just an illusion of the puppeteer God or mystery that's really going on.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    No, as per above, people sometimes know something, other times they do not. Plenty of people know of their own death. Plenty of others do not. Such is our existence, some things we know, some we do not. It's always down to an individual's existence, that is, what experiences of knowledge they exist with.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    Sometimes, yes.

    Not always though, like any peice of knowledge, people are sometimes without it. Humans sometimes know why they are here, be that in an ethical sense of knowing what you ought to do in your life or a descriptive sense of know how you are a distinct entity of the world.

    You seem to not know who we are. You keep insisting we are God or some mystery, rather than our own existence. We can do a lot better than such confusion of ourselves with an infinite entity.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    We have needs or goals because it is a feature of our existence. The counterfactual of a person without needs or a goal shows this to be the case. What would it take, for example, for a human without a need for food? The existence of someone who didn't need to eat food.

    Our own existence is the reason here.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    My bad for unclear language, I meant that we would finally have a descriptive account (God) for what/how something was.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    Unless it happens to be God of course, then we can finally be certian. Or so many these stories would seem to have it.

    One must ask why God amounts to any improvement here.
  • How important is (a)theism to your philosophy?


    Were you expecting your dog to speak English and so understand your words?

    Speech isn't important here. The point is that the (material world) needs no God to speak it into meaning. Meaning is necessary to it, imbued within the material presence itself. No-one has to speak meaning for it to be. Gods included.
  • How important is (a)theism to your philosophy?


    That's why we identify meaning with the meaning of material things(including minds-- not brains-- but the existing mental entity caused in the world).

    The material world means, it is necessary. Existence is responsible.

    No nihilism and its extra worldly imaginings required to account for meaning. Meaning is staring at you, immanent to every material presence.
  • Atheism is untenable in the 21st Century


    The God you have in mind clearly does not exist. It's infinite nature precludes it from acting in the world, it cannot be the means by which any state is made true over another. Necessity precludes existence.

    As for other Gods, those existing being who take action in the world, that comes down entirely what happens in the world. Such a God is a being of the empirical world and is testable in such terms.

    In this respect, there are many possible Gods, but it would seem few, if any, of the Gods asserted by a religious text exist, since they appear to make a host of claims falsified by events of the world.
  • Deficiencies of Atheism
    Similarly God is real, and has real properties such goodness, all-knowingness and all-powerfulness, even though s/he doesn't exist. :rofl:Janus

    All the proof of atheism any one will ever need. The reality of God entails non-existence. :cool:
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    I'm inclined to think there is no responsible way out in this so situation. So long as stability was given by the presence of US troops, I don't think there is an ethical way to withdraw. It's analogous to disbanding a security force and a rule of law to allow friends to be robbed.

    Being the closest thing to God in the area of foreign policy comes with responsibility. In these circumstances, the tragedy is entirely lost. To withdraw is to literally abandon your friends because there is work and risk involved to have their back.
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    My point is that your account of sex is just another layer of these sexist assumptions. What does anyone any one need a penis to be a man, a womb to be a woman? Just as an identity is not one's hair or dress, it is not one's biological features either.

    There are no "real biological idenities" because they fact of an identity is a different to existence of a biologcal feature. Such a notion of real biological identities are just another sexist assumption about about a body and how it belongs.
  • Deficiencies of Atheism


    In a way... but less trying to disprove an existing God (that's a space for emprical questions and answers), than showing that the a priori infinite being posed as God cannot exist/give account of finite beings.
  • Deficiencies of Atheism


    The more interesting question to ask here is: how does God explain any of those?

    Not because they do.not have explanations or need God to be explained, but rather to question the entire approach for handling unknown questions. What explanatory power could "God did it" or "My religion says so" ever have in this context? It's simply stating a relation of concepts, no more explanatory than if we said "atoms did it", "brains did it" or "2+2=4 did it."

    God is always cheap herebecause God is literally anything and everything. Being other to the finite instances we are trying to describe, it never says much interesting about how things came to be or what they are. Just silly humans struggling to come to terms with self-existence by shifting it into something else.
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    Arm is a word and concept.for a specific different body part. It's not just a collection of traits. There are many ways traits of an arm might collected which are not an arm. There are also many different traits which may be collected in an arm (e.g. articfical limbs, robot arms etc.), which are not in a given in another (a biologcal human arm).

    It is not used to describe a collection of smaller traits. Arm describes a distinct object of the body, wh8ch also has many smaller parts. (unlike sex, which names not a body, but an identity).
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    It absolutely does not. All these facts are given by what a body does. It's the breasts (Or not breasts! Breasts aren't the only possible state which might occur with someone nursing )and what they are doing, which defines who is nursing.

    Sex does not. In this case, it is just our just-so story of who is supposed to nurse on account of the identity of sex. It doesn't even get those with breasts right: some of them don't nurse, some of them cannot nurse.

    Which is why I would stay it is both useless (as it achieves nothing of value) and inaccurate (since it is a category error which makes mistakes about bodies). :wink:
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    That is the proof. Sex is not actually telling us about the body parts. We still had to use the body parts themselves to give a description of the body (sex organs, chormosmes, etc. ). Sex is doing no work in describing the body. It gives us nothing about body parts and we do not need it to describe what body parts are present.
  • Deficiencies of Atheism
    What if our terrible predicament is to believe our terrible predicament can be overcome? Perhaps there is no answer to our death because we are being who die.

    The hubris in assume our predicament can be overcome just because we want it has always astonished me.
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    The failure is there is there is acually no descprtion. If you are dealing with the body, then the terms which describe it are that a body exists. To speak of this notion of sex does not.

    It's not that there aren't people with the body parts expected under th is notion of sex, it's that sex isn't an account of them. Sex is describing a supposed identity (people with a body have this meaning of sex, male, female, etc.), not the body parts. (Which we see in how each body part is still has to be described on its own terms). As such, sex is not an account of what bodies are present, but one of what bodies mean in an identity of sex.
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    I meant anyone, since I'm discussing the description of individuals. Due to being a category error, this account of sex fails in any individual instance it is used. It does not even work with cis people.
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    Misreading my point, the so called an anomonlies are not the problem with this account of sex, although they are symptomatic of it. This account of sex does not work for anyone.

    Bodies don't care what identity they belong to. They will be what they are. Antlers are antlers on male, a female or someone with no sex. So are breasts. The mistake of this account of sex is a category error. It's confused the existence of bodies with an identity category of sex.
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    Our identities are social constructions. You seem to.misundertand what I mean by social constuction. I do not mean a certain type of cause opposed to a biological cause. I mean the existence of a certain social relation of the world.

    Social constructions frequently involve the body in their causes, since the social context involves are body reacting to the environment. Much of social constructs are biologically caused. The languages we use, for example, are a social construction. They are also caused biologically, language being a reaction of our body with our environment.

    I do remember that. You are mistaking your notion of sex for the body. As I said earlier, you are reasoning backwards. Instead of working from bodies which occur and are observed, you are trying to define what bodies exist by your expectation of what they must have. Deers don't need to be male to have antlers, humans don't need to be female to have breasts. For either to have a body, they only need existence of that body.
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    Oh I know you were being facetious, I was just taking seriously for any reader poised to attack me for supposing yeast spreads had an identity essentially defined by having some property.
  • The power of truth


    I know the metaphysical sorcery to make it sort of work, but then it's not really an account of any specific proposition, so it's just confusing in discussion of theories of truth.

    The similarity shared by all truths (that they are the case) is never an account of how any of them are true.
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    The objection does work.

    A property of being English or Australian is not exhaustive of an identity. The entity of a yeast spread might have an identity which breaks our expectations of culture of origin, an Australian marmite or English vegemite . We always have to go to descprtion of an identity itself.

    But that is why I said what I did, since the instances you were talking about were Australian vegemite. Your description failed not because there cannot be an Australian marmite, but rather because the instances of yeast spread you referred to are Australian vegemite.
  • Disambiguating the concept of gender


    Just the opposite, which I covered in the other gender thread:

    Sure we categorize the world with words. Sex is an anatomical category, not a social identity. "Sex" refers to those differences of anatomy and their related functions and behaviors that exist in 99.9% organisms of all species that use sex to procreate.

    "Man"/"Woman" are terms that refer to differences in species and not just sex.
    — Harry Hindu



    Sex has in mind something more tham just difference in anatomy.

    When we use sex, we are not dedicated to identifying anatomical parts. We are interested in identifying which people are male and which people are female. It’s why we don’t just point out an anatomical difference by describing their are different anatomical parts. It’s a self-defined identity. Rather than just describing what bodies people have, it’s an attempt to capture our bodies under specific conceptual meanings. Sex is a categorisation of who takes on an identity of male or female.

    You’re right this is an attempt to identify a different species. Species is the same kind of category. If I assert an entity is a certain species, and so must have certain set of anatomical parts, I am making the same sort of argument defining a conceptual identity.

    But it’s species which is the illusion (an antiscientific) here. For rather than taking anatomy and people on their own terms, describing bodies in terms of what states occur and are observed an each entity, species attempts to define existing bodies and entities through only our conceptual idea of which anatomy can belong to them on account of identity. The account it’s giving is working backwards.

    Instead of looking out at the world, at an entity with identity and taking what bodily features it has, these accounts take species as anatomy, as if the body of entity could be defined merely by our concept of what must be. The approach is anti-scientific because it cannot track instances of the world in which a species exists or behaves in ways we do not expect. It’s using our expectations where the existence of an entity should rule.
    — TheWillowOfDarkness
  • Disambiguating the concept of gender


    I know that, which is why the fact I don't accept the essentialism of biological sex (by this I mean the idea that someone's anatomical properties make them masculine of feminine) is integral to the point I was making.

    My point is not only the properties of gender roles like long hair, wearing dresses,etc. which are essentialist, but also the anatomical properties which are supposed to define sex. Why does one need a penis to be male? Why does one need a vagina to be female? If identity of male and female is indeed non-essentialist, then it should be possible for someone of any body to have an identity of male or female. Even in terms of se, the category of male and female cannot be reduced to a property of body .
    The identity of male and female, even in sex, is only given by the identity itself. One can only be male or female, whatever their anatomy, by the fact of having the identity itself. There is no set of properties which makes anyone male or female.

    So when Pfhorrest asserts a feminine identity, it's not on the basis of having certain properties which must make them feminine. No essential properties are granting feminine identity. There are no such properties!

    Rather, the feminine identity is given in terms of itself.

    That's to say, Pfhorrest has a property of feminine identity which is present entirely on its own terms. Not a feature granted by having some set of properties which make one feminine, but to exist with a fact of feminine identity itself.

    Just as a cis man with a penis exists with a male identity itself and thinks the concept of man is of him, Pfhorrest exists with a feminine identity and thinks of the concept of woman of her/them/he (I do not know Pfhorrest's pronouns. Normally, I would just use "they" when I don't know pronouns, but I'll put a range here just to make a point about the self-definition of identity).
  • Disambiguating the concept of gender


    That's just having an identity. There is no specific set of properties which amount to being more feminine or not.

    Anyone with a sex or gender is in this position. The cis man with a penis who thinks "I'm male" has the same sort significance and feeling of belonging. (it's also true of anyone without a sex and gender, since they will have a thought and sense of belonging to "no sex and gender." )
  • Disambiguating the concept of gender


    Missing the forest for the trees. The social expectations and myths to change ones body do not vanish in a world which properly recognises and is inclusive sex and gender. Alteration of bodies is, in the end, a question of bodies. Social forces manipulating people to that end can still function perfectly well in that space. Body ideals, presented as irresistible, can occur perfectly well in themselves. A lot of the already do. The six packed men and thin woman plastered over advertising, for example, don't always come with a specific reference to gender (i.e. "Women must be this", "Man must be this" ), but instead are shown and imply the value of the body (whatever sex or gender it might be).

    We are dropping the ball if we think dissatisfaction with bodies is merely a question of whether if someone with certain properties can belong to sex or gender. A paradise inclusive of sex and gender (in the sense of recognising both are identities in themselves, not given by any particular property or another) does not amount to overcoming dissatisfaction with bodies and social expectations surrounding it.
  • Disambiguating the concept of gender


    It appears that way because the group of sex essentialists (@Swan @Bitter Crank, @Terrapin Station and @Artemis) haven't realised the terms of identification. Trans people are not non-conforming because they fail to meet a standard required to be a sex or gender. They are non-conforming because their identity breaks with what's expected of them by a social expectation.

    One does not, for example, need a penis to be male. Or a vagina to be female. Like wearing long hair , dresses or enjoying sports, to have a penis or a vagina is just a another property of a person. Identity is a distinct fact from these properties. Some women have a vagina. Some women have a penis.

    In a world where identity is properly understood, trans people would not be trans. Not because they wouldn't have an identity, body or dysphoria, but rather because whatever manifestation of those three they had, it would not break identity rules for them to be trans. The prominent trans woman of imagination would just be a woman, with a penis and dysphoria about her body. She would not to trans in the sense of violating an identity expectation. A woman with a penis, who senses her body with a vagina, would be just as much expected of a woman as having a vagina and feeling it belongs.
  • Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues


    Sex has in mind something more tham just difference in anatomy.

    When we use sex, we are not dedicated to identifying anatomical parts. We are interested in identifying which people are male and which people are female. It’s why we don’t just point out an anatomical difference by describing their are different anatomical parts. It’s a self-defined identity. Rather than just describing what bodies people have, it’s an attempt to capture our bodies under specific conceptual meanings. Sex is a categorisation of who takes on an identity of male or female.

    You’re right this is an attempt to identify a different species. Species is the same kind of category. If I assert an entity is a certain species, and so must have certain set of anatomical parts, I am making the same sort of argument defining a conceptual identity.

    But it’s species which is the illusion (an antiscientific) here. For rather than taking anatomy and people on their own terms, describing bodies in terms of what states occur and are observed an each entity, species attempts to define existing bodies and entities through only our conceptual idea of which anatomy can belong to them on account of identity. The account it’s giving is working backwards.

    Instead of looking out at the world, at an entity with identity and taking what bodily features it has, these accounts take species as anatomy, as if the body of entity could be defined merely by our concept of what must be. The approach is anti-scientific because it cannot track instances of the world in which a species exists or behaves in ways we do not expect. It’s using our expectations where the existence of an entity should rule.
  • Disambiguating the concept of gender


    In a trans context, the sensations have to be social mediated because they have to be indexed to certain concepts and lingistic practices. Dysphoria about one's body doesn't itself entail a sex or gender identification. We have to understand or learn our bodies relate in these specific ways of identity.

    Without this social aspect, one would just have an sensation and sense about their body. Dysphoria would manifest not as an idenfication as male or female, but just need for different body parts.

TheWillowOfDarkness

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