Given that the evolutionary remnant of dinosaurs are birds, and some birds (corvids, parrots) are extremely intelligent (about as capable of solving puzzles as the higher mammals), I think it's quite likely that given about the same amount of time, an intelligent species might have evolved from the dinosaurs.

The worry is in the area of the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, and the possibility of a "Great Filter" at any one of numerous key stages of evolution. As Robert Burns said, "there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip," and there are many possible barriers and "filters" of various sorts (natural disasters, epidemics, etc., with bad timing in relation to population spreads, fits of genocidal rage) that could potentially nip the progress of an intelligent species in the bud.

It seems like we've been exceptionally lucky in this sense, and keep slipping through by the skin of our teeth; perhaps there's a threshold or tipping point in the development of consciousness and rationality, whereby the more a species passes its "filters" by luck, the more it develops a canny sense of avoiding "filters," while at the same time getting more and more knowledge that enables it to spot "filters" coming and avoid them in a more conscious, rational way.

On the other hand, I'm inclined to suspect that the truth is probably a bit boring and annoying: I suspect the "filters" are quite powerful, such that perhaps only a handful of species ever reach sentience and scientific awareness per galaxy, and given the vast distances and times involved, they're hardly likely to ever come into contact with each other.

The rather obvious "filter" in our future that we may or may not pass, is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a species most members of which are still fairly stupid and impulsive (and I would include myself in that categorization in terms of the big picture). Technological development seems to be outpacing moral development and the development of wisdom. Not a good mix.

The real problem with this type of Great Filter scenario (WMD holocaust) is that while there would probably be enough survivors to keep the species going at some basic level after such a global disaster, all the fossil fuels that are readily available from a situation of low tech (coal, oil, etc., close to the surface, get-at-able with relatively primitive tools) have already been used up, so there would be no way of rebooting civilization through another industrial revolution.

That would make the situation even gloomier: perhaps there are numerous species permanently stuck at a sort of mediaeval level of technical development (like in Game of Thrones), with maybe only one or two per dozen galaxies (or a proportion of that order) having passed smoothly and consistently through all the "filters," reaching a level of development way beyond our own.

On yet another hand, we may in fact turn out to be the "Elder Race" in our own galaxy, and we may go on to discover and "uplift" many others in our locale and make new friends. I rather like that scenario, so I'm going to make-believe it's correct :)

Strange how free will suddenly can become irrelevant, huh? — Heiko

Free choices are influenced by conditions, including political conditions (a free choice takes into account as many factors and conditions as possible, and then makes a decision based on that information). Market conditions incline, but do not necessitate. For example, one given employer might find the kid with his baseball cap on backwards pretty useless compared to the more skilled, experienced worker that he could employ, but he might like the kid and think he has promise and has other good qualities like loyalty and good timekeeping, and notice that he's been at least trying to conscientiously learn the trade, so for his particular case, he might be willing to make the trade-off. There's a myriad of possible responses, as I said. The higher unemployment rate that's caused by minimum wage laws is the aggregate result of all those many varied individual decisions, or one might say a mean around which all those varied decisions tend to cluster. (Just like prices.)

This sound like you had an idea what was worth how much. — Heiko

No, it's just a general observation explaining the economic logic of the situation and making a prediction, based on economic theory, which has been borne out by the facts again and again and again. But people look at the visible beneficial result of minimum wage laws (a few people employed at a higher rate) and proceed to pat themselves on the back while remaining blissfully unaware of the damage that's not seen and is not obvious, and only shows up after policy's been implemented for a while (higher unemployment) - until it shows up in statistics, whereupon of course they blame capitalism ;)

To act too extremely, even when one is positive of their rightness is counter-productive to their aims. — All sight

Just wanted to add: the fundamental problem with the Left at the moment is that having had cultural hegemony for so long, they've forgotten the basic principle of civil discourse: the capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism, the capacity to reflect on the possibility that for all one's certainty and moral conviction about one's analysis of the situation, one may yet be wrong, and the other fellow right.

When one forgets that, one starts to pre-judge everything that comes out of one's interlocutor's mouth, one ceases to listen, one ceases to learn. The Right has certainly been guilty of that in that past, in times when it was ascendant; now it's very much the Left's turn at making this fundamental error.

And that's why the Left is becoming a laughing stock. It's a kind of intellectual slapstick, the intellectual and moral equivalent of stepping on a rake.

And I meant there cannot ever be another cause of unemployment but the two mentioned. — Heiko

This is silly semantic quibbling. It's legitimate in ordinary language, to call a government policy the cause of a statistical trend, even though everyone knows perfectly well that the efficient/necessary causes involved are the millions of individual decisions that go to make up the trend. Newspaper/media articles and scientific papers do it all the time.

How would you define what the labour is worth? — Heiko

I don't have to define it, the employers do. They are the ones who have to weigh up the costs and benefits to them, of employing such people.

A cure for pessimism? What would be the point? — Vinson

Um, if it's implicated in depression?

Lovely stuff.

This argument is reminiscent of the Ontological Argument isn't it? It seems to put in clearer terms the intuition that the Ontological Argument tries to express in a more muddled way.

The only problem with this line of reasoning isn't with the reasoning itself, which is lucid, rather with the fact that the "technical" metaphysical concepts involved (like actuality and potentiality, formal cause, final cause, increments towards perfection, etc.) are quite alien to thinkers raised on "modern" and "Postmodern" philosophy and require extensive explication - "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means." :)

The added wrinkle is that objective morality, in the Aristotelian/Thomist system, is itself related to degrees of perfection (the moral person seeks to actualize their potential, the form of them, as best they can).

I didn't mean that minimum wages are the sole cause of unemployment, just that they do cause unemployment when implemented.

The reason is obvious: if you make labour cost more than it's worth, the demand for it will be less. Employers will simply not employ people at the higher rate - they will use substitutes, re-organize the business, employ more automation, etc.

Some labour just isn't worth very much - the labour of young, inexperienced people, the labour of relatively stupid people, the labour of immigrants who can't speak the language, etc., etc. But in a free market such people will be employed at the not-very-great value of their labour. However, if their labour is artificially priced higher than its value to employers, they won't be employed at all.

That's handy for entrenched union interests, who don't want the competition (IOW they don't want new blood getting on the bottom rung of the employment ladder, gaining skills and work experience, and eventually competing with them), but it's a miserable deal for those who now have no job prospects at all.

Another example of the maxim: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Minimum wages imposed by the state — Heiko

Minimum wages cause unemployment, they are entirely counter-productive. Most especially, they prevent young people from getting a foot on the ladder of economic progress. They are usually supported by entrenched interests, such as unions.

This is paralleled at the other end of the scale by various forms of corporate welfare. In reality, all legislation that goes against laissez-faire is the product of collusion between big business and the state, or between organized labour and the state, in both cases purely for the purpose of maintaining those interests in their entrenched positions, as against the interests of society as a whole (for corporations especially, maintaining their market share against competitors - the very last thing big business is interested in is a genuinely free market, which is why big business heavily supports Left-wing parties and institutions financially; the more people believe in the fiction that the State can and ought to control the economy, the more levers banking and big business have to influence the State, it's a complete con-game).

The idea that fiat law related to economic matters benefits society as a whole is totally bogus, propaganda for useful idiots. It's politicians buying the votes of the ignorant with promises they cannot possibly keep, at the behest of special interests.

The end result isn't robbing Peter to pay Paul, it's robbing Peter to pay Peter - IOW a useless churning that's a leech on the economy and the main reason we can't have nice things.

As Frederic Bastiat said: "the State is that great fiction whereby everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else." ;)

the contradiction of capital-interest and the human society — Heiko

Which has yet to be demonstrated, for all the reams of Marxian twaddle that have been written.

The examples I cited of food being exported from Ireland and India during famines are counter examples to this. — Andrew4Handel

No, they are examples of "particular and rare circumstances." Vast, vast amounts of commerce have been going on successfully for the past few centuries under capitalism, supporting an ever-increasing populationin absolute terms, and not just supporting it at subsistence level, but always incrementally more and more in fairly comfortable lifestyles.

An increasing global population, living in incrementally improving comfort,directly contradicts your point. If capitalism and private property were peculiarly conducive to famine, we would have already reverted to a tribal situation. And it would actually also be more violent in percentage terms (since tribal society is more violent in percentage terms, and more prone to famine, diebacks as a result of natural disasters, etc.).

Again, related to the other point, the thing to focus on is percentages. When you say:-

I think a million deaths Over 3,000 is a more violent world. — Andrew4Handel

That's true in a sense - yes, there is more violence in absolute terms, but that's just what you'd expect when there's more people, even if the political arrangements were idyllic in your terms, and the number of deaths was relatively small, and remained at the same percentage as the population increased, the world would still be "more violent" in the sense you're using here.

owning a resource can mean preventing others from accessing it,. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, that's exactly the point I've been making: CAN. But not invariably, not inevitably, and actually only rarely. The rule of private property is subject to the harm proviso or harm condition. The limit of private property is where ownership could be construed as limiting others options in a harmful way. Harm justifies interference, and it's the only thing that justifies interference. IOW while private property is an absolute principle, there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on what constitutes the condition, harm, under given circumstances (it's not always obvious).

Again, it's really quite simple: allow others to keep control of whatever they're controlling, until and unless they cede control to you voluntarily, or until you can justify interference with their control on the basis that they're doing harm in some way. That's it, that's the rule of several property in a nutshell, and it already covers all the things you're concerned about, without any need for centralized control of society. It's not perfect, market failure does occasionally occur, but it's the best we can do short of having a benevolent AI with perfect information and perfect oversight, to order us around.

I am the only one presenting actual historical evidence. — Andrew4Handel

No, apart from the wiki list (which actually partly contradicts some of your points) you're presenting tendentious, biased, ideologically-motivated propaganda. It's a distraction. I'm not interested in getting into the weeds re. famine, I'm interested in the philosophical question you opened with.

Again, please don't misunderstand me. You seem to be a gentle, well-meaning soul who's disturbed by and concerned about suffering, and I'm not saying your analysis is entirely without merit (cf. the points I made above about how limiting options can constitute harm). What I am saying is that you are looking in the wrong direction for solutions because you are misdiagnosing the root philosophical aspects of the problem. If you are concerned about people starving, suffering, etc., private property and capitalism are your friends, not your enemies, and if you think otherwise then you've been bamboozled by ideology.

How can tribal societies be more violent than two world wars, the holocaust and trans Atlantic and Arab slave trades? — Andrew4Handel

Because there are obviously going to be more people killed for various reasons in absolute terms when there are more people. What's important is the percentages, because shifts in percentages reflect the effects of political and economic measures over time.

A society with 10,000 people of which 3,000 die violent or theoretically avoidable deaths each year is more violent and less well run than a society of 10 million people of which a million die violent or theoretically avoidable deaths each year, regardless of the fact that a million is a much larger number of dead people than 3,000.

Still, the four rules in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences pale in comparison with the elaborate account of the hypothetico-deductive method and the need for controlled experiments laid out in the scientific works Robert Grosseteste. — Dfpolis

Descartes tried writing systematic treatises many times, but never finished them. Bear in mind that he was actually a scientist and mathematician (in both of which fields he was a genius of the highest order, just as in philosophy), his main interest was science, and the main purpose of his philosophical investigations was in fact to find a secure foundation for science, and answering the sceptics was part of it. The philosophy really didn't occupy that much of his attention, and he felt he'd pretty much done with it quite early in his career. But as I say, the philosophical aspect of what he said became very popular and skewed the public image of him.

To get that more rounded picture of Descartes, cf. Tom Sorrell's introduction to him.

Religion can't study philosophy but philosophy can study religion. — TheMadFool

St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Ibn Arabi, Je Tsongkhapa, Nagarjuna, Laozi and several hundred other notable religious thinkers from many religious traditions all over the world would like to have a word with you :)

Why is a religion so good at commanding people to behave a certain way — Posty McPostface

It's not that it's good at commanding people to behave a certain way, rather it commands people to behave in a way that's genetically successful (relative to time and place) which leads to group survival and therefore individual reproductive fitness and the selection of people to whom the religion is naturally congenial. IOW, the tail wags the dog: religion in its exoteric forms (the esoteric forms, mysticisms, etc., are something different) is an externalization of genetic imperatives and group survival strategies. The group that has a religion as "social glue" will survive better, and perpetuate itself through time better, than the group that doesn't. This is why subversive elements in any society attack its religion first - disintegrate the religion, and you start the process of the disintegration of the group.

It doesn't follow anyhow that if I don't own something you have equal right to it. — Andrew4Handel

Again, you are completely missing the point that there's no there there, unless there's some sort of ongoing relationship of use or control between person and thing. There's nothing there to have rights or not have rights about, unless there's an actual relationship between person and thing that you can either let be or interfere with.

Rights are not some mystical halo that stretches from a given individual or group through some kind of rights-ether across the whole known and unknown universe.

You have no right to a thing at the other side of the world that you've never seen or come into contact with, you have rights only in relation to things that you have some sort of ongoing control/use interaction with. The right to private property is simply an obligation the rest of us take on, to let you keep control of whatever you control, until and unless you do harm. Why do we do that? Because we know how horrible it is to have things taken away at random by others, and we extend to others the same consideration that we would wish for ourselves.

The outrage you feel against (e.g.) colonialism depends on the very same intuition. There they were, the natives, happily using their shit, until the big bad colonialists came along and took it from them without so much as a by your leave (or so the story goes - it's largely a myth, but let's run with it for the sake of the argument).

The outrage is that some people took control of things from others without their consent. But that just is breaching the rule of private property, that just is theft. Theft is not breaching your supposed etherial "right" to things you've never seen or entered into a relationship with, it's breaking an actual thing, an actual ongoing relationship between person and thing.

Nihilism could entail cooperation and pragmatism. — Andrew4Handel

Private property is a system of co-operation and pragmatism - just one that doesn't require central direction. It's certainly not the only possible system of social order, but it's the most basic because it deals with individuals first, and individuals are the active units, the things that have hands and brains, the things that can do things, either individually or in groups.

You need a government and army to enforce property rights and a legal system in the past there was the divine rights of kings now there is inheritance law. — Andrew4Handel

That's central authority, but it's not central direction. As it happens, the question of whether central authority is necessary for governance is still open. Obviously, historically, systems of private property have developed out of the central authority of kings and governments; but (albeit more rarely), they've also arisen as spontaneous orders - e.g. the Law Merchant, the legal system of mediaeval Iceland, etc. - so it's a moot point whether the historical path that was actually taken is the only path that can be taken.

But at any rate, again you're missing a crucial distinction. If you don't have a system where the question of who gets to control what when is decided by an abstract rule that applies equally to all (whether enforced by a central authority, or as a spontaneous social order), then the only possible alternative is that someone has to ACTIVELY DECIDE who gets to control what, when. Names have to be named: Bob (or Bob's Tribe) gets to control x for A duration, Alice (or Alice's Tribe) gets to control y for B duration. IOW unless you simply want chaos, then absent a social order run on abstract principles that apply equally to all, someone or some group has to assign control/use of things directly to other human beings (whether it's done in their name, by delegates or representatives or whatever, is another issue, but also, it turns out, largely irrelevant).

But it's not just that: not only does the question of who gets to control what when have to be decided centrally, the question of what they do with what they control has also got to be decided centrally.

So where has freedom gone?

It seems to me tribal societies with traditional methods are less prone to starvation and over population , live within there means and understand their land. — Andrew4Handel

This is a fantasy, known as the fantasy of the "noble savage," and it's been a fantasy since Rousseau first popularized it among intellectuals it in the 18th century. Most tribal societies are extremely violent compared to ours, and full of continuous inter-tribal strife. Evidence that's been presented by ideologues to the contrary has invariably been found out to be bogus (e.g. cf. the foofaraw around Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa).

You've got a very distorted view of history. I don't blame you though, current State "education" systems are terrible, and they've been captured by an insane ideology that pumps its tendentious drivel into the soft heads of children from kindergarten through childhood to university, and continues reinforcing it via media and "entertainment" systems through adulthood.

So we are fundamentally the same person, but changeable. — Waya

Yes, I liken it to a massive ocean liner and a tugboat. The tugboat is relatively small, but it has enough power to move the liner given a bit of time and patience. It's like that with the bulk of us and our conscious minds.

I largely agree with this, but it's not true that "most philosophers" today think what you say they think.

Most philosophers today understand that the course of investigation presented in the Meditations wasn't Descartes central focus, but rather just a preliminary investigation into the conditions of certainty wrt scientific knowledge. Descartes wasn't a sceptic, he was trying to strip away what he thought could be doubted, to get at foundational principles that couldn't be doubted, so that he could then rectify the scientific process and put it on a sound footing.

It's actually later philosophers and near-contemporaries who took the knowledge-questioning bit and turned it into a sort of standalone conundrum - which then resulted in the bifurcation between Empiricism and Rationalism.

What I would say (that partly echoes what you're saying) is that Descartes mistakenly took the positing of mere alternative logical possibilities for reasons to doubt. It's not surprising he did this, because it's what sceptics (in the philosophical sense) do generally, and Descartes was trying to see what could be discovered by following the sceptical line of reasoning to its limits.

The reality is that doubt is a game that can only be played in the context of some accepted truths - IOW, to actually doubt, you need a reason to doubt, which is based on something accepted as veridical (e.g. the subsequent sensory evidence - like looking closer - that tells you that what you previously thought you saw was just a hallucination or an illusion).

The sheer fact that one could be mistaken, and that (for all one knows) reality might be different in any of a million "logically possible" ways from what one thinks it is, is not itself a reason to doubt.

A person is generally defined socially, and by biography, but those are tethered to biology.

IOW, you first identify the physical object, the human animal, with its shape, form, size, colouring, etc., and with its biologically-driven proclivities and potential (which are generally circumscribed by man's being a social animal); then on top of that is layered the identification of social roles that social animal (given its construction, capabilities and potential) may play, then on top of that is layered the unique style of motion, speech, etc., that social animal manifests as a result of the previous two layers plus their own ongoing internal world-and-self-modelling, and peculiar biography/trajectory through life, all of which results in a thinking (and social) animal.

That total package is the person.

At each stage, you are moving more from something given, to something that's ongoingly self-created by the person. The social roles are intermediary, in that they are partly thrust on us, partly something we choose (whereas our biology is totally a given hand of cards that we're dealt, and our creative, individualistic manifestations are totally self-built, the result of choices made in the present - choices not necessarily reflected in self-consciousness, but rather choices in a broader sense, made by the total package and usually reflected in self-consciousness).

(Of course the division into three layers, genetic, social and individual, with each subsequent layer built on and constrained by the previous layers, is just a rough-and-ready approximation: the reality is complex, with lots of interweaving between the layers, and it also differs between people case by case. But that's the general picture.)

My key point is advocating stewardship. — Andrew4Handel

Which is fine in some circumstances. But stewardship needs a central authority to decide who gets to "steward" what when. The advantage of the system of private property is that it doesn't require that kind of central decision-making authority, it just requires everyone to follow certain abstract rules (grounded ultimately in the principle of the Golden Rule, or something like the Kantian Categorical Imperative).

This:-

How much evidence do you want me to provide about misappropriation of land and resources which already had a claim or occupancy on it? — Andrew4Handel

Contradicts this:-

I do not see a way to claim someone owns somethings which I think is actually a metaphysical claim. — Andrew4Handel

(My bolds) The claim of misappropriation rests on the idea that the natives were the original owners of their land.

Before you go hareing off into emotional appeals based on incidents that may or may not be based on facts, and may or may not be characteristic of colonialism and/or capitalism, please try and understand this basic philosophical point.

I think you're overthinking. There's a hallucinatory quality to ideologues trying to outdo each other in terms of originality in uncovering ever-subtler ways in which capitalism is bad yo. :)

So what's going on here? What is happening? Why can't we stop? — csalisbury

Human beings have the habit of creating models of the world, because it's useful. However, once established, the habit can go off on its own, with its own internal logic, not necessarily tethered to matters of survival (art for art's sake). But because it's a habit, it can be done blindly, obsessively, etc.

thought is not life — unenlightened

Not by definition, but you do have to be alive to think.

If every effect has a preceding cause, as classical inquiry implies, — HuggetZukker

That's not the Thomist argument, the Thomist argument is that everything we experience has a cause. That's precisely why the classical Cosmological Argument has some plausibility: although everything we experience has a cause, it's still possible that something exists uncaused that we have no experience of.

I'm inclined to go with Kant: treat others not as means ONLY but ALSO as ends in themselves.

IOW, the waiter treating their customers like shit is at fault, and the the customer treating a waiter like shit is also at fault. Season to taste with varying cultural norms.

Yeah this is fairly standard theodicy. The only problem with it is that it's all very well and good in a world of sophisticated adults learning from their mistakes, etc., but it doesn't make any sense of what we would normally call "senseless" suffering happening to innocents.

And further, if you do use this justification, the cost of innocents' suffering for this pretty pattern of dualism and redemption makes it even more evil.

This is where the karma idea has a bit of an advantage in theoretical terms: you can explain away the kid suffering sexual abuse as being punishment for crimes they committed in a past life. That makes the picture make a kind of sense over vast stretches of time. But of course it's horrendous in another way, and excuses current abuses, etc.

Your position seems somewhat colonialist and justifying controlling already settled territory because you feel your values and lifestyle are superior. — Andrew4Handel

No, the classical liberal or propertarian position is against colonialism because the natives were there first, doing stuff with their environment, they are the ones with the "already settled territory."

Again, I'm not saying that what you're talking about is total nonsense, but like many on the Left, you are misconstruing what the problem actually is. The grain of truth in what you are saying is that people doing stuff with things limits the options of other people to do stuff with those things (IOW if something is already being used, you cannot take control of it without their consent, or without exchange). And under some (quite rare) circumstances, that may possibly be harmful if those are the only options available.

However, if it's harm, it's not harm because it's theft (taking control of something away from people who already control it without their consent - ex hypothesi, the people whose options are being limited have no control over the thing, if they did, control of the thing wouldn't be an option, but a realized fact).

Rather, it's potentially harm if and when two conditions are fulfilled: 1) that people's options for controlling x are being limited (by others' already-ongoing control of x), and 2) that they have no other options available (for survival, etc.).

But those conditions hardly ever hold in a developed capitalist society based on private property.

In sum, the trope "property is theft" is really, really stupid (or rather, not stupid, but merely a rhetorical trick to get the unwary riled up). More sophisticated Leftists, like Marx, understood this, and based their system on the labourer's property in their labour (i.e. it's the working class' surplus labour that's being expropriated - here the error is more sophisticated, and deeper, so I won't go into it now, but you get the general idea).

We must have survived on the land at one stage with no tools or technology. — Andrew4Handel

Well in a sense, yes, our more ape-like ancestors survived like that. But our recognizably human or human-like ancestors co-evolved with technology as far back as can be traced. There has never been a time when we didn't modify our environment extensively, to the limits of our capabilities.

Primarily land is for basic survival shelter or food. — Andrew4Handel

You're vastly underestimating how complex and intricate the society that's sustaining you is. The only sorts of people alive today who are in the kind of situation you're describing are undiscovered Amazonian tribes and the like.

I don't think you can justify ownership based on clever usage of resources. — Andrew4Handel

Ownership doesn't need any "justification" in that sense; the argument I outlined justifies the utility of it, but ownership as such is a very basic human habit that, again, goes as far back as humanity. You let people keep control of whatever they control until and unless they do harm. This is because doing things with stuff is the most basic human function, and to interfere with humans harmlessly doing stuff is grossly immoral.

I don't really get the impression that there is an overriding method or metaphysics in science other than what people pay lip service to. — Andrew4Handel

Your impression is mistaken, interest in the topic has been lively for several centuries and there's a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to it, called "philosophy of science," with several major theories which tend to be roughly similar in overall outline, though they differ in details, both in terms of epistemological and metaphysical subtleties, and in terms of special conditions and limitations necessary for particular sciences. For example, there are strict limits on what's possible in the way of experimenting with human beings, which limits the kinds of investigations that can be done in psychology and the social sciences as compared with, say, physics or chemistry; or again, although history is in some ways a scientific discipline, the fact that you can't rerun historical events and change the parameters severely limits how scientific history can be.

The general idea with science is that it's both a co-operative and competitive enterprise involving the generation of informed guesses (hypotheses) whose concrete, experiencable implications are deduced and then tested, both in themselves and as compared with what would likely eventuate if the hypothesis is false. Scientists publish the results of their tests and the methods they used, so that other scientists can try to either confirm or disconfirm the results of their testing.

That's the basic logical part of science, but there are also both overall traditions that scientists follow with regard to science in general, and specific learned traditions (things that you learn from experience, tricks of the trade so to speak) for the special sciences in particular, that go along with that basic schema. For example, in order to generate a pool of good informed guesses scientists often do a fair bit of data gathering and observation. But the crucial bit is the deduction and testing - the deductions have to be precise and logical, and the testing has to be as rigorous as possible in order to isolate the causal factors under consideration as much as possible.

The problem with your position is that very few parts of earth, of the useful matter on earth, are a passive resource just waiting to be plucked off a tree (or sat on). They have to be worked on by others to become useful. And that's why we have division of labour and property rights - that way you channel peoples' efforts as efficiently as they can be (into things they are particularly good at, specialize in) and you let them have the use of things for as long as they want (provided they're using things harmlessly) so they have a chance to fulfil whatever designs they may have on their bit of matter, so that it may become useful to the rest of us.

And you are not necessarily depriving someone of anything by using a resource. You may be, but only in very particular and rare circumstances. In fact by adding value to a resource (by processing it into a more useful form, with your particular specialized knowledge, know-how, skills, etc., that they don't have) you are usually enriching others' possibilities.

Essentially, your argument has limited viability, and only in the case of land as something to live on - but that's actually the least of humanity's problems, there's plenty enough land to live on for everyone. The real mystery, the real difficulty, is how to produce enough to keep everyone alive, happy and fulfilled.

The real cause of the confusion here is a misunderstanding (with the Left generally, but also with some liberals) of what property is: it relates to actual concrete ongoing use of something, a relationship of control, steering, shaping, marshalling, between a human being and a bit of matter: that's what's being protected by property rights.

I am not being deprived of the use of something on the other side of the world that I'm not using, that I'm not in a natural relationship of control with. Therefore someone else using it is not thieving from me; they are not snatching CONTROL of something FROM me (which is what theft actually is).

Again, the limited validity in what you're saying is that by taking control of something uncontrolled by me (or by anyone else - the limiting case of first use), they may be limiting my options for controlling things. For example, it's an old principle of English law that you can't "hem someone in" by owning all the land around them and preventing them getting to market with their produce. That would amount to a kind of harm. But in the vast majority of cases, it's as I said above: other people are usually adding tremendous amounts of value to the bits of matter that they control, which actually redounds to your benefit when they exchange the product of their activities with you for the the things you produce that are useful to them (you'd rather have an iPhone than a lump of silica in the ground, right?)

Great stuff :)

Whether it does or doesn't in reality, it's certainly true that we're unable to conceive of something happening without it happening somewhere and some time. We're also unable to conceive of anything happening without a cause or context.

Now if that is our best image of true nothingness - the absence even of possibility - then what is the opposite of that. — apokrisis

That's what I mentioned in my comment though, it can't be the absence of possibility in general. It's definitely the absence of the specific possibilities represented by the categories (the empty boxes), but that still leaves a generalized possibility.

I don't think you can get away from this: no matter how much you negate, negate the filling of boxes, negate the empty boxes, you're still left with the possibility of boxes, the possibility of dimensions or categories to be filled in, so a kind of raw, unformed, unspecified possibility is the "cash value" of nothing.

Even if there's nothing, nothing, nothing, there's still the possibility of something, in fact one might even say that nothing is the maximal possibility of something, because the whole pandora's box is stuck behind the firewall, IOW "it" could be (is the possibility of being) anything.

every possibility must exist at every time but never any one at any particular time — unic0rnio

That's an interesting thought that relates to something I've occasionally wondered.

If you think of non-extension in every dimension, non-existence in every possible category, that seems to be as close to a "true" nothing as you can get, although awkwardly, you're still left with the categories and dimensions as possibilities to be "filled out" with existence, or actuality.

So the true true nothing would seem to be not just lack of extension, lack of existence in any particular category or possibility, but also the absence of those very categories or possibilities themselves.

But then it seems like you can't get away from the (so to speak global) possibility of categories and dimensions.

The interesting thing is that this last, final, most etherial form of nothing, is indeterminate, just a kind of raw, unformed sort of possibility (whereas the absent categories and their lack of filling-in were determinate, had shape).

Essentially, it seems like if you chase down nothing as far as possible, you're just left with this kind of unformed possibility. But is that possibility not a something? It seems to be a something, but an indeterminate something.

But maybe that's just what nothing is, the concrete shape of it: nothing is the possibility of something.

Just because, it was upon talking to someone else about their kids, and how they are surprisingly political, more so than we are, and surprisingly right leaning, in the sense of a rebellion against all of the diversity, and inclusion stuff, and what not. None of them had any actual person they're following that I know of, or group they claim to belong to, but just all of the internet mockery that they were right into. — All sight

Yeah, there have been some analysts who reckon Gen Z is more Right-leaning than any generation since WWII. On the other hand I've seen other analysts saying the opposite. I think the truth is probably inbetween. There's still a lot of hangover from the school/academic/media/entertainment indoctrination of the past 40 years or so in Gen X-ers and Millennials, so probably also in the young generation now growing up, but I think there is probably some shift in the weighting.

A fair number of Millennials are shaking off the trance currently just as a result of thinking things through and revising the received wisdom, while on the other hand there are probably still many Gen Z kids who are, or more likely pretend to be, ideological zombies (most likely, the "teacher's pet" types who are laser focussed on career and know how to make the right noises to get ahead with the culture as it currently is).

But there have certainly been a few documented amusing incidents of classes of quite young kids trolling their SJW teachers hard. That could be indicative of a larger trend, or it could just be accidental lumpiness.

At any rate, to some degree, younger generations are bound to be somewhat irreverent to the sacred cows of the establishment, whatever the establishment is. If the situation does fold over to the Right being in power for a few decades (which I think is likely), the irreverence will eventually go the other way again. (This is because there's always a lot of hypocrisy among adults wrt their kowtowing to establishment norms just to get on in life, and kids can smell it - for kids, IOW, it's more the result of an emotional reading of adults than an intellectually considered thing.)

I used to — Maw

lol

Have you ever said anything coherent and on-point in response to one of my posts? Or are they all just red rags to a bull?

I don't think it's actually a Left/Right thing so much as it's a Globalist/Nationalist thing. There's definitely a resurgence of nationalism in Europe and European-derived countries, as a reaction to globalism, and the mass uncontrolled immigration to Europe and European-derived countries.

But one has to unpack "globalism" a bit: it's an ideological and political confluence of several factors, with three main strands:

1) modern liberalism as a quasi-religious cult that has aimed single-mindedly at the control of public opinion for nearly a century, the end result of a Gramscian "Long March Through the Institutions" (starting with academia, with the Frankfurt School in the 30s and 40s, moving through to media, government and mass entertainment in the 1950s, and again the influence of Cultural Marxism in the 1960s and onwards), and this would include Feminism from about the 1970s on;

2) the remnants of the Boomer "New Left" in both the US and Europe (themselves somewhat influenced by 1) in its 1960s iteration) finally come to major positions of power; and

3) major bank and big business interests (often using the rhetoric of the free market, but not overly-enamoured of the substance of the idea - they prefer big government).

The 2) people think of the nation state as the primary cause of war, the 3) crowd want Rome to have a single neck and love cheap labour, and the 1) crowd see the nation state and nationalist traditions as institutional obstacles to their vision of utopia.

The reaction is also somewhat complex, comprised of:

1) old school nationalists, including both ethnic and civic nationalists (American conservatives would belong to the latter group),

2) a formerly Left-leaning, but latterly disenfranchised, disaffected working class, despised by the "elites", etc., etc. (this has been canvassed fairly well by mainstream analysts in response to the Trump phenomenon),

3) younger cohorts who have been raised by 1)-type globalist indoctrination, but are rejecting it and looking for alternatives (and this group may actually include a fair number who formerly thought of themselves as on the Left). This is the internet-savvy group; also the group that's doing a lot of the mockery you're talking about.

Nationalism will win for the foreseeable future, because globalism (or rather, the kind of globalism we've had up till now) is fundamentally incoherent and insane, while nationalism is actually coherent and sane: the relatively ethnically-homogenous nation state remains the largest viable political unit.

Something like Kantian globalism (or what one might call "Star Trek globalism") will undoubtedly triumph in the end, but it can only really come about by an organic process of rapprochement between genuinely diverse nation states, not by a forced, top-down process of homogenization under a global totalitarian regime, which is what's been attempted over the past half-century or so.

Rights imply concomitant obligations.

So-called "Negative rights" imply an obligation on others to refrain from doing something (to not-do something, hence "negative" rights, like the right to property).

So-called "Positive rights" imply an obligation on others to do something (positively provide a good or service, like education).

So really, while I don't have any principled objection to some measure of basic positive rights out of simple kindness and compassion (although I would limit them severely, for obvious reasons - there's a potential slippery slope to totalitarianism there), anything like "right to x" where x is an object or a service provided by others, really ought to specify who those others are going to be, and how the good or service is going to be provided, even if it's just in a rough, general form (like "the public shall provide through taxation ...").

Otherwise it's just feelgood hot air, the Great & Good bigging each other up, and useful idiots virtue signalling to each other.

No one’s utterances are all guaranteed to be true. — Michael Ossipoff

But then in that case, there's nothing special about a "claim" as opposed to an "opinion." The most you could say is that a claim is an opinion with some attempt at support, or an opinion is a claim with less or no attempt at support.

No, that isn’t necessarily an assertion. An assertion isn’t just an expression of opinion. To assert is “to declare or state positively” (as I already quoted two dictionaries). — Michael Ossipoff

But I can "declare or state positively," I can stamp my little feet as much as I like (so to speak), but for all that, I may yet be wrong.

Each of the above statements between the rows of asterisks expresses a claim, not just an opinion. I claim that they’re true (not just that they express my opinion). — Michael Ossipoff

But your opinion, if isn't just you letting off wind, is also a claim that something is true.

A statement isn't made more certain by it being couched in terms of "No guys, I REALLY REALLY think this (which is my opinion) is true, and here are my reasons ..." :)

Yes, theories, or supposed “laws” about the physical world, can be, and have been, later determined to be wrong. And so, statements about how the physical world works are conjectural, to varying degrees.
.
But that isn’t true of all statements. — Michael Ossipoff

Well, no, not in that sense; but you'll notice that most of the things you laid out as claims are in the area of "analytic" or "true by definition" or "a corollary of the definition of x is that ..."

But that's not what we're interested in, surely? We're interested in objective truth, truth about the world. Following the line of though that passes via Hume and many other philosophers through to the later Wittgenstein, I would say that an analytic/apriori truth is a truth about the world only indirectly, only insofar as it's (truly or falsely) outlining our own linguistic and conceptual habits, our definitions, our criteria for calling things "A" or thinking of them as A. But you may define a thing as you like, whether it exists or not (as so defined, or differently defined) is another question.

Everything can in principle be challenged, everything is in principle open to doubt, including your claim examples, including even the deepest "synthetic apriori" axioms we use, including even the laws of logic. Where I part ways with the sceptic is in that I don't believe there's any reason to doubt until there's some anomaly that needs explaining. For doubt to bite, you need a reason to doubt, and the mere logical possibility of alternatives isn't a reason to doubt.

BUT, that permanent status of conjecture that all our statements have (including this one) means that the presumed authority of "claims" vs. "opinons," or the supposed importance of the distinction that goes back to Plato, between "Justified True Belief" as against "mere opinion" is - well, not exactly bogus, but doesn't bear the weight it's traditionally been thought to bear (e.g. cf. also Gettier problems).

Justification is really more a part of rhetoric/persuasion than it is of the actual knowledge-discovery process, which proceeds by PUNTING possible-ways-things-could-be and then SIFTING them, rejecting those theories whose corollaries and implications predict results that turn out to be false in experience. Claims that fail modus tollens cannot possibly be true (although even then, one can attempt to "save appearances" to some extent, by re-jigging the underlying definitions), but claims that survive testing may yet be true - and that kind of corroboration is (I think) the best we can do.

(All of this actually leaves me more open and willing to try on religious and mystical claims, btw. I'm much more open to the classical - Aristotelian, Thomist - arguments for God's existence than I used to be, for example.)

Heck, even Daoism is much more intimately connected with particular ritual and praxis than people think. The idea of a pristine "philosophical" Daoism versus the messy, woo-woo "religious Daoism" is now thought to be largely a bogus artifact of the fact that the early Protestant interlocutors of Daoism got most of their information about it from Confucian scholars!

The "magical" and political aspects of these things have always tended to be quite mixed in with the philosophical elements.

It was actually so in the West as well at one time - philosophers like Parmenides and Empedocles are more like Eastern guru figures, or Western occultists doing ritual magic, etc., than they are like Bertrand Russell expatiating from his armchair smoking a pipe :)

But there is definitely a common thread of "non-dual" philosophy in the Eastern systems - and funnily enough, Alan Watts was one of the first to really get it right.

Alan Watts is an odd one, because he's often the author who first piques the interest of Westerners in things Eastern, but then when one gets more deeply into the authentic traditions, one leaves him behind and one may even pooh-pooh him as "simplistic." But actually, when you come out the other end, you realize he actually did pretty much get it right after all! :)

For example, here's one of Watts' incredibly profound nuggets:"If you can agree that you are not separated from reality, then you must agree that your 'self'-awareness is also reality's awareness of itself."

This is actually the root of the to and fro in both the East and West around the Big Questions. It seems like consciousness is a personal thing that's rooted in, or otherwise somehow metaphysically tethered to the body.

But what if one's consciousness is actually impersonal, a cosmic event? What if one's thoughts (the images, words, etc., that pass before the mind's eye) are no more personal, belong no more to just this body, than a flight of geese across the sky?

Love is the superlative exchange. — Blue Lux

Yes, to some extent love is (or has a lot to do with) the feeling of being understood - but as people occasionally find, even that can be mistaken! :)