Why don't you just not make a frankly silly assumption, like that we're all clones, and then try to push the faux-problem of explaining why we're not onto me? — S

I'd like to propose a different sort of silliness. Imagine, if you will, someone cloning you and then placing the cloned baby S into a very different culture than the one you grew up in. Cloned baby S would adopt whatever conceptual order or abstract principles, or whatever mysterious extra-mental phenomenon that exists in that culture. Let's say for the example that the culture is cannibalistic. Let's also assume for the example that you're not a cannibal and believe that cannibalism is immoral, if only marginally. Both you and cloned baby S started out with practically the same neurology or limbic system, yet cloned baby S is cool with eating people and you, we assume, find it immoral.

Essentially the same physiology yet two very different moral frameworks. Clearly, it is inadequate to say that the mind or limbic system is the source of morals because it cannot account for vast differences in moral frameworks. Saying "we often feel differently and judge moral matters differently" isn't explaining or accounting for the differences.

So you’re basically making a distinction between witnessing a morally charged event and personally experiencing one. Does that make sense?

There is nothing whatsoever in my explanation which can't account for divergent moral frameworks. — S

I guess we’ll never know your accounting. :sad:

It's not close enough to morality to be as relevant as the kind of explanation that myself and Terrapin are presenting. — S

I began by showing the inadequacy of your explanation which, to reiterate, is its inability to account for divergent moral frameworks.

There must be some "mysterious extra-mental phenomenon," at work too.
— praxis

No, that doesn't follow, unless you add some false premise along the lines of what Terrapin said or some other unfounded notion. — S

The 'mysterious extra-mental phenomenon' in the specific case that I mentioned involves concepts such as liberty (freedom to choose), and I guess the sacred (sacredness of human life). Though our moral intuitions may start out relatively the same, the culture we grow up in imbues us with concepts and divergent moral frameworks, like conservatism or liberalism.

Our ability to cooperate on a large scale is more dependent on our ability to form and share concepts like liberty and sacredness than it is to inherent moral intuitions. Can any other species of mammal, for example, cooperate on the scale that we can? No, and what do we have to thank or curse for that? Mysterious extra-mental phenomenon.

What do you mean by indirectly related?

That doesn't explain, for instance, how some people can be pro-life and others pro-choice. There must be some "mysterious extra-mental phenomenon," at work too.

So what’s with the monkey business? You jealous of Rogers human dna?

I consider the aesthetic and ethical to be antithetically related. — Merkwurdichliebe

It’s a well documented phenomenon that attractive defendants in court receive fewer convictions, and when convicted get lighter sentences, than unattractive defendants. So in at least some situations the two appear to have incongruous concerns or objectives.

On the other hand, aesthetics can be powerful in delivering meaningful stories or stories with moral messages.

They named the human-chimp Roger. — frank

What a coincidence, that's my middle name.

Ah, right.

Couldn't find a graphic but it looks like Democrats were about 46% to Republican 21% in the mid 70s. That changed to 35% & 31% by the mid 80s. Maybe it took that long for the acid to wear-off.

About the middle of the Boomer section, if you're curious about the distribution of that specific time in history.

What's clear? — frank

the '60s generation in the Democratic Party, and they have not so far embraced the Republican Party as much as might be expected from their ideological transformation. It isn't clear who they will favor in 2012

Well, it's clear now.

60s generation ≠ Boomers

Were they? Boomers are predominantly conservative and this affiliation has been consistent over time.

you get a whole lot of people who are "spiritual but not religious" cause they want all the coziness of a creator without the hassle of being told what to do or what is right and wrong.
— NKBJ
That is a cynical view of what SBNR means, and I would say that in the majority of cases it is wrong. — andrewk

I don’t think it’s cynical. If a spiritual practice doesn’t offer some sort of “coziness” then what good is it. And is it good to be told what’s right or wrong by some rando religious idiot? No.

If strong, positive, secular and civil values replaced religion, that would be fine. If religion is going to be replaced by fascism, or blind faith, or aggressive dehumanizing conversions, then no. — Bitter Crank

Not that it’s easy to separate religious & secular values from any culture, but what values are currently missing from contemporary secular and civil life?

If I’m not mistaken, you’re not religious. If that is the case, do you by chance tend to have blind faith in things? Are you a fascist? Inhuman?

Religion may help bind groups with common values but it does not somehow create these values from nothing.

With the high taxes, crippling regulations, need to build 37 bathrooms (one for each gender) and designated “safe spaces” on each deck of the ship, etc etc, the lava would be knee high before the socialists could launch even one ship.

It's good to be honored for being a cog in the economic wheel that will most likely lead to collapse and widescale suffering or even extinction of our species because of its unsustainability?

without the police everyone would be very poor — Ilya B Shambat

Especially stakeholders in the for-profit private prison industry, which has grown substantially in recent years. Perhaps you should add prisoners to your list of economic honorees.

You haven’t shown anyone reasoning or making the claim that reason is useful for everything.
— praxis

God is typically a proposal about the most fundamental nature of all reality. The proposal has the biggest scope of any proposal. — Jake

No, wrong again. The claim (it’s not a proposal) is that God exists and she created us, etc, etc. There are few if any claims about the fundamental nature of God himself, for instance, such as how God came to exist. If God created us, who created God? If God is everything then is it essentially nothing? All sorts of questions about the fundamental nature of reality are unaddressed by the religions that I know of.

It could be that we all exist in a simulation, for example, including God, and in the simulation, everything in the Bible and all other religious doctrine is actually true. In the simulation there’s a heaven and a hell for Christians, a Nirvana for Buddhists, a Valhalla for some pagans, whatever floats an individual's religious boat, so to say. In the simulation, even atheism could be true. Upon death, the atheists would simply be deleted from the simulation rather than placing them into an afterlife simulation. None of the religions in the simulation, though all of them concurrently true, would be making a claim about this more fundamental reality that is running the simulation.

You need to understand that religion doesn’t need to make claims about “the most fundamental nature of all reality,” and its claims don’t need to be true, they only need to be meaningful.

What's happening here is that all of you are atheist ideologists who perceive the threat to the glorious self-flattering personal image you have created out of atheism, and so you are engaging the usual atheist dodges. — Jake

I just proposed a metaphysics that not only theorizes how the 'father in the sky' religion could be true, but that ALL religions, as well as atheism, could be true, and there are thousands of religions in the world. Sometimes I amaze even myself, speaking of self-flattery.

None of you have even attempted to prove the qualifications of the methodology which your entire perspective depends upon, because you know you can't. — Jake

I assume you mean that none of us have attempted to prove the efficacy of using reason to formulate proposals about "the most fundamental nature of all reality," which is a proposal that has "the biggest scope of any proposal."

I just proposed a proposal that encompasses all religious claims, and I did it with reason. So you tell me, does this prove the efficacy of using reason to formulate proposals about oh-so MEANINGFUL stuff?

I’m not sure. If anyone has, and Jake can show the error in this reasoning, and also show a refusal of this person or persons to accept their error and adopt the corrected reasoning, then Jake will have made his case for ideology, in my opinion.

I have little hope that he’ll be successful.

they are assuming, without proof, that logic and reason have infinite ability, are able to meaningfully analyze anything in all of reality.

It's an unwarranted leap from...

Reason is useful for very many things.

to...

Reason is useful for everything. — Jake

Is there another means to “analyze” reality, meaningfully or otherwise?

You haven’t shown anyone reasoning or making the claim that reason is useful for everything. You also need to show the error in reasoning that reason is useful for everything.

So it’s good to be honored for economic contributions, right?

Logic and reason are the chosen authorities of atheists. The Bible is the chosen authority of Jews and Christians. You wish to apply one rule to theist authorities, and another rule to atheist authorities. That's not reason. That's ideology. — Jake

No, failure to apply logic and reason to logic and reason is irrational (not logical or reasonable). If I reason, for example, that you’re confused, but upon further pondering have the insight that you’re only feigning confusion and for some emotional reason choose to deny the insight and fail to revise the prior assessment, that’s irrational.

You need to show faulty reasoning and failure to revise the faulty reasoning. Good luck. :smile:

The "right set of sense patterns"...??? Is that an unknown set? — creativesoul

The predicted set, based on memory. For example, 'the cow jumps over the ______.' Many people would predict the sentence to end with 'moon', and if I ended it with 'cat' or something else they would have a prediction error, their prediction having been invalidated. That's what I meant about verification.

I haven't explained the theory well. If it interests you, it's based on the work by Jeff Hawkins.

Could it be just as simple as Red and you both making a connection between the utterance of "ball" and the ball? — creativesoul

In a nutshell.

And in a nutshell, I guess my point is that shared meaning may be enhanced or expanded with symbols, language and cognitive thought, but it's not dependent on these things, whereas shared values and goals are essential. Maybe that's obvious.

Funny that Rhode Island is quite blue.

Sounds like it might be an effective approach to a difficult problem. I was able to watch it, btw, when I used a computer. I was away from home and using a phone when I tried it the first time.

I didn't care for the presentation, which is heavy with what is intended to be emotionally persuasive content and light on information about the actual proposed solution.

If who came first was judged to be a valid basis for settling the dispute then it would open the door for other groups to come forward and make a claim. That's unlikely, but then if it were possible to make a rational case for either of your two options it's highly unlikely that it would help to resolve the dispute. This is just an exercise, right?

An odd question: can you see, hear, or touch the odor of a plastic dog toy? or, how can we recognize the scent of perfume without sight, hearing, or touch?

I don’t have a great understanding of it but the theory of biological intelligence I like claims that different categories of sense data is processed in parallel using the same basic algorithm. Red’s olfactory concept of ‘ball’, for instance, may in part be built of sense patterns representing basic components like plastic and his own slobber. When the right set of sense patterns is recognized and verified it goes up the hierarchy to a larger concept or mental representation culminating in an invariant form. The highest invariant form contains patterns from all sense categories.

The process is actually quite simple and efficient, at least compared to a computer. It accomplishes in a small number of steps what a computer would require thousands.

Could this be one of the main contributions of psychopathology in human relationships, seeing as a potentially sick format delimiting how we must bond to another, is the door through which all relations of the market society must pass? — Anthony

If only it were that simple.

So then my question comes: On what basis are we to establish to whom any given piece of land belongs: (1). on the basis of who inhabited the land more recently before the conflict erupted (aka Palestinians) or (2). on the basis of whose ancestors inhabited the piece of land first (aka Israel)?

And, whichever one you choose, on what meta-principle are you making that choice? — rickyk95

If it were a matter of who inhabited the land first, it's still questionable if Israelis qualify as being first. There are fossil records of neanderthals inhabiting the area, for instance. On what basis would they be discounted? Because they're extinct? Because they didn't have a similar enough culture? In any case, there were also pre-Israeli humans, and they must have had a similar culture to early Israelites, so Israelites could not be considered first in any fundamental way.

If I recall, the manner in which Israel acquired land was rather underhanded. Simply displacing people from their land isn't a good ground of ownership in civilized society.

I'm confused again.

I was thinking more along the lines of a language between the two of you. For example, your saying his name out loud. Would you say that the two of you share the same meaning? If so, how do you take account of it? What does it consist in/of such that the two of you can both understand it in the same way, by the same process, or however else meaning is shared on your view? — creativesoul

I'd rather focus on a different word to avoid the complexities of dogs and identity, if you don't mind.

"Ball" is a word that he has an invariant representation or concept for. If I say 'ball' to him, he'll start looking for one of his toys that we sometimes fetch with. I imagine the pattern he associates with 'ball' is basically any one of his toys that we've fetched with in the past, so there's no difference between a frisbee or a tennis ball, for instance. A ball isn't necessarily spherical for him. That level of abstraction or type of meaning is lost on him. His olfactory concept of 'ball' is surely more acute than mine. He could no doubt find one blindfolded.

Though our capacities and senses are different, the process of how we both developed an invariant representation of 'ball' is the same, which is patterns of sense data processed in hierarchical auto-associative memory. Where our different concepts overlap is in fetching. Red's concept may be limited to fetching but then our concepts, on a larger scale, are similarly limited.

I don't know why dogs love to fetch, and it's not in the activity itself, they're not interested in fetching alone, so part of it must be social interaction or cooperative play. Whatever the case, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the activity is meaningful for them. I enjoy the activity as well, though I mostly do it for his exercise and to help burn off his energy. I believe it's most meaningful because we're both social species and the activity fulfills basic social needs and facilitates bonding.

Well, the Cynics proposed that we do away with ALL wealth and comfort and expose ourselves to voluntary discomfort. Do you think they were actually happy people? Seems like the cool-headed Stoic is at an advantage here. — Wallows

I don't know anything about the Cynics besides a quick synopsis, but I would agree that regularly getting outside of our comfort zone may be an essential part of happiness, in that it's necessary for growth or development. Stagnation tends to be meaningless and leading to degeneration.

We also can’t ignore our irrationally.

I agree.

Legal defamation of business competitors or political rivals would be rather anarchistic, on the other hand, and lead to instability.

I don't frame anything simply on "harm." — Terrapin Station

Now I believe you’re not a liberal.

I'm not at all claiming to represent anyone else. I was just telling you that my views don't at all equate to typical liberal views. — Terrapin Station

I think you could safely remove ‘liberal’ from the sentence. I doubt it’s typical for a libertarian to be so absolutist.

I wonder, would you also not pursue a legal case if someone intentionally damaged your property? For business ventures, reputation or branding can be much more valuable than property. I don’t see a fundamental difference between brand and property when intentional harm is committed.

I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm not in favor of slander and libel laws, or any speech prohibitions whatsoever. — Terrapin Station

So you wouldn’t pursue a legal case for ideological reasons, no matter how bad the damages?

Must be easy to compete with libertarians.

So you don't buy that most people are in favor of slander and libel laws? — Terrapin Station

I do indeed, including libertarian hero Milo https://bigleaguepolitics.com/exclusive-milo-yiannopoulos-talks-his-lawsuit-against-newspaper-that-blamed-him-for-5-deaths/

Are you implying that if someone damaged your professional reputation, for example, and it cost you significant monetary damage, you wouldn't pursue a legal case because of ideological beliefs?