I once mentioned this to apokrisis and I feel this is as good a time as any to state it again.

$Nothing/0 = (+x) + (-x)$.

If an object is sitting there, motionless, at rest it can mean two things:

1. No force is acting on it

or

2. All the forces acting on it are equal & opposite i.e. they cancel each other out. Symmetry.

In the case of 1, there's no hope (ex nihil nihil fit), but 2 is a different story, even the slightest fluctuation could, well, break the symmetry. Voila! The Big Bang (creatio ex nihilo).

:up: Thanks a ton!

What's the difference between a log fire and life? Both are chemistry. Are we conflating complexity with emergence i.e. are we simply imagining that there's something more to a cell than a smorgasboard of chemical reactions?

particles being you, can never be you again. — Haglund

I would like to be me again! I have some very reliable people who can/will ensure that is the case...till the sun grows cold and the stars are old. :grin:

My gripe is a simple one. As far as I know, the only justification a transsexual man has for identifying himself as a man is that he feels/thinks he is a man. The absurdity of this transsexual logic is brought to the fore by applying it like so:

1. I feel/think I'm an elephant (man/woman)

Ergo,

2. I am an elephant (man/woman)!

Why is me going "I am an elephant" a delusion and a transsexual claiming "I am a man/woman" not? :chin:

By the way thanks for explaining BIID. Helpful!

@jorndoe

free speech doesn't itself mean free of consequences — jorndoe

filter — jorndoe

There doesn't seem to be an appropriate concept in psychology for my views, so I'll describe it: When it comes to thoughts, it all boils down to one simple truth which is that they're, for the most part, spontaneous and involuntary. The best word to describe it is found in the art world viz. automatism.

That being so, we can't be/shouldn't be held accountable for our thoughts.

The next thing I wanna talk about is what are known as filters. These serve as checkpoints, they exist between thinking and speaking & thinking and doing. Not everything we think is spoken and not everything we think is done. Free will, if it exists, is a checkpost where only those thoughts that have a valid permit (good, useful, etc.) are allowed to pass through into speech & action territory.

:up:

:smile:

Once upon a time, in a country far far away, called Greece.... — Haglund

The Indians too were very good logicians. The Chinese, however, are a different story. Taoism seems to be a slap in the face of logic!

:up: You're on target 180 Proof. The thing is there's no strong evidence the other way round too i.e. we don't have any strong justification to say that we don't survive physical death. This, to me, is the crux of the issue and explains why the belief in an afterlife is so persistent. True there's denial, hope, fear mixed in there as well, but the nub of it is that we really don't know, oui?

Old wine in a new bottle: The Ship of Theseus. What if we reassemble your brain parts. What then?

Here's the thing...

We can think whatever we want.

We can't do whatever we want.

Speech, looks like, is intermediate between thinking and acting and so the riddle of free speech takes shape! For instance, I can think "I'll pinch Anderson's wallet" and no one will care (because no one can know that); I can actually steal Anderson's wallet and be brought to book; when I say "I'll pinch Anderson's wallet", I'm immediately a prime suspect in the event Anderson's wallet is stolen.

You are, by law, directed towards the institutions of knowledge. In my humbly humbleness I can't help calling that authorative... : — Haglund

Radical skepticism is in order. We must put logic in the dock, interrogate it! How did it come to be this powerful? What vile trickery did it put to its service? Who were/are its accomplices? :chin:

I sense you're conflating authority with knowledge (justified true beliefs).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there's nothing amiss about putting rationality on a pedestal like philosophers, scientist, and freethinkers do. No authority, even one inanimate like logic must be allowed to hold such sway over our lives. However, as you would've guessed, I'm merely running around in circles here - it's rationality that cautions against rationality!

This is Bartricks' insistence on incoherency. Bartricks claims that this proposition, which I claim is incoherent, just appears as incoherent to me. Now I see it's incoherent to you as well. So we can say that it is incoherent to us — Metaphysician Undercover

Even if you were right, and as far as I can tell you are, philosophy, to my reckoning, is not a democratic institution i.e. we're not warranted to feel good about ourselves because we concur! :grin:

I'm sorry we couldn't come to some kind of mutually satisfactory understanding of the situation. Bye!

:ok:

Baden
Could you delete my account? Thanks. — kierkegoord

@Baden For your attention & necessary action.

All I'm trying to get across here is that the transsexual argument boils down to:

1. I feel/think I'm a woman/man

Ergo,

2. I am a woman/man.

If you abstract the form, you get

3. I feel/think I'm an x.

Ergo,

4. I am an x.

Substitute x with anything under the sun and we see the folly of their "logic".

What is free thought? Don't you think your thoughts have been formed by science, on school? You were forced by law to follow the brainwash. Or braintaint maybe. Isn't science stifeling too? There are a lot of science ayattolah's. Threatening with punishment if you don't adapt — Haglund

Everybody knows what free thought is. Look it up.

I said nothing about science. Nevertheless, you would be going against the spirit of science if you ever adopt a dogmatic stance as a scientist. With religion, dogmatism (so-called orthodoxy) is a defining feature.

:ok: We need to be very clear as to what constitutes a cause then. In the OP's example, the ball is not the cause, nor is its weight the cause because if they were, we know, for certain, both exist prior to the effect (the depression in the cushion). So, tell me, what is the cause for the cushion's deformation?

Of course that is true. Religions can be a source of oppression, no doubt about that, but they’re not only that — Wayfarer

How do we tell when things are going south? Slippery slope fallacy notwithstanding, always being on guard is a headache, oui?

Suppose there are identical twins, A and B; it doesn't get more similar than that. If then A thinks she's B, then A is B?!

There's something quite odd about transsexual logic in my humble opinion.

About the guy who had leg issues, do you have a reference?

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

:ok:

You raise some very important points. I too am of the view that there should be some things that are sacred if that's what you're getting at. In the simplest sense, it puts hallowed objects, ideas, places, whathaveyou in a safe spot in a manner of speaking, away from corruption/defilement/spoilage as it were; an essential part of being a good human being seems to be to protect/preserve/perpetuate that which, in general, keeps us sane, peaceful, content, and simultaneously, provides a higher ideal we all must try to attain. This, in short, is what holy is all about in my humble opinion.

The problem/catch is that sacrednsss is used as an excuse/reason to stifle free thought, the classic example being, at the moment, Islam - it doesn't take much to elicit a fatwa from the grand Ayatollah of Iran if you catch my drift.

It'a a tightrope walk - on one side fatwas and on the other side orgiastic decadence. Tough call!

So as per transsexual logic, if I think/feel I'm a beaver, I am a beaver?! :chin:

Methinks trans people are confused. There's a difference between I want to be a man/woman and I am a man/woman. For instance, there are young teenage boys who want to be Justin Bieber or some other singing sensation, but they, for certain, don't believe that they are Justin Bieber.

By transsexual logic if someone wants to be Mickey Mouse, s/he is Mickey Mouse.

I recall, back in the early eighties, some close Nepalese friends puzzling as to where Australia's Meti where. I didn't understand the question for another twenty years... — Banno

:lol:

I was hoping to steer away from that topic and address the OP. Looks like that is no going to happen. — I like sushi

Let's try something else. Since a ball has to be placed on a cushion, there's a time t₁ when the ball is not on the cushion, oui? Put simply, the ball & the cushion precede, existentially, the ball on the cushion & the subsequent depression.

The ball on the cushion happens (say) at time t₂.

Both the ball and the cushion as necessary causes (without them there's no effect) do precede the hollow in the cushion, oui? t₁ < t₂

Ergo, since there's something critical to the cause (vide supra) that must precede the effect, simultaneous causation is untenable in that sense, oui?

@Bartricks

Here's what to me is a strong argument for simultaneous causation: If a cause exists prior (time t₁) to the effect (time t₂)then the effect should've already occured (at time t₁).

My response would be that certain aspects of a cause preexist the effect it produces. For example, in your ball-cushion case, the ball, a necessary component of the cause, temporally precedes the effect, the depression.

Again, you're not engaging with my arguments.

I don't know what you mean by a 'mechanism'. I'm assuming you mean that there needs to be some kind of intermediary between cause and effect. How does that change anything?

So, I'll just keep repeating myself until you answer: if A, a substance, causes B, when does it do so? — Bartricks

Well, let's look at your ball & cushion example. The ball causes the cushion to develop a depression. The mechanism of this deformation is the ball's weight acting on the soft cushion, oui? Does this mechanism occur instantaneously or is there a time lag, no matter how infinitesimally small, between placing the ball on the cushion and the corresponding hollow in the cushion?

Before you answer that question, remember the ball's weight is temporally anterior to the cushion's depression.

Another point worth noting is that the cause (the ball) exists before the effect (the dent in the cushion).

And what or who determines the motion inside the block? — Haglund

Frankly, your guess is as good as mine!

Well, if the universe is a block of 4D spacetime, the so-called now is a slice of it. Depending on the angle of that slice, I could be coevals with Socrates or Charles Darwin or Werner Heisenberg or (even) Lucy the hominin or dinosaurs or you get the idea!

This quote is perfect example for "out of context" method, because he puts forward presumably only negative connotations without asking or saying anything why is that so? — SpaceDweller

Dawkins' good pal, Dan Baker has, if memory serves, taken care of that.

Oui, bien sur. But. The beautiful patterns might be disrupted by a small and fast change, like 1 degree uprise in 10 years without falling back. — Haglund

:ok:

Richard Dawkins — SpaceDweller

Richard Dawkins, in an interview, makes it a point to say that on a scale of 1 to 10, his certainty that there's no God is a 7. He's not a complete atheist to the extent and degree certainty in one's position counts.

His stance is that even if God exists, He's not worth worshipping for the following good reasons:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. — Richard Dawkins

Yes. If you change the average T in a shirt time, the natural balance gets distorted. A small change, say 1 degree, leading to less patterns and more chaos — Haglund

Chaos, in my humble opinion, as some say it is, is "order undeciphered". That seems to be the crux of chaos theory, oui? The "randomness" is an illusion. Have you seen those colorful pictures of chaos? They don't seem chaotic; mayhaps it's a matter of scale. The quantum world, according to physicists, is one where chance rules, but at our scale, everything's as orderly as troops in formation.

Here's what feels like a good rejoinder to people who think antinatalists are hypocrites because they don't suicide:

It's not that life is enjoyable, it's that death is painful.

The antinatalist is in quite a bind! S/he knows that nonexistence is better but then the agony of death! :grimace: I don't wanna live but I don't wanna die too! Reminds me Chris (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) who rejects every logically possible choice that's given him by his dad. The perfect setting for a Zen moment, oui? Rationality is out of the question! Tis time for madness!

All that comes to my mind is Socrates. If there ever was a virtuso/master of the Via Negativa, it has to be this so-called gadfly of Athens. He, according to legend, asks for a definition and then adroitly demonstrates why that particular definition just won't do.

A typical conversation with the teacher of Plato would look like:

X: This
Socrates: No, not this.
Y: That
Socrates: No, not that.
Reiterate...ad infinitum/ad nauseum :vomit:

Neti neti if you were a vedic pundit!

I don't wanna know what it isn't. I wanna know what it is! — Skipper James T. Kirk

Odd thing to say for someone who wants to go where no man has gone before!

Yes.
Journalists are getting clicks on scary titles. Politicians get votes from scared people. Green energy shills are getting government payouts. Celebrities get to fly around in private jets, telling people how they should live. Even Austin the weirdo, who lives in his mom's basement, can walk around with a placard and feel like he is saving the earth. — stoicHoneyBadger

:lol: One surefire way of convincing us that there's truth in these climate change claims is to make a prediction and see if it comes true. Einstein did it with his theory of relativity - remember the solar eclipse of 1919.