Being composed of baryonic matter exposes one to high levels of chemicals, especially for those living outside of the intergalactic voids. To avoid unwanted chemical reaction in proximity to galaxy clusters, convert your substrate entirely to dark matter.
A Google account gets you email (and an RSS reader) and a blog (with RSS syndication) and it used to get you an (XMPP) IM account before they discontinued Talk, plus lots of hosting services like YouTube and Google Photos and so on. That's an integrated platform using entirely open standards, no walled garden required.
I will grant that having a one-stop-shop to get and access accounts on all the different kinds of services that collectively already did what Facebook does is a useful thing, but the point is that Facebook isn't actually doing any individual thing new, it's just redoing a bunch of things that were already being done, and doing them in a walled garden.
You could do things like, even at a one-stop shop, that outside of a walled garden. A Google account is pretty much that; Gmail (and back when it existed, Talk) is your Messenger, Blogger+RSS(+Gmail) is your feed and following, etc.
What is the "social networking part", besides maybe an easy way of finding out what "address" (username) to find someone at?
Blogs and RSS feeds handle feeds and following. Email and IM handle messaging.
Addresses/usernames can be shared over those channels, or even older ones, or found with search engines, so I don't see what was missing before that FaceSpace adds to the equation, besides a walled garden, ads, and privacy invasion.
He is obviously giving you more return per hour of pay, so if you won't give him more per pay per hour for that return, maybe one of your competitors will...
While I personally like that idea, the counterargument I've heard against it is that it defeats the bandwidth- and CPU- and memory-saving purposes of blocking ads, and gets you only the security and anti-annoyance features. Combining your sandbox idea with some kind of resource-limiter on the sandbox (so the site can only use a reasonable amount of bandwidth, CPU, memory, etc) seems like it could alleviate some of those concerns, but then I suspect that the actual parts of the site the user wants to interact with would be bogged down by sharing those limited resources with all the adware that's desperately trying to hog them.
Also add to that that "warrant" in general (outside the specific legal sense) means "permission" or "justification", not "command". A legal warrant is the judge specifically OKing certain action; but it is not a command that certain actions be taken, just an official declaration that those actions are warranted, justified, permitted.
I'm also white, in my mid 30s, no criminal record, don't hang out with scumbags, etc, and I have four stories about the cops in my small hometown in the coastal mountains of California to share:
First, a decade and a half ago, I was walking down the street when a cop drove by and waved me over as they parked their car. They asked if my name was John. It isn't, and I told them so, and they left. Then turned around and asked for ID, confirmed it, and left. I was left confused. What the hell just happened?
Next, a little over a decade ago when I had just moved out of town to the nearest slightly-bigger city, and used to come back to my home town to visit my girlfriend a few times a week, every single time I was leaving town I would be tailed by cops, pulled over just before I left town, wait 15-20 minutes as they double-checked to make sure I still didn't have any warrants out since two days ago (I never have, I have no criminal record besides minor traffic violations from years before), one time actually calling another officer who "heard" that someone with my (unusual) first name had a warrant out for him to come look at me and say "nope, not him" (AFTER running my license already). I have no fucking idea why they did this, just to harass me it seems but why me, some random nobody? Did they do this to lots of people, out of boredom? This sounds just like the kind of thing that would be called a "DWB" if I weren't white. (I've mostly had bad experiences with traffic cops before too, but mostly just the usual "money-making" kind of traffic cop behavior, only occasionally accompanied by blatant lies from them).
Then a few years ago I was assaulted by some teenagers in a nearby park after pointing out they're not allowed to smoke there (also, they're underage and can't smoke at all, but that part hadn't even crossed my mind). I called the police and lead them to the punks still nearby on the other side of the park and wanted to press charges. They said "we'll just talk to their coaches" and sent me away. No fucking justice I guess, even in the face of the most blatant of crimes? One of the kids tried to scare me with a "do you know who my father is" (I told him I didn't care), so maybe they were some of those privileged elites I hear about? (Also, they were also white, and neonazis apparently, as they called me a "white nigger" and "race traitor", what the fuck does that have to do with anything?)
Earlier this year I had a complete fucking meltdown in my house from an overload of work- and family-related stress, and the neighbors called in a noise complaint, twice, over the sound of my screaming and bawling. The cops came to my door, and just wanted to make sure I was OK, and said that they were happy to have gotten to meet "one of the good citizens", me, instead of the "kind of people [they] usually have to deal with". I was shocked, absolutely shocked at how unbelievably nice and police they were, when I expected "cops are here, that means I'm in trouble".
I just don't know what to think about police anymore.
As a former rabid Apple fanboy (16ish years in recovery), that's about my assessment of Apple today, or across the last decade or so. Nothing worth getting super riled up and excited about because it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but still... the alternatives are worse.
I think they're snarking on the possible interpretation of the text as "20 and 24 year olds born in the 1960s", i.e. people currently in their 20s, but born 50-ish years ago (who would then obviously be lying about one of those things).
Paying for retirement out of current tax revenues (as we do with Social Security) basically is children caring for their aging parents, just on a societal scale rather than a familial scale. The working young pay to fund the care of the non-working old. And doing it on a societal scale seems much more fair than every individual retiree depending on the fickle financial fortunes of their particular children.
At best, an adherent to your system could say “according to how the majority of people’s appetites seem, it is probably wrong to murder.”
Not at all, in several ways. One, majoritarianism doesn't matter. Nobody gets to tell anybody else that their appetites are aberrant and don't count; the objective good must account for all appetites, just like the objective truth must account for all observations.
Second, this seems to confuse what an appetite is: I can't have an appetite about whether or not it is wrong to murder you, so it's not like it would be possible to even have a unanimous-minus-one consensus of appetites that murdering the one objector is good; appetites aren't desires, or intentions, they're experiences. The most relevant appetites in determining that matter are those of the would-be victim, and the job of the rest in trying to answer the question of whether murdering them is OK would be to consider what it's like to be murdered and it that seems good or bad according to their hypothetical appetites as the hypothetical victim. In more contentious cases you'd want to actually go and experience the thing someone else experiences and see if that feels good or bad to you in those circumstances, but with something like there's experience enough to draw from to make that inference without further testing -- we've all been injured at some point or another, to some extent or another, and we know whether that feels good or bad, and since murdering someone would involve injuring them we can conclude a lot about it without having to be murdered ourselves, obviously.
Third, there don't have to be broad absolute rules for things to be objectively true or false, so the conclusion wouldn't even need to be "murder is (probably) wrong", but more along the lines of "it is usually wrong to murder"; it might be (though in the case of murder, it isn't) the case that some times a thing is right to do and some times it's wrong, but each particular case is objectively right or wrong, even though there isn't a pattern to them -- or rather, even though that pattern isn't the one that applies to them.
On top of all that it assumes uniformity of nature when your system can’t provide an absolute basis for that either. You have to accept it as an axiom to even begin to use your system.
Every system must take some things as axioms. I actually kind of misspoke when I called it an axiom of my system earlier though, as it's not taken without any justification, it's taken as a consequence of even more fundamental principles. Even these aren't really the ultimate starting point, but those more fundamental principles are essentially: we ought to try to figure out what's true and false, good and bad, etc; and to try try anything, we must assume neither success nor failure is inevitable. Denying uniformity of nature would mean failure at figuring out what's true and false was inevitable, so consequently we cannot deny it. (The deeper principles still answer the question of why we ought to figure out what's true or false, good or bad, and the answer to that is essentially that no matter what we do, we're attempting in one way or another to employ truths as means to achieve good ends, so no matter what we do it behooves us to figure out what's true and false, good and bad).
I believe that a consistent materialist worldview does reduce to skepticism.
It's interesting that you read my Codex, because just the other day I was thinking "wow, this guy is a walking almost-self-admitted example of my contention in the Codex that fideists are just nihilists hiding behind God, and nihilists are just godless fideists". (Of course that last part isn't very new, Neitzsche concluded more or less that, but that's not well-known about him). You and a nihilist (or radical skeptic if you like) share so much philosophical framework in common, and it all looks equally faulty to me; it hardly makes an
To say that something seems good or seems evil implies that goodness or evilness exists. Though moral judgments can be made prescriptively, you have used these terms descriptively through this conversation. If you claim it exists...
This is the fundamental thing that I think is at the root of a lot of philosophical issues, ethics especially. The truth of a proposition only implies anything about the existence of something if the proposition is saying something about what does or doesn't exist, and not all propositions do that. We casually use the word "exist" in modern English in places where strictly speaking we probably shouldn't, and to avoid obnoxious circumlocutions I let myself do that too, like I have been in this conversation. But in an ideal language we wouldn't do that.
For analogy, consider the proposition that 2+2=4. Where is the number two? Where is the number four? Do numbers "exist", at least in the same way that rocks and trees and tables and chairs do, and if so, where, or what other objects constitute their existence? Does there need to be some singular cosmic table of addition somewhere out there to make propositions about addition true? It seems kind of a nonsense question. We can say true things about the relations between different quantities of things without there needing to be a, or the, number two out there somewhere. Because despite the superficial grammatical appearance of it, the proposition 2+2=4 isn't attempting to describe concrete facts about the world, but rather just the relations between concepts, that might or might not apply to any things that actually exist. Mathematicians can and frequently do just make up conceptual structures that so far as anyone knows have no bearing on reality, and then figure out true statements about those structures' relations to other structures.
I'm not saying that ethical propositions are the same kind as mathematical ones, but just that, like mathematical ones, they're not the same as the kind of propositions as those that that tell us things about real rocks and trees and tables and chairs and the like. Mathematical propositions are just an example of another kind of proposition that isn't like that, and doesn't depend on things actually existing to be true, even though we casually use the word "exist" when talking about them.
Of course there are mathematical Platonists who think that there really is such a thing as the number 2 that actually exists in some immaterial realm of forms, but I think that's just another prime example of this kind of confusion. Not all sentences have to be reduced to descriptions of the world to be able to be true or false.
Reductive materialists take all propositions to be trying to describe what exists, then say that only that matter exists, which gives absurd results. People like you do the same reduction of all propositions to descriptive ones, and then appeal to all kinds of immaterial things existing to avoid that absurdity, just falling into a different one instead. I say not all propositions reduce to descriptive ones -- when it comes to descriptive ones, yeah, the only kind of stuff that exists is "material", broadly speaking (physical), but there's lots of important things to talk about besides what does or doesn't exist.
How do you objectively ground prescriptive statements?
How do you objectively ground descriptive statements? This is a major point here and maybe I breezed past it too quickly before. People disagree about what is or isn't real, all the time -- maybe a little less now in the scientific era, but in ancient times especially, look at conflicting creation stories from different religions for a great example. Religions aside, people look at things with their subjective senses and make immediate subjective judgements about what is or isn't true based on those. People aren't even born with the concepts of object permanence and three dimensional space -- young children
The unnecessary use of at best slightly applicable philosophical terms made me do a double-take too, but after applying the principle of charity (another philosophical concept: try to interpret a text in such a way as it makes the most sense possible) I think that they were going for is "positivism" as in "verificationism" as in "only the things we can (easily) measure matter" as in "all we care about are the numbers (that we've chosen to care about, e.g. the number of people on our mailing list, and not any of that hard-to-quantify-but-maybe-more-important stuff)", and then "utilitarianism" as in "the ends justifies the means" as in "it doesn't matter what else (e.g. that hard-to-quantify stuff) we have to sacrifice, we'll do anything to get our special chosen numbers higher!"
It does not protect you from the consequences of that speech
It absolutely does protect from certain specific consequences. That is what freedom is: protection from certain consequences of action.
Sure, it doesn't protect from all consequences, but it protects you from government retaliation, and from violent retaliation by private parties, and a broad assortment of such consequences. If it didn't, and the government or private parties could punish you without limit for speaking, then there wouldn't be any sense in which speech was "free".
Sure, it doesn't protect from all consequences, but that just means that speech is not absolutely free.
The Monte Carlo is also a famous casino, and not some kind of mathy casino where everyone employs the Monte Carlo method to win at gambling either. (The method was code-named after the casino, though, but being a code name it explicitly had no connection to the content of the method).
It's my birthday and I don't want to spend a lot of time responding (and I expect next week to be terribly busy so I probably won't want to continue after that), but there's a handful of things I do want to respond to in here.
I'm saying that it is not possible for multiple systems to be objective. If there is an objective system then all differing systems must be false and therefore not objective. You said “most ethical systems employed by most philosophers, such as deontology and utilitarianism, are both non-theistic and objective.” Calling two differing systems objective makes no sense.
There's two different senses of "objective" being conflated here. One, the sense I meant when I said that there are many different kinds of secular objective morality, is the sense whereby a given point of view or ethical system considers the answer to the question "are there objectively right and wrong moral assertions?" to be "yes". The other, that you're conflating with it, is whether a given point of view or ethical system is the objectively correct one to use.
My initial point was that there are plenty of logically possible, non-contradictory stances one can take where ones believes some things are objectively right and wrong (morally) without believing in God; it doesn't follow from the rejection of God that one must reject morality, unless one also holds onto religious assumptions about morality, which most people who reject God don't. (Some do, and they become nihilists, and even people like Nietzsche argued that that is something to be overcome, a lingering vestige of the religious worldview, and not a good thing that people should strive for).
Which of those stances is the objectively correct one to take epistemically is disputed between them, but that doesn't mean that none of them is correct, any more than the existence of disputes between religions means none of those religions is correct. "What in particular is morally right and wrong, and how can we tell?" is a different question from "is anything actually morally right or wrong, objectively?", and there are lots of secular viewpoints who agree (along with most religious viewpoints) that the answer to the latter is "yes", even though they disagree about answers to the former question (as do different religions).
So if you reject dualism can I deduce that you are a materialist? If all that exists is matter, where does morality come from? Is it matter? How do you account for it? You claim it is universal so it can't be only in my mind. You have rejected that things have moral properties. What is it?
I'm not strictly speaking a materialist, but I'm probably close enough to what you mean by that. I'm a physicalist, which is different from a materialist in that there are physical things besides just matter, and that I reject that there are ontological material substances distinct from their attributes, and I'm also a little unusual (but not alone) amongst physicalists in that I'm also a panpsychist; there are no non-physical mental substances, nor are there even non-physical mental properties of otherwise physical things, but there is a mental way of looking at the same physical properties of physical things.
(This isn't really related to the moral issue to I'll be short about this: basically, what fundamentally exists is a web of interactions, which you can visualize as a graphical web of lines connecting at nodes. The objects that exist in reality are those nodes, which are defined entirely by the lines connecting to them -- there's no such thing as a point connected to no lines. The attributes of a thing are those lines -- the attributes of a thing are the ways that it interacts with other things. Mental experience is then what the lines connecting to the node that is you seem like to you; they are the reciprocal of the attributes you seem to have to the rest of the world, the other half of the equation of how you and
This whole problem could have been avoided if we had just done the sensible thing in the first place:
When you have a group of extant species, and then you discover that there are a whole lot of extinct species that are more commonly related to that group of extant species than to anything else, you generally say that you've discovered a bunch of extinct members of that extant group.
So when we discovered the relationship between e.g. Stegosaurs and Finches, rather than saying "we've discovered that birds are dinosaurs", we should have said "we've discovered that dinosaurs were birds".
love cannot exist without free will, and free will involves the possibility of evil
That's still assuming the incompatibilist conception of free will. On a compatibilist conception of free will, it is possible for God to guarantee that evil does not occur, even in a world with free-willed people, and so the possibility of love cannot justify allowing evil because you don't have to allow evil to get the possibility of live.
I'm interested in hearing which arguments you believe are the strongest, yet fall short of the mark.
Plantinga's free will theodicy, which falls short of the mark because it misconstrues what free will even is (randomness is not freedom), and so falsely concludes that allowing free will means giving up the ability to eliminate all evil from the universe by design.
I'm also not even convinced that free will is so valuable that, even if it did necessitate allowing evil, it would be worth it. If freedom is just the freedom to err, I'd rather just automatically always do the right thing and enjoy the benefits of that. I don't really want to be made in such a way that I sometimes screw up just because (in fact I make enormous efforts not to be like that), and I definitely don't want other people to be that way and then suffer the consequences of it.
No other theodicy I'm familiar with even warrants a response IMO.
If an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God must stop evil, such a being possesses less free will than His human creations.
Firstly, this still assume the incompatibilist conception of free will, that to be free means to be undetermined, or in other words, to be random. I disagree with that, for reasons I've argued all over this thread already. And, like above, its far from established that God would be better for having that kind of so-called "freedom"; I'd consider the absolute inability to err a virtue, even if it did mean less "freedom" somehow.
Furthermore, even if an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God could allow evil if he felt like it, him ever feeling like it would make him not-all-good; and if somehow he randomly did it despite not feeling like it, that would make him not-all-powerful.
You seem to be putting the full weight of moral responsibility on God because he does not always act to stop it. Don't forget that the individual is still morally responsible for the action. Also, victims are sinners. Scripture teaches that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Suffering and death are the penalty of sin. No one is good. Why should we be entitled to mercy? God needs a monumental excuse for being just and allowing people to receive the penalty of sin? What is amazing is that God comes into the world, lives the sinless life we fail to, and then takes the penalty upon himself for all those who believe in him. We are certainly not entitled to mercy and yet he provides a way to receive mercy.
If God is all-powerful then he could have made a universe full of people who are not sinners. He chose to, at the very least, allow sin to randomly come into the world, if it wasn't deliberately part of his plan. If he's all-powerful, then everything that happens, including people sinning, happens either because he wanted it to, or because he rolled a metaphorical die, shrugged and said "ok, I'll allow it".
Free will theodicies of course argue that free will is such a good thing that it would be worse to deny it than to allow its consequence, namely (they argue) the possibility of sin randomly (i.e. by nondeterministic so-called "free will") coming into the world. IIRC you've already said you reject such free-will theodicies (can I assume you're probably a Calvinist?), but even if not: those fail because they misconstrue what free will even is (randomness is not freedom), and so even if free will is an overriding good that could justify allowing the horrors that exist in the world if those were a necessary concession to it, they're not; if there were an all-powerful God, he could have made a universe full of free-willed people who were born as perfect saints and would never choose to sin, even though they could choose to sin if they had any reason to want to do so, which they wouldn't.
Creating known-defective living creatures and then letting them suffer from their defects or worse still, actively punishing them instead of just fixing them, is not the act of an all-good, all-powerful being. It sounds like the kind of thing an evil being would do, though it could maybe be the best that a less-than-all-powerful being could do (or an unfortunate oversight by a less-than-all-knowing being), but then in any of those cases that being wouldn't count as God.
Edicts are not what I base morality on. The absolute standard for morality that a Christian holds to is God himself. Not an edict. That is completely different than a moral system chosen arbitrarily as you seem to be suggesting.
How do you know what God is like, what he wants, or what he says is moral, and how do you reconcile what you think you know in that regard with people of other religions who think they know that God is/wants/says something different? How is your religion not just as "arbitrarily" chosen as any non-religious ethical system? People, including religious people, have to pick, somehow, for whatever reasons, what they think is the right way to tell good from bad. None of them think their choice is arbitrary -- they all have their reasons -- and all of them think they've got the right answer, even though others disagree. Anyone who's not a moral nihilist will agree that at least one of them might have the right answer, even though others disagree.
The moral nihlist of course will say that their disagreement is evidence that none of them, religious or otherwise, have the right answer, because (they say) no answer is right or wrong, they're all just arbitrary choices, including the religious views. But you and I both disagree with that. All I'm saying is that there are some views, chosen from among the various differing views (including the different religions), according
Thank you; and, even with an exact solution governing it's behavior (and the exact details of the initial condition), computing the evolution of increasingly more chaotic systems is increasingly more time consuming, to an eventual limit that some systems' evolution cannot even in theory be computed faster than the systems actually evolve.
Taking a step back, it should be pretty obvious that it would be impossible in principle to compute the evolution of the universe faster than the state of the universe evolves, because the mechanism doing the computation is a part of the universe, and the act of computation is a part of the universe's evolution. The physical limits of the universe therefore impose physical limits on the speed of computation, and at some point you reach a maximum theoretically-possible computation efficiency, and a maximally-efficient computer of a given size can only compute some maximum complexity of system faster than that system itself evolves; to predict a larger system you need a larger computer, and to predict the entire universe you would need to turn the entire universe into a computer... that then emulates its old self. And still more slowly than its old self would have just evolved on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
Being composed of baryonic matter exposes one to high levels of chemicals, especially for those living outside of the intergalactic voids. To avoid unwanted chemical reaction in proximity to galaxy clusters, convert your substrate entirely to dark matter.
A Google account gets you email (and an RSS reader) and a blog (with RSS syndication) and it used to get you an (XMPP) IM account before they discontinued Talk, plus lots of hosting services like YouTube and Google Photos and so on. That's an integrated platform using entirely open standards, no walled garden required.
I will grant that having a one-stop-shop to get and access accounts on all the different kinds of services that collectively already did what Facebook does is a useful thing, but the point is that Facebook isn't actually doing any individual thing new, it's just redoing a bunch of things that were already being done, and doing them in a walled garden.
You could do things like, even at a one-stop shop, that outside of a walled garden. A Google account is pretty much that; Gmail (and back when it existed, Talk) is your Messenger, Blogger+RSS(+Gmail) is your feed and following, etc.
What is the "social networking part", besides maybe an easy way of finding out what "address" (username) to find someone at?
Blogs and RSS feeds handle feeds and following.
Email and IM handle messaging.
Addresses/usernames can be shared over those channels, or even older ones, or found with search engines, so I don't see what was missing before that FaceSpace adds to the equation, besides a walled garden, ads, and privacy invasion.
Go back to using the perfectly good open technologies that predates all this walled garden social network shit.
Unlike email vs telegrams, Facebook adds nothing that didn't already exist before (in email, instant messaging, newsgroups/forums/mailing lists, websites, etc) except ads.
He is obviously giving you more return per hour of pay, so if you won't give him more per pay per hour for that return, maybe one of your competitors will...
While I personally like that idea, the counterargument I've heard against it is that it defeats the bandwidth- and CPU- and memory-saving purposes of blocking ads, and gets you only the security and anti-annoyance features. Combining your sandbox idea with some kind of resource-limiter on the sandbox (so the site can only use a reasonable amount of bandwidth, CPU, memory, etc) seems like it could alleviate some of those concerns, but then I suspect that the actual parts of the site the user wants to interact with would be bogged down by sharing those limited resources with all the adware that's desperately trying to hog them.
Also add to that that "warrant" in general (outside the specific legal sense) means "permission" or "justification", not "command". A legal warrant is the judge specifically OKing certain action; but it is not a command that certain actions be taken, just an official declaration that those actions are warranted, justified, permitted.
I'm also white, in my mid 30s, no criminal record, don't hang out with scumbags, etc, and I have four stories about the cops in my small hometown in the coastal mountains of California to share:
First, a decade and a half ago, I was walking down the street when a cop drove by and waved me over as they parked their car. They asked if my name was John. It isn't, and I told them so, and they left. Then turned around and asked for ID, confirmed it, and left. I was left confused. What the hell just happened?
Next, a little over a decade ago when I had just moved out of town to the nearest slightly-bigger city, and used to come back to my home town to visit my girlfriend a few times a week, every single time I was leaving town I would be tailed by cops, pulled over just before I left town, wait 15-20 minutes as they double-checked to make sure I still didn't have any warrants out since two days ago (I never have, I have no criminal record besides minor traffic violations from years before), one time actually calling another officer who "heard" that someone with my (unusual) first name had a warrant out for him to come look at me and say "nope, not him" (AFTER running my license already). I have no fucking idea why they did this, just to harass me it seems but why me, some random nobody? Did they do this to lots of people, out of boredom? This sounds just like the kind of thing that would be called a "DWB" if I weren't white. (I've mostly had bad experiences with traffic cops before too, but mostly just the usual "money-making" kind of traffic cop behavior, only occasionally accompanied by blatant lies from them).
Then a few years ago I was assaulted by some teenagers in a nearby park after pointing out they're not allowed to smoke there (also, they're underage and can't smoke at all, but that part hadn't even crossed my mind). I called the police and lead them to the punks still nearby on the other side of the park and wanted to press charges. They said "we'll just talk to their coaches" and sent me away. No fucking justice I guess, even in the face of the most blatant of crimes? One of the kids tried to scare me with a "do you know who my father is" (I told him I didn't care), so maybe they were some of those privileged elites I hear about? (Also, they were also white, and neonazis apparently, as they called me a "white nigger" and "race traitor", what the fuck does that have to do with anything?)
Earlier this year I had a complete fucking meltdown in my house from an overload of work- and family-related stress, and the neighbors called in a noise complaint, twice, over the sound of my screaming and bawling. The cops came to my door, and just wanted to make sure I was OK, and said that they were happy to have gotten to meet "one of the good citizens", me, instead of the "kind of people [they] usually have to deal with". I was shocked, absolutely shocked at how unbelievably nice and police they were, when I expected "cops are here, that means I'm in trouble".
I just don't know what to think about police anymore.
As a former rabid Apple fanboy (16ish years in recovery), that's about my assessment of Apple today, or across the last decade or so. Nothing worth getting super riled up and excited about because it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but still... the alternatives are worse.
I think they're snarking on the possible interpretation of the text as "20 and 24 year olds born in the 1960s", i.e. people currently in their 20s, but born 50-ish years ago (who would then obviously be lying about one of those things).
Paying for retirement out of current tax revenues (as we do with Social Security) basically is children caring for their aging parents, just on a societal scale rather than a familial scale. The working young pay to fund the care of the non-working old. And doing it on a societal scale seems much more fair than every individual retiree depending on the fickle financial fortunes of their particular children.
At best, an adherent to your system could say “according to how the majority of people’s appetites seem, it is probably wrong to murder.”
Not at all, in several ways. One, majoritarianism doesn't matter. Nobody gets to tell anybody else that their appetites are aberrant and don't count; the objective good must account for all appetites, just like the objective truth must account for all observations.
Second, this seems to confuse what an appetite is: I can't have an appetite about whether or not it is wrong to murder you, so it's not like it would be possible to even have a unanimous-minus-one consensus of appetites that murdering the one objector is good; appetites aren't desires, or intentions, they're experiences. The most relevant appetites in determining that matter are those of the would-be victim, and the job of the rest in trying to answer the question of whether murdering them is OK would be to consider what it's like to be murdered and it that seems good or bad according to their hypothetical appetites as the hypothetical victim. In more contentious cases you'd want to actually go and experience the thing someone else experiences and see if that feels good or bad to you in those circumstances, but with something like there's experience enough to draw from to make that inference without further testing -- we've all been injured at some point or another, to some extent or another, and we know whether that feels good or bad, and since murdering someone would involve injuring them we can conclude a lot about it without having to be murdered ourselves, obviously.
Third, there don't have to be broad absolute rules for things to be objectively true or false, so the conclusion wouldn't even need to be "murder is (probably) wrong", but more along the lines of "it is usually wrong to murder"; it might be (though in the case of murder, it isn't) the case that some times a thing is right to do and some times it's wrong, but each particular case is objectively right or wrong, even though there isn't a pattern to them -- or rather, even though that pattern isn't the one that applies to them.
On top of all that it assumes uniformity of nature when your system can’t provide an absolute basis for that either. You have to accept it as an axiom to even begin to use your system.
Every system must take some things as axioms. I actually kind of misspoke when I called it an axiom of my system earlier though, as it's not taken without any justification, it's taken as a consequence of even more fundamental principles. Even these aren't really the ultimate starting point, but those more fundamental principles are essentially: we ought to try to figure out what's true and false, good and bad, etc; and to try try anything, we must assume neither success nor failure is inevitable. Denying uniformity of nature would mean failure at figuring out what's true and false was inevitable, so consequently we cannot deny it. (The deeper principles still answer the question of why we ought to figure out what's true or false, good or bad, and the answer to that is essentially that no matter what we do, we're attempting in one way or another to employ truths as means to achieve good ends, so no matter what we do it behooves us to figure out what's true and false, good and bad).
I believe that a consistent materialist worldview does reduce to skepticism.
It's interesting that you read my Codex, because just the other day I was thinking "wow, this guy is a walking almost-self-admitted example of my contention in the Codex that fideists are just nihilists hiding behind God, and nihilists are just godless fideists". (Of course that last part isn't very new, Neitzsche concluded more or less that, but that's not well-known about him). You and a nihilist (or radical skeptic if you like) share so much philosophical framework in common, and it all looks equally faulty to me; it hardly makes an
crap, I accidentally hit submit before I was done, but I have to do other things now... will continue more later
To say that something seems good or seems evil implies that goodness or evilness exists. Though moral judgments can be made prescriptively, you have used these terms descriptively through this conversation. If you claim it exists...
This is the fundamental thing that I think is at the root of a lot of philosophical issues, ethics especially. The truth of a proposition only implies anything about the existence of something if the proposition is saying something about what does or doesn't exist, and not all propositions do that. We casually use the word "exist" in modern English in places where strictly speaking we probably shouldn't, and to avoid obnoxious circumlocutions I let myself do that too, like I have been in this conversation. But in an ideal language we wouldn't do that.
For analogy, consider the proposition that 2+2=4. Where is the number two? Where is the number four? Do numbers "exist", at least in the same way that rocks and trees and tables and chairs do, and if so, where, or what other objects constitute their existence? Does there need to be some singular cosmic table of addition somewhere out there to make propositions about addition true? It seems kind of a nonsense question. We can say true things about the relations between different quantities of things without there needing to be a, or the, number two out there somewhere. Because despite the superficial grammatical appearance of it, the proposition 2+2=4 isn't attempting to describe concrete facts about the world, but rather just the relations between concepts, that might or might not apply to any things that actually exist. Mathematicians can and frequently do just make up conceptual structures that so far as anyone knows have no bearing on reality, and then figure out true statements about those structures' relations to other structures.
I'm not saying that ethical propositions are the same kind as mathematical ones, but just that, like mathematical ones, they're not the same as the kind of propositions as those that that tell us things about real rocks and trees and tables and chairs and the like. Mathematical propositions are just an example of another kind of proposition that isn't like that, and doesn't depend on things actually existing to be true, even though we casually use the word "exist" when talking about them.
Of course there are mathematical Platonists who think that there really is such a thing as the number 2 that actually exists in some immaterial realm of forms, but I think that's just another prime example of this kind of confusion. Not all sentences have to be reduced to descriptions of the world to be able to be true or false.
Reductive materialists take all propositions to be trying to describe what exists, then say that only that matter exists, which gives absurd results. People like you do the same reduction of all propositions to descriptive ones, and then appeal to all kinds of immaterial things existing to avoid that absurdity, just falling into a different one instead. I say not all propositions reduce to descriptive ones -- when it comes to descriptive ones, yeah, the only kind of stuff that exists is "material", broadly speaking (physical), but there's lots of important things to talk about besides what does or doesn't exist.
How do you objectively ground prescriptive statements?
How do you objectively ground descriptive statements? This is a major point here and maybe I breezed past it too quickly before. People disagree about what is or isn't real, all the time -- maybe a little less now in the scientific era, but in ancient times especially, look at conflicting creation stories from different religions for a great example. Religions aside, people look at things with their subjective senses and make immediate subjective judgements about what is or isn't true based on those. People aren't even born with the concepts of object permanence and three dimensional space -- young children
The unnecessary use of at best slightly applicable philosophical terms made me do a double-take too, but after applying the principle of charity (another philosophical concept: try to interpret a text in such a way as it makes the most sense possible) I think that they were going for is "positivism" as in "verificationism" as in "only the things we can (easily) measure matter" as in "all we care about are the numbers (that we've chosen to care about, e.g. the number of people on our mailing list, and not any of that hard-to-quantify-but-maybe-more-important stuff)", and then "utilitarianism" as in "the ends justifies the means" as in "it doesn't matter what else (e.g. that hard-to-quantify stuff) we have to sacrifice, we'll do anything to get our special chosen numbers higher!"
It does not protect you from the consequences of that speech
It absolutely does protect from certain specific consequences. That is what freedom is: protection from certain consequences of action.
Sure, it doesn't protect from all consequences, but it protects you from government retaliation, and from violent retaliation by private parties, and a broad assortment of such consequences. If it didn't, and the government or private parties could punish you without limit for speaking, then there wouldn't be any sense in which speech was "free".
Sure, it doesn't protect from all consequences, but that just means that speech is not absolutely free.
The Monte Carlo is also a famous casino, and not some kind of mathy casino where everyone employs the Monte Carlo method to win at gambling either. (The method was code-named after the casino, though, but being a code name it explicitly had no connection to the content of the method).
It's my birthday and I don't want to spend a lot of time responding (and I expect next week to be terribly busy so I probably won't want to continue after that), but there's a handful of things I do want to respond to in here.
I'm saying that it is not possible for multiple systems to be objective. If there is an objective system then all differing systems must be false and therefore not objective. You said “most ethical systems employed by most philosophers, such as deontology and utilitarianism, are both non-theistic and objective.” Calling two differing systems objective makes no sense.
There's two different senses of "objective" being conflated here. One, the sense I meant when I said that there are many different kinds of secular objective morality, is the sense whereby a given point of view or ethical system considers the answer to the question "are there objectively right and wrong moral assertions?" to be "yes". The other, that you're conflating with it, is whether a given point of view or ethical system is the objectively correct one to use.
My initial point was that there are plenty of logically possible, non-contradictory stances one can take where ones believes some things are objectively right and wrong (morally) without believing in God; it doesn't follow from the rejection of God that one must reject morality, unless one also holds onto religious assumptions about morality, which most people who reject God don't. (Some do, and they become nihilists, and even people like Nietzsche argued that that is something to be overcome, a lingering vestige of the religious worldview, and not a good thing that people should strive for).
Which of those stances is the objectively correct one to take epistemically is disputed between them, but that doesn't mean that none of them is correct, any more than the existence of disputes between religions means none of those religions is correct. "What in particular is morally right and wrong, and how can we tell?" is a different question from "is anything actually morally right or wrong, objectively?", and there are lots of secular viewpoints who agree (along with most religious viewpoints) that the answer to the latter is "yes", even though they disagree about answers to the former question (as do different religions).
So if you reject dualism can I deduce that you are a materialist? If all that exists is matter, where does morality come from? Is it matter? How do you account for it? You claim it is universal so it can't be only in my mind. You have rejected that things have moral properties. What is it?
I'm not strictly speaking a materialist, but I'm probably close enough to what you mean by that. I'm a physicalist, which is different from a materialist in that there are physical things besides just matter, and that I reject that there are ontological material substances distinct from their attributes, and I'm also a little unusual (but not alone) amongst physicalists in that I'm also a panpsychist; there are no non-physical mental substances, nor are there even non-physical mental properties of otherwise physical things, but there is a mental way of looking at the same physical properties of physical things.
(This isn't really related to the moral issue to I'll be short about this: basically, what fundamentally exists is a web of interactions, which you can visualize as a graphical web of lines connecting at nodes. The objects that exist in reality are those nodes, which are defined entirely by the lines connecting to them -- there's no such thing as a point connected to no lines. The attributes of a thing are those lines -- the attributes of a thing are the ways that it interacts with other things. Mental experience is then what the lines connecting to the node that is you seem like to you; they are the reciprocal of the attributes you seem to have to the rest of the world, the other half of the equation of how you and
This whole problem could have been avoided if we had just done the sensible thing in the first place:
When you have a group of extant species, and then you discover that there are a whole lot of extinct species that are more commonly related to that group of extant species than to anything else, you generally say that you've discovered a bunch of extinct members of that extant group.
So when we discovered the relationship between e.g. Stegosaurs and Finches, rather than saying "we've discovered that birds are dinosaurs", we should have said "we've discovered that dinosaurs were birds".
love cannot exist without free will, and free will involves the possibility of evil
That's still assuming the incompatibilist conception of free will. On a compatibilist conception of free will, it is possible for God to guarantee that evil does not occur, even in a world with free-willed people, and so the possibility of love cannot justify allowing evil because you don't have to allow evil to get the possibility of live.
I'm interested in hearing which arguments you believe are the strongest, yet fall short of the mark.
Plantinga's free will theodicy, which falls short of the mark because it misconstrues what free will even is (randomness is not freedom), and so falsely concludes that allowing free will means giving up the ability to eliminate all evil from the universe by design.
I'm also not even convinced that free will is so valuable that, even if it did necessitate allowing evil, it would be worth it. If freedom is just the freedom to err, I'd rather just automatically always do the right thing and enjoy the benefits of that. I don't really want to be made in such a way that I sometimes screw up just because (in fact I make enormous efforts not to be like that), and I definitely don't want other people to be that way and then suffer the consequences of it.
No other theodicy I'm familiar with even warrants a response IMO.
If an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God must stop evil, such a being possesses less free will than His human creations.
Firstly, this still assume the incompatibilist conception of free will, that to be free means to be undetermined, or in other words, to be random. I disagree with that, for reasons I've argued all over this thread already. And, like above, its far from established that God would be better for having that kind of so-called "freedom"; I'd consider the absolute inability to err a virtue, even if it did mean less "freedom" somehow.
Furthermore, even if an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God could allow evil if he felt like it, him ever feeling like it would make him not-all-good; and if somehow he randomly did it despite not feeling like it, that would make him not-all-powerful.
You seem to be putting the full weight of moral responsibility on God because he does not always act to stop it. Don't forget that the individual is still morally responsible for the action. Also, victims are sinners. Scripture teaches that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Suffering and death are the penalty of sin. No one is good. Why should we be entitled to mercy? God needs a monumental excuse for being just and allowing people to receive the penalty of sin? What is amazing is that God comes into the world, lives the sinless life we fail to, and then takes the penalty upon himself for all those who believe in him. We are certainly not entitled to mercy and yet he provides a way to receive mercy.
If God is all-powerful then he could have made a universe full of people who are not sinners. He chose to, at the very least, allow sin to randomly come into the world, if it wasn't deliberately part of his plan. If he's all-powerful, then everything that happens, including people sinning, happens either because he wanted it to, or because he rolled a metaphorical die, shrugged and said "ok, I'll allow it".
Free will theodicies of course argue that free will is such a good thing that it would be worse to deny it than to allow its consequence, namely (they argue) the possibility of sin randomly (i.e. by nondeterministic so-called "free will") coming into the world. IIRC you've already said you reject such free-will theodicies (can I assume you're probably a Calvinist?), but even if not: those fail because they misconstrue what free will even is (randomness is not freedom), and so even if free will is an overriding good that could justify allowing the horrors that exist in the world if those were a necessary concession to it, they're not; if there were an all-powerful God, he could have made a universe full of free-willed people who were born as perfect saints and would never choose to sin, even though they could choose to sin if they had any reason to want to do so, which they wouldn't.
Creating known-defective living creatures and then letting them suffer from their defects or worse still, actively punishing them instead of just fixing them, is not the act of an all-good, all-powerful being. It sounds like the kind of thing an evil being would do, though it could maybe be the best that a less-than-all-powerful being could do (or an unfortunate oversight by a less-than-all-knowing being), but then in any of those cases that being wouldn't count as God.
Edicts are not what I base morality on. The absolute standard for morality that a Christian holds to is God himself. Not an edict. That is completely different than a moral system chosen arbitrarily as you seem to be suggesting.
How do you know what God is like, what he wants, or what he says is moral, and how do you reconcile what you think you know in that regard with people of other religions who think they know that God is/wants/says something different? How is your religion not just as "arbitrarily" chosen as any non-religious ethical system? People, including religious people, have to pick, somehow, for whatever reasons, what they think is the right way to tell good from bad. None of them think their choice is arbitrary -- they all have their reasons -- and all of them think they've got the right answer, even though others disagree. Anyone who's not a moral nihilist will agree that at least one of them might have the right answer, even though others disagree.
The moral nihlist of course will say that their disagreement is evidence that none of them, religious or otherwise, have the right answer, because (they say) no answer is right or wrong, they're all just arbitrary choices, including the religious views. But you and I both disagree with that. All I'm saying is that there are some views, chosen from among the various differing views (including the different religions), according
Thank you; and, even with an exact solution governing it's behavior (and the exact details of the initial condition), computing the evolution of increasingly more chaotic systems is increasingly more time consuming, to an eventual limit that some systems' evolution cannot even in theory be computed faster than the systems actually evolve.
Taking a step back, it should be pretty obvious that it would be impossible in principle to compute the evolution of the universe faster than the state of the universe evolves, because the mechanism doing the computation is a part of the universe, and the act of computation is a part of the universe's evolution. The physical limits of the universe therefore impose physical limits on the speed of computation, and at some point you reach a maximum theoretically-possible computation efficiency, and a maximally-efficient computer of a given size can only compute some maximum complexity of system faster than that system itself evolves; to predict a larger system you need a larger computer, and to predict the entire universe you would need to turn the entire universe into a computer... that then emulates its old self. And still more slowly than its old self would have just evolved on its own.