1. All memory stored information.
2. Skepticism Vol.1
3. Skepticism Vol.2
4. Skepticism Vol.3
5. Skepticism Vol.4
6. Arguments from skepticism Vol.1
7. Arguments from skepticism Vol.2
8. Arguments from skepticism Vol.3
9. Arguments from skepticism Vol.4
10. Conclusions of 8 volumes of skepticism and arguments based on all stored information.
11. Creative ideas and predictions on the universe.
12. Creative ideas and predictions on humanity.

All other experiences, emotions and the ego is irrelevant for the people who will use the knowledge in these lockers. I only leave that which I believe is of importance to others but put all mashed up memory in locker 1 to make room for further analysis of locker 2-12.

The feeling or experience of something as unpleasant but not immoral (like the taste of food you don't like). And the feeling that someone has done something wrong. — Andrew4Handel

Feelings of the one making a moral choice cannot be a foundation for morals, only the concept of what is essentially good for you and others combined can be used. Feelings distort, they're "system 1" in psychology, moral choices should be carefully assessed. If done over a long enough time frame, people can be trained so that "system 1" does these assessments as instincts, connected to our emotions. It's a fine-tuning of empathy that detaches itself from established morals by religion and political agendas into a working model for the well-being of the individual and groups/mankind.

We can feel something to be wrong, but we can train ourselves to understand and deconstruct that feeling to know if that feeling is justified or just a feeling detached from the logic of the moral choice.

Euthanasia is a good example of this. It feels awful making such a decision, but deconstructing our feelings shows us that the feeling is irrational to the logic of the choice. We suffer by the choice, they suffer from their sickness. We will suffer after the choice but we will feel good that we relieved them of their suffering. The conclusion is that you do something out of the well-being of both yourself and the one who is sick combined, even though all current emotions scream otherwise.

Morality is detached from feelings in choices but should generate positive feelings by the result of the choice.

Of course, sometimes our choices have to be made fast and we rely on "system 1", on instinct, but if we live by carefully assessing our morality based on the well-being of others and ourselves combined, we will train ourselves to have a better balance in those "system 1" instincts, just like we have trained our moral instincts to the moral values we have at the moment.

It seems that there are no moral facts or method for finding them. But a lot of people seem to think that feeling something is wrong is an adequate basis for morality. — Andrew4Handel

This is the difference between those who aren't schooled in rational dialectics and those with philosophical methods of reaching conclusions. It's like "system 1" and "system 2" in psychology. Most people live by "system 1", they rarely make time for "system 2" other than organizing their base knowledge into instinctual behavior.

This is why they cannot grasp the process of deconstructing common knowledge to find out if it's actually wrong or not.

I don't see morality to be anything we cannot find facts around or not having methods of finding them. The truth is that morality as a concept outside of religion or established institutions of power is a totally new thing historically. We've maybe been discussing this the last hundred years or so for real, with actual detachment from any former established "rules".

The problem is that people have a problem of detaching themselves from the established morals in order to find rational answers. I.e people aren't really discussing this with philosophical methods. I see it time and time again on this forum; people are not actually making rational arguments, only talking about their feelings on a subject. Many on this forum, maybe even academic philosophers it seems, abandon rational methods in favor of "system 1" irrationality and emotional outbursts.

Here's a baseline for morality.

1. Do what is positive for the well-being of yourself and others combined.
2. Morality is an evolving process and each situation must be assessed carefully according to point 1.
3. Assessing what is morally good needs to involve current knowledge about human psychology, sociology, and knowledge about human well-being for the individual and larger groups.

Points can be added, but the foundation is still well-being for the individual, the self and everyone else combined, not separated. Any other model is able to be corrupted.

This can invite utilitarianism into the picture, killing few to save more. But that is not something that I find morally good or bad, it's just assessing the moral of the situation. If you are in a situation of saving more by killing a few, there is no real good or bad choice, much like many other situations in life. You do not know if treating someone bad might be good for them down the line or not. But that cannot ever be the factor within moral choices since it's an unknown factor unable to be quantified within the calculation.

Therefore, you can only assess morality according to the things you know, i.e what is good or bad for people in the now. Morality should be about making that calculated choice and even if it turns out bad, the act of the moral choice was still done with good morals in mind. If the calculated choice was done with the points made above in mind, it's hard to make a choice on bad morals.

Now, of course, people can't walk around and always assess situations according to current scientific findings within psychology and sociology, but we can train ourselves to assess better than how we are doing it right now. Because right now, as you mention about youtube-comments, people make moral choices with "system 1" based on moral truths in "system 2" that has been corrupted by a society that is infantile in its moral system; a system past down from religion and political agendas.

People don't know how to act, because they have learned truths and ideals by other people who don't know how to act. This circle of anti-intellectualism is the established foundation when the contemporary methods of finding good morals should be a deconstruction of the morals we have established, erasing the fat and bullshit, scale it back to the basics and evolve it.

It isn't impossible, it's just that people do not do it for real. People do not think, because we act out of comfort, never out of careful thought. This can also be seen on this forum, where we demand careful thought, people write out of "system 1" not "system 2".

Deconstruct your beliefs and convictions, assume that you are wrong and falsify your opinion. If not, you aren't really making rational arguments or think in a way to evolve your ideas and theories. That is how you find answers and evolve things like morality into a more modern point of view.

That's where the difficulty lies. Morality has a rational basis on empathy but children are incapable of understanding arguments aren't they? That or their reasoning skills aren't developed enough to comprehend moral arguments. It's like trying to feed an infant with adult food. Infants simply lack the ability to digest adult food.

So, we must resort to a simpler method - reward & punishment. It's a language children understand. — TheMadFool

I'm not sure this is entirely true. It seems that abandoning reasoning with kids in favor of reward & punishment is the lazy route. It's giving up on actually preparing kids for life because parents don't have enough time to pay attention to their kids. It's one of the reasons I believe that most people in our developed society actually aren't equipped to have children because of the time constraints society have on parents.

I'm not saying abandon all, and do over. I do think there is a reasonable level of reward and punishment, but I wouldn't really call it reward and punishment. The foundation for these methods is basically teaching capitalism. It's hacking the reward center in our brain and using repetition to establish fear. I would say that a lot of the fears that parents establish in their kids could even impair their ability to think rationally later on, essentially making Orwellian thought-crimeesque pavlovian behavior in that as grown-ups they can't even, in their own private thoughts, allow themselves to think in certain perspectives on a subject. So I don't think reward and punishment is the way, the level of restriction and what's allowed by parents should be controlled with consequence and personal reward. I'm not talking about small children at the age of 3 but from 5 years of age. Children at that age start developing social skills and it's from this age parents need to pay attention to what they are doing. If the children do something bad, the consequence needs to be out of that context and not out of something else. Instead of taking away their candy when they do something bad, it should be a consequence out of the things they have done so that they start connecting the dots between cause and effect.

The biggest problem with having a punishment that isn't in context with what they've done is that they learn that if they do something, the consequences can be "whatever" other people can imagine. When choices later on in life becomes much vaguer and what is moral or not is cloaked in ambiguity, people can freak out since they've learned from an early age that punishment for doing something wrong can be something entirely different from what they actually have done. We essentially learn to distrust other people, especially in situations when we aren't sure what is entirely right or wrong. It affects relationships, business relations and so on, not just aspects of crime and punishment.

And this is why the following becomes a corrupted ideal...

As for the difficulty with adults, I think a punishment is justified as a deterrent and not as a process to exact vengeance. When people know they'll have to pay a price for breaking the law, they will think twice before doing anything illegal. If they still commit a crime then punishment is justified because they were aware of the consequences and yet committed a crime. — TheMadFool

First off, there's research that suggests that some form of crime and punishment is needed as a baseline for a working society, even though research is still ongoing on this. But the ideal you mention here is exactly how every one of us has been brought up to view morality.

Let me ask you, is it possible that you are wrong? Is it possible that the common knowledge outside of the scientific community, among the general public, is... wrong? That we have been so trained in thought about how punishment is a deterrent that most of us are unable to combine it with the actual facts on how our human psyche works?

The entire idea about it being a deterrent is not able to combine with the true nature of why people commit crimes. Those who commit crimes already know it's wrong, they do it because for most of them, they have no other choice or they have been pushed so far that reason is suppressed by strong emotions they cannot control. People aren't rational, no one is rational in their day to day life. If people were rational, commercials wouldn't work, but they do, they control people so effectively that businesses can steer people to do whatever they like. We think and act out of emotional choices, not rational ones. We are only rational when we use "system 2" of our brain, as we are doing now when discussing. We do not act out of instinct but out of slowly writing our balanced opinion on these subjects. This is one reason why I feel verbal discussions often fail since we are so focused on the social skills we need in order to maintain a conversation, while the process of writing is much more careful. Maybe that's why I write so much since I want to carefully address all aspects of the subject.

The hard truth is that punishment only works as a deterrent for those who already have no reason to commit crimes. It's the true paradox of crime and punishment. If there were no punishment or law, then people that have no reason to commit crimes could do it since there are no parameters about order in society, so a baseline is needed. But it does not have any effect on those pushed into a serious criminal life. It's an illusion that everyone who isn't a criminal has about criminals.

The best example of this is when people who aren't criminals watch a movie about a criminal. They get emotionally invested in that characters life, feel empathy, and feel that the character is treated wrong when they get caught. In any other context, in the news, people would spew hate over these people, but not when they've established an empathic connection to such a character because that is exactly the moral ambiguity that our irrational emotions have on us, have on those who commit crimes.

We cannot demand logic towards criminals out of the moral compass that we have since we are demanding them to act more rational and reasonable than even we do. We demand reason, balance, and almost inhuman rationality from them since our parameters is that of our own comfort in life. It's much harder to demand the same rationality and reason if we were in the same shoes as them.

Which leads to...

I guess it's assumed that by adulthood we're supposed to be in the know about moral rules. Is this assumption justified? — TheMadFool

No, we do not know about moral rules since our moral rules are illusions. It's either past down morality from religion or it's a twisted morality based on corrupted agendas by others. True discussion about morality need to be detached from everything we've learned about morals, it needs to be founded on scientific facts about human psychology and a baseline of the things that are objectively good for humans, which isn't as straight forward as it sounds, but it's the only true morality we can establish. Every other idea about morality is influenced by doctrines that have nothing to do with morality but by religious and political control.

Essentially, most people in the world today do not live by the knowledge we have about humanity, society, psychology, morality and so on. We live by our emotions, we live by the stupidity of comfort, by, in psychology, "System 1". We are irrational, we reject truth in favor of comfort. This is why our systems in crime and punishment, in parenting, in finding morality are so extremely flawed.

It's the reason I turn to philosophy in the first place because it has the means and methods of deconstructing our irrationality to find truths a priori.

The basic idea here, the question I ask, is what if you are wrong? What if every idea you have about the subject of crime and punishment is wrong, wouldn't you want to know that it is?
- Comfort says no, "system 2" says yes.

But philosophy doesn't allow "comfort" to be a factor in thought.

Children are morally pristine, innocent, but criminals are morally depraved and some are downright evil. — TheMadFool

This is a very simplistic summary of criminal behavior and behavior in general. There's a lot more to this than just singular labels.

The thing is that punishment is an illusion. It's a legacy from times when we didn't know anything about the human psyche and how we behave in social groups. At this time in history, we have a lot of knowledge about how we function as a species. But we still have punishment as a way of teaching and controlling morality. Without there being solid evidence at all about its effectiveness.

Children, for example, do not start acting morally because they have been punished for their behavior into good behavior. Its observed that it creates anxiety and fear of authority more than any balanced morality later in life. The more effective way is to show and really teach children why their behavior is wrong. The consequences for others, not the self. It builds up better empathy and better social skills than fear.

In crime and punishment, there's no real evidence for punishment having any effect on crime. It might be the difference between total chaos and the baseline for a functioning society, but there's nothing that proves it to actually be a factor for those that has decided on making a criminal act. It's basically a total misunderstanding of the mechanics of how why criminals do crimes. To fix problems with high criminality, you don't punish more, you fix the problems that nurture crime and criminals. You fix socioeconomic problems, segregation, inequality etc. Thos things that pitch people against each other and pressures in life that place someone on the brink of being homeless. Desperate people do not care if there's punishment or not, they do not see any other way forward but committing a crime. And if it's about violent acts that do not revolve around money, it's the desperation of the situation, the inability to see a way out, the anger of failure etc.

The psychology of criminals should not be ignored and punishment, as it exist today, is a very medieval and blunt tool for controlling crimes. The one thing that keeps it going as the method even today when we know much more about psychology and sociology is the retribution and revenge aspect.
Punishment is retribution and revenge, it is not a cure for crimes. But society has even wrapped the linguistic description of punishment in ways so that it doesn't come across like revenge. It's "the state against..." and "by the law you are punished..." etc. Never, "the victim's revenge..." "by the victims suffering you will receive their vengeance in form of...".

As soon as you really dive into the psychology, sociology and deconstruct what punishment really is, you will see that there is no paradox since punishment in itself is a paradox against what punishment is supposed to be in the first place. It doesn't reduce crimes, it doesn't teach children the right lessons, it does the opposite.

It's the message that stories like Judge Dredd tells. In that society, the police have the special force "Judges" that will punish on site, often by direct execution. It should be the perfect fear for criminals, but instead, crimes are on the rise and the criminal acts more violent. Because no one in Judge Dredd cares for the actual reasons crimes occur, they are blind to the punishment aspect of keeping control and it fails. That's the dystopia of that story. And that's the truth of punishment.

We just had a topic created about abortion, why start another one?

I'm not going to look them up but I understand your argument above. — DingoJones

From what I remember, I referenced my previous posts in this thread. If you didn't read those then I don't really know why you argue against me since my points have been argued clearly before this in this very thread. I won't repeat myself out of someone else's laziness in order to counter an argument I already countered. If that is the way you like to keep the dialectic I believe you are more interested in just pointing out your opinion rather than actually discussing the topic.

When you put in the restrictions on speech to prevent people being manipulated by hate speech, you also install the means for others to use those restrictions to suppress whatever speech they choose. — DingoJones

You haven't understood a word about the method I described earlier. What you are saying is falling in line of a false dilemma fallacy ignoring the nuances of what I've been saying.

Restricting free speech (to a certain extent, I'm not a free speech absolutist like Terrapin) is about control. — DingoJones

No, it's not. Only if your intention is control. If your intention is to promote well-being for the self and others while keeping the freedom of the individual you measure and calculate the methods according to those parameters. You straw man my argument into a binary idea of restrictions being just about control, nothing of what I said points to it being about control.

That control might be fine in the hands of someone who truly has everyone's best interest at heart (although I doubt it, as even the best intentioned person can be wrong) but the exact same logic and method can be used by bad actors with other, more nefarious interests at heart and has. — DingoJones

You misunderstand or intentionally misunderstand the method I proposed to make that argument. As I said, the method also makes it impossible for those trying to restrict free speech as a form of power, to be able to control free speech. In what way can a person use my method to do this? Give me an example and we can create a dialectic to improve the method further.

I have read all your previous posts, but I could only bother to clarify one of the errors they contain. — DiegoT

I do not disagree with what you wrote about color perception, it was merely a way to define my point. Maybe crude in its formulation, but it was not specifically about colors and perception, but about deduction. The idea that there is a certain scientific baseline for color and if the perception is way off, there might be something way off with the sensory observation of that color compared to the baseline of human biology. Maybe it was a bad example, but if you read behind the lines, I think the point was about something else entirely.

Perhaps in this media, we can keep the question more true to the biological aspects and philosophical aspects of the subject. — EpicTyrant

Good luck, even if I believe this forum is a bit better for debating complex questions, I think there are many here who don't even know how to keep a dialectic in any Socratic form whatsoever.

Why is this considered moral by human standards and not frowned upon? What is the difference between ending a premature state of life other than a fully developed one. Is it the lack of perceptive of reality and consciousness of the premature state of lifeform that makes it more bearable to perform an abortion for the carrier? Because the only thing that separates the premature life form from a fully developed one, is the passing of time. — EpicTyrant

In some situations, I think this is closely linked to how you would answer the question about euthanasia. In terms of painful deceases why would existence through that pain be better than ending it before it's even conscious of its own existence? It would be the same as euthanasia.

But I think this is about morality when someone is canceling pregnancy out of, for example, the decision to not being ready to have children in their life.

If we were to go by pure logic in this, it would become a bit horrific for some, but the logic points consciousness being developed so late and the ability to understand it's own existence that a super late abortion would be like removing an organ. It's a living thing, but it isn't anything yet. If you define it all by the concept of time, why not go backward? If time is everything, wouldn't the ejaculation of male sperm be like killing millions? And the menstruation killing the egg that should have become a new being?

I think this subject has so much emotion and religious/spiritual confusion around it to ever be put into a definitive answer. But if we are to carefully break down it all, an infant doesn't know its own existence really. A newborn baby doesn't have the cognitive function to understand anything other than mimicking and registering events. Right before its birth, it gets pulled out of a sleeping state which is the final stage of its existence before birth. So we could argue that it is its own person as soon as it starts working its cognitive journey to a higher cognitive state. But that would mean that you could abort a child right before its birth before it wakes up out of its sleep state. This is a horrible idea to many but its really not illogical. The baby isn't aware of its existence, it's not aware of anything. If a newborn baby sometime after its birth isn't conscious of its surrounding or existence why would an unborn baby have any notion of anything, especially since the only cognitive processes is sleep without anything processed through that sleep in term of dreams etc.

The conclusion to this is essentially that based on measuring an unborns cognitive ability and consciousness it will not even notice its own end. The trauma of losing a child at that time in pregnancy should not inform of the morality of the ending of its existence. All of this is about what is considered justified within the idea of the unborn child's existence. Through this idea, I cannot deny that it seems that the idea of a late abortion has emotional attachments to it that don't have any foundation in logic to the child's pain or existence when stopped existing. The event is measured by the pre-existing morality of the parents and society around them, the emotional trauma of the event of ending a pregnancy and spiritual/religious fantasies about existence. Measuring by the actual existence, a newborn child that's out of the sleep state should not be terminated, i.e after birth or after the awakening from that sleep. Before that sleep, there is no pain to the end of existence.

This would mean that up until awakening from that sleep, abortion should be "ok". This is the logic when looking at the actual biological process of pregnancy.

So the measurement of what is morally correct comes into contact with how we define a person. If we use euthanasia to terminate someone who is braindead and that is considered ok, why is it not ok to terminate a pregnancy for a child who has not even awaken from a sleep that has no cognitive foundation? Because that child has an entire life ahead of them taken away? What about sperms? With each ejaculation, there is one sperm that would have been a child with an entire life ahead of them. So how come we draw the line at some point?

I would say that the line is drawn because of our emotional opinion about a child. If it looks like a child we cannot abort. I think this is a problematic way of looking at this. The reasons to abort can be many things and I assume everyone is on board with abortion being a right for free people to be able to decide the course of their life.

But the morality of judging the importance of existence based on the physical form of something is just as irrational as judging the rights a statue that resembles a human has to exist. The value of existence should be measured by the cognitive completion of that being, otherwise, it's just an organ, organic matter, a statue of organic matter that we imbue with the importance of existence out of our emotional reaction to the form, not to the logic of its existence.

I would argue that existence isn't valuable as its own being until it starts coming out of the sleep stage right before birth. But in order to make room for any errors in judgment over the cognitive capabilities, I think the third trimester is the last stage to do it. In the question of doing it at all, I would argue that there's no point in dwelling about a fetus existence more than sperm ejaculation or passive organs consisted of living tissue. To think about the existence of a fetus in terms of the possible existence of a human later on, would be like dwelling on the consequences of all male ejaculations and sperm dying. There's no logic to this emotional attachment to a fetus because it's a form without consciousness. It has just as much future as the sperm ejaculated during sex. If it's about when a sperm and egg combine, there's so many impregnated eggs getting ejected as menstruation without many couples even noticing it as being an impregnated egg.

The problem people have with abortion has nothing to do with the logic of biology and is almost entirely about religious, spiritual and emotional irrational concepts about the topic bypassing any rational ideas because it's such a powerful topic. Birth and death is such huge questions when thinking about our existence that it's easy to understand why, but seriously, if you view biology in any scientific way, the answer is less powerful than our emotional reaction to it.

The worst part, however, is how society sets the parameters around this topic based on emotion rather than reason. We force people with more rational and mature concepts of this to act according to the ideas of emotional uneducated and in my opinion unintelligent voices of the public debates. In essence, a woman who still has the baby inside of them should not be considered a murderer or morally bad if they terminate their own pregnancy. Essentially it's still their own body they are manipulating, it's not detached yet and isn't conscious of its own existence. People force women to act in a certain way because of emotional responses to the subject rather than logical ideas about it. In my opinion, this is despicable to the freedom of individuals. It's a legacy from religious bullshit that's always been so emotional at its core that it manages to survive beyond the obvious religious existentialism and through that become an emotionally loaded taboo rather than biologically reasonable.

What doesn't kill you will try again later. — Bitter Crank

What doesn't kill you will grow stronger and be able to kill you later.

colours are not objective measures of anything, but subjective experiences. What is green or not depends on the observer, and this has been proven — DiegoT

I think you stumbled into a line of arguments that wasn't about this specifically. It was an example to a point about deduction outside of opinion based on emotion and sensory experiences. I suggest you read all my previous posts.

Ok, I understand all that, it doesnt address the failure of the process that necessitates the exclusion of exactly the kinds of things people call hate speech. You are familiar with the tragedy of the commons? As long as someone is able to ban certain opinions or expression of them, no matter how right they may be, someone will use that power to oppress. The worst atrocities in modern times emerge from this, and thats why free speech is do important. Besides, restricting what opinions people can express doesnt change thise opinions. The KKK wore hoods, they hid. I want my racists and crazies right in the open where I can see them. Shout your hate to the heavens at your discretion, so I know where to start looking when there is a lynching. — DingoJones

I'm not sure if you've read everything I've written in this forum thread, but I've pointed out examples of totalitarian states using restrictions as means of power and how the method doesn't give power to them, it rather takes it away from them. Be careful of false dilemma fallacies. The method doesn't restrict in a way that can be used as a tool of power, because if you argue through the method that someone should be restricted in their opinion and they then present an argument for why they expressed the opinion and it is a solid argument that falls in line of being constructive free speech, then you cannot use the tool of restriction as a means of power. The only way for someone to use restriction as a way to oppress and have power over others is if they restrict speech through their made-up reasons, not rational reasons.

The whole reason there is a discussion about restrictions is based on the common "Unlimited tolerance leads to intolerance". I agree I want to see the racists out in the open, but unrestricted free speech can also lead to manipulation of the population. It wasn't racists out in the open that built up the general populations opinions on Jews in Nazi-Germany, it was years of pointing them out as vermin that manipulated people into accepting the atrocities they went through. The way Trump is talking about Muslims and immigrants, totally breaking point four of my list, has changed how many act around immigrants. As someone who doesn't live in US, but has been there, it's easier to see the shift between a trip years ago and today. Not by the racists, but by how the general tension and day to day life looks like. I've seen it here in Sweden as well, how people were in defense of people in poverty but after the rise of right-wing populists who win votes by pushing fear and breaking all the points on my list, the general population has become colder against those in poverty. I've seen people who aren't racists who're slowly been shifting from trying to help the poor, to ignore them because they think the poor are criminals. When questioning them about why they shifted their point of view, they cannot pinpoint the reason, they "just know".

This is why unrestricted free speech can be truly destructive because keeping racists in the open demands that everyone is intelligent enough to not be manipulated by these people. The obvious ones are obvious, but some of them know how to manipulate. This is why populism has been growing so much because they use "freedom of speech" as their defense against anyone who criticizes their opinions. And because there is this idea about unrestricted freedom of speech, their voices has manipulated so many that a large portion of the world is infected by this manipulation of the population.

Unrestricted freedom of speech can lead to massive manipulation of the population by those who hide behind freedom of speech. As you said, the KKK hid behind hoods, but what happens when they hid behind freedom of speech and you cannot do anything to battle their manipulation of people desperate to find a black sheep for their problems? If you had a method to pinpoint when they are manipulating, when they don't have reasonable or rational opinions and through that be able to pierce their defense of hiding behind free speech, without restricting free speech. Isn't that a powerful weapon against the populism and growing common racism and polarization we see right now?

for the noseeum argument against the existence of God. — Rank Amateur

I'm more for keeping burden of proof towards any argument for God.
Otherwise there be teapots in space

The stuff in quotation marks. "There's a definition of blue by measuring the spectrum of light bouncing from that blue pen. The spectrum shows its green. You are wrong, it is green" — Terrapin Station

I'm done answering these vague questions. Write an argument against what I've been saying on the topic. I'm done wasting time on your lazy dialectics.

I think you are missing the point, the fact is that regardless of who is actually right, people will disagree even after going through your proposed tests of wrongness. When they do, an additional
appeal to what is objectively right isnt going to solve anything. The appeal that must be made is to an objective standard of some kind that functions in spite of peoples feelings about their rightness/wrongness. That way, no one can force their own standard on anyone else based on how convinced they are of the argument. For freedom of speech its the same reason that freedom of religion necessitates the seperation of church and state. Its a safeguard against when the process you are describing fails, and it does often fail. If it didnt, I would agree with you 100%. — DingoJones

It's not a proposed test of wrongness, it's a test of whether the opinion has solid grounds outside of the emotional reaction to something. If you test the opinion expressed, to those points, you are deducing whether it's based on someone hating black people out of an emotional response to what they perceive as unknown, i.e racism, or if they have a comment about a statistic that is predominant about black people, therefore a constructive thing to express in order to keep a dialectic about the problems the statistic points at.

If the method can pinpoint when someone is essentially talking out of their ass and when they have a solid and reasonable argument as the basis for their opinion, it's the closest I've yet to see answering where to balance between free speech and restrictions of harmful speech.

If you are trying to find an objective "to end all" standard, I think that's a simplified way of looking at something that is always evolving and changing. If you develop a standard of what is right and what is wrong you are creating a doctrine to follow rather than a method to constantly find the best answer.
The method I proposed does not say if someone is right or wrong, it points to if the reason they are saying it is unsupported by anything other than an emotional opinion. Anyone with little knowledge of psychology knows that emotional foundation for an opinion rarely has any valid merit of being constructive. It might point to a problem, but the opinion is rarely right when tackling complex questions. In terms of racism, emotional opinions are probably never correct, valid or of any value to constructive discussions. They will feed racism, divisions between people etc. If you use the method I proposed you can see which opinions that has value to discuss and be passed through free speech and which ones to discard as emotional outbursts that feed the problem.

The method demands serious deconstruction of opinion to find it's validity within free speech. I'm of course talking about opinions that might look like harmful speech because that is where the line gets hard to pinpoint what is and what is not free speech.

Some individual has to know this, and has to note it--that is, make a claim about it and so on, in order for us to take any action with respect to it, correct? — Terrapin Station

Has to know what? That the spectrometer has that as its definition of blue? Here's another definition of pure math #0000ff.
If you see it like #0000ff and the spectrometer sees #00ff00, then based on the facts about how the cones and rods in our eyes work and how they are processed in the brain, we can conclude there is something wrong.

We can move on to talk about the nature of perception, but that wasn't the point of the argument. This example was part of the argument you ignored because... whataboutism.

So once again, please form an argument to answer what this topic is about rather than irrelevant nitpicks about other topics. The example was about the deduction of something a priori, that a specific color is something defined and if suddenly experienced differently, it's not proven as an error of the senses by opinion, but by deducing where something is wrong. The one who said it was blue or the one who said it was green.

Answers have been given to your previous questions.

but be careful what you accept as proven theories. — Rank Amateur

Also, be careful using this as a counter-argument to arguments that use science as a basis for its conclusion. I've seen lots of counter-arguments from people that use this to counter anything science-based, however solid its foundation is, in order to put the argument into the notion that its a fallacy and by that create the notion that their own counter-argument is more or equally valid.

The rock thing was pure metaphor. — Rank Amateur

For proof?

You are not clear in what you are asking. Please form an argument that is taking into account what has been said and ask again.

You have been given answers to everything you asked, please re-read what has been said.

You start your post with a true observation of science, but you turn that into somehow trying to prove your validity in argumentation because you offer up something that should be swallowed just because science hasn't proved something yet?

The ones doing true science, the ones who are actually constantly in search of real answers are the ones never happy with the answers they get, but also, they do not take things with questionable logic as answers to anything. Just because scientists don't know something, doesn't mean they accept wild fantasies before finding the true answers.

It's also wrong to say that science is wrong all the time and build on correction. Answers in science that are proven theories are proven theories and they build new theories on top of them. This is why the unification theory is so hard since you can't erase the proven theories of either side, you need to find a theory that combines them all.

the proof isn't good enough, bring me another rock, and I'll let you know if that one is any better — Rank Amateur

This requires there to be proof in the first place. Questionable logic that is based on assumptions and fallacies does not count and all arguments so far, for any supernatural beings, have failed to reach that level of deduction.

This applies to all sides, but scientists are probably the only ones who keep demanding themselves to be better constantly. If religious apologists were ever that disciplined in trying to prove their ideas, things would look very different.

Even if "the world itself" can do all of that somehow, for us to know about it, note it, do anything about it, someone has to think and assert those things, right? — Terrapin Station

Somehow? We have spectrometers that define the color spectrum. We can conclude that if someone defines a color different to other people and to results of facts a priori, there might be something wrong with that person's sight or visual centers in their brain, hence further looking revealed the tumor. There are no assertions with this. It's a deduction and research. It's how you are able to write on your computer, someone researched and used facts we have concluded in order to create the computer.
As an example, in science, in order to reach a theory, you need to prove it. There are no opinions involved. Someone research, develop the theory, test it, it's there, a priori.

You are making a Reductio ad absurdum fallacy. You haven't really cared for the argument presented.

Even if it were somehow possible for an argument to "decide for itself," we'd need to be able to recognize this, wouldn't we? — Terrapin Station

You see a blue pen. Someone says it's green. There's a definition of blue by measuring the spectrum of light bouncing from that blue pen. The spectrum shows its green. You are wrong, it is green. You might have color blindness, you might have an issue with how your brain process visual sensory information. Doctors find a tumor.

Did someone decide you had a tumor? Did someone decide the pen was green?

Someone say black people should be restricted in society. Why?
He says they do more crimes than white people. Is this true?
He says some black people in his neighborhood has committed crimes against him.
Conclusion: his opinion is based on flaws and emotion that when expressed push hate between black and white people, segregating them. This is harmful speech, concluded by breaking down his speech and analyzing the intention or the reason for it. It breaks point 4 and upheld point 2 and 3 of my previous list.

Someone say black people should be restricted in society. Why?
He says they do more crimes than white people. Is this true?
He says that statistics of the city has shown there to be more crimes among black people.
Conclusion: his opinion is dangerous in its conclusion but still within the freedom of speech since he presented a reason for his argument that demands taking a look at the facts. This simplified conclusion of his might stir up emotion, but it can also lead to looking into these statistics and researching why it is like it is. Further down the road, it might lead to tackling crime by working on the socioeconomics of the city. His argument might feel like a personal attack, it might look like it's point 2 and 3, but because it's based on facts in point 4, the causality is not leading to pitching black and whites against each other but improvements to the well being of society.

Pitching people's arguments against those four points, testing them through a rational deduction, gives an answer to if the opinion is harmful or constructive freedom of speech.

If you can't recognize what is a valid argument you are not educated enough to be able to break down an opinion to find out if it is. The list I presented earlier is a good starting point to validate someone's opinion. If you think there are flaws in that list, then that's in line with what I said that it's a process that, like anything else, need to be evolving. But the four points aren't an opinion, they're a framework based on the well-being of the self and others. If you can't agree to a foundation that is about the well-being of the self and others, then you need to present an argument for why we should form conclusions about a society based on anything else as a foundation and what that other thing should be.

The framework is the well-being of the self and others and the deductive argument through that decides if something is harmful or constructive through freedom of speech. No one decides out of opinion through this and if someone is unable to conclude if something is harmful through a rational argument because they lack the knowledge to do so, they should not be the ones doing the deduction. If this is something you cannot agree with you first need to explain why well-being of the self and others isn't a foundation to build a strategy on. It's the framework for the argument that decides what is what and it's the framework that removes the individual opinion about what is free speech and what is harmful speech. This is the basic elements for the argument's use.

And so who decides? — Terrapin Station

If the argument is solid it's the argument that decides. This has been answered many times to you, but I'm starting to believe you don't know what a rational argument is or how it works. I'm not going to answer anymore to someone who doesn't seem to understand the answers given. You aren't building on them, you are just asking your questions over and over without even listening to the answers given. If you aren't interested in a proper dialectic then there's no point.

Did the suffering lead to the individual growing a further understanding of life and gave them tools to tackle life in a way that is better than before?

Did the suffering after a certain event stay with the person in such a way that it is crippling them and their thinking?

Did the suffering cause such harm that they can't have a balanced life and all that is left is depression, hopelessness, and longing for life to end?

I think that these questions should be answered to find out if the suffering was enough. Because suffering isn't just part of life, it is essential to be able to reach a balanced point of view. I have never met anyone with a balanced morality, balanced opinions, rational view on hard questions etc. that didn't go through some kind of hard suffering in their life. But I think the key is that the suffering should lead to the person growing and becoming a better person both for others and themselves, if not, if it keeps them down, if it's destructive for their well being or others well being while limiting their ability to grow as individuals beyond that suffering, it is too much.

What is too much and what is not is very much up to each individual. That's why some can walk through fire, destruction, mass deaths, and horrors and still come out as stronger people with a kind soul and feel happiness. While others who experienced just one of their loved ones dying might have crippling traumas for life.

I don't think we can find an objective balance to this, it's a balance in each individuals life. But we could help those who can't find that balance. I'm generally a person who acts on my sufferings like they are valued life lessons like any other. I think that is a healthy way of looking at pain and suffering, as things that teach us something. It's painful but look for each lesson each event gives you and try to use it rather than suppressing it.

To Joe, they lead to a justified conclusion. To Bill, they do not. Now what do you do? — Terrapin Station

Because it's based on facts outside of Bill's and Joe's opinions, biases, and past down doctrines. That's why. If so, Joe might think the conclusion isn't what he hoped for, but it's proven to be best for most people and the most balanced conclusion at the time. For Bill, he just wants reality to be formed by his own opinion and is in the wrong.

This is what deduction is. You don't seem to understand the foundation of what a reasonable argument is composed of.

And we non-personally figure out if we've deduced a correct conclusion via? — Terrapin Station

The facts. I'm wondering, have you ever done any deduction or induction? How do you reach conclusions in your philosophical thinking? Are you just expressing opinions? Because just expressing opinions is quickly picked apart in philosophy, you need to have more than just Bill and Joe's opinions.

That is beautiful! :hearts: That is the kind of thinking that attracts me to the forum and gives me hope for humanity. — Athena

Kind words are rare, thank you!

If we all understood the reasoning you gave us, we wouldn't need moderators because logical and social agreements would rule. We need moderators now because we have neither the understanding of logic nor the social agreements and things spin out of control without authority over us. That reality pushes the question of who has that authority and what qualifies someone to be a moderator, and should the accused have a defense and a trail? — Athena

And this is the challenge really. I think that a balanced and strong moral compass comes out of a balanced life in which both positive and negative events form the identity of the adult thinker. This balance is however very hard to achieve for every person in a civilization. This is why decisions need to be formed out of a process, a deduction, a way of reaching a balanced answer through research rather than influenced by pushing a morality that is essentially a past down doctrine.

Throughout history, we have only taken positive steps forward in society by questioning the norms of the day with rationality and reason. Each time we have changed the world through that, we have improved the quality of life and well-being. Each time we have changed something with questionable logic or through other reasons than what equates to the most well-being for all, we have opened up society to the horrors of mankind.

The baseline should not be that someone in power has authority over others and through that creates balance. It should be through a process of logic based on the well-being and quality of life for all. Philosophical deduction and dialectics about everything should be the foundation of society. All can participate in the discussion, but only the most well-thought and rational arguments should be what guides society. If someone proposes an argument that is good for 10 people and someone disputes it by pointing out that there are 12 people and they have an argument that is good for all 12, that solution is the norm before someone points out something better.

This foundation is however never settled on a solution to fit all, it's a dialectic over time. Always balancing what is best for people.

In this case, the question is freedom of speech vs harmful speech. For those not using "the process of deduction" to reach a balanced answer, it pitches them to either binary side of the argument. Generally, this is the majority of how people behave with these types of questions, tribalism rather than actually thinking. But it's easy to get started, just think about the positives and negatives of each side, see if there's a way to find that balanced position. Harmful speech can destroy lives, it can lead up to such horrors as genocide if left unchecked, but blindly limiting it can lead to state control or even personal censorship that limits people's ability to think freely. How does one balance between freedom and protection of the people?

First off, pinpoint what harmful speech is, is it personal, general?

In a liberal place, all people are agents of their freedom, they make decisions for themselves and have obligations to society only through self-interest. It reflects much how human psychology actually works. Limiting peoples freedom leads to corruption and control by others over that freedom. But an unbalanced person could create havoc on other people if everyone is free to do anything. The self-limitations only work if a person already has a balanced moral code. And if one unbalanced person becomes powerful enough to have followers under their ideas, it could lead to things like Nazi-Germany.
So the conclusion here is that freedom of the individual is essential for the well-being of a person since it's the natural psychological state we have. But unlimited freedom can lead to very dark places. Unlimited freedom is therefore not the answer and we can't have unlimited freedom of speech since it can lead to harmful results. But how do we limit freedom of speech? First, we already apply laws to crimes like murder, physical harm, and even psychological harm through harassment, insults, libel etc. We have defined laws against individual actions against another individual. So defining harmful speech already has some basics within it, like those we have laws against, those defined by actual harm to others. So what is the balance between? Crime vs freedom? No, it has to be about the things that can't be proven as crimes since the causality can't be direct. If a large group of millions of people uses a speech that builds up hate for a specific group of people over a set of 10 to 20 years, that is not possible to punish in court or for any law to prosecute. Most people don't even realize transitions through this period of time and children growing up within this timeframe might even learn that this is the norm of society.

Harmful speech vs freedom of speech is therefore about long term consequences within a free society. By looking at it like this, it's easier to start seeing how to draw up a deduction to define when someone is making a harmful speech and when someone is expressing themselves backed up by the freedom of speech. For me, the baseline is those four points I made in an earlier post. By using them, we can define what someone is actually saying. Like for example, if someone is blaming Muslims for all terrorist attacks. Is that statement based on facts? Looking at those facts it's clear that there's a very small fraction of Muslims that are actually fundamentalists doing these terrorist acts, it's in the numbers and makes the statement not based on facts but through racism against this group. The statement is, therefore, a harmful speech and should be removed, blocked and erased since it's not an expression of freedom of speech, it's an expression that pitch groups against each other, it's creating conflict and rise of racism. If someone or many are killed down the line because of such speeches, it's comparable to when someone talks about killing someone and someone who hears it commits that act. It should not be tolerated because the causality is there. But if someone is criticizing how Islam has violent ideas in their religious texts and that there's a wide-spread limitation of women's rights that is destructive for people's well-being within Muslim states and you look into those facts, it's clear that there are violent ideas that some could twist into dangerous acts and women's rights are in fact limited to the point that they are not equal to men and violence within families, honor killings by husbands and brothers occur. This is a speech that is based on those facts and therefore is a reasonable and rational criticism against Muslim ways of life with the well-being of people in mind.

This is why so many jump to conclusions, because they do not look into facts, they do not understand where on the scale someone's speech is put and if someone use both facts and twist them into arguments that are racist, if people did breakdown their argument they should demand the person to put forth an argument that is without that racism otherwise be blocked or censored.

So back to the question of authority, the deduction process is the decision making for what is and what is not harmful. But the authority should be the one making this deduction. If a person does not have the qualifications to be able to do a deduction of this kind, they should not be in this position. In terms of moderators of a forum, they should be on that level, if they aren't, they are essentially advocating destructive censorship over free speech and if they don't care at all, they are putting out the red carpet for destructive causality.

This is why I think there's a point to the philosopher kings. I'm very critical against the unlimited democracy that we have today since it creates demagogy. The people in power should be elected, but having anyone who just decided to become a politician be able to reach those levels because they know how to play it rather than being balanced thinkers creates a very unbalanced society. The only reason why most western societies haven't crashed and burned is that we've had enough restrictions on these politicians to keep the machine from becoming too corrupted. But my opinion is that we should have a little more demand on the moral compass and knowledge that politicians have. We have it for any other occupation in society, but not politics.

We don't all agree though. Not at all. — Terrapin Station

Deduction, making a rational and reasonable argument bypass disagreement.

So someone has to make the decisions about what counts and what doesn't, etc. — Terrapin Station

No, deduction bypass personal opinion, that's the point.

Who gets to make those decisions and why do they get to make them? (And what do we do with the folks who don't agree with those decisions?) — Terrapin Station

If the deduction of a speech that criticizes a specific ethnic group, concludes that it is not based on facts and that the criticism is coming from an emotional reaction out of a fear of the unknown (fear of another ethnicity). The deduction itself has proven it to be a harmful speech against this group and that the possible consequences of such a speech may stir up hate against this ethnic group, further pushing a division between people and the rise of racism between them. No one decided this, the deduction and breakdown of the speech decided this.

Why is it so hard to understand that "who" is irrelevant to this process? What actions to take after a deduction has concluded is another question entirely. This is about spotting harmful speech vs free speech. "Unlimited tolerance leads to intolerance" is something I think you know about? So the question is, how do we spot intolerance in order to limit that without infringing on free speech? To view this as a binary "free or controlled" question is an extremely simplified and naive take on the subject.

It's like you don't even read the arguments put forward and just keep pushing the "who's deciding" argument. It's already been answered.

How do we get to "This isn't factual and reasonable" if someone doesn't decide that? — Terrapin Station

By deduction of what the speech is saying. Or are you not able to break down what someone is saying to find if it's based on rational ideas or if it's based on emotional unreasonable ideas about another group of people? Are you unable to form a dialectic with the one who formed the speech to question the validity of their speech through pointing out the lack of facts?

If you encounter someone who says "I think black people shouldn't be mixed with white people". Are you unable to break down that thing into: "Is this based on facts and if so what?". If that person then reply saying "I think white and blacks are too different to exist together". Are you unable to question: "Are black and white people so different that this is true?" and "Does keeping black and white people separated creating a healthy balance in society that has a positive effect on people and society?"

The deduction of a person's speech is kindergarten-level breakdown of intentions. If you can't see what is harmful to groups of people, what is dividing people and what can lead to things like genocide and racism, then you might be too uneducated to spot these things. It's a very basic form of questioning someone's opinion that should be obvious for anyone with a normal education.

The problem is still that you view this as an authority, a "who" that decides something. It's like you intentionally misunderstand what "deduction" means in order to push the idea of an authoritarian agent deciding things.

Deduction bypass authority. It's the breakdown of a speech that informs if it's harmful or not, no one decides.

Read the entire thing and you will understand that your fixation with "who" is irrelevant.

One or more persons' feelings could be hurt by anything conceivable. Anything you might say, anything you might wear, any way you might look at them, etc. — Terrapin Station

Point 1 is, therefore, pointing out that harmful speech isn't about hurting a specific person.

Who gets to decide what's negative or not and why do they get to decide? — Terrapin Station

By deduction of the validity of what someone says is meant to stir up hate as in point 3, or is valid criticism, as in point 4.

Dividing people into categories like "Folks who say prohibited things"? — Terrapin Station

That idea is a reductio ad absurdum fallacy. By using these points to figure out if someone is using non-factual criticism of a group in order to spread hate and divide people, does not mean putting them into a group that says "prohibited things" and should, therefore, be stripped of rights. You are making an absurd hypothesis of what this is about.

Who gets to decide what's factual and reasonable and why do they get to decide? — Terrapin Station

By proper deduction of what is being said.

Why are you so focused on "who gets to decide"? It's not about who, it's about how people should spot harmful speech that is destructive on society. You seem to be extremely fixated on the idea of an authority that goes around censoring that you do not even understand the basic idea that I proposed. It's not about "who" is going to decide, it's about everyone using their intellect to know the effects of harmful speech and how to spot it. If you use those four points onto someone's criticism about a group you can deduce if it's a criticism that is made through a rational and reasonable argument or if the argument is coming from hate of a group. If Nazis are talking about Jews as vermin, does that have any factual support if you break down their argument? Or is it harmful speech that out of repetition creates hate of Jews? Point 2 and 3.

I think my point was pretty straight forward and has nothing to do with "who gets to decide". No one decides. Deduction of the intention of a speech decides if it's harmful or not. If you don't believe that harmful speech can stir up extremely destructive consequences, I think you should read up on how the apathy of the German civilian population made room for how Jews were treated. It's the most obvious and well-known example of this thing.

It's a good sentiment. But it still doesnt work. I used to live in a black neighborhood, and anything that I said would be interpreted as hateful. Anything at all. I couldnt even say hello without black people claiming I was trying to start a fight. — ernestm

It's more of a starting point. As I mentioned, an evolving form is the most optimal form. But I would say that your example is an example of when it's not harmful speech. If you said "hi" and that was considered harmful, it was those who considered it to be so that was in the wrong. They can be right in criticism about how whites treated them, they can be right in many things about their situation and socioeconomic position and they can be skeptical about the presence of white people in their neighborhood based on previous accounts of negative events. All of those are based on point 4. If they break point 4 they are not sticking to facts and uphold point 3 and 2. If they were just out to hurt you personally, as in point 1, they wouldn't have the need to bring ethnicity/race into the way they treated you. So, they essentially didn't have the intention of hurting you personally, breaking point 1, they didn't have factual reasons for rational criticism of your presence, as in point 4 and they upheld point 2 and 3.

Therefore, they committed harmful speech and should be criticized for doing so.

So it's not an example against my points, it's enforcing that baseline even more. The example you brought up seems to be focused on the idea that harmful speech is only against minorities or specific groups in line with what we see in media, but harmful speech is based on parameters that aren't influenced by the current state of politics. You can apply those four points to any time in history between any groups of people and it's still a good baseline for judging if someone is committing hateful speech that ends up dividing people.

It is actually impossible to stop discrimination for that reason. — ernestm

It's only impossible to handle the balance of free speech vs harmful speech if you handle it as a binary system. If you are able to accept things to be a shifting complex entity rather than a simple line between two points, it's possible to handle it. But the problem is that all those in charge of handling it, does so in this binary way. In that sense, you are right that it's impossible.

But for those of us who like to solve the riddle, I think handling the subject like a tesseract rather than a cube. At a philosophical level, all things need to be that way. If something is a square you think a cube if something is a cube you think a tesseract. I don't think that this subject is unsolvable, I think it's constructed of an answer that is always shifting, i.e the definitions of harmful and free speech need to be closely connected to what we perceive as being that in society.

Let's say that there comes a time when bald people would be considered lower in intelligence and a lower class of humans. Today it's not very nice to call out someone's baldness, but it's not racist. It's classified more within free speech and no one is going to call out someone for making fun of baldness as being racist or committing a hate crime. But if there is a general idea through society that they have lower intelligence and are a lower class people, it has become racism and the harmful vs free speech should reflect that at that time.

There's been a lot of research done on how hateful speech triggers behavior that is harmful to the people the hate speech is about. It's generally not about someone getting hurt by the words, but by how the acceptance of hateful speech numbs a society into a certain behavior. Talking about Jews as a lower class people or calling them vermin, as was done in 30's Nazi-Germany, didn't result in the words themselves hurting Jews. Even if they did get hurt and many fell into depressing mental health issues, the biggest threat was how the general talk formed the entire society into acceptance of how Jews should be treated. People stopped caring when they were dragged out into the streets and forced onto trains. Because of years of talking about them as vermin made people accept them as vermin. People, collectively, are pretty much stupid in this regard. Over a course of time, you can make a population think and feel just about anything if you know how to do it. Anyone who thinks this is bullshit does not know about the psychology behind it and need to read up on it before pointing out that free speech should be unrestricted and binary freed.

The question shouldn't be about the binary ideas of free speech vs restricted speech. It should be how to define harmful speech since the result of unrestricted free speech has been proven to generate the worst crimes in history. It's naive to think that this is a binary topic in which you choose a position and then simplifies reality around it.

So to break down the building blocks of harmful speech that should be restricted.
1. It's not about hurting one or more peoples feelings.
2. It's about creating a negative idea about a group of people.
3. It divides people into categories that through repetition may build hate/dislike between groups.
4. It is not based on factual sources that work as a foundation for reasonable criticism of a group.

There may be added points of definitions, but in general, I think it's reasonable to define harmful speech not as hurting others directly but indirectly steers society into dividing people and creating foundations for hate that might build acceptance of negative actions against these groups. We saw it with Jews in Nazi-Germany and we see it today with immigrants and Muslims. Derogatory speech against immigrants by people like Trump and his followers has increased the acceptance-level of derogatory actions against immigrants and Muslims.

But we can also see it in other movements like the wave of feminism that's going on. As I mentioned, the derogatory talk about white men, the use of "CIS men" in derogatory ways are increasing the acceptance levels of negative actions against white men. To the point of courts lowering their level of evidence requirements in cases of sexual violence when the accused is a white man.

If you actually analyze and look closely at different speeches it's actually not that hard to spot what is harmful speech and what is free speech. If we define it through the points above it's not that hard to see when someone is using facts to criticize a group behavior, like the common violence against women within the culture of Islam and when it's harmful speech aimed at pitching groups against each other or derogatory against a certain group, like if someone says all CIS white men are responsible for violence against women. When someone is using facts to describe why there's a lot of crimes committed by a group of immigrants by analyzing their situation and socio-economical reasons, compared to when someone is using harmful speech to blame immigrants as a way to find a black sheep for their own failures.

I actually don't find it hard to spot what is what in society and I think that just taking a stance on either binary side, where you at one point want to ban all things that might sound harmful (even when it's not, in the way that blind SJWs are doing) and unrestricted freedom of speech that's oblivious to the effects it can cause down the line.

You don't choose a side, you deduce the balance and hold that ground.

Just to point out, this is ending up discriminating against people for speaking at all about differences in ethnicity, gender, or culture. There is no clear line what constitutes criticism and what not. — ernestm

No, it's not. You are taking one part of my text out of context and doesn't read into the nuances of the entirety of it. This is usually the way these discussions go; the nuances get thrown out the window to make a point instead of actually understanding the argument someone said before answering.

Nice post. Just sad that you had to start it with a statement equal in merit to one that begs the question. What do you think? — Wallows

Maybe that went into somewhat of a fallacy, but I think the general note is that people talk a lot about objective meaning to life or similar, but there isn't a single rational argument that can provide a notion that there is any objective meaning to our lives or to anything. We are too biased to our own existence and therefore we give ourselves more value than we have in comparison to the entire universe. So we believe irrationally that there is a grand meaning to our existence when any reasonable induction points to there being none. We can only invent a meaning, meaningful to ourselves as human beings and because of our individuality we can't invent an objective meaning, only individual ones. We might be able to conclude a meaning, value or purpose that might be true for as many people in as many different cultures and situations as possible, but we could never find anything truly universally objective.

What I am saying about String “Theory” and M “Theory” is that they are no better than me saying there is a universe where I am king of the world. My language of English makes this possible. The language of mathematics (which is pure tautology) makes it possible for physicists to say there are 11 dimensions. — Noah Te Stroete

The difference is that no scientist is saying that they are the truth. Because they are only hypotheses. Popular media have distorted these ideas into being something they are not. But in religion assumptions and guesses equal proof or logical reasonable arguments for God. That's why religious apologists arguments are childish at best. String theory and M-theory are only a path towards a unification theory, nothing more, nothing less, so using it as a counter-argument to what I have said becomes weak as a counter argument. There's been a lot of hypotheses from the days of Einstein that have been considered unprovable and impossible to use as scientific theories, only to later be proven and become solid facts. But you assume that to mean that String theory as it's proposed now to be proven in the future, but not even within the scientific community is string theory considered true or anything other than a stepping stone of scientific reasoning based on established facts towards a unification theory.

You are still just saying the same thing over and over, but it's still not in support of the Kalam argument proving anything at all or any religious argument to be at anywhere near the level of a scientific hypotheses since those are based on a lot of facts and established science while religious arguments assume way too much in order to reach their conclusions. I don't see religious arguments being anywhere near scientific ones because the foundation of the two is like comparing child play with a lab. Saying that some scientific hypotheses to be impossible or close to impossible to prove does not lead to religious arguments becoming more logical or reasonable, they are still weak. It's like a desperate attempt to put flawed arguments at the level of unproven science in order to argue that therefore the religious flawed argument "could be true". This is a very flawed way of trying to push flawed arguments into being more reasonable without actually making the argument reasonable.

No. They are unprovable, untestable hypotheses. There are no CONCEIVABLE experiments to test their validity. This was not the case with the Higgs Boson. — Noah Te Stroete

Can you see into the future? Do you know that humanity will never be able to prove them? Isn't that an assumption that demands you to know a lot of the scientific history of the future? Also, your example about string theory counter argues nothing of what I said about science and religion. The big difference is that those who have less to no insight into the world of science generally misunderstand theories and hypotheses as nothing more than guesses when they are far more than that since they have a foundation in established science. Religious arguments get into childish logic at best.

Furthermore, internal consistency in mathematics may not refer to anything in reality. M theory may be mathematical fantasy. — Noah Te Stroete

As I said, nothing of what you say about the topic of string theory and m-theory counter argues what I previously said.

Perhaps you are not familiar with philosophers’ objections to calling String Theory and M Theory “not science” in that they are not even conceivably testable? They are metaphysics. Not true scientific theories. — Noah Te Stroete

They have a foundation in already proven theories and facts. They are hypotheses. Just like I said the Higgs Boson field and Gravitational waves were unprovable and considered "fantasy" by those criticizing science. They are both proved to be true. The difference is that the science community does not conclude them to be true, they know they are hypotheses and nothing more. But religious apologists use this to propose that "therefore our ideas could be true", which is a fallacy. And the Kalam argument still doesn't do much, even if we in the end proves there to be a sentient being kickstarting the universe and Big Bang, that in itself still doesn't underline that this being is "God". The confusion about hypotheses and theories as concepts in the scientific world seem to be a big reason why people don't understand the ideas proposed. No one who is educated about string theory or m-theory propose them to be true, but they are also not rooted in fantasy but already established science, which means they are qualified guesses compared to just guesses. The difference between the two is night and day.

My point was that so-called “scientific” hypotheses about the origin of the universe or what caused the Big Bang are untestable, unverifiable conjectures, pure metaphysics. As such, they are not really science. — Noah Te Stroete

A hypothesis is a qualified guess not yet proven. That is not the same as the type of guesswork that apologists do when trying to use philosophical arguments. The scientific process is pretty solid in what it does, it does not conclude any answers until they are scientific theories. You are also pinpointing testing Big Bang as being untestable. That would require you to be able to conclude that science will not ever be able to test or measure these things into proven theories. You do not know that and it comes off as the people saying people would never fly and then we did. That's a lot of assumptions about science in order to defend the Kalam argument, but it requires you to know all the scientific discoveries in the future.

If the Kalam argument was to be solid, there can't be anything that can refute it. Assuming things about science or God does not make the argument correct. That is why it fails.

Pointing out that science is equal to faith by pointing out that hypotheses aren't proven is a misunderstanding of what a hypothesis is and also a simplification of the scientific process in order to support an argument that science is flawed. The difference between science and religion is that science requires burden of proof to be fulfilled and it never points to hypotheses being anything other than qualified guesses. But even with qualified guesses, they are still rooted in much more solid grounds through already proven theories and facts than proposing ideas about God on top of an argument that doesn't even connect to it, which is what religious apologists does.

The big difference is that science evolves and changes their view on a subject by testing and working it out through logic and measurements in order to reach as close to truth as possible. Religion doesn't do that, it concludes without proper logical reasoning and fills in gaps to fit the narrative. The two aren't even comparable.

A good example of an "unprovable" hypothesis is the one about the Higgs Boson field and also the one about gravitational waves. Both were recently proven to be true and measurable. Assuming that science can't answer something based on what we can't answer today, ignoring any possibility of answering it in the future, is a big logical misstep.

Show me where I've declared it so. You can't. What I actually said was that I remain unconvinced that it's sound. — S

It is sound, in describing that something must be the first cause of all the causality. It doesn't prove anything else than that. But one could argue that the argument assumes the first cause to be defined by our universal laws and what we can measure with scientific methods at this time in history. If we can't define the first cause, we don't even know if we can pinpoint it as a first cause in the timeline of our time dimension. So the argument in a way assumes a lot about its conclusion, even if we detach it from the idea of God. It really doesn't do much as an argument since so much of the premises needs to be proven before the conclusion.

It's a very weak argument that requires belief and assumptions to work, meaning it's flawed, at best says there was a Big Bang... which we already know through scientific theories.

However, the need for a cause of the universe is still there, and the so-called “scientific” causes are also posited faiths. — Noah Te Stroete

Scientific causes are based in hypotheses and theories and no one of them is concluding anything to be true. Faith and religion settle down with it being God. That is a logical misstep. Science has much more pressure to prove something and if you believe that they present something equal to faith you misunderstand the scientific process entirely. You need to prove that the first cause, if you can prove there to be a first cause and not for example circular time is the truth, is God. If you can't, the Kalam argument doesn't prove anything. It's actually a pretty weak argument saying essentially nothing outside of common sense about causality really. So the Kalam argument does not have anything to do with God and any notion it does is a fallacy if it's not proven. Burden of proof still applies, or the teapots will fly around the sun, if you understand that reference.