What makes a cause adequate or not?

Sure. Here's one example of evidence: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a27102/read-thoughts-with-brain-scan/

I just don't think it would be that simple. There's also group think- tyranny of the majority. Let's say you're part of the guild of the widget programmers... The other programmers are not to your liking. You don't like their style. Where do you go? Other widget programmer organizations? Who decides who is in and who is out? There has to be a level of coordination and autonomy to make decisions which a collective cannot always do. I am willing to bet either hierarchies will naturally form, or some form of exploitation, individual or group-based will ensue. Instead of an individual, it may be a process that becomes exploitive but deemed necessary. Then perhaps the labor itself is simply exploitive of the worker as the demands of the labor are such that the worker will simply need to be used and alienated for this product to be created. — schopenhauer1

I can't answer some of those questions under Marxism because I just don't know (or remember if I knew at some point) enough about Marxism to know the procedural details. I don't recall how people are chosen or allowed (or whatever) to do a particular sort of job, for example.

What I'd do under my system is allow anyone to do any sort of job they'd like to try, where they'd receive training in the job as required, but you'd just not get a lot of benefits from it until you were able to get to a point where you're able to provide things that people want/need with that job. That would discourage people from arbitrarily deciding that they want to try to be cardiovascular surgeons, etc. But my own system would be very different from Marxism.

How do we conclude what we "feel"?

Introspection.

What does it mean when we claim a feeling that we're not currently experiencing?

That in the relevant situations, which we're at least periodically in, we have that emotion.

The broader senses of "contradiction" that you're referring to are more vague than the very specific sense that I mentioned.

Even in Ancient Greece they would have simply been wrong to figure that there was anything unchanging.

As aforestated, Aristotle did not consider the questions that Heraclitus and Parmenides were asking to be scientific; questions relating to ''Being'', for Aristotle, belong to a subject prior to science, that subject being metaphysics. — philosophy

First, metaphysics isn't just Aristotelianism qua Aristotelianism. Even it were, Aristotle didn't use the word himself. He didn't name the book that. The book wasn't named that until the 1500s.

Metaphysics is typically seen as "philosophy/theory of being or existence." The bulk of it, especially now, is ontology. We're studying what exists, what its nature is, etc. Well, that's the same thing that we're doing in the sciences, like physics. Because the methodology of the sciences is different than the methodology of philosophy, there are some things in this regard that we can't do so well in the sciences--the purely logical aspects, aspects that can't be transformed to empirical tests, even theoretically, etc., and philosophy has more of an emphasis on looking at things at the broadest possible level of generality. But if what exists is stuff like quarks and neutrinos, then that's what we need to be talking about/looking at in our metaphysics (our ontology).

Is Being (i.e. a metaphysical, unchanging world) accessible to reason? — philosophy

There is nothing unchanging.

''Metaphysics'' literally means ''after physics'', that is, after the subject-matter of physics (the physical world of change), — philosophy

Metaphysics (the "book") was actually named that because it was placed after the "book" named physics in an Aristotle compendium. There's no reason to take the subject matter of metaphysics to be separate from the subject matter of physics (well, at least where physics is a subset of it)

There's no good reason to take "being" to refer to something unchanging, and distinguising it from becoming is a big error. So if you start off with an error like that, you're likely to say silly things.

Being (i.e. an unchanging, metaphysical reality) — philosophy

Why would we take "being" to refer to something unchanging?

Re "metaphysical," it's a mistake to see it as distinct from physical things in my view, as I mentioned above.

You're still going to need structural hierarchies in some situations to produce things, but one thing that could be done is to rotate people in and out of positions--to take turns driving, basically.

But even if you don't do that, since workers are having equal say regularly, someone trying to negatively exploit others doesn't sustain a power relationship where the people being exploited can't do anything about it.

We know that we're (as individuals) conscious because of our first-person experience. We know from a lot of evidence that consciousness is a property of our brains. It's some combination of the exact materials, the structure they're in (the relations of the materials), and the way our brains function (processes of/in our brains, changing relations in other words).

We infer, via induction, that things other than ourselves are probably conscious, relative to their material/functional and behavioral similarities to ourselves. So it's a pretty safe bet that other humans are conscious. Re other animals, the more different they are in terms of brains and behavior, the less comfortable we are assuming that they might have anything like our consciousness.

With computers, robots, etc., we're able to program some at least superficially similar behavior, but materially, they're very different. So it's not going to be clear at what point, if any, it would make any sense to attribute consciousness to computers or robots.

In On Nature, Parmenides argues that the senses deceive us and that change is an illusion. — philosophy

Which makes no sense, because it has to be true that at least the "illusion" changes.

Reason tells us that all things are one; — philosophy

My reason tells me that things interact, but they're not just one thing.

Second, and related to this, the distinction between the (physical) world as it appears to us and the (metaphysical) world as it really is. — philosophy

I don't agree that that distinction holds water.

Parmenides reaches his (startling) conclusion through what seems to be a rigorous, deductive argument. What's interesting is that Parmenides appears to be using logic to reach what we would call a mystical conclusion. Perhaps his argument is not really as logical as it appears? — philosophy

I'd have to review his argument.

Being is indemonstrable. By definition, it is not an object of sense-experience. — philosophy

If being is not an object of sense experience, then frankly, I don't even know what the hell we'd be talking about. What is "being" supposed to refer to in that case? Is "being" supposed to be some sort of code word in that case? A code word for what?

Not that I'm a Marxist, so I'm not trying to argue in support of Marxism, but just in terms of this logically, if the workers are all getting an equal say in things, the company is worker-run by all workers, etc., then I don't see how it makes sense to suppose that everything is going to stay the same re managers exploiting other workers to get the most out of them. That wouldn't be all of the workers getting an equal say in things, etc., would it?

Are "vague" and "more vague" the same thing?

And I wouldn't mind hearing an explanation on how the big bang is the source of everything. What that tells us about the source of morals remains to be seen. — Merkwurdichliebe

The big bang is one of the causes of everything, isn't it? You can't have humans if the big bang didn't happen.

So why would that be any less the source of morality, per the way that you're using the term "source," than any other cause you're suggesting, where the cause isn't itself morality?

Because "contradiction" is useful, especially in philosophy, as a very specific idea. Making the usage more vague doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

You didn't deal with either point I made.

(1) "Source" doesn't conventionally denote "causes of x that aren't themselves x"

and

(2) Given the way you're using the term, why isn't the big bang the source of everything?

What I consider a contradiction is a non-equivocated instance of P & not-P (although I'd not require that a real contradiction is a literal proposition, but we should at least be able to state is as a proposition, as a non-equivocated instance of P & not-P, so we have to be both affirming and denying the same thing, in the same respect, at the same time, etc.)

An example. Just one would be fine. A "conflict" isn't the same thing as a contradiction, is it?

100% of existence is saturated with contradiction. — whollyrolling

What's an example of that?

But if you start with clean ideas (non contradictory axioms) you get clean theories. — Devans99

You can try to be careful about avoiding contradictions, but they can creep up unexpectedly. The more complex any "system" is, the more likely it is to have contradictions.

Sets are just ideas. They're something we made up. Can we make up ideas that run into consistency problems? Sure. And then we can make up modifications or restrictions to avoid the consistency problems.

Do you believe that someone can just so happen to feel the same way that the rules have something?

Take a river. It's source is the snow from a mountain top. Snow has its source in ice precipitation, which has its source in cloud condensation, and so on. All these factors are necessary if we want to adequately understand the source of the river. — Merkwurdichliebe

The source of a river is a common term of art in the Earth sciences. I guess you're not familiar with that. As that term of art, it refers to the point where the river begins as the river in question.

With the way you're using the term why wouldn't "the big bang" be the answer to the source of everything?

So do you agree that "living creatively" involves breaking rules rather than following them?

Because there was confusion about this earlier with someone else, are you using "source" to refer to where morals arise as morals? An analogy would be the source of a river.

It seems like you're appealing to something like the normal artistic sense of "creative" there and not simply defining it as "living so that one breaks rules"

So in short, what was the non-neurobiological source in all of that?

A non-neurobiological explanation for the source of morals would include historical or societal explanations that go far beyond the scope of neurobiology. — Merkwurdichliebe

Can you be a bit more specific. What would be an example of this?

But if we only discuss it as an effect of neurobiology, we will never adequately understand the source of morals. — Merkwurdichliebe

What do you figure is a non-neurobiological source?

Then it follows that all of science is complete bullshit. So then, let's agree to never mention science when trying to validate a point about anything. — Merkwurdichliebe

I can't even begin to imagine how confused you must be, or how you could have ended up that confused, if you think something above has some implication for whether science is bullshit.

Ok guy, sure you don't do explanation discussions. But, please go on and explain more about how you dont explain things. — Merkwurdichliebe

Debates about whether something is explained, goofball.

Objectivity I say. That you can test them if the assumption is correct or false. — ssu

And what implication do you see that having for metaphysics?

got it. You watch terrible porn... — Benkei

My porn appetite isn't very limited. ;-)

It seems odd because you have it backwards, authenticity is the degree to which an individual's actions are congruent with their beliefs and desires, despite external pressures (“rules”). People make all sorts of compromises in their lives in order to be accepted. Many support shared fictions, that they know are fiction, in order to express solidarity with their ‘tribe’. Trump supporters are a recent and particularly ugly example of this. — praxis

In other words, let's say that it's a rule that you should help disabled people when you can.

And then let's say that Joe comes along, and Joe really likes to help disabled people when he can.

Well, per the definition presented, to live creatively is to break the rules. So if Joe isn't breaking the rules, Joe isn't living creatively. Thus, insofar as this issue goes, Joe can't live both creatively and authentically, because in order to break the rules, Joe has to act differently than his existential authenticity would have it--living authentically to Joe in this situation in entirely consistent with the rules.

In fact, someone might happen to agree with almost every rule. So they'd not be able to live both creatively and authentically, per this definition of what it is to live creatively.

As the term itself is defined, you simply cannot get answers to metaphysical questions in the same way as you can for ordinary physics, science, etc. — ssu

As the term is conventionally defined in philosophy, why aren't physics claims metaphysical claims?

Every single one of the millions of species which have existed on Earth for millions of years have been of limited ability. — Jake

Limited ability to understand things, though? How do we know what, if anything, other species are understanding?

on the surface maybe and that's discounting the uncomfortable positions porn is filled with. — Benkei

But the majority of porn doesn't have uncomfortable positions. Maybe you're watching a pretty limited selection of stereotypical porn?

There's a ton of porn showing anything you can imagine, any way you can imagine it, including a lot of porn that's literally just everday people filming themselves having "garden variety" sex.

I see needs as necessarily hinging on wants/desires. Some people have curiosity about the "furniture of the world" so to speak. So they're going to unavoidably do metaphysics in some manner.

Yes, possible. Not very likely in my view, but this is clearly debatable. — Jake

I'm of the view that there's no way to determine likelihood for these sorts of things.

I think what people are usually referring to by "likelihood" is just how close something is to what they already believe.