General Philosophy

Is taxation a form of stealing? Here is a scenario. I am walking down the street and see a poor woman who needs food. To help her, I strong arm the first person I see, and take his wallet and give it to the woman. Is this stealing? Say there is a crowd of people there, cheering me on to strong arm the man to get his wallet, to give to the woman, is that stealing? This is how taxation works. The group agrees to let an agent forcefully take what it did not earn, nor what belongs to it. It has all the elements of stealing. Does that mean those who like to tax the most are the biggest thieves? Let us extrapolate the scenario even further. The group agrees …

I don't know if this is the right place to post this. But, I was wondering how you would win the game "Prisoners Dilema". This is how you play it: You and another person commited a crime. You can either decide to tell on the other person or stay silent. If you both stay silent, then you both serve 1 year in jail. If you decide to tell on the other person and the other person stays silent, then the person who was silent will go to jail for 10 years and you get to go free, vice versa. However if you both tell on each other then you both go to jail for 5 years. Assuming you need to get the least amount of jail time then your partner by X amount of minutes/hours/ec…

Yeh, I know i didn't put this in religion, but even though it's religious in nature it's more of just a thought exercise, as anyone who knows me will understand that I'm in no way seriously trying to recognize or legitimize anything metaphysical, so i thought it better suited to philosophy. Anyway, so I was just thinking of ways to get the Christian Trinity to make at least a tiny bit of sense, because I've been reading a TON of christian apologetics lately and kind've got frustrated with their smug explanations of the trinity that still never made the sense they claimed they did. What I've worked out is that if you accept "God" itself as simply being the abstract…

*note - I'm plagiarizing some stuff in this article for the purposes of continuity and that nobody peaks ahead. The source is posted at the end. An experiment on social research of WWII soldiers discovered the following (items in parenthesis is the explanation provided): While you read them, ask yourself if you think the result was expected. Then ask yourself if that's the outcome you would have predicted from such a study, before knowing the result. 1. Better educated soldiers suffered more adjustment problems than less educated soldiers. (Intellectuals were less prepared for battle stresses than street-smart people.) 2. Southern soldiers coped bette…

i say "our logic is based on our experience" my friend tells me to stop talking from my ass and prove it. i ask him to disprove it, he says the burden of proof is on me, cuz i'm making a claim. i pointed out that hes also making a claim by opposing me(that logic isn't based on experience), and that in reality proof is on the one making the extraordinary claim, and mine was simple common sense. he said that it's common sense for me, but i can't objectively state that. so, he kept demanding "proof". and while he's a total ass, and i should've ripped his bones apart, i just shut up since it's a fight of words. i even asked him to giv me an exampe of a logical s…

I don't like some aspects of the society. For example, the way education is handled. Education is basically learning something we want to, out of choice. After a certain degree of compulsory education, which I understand is sort of necessary, shouldn't one be allowed to freely choose what he wants to study? And, is it a waste of time to fret and try to do something against some aspects of the society we live in? For example, trying to change the general outlook on something as basic as scientific temperament?

I got into this argument with a philosophy professor. Basically, I read some Karl Popper, ok, and what I got from him is that theories cannot be true. They will eventually be over-ridden. Thus, I claimed that despite how much a person wants to think a theory is "right," it's ultimately going to be wrong. So, whenever you do put forth a theory, you have to recognize that's it's already wrong, because it's going to be over-ridden in the future by a newer theory, of course, which will be over-ridden and so on and so on.... What do you think?

When thinking of being Patriotic at time its often spins into various other concepts. One I think is if being Patriotic is like being ignorant basically. I mean to explain on it goes like this. Do you think that because a nation has an established set of social laws and or customs, such as being democratic, that such a system should be viewed outside of ever changing? I think the constitution of America was a grand achievement for humanity really, the concepts themselves helped lay the groundwork for some kind of notion of universal human rights outside of anything prior to it that I know of. Yet I wonder if in all things possible that its so good it could n…

While entropy gradually disorganizes matter in the universe, the phoenix effect gradually organizes it, causing atoms to become heavier through each successive generation. Is it possible that there could be some force that causes this with a grand design? On another note, It seems that life is all about organization, until we reach Maltheusian economics, but China's one-child rule addresses that. So here we have two constants that dominate the universe, the propensity for matter to organize itself into heavier and heavier elements and the propensity for these elements to organise itself into more and more complicated chemicals and more and more complicated forms o…

What qualifies something as living? Should we as scientists consider something as living? Is this a term that has psychological attachment? If so, should we abandon it? I will set forth the idea that everything is dead. Nothing can be defined as living; and nothing should be defined as living. Atoms and molecules are not living.