do you think life for the average citizen in a country like the UK or USA has got better or worse or stayed much the same, in the last 2000 years? — universeness

I don't have a clear concept of how our physiological reward system works so I can't give an exact answer. What if people 2000 years ago experience the same level of satisfaction by having a full meal as what now only winning a hundred grands of lottery can stimulate? Empirically desire seems to be infinitive (which is why addiction can form) so I can't really tell if we on average feel better and "live better lives"(especially if the newer generation takes the advantage for granted).
At the end of the day I can't speak for citizens in general. Reflective ones often rationalize and therefore devastate what could have been a pleasure to them.

I explained to him it would still be him compelling her to interact with him, even if just by engineering her nature; she would have no choice in the matter. Furthermore, why would, or should, she want him, given any measure of freedom? — ToothyMaw

Why would, or should, we humans want a spouse? Do we really have control over our sexual desire (though we may control our behavior caused by the desire), or is it just some engineering of nature in our genes to make us breedable? If thought & behavior manipulation is such a taboo, we shouldn't even see giving birth or education as moral in the first place.

Do you really think justice is non-political? Do you really think justice depends on representation?

Are patterns exactly equal to rules?

Notice the difference between simply listing the array: 2, 4, 8 ...

and requiring such array to: start from 2, multiply the previous number by 2 to get the next number in order.

Well, you might as well argue that we understand each word from observing patterns. Such as the way we follow the rule of the word "multiply" by doing what gives us results that accord with what we observe: we observe that multiplying 1 by 2 is 1+1; 2 by 3 is 2 + 2 + 2, etc, so when we follow my more specific rule above, we just follow the pattern to get 2+2 = 4; 4+4 = 8... So the rule is still just patterns packed together, each allowing some discrepancy of understanding.

Btw, I think at some point in Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein actually discussed the margin where the rule learner turns from observing patterns to understanding rules - his conclusion if I remember correctly is just as obscure. I'll take a closer look at what he was trying to elaborate on.

Yes, and thanks for pointing out that we are assuming our reasons to be proper.

Sorry, I tend to unintentionally write long sentences. I meant that given how developed the modern morality system (of course I'm referring to the slightly liberal side) is, it is even easier than ever for people to assume certain things to be correct or not with circular reasoning embedded in the system. To this end, they are not actually applying reason - but simply following different degrees of rules. That's why I said if we want to engage our real reasoning faculty now, we need to approach the limits where this system of rules is no longer able to give a simple yes or no answer.

Ok, I see where you are leading at. The thing is, in many examples you raised the proper values or at least reactions in accordance to the values can be directly taught without undertaking the due process of reasoning. What if the question is more complex, e.g., is it necessary and respectful to history to intentionally choose a non-white casting for the founders of the US in the musical Alexander Hamilton? I believe that under such circumstances, 8 out of 10 "random kids on the street" would divert the topic into mere racism and give a pc answer because that's the only way they've been instructed to reason, which is now doubtfully reason anymore.
To me, reason essentially requires some "breaking the frame" mental process, like, when we say, let's not assume such and such to be correct - what if I don't call the police even when I'm stolen something? Whether we return to the original conclusion that we'd better call the police doesn't matter - it is our ability to recognize and approach the limit of rules and symbols which particularly in modern times have developed to appear so comprehensive and self-explanatory, that really distinguishes fundamental reasoning and the rest.

I don't think we are on the same topic here. Let's clarify our discrepancy in beliefs - I was trying to say that to be able to think differently from the conventional modes shaped by our patriarchic society, the reasoning faculty is definitely involved no matter the extent, but your point was that there's some threshold to reasoning and the thinking process below which reason is not triggered. Is that correct?

(B)ut I don't think this applies to reason proper, which includes judgement, inferences, deduction, etc

While I agree that most differences in viewpoints, statements, and beliefs have nothing to do with reason itself and I myself hate "debates" whatsoever in my high school classes in which speech precedes reflection, I do think that in the patriarchic society in which backgrounds and perspectives are instilled to women by men, to recognize the necessity for some new kind of value, as long as this "newness" does not originate merely from the biological difference between men and women, requires a certain extent of inference and judgment - if that's how you define reason proper - upon women themselves.

"To quite the contrary, it's always about the mouse, the tree, and the spatiotemporal relation between them; none of which are propositions." - @creativesoul

I didn't track far along the thread but from the first argument:

As you can break down your content of belief, so can I the proposition - that a certain statement about either the mouse, the tree, or the spatiotemporal relation is true or false - and as far as your atomization of content can go so can the proposition.

The interesting part that you mentioned is that belief does not require naming, but does proposition? I don't know.

I do find signs from feminism and women's engagement in politics, etc. that women start to rethink the rules and values that are mostly men-framed and want to play a role in reframing them. While most reframing still has to do with biological or economical powers (I'm assuming that's what you mean by ethics), it would be interesting to speculate when it extends to other areas.

Hum, one thing I find about sex - the more I reflect on it the more I want to get rid of it. It's like some otherly pleasure imposed upon me through my body structure. Wouldn't sound like a bad idea if I had more control of it with future technology, like, I can remove my sack and plug it back in whenever I want.

I guess we'll have to keep bringing it up then since the problem is not addressed sufficiently and continues to worsen.

For example, you find out about an artist on the Internet and you really like his or her works. You want to support him or her. This is where the problem begins. Close to everywhere is hinting you the only means to do so: join the YouTube membership; subscribe to the Patreon; buy the merch, etc. This may not be the way you want to support the artist, nor does the artist find money the optimal means to support him. But because he needs money to live and make more arts, and more importantly, the corporations, if not the society in general, makes money paying so much more convenient than other methods and their goal is simply to suck as much as possible from your wallet, you are pressured to receive the signal that if you want to show the symbol of supporting him, it has to be through money. The assumption this creates would be - if people don't buy the merch, subscribe to Patreon, or join the membership, people don't appreciate the work.
Does the artist or do you have a say about what the values of the works are now? On the market, technically no. It's the sense of powerlessness inflicted upon both sides.
Or, if you really don't give a fuzz about whatever others say at all and do art for art's sake, I do have to admire that as that's what I have never encountered.

If art is bought and sold in a particular price range then clearly there is an agreement among art buyers and sellers about the art's monetary value.

Is it really an agreement or enforcement by the more powerful, in this case, the wealthier, upon the less - but since the more powerful frame the language and culture at the same time, they get to "justify" this enforcement and make people accept it as a norm or mutual "agreement"?

Yes, it can be argued that this is the case for close to any aspect - it's just that being materialistic about some does not trigger me as much as being so about arts.

Once you spend money to own it, a transaction is performed already, so it's already funged.

You see, I shouldn't have written philosophy with anger and I take responsibility for the inaccuracy of my language. But no, I am completely against objective aesthetic standards. What I am arguing is that when money or market gradually makes up a greater role in considering the worth of art, we seem to accept that how much art is worth lies completely in how much revenue an artist makes, or how willing the public is to consume for the art. Had there been many diverse standards to look at arts, the involvement of money drastically narrows down the scope we can look at it.

I didn't read for long, but it's from what I have read, it's actually well over 100 years: "The duration of copyright in these works is generally computed the same way as for works created on or after January 1, 1978: life plus 70 years or 95 or 120 years, depending on the nature of authorship." as from your link. If we set aside the discussion of whether the length of copyright protection is reasonable, the problem there still is - is this decided by artists themselves or the legislators who convince the artists to agree with the law? Of course, under the current environment in which capitalism dominates the logic of speech the legislators can justify it as "out of concern for their families" and the artists may "choose" to benefit their descendants - I am arguing the same point as in the main post: if you do care about artists being able to make a living and help their families, why not enact laws that ensure profit for them during their lifetime so they have total control of the assets they deserve? When you grant posthumous copyrights you are not necessarily granting them to the artists, but to the corporations that they've been signed to, whom they have no control of in terms of whatever to do with their work after their death. Just as in the example I raised of Glenn Gould and Sony, Sony obviously has committed sacrilegious acts upon the works of Gould under the protection of that posthumous copyrights - who has benefited more from here, Gould and his family or Sony? As in the conclusion of my main post, this rule has been so well structured in explaining its logic and morality that people follow it as if it is righteous; nonetheless a little bit of reconsideration tells me at least that there's certainly a better way for arts and artists had capitalism not dominated the rule-making of art evaluation.
To take even one more step back, the works of certain artists remain undervalued until the market recognizes their worth after the lifetime of the artists - now, doesn't the word "market" again link you to something?
Again I'm nowhere near offering a better solution to this. I'm just sharing something that upon my reflection agonizes me quite a bit recently.

I've gotten started on the I Ching a couple of times, but never got very far. The Tao Te Ching, on the other hand, grabbed me and shook me when I first read it. I find the poetic format much more compelling than the stories in the Zhuangzi. I think that's because I tend to be very intellectual, verbal. I'm an engineer and the Tao has always felt like engineering mysticism to me. — T Clark

Thanks for the archive. The thing about the ancient Chinese text is that each character is so compact in both syntactic and semantic sense. So not to mention translating into other languages, it cannot be ensured that all the nuances are kept when explaining it in modern Chinese. I take that it is easier to keep the poetical sense when converting Tao Te Ching into English than when doing so with Zhuangzi.

In terms of I Ching, the interesting thing about it is that it is highly structured into 64 chapters, each with 6 verses. The gimmick here is that each verse is coordinated with either the Yang or Yin element of the divination. Six of the Yin or Yang elements combine in sequences to form one diagram of the divination so there are a total of 2^6 = 64 forms of the diagram, each of whose attributes explained in the correspondent chapter. Many have tried to use this well-organized structure for fortune-telling, but some philosophical elements are highly valued among Chinese-language scholastic communities.

Yes, well. I think this says a lot more about Kurzweil than it does about me or you or anyone else. Last time I looked, he was trying to keep himself alive until he can upload his mind into a computer and live forever. — T Clark

I can definitely sympathize with his own eagerness to survive but I felt kind of cringed in the documentary that he seemed to be intended to revive his father who had passed away for quite some time.

There's a documentary regarding transhumanism called the Transcendent Man. Ray Kurzweil was the protagonist and he spent some significant part of the documentary explaining that our fear for death is inevitable and acceptance is lying to ourselves. I hold the same personal perspective but I wouldn't take that as ubiquitous to everyone since I don't have telepathy. :lol:

I humbly accept your compliment.

For these pieces, I've worked from the text and Chinese annotations. To be honest I wasn't all that into philosophy until recently so I didn't know these translations have existed. Long story short, I was prepping a presentation assignment for our English class at school on the poem Thanatopsis by William Bryant. Then I found connections of the poem with Zhuangtsu's work I encountered earlier, and I came across the idea: why not bring some of these pieces together to the class (I go to school in Virginia but I'm Chinese)? I didn't want to bother going through Google to find the translations so I did the work myself.

I'm glad that I translated these several verses and shared them. But realizing that other people have done the work, I feel like pausing for a while. I regard myself right now as "the hollowest nut" as Nietzsche put it so I'm trying to get more solid for the time being.

No, I haven't translated Tao Te Ching. But if I feel couraged again to share some of the related works I tend to find more interest in starting with I Ching. I'm envisioning the project as pulling threads all over the history of philosophy though more than the translation - that being I found out the translation has already been done as well.

All that being said, I'm a rising senior so I both actively and passively place college application and GPA as my primary focus. :lol:

This is a tricky paradox - why do all living minds tend to fear death while empirically it's a necessity? So far we've been extending the limits of life - mainly through means of biotechnology. Yet are our biological features the only decisive factors on how long we can live (by that I have included accidents and other "non-natural deaths" because, at the end of the day, it is the biologically fatal damage that results directly in death)? Before answering that question, we even have to achieve breaking through biological limitations, and when that will happen, as you said, remains a million-dollar question.

I'm afraid I can't afford to be called "acquainted with Wittgenstein" yet. I happened to skim through some of his works recently. Therefore, I would reserve from giving improper answers to the two questions you asked. They are definitely good questions to investigate, however.

As much as Wittgenstein expounded on the characteristics of language, he never gave a strict definition of what it to him actually is. As from Stanford Encyclopedia:

Language-games are, first, a part of a broader context termed by Wittgenstein a form of life (see below). Secondly, the concept of language-games points at the rule-governed character of language. This does not entail strict and definite systems of rules for each and every language-game, but points to the conventional nature of this sort of human activity. Still, just as we cannot give a final, essential definition of ‘game’, so we cannot find “what is common to all these activities and what makes them into language or parts of language” (PI 65).

I'd say that language in his term is rather some kind of rules, symbolic nor not, that humans perceive, understand, and apply, based on how he arranged the order of discussion in Philosophical Investigations -- language-games, rule-following, and the private language argument. Arguably our subjective world consists of the rules we perceive.

It doesn't make sense or one has to work really hard for it to connect at an emotional and also a rational level. — TheMadFool

Yes, from the lyrics, I do find the program to be semantically incapable (assuming that it is not smart enough to form a new way of using words to communicate that humans do not understand). But derailing from the discussion, as a rock fan I have to point out that the lyrics of Nirvana and Radiohead are somewhat incoherent too lol.

The next goal, the follow-up move, is to create something that's more creative than us (technological singularity). — TheMadFool

I would say the OP was developing toward this question without pointing it out: Can we ultimately make something more creative than we are?

P.S. No need to feel apologetic. I've had some of my best conversations in this forum. I'd like it if they added a like button function though for remarks that I don't have an immediate response to.

That was the point of my discussion there. Is the apparent "creativity" forever a mere reflection of humans' own creativity through algorithms on the machines, or can the new structure of computers - not von Neumann but of neural networks - break itself through the wires of algorithms, just like the imaginary kid I mentioned in the OP (whom I did not assume to have complete been innovative either)?

Weakly phrased my OP is, but I would consider your point as the first case that it discussed - creativity as a result of pre-existing instructions.

I think we have a slip here in taking the concept of creativity. What I meant here, as well as in the OP was whether creativity can emerge by itself out of intellect, be it natural or artificial. SCAMPER can definitely be encoded in whatever ways into computers, as in the OP, instructions, but the point is whether computers can go beyond that. I would not take for granted that the answers to the SCAMPER questions can be formed via mere algorithms. From the limited experience I have in computer science, most of the programs that I saw or made only involved commanding the computer "In such and such condition, do this", but not asking the computer "now I have this and this situation, what's next?". We ask these questions to ourselves and translate the answer into codes so when another person has the same question, the computer can give the answer - but NOT ITS answer, right?

I'm afraid I cannot arrive at an immediate agreement on this one. It is true that asking ourselves the questions in SCAMPER facilitates the activation of our creativity, but actually deriving the answers is what requires actual creativity. Using the same example as in the website: Supposing that the front-facing camera is not yet created, and you think: "what use is not yet adapted to the smartphone, but would be useful?" Then you came up with the idea "I can put a camera to the front". But how do you jump from the question to the resolution? You can justify with that "I observed that people like to take pictures of themselves, but they wouldn't be able to see what they are picturing with the screen turned away from them, so putting a camera in the same direction as the screen's would help." But what has led you to jump to considering selfies taking when the primary question is "how to improve the features of my cell phone?" It is the ability to somehow establish an unprecedented connection between multiple things that you know independently. Can any algorithm do that? I'd say if you could write out every step of how your thought switched from place A to B -- which I am unable to do.

I think I have got your point to some extent. I did notice that a lot of what the Buddhist texts discuss are based on the context of "having arrived at the other end". Before that stage, probably the so-called emptiness is not the real emptiness.

As a new member, I had underestimated the number of responses I would have with this post, so the poll was more of a last-second whim. I phrased the second option so because I was having Lacan's Symbolic Order in mind when I was improvising the poll. If I could revise it I would define the “value" I speak of here as something more like the "object cause of desire" (less the physical measurement, so as to say).

Upon that, really appreciate your take on value and existence. Very inspirational.

I'm no expert in Buddhism (as a matter of fact, philosophy in general), but I'd appreciate, if possible, some elaboration or sources of reading on the absolute distinction between the Shakyamuni and ordinary humans. As for what I know of, though, the ideology of Zhuangtsu has considerable resemblance to that of Chinese Mahayana, particularly Zen, to the extent of even serving as some source of influence.

As a new member I was frankly surprised by the amount of reaction I get here. Thanks! A clearer way to put the second choice of the poll would be "value exists as something of transcendence that does not require human experience of activity to be present".

Thanks! I'm definitely checking Neil Tyson's essay out!