I've learned recently that cats are actually flerkens (movie reference). I do agree with the OP that philosophy arguments on here tend to go down the semantic rabbit hole and end up with people talking past one another. Or definitions are shifted so that arguments can be won.

As an example from a while back, someone posted that color irrealism is a challenge to direct realism. The argument went on for a while and devolved into direct realism meaning how things appear to us, which is not what realism means, but that's how it got redefined.

The entire history of humanity is technological. We can't survive without some level of it. And we certainly can't continue to support billions without modern tech.

Just remember to double tap the zombies. Also, good cardio for running away.

It's universal given a standard definition for arithmetic and natural numbers. And seeing as how useful arithmetic is, we can assume any intelligent beings out there in the cosmos will agree that 2 + 2 = 4.

Ideally, we should just all slow down. But, realistically, that's not going to happen. — Baden

So in reality we live ideal lives? Way to settle that long standing debate.

Could this be generalized to asking why it's ethically wrong to consider one group of people better or worse than other groups based on some biological factor like gender or ethnicity?

We could take height. Anyone above or below a certain height is somehow lesser. Why is that? Well, because seven feet tall people should rule the world, because they can see farther. Or something.

That sounds dumb, but little people have faced discrimination. If you're under four foot something, then society has had a tendency to think less of you. And the seven footers were probably treated like freaks at some point (before modern sports).

What does methodological naturalism have to do with repeatability? — Echarmion

A scientific prediction has to be based on experiments and observations that can be reproduced. Otherwise, human bias and experimental flaws can be mistaken for real results. We should always be cautious with any single paper or experiment. There always needs to be confirmation.

And I don't see how you go from "social processes are not well understood" to "therefore predictions about social processes are unscientific" — Echarmion

I didn't say "social processes" in the generic sense. I said societal collapse, which is quite specific, and would mean the global society we have today.

Indeed. Notable ones in the past 50 years or so:

Population bomb: no way we can feed several billion people.
Silent Spring: chemicals like DDT would wipe out birds and other animal population.
Rainforest deforestation: Amazon will be cut down in a couple decades.
Ozone depletion: everyone will be getting skin cancer from the sun.
Acid Rain: northern forests will die off.
Peak oil and various minerals: we'll run out and civilization will crash.
Animal population declines: means major extinction is on its way.
Carrying capacity: The Earth can only support 4 billion people.

Now all of those have been or still remain problems. But the worst case scenarios have not come to pass. Animal populations have a tendency to recover (often when protectives measures are taken). New oil fields and mineral deposits are discovered with better means of mining them. DDT was banned, air pollution in developed countries has declined, the rate of deforestation went down, the green revolution happened, and improvements in technology change the carrying capacity equation.

Also, our understanding of the environment improves as do the computer models over time. So predictions are adjusted. The key point is that society adapts and changes over time.

That is a highly controversial statement. Which epistemological principle requires repeatability specifically? — Echarmion

Methodological naturalism.

The main issue in this thread isn't with climate change predictions, it's with societal collapse predictions, which are not scientific, even if the reasons for predicting a collapse are scientific.

Consider the analogy with predictions about future automation displacing a large percentage of jobs. The studies about current technology might be sound, but prediction about how the technology will be applied and how workers and employers will adapt are not well understood.

What, no reintroduced cloned Woolly Mammoths to go with rest of the natural riff-raff? What better way to combat climate change than with an ice age critter.

There is a way, You type the words on a lap top and then click "post comment". Science is all about predicting the future — unenlightened

Science is all about repeatability, and societal collapse isn't a repeatable phenomenon. It has happened for various societies in the past. But that's history, not science. And there's a difference for a reason.

But yes, anyone can type words on a laptop and click post.

Also, when did the doom and gloom predictions go from later in this century to a decade from now? The conspiratorial part of me thinks it's a strategy to motivate people to act sooner so as to avoid eventual bad outcomes.

2. Social collapse will be worldwide, and in the next 10 years or so. — unenlightened

There's no way to make an accurate prediction like that. It's one thing to predict the climate 10 years from now. Seems like we have fairly good models. Society is a whole different animal.

There's fuck all to be done to stop it. — unenlightened

How can anyone know that without time traveling into the future? There have been proposals for engineering the environment to correct for global warming and removing the C02 form the atmosphere.

"I have chosen to interpret the information as indicating inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction." — unenlightened

It's not the first doomsday prediction in the history of the human race, nor the first environmental apocalyptic prediction in the past several decades. To date, the doomsday predictions have not come true. I'm a bit skeptical of worst case scenarios. Not that they can't happen, but when they're talked about in inevitable terms. I don't think we can know enough about a system as complex as the environment in conjunction with human civilization to make such claims of certainty.

I wonder why Camus thought life was meaningless? Did he give death as a reason? Or is life meaningless even for an immortal? — TheMadFool

I think it was more that nature was meaningless in the absence of something like God. So yeah, if you could be immortal, the world would still be lacking meaning. Although arguably, you would be living in a different world (like say heaven), since you can't be immortal in the actual one.

The definition of "suffering" employed by pessimists/anti-natalist is not normative free and not acceptable in any type of everyday usage of the word. This is the "whiny" part in my view, where boredom all of a sudden become suffering. You're not suffering, you're just bored; — Benkei

To be fair to the anti-natalist, boredom is just one part of what makes life less worth living. If some occasional short term boredom were the end of it, then sure, we could easily dismiss their argument. But it's not. I'm okay with some boredom. But there are other things in life that are not so okay that often have to be dealt with which do make me question whether being alive is worth it, from time to time.

America simply provided a new packaging to an old theme using science, magic and mythology. Americans are excellent at business. — TheMadFool

Yeah, America had a big market for comic books at one point which hasn't gone entirely away and a lot of the characters and stories have made it into movies, which now have big international audiences.

The stories and characters evolve a lot over time. They're not all about the heroic American saving the world from evil communist or Nazis plots. There's even alternative versions where you have a bad Superman who terrorizes the planet. A movie is coming out based on the idea of what if the Clark Kent-like character had dark tendencies as a child?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6eB0JT1DI4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6eB0JT1DI4

There is Black Panther, who leads a fictional African nation in Wakanda that's more advanced than the rest of the world. He ends up giving refuge to Captain America's friend who was a fugitive from the other world governments, and the Avengers like Iron Man who were ready to agree to government oversight in the movie, which Captain America, being the good libertarian that he had become, was adamantly against.

So how do you interpret Thanos form the Avengers: Infinity War where his goal was to solve the perceived threat of overpopulation with genocide in order to prevent the eventual extinction of life?

You do have 007, who's kind of like Batman in that although he has no actual superpowers, he does super heroic things backed by all the technical gadgetry, money and women that he needs.

The infinite set of empty sets?

Presumably, in order to do this, there are sets. — Banno

Sets all the way down.

Suppose you come upon a universe that is empty. You say, "Oranges are absent. Pears are absent. Pomegranates are absent ..." That's a lot of absence, and it takes a mind or an observer to notice it. In a universe containing nothing, there is nothing ... not even absence. This is the same conceptual error the OP is making. Nothing is nothing. There can't be anything. No concepts, not even absence. If you notice there are no oranges, who is doing the noticing? — fishfry

Exactly. There is no such thing as an entirely empty universe with nothing in it.

You agree? If the class has 30 people enrolled and 29 show up, one is absent. Not seven billion. — fishfry

Agreed. Also all the people that don't exist, or are dead, or will be born.

How do you define nothing? — Christoffer

Absence of anything.

If you define that space as having properties, but if there are no properties to that space, isn't it then nothing? — Christoffer

I'm not aware of anything in reality that matches that.

Is it not still a room even if space in between is a vacuum, not even with quantum particles? Does a room need air to be a room? — Christoffer

No. Just pointing out that the space isn't nothing. It's just not building material.

I hold to my own absolute truth: no cunning arrangement of words can oblige things to be thus and not so. — unenlightened

Not even God?

Shall we we say that 'coming from' already presumes space and time? — unenlightened

Pretty much. So is popping into.

You have to add nothing to the building blocks; walls, floors, and ceilings of a house in order for space to create rooms. — Christoffer

That sounds like a really weird way to phrase building a house. But okay, you're creating space for rooms. It's only nothing in the context of it not being building material. There's still air, hopefully.

Guess the question would be does the space between objects exist. — Rank Amateur

Well, the atomists thought the void had to exist for a variety of reasons. But modern physics makes space out to be something and not just a void. It's a good question.

Maybe I am looking at this incorrectly, if you point is “nothing” has no physical presence, I agree- but I don’t think that is any kind of important concept — Rank Amateur

If we're trying to show why something cannot come from nothing, then a good starting place would be to decide whether nothing has any ontological existence. If it doesn't, then there isn't a problem in my book. It's just a play on language.

So where does it all come from? — unenlightened

The absolute vacuum ....

I visualized the universe erupting out of nothing as a quantum fluctuation and I realized that it was possible that it explained the critical density of the universe. — Edward Tryon

I can't tell you how much that language bothers me. Perhaps the actual math/physics makes sense, but what he's saying sounds like nonsense to me.

Meaning to us, but that doesn't mean the absence of something exists as far as nature is concerned.

You don't have to play Chess. — S

But in order to play Chess, you have to follow the rules. Otherwise, you're playing a different game.

not sure the concept of an absence of something occupying some specific space, in some specific time is any less meaningful than the concept of something occupying some specific space at some specific time. — Rank Amateur

Other than things exist occupying specific times and places?

So chunky stuff all the way down?

I go back and forth on the reality of mathematics.

Lucretius made the argument that something can't come from nothing or else anything could pop into existence at any time. We don't observe that, therefore it's impossible. If it were possible, we would observe it, because there's nothing stopping something from popping into existence.

But really it's just a semantic argument because nothing isn't a thing. It denotes lack of existence in language, because it's useful for us to have that concept. It doesn't make any sense to say that something could come from nothing, when nothing is merely a concept.

Here is one place where I agree with the Witty enthusiasts about abusing language to create a seemingly deep philosophical puzzle.

Current theories centered on the big bang are primarily the result of reifying mathematics. — Terrapin Station

That does raise the question of what matter is. Tegmark has a point about physical properties being mathematical.

So was it a quark soup?

But then what about cosmology? Was matter there at the beginning?

As for not understanding, we have math to help with that. Why should we expect to understand something so far removed from everyday experience? It's not like we evolved to be physicists or philosophers.

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It sounds like Aristotle didn't have too much to go on in terms of the natural world and of course, we can't blame him for that since he lived so long ago. I think that back then, the conclusion most would come to is that matter stays the way it is, and only forces of nature could change how matter is. — TogetherTurtle

He did have access to the writings of the atomists, right? I think their reasoning was superior, but lost out for other reasons.

I don't know how that would make sense, though. I can't make sense of there being anything that's not matter or some relation of matter. — Terrapin Station

What about fields and energy? What makes matter more primary?

Space and time aren't "things in themselves," they supervene on matter and its relations. — Terrapin Station

That's one view. But matter might supervene on fields that also make up space and time. Consider the earliest point in the universe right at the Big Bang. Did matter exist then, or did it form because of how things went down with symmetry breaking and inflation or what not?