Well, is intelligence or consciousness more important than legs or arms? — Angelo Cannata

Well I would argue that the scope of what it is to be intelligent is vastly larger than “what it is to have arms and legs” - as intelligence in the loosest sense is the “workability” or “logic” and pragmatism of a system - being organised, consistent and with the capacity to enable new and ever more diverse phenomena - more complex than those it is based on. Evolution or trial and error .. i would say could be thought of as a logical/ reasonable and intelligent means by which to find a path towards improvement. Stephen Hawkins said “intelligence is the ability to adapt”.

I don’t think intelligence is mutually exclusive to Brains Simply that brains are an exemplary demo of intelligence at work. However arms and legs are more restricted in that they only function for a specific body type in a specific environment. Intelligence should be applicable across the board

damn that’s a conundrum then haha. What are we left with? Just the self and our internal state directly accesible only to us as individuals?

Though I subscribe to panpsychism, I do not think intelligence requires self consciousness. — Jackson

I’m inclined to agree. Having sense (sentience) of something can be very primitive/ basic and doesn’t mean it’s intelligent. AI is intelligent because it’s intelligence is contextual. It’s highly efficient at the tasks it’s programmed to do. But it’s not conscious.
And while intelligence is very broad and has multiple facets, consciousness must have a sense of being/ self- reference which intelligent mechanistic processes don’t require.

The problem goes back at least to Leibniz. Science can be practical, but cannot be true because it cannot be false — Jackson

Aha now I understand what you’re getting at. Apologies for the misinterpretation.

I am saying that physicalism is not science. — Jackson

Alright. But if that’s the case what is the relevance of your previous statement:

If a scientist or philosopher says physicalism is true, we expect proofs — Jackson

Surely if physicalism and science are unrelated then why do we need a scientists proof for physicalism

I understand however science has difficulty proving all things. Hence why I asked. Proof can be sought not only scientifically but mathematically, philosophical etc.

That’s because scientific method is based on 1. Repeatability (which fails for exceedingly rare substances, events that may only occur once or twice over large spans of time)
2. Observability - “our dissections are only as good as our sharpest knives.” That is to say our instruments for measurement are physically limited and not all things are within our current reach of measurement.
3. Predictive value - which fails in the realm of highly unstable or extremely rapid physical states - like quantum fluctuations, the speed of light, black holes, the Big Bang etc.

Scientific method like all methods has limitations in offering Proofs.

If the universe had intention to create humans it sure took a long time. — Jackson

Very true. But perhaps time to a human and time to the universe are very different. We know its rate objectively depends on distance, gravity, relativity etc and also “human time” is somewhat arbitrary : assigned to relatively quick cycles that we can observe. But for something that exists as long as the universe could - perhaps life and humanity arose in reasonable haste. Alas we most likely cannot appreciate that in its entirety I suppose considering we are only here for an average of 70-80 years or so.

There is no way to prove it false or true. — Jackson

Interesting, could you elaborate a bit more? Also out of curiosity by what criteria is something “proven” to you or in the sense that you’re using it here?
Is it proven if it’s consistently the same throughout time - ie repeatability? If it stands to reason/ logic, or if you have first hand experience/ have observed it? Or other possible proofs?

You then proceed to make claims that presuppose that people exist prior to procreative acts being performed and desire to be brought here. That is not something one is entitled to believe. — Bartricks

I made no such claims in any format different to how you did. We are both speaking on the behalf of those born/ to be born and whether it’s morally correct or not.

I also don’t see how ignorance is unjust. There’s nothing intrinsically unjust about being ignorant as long as someone knowledgeable (the parents) are providing for the needs of the ignorant. They are ignorant to both sadnesses and joys of the world so it’s ultimately neutral to be born ignorant.

Furthermore being ignorant allows for learning and education and trial and error. It allows for growing up which is a unique experience and part of life.
What would you suggest - that we are all immortal and omniscient?

Being omniscience the opposite of ignorant, doesn’t just stop the ability to be unjust/ immoral as choice is always an option for the conscious. So it’s a moot point

To procreate is to create an innocent person. They haven't done anything yet. So they're innocent.

An innocent person deserves to come to no harm. Thus any harm - any harm whatever - that this person comes to, is undeserved. — Bartricks

They are also born ignorant. Ignorant of the concepts of “moral”, “justice”, “choice/ free will”, “harm/ suffering” and the diversity of “joys/ pleasantries” that life will serve them. The only harm or joy they experience as an infant is basic at best and instinctual - satiety, warmth, sleep, quiet and comfort vs. Hunger, thirst, coldness and startling sensations.

To not permit them to be born and grow up you deny not only the capacity to know greater and more complex joys and wonders, you prevent them from autonomy - allowing themselves to be educated to a point in which they can be self determined, self fulfilled, self directed.

You deny them the opportunity to fight suffering, to offer goodness into the world and bring joy and comfort to those around them/ their loved ones whether or not they suffer unjustly in the process of maturing.

Furthermore, one must experience pain, suffering, illness to know what it means to suffer and therefore the importance of being a good person, of being compassionate, of being empathetic and therefore gaining the wisdom to ameliorate it in others.

One is not just a passive object subjected to suffering and joy. We are active - we create both for ourselves and for others. And therein lies the free will to do either.

To live is to survive. It’s competitive, it takes effort and control and order and comes with an inherent angst - the prospect of failure and death, of decay, of the end, that every child comes to know at a certain age.
Entropy is against living systems.

I don’t believe that suffering coming to the innocent is a reasonable argument for anti-Natalism because it should be the victim of said harm that decides whether it is something they can prevail over and feel proud of overcoming. And they can’t do that if they are not granted the permission to live and decide for themselves.

Instructions/algorithms, simultaneous/sequential, creating the stuff and the laws they follow (faithfully). — Agent Smith

How does an instruction instruct its own composition? I find it hard to understand how an algorithm or code or whatever used to determine the structure and components of the universe comes about simultaneously with that which it’s coding

it is impossible to refer to anything objectively, to anything itself, because when we say "anything itself" we are already applying our interpretation of what we are referring to. — Angelo Cannata

Would this mean we cannot know any truths about anything? Only our “personal/ subjective” truth about them because we cannot observe or consider anything objectively?

I don’t know how I feel about that haha. What would be the point in any pursuit of knowledge, insight and wisdom because it can never be objective true.
Second issue I have is when you factor in pragmatism. If what we “think we know” about electricity (for example) allows us to manipulate it and get it to do useful work for us as a society one would reasonably consider we have concrete objective understanding of the property/ phenomena. Because we know how to use it and can predict what other utilities it can be practical for and then execute those also.

If it’s impossible to refer to anything objectively there would be gross inconsistency in pragmatism

Seconded. It's meaningless to discuss "karma" without reference to a particular doctrine of karma (there are several of them). — baker

I gave three of interest. Eternalism. Nihilism or absurdism. Have a read over the post again and see what you think :)

we pretend that the universe is “set up” or obeys according to the schemes we built. — Angelo Cannata

Also I’m not saying chicken before egg here. I don’t believe the universe “obeys” anything we apply to it rather that our paradigms and algorithms (in physics and chemistry) are descriptive “best” explanations for what we observe. I’m in agreement with you on that.

However it doesn’t address much of what I asked. And whether we apply science to the universe or don’t it still does universe things in a way which is either fixed by some constant property throughout time or it’s all chaos and nothing is constant. I’m asking what others believe is the case in that respect

The universe is not “set up” in any way — Angelo Cannata

I’m using the term loosely and figuratively so as not to detract too much from the main argument with defining specific words. Because we could be here all day defining exactly what each term used means and then the flow of the discussion never precipitates.

You may use whatever synonym or appropriate replacement for “set-up” as you please. “Established”, “came to fruition”, “exists”, “acts in a certain predictable manner” etc etc. But as you’ll see from the thread the discussion is about whether the properties of the universe are predetermined from the beginning or if they emerged randomly and symbiotically like an evolution. “Set-up” I’m pretty sure falls somewhere in that spectrum.

Another problem would be, yeah, why do anything? Not sure if you imply we wouldn't hunger or thirst period or if hungry or thirsty we'd still feel that way until we eat or drink? That's a big factor in how society would change. — Outlander

I agree... if you can still die from hunger and thirst or even suffer endless starvation without dying from it (probably worse) then there is still a fear of death or suffering.

Tbh immortality or mortality I think there’s no getting around the fact that a portion of either timespan will be spent suffering. So the question of desire for immortality is no longer positive but neutral. You will have more time for more good stuff and more sh!t stuff.

"If you're having a good time, why would you want it to end?" — Outlander

The issue here is that... the human body and mind is exceptionally good at adapting a new base level, a new norm.

Consider two people: person one has only ever been offered the most basic mundane and bland meals for their entire life up until this point.
Person two has had a top Michelin star group of chefs cook all meals at their mansion since they were born.

Now let’s bring them to a fancy dinner. The first is blown away by how good it is and is quite literally living their best life, the other recalls how their family chefs made the same meal to a better standard a month ago.
If you wine and dine the impoverished person (person 1) for long enough... the difference in pleasure between them and person two gets smaller. Until person one is just like person two - privileged and unaware of it/ with very high expectations.

To loop back around to the immortality - an “unrealistically fortunate” life is just that. Unrealistic. Sustained happiness is impossible because happiness without its contrasting or opposing feeling loses all meaning. Even novelty gets boring - people tire of constantly being exposed to new and novel experiences - thats why avid travelling is exhausting, sometimes they want to sit around and do nothing or something that’s mundane and familiar.

, otherwise it is like a treasure that we reduce to vague romantic words full of charm, but empty of any useful and serious substance. — Angelo Cannata

I’m not sure if you can apply scientific objectivity or harsh rigorous and skeptical criticisms to all domains of human awareness. I often feel a scientific approach oversteps itself in some areas it doesn’t strictly belong. That’s not to say I don’t find it one of the mightiest tools we have in understanding the physical world but such that consciousness is not a physical thing as far as I know but a subjective state, it doesn’t really seem relevant here.

For example, It wouldn’t make sense to empirically dissect and analyse the components of a poem or say, apply some science to it. Poemology.

It is art. Art and science may overlap but they cannot ever be the same thing. The very act of analysing a poem, or art removes immediately the intuitive sense and pleasure one may get from it. It warps the general perception, the meaning, the feeling. And yet - poetry and art are a product of the mind - which according to the scientifically inclined can be reduced entirely to objectively measurable processes and hard research.

The point I’m getting to is that I believe conscious states of mind like the god-like oneness/ ego death I outlined above may be more akin to the romantic art, poetry etc than to hard neuroscience. Consider here that the hard problem of consciousness still stands to this day unresolved.

I am willing to concede that perhaps it can be reduced to hard objective facts and may indeed be done in the future. The hard problem finally resolved.

But until that certainty is established I dally with the alternative more vague mysterious and romantic approach. Which for the record I don’t think is empty and without serious substance. It’s merely a different but equallly important approach to the kind as sciences one.

Neuroscience, elevates the brain, basically a piece of meat, beyond its true capacity. — ArielAssante

I thought the whole point of neuroscience is to elucidate the true capacity of said “piece of meat”?

If you've got to deify a physical entity, there's none greater than that other "g": Gravity. — 180 Proof

Okay I’m listening haha. Can you explain more about why you see gravity as a superior candidate?

However, the old German is right, pure light is pure nothingness because it does not bear any contrast within itself. — Tobias

Yes this was sort of along my line of thinking also. Lights properties are impressive and seem almost otherworldly yet it is present everywhere- in plain sight so to speak hehe

Gods are non-physical eternal — Hillary

Well I was pouring out how light is also non-physical (massless) and eternal (cannot be created or destroyed)

could we use light as a metaphor maybe? — Hillary

Yeah why not. There are a few parallels. Perhaps they couldn’t be the same thing but maybe some phenomena have more god-like properties than others. I would say the properties of light are so strikingly bizarre that some of these parts of physics like the idea of indestructibility, timelessness, etc are worthy of awe. They seem so strange and impossible yet they are. And mathematically proven too.

If god is anything material - and if god is anything like his cosmos - god is the perfect sacred commingling of darkness and light. In the bizarre mythology of William Blake - perhaps the solitary mystic genius of 18th and 19th Century England - the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. — ZzzoneiroCosm

True is guess it would be a sort of yin yang, positive negative, light dark thing. You can’t really have one without the other and if “god” is all things it must be both

Why does it need to be caused? — Jackson

Similarly, why does it not need to be caused? Is there not equal reason to argue either viewpoint logically?

Is it that the set of all causes cannot include itself ? - just as a Venn diagram of all Venn diagrams doesn’t contain itself and therefore cannot be a set of all Venn diagrams.

The universe can exist without being caused — Jackson

Can you elaborate on how?

Theological arguments assume existence must have a cause. — Jackson

Can something ever be self-causing? Is a cycle not a circuit whereby outcome is the same as the original input?

That than which nothing greater can be conceived.

But also, the falacious argument that existing is better than not existing, there fore God exists. — Jackson

Interesting but how is it fallacious ? non existence cannot decide whether it’s greater to exist or not by virtue of not existing. One must exist first to decide whether to continue existing of bring about its own demise. Non existence as a concept can only be appreciated by that which is not in a state of non existence.

So in this sense existence trumps non existence due to the ability to reason, to choose, to ponder, to have a certain sense of free will be it an illusion or actual true free will. 0-1 points to existence over not existing

what would happen if two individuals held mutually exclusive beliefs about the very same events? — creativesoul

The article explained that belief would be in this situation the mean of all beliefs - ie every sentient believer has a proportional influence on the outcome. So if there were only two people and they believed contradictory things about the same event they would probs cancel out I guess. However there are billions of “believers” in this hypothetical situation so that is unlikely to occur. It would be some amalgamation of all inputs

Impossible — creativesoul

That’s why I said “suppose”. It’s a hypothetical situation leading to hypothetical conclusions. Replying “impossible” to a “what if” question has about as much value and insight as not writing anything at all

Philosophy is about learning, not proving one is right. — Jackson

Absolutely agree. I refer to Aristotle for this one: “it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it”.

But your other comments are welcome and worth discussing. — Jackson

I like your approachability and curiosity. I sometimes think the philosophers here are most jaded and set in their beliefs/ not willing to entertain much outside their own line of thinking

However, Oedipus was himself the cause of the problem. — Jackson

True he was a bit more involved in the outcome. However some food for thought on the matter, it’s often said that the only difference between the “trouble maker/ terrorist” and the “freedom fighter/ righteous rebel” is who holds the pen when all is said and done - “history is written by the victors”.
Depends on which side you ask. To the villain - the good are the enemy.

What is information — Pantagruel

Information = change.
A by itself is nothing but A in relation to B? Now that’s information. Because they are either qualitatively or quantitatively different from each other in some form or another. Information is the property of contrast, for if something had no matter, no spatial dimension, no mass, was completely uniform in every way with no characteristic dividing it into any other category, it would have no means by which to interact - nothing that can be relative to itself.

“It takes two to tango”

Oedipus was the king and therefore obligated to seek justice. But no matter what he did or did not do fate determined the outcome. — Jackson

To tie this back to the OP, could it be said that many historical figures were subject to this “Oedipus Rex syndrome” in that their goal or personal moral obligation to upturn the status quo or greatly shift social beliefs inadvertently placed them in the gravest of dangers? It seems no matter what they did their mere being and what they stood for was symbolic of such a great threat to the current powers that they had to be terminated.

Mahatma Gandhi, Lincoln, JFK, Martin Luther king, Joan of arc, Jesus Christ etc - all martyrs.

It seems to, in some sense, guarantee success, oui? :chin: — Agent Smith

Yes it has the potential to guarantee the outcome you were looking for, the major component being to either a). establish a set of circumstances in which there is no other logical choice but to react/ behave a certain defined way or b). A circumstance in which it doesn’t matter how you act - that all possible options are anticipated and lead back to the same outcome ie. a false sense of free will within a circular system.

Slaves^^ are individuals (by force or with consent) treated – used – by others as mere means-to-ends (pace Kant). — 180 Proof

Interesting and what say you of the difference between those that are slaves and have their accommodation and food provided for them so that they may be forced to work for a master and those who are paid just enough (minimum wage) so that they may struggle to pay for accommodation and food and get stuck in a vicious unyielding cycle of depending on said job that keeps them in a financially precarious position where they’re unable to risk changing lifestyle/ cannot afford the time to do anything to better their situation. As is the case in many dead end jobs in the world

Oedipus Rex? — Agent Smith

Yeah there are some interesting corollaries in parallel between this situation outlined above and Oedipus Rex. In that a). Both feature self fulfilling prophecies b). It deals with the fate verses free will interplay and c). In an effort of the characters involved to avoid harm, they inadvertently place the main person in harms way.

But the difference being them is that in the scenario described above the man has preemptively anticipated/ ie in foresight made his decisions knowing the implications whilst his family did not while Oedipus Rex only elicited the true nature of his situation and its consequences in the end whilst his family and the oracles between them knew the truth. It’s a bit of a role reversal.

Thus above is a man willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good whilst Oedipus Rex is a man who inevitably sacrificed his perfectly good life in pursuit of the greater good.

Trading my own life is not possible. I can't exchange my life for anything. Being dead puts me beyond the possibility of taking anything in exchange. — Cuthbert

Well the suicidal would beg to differ they would say they are trading their life for an end to suffering, for mercy or the peace of oblivion

But life itself is not tradable — Cuthbert

I’m not sure if I agree that life is not tradable. Allow me to elaborate in a few different trains do thought:
1). By donating one of a pair for f vital organs for example a kidney to my brother - I have in essence exchanged mortality with him in that my mortality increases as I only have one kidney and no backup if shit hits the fan. But his life is extended by having one functioning kidney as opposed to two non functioning ones (certain death)

2). The subject of Natural selection - competition over the elements that sustain life (water, shelter, food - all physical objects - which are subject to trade, exchange and theft etc means that the ability to live fundamentally depends on the balance between abundance and scarcity. My chance to continue surviving in that case can be exchanged indirectly in the form of say a well of potable water which could be stolen from me by someone equally in need.

3). The ability to purchase an assassin or militia, the ability to encourage or carry out genocide means that money, power influence and politics can indeed end or sustain lives. Life can be traded through our actions. For example I could in theory exchange the lives of all the citizens of a city for total mass destruction through the advent of nuclear weaponry if I was enough of a headcase to do such a thing.

So I think there are several ways in which life, death and material objects can be traded in each others place through action

I agree wholly with that extract