What you don't care about the russian lives it would safe? — Echarmion

Then don't vote for Trump?

You have so many; I'm jealous.

To start, if determinism is true, it makes no difference what we believe as what we believe is preordained. — I like sushi

Surely this is not true. If determinism is true then what we believe is preordained along with what we decide and what we do, but all these things still make a difference in the sense that they are determining causes of what happens. My belief that you have gone wrong here determines my act of writing this particular response. If I happened to believe you were right, I would not write this.

When I do my accounts, the result is predetermined on any view of determinism v freedom, because all the transactions have already happened. Nevertheless, I still have to do the sums, and doing or not doing the sums is necessary and makes a difference. In the same way, I have to actually tell the waiter the predetermined order that I will make from the predetermined menu that he has to show me, because that is how these things get determined, by my choosing act, that has to be primed with the menu information.

What is true is that determinism makes no difference to the decision making process that one is constantly going through, as that process is the determining of our actions; unless one falls into fatalism, which is false. "Waiter, don't bother me with the menu, bring me whatever my predetermined choice will be." The waiter cannot oblige.

Notice that the resignation letter isn’t on official Whitehouse letterhead, — NOS4A2

I believe he did not resign. I believe he dropped out of the running for nomination for reelection. A party matter, not an official presidential matter.

Singer's point seems obviously correct, but then, Western culture is entirely predicated on production and consumption of material goods. — Wayfarer

It is obvious indeed, and it does not involve making a virtue of poverty or dependence as some have suggested. But it makes the individual responsible for rebalancing an economic system built on exploitation and radical injustice. This rebalancing needs to be done through the monetary system itself; demonising those who are hypnotised by the ideology of greed that has dominated the West for centuries produces much resistance.

We live, in the West, in an architecture of isolation, of private consumption and production, and our connectedness and interdependence is hidden from us. One's status is defined by how much one extracts from this system, not by how much one contributes to it (though the pretence is that these are the same). Singer has the right criticism but it is directed at the individual when it needs to be directed at the way of life that is imposed on the individual, of being morally responsible for social inequalities that they are entirely isolated from. We are pawns in a rigged game we did not invent and have no choice about playing.

But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
’Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game — Bob Dylan

It isn't clear to me, at this point, what a "balance" between our species and "nature" would look like. — BC

It's not all that hard to understand the principle of the thing. If herbivores have no control on their population, then they will breed until their numbers exceed the ability of the grassland to sustain them. Then they are in overshoot. They eat the grass down to the bare earth and then starve. Then the population crashes and eventually the grassland recovers, or else some other vegetation is established that supports a new population of consumers. I can hear the buffalo on their philosophy forms saying " Well I like grass, what you want me to eat?" as the desert encroaches.

One of the things that happened with the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone is that certain areas around the rivers became more dangerous because the view is limited and wolves can get close. So these areas were less grazed and the vegetation became more diverse allowing another habitat and expansion of other species. [More diversity equates to more resilience of the ecosystem.]

Imagine that human intelligence could replace the predator, such that we could agree to keep, say, half the land, and half the ocean free from human exploitation. That would be a smart move for a dominant species that knew it needed to have a sustainable relationship to its environment. If only we were a bit more smart!

All of nature hunts, kills, consumes, devours; vines strangle, weeds crowd out and take over, each animals draws oxygen from the air leaving waste in its path. — Fire Ologist

Just so, and well farmed animals will suffer less stress, be better fed, and protected from disease and parasites than their wild cousins. Even the most organic and vegan farmer has to control their plot and slaughter the pests that will seek to exploit her industry - slugs, caterpillars, aphids, wire-worms, etc. Suffering is part of life, as is consumption of other life. Not to mention the starving rabbits and feral goats that gather along the fence-line looking longingly at the lush vegetation they are being deprived of.

Like, , I don't eat meat because I don't like killing it, but do eat eggs and cheese. And I feed my vegetables with sheep and goat droppings and dead seaweed. Real experience of the natural world encourages a more realistic attitude to life; the problem with humans is not their cruelty but their proliferation.

We are in overshoot. This is a natural phenomenon that can happen to any species when it becomes out of balance with its environment. Dutch Elm disease, for instance, rampaged through Europe some years ago and killed off most of the elm trees. And now it is not rampaging much any more because it has killed off most of the elm trees that it used to live on. Humans are likewise destroying the ecosystem that they depend on, and the population is about to crash. Unfortunately, that crash is worldwide and will take many many species and whole eco-systems with it. And the human suffering along with it is already growing and will be huge.

Don't measure your success by my presence; I am a notorious shoveler of shit.

If the King is in check then the other player can swipe away the peices, — Moliere

That might be (but actually isn't) an interesting game, but it is no longer chess. Allegedly, rugby was invented when some idiot was supposedly playing football and picked the ball up and ran with it. A few other things had to change before it became a game worth playing.

There is a card game called "52 card pick up", in which the dealer throws all the cards up in the air, and leaves their opponent to pick them up. It's faintly amusing. Once.

And yet it lives, five years on. — Banno

As does 52 card pick up. But if you want to do something interesting in mathematics, or the philosophy of mathematics, this is not the way to go about it.

It's the 'many worlds' interpretation of mathematics.

Always "and", and never "or", but also "or"... Etc.

Banno's thesis is that maths is invented, not discovered, just as games like chess are. Well then it is very easy to invent some rules for a game or some rules for a mathematics, and there are lots of them. But most are dull or unplayable.
So the thread itself is badly set up as a game that doesn't have much interest or significance, because posters can, and nearly always do, take the nuclear option and pretend they have "won". A better win might be if we could come up with a new form that was consistent and incomplete, but not isomorphic with arithmetic or something like that. I don't have a better set up that would encourage that, unfortunately.

Interested puzzlers are recommended to search out the books of Raymond Smullyan.

Every contradiction shall be resolved both ways.

Nominalism to me is the claim that language is made up by folks for their convenience, and the rules are likewise made up for convenience. It is convenient to distinguish tables from chairs so that one can tell the children not to sit on the table or they won't get any dinner.

Contrariwise, if everyone sat on tables, they would be chairs.

If implications were horses, then logicians would ride.
If implications were coaches, then logicians would still ride.

Let A = "Unenlightened's testimony is unreliable"
Let B = "Unenlightened tells the truth"
not B ="Unenlightened does not tell the truth"

Hush, children!

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. — Wittgenstein

I see a re-accession to the European Union on the horizon. — javi2541997

Now that is funny. The UK population would vote for it of course with the benefit of hindsight, but the EU, perhaps, would not be so keen to welcome home the prodigal Isles, and break out the fatted calf again.

Most people are amenable. If you say, "Excuse me." they will get out of your way; if the traffic light shows red, they will stop; if people around them are upset about fox-hunting, they will stop fox-hunting. They need no leader to conduct their lives beyond custom and decency.

We only need a leader if we are going somewhere new. The future is always somewhat new, and mainly the same, so the leader is mostly unimportant, and occasionally vital. Occasionally, circumstance requires a great change in society to be made rapidly (climate change comes to mind for some reason). When we as a society come to recognise this need, we turn to face it and find that someone is already there out in front making the change. A leader has miraculously appeared.

Such a leader is not to be confused with those power seekers who only follow the crowd, but try to push their way to the front. Following such we will go nowhere pleasant.

Although, it is not in the same context, be careful with those small parties. We have independent parties in our Congress, and they persuade the main party (PSOE, that is the Labour Party), but just for personal benefits, forgetting the common and national goals. — javi2541997

Yes, it is not particularly good news, but a sign of the fragmentation of society. It would be nice if one could campaign for Palestine recognition, or the environment or immigration control or whatever without having to form a party but have influence on the existing parties. There is no principle any more, only "interests" and "opinion"; for want of moral consensus we are prey to ideologues.

It cannot be stable to have a minority of 34% of a turnout of 60% which I think comes out to a government with just 20% of the electorate supporting, and some of that a reluctant "they can't be worse than the last lot" support. With a little help from a hostile and scandal-hungry press, that support can vanish almost overnight.

I think my first reaction to the result is not to emphasise the victory of the labour party, but more the quite astonishing rise of the small parties. If you are not familiar with the electoral system of the UK, we have a 'first past the post system', and this massively favours there being 2 parties. So, for example, in my local constituency, labour won the seat comfortably with just over 33% of the vote. I think the figure nationwide is about 34%. So labour have won two thirds of the seats with only one third of the votes.

Given this situation, the fact that there are over 100 third, fourth, fifth party and independents is highly significant. I hope this will persuade Labour towards some electoral reform. but I doubt they will see that it is in their interests, as one of the big two.

I voted for Biden today. No wait, wrong country, wrong thread; I voted green.

like Rome, the Pax Americana has finally explicitly devolved from republic to dictatorship — 180 Proof

It couldn't happen to a nicer country. :cry:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/may/08/hopeless-and-broken-why-the-worlds-top-climate-scientists-are-in-despair



Written words unfortunately formatted for phone users, or spoken, take your pick.

We are naturally social and rape violates the nature of humans to be social? — Hanover

No, that's not what i said. Chickens are social, and their society generally consists of a dominant cock who kills or chases off other males, and a harem of hens that he pretty much rapes on a daily basis. The hens in turn have a pecking order of dominance and submission. Societies, even human societies are not necessarily "nice". Hence I distinguish social relations based on power and violence from those based on cooperation.
This is not to say that cooperation can survive without any coercion to defend it against exploitation. The subjugation of women, slavery, warfare, and rape, are all social arrangements possible to humans. To resist them we have religion, morals, government, justice systems etc.

'No sequence of words or of logical symbols, however cunningly arranged, can oblige the world to be thus and not so.'

Thus saith the unenlightened.

This is simply a sad fact of life for me, though God can famously speak, and it is so. God's words are infinitely more puissant than mine. He can speak me into existence, allegedly, but I cannot return the favour, and nor can Gödel.

So help me out here. Bob wants to rape and feels it very much a part of his intrinsic nature and he doesn't want to be judged for it. He asks me why it is immoral to rape. What do I tell him?

Am I immoral when I condemn him? Why? — Hanover

The intrinsic nature of a human is to be a social animal. Bob's experience has taught him that there is only one form of sociality which is hierarchy based dominance/submission relations imposed by coercion and violence. He does not understand voluntary cooperation and believes it to be a variant form of manipulation.

It is probably going to be impossible to explain all this to Bob in ten minutes, and you will have to deal with him in the only way he can understand, with physical restraint. Once he is not in a position to dominate and control, then you can perhaps start to model a cooperative and respectful relationship to him. I believe this is called in legal circles "reform". It may not work, because old habits die hard.

I still feel the guilt, but that doesn't mean I'm really sorry or think of myself as not-good or needing-to-be-good. — Moliere

I don't understand, unless you are describing the internal conflict?

"Guilt" becomes a category I can assign to others — Moliere

Yes, Mummy only says "be good for Mummy" when she has assigned 'badness'. In fact you have it backwards; one is told to be good, and thereby learns to assign guilt to oneself. Because if one was good, one would not need to be told. Children are helpless and dependent on people who assign them to be ...

- egocentric predators - until puberty, they will be ostracized by their peers, imprisoned or killed by law enforcement agents. You can't have a society of toddlers in adult bodies - that's a purposeless mob. — Vera Mont

So they have to internalise that identity and fight against themselves to placate those upon whom their life depends.

. Moral certainty is the death of ethical thinking. — Moliere

Tell me more...

But I also dislike guilt, generally speaking. I think it's not so much a feeling of moral knowledge but a conditioned response which is used to control people. — Moliere

"Be good for Mummy!" Here it starts; the helpless dependent child is told to be what they are not.

I resist social control from the identity of the individual; I exert it from the identity of social being, and I feel guilt from an awareness of the contradiction. One cannot demand of the community that it transcend the human condition. One cannot go back to innocence, so the only resolution to the human condition is personal: —transcendent miracle, or sartori. Until then, I remain, frog/horse,

unenlightened.

I would want to distinguish that tradition from the "Christian tradition" per se. — Leontiskos

I would distinguish it as being the meaning of the Fall as told in the Old Testament, and therefore strictly speaking, pre-Christian. But I am no scholar of Judeo-Christian history.

Simply, there is no virtue in being un-fallen - innocence is the natural condition, and virtue arises from the fall along with vice as "knowledge of good and evil" - What philosophers call "moral knowledge". If you don't know good from evil, there is no virtue in doing good and no vice in doing evil, you just do what you do.

(When I were a lad this stuff were taught in school; kids these days don't understand the language and tradition properly in the first place, and then get all superior and dogmatic in their ignorance, mistaking it for virtuous rationality and freedom from superstition.)

Well that's not fair. — Moliere

True. Fair would be that once you have fallen there is no redemption. Without guilt, there can be no virtue.

We have eaten of the apple of self-awareness, and fallen into internal conflict between what we are and what we feel ourselves to be.

To say that man is a social animal expresses this conflict - between the individual animal and the community. I identify myself as this — I am a social animal — and thereby fall into paradox such that any claim to social virtue is the expression of animal individuality. "I am that fool who prides himself on his humility." Or else I am the worse fool who thinks he is already the god-king.

And so we fall into self-improvement, social improvement, and global improvement, as though through our internal conflict we can outthink that nature from which we spring. Yet one does not really have to go all the way to China; in our own Christian tradition, the individual conscience also reigns supreme. If you follow that internal voice, you cannot go wrong. (But on the other hand, you might well get crucified.)

Is the end of life, or the beginning of life for that matter, not a necessary part of life? In that case, the end of life cannot have a different value to to life itself. We who live, can celebrate the end of a life as we can celebrate the beginning. One can yearn for a child that does not yet exist, and one can mourn a child that has died.

But when philosophers ask the wrong question, they get into a muddle, and opposing life and death as though they are separable is the beginning such a muddle.

Those of us that understand that if there is intelligent life on Earth, it is certainly not human, have to face a catastrophe in which all certainties will be lost. There will be no last rites and no decent burial; our copses will rot in the burning cities as they are already doing. We turn on each other because that is what we have been taught, and that is all that is left.

The prospect of AI plugging itself into the electrical energy circuits it builds and maintains in order to reproduce itself is of course the merest projection of human greed onto the inanimate. Why would AI bother?

It has always been something we understood about ourselves, that we were prone to — one has to have something at the centre of one's life, and if it is no a god, then it will be oneself. Unless it is a void ...

A common way that hubris was committed was when a mortal claimed to be better than a god in a particular skill or attribute. Claims like these were rarely left unpunished, and so Arachne, a talented young weaver, was transformed into a spider when she said that her skills exceeded those of the goddess Athena, even though her claim was true. Additional examples include Icarus, Phaethon, Salmoneus, Niobe, Cassiopeia, Tantalus, and Tereus.[12]

The goddess Hybris is described in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition as having "insolent encroachment upon the rights of others".[13]

These events were not limited to myth, and certain figures in history were considered to have been punished for committing hubris through their arrogance. One such person was king Xerxes as portrayed in Aeschylus's play The Persians, and who allegedly threw chains to bind the Hellespont sea as punishment for daring to destroy his fleet.[citation needed]

What is common in all of these examples is the breaching of limits, as the Greeks believed that the Fates (Μοῖραι) had assigned each being with a particular area of freedom, an area that even the gods could not breach.[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris

As for the green movement, you and I and a couple of friends, The Greeks have already told our story too.

Cassandra was a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Her elder brother was Hector, the hero of the Greek-Trojan War. The older and most common versions of the myth state that she was admired by the god Apollo, who sought to win her love by means of the gift of seeing the future. According to Aeschylus, she promised him her favours, but after receiving the gift, she went back on her word. As the enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, he added to it the curse that nobody would believe her prophecies. In other sources, such as Hyginus and Pseudo-Apollodorus, Cassandra broke no promise to Apollo, but rather the power of foresight was given to her as an enticement to enter into a romantic engagement, the curse being added only when it failed to produce the result desired by the god.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra

We used to be hunter-gatherers. So, don't grow food. Hunt it instead. — Tarskian

Look forwards, not backwards.

If we do that, we need to get rid of billions of people too. Who volunteers to leave first? Not me. — Tarskian

I will be leaving soon enough. So will you. That is going to happen, and the population will reduce to a sustainable level. Because an unsustainable level is "unsustainable". So your fatuous argument is to exclude the proposed middle of an agrarian society because 'no reason' in favour of a complete collapse to an imagined hunt that neglects the accompanying gathering. Or else the machine paradise...

Teach your brats to cook, to grow food, to work wood and metal. And how to get along with the neighbours, which is by having all these useful skills that can help them stay alive. The machines are no longer your friends.

Any bias towards the truth doesn't readily accept appeals to authority while completely ignoring the counter evidence, which you'll never witness on MeidasTouch or in the prosecution's case. This leads me to remain suspicious of any professed claims towards facts or balance, especially when it comes from the open prison of some European nanny-state. — NOS4A2

You paranoia is not admissible.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/landmark-supreme-court-ruling-throws-doubt-on-new-uk-fossil-fuel-projects

tldr: fossil fuel extractor have been claiming their projects are carbon neutral because the product will be used by someone else somewhere else. Someone likened it to tobacco companies saying their product did not cause cancer as long as it was not burned. The law has decided otherwise. A small hurrah!

It is perhaps apposite to say something semi-philosophical about "bias". It is surely the duty of the media, and ordinary mortals not to be even-handed as between truth and falsehood, but to be maximally biased towards the truth. If every true statement is balanced by an equal falsehood, then no communication can happen at all.

The difficulty, of course, is in deciding between competing stories and competing story-tellers. And in this context, the rules of evidence developed by the legal system along with the sceptical methods of science serve as the best models of a pragmatic way of seeking the truth.

And to bring this to a short conclusion directed at the topic in hand, If one looks at the court cases that Trump has been involved in, the general result is that he loses, whenever the actual facts are tested in court. Jury after jury, after grand jury finds against him whenever the rules of evidence are applied, and not the rules of Noddy in Toyland.

Not that justice is inevitable, and wrong decisions are never made, and as soon as I start seeing any real evidence of kangaroos or other marsupials dominating the US legal system, I reserve the right to admit I was mistaken. In the meantime, there is no balance to be found between Fox News and Meidas Touch; the former is a propaganda machine and scandalmonger, and the latter is a politically biased but fact based reporter of the terrible state of the US.