It's more that: if what materialism says is true - if we are a kind of 'rogue chemical reaction', the outcome of a 'collocation of atoms', as Bertrand Russell put it- then any idea of meaning is basically an illusion. — Wayfarer

Why? Nothing imbued me with a shirt. I'm still wearing one; it's not an illusion.

Ah so you clearly do want to talk about it, you just can't handle people pointing out where you're wrong. Figure out what it is you want and act accordingly and, try this, with some maturity. If you want to defend the point, great, but like you say this is a philosophy forum and posts like your last aren't going to cut it: that's just tantrum-throwing. If you don't feel inclined to defend the point, just have some dignity and move on peacefully. If you're just trying to pick a moronic fight, well carry on as you are I guess. I'm here to discuss the matter, including the finer details. For the record, I considered the matter closed several posts ago.

That's not an argument. You're just citing other people who believed in the power of speech. Instead maybe focus on how no one has ever been roused by a great speaker, moved to tears by a poem, stunned by a Shakespeare play, put in stitches by a great comedian, etc.

It's so interesting to see you all focusing on this out of the entirety of my argument. It's like you don't get my point whatsoever. — Christoffer

You're on an internet forum, get over it. If a little subdiscussion starts over what you think is one trivial and uninteresting detail, you don't have to entertain it, just move onto the next comment without whining.

"Real magic isn't real. Only fake magic is real." (Dennett)

When we say "Is Santa Claus real?" we're implicitly ruling out the Santa Claus that is real as a referent. We don't mean this guy:



we mean this guy:



who's a mishmash of the other guy, older pagan and mythological figures like Thor, and a hugely successful Coca Cola advertising campaign.

We confuse ourselves because when we can all describe and recognise the same thing, we meet a criterion for objective reality (consensus), but the second Santa Claus only exists as a class of symbols in media. It is second-hand evidence only.

You can be deceived into believing it's real and that first-hand evidence is evidence that he is a real object (meeting him in his grotto as an impressionable child), or you can go along with the fun knowing that Santa Claus doesn't actually exist as an object (even though there was a real Saint Nicholas, we don't mean him). Either way, this puts him in a category along with lies, deceptions and hallucinations: things we can refer to because we have the ability to encode (recall, describe, perhaps agree about) symbols that resemble signifiers but aren't.

I could make up a fictional character on the spot and ask if she is real, and we'd probably agree she is not, and yet she would have her encoded symbols, perhaps not as exhaustive as Santa's but enough to refer to her with in conversation. The only difference with Samantha Smooth, dentist by day, vigilante at night except when she's DJing, is that most people wouldn't know who I was talking about, or know of her symbols to talk about her, which is just the consensus = objective trick of fiction.

I would say that even in the cases where conflicts and wars were seemingly by other reasons, religion has a core anyway. — Christoffer

Oh sure, if you define religious war to include all wars not about religion, then trivially all wars are religious wars. Perfectly logical.

In general, even most wars where religion was heavily involved were primarily to build empires. — T Clark

Exactly right.

Why, Benkei, are you so emotionally invested in diversity in America when your own country lacks the diversity that exists in America? — Harry Hindu

America certainly does have a significant black population. It should be proud of-- woah, nearly got me!

22.5 years. Will it be a turning point in the USA? No more Rodney Kings and Breonna Taylor? Or when they happen that they won't get away with it? — Benkei

Just been watching this on the news. You can get carried away when you see one guy happen to not perform a miscarriage of justice on a particular day. I don't think it's likely that somewhere like Texas will suddenly have a change of heart, or even agree that there hasn't been a miscarriage of justice.

Studies? — ToothyMaw

You're on the internet dude, I don't have to do your research for you. It's not exactly obscure.

I'm with T-dog on this one. There are religious wars but, more often, religion is the excuse and rallying point, not the cause.

EDIT: I seem to be largely defending religion atm. I have no explanation for that.

If time is an illusion does that mean reality is a matter of psychological perspective. And in search of evidence or scientific truth is merely arbitrary — SteveMinjares

I don't really get how you arrive at the second sentence from the first. Let me put it this way: What is the basis you cite for the claim that time is an illusion? Scientific evidence, right? So if scientific evidence is effectively meaningless, the claim doesn't hold up.

What the article is telling you is not that time isn't real, but that our perception of time isn't real: that the _arrow_ of time is an illusion. Time still exists in the same way space does. The thing at fault here is precisely the thing you give primacy to.

Anyway, to the point... The arrow of time isn't a uniquely psychological construct. Even without minds, there is an arrow of time due to thermodynamics: due to the initial conditions of the universe, things tend naturally toward disorder, since there are more attainable disordered than ordered states.

When you learn something about the past (in a way you can't learn about the future), you are increasing the order of a complex system that, like everything else in the universe, is inclined toward disorder. That might seem like a faff; in fact it is vital. Imagine a universe in which things could just spontaneously order. You might have a memory today that you didn't have yesterday that is uncaused by your own past. You can imagine that "knowing" anything would be impossible if information was spontaneous and uncaused. So entropy is essential in having any kind of relationship with the world outside ourselves, indeed for life itself (since life is similarly battling against and dependent upon entropy for its existence). Far from the solipsism you suggest, our sense of time is intricately bound up with the details of the objective universe that science illuminates (as it has illuminated for you the illusory nature of that sense of time).

We can agree we don't want to suffer involuntarily, but since the suffering we wish to avoid is subject-dependent, it's merely a category of subject-dependent things.

Feeling like I just upset you, not intended dude :( I'd not argue against the harm Christianity has done in various guises, including the anti-Judaism of the Church and numerous adored (indeed canonised) theologians en route. It wasn't even really my intention to say that Christian ethics are particularly good, just that they are extremely important to the dominant ethics of much of the world. (Even the McDonaldisation of morality this entails is evil, but hardly the fault of Mr Christ or his biographers.)

If any mutual enrichment takes place, I am also, along with His Holiness, grateful, but if it does not. my gratitude will turn to something else. — FreeEmotion

Oh no. We better stop sciencing.

The 'Gentile Christianity' of Paul (re: the Christ) had completely vanguished the rival 'Jewish Christianity' of James (re: the Nazarene) by the time the Church had been established in Rome which, I think, set the table, so to speak, for sanguinary millennia of anti-Judaic persecutions and pogroms (e.g. "blood libel") ... culminating in the Shoah. — 180 Proof

I think that's a stretch. There was plenty of anti-Judaic sentiment in the Roman Empire already, and that seems triffling in comparison. Nor is anti-Judaism --> holocaust very compelling... Jews at the time were just as, more, anti-Christian.

Pauline Christianity is inherently anti-Judaic as shown by how the "Church fathers" legitimized the antiquity of "the Christ's" lineage by coopting ancient Hebrew scriptures as surpassed (read: incomplete, inferior) "revelations" – repurposed as the "Old Testament" – and appending the OT on to the NT "good news" wherein "the Jews" are depicted as "guilty of deicide" – the evergreen tree of Christendom's, anti-Judaic antisemitic fruits. — 180 Proof

That's rather circular: it's an interpretation based on the desired conclusion. The Christian Bible is rare insofar as it does acknowledge some of the primary texts of another religion. You could equally spin that as great respect. In reality, it was probably just a necessity.

Time to bust out my Space 1999 erotic fanfiction.

Say if you're arguing with a sociopath who doesn't feel that necessity, being one of the edge cases, what argument is going to convince them that they should? A utilitarian one? — Marchesk

A sociopath can completely agree with the description, agree even that to that extent they are faulty, and still choose to live antisocially (i.e. to not attempt to mimic social persons) since the _reason_ for behaving socially does not impact them personally. And why should it?

Once upon a time there would have been personal repercussions for antisocial behaviour: you were known to everyone who might be impacted by that behaviour. Now it's pretty much an advantage to be antisocial; in fact for many it's a virtue. So the answer is: an unsuccessful one :)

The nearest I have to a more optimistic answer is to look at current trends. Thanks to levelling processes like democracy and the internet, social behaviour is reasserting itself: we are mostly becoming more egalitarian, more altruistic, more socially conscious. The world is telling itself to do better and is sometimes listening, nudging itself closer to what makes us distinctly human. That doesn't help in individual problems like the one you describe, but individual problems can be dealt with by individual solutions.

What argument is going to counter the antinatilist? — Marchesk

I've never seen a rational antinatalist argument, but does there need to be a counter-argument? The origins of our moral thinking may be universal bar accidents, but it doesn't mean it's appropriate for the world we find ourselves in. In a thread I started last year, I argued that moral problems are an artefact of having moral biology evolved in one environment but being born into a completely different one. It was an oversimplification but it caught the right sense imo. If we share an understanding of what's right but have no means to realise it, we're in an existential situation. As long as the antinatalist isn't hypocritical, it's difficult to say they're wrong on moral grounds.

The concern here is that the objectivity of a biological underpinning for morality won't settle certain moral questions, because there's no moral evolutionary reason for human morality — Marchesk

It's more than a concern. It seems to me a fact. If it could, there'd be no reason to augment it with anything: it would be an objective thing only.

I'm not quite clear on this point. Consider a MZI with equal arm lengths where the emitted photon always goes to the same detector. We would still need to add the amplitudes of the paths that go to the untriggered detector in order to make the correct predictions. — Andrew M

Not at all. Counterfactual final states contribute nothing to the amplitude at the factual final state. The amplitude at a given final state is the sum over histories between the initial state and that state, nothing more. Problem is not knowing what the factual state is.

Since 5th/6th century CE ... "for at least the first millennium of Christendom", and then the rapid emergence of counter / secular discourses on ethics. — 180 Proof

Since before then til present day, they've worshipped a Semite as a deity, likewise his mother, and honoured the Semitic posse that founded that religion. I don't think that's particularly anti-Semitic. I know there was a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment at the time, derived in part from Judaism's relationship with Rome, and obviously Jews found the NT generally objectionable, but I don't see anything anti-Semitic in it, nor in how Christianity in general has arrived to the masses today. Particular theologians are notorious but this has as little impact on the modern Western ethic as moral philosophy, less probably.

Probably easier for an ordinary person than anyone vested with divine authority, judging by the behaviour of priests. But anyway the question is about philosophical perspectives of the Bible, no? The importance of the Church was merely in spreading a meme. It's not like J-dog promised us a great church on Earth, nor can he be held responsible for the progression of bastards that exploited the religion in his name.

But there is fundamental bad in Christianity as well. Hell being the obvious one.

If anything, by this list of particulars, the Christian Bible maldeveloped ethics in Western societies for at least the first millennium of Christendom. — 180 Proof

Well a lot of that was later. Anti-Semitism was really middle ages to... 20th century by my reckoning.

I agree that forgiveness was important but I don't think that it was always that simple. For example, I believe learning in history that in the Catholic church there were 'indulgences' in which people were expected to pay for their sins to be forgiven, even though tasks such as building bridges. I also believe that it is likely that the rich and powerful still oppressed the poor. I imagine that behind the scenes of the church and the rhetoric of Christian ethics there was so much oppression. In particular, the Church held onto the wealth and power. — Jack Cummins

Oh definitely, see: "however un-Christian". I don't like the Church of today either, however "liberal" its worst members think it's becoming. The fairly recent protectionism and enabling of paedophile priests lays to rest any viable claim to moral authority, or even any moral praiseworthiness. Nonetheless, however it did it, for whatever selfish reasons, it did spread a relatively positive moral philosophy: a virtue ethics promoting self-judgement and social values. I'm not sure that forgives the Church anything; I was focusing more on the importance of it rather than whether it should have happened.

But I think that the important links of this were the theologians and the Church, because these were leading authorities. — Jack Cummins

It was the Church who collated and edited it, and who spread... whatever bits of it they wanted known, however modified. Very successfully. The dominant modern Western ethic is very much founded indebted to the New Testament, in part because it was a revolution within an expansive power, in part because it's been forcefully spread, however un-Christian that was, to most of the planet. That's not to say there's anything original about it, which I think was 180's point maybe.

As such, its ethical character is unavoidable in assessing the Bible, specifically the New Testament, from a philosophical perspective. I think perhaps the most potent feature is the ethics-focussed change in the relationship between people and God: a creator that loves its creation, wants its creation to succeed, forgives it its failures if forgiveness is sought. Theoretically this is a shove from a new metaphysics in the direction of a new ethics, but really it's bending metaphysics to ethical ends: the creator is a father figure, a judgemental but forgiving loved one you'd not want to disappoint, and would want to be forgiven by if you did. But also it moves the role of the judge from God to people: the onus on forgiveness is a call to validate yourself before the final judgement, and most of judgements prioritise social behaviour over divine box-ticking.

Suppression of speech on the basis of protecting minorities would count as suppression serving a greater good - at least for those in favor of it. — ToothyMaw

Precisely: it's contingent.

Sorry if that's a little pedantic. I think we mostly agree. — ToothyMaw

That's fine,I was also being pedantic :)

I think hate speech should be allowed, along with things like Holocaust denial. — ToothyMaw

What about other acts of harm that involve speech? Lying, slander, etc. There's a Venn intersection between acts of speech and acts of harm, and I see nothing about speech that exempts it.

Banning it just adds to its draw and validates purveyors of hate — ToothyMaw

I don't really buy that leaving a website running that promotes hate of oppressed minorities is less harmful than removing it. I've heard this argument many times, but experiment, measurement, can and has put it to the test. Social media is proof positive that platforming vile crap just makes more suckers that believe it.

I personally have little regard for people's feelings - and maybe that is a fault - but I also have little in terms of feelings to be hurt. So, overall, hurt feelings is a pretty crappy reason for censorship, imo. — ToothyMaw

Substitute for "ass kicked", "rights removed", "opportunities limited" or all the other aims of hate speech.

Who said "most of the world's morality"? In the spirit of the OP, I'm referring to
the development of philosophy in Western society
— Jack Cummins
which includes ethics. — 180 Proof

Or the West's.

You identified the New Testament as providing a revolutionary new ethic. In order for it to have been revolutionary, it would have had to overthrow the prevailing ethic of the time, whatever that might be. The OT ethic was at least one of those ethics pre-existing the NT ethic, so I asked what distinguished the NT ethic from the OT one that it would have had to replace following this revolution in ethics. — Hanover

It doesn't follow that the OT encoded the dominant ethic that Christianity overturned. This just makes absolutely no sense.

You indicated that the New Testament was a good first stab at an ethical theory, and I pointed out that it couldn't have been the first stab if it was newer than a prior ethical theory. — Hanover

an. Indefinite article. I think you're reading this as "any" or "all"? Otherwise again this makes no sense to me.

NT aka "Platonism for the masses" – really? :chin:

Not the Torah (re: Hillel the Elder's "golden rule")?

Not the Nicomachean Ethics?

Not Epicurus-Lucretius? Not Seneca & Epictetus? — 180 Proof

Happy to hear the counter-argument in which Nicomachean Ethics became the foundation of most of the world's morality. Philosophers are a very thin end of a very big slice.

This definition might seem a little presumptuous; suppression of speech occurs even not in the context of furthering a good — ToothyMaw

Well that's fine. Suppression is censorship when it serves the common good. But I'd also dispute the "of the common good" since that could cast mere censorship as broader suppression when in the defense of minorities, for instance.

I would argue that any speech, no matter how odious, should be permitted if it is both meaningful and not a clear and direct incitement to violence. — ToothyMaw

Much hate speech is not clear and direct incitement: it is rabble-rousing against a particular person or subset of people. Another poster here recently pointed me in the direction of an anti-trans website dedicated to giving the impression that trans = criminal, and not caring too much for facts in its efforts. it's not outright calling for violence against the trans community, but it's certainly doing its utmost to generate that sort of hatred.

There are also other ways of hurting people than physical violence. I don't think protecting speech that would encourage, say, distrust in the Irish work ethic is to be encouraged.

To the lefties in favor of suppression of speech: what if it gets turned around on you? — ToothyMaw

It does, of course. I've been censored often. And to not be hypocritical, one has to check one's own behaviour against that one claims to endorse or censure. But that's just not being a douchebag. Someone like Trump, who persecutes and vilifies anyone who disagrees with him while going out of his way to harm others with his free speech, is a hypocrite and a douchebag.

Reciprocity is key. What you should and shouldn't say isn't an objective set of rules, it's consensual politics: I don't want my feelings hurt and I don't want to hurt yours. And it mostly works. The problem is the people who don't want their feelings hurt but want to hurt your feelings, and have an inconstant relationship with censorship as a result.

Aesthetics is another area of interest, both the aesthetics of the book, and that which it has inspired.

What is that ethic and how was it revolutionary when compared against the OT ethic that predated it? — Hanover

Why would an OT ethic be the thing it replaced?

How has its ethic better stood the test of time in comparison to other ethical theories? — Hanover

By having more correlates in modern ethics than others.

If the New Testament was a first stab, why is it called "new" — Hanover

You know it's almost 2000 years old, right?

I employed the best science I could muster. — TheMadFool

Physicalism is about the observable universe. This includes the states of massive and non-massive bodies, but also about the changes of those states. There is no requirement that when the state of the brain changes from A to B, the brain must change mass or volume, or have done work on something.

A fundamental part of the physics that physicalism endorses is entropy. Thermodynamics states that if a system such as the brain changes to a more ordered state, there must be an over-compensating increase of disorder in the environment. When you think of Aphrodite, assuming you were thinking of nothing else, your brain releases heat. Of course, your brain is *always* thinking about something, so it's always releasing heat: you cannot isolate a single thought and say "The brain changed from state A to state B and released energy C". But you can observe the physics of thinking generally.

I am asking what people think about the Bible, in relation to philosophy, and, certainly, it played a crucial role in the development of philosophy in Western society. — Jack Cummins

The most important overlap as I see it is in ethics. To an extent, the New Testament is a foundational moral theory, completely revolutionary, that has mostly stood the test of time. It's sort of the Newtonian mechanics of morality: yes, we've moved on (or at least the secular world has), but what a first stab!

In all other respects, it's weak to middling. It is a historical document (which tells us things) but not a history text. We can learn things about the time it was written, but ideally you'd cross-reference it with contemporaneous texts from that region, and there aren't a lot of them. Its actually historic accounts range from the dubious to the outright nonsensical. The history _of_ the Bible is probably more telling than the actual Bible.

Metaphysically, it's like all metaphysics: if you believe it, it's right for you; if not, it's completely unjustifiable.

Accordingly, it may be said that (1) the source of the Bible is a higher intelligence (that may be human or divine), (2) its purpose is to direct us to a higher perspective, knowledge and experience of life, and (3) that it is addressed to those who have the capacity to understand its message and the will to put it into practice. — Apollodorus

Well, anything _may_ be said, but that doesn't make it true. What we can say for sure is 1) that it was written, editted and collated by humans, whatever the nature of their inspiration, 2) it was meant to create a canon of texts for a religion that already existed in divers forms (essentially criteria for saying "You are wrong", 3) that its actual content is largely irrelevant, since those who created it have historically not been bound to it, nor have been keen on others reading it.

However, as there are no long term effects known, ten years later it turns out that the Mrna technology resulted in a genetic mutation which results in a pronounced decline in fertility, not in us that were vaccinated, but in our children. The already decreasing birthrate decreases to the point that without some form of drastic technological intervention the species will be functionally extinct within 100 years. — Book273

True, we can't know now what we'll only discover in future. On the other hand, there are effectively infinite unseen outcomes of anything. By your own reasoning, you should probably kill yourself in case you case a bus crash in five years, killing dozens. But what if that doesn't happen and you're actually key to a peaceful interplanetary federation and the continued existence of the human race.

This is why ab rectum what-ifs are not something you can act on: for every what-if that leads you one way, there's another what-if that leads you in the opposite direction. A lot of anti-vax bullshit relies precisely on selective counterfactual futures: regard the what-ifs that support my position; disregard the ones that don't.

What's more effective than wild guesses is the facts we have, short of omniscience as they may be, and right now the facts tell us that your probability of infecting yourself and others -- of realistically killing people -- is a lot lower if you get vaccinated. Picking and choosing invented scenarios to forgive yourself for the people you have a very real chance of killing is not compelling.

That is, what we can say about nature is that you will find, with some well-defined probability, either a dead cat or a live cat in the box when you open it. — Andrew M

Yes, quite. Although there's a danger here of giving the sense that QM is a bottom-up theory of ignorance: it isn't. The version of QM that encodes such ignorance (density matrix theories) is mathematically distinct from QM, and will yield different experimental predictions.

Quantum superposition is experimentally verifiable, so the wavefunction captures something ontological. On the other hand, we cannot say anything about a system's state until we measure it, which is problematic because of the huge initial-state dependence of the mechanics. With good old-fashioned non-relativistic unidirectional time, that's a problem: we must capture every possibility in the wavefunction, not just to ensure that a possible outcome is represented, but to capture all possible interference effects that manifest over many measurements.

In principle, relativistic quantum mechanics does away with this. Instead of capturing all possible paths from a given initial state, we capture all possible paths between a given initial state and a given final state. There is no need to represent an outcome that will not happen, nor to represent interference between trajectories toward outcomes that are orthogonal.

the shut-up-and-calculate philosophy or the Copenhagen interpretation (which I think of as shut-up-and-calculate minus the shutting-up part) — Get real - Scott Aaronson, Nature Physics, June 2012

Haha that's excellent!

For the record, I will be reporting that website to the UK police. — Kenosha Kid

This has been done, for the following reasons.

The website, far from the credible source Andrew seems to think it is, is the product of some pretty fucked-up people scouring the media (tabloid press, social media) for claims of trans women (very loosely defined) committing crimes. The website shows the full name (including dead name if applicable) and photographs (as male and female where available), along with tags the website authors believe we should label these people with.

The website authors claim it exists to protect cis women from trans women, however most of the crimes appear to be unrelated to crimes against women and girls, ranging from driving offenses and minor drug offenses to violent offenses against men, making their inclusion irrelevant.

Many of the supposed trans offenders who were imprisoned transitioned in prison, after they committed their crimes as cis men, making their inclusion irrelevant.

The website includes persons never charged, and persons charged and acquitted; in fact, these significantly outnumber the meagre number of individuals they confirmed as charged (although they don't seem very completist about this), making their inclusion irrelevant.

The website claims to be targeting trans women, but casts the net very wide in terms of what it may call trans, including transvestites and other cross-dressers, their inclusion irrelevant.

Sources the website use include rabid paedo-hunter--type Facebook groups and the worst and most hyperbolic of the UK tabloid gutter press. The MO of the site is very simple: to by any means maximise the number of crimes, whether they be true, false, alleged, or acquitted, it can try to lay at feet of a small minority group of people.

This is a clear case of publishing open hostility toward the transgender community, which is a hate crime in UK law.

As for you @Andrew4Handel, I'd say more reputable citations in future would be good, but it's not like it was tricky to gauge. I assume you knew what you were doing -- it generally seems to be the case that prejudiced, phobic people don't really care what people think of their evidence, and you'll likely be smirking yourself to sleep tonight. I haven't engaged with your responses since because on the basis of that I sense you're an irrational, hateful individual. And, to be honest, I'm still reeling from that website. God knows where else you go when you're working yourself up into a frenzy, but I'd rather not go there.

I wanted insight and I guess I got it, but there's no answer to my question to be had from you. I suppose it's an argument of sorts, but it's an argument driven by barefaced bullshit and hate, not quite what I was after. All I've really learned is how mentally disturbed transphobes can be.

For the record, I will be reporting that website to the UK police.

I'd agree with you. How does this warrant intolerance to the vast majority of trans women who aren't advantaged in this way, or those that are who wouldn't do it?

There's something self-similar in transphobic arguments: in lieu of an argument against people living their lives in a way that makes sense to them, it's always: "Well this person committed a crime while trans," and "That person got an unfair advantage while trans." So what? What does that have to do with whether the majority of trans people should be allowed to live their lives?

In cosmology, as the term super-natural would imply, something beyond the laws of nature and pure reason has caused something rather than nothing. These concepts further imply there must be something, logically, that goes beyond the laws of nature — 3017amen

Wut. Lemme get this straight... What you're saying is that because we define "supernatural" to be beyond nature and reason, there must logically be something beyond nature and reason?

The rate of female sex criminals has risen sharply and this is because sex offenders who are male identify as women and the courts legally have to refer to them as such. — Andrew4Handel

Is this really true? I mean, I can believe that some chancers have tried it, but nothing that would account for a sharp rise in nominal female criminals. What's your source for this.

Either way, that's not something you can lay on a trans woman.

What are you classifying as transphobic comments? — Andrew4Handel

Deleted

If you look at this website of crimes committed by trans identified people in the UK it is all men.

https://transcrimeuk.com/ — Andrew4Handel

Holy fuck, I totally misread this. What kind of psycho starts a website listing crimes by a particular demographic?

saying atheists convert after consideration — Athena

Ah, not quite what I said. I am aware of some edge cases of atheists concluding that there must be a creator. That is not to say that this is the main way atheists convert, just that it's possible. Nor am I saying their reasons were in any way sound :)

A world where the speed of light randomly changes is less simple than a world where it is constant (all other laws and initial conditions being equal). — litewave

I agree.