I can reiterate also. Cultures, particularly in the Information Age, can accommodate a range of moral views and values. — praxis

How are we getting a range in the example I'm explaining?

My point is the simple observation that treating everyone equally serves only to maintain existing inequities.
— Banno

I agree. — Merkwurdichliebe

I didn't see that comment but someone would have to explain it to me. It seems contradictory. We can't both maintain inequities yet be treating people equally.

Suppose I make a judgement that there is no injustice here, yet someone else claims the contrary. Is my judgement sufficient? — Banno

Sufficient for what?

One of the outstanding characteristics of the privileged is their inherent inability to see their privilege. — Banno

Even if I were to agree with that, aren't I in the demographic in question?

And this is for you to judge? — Banno

?? Of course. Why wouldn't it be for me to judge? Which judging individual am I supposed to defer to and why am I supposed to defer to them?

People in the same family, who interact with the same adults, go to the same school, have the same teachers, have many of the same friends, listen to the same music, watch the same movies, etc. can have very different moral views, and yes, those views can include things like "Cannibalism is/isn't okay"

If there's an injustice which needs redressing, — S

Depends on the (supposed) injustice, but I don't believe there's any injustice here (obviously).

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

It seems as if you're unaware that people in the same family, including twins, even, can and often do have completely different moral views.

What do you mean when you say you are an "atheist," Terrapin?

Are you expressing a "belief" or guess that there are no gods...or are you simply saying you lack a "belief" that any gods exist?

If the latter, to you also lack a "belief" that no gods exist? Are you generally lacking a belief in whether gods exist or do not exist? — Frank Apisa

I believe/I'm asserting the fact that no gods exist.

This is a tangential discussion from another thread. Nagase and I were discussing whether it's appropriate to account for the reference mechanism in requests - like 'Will you get me some water Jake?' - through an algebra of declaratives with propositional content / assertions that can be associated with the request - equivalence classes of {'I (Jake) will not get you some water'} and {'I (Jake) will get you some water'}. — fdrake

Easy answer: in most cases, no, that wouldn't be at all appropriate.

There might be a few people who think that way about it in those situations, but that would be extremely unusual.

I don't have a problem with there being a "men's rights" movement, but at present, it seems kind of dumb to have one.

I'm an atheist.

I'd rather be immortal, as long as I could be relatively young/healthy as an immortal.

Extramental concepts?

That doesn't explain, for instance, how some people can be pro-life and others pro-choice — praxis

"Evolution doesn't work so as to produce a bunch of clones in this regard."

You posted twice and didn't address me either time. I only noticed the second one: "I was just giving you a chance to build your position "

Re "opposite," in this case it's the complement, or rather what people are (logically if not explicitly) implying when they deny that determinism is the case.

I was just giving you a chance to build your position — Merkwurdichliebe

I'm not interested in typing some long, very generalized thing. I think it's rather a problem on this board that people tend to do that. There's usually no focus. People ramble on. They'll bring up 15-20 different topics in a long post without really addressing any of them, without having any clear logical connection or flow to their "argument," etc. I just wanted to simply correct a conceptual misunderstanding. If you disagree or don't understand what I said that's fine, but ask specific questions, keep things focused, etc.

Ask a more specific question if you don't understand something I said.

Because saying that the opposite is that we're not influenced by anything ignores other alternatives. So it's a false dichotomy.

Morality comes from the way your brain works. Broadly, it stems from evolutionary development. We evolved into the sorts of creatures that both require a number of extended (over the course of many years) interactions with others of our kind in order to be able to survive long enough to reproduce, and being okay or not okay with certain behavioral interactions, both for ourselves and by proxy for others, helps in this regard. So that development was evolutionarily advantageous while not being enough of an evolutionary liability to be deselected overall.

So we have innate dispositions to be okay with some interactive behavior and not be okay with other interactive behavior. Evolution doesn't work so as to produce a bunch of clones in this regard. But there are some broad things that are far more common than not.

At any rate, the answer is that it's just a way that your brain works.

He is addressing what you are talking about, i thought you might be interested. — Merkwurdichliebe

Ah, okay. I was just trying to simply clarify something about the distinction for TheMadFool (and for anyone who might have agreed), contra a misunderstanding that he had.

What would you say that has to do with my post?

We don't create facts with our claims (aside from the fact that we made whatever claim, for example). And we don't "revise facts" when we change our beliefs, or change our accounts of what things are, how they work, etc. Our claims/beliefs are about facts.

Without sidetracking too much re ontology of meaning, the only sense I can make out of someone thinking that we can't "mean" the normal usage of "houses" and "flowers" with "Houses can/can't turn into flowers" is that the person coming to that conclusion (the conclusion that we must be using the terms in some novel way) believes, for some reason, that people can't be too imaginative, or too deluded, etc. Why they'd believe that is a mystery. People can be very imaginative. They can be very deluded. And so on.

Now, that doesn't imply that someone necessarily has conventional meanings in mind when they say "Houses can/can't turn into flowers." They might, or they might not. But by the same token, someone might not have conventional meanings in mind when they say "Seeds can turn into flowers," either. Again, they might or they might not. The only way we can learn whether someone has something like the conventional meanings in mind or not is by interacting with them and/or via observing how they're using words in a broader context/via additional occurrences of the words in question.

Freewill is usually contrasted with determinism which is the belief that the any state of affairs is causally specified by what comes before it. — TheMadFool

Right. But the opposite of that wouldn't be decisions that are not influenced by anything. The opposite would simply be some departure from strict causality.

The moral of the story is that OCDish adherence to principles is a bad idea.

That doesn't mean that the content of a principle is a bad idea. But just adhering to it or interpreting it in an OCDish, theory-worshipping manner is a bad idea.

its not incoherent — christian2017

Yeah, it is. You could attempt to make it coherent, though. No one has been successful in that yet.

This is why we'll never come to an agreement based on your current beliefs. — christian2017

Is that what you're shooting for? Coming to an agreement?

If that's all you wanted to talk about, then why didn't you make that clear sooner? Why waste both of our time like that? — S

How am I supposed to know that you weren't following the conversation? I quoted the bit I just re-quoted above, and that's what I was responding to. Then Frank responded to my comment about it.

So if it's something an individual is doing, you're just not going to call it meaning?

It's not a fallacy to argue that the word "cat" means something other than "dog", — S

Toargue that it means something per what?

How would you prove — christian2017

Empirical claims are not provable period. So you're asking for a category error.

Perhaps thoughts exist outside the space/time continuum. — christian2017

The idea of anything existing outside of space or time is incoherent.

If you have no particles it very hard to measure time. — christian2017

I would say that if you have no particles you have no time to measure.

To say you need particles for new events to occur is conjecture. — christian2017

I don't think there's any conjecture to it. An event with no material is incoherent.

Out of curiosity... what would you say that thoughts or ideas are? Material or non-material? — 0 thru 9

Material. They're ways that our brains function.

Was i supposed to say "have you read the book flatland?". I'm sorry. My deepest apologies. Your being a troll Terrapin Station. — christian2017

Telling someone to read a book assumes they haven't. Why not assume that they have read the book in question?

Where did i make an assumption about what you have read? — christian2017

"Read the book Flatland" . . . and don't be so sensitive about your age.

You don't properly understand what is and what is not an argumentum ad populum fallacy — S

What is the "proper" understanding?

don't make assumptions about my age. — christian2017

But it's okay to make assumptions about what I've read/what I'm familiar with?

I only ever meant to make the point that the logical possibility of an undetectable god means that your criticism about evidence misses the point that was being made. It misses the point because it can only be criticism against a detectable god, and it was never specified that a detectable god is what is being talked about. On the contrary, it was clear to me that it was an unspecified god that was being talked about. — S

My initial post in this tangent was about the following, and it was only about the following:

I am making a statement about the absurdity of supposing the default position on an issue where there is no evidence of being...is that what is being considered DOES NOT EXIST.

The default should be, I DO NOT KNOW IF IT EXISTS. — Frank Apisa

That's not even specifically about the idea of a god. It's a more general epistemic idea.

read the book Flatland. — christian2017

The first time I read that SciFi/fantasy novella was probably 20+ years before you were born.

Descartes, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Kant, Marx, just to pick a few at random off the top of my head. They were all born into affluent families and received "higher education" that was expensive and unavailable to a vast majority of people at the time. — whollyrolling

So first, the slave-master stuff is pertinent to 200+ years ago?

The theory of special relativity dictates that the measurement of time is only in accordance with how fast particles are moving. In the case of a photon and all the particles that are of a similar size or small than a photon: the x vector, y vector, and z vector can never be combined to exceed C (speed of light). A clock that approaches the speed C will slow down in terms of the way it tells time.

This has been shown on airplanes carrying clocks over long periods of time. Time can only be measured in relation to moving objects. If there is no objects there is no way for humans to measure time. — christian2017

I'm not clear on how this is a response to my post.

In what way is that vague? You don't understand "better" or "more"?