You know, on another thread I was just saying

"Like a thirsty man drinking salt water, desire can never be satisfied." — Theologian

Reading this, I can't help but think of two quotes: one from Bill Gates, the other from The Buddha.

"640k ought to be enough for anyone."
~Bill

"Like a thirsty man drinking salt water, desire can never be satisfied."
~Buddha.

PS (So far the Buddha seems to be winning! :gasp: )

I've only been seriously studying philosophy for a little over a year. There are some hard choices I need to make as to which of the many dense tomes that are ahead of me I invest my time and energy in - and in what order. I always try to be upfront as to the limits of my own knowledge, and one of the reasons why I engage here is that I figure I might actually learn a thing or two from people who are a bit ahead of me. Or at least know more about certain things than I do. If you want to be contemptuously dismissive of that, then fine. But I think that says more about you than it does about me.

I would also point out that so far at lest I am the ONLY person on this thread to make the effort to back up ANYTHING I've said with any references at all. And I have backed them up: with two instances in which Marx explicitly claimed that his predictions would "inevitably" come to pass, and one reference to an authoritative secondary source which said exactly the same.

By contrast, your main response at this point seems to be ridicule. Ridicule is not a valid argument form, and I do not find it persuasive.

There are also serious problems with the things the two of you are saying.

First of all, @Maw, let's put the quote I gave and the line you added immediately after together, so everyone can see the whole thing.

""The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx’s prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism."

You claim:

the following sentence literally refutes that: — Maw

The which being:

"However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal."

Clearly, this doesn't refute the preceding sentence. Refusing to speculate on the nature of communism, or exactly how it would arise, is not the same as not claiming that it is inevitable.

I can claim that the sun will inevitably explode while refusing to specify exactly how, or describe the exact nature of the explosion. You might not be very impressed by my claim. You might even consider my failure to give any details to be a serious flaw in my whole sun exploding theory. But my refusal to provide the details does not change the fact that I did say that the sun would inevitably explode.

There is no refutation here.

Now, @Bitter Crank, let's look at your post. You begin by saying:

Obviously, the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital are not the same kind of book. — Bitter Crank

Well, you've got me there. But up until now, no-one mentioned either. It doesn't change the fact that Marx said what he said. In both works.

Moving on, I claimed that Marx said that certain things were inevitable. To which you replied:

Marx described the reasons for class conflict (between the proles and capitalists) and that the proles would win--not because it was his preference, but because the exploited class would eventually achieve a level of development where they could, and would, dispossess the exploiters. Of course, they (WE) don't have to win -- now or at any time in the future. — Bitter Crank

And this is... supposed to show that I am wrong? Because it seems to me that you alternate between making my argument for me:

"Marx described the reasons for class conflict (between the proles and capitalists) and that the proles would win--not because it was his preference, but because the exploited class would eventually achieve a level of development where they could, and would, dispossess the exploiters."

And then immediately contradicting yourself:

"Of course, they (WE) don't have to win -- now or at any time in the future."

Does that seem internally consistent to you?

To say nothing of the fact that all of the above, all of it, is left at the level of raw assertion. You provide not one shred of evidence to support your claim that this is what Marx actually said.

Finally, you end with:

Karl Marx didn't lay out a time table. — Bitter Crank

The thing about this is that while it may mean that Marx's theories were never scientific, and I was wrong to say that they were (and so was he, by the way -- I'm not the one who coined the term "Scientific Socialism"), it certainly doesn't mean that they are scientific now.

Absent some kind of timetable, or account of the circumstances under which it will inevitably come to pass, no prediction is scientifically valid. It's like the old joke: "This serum could provide immortality - but it will take forever to test!"

There's always tomorrow.

My knowledge of Marx is, I admit, derived from secondary sources. But so far at least, I think I have put together a vastly better referenced and more coherent argument than either of you. Or even, dare I say, than both of you put together.

I realize that quoting out of context can be dangerous, and I don't claim to have done any more than a bit of searching online. But that said...

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

"The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property."
page 5

"What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."
page 21

The SEP also disagrees with you:
"The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx’s prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/

I'll be honest: I am disinclined to invest the level of effort necessary to come to a really well informed view of my own. I remain open to the possibility that my current view is misinformed and... wrong. But if you want to convince me of that, I'll need a bit more than you've given us so far.

anyone who says that Marx claimed Communism was inevitable - as if it can arrive fully formed without human agency - clearly hasn't read Marx. — Maw

Okay, I have to cop to that. But such is my understanding of him. If it's wrong, perhaps you could tell us what he does say, and where.

Cheers.

As for Marx, Popper's critique stands good for me. — Banno

Aye. It's important not to forget that it was advanced by Marx as a scientific theory. I can't recall Popper's exact line off the top of my head, but it was to the effect that when spontaneous revolution, as per Marx's original writings, failed to arrive, his devotees saved the theory at the expense of its falsifyability. It was no longer demonstrably wrong precisely because it was no longer scientific.

I think there are a lot of shades of meaning that are important here. European capitalist countries do seem to have had a more constructive approach to global warming than... some others.

Most people outside the USA are quite amused by what is considered "socialism" there. It seems both inevitable and hilarious that the end result of decades of conservative rhetoric damning any kind of social safety net as "socialist" has been that large numbers of people have concluded that they would actually quite like a bit of socialism, thank you very much!

Marxist Leninism has obviously produced dystopias that that most people who've had to live in basically wanted to be rid of. But does that apply to socialism more generally? Command economies more generally? I'm not convinced. Once it became possible to measure the size of the Russian economy in Western capitalist terms, it became clear that it was basically the size of the Netherlands. If anything I'm more impressed by the fact that that such an economy managed to give the US a run for its money for as long as it did than I am by the fact that it collapsed in the end - as a result of the fact that it was spending something like 30% of its GDP on the military.

A big part of the problem here is that social and economic theories become ideologies. At which point any meaningful analysis or criticism of the doctrine informing government policy largely stops, and publicly attempting to engage in such analysis or criticism often becomes quite dangerous - for the person attempting to provide this important social good. Perhaps the most important point here being that public analysis of the doctrine informing government policy is a social good, and there are consequences to not having it. Just as there would be if we stopped building roads.

Another problem with the politicization of social and economic theories is that it often seems that everything has to be reduced to the level of a sound-bite to have any "cut-through" at all. But then, how can these theories be put into effect without being politicized?

Not a situation that leaves one feeling terribly optimistic about the future of humanity.

Now I have this playing in my head...

On the face of it this position has serious logical flaws. But... it would be wrong to pre-judge without reading their argument. Can you give us a reference? A specific paper?

That too!

What would be the difference between an illusion of consciousness and consciousness — Terrapin Station

Ooh, good point!

In a way, you could even say that the illusion theory is just pushing consciousness away one step. What then is experiencing the illusion?

I speak with no direct knowledge of Frankish and Dennett's work, so some caution is in order. But on the face of it it seems like a redundant middle step that explains nothing.

It looks good from what I skimmed through. — TogetherTurtle

Thank you! :grin:

If you wish to discuss free will vs determinism, go ahead. I like to discuss that too. — TogetherTurtle

Well then! I'm just going to take the lazy way out and post something I wrote for an assessment task a little while back. It's on point...

***
Power to The Puppets

Whether free will is compatible with determinism, and whether we can have either, both, or neither, is entirely dependent on our definitions.

Determinism has traditionally been defined as the theory that every event is uniquely prescribed by antecedent events. Thus, anyone with perfect knowledge of the universe at one point in time, of its causal laws, and sufficient computational power, can infer with perfect accuracy the state of the universe at all other points in time. The problem with this claim is that it is incompatible with quantum mechanics, which holds that at a quantum level, the universe is random.

Free will may be defined in such a way that it is easy or impossible to reconcile with determinism. The psychologist Skinner argued that since all behaviour is controlled by our biology and environment, what we are actually talking about when we talk about freedom is freedom from aversive forms of control. Hume defined as free all actions motivated by desires originating from within the person. There does not seem to be any problem reconciling either kind of freedom with determinism.

Kant, however, derided Hume’s idea of freedom as “the freedom of the turnspit,” and claimed that in order to be truly free, the will must be an “uncaused cause.” This is clearly incompatible with determinism. Similarly so Descartes’ definition of freedom as the “ability to do or not to do something,” and his claim that “the will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained.”

But the kind of freedom philosophers like Descartes and Kant demand is not only incompatible with determinism: it is incompatible with any naturalistic theory of the mind.

From Beyond
Suppose a mind is a physical process. Whether that process is deterministic or random makes no difference: the mind is whatever that process makes it. Hence so too are all its choices. Replacing the freedom of the turnspit with the freedom of the quantum random number generator renders it neither more nor less the puppets of physics.

Not surprisingly, the theories of both Kant and Descartes are heavily reliant on things beyond science’s ken. Descartes saw the mind as comprised of an entirely non-physical kind of substance, while Kant posited a “noumenal” realm in which the mind could be free. But such approaches are unparsimonious to say the least, and create many problems.

One is that we have not so much reconciled free will with an orderly (be that order deterministic or probabilistic) universe as posited an entirely new universe or substance with no order at all, save perhaps for that which the will self-imposes. Another is that we are now faced with the problem of explaining how the different types of substances or realms interact; and of producing the evidence of this interaction, or else explaining its absence. Finally, we must somehow sidestep neuroscience, leaving us with what we might call “the free will of the gaps.” These are serious problems, so the arguments of the likes of Descartes and Kant need to be compelling.

Descartes first argued as follows:
1. Descartes could conceive of having no body, but could not conceive of having no mind
2. Therefore body and mind have different properties
3. Therefore the two must be different things.
But our conceptions of a thing cannot be properties of the thing itself, because if they are, then Donald Trump (very stable genius) cannot be Donald Trump (mania sufferer/malignant narcissist).

Closely related is Descartes’ second argument:
1. If you can clearly and distinctly conceive of something it is possible
2. You can clearly and distinctly conceive of your mind being distinct from your body
3. It is therefore possible your mind is distinct from your body
4. If two things are possibly distinct they are distinct
5. Therefore the mind is distinct from the body.

It is again possible to show by example that this argument form leads to false conclusions:
1. I can clearly and distinctly conceive of the morning star as distinct from the evening star
2. It is therefore possible the morning star is distinct from the evening star
3. If two things are possibly distinct they are distinct
4. Therefore the morning star is distinct from the evening star.
Yet both are the planet Venus.

Kant saw the existence of free will as implied by and inseparable from our rationality. But consider an artificial intelligence (AI) capable of simple reasoning. Now consider the chip on which that AI runs. We do not say that the AI is able to reason because it causes the chip to transcend the laws of physics. Rather, we know that the AI functions precisely because the chip obeys the laws of physics.

But if reason implies not other realms, but working hardware, it is no less reason for the fact. If it enables us to apprehend our environment, consider alternative courses of action, and implement those choices that appeal to us, this surely represents at least a kind of freedom.

We may decide what we decide because we are what we are, but this does not mean our own cognitive processes are not making decisions. It only means that there are also other things deciding us. As with the AI and the chip, our rationality exists not despite their determinations, but rather, because of them.

Conclusions
Determinism, as traditionally defined, prescribes a perfectly predictable universe that is clearly at odds with contemporary physics. Whether we consider the probabilistic order of quantum mechanics an alternate form of determinism, or an alternative to determinism, is a matter of definitions. Whether or not we get to keep determinism depends on which definition we pick.

In any kind of orderly universe, without recourse to something above and beyond that universe, we are all physics-puppets. But the “above and beyond” comes with fundamental problems with no clear solutions, and the arguments in support of its existence are less than compelling. It does not seem to carry its weight.

Whether it is possible to reconcile free will with our status as physics-puppets depends on our definition of free will. If we insist on a mind that has the potential to be an uncaused cause, which is to say an ultimate cause, then no such reconciliation is possible. If, on the other hand, we can settle for proximal causation, in which free will means only that the physical world has been arranged in such a way as to create a being with the potential for rational decision-making, then yes:

There is such a thing as a free puppet.

Perhaps you have to be a Kurd or a Palestinian to understand just what it means not to have one's own nation state today — ssu

...or perhaps a Finn?

The freedoms of an individual is a totally different issue than a freedom of a people. — ssu

I hadn't considered that. I guess your answer and mine to the OP deal with completely different issues.

PS...

...although perhaps the point I made regarding individuals in a society also applies to your point as well?

Hypothetically, if you were to create or live in a new nation, what would you expect to be your basic freedoms? What would you expect to be obligated to do? What would you expect not to be able to do? — TogetherTurtle

From this paragraph in particular, I take it that you intend to start a thread looking at the problem from the perspective of political philosophy. In other words, not to address (arguably) more fundamental problems such as free will vs determinism.

You also ask for specific basic freedoms, obligations, and limits on freedom (what we're not allowed to do).

I'm not entirely sure to what extent philosophy (or "philosophizing") can provide comprehensive answers to the kind of question you want to ask. I'm not even sure to what extent anyone can provide comprehensive answers.

For example, we might begin by agreeing that we give up our freedom to harm others. But how much harm is too much? Okay, we don't get to run around murdering and raping. But do we get to smoke in public? If we accept that there is a limit on how much harm we can do (implicitly accepting a degree of utilitarianism), we might break the problem down into two separate questions:

1. How much harm is too much?

2. How much harm does second hand smoke do?

To answer the latter question, we have to stop doing philosophy, and start doing medicine.

"Okay," you might say, "but that's just a technical question. Surely philosophy can delegate those."

But suppose we think about the economic basis of our society. How well do unregulated markets work? To what extent do they lead to the wild swings of boom and bust that were so prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries? To what extent do they lead to monopolies -- like Standard Oil? Or, for that matter, like Facebook and Amazon?

My point here is threefold.

1. These are to some degree at least empirical questions. I don't think we're going to be able to answer them entirely a priori.

2. Not only are they empirical questions; they are questions to which the correct answers may change over time, as society and technology change over time. Thus, they cannot be answered once and for all. They call for an ongoing program of research.

3. These are questions that go to the fundamental structural basis to our entire society. Whatever our answers, they have profound implications for our freedoms. And those answers will change over time.

Just to be clear, I was only using markets as an example. I think the above would apply to any structural basis for an economy and a society where society and technology are not completely static.

The above argument does, of course, implicitly assume an acceptance of the notion that living in a society implies or compels some some willingness to make trade-offs between freedom and other things that we consider worth having. My point is, the range of trade-offs available to us is in a constant state of flux.

Sooo... I guess where I'm headed is that I have my doubts as to what extent these questions can ever be answered on anything other than a fairly short term, ad hoc basis.

PS I'm sorry. I just can't resist...

The universe does not get anything or not get anything by what humans do or feel.If so, the universe itself would be using people for a game of net good or whatnot. — schopenhauer1

Well, I guess we're just bits of universe ourselves. So the universe gets whatever we get. Good, bad, and in between.

In a sense, there is no person for there to be an end for yet, so it is always for the parent, prior to birth. Going a bit beyond Kant, I just call this a circular contradiction. — schopenhauer1

I am not completely convinced that this is a circular contradiction. Let me run three arguments by you.

1. Assume an eternalist view of time, in which the future is just as real as the past. The fact that the person you're doing things for is not around yet seems of no more relevance than whether they are around here. So doing something for someone in the future is no different from doing something for someone in a different city - or even just next door. So if we assume an eternalist view, doing something for someone who does not exist yet is not incoherent.

2. Ask: "What is implicit in the idea that you should always treat humans as an end in themselves, never only as a means?" Doesn't this imply that humans have intrinsic value? And if humans have intrinsic value isn't creating more humans intrinsically good?

3. Consider your own starting argument: that having children is wrong for the reasons you outline. But... is not your argument dependent on the idea that you can do something to someone who does not yet exist? So how can you now turn around and say that you can't do something for them?

most people would think the slave-owner is wrong. Here's where it gets controversial- I think having children is also wrong for the very same reasons — schopenhauer1

I can see similarities, but I can also see non-trivial differences.

One is that a slave can be freed. A child can only be "freed" by being killed. So the slaveowner has an option the parent does not: releasing the slave to go on and have an experience of life other than the one you describe. Unless one believes in an afterlife, the parent has no such ability to "free" the child.

Two things to add to my previous post...

1. I'm not sure you're on entirely solid deontological grounds asserting that having children is using people as a means rather than treating them as ends in themselves. Are you completely certain if your goal is to have children, you can't say that you have treated the person as an end in themselves?

Don't forget: even Kant allows us to use others to achieve our ends. We're just not allowed to treat them in a way where we're only using them as an means to an end.

2. Consulting my feelings rather than logic, I can't help but think of an argument I once heard about colonizing Mars. The speaker, who was an astrobiologist, said he felt that a universe with life was fundamentally richer than one without.

I'm not saying I am wholly won over by this argument. But I am not entirely unmoved by it either. I'm a bit wild and woolly here I know, but perhaps you could all it an appeal to virtue ethics, but in this case the "virtue" and the "flourishing" belong to an entire planet, or even the universe, rather than just one individual organism.

Well, as I posted elsewhere, fundamentally I am a meta-ethical subjectivist, so I don't think that anything is wrong.

I am not devoid of moral sentiment; I definitely feel that certain things are wrong. I just don't see any evidence that those feelings have any greater significance than the feelings I have that tell me that chocolate is delicious or that vomit is revolting. And I think that the burden of proof is on whoever wants to claim that our moral feelings are anything more than that.

I also think that regardless of whether we believe that moral sentiment is just another feeling, of no greater significance than an orgasm or a migraine, or whether we believe otherwise, there remains the challenge of modelling that system of feelings. If you believe as I do, it is a problem for psychology. If you do not, philosophy. [it's a little more complex than that I know; after all, there is sociology, anthropology, phenomenology... but, you get the gist.]

Either way, I am quite sure that deontological, consequentialist/utilitarian, and virtue based ethical systems all have valid insights. Pure utilitarian and pure deontological approaches clearly produce moral absurdities. When I see people who are wholly devoted to just one of these systems, it seems to me to be a classic case of becoming so enamored of one particular insight that it becomes the insight, and permits no others.

Consulting my own moral sentiments, I have no particularly strong reaction to the particular dilemma you raise in either direction.

To say that having children is wrong because you're using another person purely as a means to an end and terminate the discussion there seems excessively deontological to me (not that I'm saying you do that). On the other hand, I can't deny that life, as you also observe, is pervasively pretty nasty. Reading your post I couldn't help but think of the Buddhist "noble truth" that life is inherently unsatisfactory.

And yet, even though I do not believe in the wheel of reincarnation, I have so far not killed myself. Nor do I have any plans to do so.

But maybe that's just because evolution has programmed me not to do that...

Anyone interested in the secondary lit on Kant may also find this interesting:

It also deals with Kant's ability/inability to deal with competing ethical claims.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/30317932.pdf

I'm about two thirds of the way through writing a more serious reply to some of the arguments raised. In the meantime, I've discovered a definitive answer to one of the questions I posed in my OP.

I wondered out loud if I was the first to make the argument I did. It turns out I'm not.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2016/10/28/gregory-salmieri/kant-vs-white-conflicts-duty#_ftn1

"Any action can be described at different levels of abstraction, such that it will be willable as a universal law under some descriptions and not under others."

Oh well. Always disappointing. But it happens a LOT in philosophy.

One thing I can't quite tell about your suggestion from what I see on Amazon: does it look like a textbook? Is it built like a textbook - I mean physically?

I worry... if it looks like a textbook and smells like a textbook, she'll feel about it like it's a textbook. And that's probably not the best way to encourage a 12 year old.

Something just occurred to me: The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy.

It's a loose interpretation of what I had in mind when I OP-ed, but not entirely off point.

I wonder if she's read it?

I'm not sure if it's a little too similar to the last book I gave her, which was the Arthur Waley translation of Monkey.

Well, thanks to you we're up to 10 now!

I'd throw in another five, but... do we dare??? :gasp:

Smiles and sunshine, tim. Only smiles and sunshine.

:smile:

I agree! :up:

Sorry it took me a while to respond. — TheHedoMinimalist

Not to worry. But now you are going to have to wait for me as I'm actually quite sleepy and about to log off. Sorry! :gasp:

I would be glad to. Perhaps in the next day or two though, as I am a little tired right now.

And perhaps you could also refrain from ad hominem attacks in the form of accusing me of wilful ignorance.

I struggle to see the point of discussing a philosophy on the basis of wilful ignorance of the details of said philosophy. — Echarmion

Oh, Lord! :roll:

Let's just agree that someone is completely missing the point. Willfully or otherwise.

Well, one truth I'm going to utter right now is that I'm not familiar with all the terminology you're using, so I was planning on doing a search on some of it. I'm not going to take a position on something I'm not at least reasonably confident I understand. Feel free to elucidate further if you wish.

Though right now another truth is that I'm kinda tired, so it's adios from me for a bit!

Hmm... I'm going to have to go think about that. I may get back to you.

I’ve been thinking some more about this. I know I wavered on my original formulation at one point, but I’ve come back to it. I want to stress that I mean exactly what I said, and only what I said: that Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative forbids literally everything.

To get some perspective on all this, I often think of a brief exchange I had some years ago with a fine arts student. This particular student had no truck with abstract definitions or theories as to what constitutes a work of art. No, he wasn’t going to have any of that.

“Art,” he stolidly pronounced, “is the creation of objects.” And that, it seemed, was that.

The reason I remember that prosy proclamation so vividly is because at the time he made it, we were both visiting the house of some mutual friends where we had both often been guests in the past. And in this house, as in virtually all houses, they had a toilet. I thought of that toilet, and without speaking the words aloud, silently asked the question:

“Did you ever make any objects in there?”

[There’s a complete tangent I’m tempted to go off on here, but... that’s for another thread, and anyone at all familiar with conceptual art will know what I’m talking about anyway. Suffice it to say, that at the very least, not all shit is art.]

My actual point here being, framing good definitions, or good laws, or good rules of any kind, is hard. Our rules often wind up including things we didn’t intend, or exclude things we did. As I’ve made abundantly clear, I don’t claim to be any kind of Kant expert. Nor do I claim for one moment that forbidding literally everything was what Kant intended to do. I only claim to have put some thought into the logical implications of what Kant actually said – in his first formulation of the categorical imperative. And to have reached the conclusion that forbidding literally everything was what Kant actually said actually does.

So let’s get to that.

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”

https://www.britannica.com/topic/categorical-imperative

Only according. Only.

That, word “only” is crucial here. It means that if there is even one maxim that an act violates, Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative has been contravened. Yes, weighing up competing maxims does seem to me, as well as to others here, to be the reasonable thing to do. Maybe Kant himself even said as much elsewhere. Until someone produces the reference for that I’m frankly skeptical, but I don’t know for a fact that he didn’t. And even if he did, so what? “Weigh up competing maxims” is most definitely not what this rule says, and we all know it.

“Act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should be a universal law.” That’s it. If you act according to even one maxim which you cannot at the same will to be a universal law, you won't have acted only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should be a universal law. You will have broken this rule. End of discussion. So if an act can be described by any maxim that you would not will to be universal, and you perform that act, you have broken this rule. Again, end of discussion.

And if anyone here can think of even one act that is not in accordance with at least one maxim that no basically normal person could ever want to be universally applied... I challenge them to tell us what it is!

Even though shopenhauer1 has told us that foisting challenges on another individual is always wrong...

Oh well. I like shopenhauer1, but honestly, I’m a meta-ethical subjectivist anyway. So I don’t think that anything is wrong.

:grin:

It's the same as saying "All truths are relative." The most obvious problem with that being that merely by the use of the universal quantifier, "All," you have explicitly stated that this is not a relative, but universal truth. Again, it's self defeating. — Theologian

It would be self-defeating if being relative and being universal are mutually exclusive. — creativesoul

I can't deny that that was an unstated premise of my argument. But I would assert that to say that truth is relative is precisely to deny its universality. At least in my experience, that is normally what it is taken to mean. See:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/

Would you accept that "no truths are universal" is a self defeating proposition?

Can you find an example of an instance in which the assertion that truth is relative means something other than that it is not universal?

But you know, if Kant really is as context insensitive as I've been saying...

Is hitting people with rules something I - or he - would will to be universal?

Thank you, schopenhauer1; on both counts!

And you know, that comic really did make me laugh out loud! :lol:

I trust you realize what a manipulative whine this is. — tim wood

Nope, I'm afraid I don't.

I recognize I may be wrong about the implication of the first formulation if the CI. And I realize it is not your responsibility to correct all my misapprehensions. But "you're wrong - now go read a 700 page book to see why" is not a particularly convincing argument that I am wrong.

And whatever else you may say of me, I am capable of making my points without resorting to personal insults.

Feel free to place me on ignore.

You've raised a few objections/questions that I think show that my attempt at a scientific definition needs to go through another round of refinement.

Would this imply that our current software is alive? Software is both complex and self-replicating. — TheHedoMinimalist

There are a few issues here. Superficially shareware seems to be a virus (depending on us, as life forms, to replicate it). So as such I would deem it alive, even though many biologists would disagree that viruses qualify as life. If computers are not themselves alive, then what we call computer "viruses" are not viruses at all, but are straightforwardly alive. Again, at least superficially. But in both cases I do have a concern.

One reason that in my first post I didn't feel it necessary to include Stephen Cook's point:

2) The replication process should not, in all circumstances, produce perfect copies and should, instead, allow for a tiny amount of random variation — Stephen Cook

...is that I figured that thermodynamics would take care of that automatically. No pattern will ever be able to self-replicate perfectly all of the time.

But now that I think about shareware and computer "viruses," I now see the need to investigate this a bit more closely. I am quite sure that in both cases, given enough generations, shareware and "viruses" would begin to evolve, thus becoming life by my current definition.

BUT, excepting those "viruses" that were intentionally designed by their programmers to evolve, and considering only code designed to be replicated perfectly, I can see that the number of generations required for meaningful evolution will in many cases exceed, even vastly exceed, the number of generations over which the code is actually copied.

So given that my definition of life is basically that it ignites evolution, and that all nodes on the evolutionary tree are alive, if we want to address the question as to what ignites evolution, we clearly have more variables to contend with than just complexity. I can see now that it was simplistic of me to focus exclusively on complexity alone.

As my previous example of computer "viruses" intentionally designed to be evolutionary also shows, we also have to look at particular complex structures that supercharge evolution. In the world of wet biology, sex is the obvious example: nodes swap complex code structures with other nodes that have at least been successful enough to reach the point of mating. I'm no computer expert, much less an expert in "viruses," but I believe evolutionary "viruses" (yes, I'm still persisting with the quotation marks!) simulate sex to some degree by copying into themselves, or into their progeny, fragments of code taken from other programs.

So to offer a slightly expanded view on what it takes to ignite evolution, we now have a certain base level of complexity as a necessary feature of life. Plus we also have the fidelity of the copying process (there's almost certainly a sweet spot here, but it may not be absolute, but rather relate to other factors like environment), the number of generations over which the tree persists, and particular complex structures, such as being coded for sex, that supercharge the process.

Finally, there are two questions you ask that I want to consider in the opposite order that you ask them.

First,

What if there was just one bacteria cell on Mars which almost replicated but got killed by an unlikely natural disaster the moment before successfully doing so? — TheHedoMinimalist

I think that in having previously admitted that all nodes on an evolutionary tree are "alive," where I'm ultimately headed is toward the idea that evolution produces certain kinds of order, and that we may recognize these ordered forms even when they do not reproduce. So we may apply the same principle to your hypothetical Martian bacteria. We could also apply the same principle to a cell of artificial life that was constructed in a laboratory but then just never transported to a nutrient-rich environment in which it could grow and ultimately reproduce.

The internal organizational structure of something is what marks it as alive. It does not have to reproduce, or even be able to reproduce in order to qualify as alive; eunuchs, worker ants, and organisms that simply die before the point of reproduction are all still alive. But nodes on an evolutionary tree are what provide our paradigmatic example of what a life form is.

If there was just one alien being on a distant plant that can live forever, would he need to reproduce to be considered alive? — TheHedoMinimalist

Well, you have already said that the being "lives" forever, which does rather imply that it is alive! :wink:

But... ignoring that (Freudian?) slip, I think what we have is that it is a "being" and that it at least persists forever. Personally, I don't think that on its own that's enough for the concept of life that I've been working towards. There are a lot of things that seem to last forever - or at least, virtually so in human terms. But we don't consider them alive.

My answer may come down to what you mean by a "being." If you mean only that it is sentient, then I think it would be a mistake to automatically equate sentience with biology. I'm not ready to rule out the idea that there may be other ways to achieve sentience.

If, however, you equate a "being" with something like us, then we're back to my previous answer re the Martian bacteria. We may indeed find that we recognize the basic structures of life in this being.