General Philosophy

After all the bumps and breaks my weathered hide absorbed during this journey, reaching the far side of 83 comes as a welcome surprise. I once thought people this age were supposed to go someplace and expire, but here I am, still walking straight up, about as physically able as ever, still cogitating with passable mental functionings and now gunning my new metallic-Bordeaux Maserati down long stretches of highway. I plan to use my post-80 years as what, to my mind, they are. Bonuses. After 80 we play with house money, age-wise. Even so I no longer buy any green bananas, since ancients like myself have to consider the reality of their mortality about now. Karmic …

Few people know that. But the idea of reincarnation is millennial. In ancient India (more or less, about 20,000 years ago), when India, before the Jews and ancient Egypt, was already forming societies into classes, Indian scholars spoke of reincarnation (karma). In ancient Egypt the initiates spoke of reincarnation. The ancient Greeks knew reincarnation because of the Egyptians. And other societies. In the bible, either for preconception or interest, the word reincarnation was replaced by resurrection. Jesus, the Christ, spoke of reincarnation. The philosophy of reincarnation explains much apparent injustice: because one is born with cerebral palsy and other is born the g…

Suppose you are faced with the following decision: You are forced to choose between one of two people to die tomorrow through complete incident: Your spouse, or a person all the way across the world that you have not met and will never meet. What is wise? To choose your wife to die? or to choose a person of unknown potential, unknown intellect, who will accomplish unknown things in his lifetime? There is no right or wrong answer as you do not know what your spouse will do, much the same as you do not know what the person that you do not know will do. The only thing you can do to find a wise path is to remove yourself from the situation wholly and consider all sides.…

Shame (in 'shy' sense) is one of the best feelings of the human being. The modern lack of shame (media first guilties, but not the only ones) is the start of a lot of critical troubles of the modern society. Do you think the same? How to fight against this? Is it possible?

I feel I am starting to get this. Absolute time does not exist. It has been shown in theory (in a loosely termed way) and also experimentally. It now is starting to feel like a second nature to me but I would like to ask a question (one that may have been posed many times ,no doubt). What are the philosophical (or just plain down to earth) consequences of this new understanding (I assume it was not an understanding prior to Einstein's Relativity theorems) ? Clearly one consequence is simply that we have to get with the program and appreciate the world as it is rather than how we would like it to be but are there any broad "world view" understandings that ari…

Is Truth supposed to be logical? For right and wrong, factual correctness is defined by a standard. Does it make sense? Does your mind see the bridge of connections for why? What if the Truth was illogical as the rest of the world? Truth means facts. Things that are true to counter mysticism and baseless things, that was it’s purpose back in 600 BC when it was first established, and of course, still so now. But what is considered to be the truth? Is it something that is factual or something that is sensible? Let’s put it in a context so we can establish a proper standard for right and wrong. If one were to kill someone and take his resources for the necessity of his own …

In numerous threads ranging from ethics regarding animal treatment to religion and general philisophy discussions about the mind I seeing what appears to be a fairly popular position repeated that animals other than humans operate on instinct alone rather than conscious thought. That even when a domesticated animal apears sentient it is just imitation or a trick of our own human projection. If animals truly operate without consciousness how does their behavior come to be and evolve? To me the implication of a purely instinctive mind vaguely implies all animals are programmed. If true what is responsible for determining that program some sort of natural god proxy; it seems…

Evginia, I like your approach. We have many ways to obtain dopamine, free and easy, or at least inexpensive, and readily available, legal, helpful to others or unobtrusive to others, ways. So good approach. However, I am mixed on providing dopamine, and blockers and reuptake inhibitors and such in a mechanical, chemical approach. I don't think our consciousness is clever enough to out think our own subconscious, much less someone else's. Consider the oxycodone problem came about because the medical profession wanted to lessen human pain and suffering. We technically have the way to provide dopamine in a safe manner. Except providing it too much makes i…

This is another Quote of Einstein. He wrote it in the book Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms"(1931). "At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact, I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research." This is completely my cup of tea! Knowledge and imagination concern in a sense a duality in science. What do yo…

What do you think about the following hypothetical dialog? Source: blog url removed by moderator Is not related to any religious concept of God but to Deism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism).

If we go to the point of asking philosophical questions where science can"t answer like " Why our reality is the way it is?, Why energy neither created or destroyed? " Why we are here in this reality?" It seems to me, that it all can be answered through the notion of an Intelligence. The first question, " Why our reality is the way it is?" is answered " Because it is the way an intelligent mind decided to create." The second question "Why energy neither created or destroyed? " talks about the property of energy which begs the question, " Why this is the property of energy?". It is the property of energy because an intelligent mind decided that it should be it's property. …

(This is going to be rambly, i have always had a hard time putting my thoughts down in a concise manner and i apologize in advance) For the longest time all ive cared about is the truth, and no matter what i cannot lie to myself as it is impossible for me to do so. I am not sure if this is a flaw or an attribute, but it has shaped the way i am today for better or worse. Everything i do focuses on truth, i get super upset with people when they get even the smallest things wrong, but here i would like to focus on the truth of our universe and how it (and we) came to be. Like many i have always had the big questions like why are we here, how did the universe come to be,…

Or have you not? Quite a few people in this forum have lectured me on "learning" here, ostensibly from them. Are they beyond learning? There is a widespread presumption on the Left that they are smarter than the "other" side, and the clear inference is always because they are smarter, they are right in whatever they say or opine. What is "smart"? The Unabomber is a very learned man, a former mathematics professor at Berkeley. How smart is he? I will leave that to each of you to ponder. It seems to me that all of us are smarter than any of us, and that we can learn from the unlikeliest of sources, sometimes even young children. There is great joy in l…

Do you guys believe that if everyone goes Vegan or Vegetarian that world hunger can be solved? I read a lot of articles online saying that the grain that animals in factory farms eat can be fed to starving children across the globe instead. But what is happening is we are taking harvest and feeding it to pigs, cows and chickens so that the rich people can have their bacon and steak. To be honest, this makes me feel bad about eating meat. Sometimes, I just wish I am blinded from the truth so I can eat and just enjoy my food with no guilt.

What if we're alone in the universe, and billions of years from now they still have no idea how life possibly began. Would humans eventually just give up and say something or another made us, or would they still claim random coincidence? I'm not trying to discuss the possibility of God here. Just what conclusions humanity would come to if it encountered a mystery it couldn't solve.

Ahem, before I begin please forgive me for any spelling or grammar errors. We look at our world as it is, but going to another world, studing its materials would be like entering another universe. In Earth we look at Hydogen as a normal thing, but alien life might look at it like a jewl, as they may have some unknown element that was part of everyday life in they're society, we would also look at it like a jewl. Now, this would trigger some sort of way to get that jewl, theres two options in this case. Our first idea would be to start some sort of trade route, but a trade route to us might look like a friendly jesture, but to them it could seem like a threat, causing …

Im posting from my phone so I appologize for not attaching the pdf here on the site. I just read this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.0583.pdf on social media aspects of anti-vaccine movements. For the purpose of this thread, you can read just the abstract and the summary and conclusions. While reading this paper something struck me...the mechanisms of spreading dissinformation on social media which enable the spreading of anti-vaxx BS a lot faster than spreading of legitimate data based on actual science can be applied not only to anti-vaccine movements but to all other conspiracy theories and dissinformation. I'm sure I'm not the only one who notices a presence of…

Einstein supposedly said this. What do you think about this statement? I don't think it makes much sense. 'religion' should be replaced with 'philosophy'.

I want to open o conversation based on this article if admins allow it. http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-defend-the-integrity-of-physics-1.16535 With great recent advancement in the physics field more and more theories are coming to light and are harder/impossible to test and prove/disprove. The article talks about many such widely accepted theories such as string/multiverse and other, my question is how do you see the future of physics and what needs to happen in order to get more reliable data and confirm or disprove future theories? (advancements in technology/human perception?)

Hey guys might be a bit of a silly one, but I was wondering this the other day in class. To expand on it a bit if my consciousness is made up of billions of parts and eventually those parts dissipate, over time say billions, trillions of years is it possible that those parts will come back together to form some if not all of my conscious self, sort of like a new after lifetheory? Again I have no idea what I'm talking about here so let me know what your thoughts are and thank you.

We are currently exploring subjects like artificial intelligence, human enhancements etc etc but what about other earth species. In the Uplift universe (Scy-fi by David Brin), the dolphin and chimpanzee characters in the series have been genetically engineered to sapiency. Is it somehow possible/ethical to improve the intelligence of a species? Something aside from selective breeding.

What is your set of mental rules that you live by? Or at least try to?

Question is very simply put in the title. What do you consider a happy/good relationship? And/or marriage?

If a person were born with no attachment to any of their senses... basically completely without an ability to interpret the physical world, but alive and conscious, even if only in their own mind. How would that person's reality unfold to them. Would it be connected to this reality? If suddenly, after growing to adulthood connected to life support, they were somehow given their senses for the first time, how do you think their reality would compare to the one they've existed in and has been the whole of their understanding? As a free consciousness, do you think the inception of physical experience would be a delusion, or a sudden reality?

Split from Anti-Human thread. First, what makes an animal sentient? I defined it as A: Being able to think logically. B: Having emotion and being self aware C: Having a language of some sort. I would, if I had to, say dauphins were the closest animal to meeting all three of these requirements.