There seems to be no discernible difference between beliefs/believing per se and assumptions/assuming.

Let us assume...blah blah blah = Let us believe...blah blah blah.

What difference does it make? — praxis

:snicker:

Of course. But the next step (the one you're missing) is that one would be prudent to learn to distinguish a dangerous dog from one that isn't, and to recognize what leads to getting bitten and what doesn't — baker

Yep, that makes sense alright! Note however, there must be a psychological term for this, negative experiences are more susceptible to hasty generalizations than positive ones: there's racism, there's dumb blonde jokes, racial stereotyping, etc.

Schopenhauer thought something like that when he first wrote his Art of Being Right. — baker

Agent Smith makes a note of that! Muchas gracias, señor baker.

I really do feel like a dick, posting here, sometimes. — baker

A thousand apologies. — Ranjeet

N/A or Mu.

Complex questions are a different kettle of fish. They can't be answered without admitting/denying something along with admitting/denying something else. It does produce the same effect - thought block - but only to novices and those ignorant of this fallacy.

Danke for your input!

You guys & gals should check this (Environmental Personhood) out!

Some excerpts from the Wikipedia entry:

Environmental personhood is a legal concept which designates certain environmental entities the status of a legal person. This assigns to these entities, the rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities and legal liability of a legal personality. — Wikipedia

New Zealand

In 2014, Te Urewera National Park was declared Te Urewera, an environmental legal entity. The area encompassed by Te Urewera ceased to be a government-owned national park and was transformed into freehold, inalienable land owned by itself.

Following the same trend, New Zealand's Whanganui River was declared to be a legal person in 2017. This new legal entity was named Te Awa Tupua and is now recognised as "an indivisible and living whole from the mountains to the sea, incorporating the Whanganui River and all of its physical and metaphysical elements." The river would be represented by two guardians, one from the Whanganui iwi and the other from the Crown.

Also in 2017, the New Zealand government signed an agreement granting similar legal personality to Mount Taranaki and pledging a name change for Egmont National Park, which surrounds the mountain. — Wikipedia

If rivers and mountains are persons, a fortiori animals are too and where there are persons, there are rights!

The problem as I see it is our idée fixe with :fire:

Like moths to a flame!

beautiful agent Smith, just beautiful. Really cleared things up for me... — Varde

:up:

As per the Oracle of Delphi and Socrates, the quiddity of wisdom is awareness of (one's own) ignorance. That is, in a modern psychological sense, to possess insight into one's own condition (re temet nosce - know thyself as in know your place).

It is not in my place to comment further.

Question: Do you want to be vegan?

Answers:

1. Yes, I want to be vegan (Trying).

2. I am vegan (Accomplished).

3. No, I don't want to be vegan (Refusal).

4. I don't understand the question (Ignorance).

Important questions:

1. Is it possible for the human race as a whole to give up meat? Will that come at a heavy price? Does it boil down to the choice abandon ethics (carnism) OR face extinction? If it does, life's a cruel joke!

2. How can we justify human rights without concern for animal rights?

I feel that cannibals have been marginalised here. — Kenosha Kid

:lol:

Sola dosis facit venenum.

The media has been deluding itself and its reader/viewership by proclaiming itself to be the guardians of truth. I'm sure aspiring journalists are fed this poppycock in their courses by their professors. They soon learn that this is, to borrow Wolfgang Pauli's expression, not even wrong.

People aren't interested in the truth! No, not at all! What we expect from the media is simply confirmation and reinforcement of our beliefs and suspicions, however wrong they may be!

The long and short of it, we don't blame the butcher for selling ham because that's what the people are demanding. It takes two to tango, oui? The media, what it is now - biased in so many ways than we could make sense of - reflects the warped psychology of the people.

"If the boat is 231 feet long, weighs 3 tonnes, then how old is the captain?" — god must be atheist

We need to find a pattern!

Relevant data (to get the show on the road).

1) 231 feet, 3 tonne boats.

2) Age of skippers on such boats.

Apposite mathematical field: Statistics, others.

Hello, I'm using this message to communicate with the administrators. Yesterday I made quotations and submitted two replies but they weren't published. I see that now I'm receving replies to my post. I will now make a clarification in reply to the user 'God must be atheist' If you publish it it will be appreciated. Thank you. — Geerts

@Jamal

They've gotten lazy. — ZzzoneiroCosm

:snicker: Laziness pays better!

Trees were funny back then...weird fruiting times, some could talk, others walk and talk! :snicker:

A Nietzschean logic is a manybranching monstrosity. Grotesque poison Yggdrasil - for the healing of the nations?!... — ZzzoneiroCosm

:chin:

In moving 'beyond good and evil' he devolves to feudal ethics, to serfs, feigned nobility, despotism. A great leap backwards. — Banno

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

It's Nietzsche's idea!, taken to its logical conclusion.

If you like sucrose, you'll love fructose! :snicker:

It's a question of evolution: from ape to man to Superman. — ZzzoneiroCosm

That's only part of Nietzsche's perspective; what about the overall progression from simplex to complex.

There were 4 revolutions:

1. Nothing $\to$ Something [ Creatio ex nihilo ]

2. Inanimate $\to$ Animate (life) [The origin of living organisms]

3. Animate $\to$ Consciousness [animals]

4. Consciousness $\to$ Self-awareness [man]

And then Nietzsche...

5. Self-awareness (man) $\to$ Übermenschen

Does the process of evolution, ceteris paribus, ever stop?

6. Übermenschen $\to$ Artificial Intelligence [AI]

7. AI $\to$ Technological singularity [ hic sunt dracones ]

Anthropocentrism — 180 Proof

:snicker: Corrected!

Bravo!

A point to make: The Golden Rule makes evolutionary sense, don't it? A species' survival depends on individuals being alike in terms of likes/dislikes; what is painful/enjoyable must be shared among all members of a species so that consistency in responses/reactions (patterns) can enable both cooperation and conflict (resolution) in ways that are reliable (repeatable).

If so, any outlier (an individual who differs from the group e.g. a sadist/masochist) would immediately stand out like a sore thumb and be in so many ways banished, overtly or covertly, from the gene pool. In other words, homogeneity is both inevitable (inclusion/expulsion from the group) and necessary (for survival).

The Golden Rule will be 100% effective sometime in the future when the oddballs would've all died out. :snicker:

Whaddaya know! The Golden Rule was futuristic, it was way ahead of its time; presently, as was in the past, it's a good rule of thumb! Watch out for exceptions! They'll go extinct, yes, but we have to be on our guard, for now!

Could anthropocentrism (the human "perspective") itself be subjectivism? We are, after all, narrating the story of the universe from a human point of view. Would an alien from another world, from another universe, understand us?

The antimatter (about $62.5 trillion a gram) rule, also called the anti golden rule:

What you don't experience as wrong or bad, you can do to others. — Xodarap

:chin: Nice!

The negative formulation of the golden rule.

That's a paradox itself. :cool: — jgill

:cool:

That's true! I cannot understand why more people don't lie awake at night about it! It requires a global response. We need the World Bank, the World Heath Organization, the International Court of Justice, Interpol, the United Nations Security Council, and the entire cast of 'Glee' on this!

Either that, or Agent Smith just doesn't know the meaning of 'existential threat'. — TonesInDeepFreeze

:snicker:

Paradoxes are an existential threat to epistemology (truth) & logic. When these two are assaulted (successfully), our world comes crashing down around our ears!

@Joshs

From the excerpts you provide in your post, it looks like Nietzche was mostly interested in how Darwinism knocks off humanity from the pedestal it had put itself on. Humans were no longer special in the living world, made in the image of God as some like to put it. We were just another animal, an ape to be precise, and we had to come to terms with that fact; a hard pill to swallow for some, but for others a piece of cake. In essence Nietzsche was putting his own weight behind the Copernican revolution of the 16^th century.

In other words, your knowledge has a likelihood of 100% that this will happen.

This is a rather complex proposition, so being 100% right by all chances is very high.

You just converted me from atheist to believer.

YOU ARE THE ALMIGHTY! — god must be atheist

Sarcasm?

Zen koan?
— Agent Smith

Very close. It's a old Hungarian joke. — god must be atheist

:grin:

I'm not in the battery business, and I'm neither a physicist o chemist. My guess is that a lot of midnight oil is being burned on the problem. It just seems to be very difficult to corral electrons and stuff them into boxes. Then there are problems with heat, chemical stability of the storage media over the long run, not to mention cost $$$.

Still, if you compare a run of the mill D cell with the battery in your cell phone... there was some real progress. Maybe there is an undiscovered exotic molecule out there that will absorb and release electric energy really really well. — Bitter Crank

:up: IE we're waiting for a breakthrough in battery tech. The transformation that would cause would be dramatic and the person/persons involved would be given Nobels for sure.

By the way, nice way of looking at the science of electricity - simple and to the point! We need more people like you!

There should be a subdiscipline of logic that studies paradoxes; they're an existential threat to the framework of knowledge we've built for ourselves.

Looks like Plato was making pronouncements on relations.

Concepts I'm familiar with that seem relevant:

1. Reflexivity. Equals: 2 = 2.

2. Symmetry. Sibiling of: If x is the sibling of y then y is the sibling of x.

3. Transitivity. Greater than (barring rock-paper-scissors sorta stuff): If x > y and y > z then x > z.

If only we could reduce the size, weight and increase the life of batteries.

Has anyone done a scientific analysis of the exact problem with batteries? Why are they so big, heavy, and short-lived? Batteries are obese! :snicker:

Virtually any mathematical conjecture would be of this type. When I compose a possible theorem I'm not certain about the argument I will ultimately use, although I am almost sure it is correct - but not absolutely. This is true of most mathematicians. Fermat's Last Theorem was assumed true long before the proof was established. But no one was absolutely certain. — jgill

What's the "truth rate" of mathematical (or other) conjectures, herein defined as the percentage of them that have been found to be true?

If it's high enough then something mighty interesting is going on:

1. Truthiness

2. Verisimilitude

3. Intuition

Truths probably have some quality other than a formal, logical, proof that's a dead giveaway - we instantly recognize them, based on that quality whatever that is.

We could be looking at something revolutionary here; we wouldn't need to prove truths the old way, via argumentation. It just feels true, don't it?

Jean-Baptiste Biot, who assisted Laplace in revising it for the press, says that Laplace himself was frequently unable to recover the details in the chain of reasoning, and, if satisfied that the conclusions were correct, he was content to insert the constantly recurring formula, "Il est aisé à voir que ... " ("It is easy to see that ..."). — Wikipedia

Google or visit wikipedia for more!

Dialectical materialism: An idea contains the seed of its own negation.

An example: Nietzsche says we must strive to be übermenschen. We should be supermen and the desire to do that makes us plain, garden-variety, run-of-the-mill menschen! :snicker:

I'm sure there's someone out there who qualifies as a saint or a bodhisattva, but so long as him/her robbing a bank doesn't violate the laws of nature, there's nothing impossible about that i.e. the probability of a heist isn't 0%.

"If the boat is 231 feet long, weighs 3 tonnes, then how old is the captain?" — god must be atheist

:chin: Zen koan?

Magma — Bitter Crank

Geothermal energy! :up:

We could offload some of our energy production onto Earth's natural heat! That would be great for the ecology but bad for the economy (of OPEC countries). How powerful is the OPEC lobby, internationally? Could they, have they, blocked/forestalled efforts/research into green/clean energy? Or are they using all that oil money to wean us off fossil fuel?