Agreed. But it's the deprivation of life, not the death itself for that individual, since they stop existing.

The deprivation of life often effects others people still living as well, whereas never existing can't do that.

That's not what majority means; nor supremacy. — Qwex

To be more precise, the explanation was that majority populations for things like race, gender and orientation have had the power to oppress the other groups, and setup society to benefit the majority more so than others. However, the majority tends to not recognize how things continue to be that way, so it can be uncomfortable for the majority to confront the accounts of lived experience of discrimination form the groups not in power.

Although majority more applies to race than it does patriarchy, since roughly same number of men and women. However, for a trans person ...

Does supremacy = majority? — Harry Hindu

Pretty much that was laid out in the intro, and majority means any group that has power over other groups. So you could be in the majority in some cases, and the minority for others. The stated goal is to move toward an equal society with no groups in power.

But our focus is to be race.

Guaranteed that no one who is part of a diversity training program said this — Maw

I didn't say they were, did I now? I said one person in the room said it. A white employee. A lot of contentious things were said by different employees. The two diversity trainers were just stating what the focus of the worksop would be and their experience as trainers, and then were open to questions, and that's when things got interesting.

Unless you're a pacifist, then war is going to present a problem for always doing the right thing. So will survival situations.

But let's take a simpler situation. Lying is considered wrong. So let's say you're in a situation where lying will prevent an argument that will jeopardize getting something done that needs to be done. Let's say it's a work project and the truth will ruin team chemistry, the deadline won't be met, and the contract is lost, so people don't get paid.

So you lie for team cohesion.

So any meeting where the assumption is one party should not exist is a ridiculous meeting. Or where one party is considered damaging to life, per se. — Coben

That is correct, but it was only one person, they're not upper management. And the two diversity trainers didn't say that. What they said is we all have our own lived experiences, and if you don't have the lived experience of whatever marginalized group, then you don't know what that's like to be that group.

Most capitalists, a cursed lot, wouldn't waste company time on this crap. — Bitter Crank

A quintessential bitter crank comment. Love it.

It’s not anything one can isolate as active or conscious discrimination - rather it’s the little things that add up: the flash of body language, sideways glance or facial expression that we hardly realise we’re even doing, that we may suddenly be conscious of and chastise ourselves for, then dismiss as too small to be noticed. These little interactions are felt more than consciously noticed, but they all inform our shared conceptual systems, in particular the affective response we have to our conceptual identity: the value and significance we attribute to who we are. — Possibility

This is an interesting point, and there was an incident in the meeting where one minority person had to wait a bit to be able to have their say, so another minority called out the white people for that as a point of hypocrisy. But my interpretation was that it was because he was on the other side of the room. And there was a white woman who had to wait as well, but for some reason that didn't count.

So then all the white people started immediately pointing out whenever a minority had something to say right way. Which prompted a third minority person to say that the whole thing was silly, and to realize that minorities have a conditioned response to interpreting things that way.

Who knows the truth of that. There was a separate meeting where the female manager got angry because the males on the phone didn't let her interrupt them, but they did let another male interrupt. So was that sexism, did they not hear her (his voice was deeper and a bit louder), were they not ready to be interrupted? Who the fuck knows. My problem is the automatic assumption of sexism or racism in these situations where you really don't know someone's intention.

Another thing that bothers me with this is so what if strangers glance at you sideways or move a little out of the way? It's not entirely unique to minorities. I've had women cross the street when they saw me. Maybe it was because I was male. Maybe it was because they needed to be on the other side. Who knows. Should it be something to get upset about? Certainly random strangers have given me weird or grumpy looks or turned away when I tried to say hi on occasion. Again who knows why. Does it matter?

There's a clear difference between someone spitting on you and calling you a racist, sexist, homophobic word, and someone moving out of their way or looking at you wrong. It's just a fact of life that not everyone is going to be pleased to see you, for whatever reason, which could be many. So should we be that sensitive about everything?

I could be missing out on the bigger picture, if all the little things daily add up to a clear pattern that I don't experience. But part of me is like what the fuck can you really expect of people?

That's an interesting observation. Whiteness remains at the center, for good or bad. It's the thing to focus on. Kind of narcissistic.

Have you consulted any of your black friends/coworkers about the uneasiness of the meeting? Like... What the fuck was that? — creativesoul

Well no, but management went into crisis mode after the meeting and had an intense meeting, followed by drinking, so I heard.

"Whiteness as a bad thing" is a horribly racist sentiment. — creativesoul

It does very much sound like that, but to be fair to that position, what is being argued is that the social construction of whiteness as a category is what's been historically racist, and people born into majority white societies implicitly absorb those views when adopting that category. It actually applies to everyone in the society in a way, since the terms white, black, red, yellow, people of color, minority, etc. can all be understood as part of the racial hierarchy society tries to place everyone into.

What's not being said is that people of European descent are harmful simply from having ancestors from that continent. It's similar to the argument that gender is constructed around males getting preferential treatment, while sex is a biological reality, not the gender roles society assigns.

That's too bad. I've quite a large number of black friends, loved ones, and family members who find it rather odd when white people act more offended by white privilege and racism than they themselves do — creativesoul

Some minorities in the meeting were expressing concern that they were going to be subjected to this discussion because white management decided that it needed to happen. I don't know who all was consulted or pushing for this, but if it's just some of the white people, and they form the large majority in an organization, then you are putting the minority employees in an uncomfortable position as well as all the other white people who didn't ask for it. It's real easy to see how this turns into an us versus them.

so I just take the hit for now and hope rational minds win out after the persecuted get to persecute for a while. — ZhouBoTong

It would be better to not have persecution. That won't remedy the injustices of the past, or make current injustices any better.

This was a white person, though. There were a couple other white people who took on the role of talking for all white people, which was annoying.

At least I hope so. — Pfhorrest

The person said that as a white person — that their existence was harmful to others, and this was a hard realization to deal with, but it was important in order to get rid of those bad things about oneself. I also know that this person is a big proponent of this sort of thing (whiteness being a bad thing).

This was said in the context of several people addressing the white members of the meeting, and the fear over creating an "unsafe" environment. Also, the White Fragility book is being circulated, which may have some insightful things to say about race, but it also does kind of state things in a way that being white is harmful, or at least the review summaries I've read give that impression. But "whiteness" here means a social construction, which is another question this sort of diversity workshop brings up.

It was said, and I was quite irritated by it. Why do you think I made that up? There is almost no position too ridiculous sounding that someone hasn't stated it.

Nobody knows whether probability waves are real. The wave function just tells us the likelihood of finding a value when there's a measurement. The thirteen fields are actually seventeen (I misremembered). Twelve matter for all the fundamental particles (six quarks six leptons, gluon, photon, W and Z bosons), the four forces of (EM, gravity, strong and weak). And the Higgs field.

Then whatever dark matter, energy and inflation are.

The problem is that mental processes don't seem to be fundamental. They exist when brains develop, which only happened after animal life evolved.

Panpsychism would be an alternative that's fundamental.

Are you suggesting that science grounds metaphysics? Metaphysics isn't the same as science. — Pantagruel

Right, but metaphysics should be informed by science. It would be philosophically ignorant to espouse the five elements nowadays.

Just like how discussions of the mind should be informed by neuroscience. Espousing a theory of mind at odds with neuroscience would be empirically invalid.

Fundamental to what? Not everyday experience. — Pantagruel

Ontology and also physics.

That doesn't discount the reality of the things which we do experience. — Pantagruel

Sure, but they're not fundamental. And it's not clear whether our ordinary conceptions of objects is coherent when factoring in their physical constitution, but it works pragmatically for us.

Ok. But "everyday experience" is the world. So why not assume "that" is fundamental? — Pantagruel

Because science tells us of many things we don't experience that result in the world we do experience. Radio waves and atoms are good examples.

Why would we ever get sick if it weren't for invisible germs and problems with our cells (cancer, auto-immune, etc) causing the problem? Sickness is only an experience because we have material bodies. Death is only a reality for the same reason. So is getting high or drunk.

"What is extended in space, and hence the objective, material world in general, exists as such simply and solely in our representation, and that it is false and indeed absurd to attribute to it, as such, an existence outside all representation and independent of the knowing subject, and so to assume a matter positively and absolutely existing in itself." — Xtrix

But that assumes our representations are not based on something related existing outside and independent of the knowing subject. After-all, why do we have the representations we do have? It would be weird if time and space have no correlate outside of experience. How would the mind create them with no basis for a temporal and spatial existence?

Another interesting property of fields is that they coexist in the same location (or all locations), unlike ordinary objects. Materialism was wrong. Ordinary stuff isn't ontologically fundamental. Of course that was true once the subatomic particles were discovered and QM became a theory.

The world isn't material. It's something else. The material stuff of everyday experience emerges from that. And it's not even predominate. Dark energy, dark matter and neutrinos make up most of the universe.

For that matter, time and space likely aren't fundamental either.

That's plausible except there are some fields we can map or interact with. A magnet in the presence of iron filings will show the magnetic field lines. Light rays are the field lines of electromagnetism. And of course there is gravity.

I think the fields are what is real, and the particles are the potential interactions. Unless there is some further reality underlying fields.

That science is a human enterprise conducted from a human perspective is entirely consistent with naturalism. The "view from nowhere" is just how a dualist sees naturalism. — Andrew M

The view from nowhere exists because science has to abstract from human perceptual relativity to get at the way things are, and not just as they appear to us. Otherwise, we're left with ancient skepticism or some form of idealism.

I would note that Quine opposed mind/body dualism. As did the ordinary language philosophers, particularly Gilbert Ryle (in his book The Concept of Mind). — Andrew M

That's nice and all, but one still has to deal with intentionality, consciousness and epistemology.

Goatcha. I voted climate change, because global poverty is on the way down, but serious enough changes to the climate could easily reverse that trend.

You didn't include AI in the list. Some people believe it is the one big existential problem just over the horizon we need to figure out, because it's likely to be out of our hands once we achieve AGI, and it quickly bootstraps itself to super intelligence.

I'm not sure about the prospects for AGI, the singularity and super intelligence, but I can't discount it either. It should be included in the list, because it's potentially a big game changer. One that could replace humans as the driving force behind civilization.

For the skeptical, keep in mind that some of the poll options such as nukes, bio-weapons and climate change are the result of technological progress, so we'd be foolish to think they were the last threats we create. Nanotech is another potential future one, if it's weaponized. Gene editing could also possibly be used as a weapon.

I would say we’re beings among other beings. “Stuff” is misleading. — Xtrix

Okay, then what problem do you have with my modern update of the great chain of being, from the very small to the universe? Is there a problem with how science categorizes the different "beings", since you prefer that over "objects" or "stuff"?

I don't really see what the issue is with any of those terms, other than they're sufficiently vague enough to encompass everything, if one wishes to do so.

I’m getting bored. — Xtrix

What is that you want from an ontological discussion? I think science helps informs us on what exists and what that stuff is made up of, at least down to a certain point. But it leaves unanswered other questions, like whether objects can have parts or whether math or information are at the bottom of it all.

Science is successful in telling us all that stuff. But there's still plenty left unexplained like consciousness, causality, the right interpretation of quantum mechanics, and whether we should think of the world as being divided up into subjects and objects.

I would say we’re beings among other beings. “Stuff” is misleading. — Xtrix

It's not misleading since science is very successful in telling us what that stuff is. Granted, it's a bit murky once you get to fundamental physics, but we know the bigger stuff is made up out of that smaller stuff physicists call particles and fields.

What "stuff" would that be? Atoms? — Xtrix

Fields, subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, tissue, organs, brain activity, people, societies, cultures, ecologies, environments, planets, solar systems, galaxies, superclusters, filaments, universe, maybe multiverse. <= great chain of being

Ultimately, a bunch of quantum-gravity stuff forming complex, decohered patterns with some consciousness sprinkled in for good measure.

The thing is quite a few members on here are ordinary language philosophy fans, and not great fans of metaphysics, so discussing the usage of words is important to them, since they're convinced philosophy goes wrong with a misuse of language, particularly when it comes to ontology.

I think we experience the world as if there is a subjective/objective divide, but the ontological situation is unclear, because we don't know the nature of consciousness. However, we're made of the same stuff as everything else, so I tend to think it's an epistemological divide.

I also thought being referred to living things, hence the great chain of being of theology from God on down to microbes, but not chairs or rocks. Unless we're talking pantheism.

The ancients may have used being to refer all things, but that's not how I understood the modern use of the word. A being was always something alive.

But as for the OP, the subject/object divide to is the difference between how we as animals experience the world versus how the world is.

Starting at about 3:38 in the video above, Phillip Ball, an editor at the Journal of Nature, is discussing popular notions of quantum mechanics. Here he talks about how people think that because measurement impacts the result:

So the human observer can't be extracted from the theory. It becomes unavoidably subjective. — Phillip Ball

He's just laying out a popular conception, not arguing for it. The point about the quote is the idea that science tries to extract the human from the observation. Right here we have a subjective/objective distinction, where it seems to be a problem that one result of QM might not allow that, at least on a popular understanding, or according to one interpretation.

But the key idea is that science tries to extract our human experience from what's being studied.

I'm wondering how many people in this forum still see the world in this way or something similar to it. It seems to be the philosophical basis for modern science, at least since Descartes. — Xtrix

We have our own experience of the world as individuals and human beings, and then we have scientific explanations of the world which are divorced from that, because how the world appears to us is not always how the world is.

This has been known since our ancestors starting making note of the difference between appearance and reality. We can use whatever terms make the most sense in modern language to describe that distinction, but yes, it's a reality of our human existence, and probably the impetus that got philosophy started.

Only a group of philosophers would sit around trying to decide whether their inaction in saving a man was responsible for his death, when everyone else would just dive in.

Philosophy exists only in action. — Brett

Also lawyers, because somebody needs to decide whether the philosophers are legally responsible for their inaction. And the one person who just doesn't like the drowning guy.

But the OP's friend brought another level to the argument. You're not having children might one day result in the drowning man going unsaved, because your child would have dived in.

However, the neighborhood man might also be a serial killer, so maybe it's good your child isn't born. But then again, he might kill someone even worse. Maybe there's a butterfly effect that determines the fate of the human race generations from now, all based on whether you have children.

But then again, the anti-natalist can just say it's better if the human race goes extinct, so ...

Ah, makes sense. I thought you were just pulling his leg.

On a semantic externalism view of meaning, a BIV cannot mean that it's envatted, because it can only refer to the sensations provided by the vat program. Putnam does have to arrange the argument a certain way so that the reference to brains in vats cannot be anything but the programmed sensation. So a person envatted last night could mean actual envatted brains, but a universe of just envatted brains hooked up together could not.

One wonders how Neo in the Matrix could understand what Morpheus was talking about when offered the blue and red pills. And the answer was he could not, he could only be shown. The choice was whether to go down the rabbit hole, or continue living a normal life. It was only after Neo got unplugged that he could understand his situation.

This kind of skeptical scenario is a problem for meaning not being in the head. If the environment provides meaning, but the environment is fake, then one cannot understand the environment being fake. Yet we seem to be able to understand simulation, dream, Matrix and evil demon arguments. So either we can know the environment is not fake, or semantic externalism is false.