Contraceptives. They were instrumental in getting us out of the Malthusian trap.

So come on scientists, prove to me there is no God and let me see how strong your arguments really are. Pile on. — MikeL

Scientists =/= atheists. There are plenty of theistic scientists.

Actually, more specifically, science =/= (metaphysical) naturalism.

Scientists are not in the business of proving the non-existence of supernatural entities. If a scientist attempts to do so, they've crossed over from science and into transcendental metaphysics. Even if they don't realize it.

Proving a negative is almost always impossible to do. — Michael

But in philosophy, if you call yourself an atheist, you better have good reasons for believing God to be non-existent. If proving a negative is so difficult to do, which I don't think it necessarily is, then agnosticism should be the go-to.

Atheists shouldn't get a free-bee and claim it's up to the theists to ground their metaphysical claims. Atheism is just as strong, if not a stronger, claim as theism. Yet annoyingly enough it's often the atheists who claim the privilege of laziness.

Another question would be, is it the ball that shatters the window, or is it the individual atoms that collectively shatter the window? Is the ball an epiphenomenon?

Compassion

What is the ideal government? — Sigmund Freud

A contradiction in terms. :s

I will reply to you when I get around to it, I'm fairly busy.

oky doky.

Can you give an example, I don't know what you mean.

Thanks.

The problem is that I've found it very difficult to operate in everyday life because of a lack of answers to these questions -- answers which would make up a person's core belief system.

I feel as though I can't go live life without having some sort of belief system(I would even count denying everything as a belief system), but with that premise, I would have to wait a very long time before I can go live life.

So the real question is:

Although I can't be sure of it right now, there is likely value in living life. So how do I bring myself to live life right now without having any certainty that anything is true? How do I make myself do things which seem so arbitrary when I feel lost in the infinite. — Bryan

The issue I see here is that you're wanting a foundationalist structure of belief when there in fact is none. Phenomenologically, we do not "live" by beliefs. I do not pick up my coffee cup because I "believe" the coffee cup "exists", and because I have a belief in what "existence" amounts to. I pick up the cup because I'm already enmeshed in the world. I do things habitually, I "know" objects through their use, not through their theoretical existence. I have no need for beliefs to get things done.

If you take a Wittgensteinian approach to this, it's not that philosophy "answers" these questions but that philosophy "dissolves" these questions. The aim of Wittgensteinian philosophy is to get rid of philosophical problems by showing them to be non-problems. This "anxiety" of having a foundation-less epistemology is to be remedied by absolving one of the need for a foundation in the first place.

Do you have a background in biology? You seem to know more about this than the average person like me. I most exposure I had to biology was my high school freshman class and a bit of independent research on my own time. Anyway:

This all seems like a highly skewed "just so" story that bolsters a victimization stance that the author clearly wants to be the case. The Hurst-Hamilton Hypothesis, is a very plausible hypothesis that proposes that the female gamete (the bigger one) does not have a suppressor gene and the male gamete (the small one) did develop a suppressor gene to prevent it from passing on its organelle DNA and cytoplasm. — schopenhauer1

I agree that the essays are literally dripping with rhetoric and irritating neologisms (the author insists on calling males "dudes", sexual intercourse as "fucking", male sex organs as "goddamn hellacious satanic shit" and semen "dudegoo", lmao at that last one), and that the essays are definitely written in a way that victimizes females and prosecutes males.

I'm not too familiar with the H-H Hypothesis. What does a suppressor gene do exactly? Why would it be a "good" thing to have a suppressor gene to prevent the passing on of genes?

As Schop says, a general reply is that nature is a balance of competition and co-operation. So rather than reducing the issue to a debate where cooperation = good vs competition = bad, the informed question is what is the appropriate balance, and is that being met? — apokrisis

One of the problems as I see it is that it's actually a choice to call certain things a certain way. So we can call an instance of a diving beetle reproduction (in which the female dives into the water to escape and the male pursues her), or an instance of blue shark (in which the male actually has to physically restrain the female by biting her neck) as "sexual prehension", or we can call it "rape". It's not wrong to call it "rape" - it just carries this normative baggage that scientists maybe don't want to include.

The semen males produce in sexual climax includes chemicals that keep sperm alive, not only in the vaginal environment of the female but in the overall "bonding" of females to males (despite the fact that the cause of death for women is disproportionately men), as well as inclusion of "sub-lethal" pathogens that keep a female alive but in a non-reproductive state. We can call this a neutral adaptation, a positive reproductive reinforcement, or we can call this brainwashing, mind-control. Once again it's not wrong to call it mind-control, but it goes against the desire for a neutral description of phenomena. When you say:

A naturalistic view doesn't presume that there is some moral absolute position here. — apokrisis

The question, then, is why a neutral "naturalistic" description is desirable, or why a neutral description is seen as superior to a description with normative undertones. Is it purely on the basis of scientific "objectivity", or is it also perhaps a psychological defense mechanism of sorts? Is it not easier to "deal" with an apparently savage reality by construing it as blind, purposeless, unintentional and amoral?

It's similar to the popular way of approaching the environment (but this time it has positive normative undertones): the ecosystem "is what it is", humans shouldn't "play God" and get involved, nature exists on its own, "separate from morality" and we shouldn't try to impose our moral will onto it. The conclusion being that, even if we see nature as morally repugnant, it nevertheless is "wrong" to try to correct this, because the preservation of a morally-repugnant nature is actually good. Human civilization exists "over here", and the rest of nature exists "over there".

Humans of course, more than any other species, rely on heavy parental investment. Or rather, communal investment - it takes a village, etc. And social structures have developed to support that. The prediction would be that "rape" would be rare in a stable, well-balanced, social situation. Or rather, that rape would be construed differently. So socially accepted if a child resulted and the man was forced to marry and support the girl, for instance in Olde Englande. — apokrisis

Sure, I mean one of the things I thought about the essays linked is that, although males do seem to subjugate females disproportionately in the world, it seems like it could be a lot worse. What that means is that it's not very plausible to say males are "waging a war" against females, for it they were, then why isn't it the very worst it could possibly be? One of the essays concludes:

"The problem with males is not that they are too lecherous or that women aren’t lecherous enough. The problem with males is biology. Feminist-leaning women fail to spend what would be far-more-productive brain-time deliberating on this fact: Being a human male is a genetic condition, a genetic condition wielding a proprietary biochemistry, a proprietary biochemistry for warmongering against females – and every other fucking thing. – Men have always warred against women. — And always will. — Men must – to keep us making them. [...] men’s war against women is in fact, ultimately, men’s war for control of the genome."

The annoying part of the essay series is how it repetitively ascribes intentions to an unintentional process. It blames males, rather than masculinity, male-ness, for all this. It's obnoxious and narrow-minded to paint the picture of males being these "sex-crazed maniacs" who would like nothing more than to go around raping and pillaging and killing everything they could. Generally speaking when people, male or female, get sexually aroused, the mechanism isn't "let's make more of me!", it's "let me release some stress!" or "let's have some fun!" or, in the case of rape, "let's humiliate/dominate!". It is through this thought-process that genes are passed along. But it's definitely not this conspiratorial scheme intentionally performed by males. This is why I think that even if someone like the original author is talking about legitimate things, they don't really care about the liberation of women so much as they care about having a good ol' time fighting an internet crusade. It's fun to be a mean person on the internet.

But I have to say that (as a male) my decision to try to see this "objectively" is not entirely for the sake of "truth" but because I feel the need to absolve myself of blame. So even if I technically don't have any guilt in this, especially since I don't have sex and don't really plan on doing so, the motivation for adopting such an "objective" stance is not a pure and uncorrupted pursuit for the truth. The evolution of sexual reproduction and the male type is in fact based largely around what we would call, if we were not trying to be passionless objective scientists, "rape", "mind-control", "parasitism". Just as we could call the evolution of life a "gladiator arena", a "failure factory", or a "red, tooth and claw massacre".

I don't particularly like being associated with parasites, just as I don't particularly like seeing my very existence as dependent on unimaginable violence and brutality. I can choose not to act in such a terrible manner but the reality is that I exist because my ancestors killed, raped and destroyed, and my physical body and psychological thinking patterns are made in such a way that doing these things is easier, perhaps even in my "nature".

If you want to fix it, turning it into a cod evolutionary debate is hardly sensible. — apokrisis

The position presented in the essays is that we can't absolve patriarchal problems within the patriarchy itself. It's radical feminism. Fixing these issues can only happen if the patriarchy itself is dismantled. And in this case the patriarchy is traced back in time through millennia of biological evolution. Rape, battery, violence, etc can not be solved though conventional means but only through the eradication of the patriarchy (which is oftentimes theorized to be connected to capitalism and religion).

Turn it around. Imagine women had a dick, men had a hole. But men - or a subset with social issues - still had a rage to humiliate. Would the shape of the biological equipment make a difference? — apokrisis

It's hard for me to imagine a male with a vagina that is actually a male. Male-ness seems to be inherently tied to the capacity to penetrate, flood, neutralize and dominate.

What do we know about the development of sexual organs? Did the male and female sexual organs develop concurrently, or was one organ around before the other developed, i.e. the "vagina" existing before the "penis" developed, which would have formed as an instrument of vaginal penetration?

All this is interesting but also quite confusing for me. I like to think I have a decent understanding of the basics of biology. I suspect the essays have been intentionally cherry-picked in some places.

The basic idea of the essays before seems to be that males developed as a biological parasite of sorts, taking advantage of the now-females by trying to replicate their Y-chromosome, so that it's not about the survival of the "species" but the survival of the chromosome. I'm not a biology expert so I'm not sure if this is plausible. But what does seem to be plausible, thanks to the many provided examples, is how sexual reproduction is oftentimes "rape" - the males want sex and the females don't. The males have to pin the females down, or inject them with paralyzing toxins, mimic behavior in order to sneak into female "harems", even spray chemicals that break down the tissue of females.

Now of course we can take an objective stance on this is adhere to some fact/value distinction and see this "rape" as simply a mechanism, with no evil or immoral intentions on behalf of males. But biology is not so dependent on only this efficient causation. Whether we like to admit it or not it does seem to be the case that sexual reproduction via rape is a prevalent phenomenon. Males might not be "intrinsically rapists" as the essays annoyingly imply, but I don't think it's implausible to say males' physiology evolved as to maximize the chances of spreading genes, which oftentimes means rape. The essay linked here says:

"Males of many species have evolved specialized appendages to seize and hold down females. This seemingly infinite diversity of “organs of prehension in males” was noted by Darwin. (Dude can call them “organs of prehension,” – but what they are are rape-arms)."

Yes, it's obnoxious and irritating that the author keeps calling things by these weird neologisms. Perhaps its a defensive mechanism on the part of males to call something "organs of prehension" instead of "rape-arms", but I hardly think only male biologists are responsible for this nomenclature. But the description stands - they are instruments of domination to manipulate a female into sex, whether we call them objects of prehension or rape-arms.

Now of course there can be sexual reproduction that is far less intrusive and "rapey", maybe even consensual. But it's also true that rape is an efficient way of getting your genes passed on (especially if there's no contraceptives available). The crux of all this is thus that rape is not simply a morally repugnant action done by sick and twisted individuals but that rape has been a common and efficient way of reproducing for millennia. Evolution has no intrinsic need for consensual sex. Whatever gets the genes passed on - specifically the organism's genes.

The opposite is true for seahorses. The males are the ones that bear the children and raise them and it is the females that compete for the males. — Harry Hindu

Very true, good point.

Interesting points, thank you.

The argument doesn't work. An organism that can asexually reproduce doesn't have gender. So, women can't claim to be the ones who were reproducing asexually. Both men AND women can claim that territory. — TheMadFool

It's not really about gender more than it is about biological sex. If we define biological sex as whatever chromosomes you have or sex organs, then females were at least in the past able to reproduce asexually.

If she had those qualities, how could you ever be sure she did not take you in out of pity? — Sir2u

ouch

It's hard to say how much pain is necessary for survival to be lexically removed. I can't give you a precise amount but I would say that any amount of pain that would make you wish you hadn't woken up that day would be enough to make death a good.

This would seem to make the amount of pain a lot less than you might have had in mind.

I, therefore, find it pretty impossible to justify my political positions to myself because they are probably expressions of self-interest. — Particle thing

Why?

Error theory is an extremely implausible hypothesis. Are you absolutely committed to the thesis that the wanton torture of innocents is amoral?

So do people who subscribe to nihilism need some kind of working system of provisonal morality to navigate everyday life ? Even though that seems like doublethink. — Particle thing

Generally speaking error theorists simply dislike what we consider to be immoral, or like what we consider to be moral. Or they adopt a fictionalist account of morality, in which we act as if morality was objective and real, but secretly believe it to be a sham, in the interests of the well-being of whatever society we live in (which, presumably, we find to be morally important...? There's a real tension here in error theory, the motivation for adopting a fictionalist account of morality sounds suspiciously moral).

Of course there are definite good reasons for contributing the majority of one's disposable income to charity. The consequentialist has to find the balance between not contributing enough and contributing so much that it fails to be sustainable in the long run.

This is why most consequentialists will argue that, although you'd be making the most money by pursuing a high-income job, you're better off pursuing what you want to do, because then you won't get burnt out, and will therefore make everyone else better off as well. Generally speaking. A high-income job won't deliver if the worker burns out after a few years.

One of the non-obvious aspects of consequentialist thinking is that we are not normally consequentialists in our everyday living (which of course raises the issue of why we should even consider consequentialism in the first place - but that's another issue). Consequentialists typically will argue that, although not having any hobbies might theoretically open up more charitable possibilities for a person to choose, in reality not having any hobbies will probably decrease your own welfare and your ability to contribute to the overall value of the state of affairs.

The same sort of reasoning is used to explain how we can still be consequentialist and yet not robots, precisely calculating the perfect outcome. For if we tried to be this way we would not be able to sustain it, and it would be detrimental to our own welfare.

It's similar to how hedonists approach the paradox of hedonism. Enjoyment is good but if you are constantly focused on maximizing your own enjoyment, you aren't going to enjoy anything very much.

Consequentialist thinking usually results in the continual maintenance of our common-sense, everyday notions of morality and only becomes more explicitly consequentialist in political discourse or in extreme occurrences.

So the consequentialist answer to this question, is it moral to have hobbies, is really context-dependent. It's basically what Parfit would have called "blameless wrongdoing".

do not study philosophy. do something more interesting / worthwhile. — The Great Whatever

I feel like what happens a lot when people study philosophy is that they don't actually really learn anything, but somewhere along the line they get this idea that not knowing anything is actually a virtue and then they become arrogant douchebags. Philosophy, studied by itself and only itself, probably turns people into assholes who have to compensate for their lack of any real knowledge by being an asshole.

I suppose the main reason why I continue to study philosophy is because I find most everything else to be boring. Philosophy is pretty silly all things considered but at least it's interesting, to me at least. But I'm also kind of an asshole sometimes too so maybe I should go on a diet.

The problem is there is not one shred of evidence to support such a view other than faith. Such a belief is exactly equivalent to Calvinism and other fated religions. — Rich

No, this is wrong. Are you seriously telling me Nietzsche advocated his metaphysical scheme based on faith?!

Determinism on the whole is destroyed by quantum physics. — Rich

No, this is also wrong. Quantum mechanics is difficult to predict but that does not make it necessarily indeterminate.

This convoluted explanation of how the human mind makes choices wreaks with religious flavor and dogma. — Rich

The same could be said about libertarian free will, which is overwhelmingly argued for by religious believers.

Why is the human brain being made into a computer is the critical question? — Rich

It's not. Computational theory of mind is more of a folk-psychological notion these days. Nobody really takes the idea seriously, that the human brain is basically a computer. That, and the representational theory of mind, have been blown out of the water by phenomenology and contemporary cognitive science.

If you check out evolutionary biologists like Nick Lane, there are much more sensible stories than this "unwanted over-powering" scenario of yours. — apokrisis

Not mine, don't kill the messenger!

But if you are talking about Homo sap specifically, what might appeal to your anti-natalism is the incredible violence foisted on the human female body by having to give birth to a monstrously brained infant through an inadequately designed bipedal birth canal. — apokrisis

No, please don't start this. I want scientific theories (which you graciously provided), not a debate about antinatalism.

This is hilariously awful, DB. I recall an article a couple of years back about the dangers of zoos reinforcing gender stereotypes in visiting children. — Wayfarer

lmao

Does the "planning" determine your action, or is the "planning" already determined? If the conscious planning is already determined, is it then merely a way of understanding your actions and communicating them to others? — Daniel Sjöstedt

I have thought about this before as well. The phenomenology of planning is that there are multiple options, choices, that are possible.

So the question seems to be, what exactly is a possibility in a deterministic system? If there is only one single path that a system can proceed in, do possibilities actually exist?

I can't help but think of Nietzschean psychology - "I" am not the originator of my thoughts, my thoughts come on their own terms. That which influences my actions is precisely that which is the most powerful. The most powerful thoughts are those which come to my attention and direct my action. It is not that I "choose" to do some action but rather a thought commands me to do something and I obey it - willing is the combination of command and obey.

But I think intuition by itself does not constitute an argument for the reality of an objective moral realm. — Modern Conviviality

Might want to look into Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism. It still runs into the difficulty of justifying how exactly morality is objective, but it manages to seem to fuse projectionist and non-cognivitism into a distinctly cognitivist morality. Our attitudes towards things are projected onto the world and in turn we "perceive" this very projection and formulate truth-apt statements.

But in general with a lot of philosophical debates and meta-ethical ones you get four camps, some form of non-naturalism, naturalist reductionism, expressivism and eliminativism, the former two being realist and the latter two being anti-realist. It's not perfectly cut like this in real life but in general it's a basic template that most issues end up being structured as.

I know that studying philosophy is no game even though it might seem so, reason why I am curious how you started studying it — Abeills

It's really the only thing that truly gives me an enduring sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, other than close friends and family. I came across it sort of by accident and almost instantly knew this is what I wanted to do with my life (which, unfortunately, I am not currently doing).

or if any of you has any schedule regarding this — Abeills

Basically I just read or "do" philosophy when I have the time, which is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

I thought that science, therefore, just focuses on what is and ignores or dodges "Why?". — WISDOMfromPO-MO

No, science does not dodge "why" questions, it just traces the answers as far back as is needed to make the model work. There's no need to insert some metaphysical theory to explain why some phenomenon happens the way it does. "Why do we perceive color light?" can be answered by "because we have cones in the backs of our eyeballs, and because color would have made it easier to differentiate things in our visual awareness way back in time." "Why do the waves on a beach change throughout the day?" is answered by "because of the moon's gravity." "How come the 'quality of life' apparently increased in the 1860s?" is answered (??) by "because of the industrial revolution, capitalism ( :-} ), technological innovations, etc."

In fact, why-questions typically end up being teleological which is not all that helpful to scientists, at least not in the traditional way. Why-questions are blurred into how-questions.

But to say philosophy studies the "why" questions is not only excluding many other things it studies but also seems to beg the question.

Intuition. Moral naturalism is a lost cause, and divine command theory is either ad hoc or fails from Euthyphro.

I'm not finished reading Braver's book yet, but as I recall Dummett equated realism with the principle of bivalence because he wanted to steer as far away as possible from "metaphysical" notions. So once I finish or get around to Dummett maybe I'll have more to say. But for now:

Dummett then goes on to claim that the principle of bivalence – an essential part of realist metaphysics – requires that what happens outside the simulation does have something to do with the meaning of the words inside the simulation. As an example, the statement "there's a cat in the cupboard" is either true or false, even if the inside of the cupboard isn't being simulated. This only works if the world outside the simulation has something to do with the meaning of this phrase when used inside the simulation. But the argument above is that the outside world is irrelevant. As such, the statement cannot be either true or false as nothing in the simulation determines it to be one or the other, and so the principle of bivalence fails, and along with it realism. — Michael

What does it mean that the "external world" is "irrelevant"? If we're talking pragmatic use, then truth claims are valuable only by how they help us accomplish our goals. But something can be useful and yet still be completely wrong. Or we might have purely accidental knowledge, and not even realize it.

So if we talk about it raining, our behavior might be identical regardless of how the external world actually is, but it still stands that our belief, that it is raining, is either true or false. True knowledge just becomes epiphenomenal.

Sure, science has done a lot of nice things. But it's still pretty boring.

In many (most?) cases, philosophy is born from a certain desperation. Wittgenstein seemed to be aware of this, but so was Heidegger, and Descartes' was anxious enough that he formulated an entire philosophy in order to combat this.

Philosophy is not a discipline. It is an activity that is basically between poetry and science. Making it into a discipline loses the original essence that drives philosophical inquiry. It's laughable, and a little pathetic too, to see philosophers scramble to justify their "discipline" by trying to make it a scientific-like discipline.

In my opinion, if a question or problem is anxiety or curiosity-inducing (both a form of desperation), then it's probably philosophical. Science is actually really boring for the most part. Nothing too exciting comes from it, in general.

This means the lemons must exist prior to the making of lemonade. — Thorongil

This is wrong. Lemons only need to exist at the moment of lemonade-making.

Wow. You must be trolling me. I don't know how else to account for such brazen stubbornness. — Thorongil

I don't know how else to account for your inability to comprehend a very simple issue. But oh well.

Lemons do not need to exist before making lemonade — darthbarracuda

Christ, be charitable. Lemons do not need to exist beforehand in order to make lemonade, if that clears things up. They need only exist at the time of lemonade-making.

If "at the moment" still presupposes the lemons' prior existence in your mind, it doesn't. — Thorongil

???

Darth, I refuse to accept that you are this daft. The I just made to you was that, if you acknowledge ANY duration of a lemon's existence BEFORE making lemonade, then you have contradicting the following statement: — Thorongil

How does acknowledging a lemon's prior existence contradict my claim that the only thing that matters is that the lemon exists at the moment of lemonade-making?

Here you acknowledge that lemons do need to exist before making lemonade. The duration of their existence is irrelevant. Whether they existed a million years or a millionth of a second before making lemonade, they still exist before. — Thorongil

No, that's not what I meant at all. I said the duration doesn't matter because it doesn't matter at all whether or not lemons exist before lemonade-making.

I said, explicitly and many times now:

Lemons do not need to exist before making lemonade, they only need to exist at the moment of lemonade-making. — darthbarracuda

You have made both of the following statements:

1. Lemons do not need to exist before making lemonade

2. Lemons do need to exist before making lemonade. — Thorongil

No, I haven't, where are you getting this from?

These are mutually incompatible statements. It's not possible for them both to be true at the same time. Only one option is true, which is the second. Therefore, you need to stop making the first claim. — Thorongil

Honestly can you stop being an ass. That doesn't even follow either. If I really was making those two statements, I would need to stop making either the first or the second claim.

To be harmed requires that a person exist. — Thorongil

Right.

Things that are nonexistent do not die. — Thorongil

But they can be born?

You said:

I said that lemons need to exist before making lemonade. You disagreed. But then you contradicted yourself and agreed with me that, to make lemonade, the lemons need to exist "before" doing so (whether by two seconds or a century). — Thorongil

Implying that I said lemons do not need to exist before to make lemonade, and then said they do. But this is false because I explicitly said:

It doesn't matter if it existed for a century or two seconds before. — darthbarracuda

I did not contradict myself. I have been consistent. Lemons do not need to exist before making lemonade, they only need to exist at the moment of lemonade-making.