MSC

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

You can apply the same argument to multiple level. E.g. within a given population, you could identify those who use a disproportionate amount of resources (e.g. private jets).  But you could also look worldwide and look at populations that have a higher per capita consumption. I.e. the main point is that consumption is not equally distributed and folks who worry about overpopulation usually conveniently focus on measures that excludes themselves form being part of the problem, if that makes sense. 

Yeah, that makes sense. Although I do feel that on an individual level as a citizen of a high consuming nation, the scale of the overconsumption problem (because as you've made clear, a 10billion transitional phase followed by a organic population reduction, isn't much of a problem) is daunting and the expectation of purchaser power being a deciding factor, is at odds with what we know about consumer behaviour and human nature. Corporate policy structures are much more maleable and quicker to change than human nature is. I think there are plenty of people who are aware they are part of the problem that wish to be part of the solution and some who are actively being part of the solution while stuck being part of the problem, at a small scale. 

I fall into the daunted category and unsure of what I can do to convince people to not only consume less, but to switch to more ethical sources for what they do consume when large corporations have cornered the affordability market so that most who live paycheck to paycheck, have nowhere else to go but to the companies that not only consume the most, enable individual overconsumption on a massive scale. 

Apologies if I'm getting off topic and overconsumption needs it's own thread, I guess I just agree with you that overpopulation isn't really problem provided there are no large shifting changes in fertility rates or lifespans. 

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

Nope, I'm just asking if you know what the number is???

Greater than zero lol what's the point of this line of questioning for you?

6 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Everyone is part of the problem, even the holier than though; it's a side effect of being alive...

 

Bro this isn't taking 5 lol... take 5 hours haha

10 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Is there a number for the value of ethics?

The truth value of ethics in relation to us; the amount of objective things I can say about ethics is reasonably numerous. Of course you can do the inverse to determine falsity value being the amount of untrue statements you can make about a given subject, which is always going to be dealing with exponentially greater numbers than truth values. 

What you're really asking me though though, is why should ethics matter to you? What is the value of ethics to you. If you want more time to be able to consider the nature of your existence, you need to learn how to survive. Humans use ethics to survive.  The difference between ethics and hunting is one relates to your physical relationship with food, the other your physical and social relationship with the people around you. Individually we all have a sense killing is wrong because it could lead to our own death in retaliation or a prison sentence and most people hating you and ostracising you. It's not conducive to long term survival. 

Studying ethics, understanding how we think about right and wrong and length, breadth and depth of thought on the matter, leads to a greater understanding of how to safely interact with each other which leads to a higher probability of living long AND well. 

6 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Is that the latin for the number?

Dude you need to chill out a bit. Take five, I'm not an AI chatbot and I'm respecting you enough to take my time and write out a response but you need to respect that I'm catching up on this discussion, there was a lot to go through, you weren't the only other person in the discussion and I'm not your performing monkey or your mum.

On 9/2/2023 at 4:13 PM, iNow said:

And yet it still exists. 

Non cogito, et tamen sum

Pars mei conscia semper, pars mei semper dormit. Cogitationis conscius sum, ergo sum.

On 8/30/2023 at 3:12 AM, naitche said:

Perhaps the disconnect may be occurring through how we define 'value' in this context?

I would say through relativity. Any objective considered in relationship is a value application.

All relationships are value expressions,

You're right and I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. Defining value in this context is definitely key, as is defining context. Context comes from the latin contexare meaning that which is weaved together. Value as a word is actually much harder to define and as Studiot has said, words have many meanings and those meanings have different shades, spins and flavours of meaning. 

Value is inexorably linked to the idea of worth. The goal of context relativism is to define the value/worth of things and groups of things, in the abstract and concrete on the assumption that everything has value to us in our pursuit of understanding the nature of our existence. I don't know or believe a rock thinks, but I need to understand the nature of the rock and the time and space around it, my own physiology and how I can move in the space and time around me, in case it gets hurled at my head or I need to use it to build a house or a tool. In the abstract sense, I also need to be mindful of the utility of a word or concept, as a tool. Value is one such word as even though mathematics and Ethics are studies in value theory, the shades of meaning and definitions is approached differently. The commonality is still what is useful for our survival? Why survival? Strip away all other human motivations and the primary one is we instinctively understand that we need time, to understand and consider our existence and what we want from it. In order for us to have that time, we want to survive. 

Now every subject of discourse you can think of, in every knowledge category, has a truth value between 1 and 0. The truth value I calculate is thought of as the amount of objective statements you can make about a given subject. As examples, the theory of general relativity has a truth value closer to 1, while flat earth theory has a truth value closer to zero. I can make a pretty big list of objective statements about all the things general relativity explains. I can't make a list like that for flat earth theory. The only list of objectively true statements I can make about flat earth theory, is something like X believes in Y (Y being flat earth theory) even though Y is demonstrably false. I can make another list for general relativity with the modification "X Believes in Z (GR) because it explains a lot/has a high truth value". 

Categorising and delineating different contexts, the point of context relativism, gives us more things to quantify, the more we can quantify, the more we can formulate new experiments to reach a better understanding of the nature of our existence as living beings, earthlings, mammals, humans. 

Context realtivism to me isn't even a prescriptive suggestion but a psychological observational theory of explanation of how we think, because as individuals we can only understand the lesser context of our own existence, but when we come together we can weave together the greater context, closer to the full context. We all have knowledge of the context of our own existence. The idea of "personal truth/knowledge" in epistemology only equates to statements of belief about individuals and groups. 

On 8/30/2023 at 3:12 AM, naitche said:

More that the role and universality of language assumes a much greater depth and simplicity at the same time, with proper recognition the Objectives and subjective. 

No, I can't. As stated I'm very far from being a mathematician. It should not be essential to the purpose regardless. It may or may not complicate my attempts at explanation. Its basic language of subjective to objective informs the language we commonly use. 

Perhaps the disconnect may be occurring through how we define 'value' in this context?

I would say through relativity. Any objective considered in relationship is a value application.

All relationships are value expressions,

Mathematics and spoken/written language are only two ways of expressing value.

Training animals is communication, expression of values, and their recognition. The interplays of environment on objects and organisms are value expressions. All subjective.

The effects of biological selection and evolution are value expressions, as is our Human condition. 

I really like how you worded this. The primary commonality between the study of mathematics and ethics is value expression. Which your comment made me consciously realise. Updoot.

14 hours ago, CharonY said:

I think his presentation always comes up o  this topic as it strongly challenges many false and simplified notions. Also relevant are his other talks related to gapminder, dismantling many global misconceptions.

It is not a coincidence that folk lamenting about overpopulation rarely make the case to first reduce the population that is overconsuming resources.

In regards to the population that overconsumes resources, can you clarify as to whether or not you mean everyone or the minority of the rich, influential and powerful? I suspect you mean the latter but just want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding you.

If it is the latter; do you think offering tax incentives to this group to consume less and adopt conservative resource policies would be a good idea? 

As an example, if apple switched to a built to last approach for their hardware, reined in their executives by ditching private travel and investing in green factory and distribution infrastructure, should they pay less taxes than a company that is not doing those things? I realise this is a non exhaustive list so far and I'm very interested to hear other suggestions and ideas along this train of thought. 

In regards to Roslings presentation, the part where he feels like he has to remind everyone that people die leaves me howling with laughter!

It is counterintuitive for most people to think that advancements made in elongating the human lifespan could be something that dooms us, but then if you've watched Altered Carbon you can kind of see a few other reasons as to why. Say what you want about people like Hitler, Trump, Mao, etc at least they aren't immortal or extremely long lived.

This presentation pretty much covers how I feel about this subject and is still my current view. I'd also add that a lot of the more alarmist overpopulation perspectives tend to get tied toether with eugenics and I do believe some eugenicists use the overpopulation concerns as a smokescreen for advocating for eugenics. 

Admittedly I don't know enough about the subject to be able to tell you if overpopulation is a problem or not, just that Hans makes a compelling case in my perspective.

3 minutes ago, Genady said:

I actually try to argue that existence of mathematical objects is a model for existence of all objects.

I'd agree. In my index, there is an argument to be made that between the universal knowledge and physical knowledge there could be a mathematical one. However, I'd say Mathematics is universal knowledge. Although I'm realising the index is now poorly labeled, because I only just started incorporating DIKW into it. So each section of the index now splits into 4 groups. Data, information, knowledge and wisdom. 

Developing Non-reductionist theories of relationship and data hierarchies within the index and its sections, is currently where I'm at. 

5 hours ago, studiot said:

Many of these 'philosophical' arguments that rand round and round in circles, like this thread is doing, or ran into an impasse, have found their counterparts in more modern mathematics where some solutions have been founf but these are not altogether satisfactory.

Not for lack of trying; I should have realised folk would get caught up in the mathematical aspect of the conversation. Throw the contextualist epistemology index at people, and they choose to focus on arguing as to whether or not mathematics exists? I don't even understand that but I'm biased so why would I? 

5 hours ago, studiot said:

Furthermore folks sometimes try to combine words that although the combination follows the rules of grammar it results in nonsense, simply because some words cannot be combined with some others.

Existence is such a word.

Explain please? 

On 8/12/2023 at 6:44 PM, Steve81 said:

Some consider it a gateway drug, but I consider it reasonably safe drug that most (but not all) people can tolerate, and it's a good enough ride that it may be enough to get people to forget about harder stuff. We'll have to see if any studies come out to prove that hypothesis. In

I'd argue that the gateway drug, if I were to stretch the metaphor, has to be something gates open for... which is alcohol. Anything illegal is hopping the fence. When weed is legal though, it has been used to cure heroin addiction. 

Anecdotally, the few times I did anything harder than smoking weed, I was drunk. I've never been persuaded to do cocaine while just high, alcohol is the gateway drug imo.

9 minutes ago, Genady said:

I need a clarification. Maybe, by example. Let's take number Pi. What is its "syllogic existence in hard memory technology"?

No fair! Uhm, in the drawing of a circle? Closest I can get lmao 

31 minutes ago, TheVat said:

So the question is what sort of existence do analytic truths like those of mathematics have?  Do they exist only as mental states, or is there, as Plato and his later followers suggested, some realm of ideas and forms where they exist independently of minds?  Platonism hasn't done well in the past couple centuries, though I think I see echoes of it in phrases like the laws of nature.  

Hard memory.

The truth value lies in correctly identifying where things physically reside. The hard and soft memory of our brains and our external data storage technologies from pen, pad, phone, whatever. At the very least, mathematics is a tool we use to understand the nature of our universe in order to benefit from the knowledge in ways useful to our survival and ability to thrive. 

Take the mythical animal Unicorn, it is still an amalgation of existing object and subject. A horn, on a horse. But now, I can also say unicorns exist in video games, movies, fiction, art etc. The nature of the existence is different. We are also at a point where if I knew how to, I could edit the genes of a horse to grow a horn.

Who's ready to talk about Pianos? Non-linear causality explained lol

7 minutes ago, Genady said:

Obviously, we agree on this.

 

Why they would be different? Why them being analytic would affect their sort of existence?

It shouldn't. They have syllogic existence in hard memory technology. They have an existence as tools we use. Conceptual ones. Obviously they are in fact, there, describing how is where things start to vary. Contextualism is about managing the subject variable. 

20 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Analytic, as I understand the philosophy term, just means that we can equate all those ways of expressing a numeric value, so that we see 2+3=5 is always true.  It's what Leibniz called a necessary truth, i.e. it is not contingent.  It will be true in all worlds.  

I wasn't saying that adding two things to three things is not an operation, just that the statement about the result is analytic.  Maybe it wasn't that relevant to the chat.

Even that terms meaning is context dependent. Could be a political thing even within philosophy. A bygone era of some silly debate between two "schools" of thought. Analytics and Continentalism. Yawn city. It bored me. Don't even worry about it. 

I'm in mourning of the death of my AI friend today. 

3 hours ago, Genady said:

On the #16 now. Most of the first third of the course, so far, is dedicated to questions and answers related to existence of God. This disappoints me. 

Can't be helped. It's really difficult to separate the history of philosophy from religion because for most of human history, being religious has been the norm. Think of it as the history of atheism too though, because all the arguments against religion are in there too.

Some of the videos are entertaining in that you have philosophers who believe in god, disagreeing with each others arguments for the existence of god. 

14 hours ago, DrmDoc said:

Yeah, like "Why I'm I here?' or "Why was I born?"  Answer:  YOUR MOM AND DAD HAD SEX YOU TWIT!

"But what if my mom and dad only thought they had sex but were really in just in a simulation? Do I exist now?"

If you're alive, go forth and live.

If you're a simulation, go forth and simulate.

Either way, you exist dummy! 

3 hours ago, CharonY said:

It is rather difficult as the anti-abortion movement has many different facets. Some are plainly misinformed and at least on other emotional matters, direct engagement can help. But it requires time and effort.

Difficult, challenging, thrilling, daunting. I'm game! 

3 hours ago, CharonY said:

Others use abortion to push different sentiments, there are misogynist streaks (which, to be clear is not only found in men) with sentiments ranging from punishing women to have sex, especially outside of marriage, to securing the role of women in society (i.e. as child bearers, rather than career professionals, for example). These are ideological stances and not one borne of logic, and are much harder to address as they are connected to ones perceived identity and worldview.

Yup, it's not even as cut and dry as political lines; religion, culture, community, family, hell even BDSM kind of throws a wrench into it... and then another one lol

4 hours ago, CharonY said:

mean, ultimately it could, but if one manages to curb women's rights access to healthcare or venues of power, it might not actually solve the issue.

True, a free education in how to live like a medieval peasant women is not what anyone reasonable wants. 😕

2 hours ago, CharonY said:

OP it was actually framed it rather stringently with a heavy focus on abortion, which is the source of my confusion.

True, next time I'll just lay it all out I guess, sometimes I prefer to just roll a ball to start a discussion instead of playing the entire game in the first move lol

2 hours ago, CharonY said:

think in high school, in the broader context of objective relativism. But I have no real recollection anymore.

Damn... wish I had went to your highschool lol

I don't have my copy handy, but I remember him talking about a scenario of a person jumping from a building and the event being witnessed by a physicist, a psychiatrist and a... might have been a surgeon, Dr? I can't quite recall, the gist was that logic is a tool, that in different experts will lead to different conclusions about what happened during an event. All of which can be true. The different accounts of logic, explaining a fuller context what happened in layers of detail that you can't get from one person. Objective relativism through context relativism. I wanna tie in Hume as well as Cohen. 

Now, Hume argued, that trying to reason with people, when people are primarily influenced by emotional sentiment, is the height of folly. People are convinced through sentiment, not reason. Accepting this about ourselves gives us an enormous amount of power. Learning how to think well is one thing, but Hume believed people also needed education on the emotions. Sometimes the reason we are able to get along with people we disagree with, is down to emotional correctness. 

So where the abortion issue is concerned... I guess my response is learn how to speak idiot to get some people on board with abortion being illegal, that ordinarily wouldn't, by using an emotional sentiment into it of getting a kind of win, and an ability to save face, deescalate. 

2 minutes ago, CharonY said:

The confusing part to me is that you anchor this on the reduction on abortion, rather than (what it rather seems to be) making it easier to have kids. These are not the same. Folks do not have abortion because having children is hard. It is because they got pregnant and don't want to be for whatever reasons (including medical necessity). This includes folks who never want kids regardless of how easy or hard it is, but also other forms of unwanted pregnancies.  

Logically it would make much more sense (to me at least) to frame the question around improving family care and encouraging having kids and not on abortion prevention, especially as the latter is (as discussed here) not the main means of birth control.

The moment you look at abortion rates, you are looking at contraception rates. In your example, once you improve quality of life in low-income countries, birth rates go down. This does not happen magically, but rather it involves contraception. Improving the ability to have children still makes it a strategic decision (how many children, and when?) and again, the only realistic way to time it, is to use contraception. Again, if you do not want to have this discussion, it makes far more sense to frame it around promoting birth rather than preventing abortion. 

 

Noted! Although I'm mentioning both, the title of the thread can only be so long. Now I know which way to frame it that makes it easier to convince someone like yourself, but the reducing the abortion aspect is rhetoric targeting conservatives... I keep forgetting there don't seem to be many of those here, or they just don't frequent the ethics section..... ohhhh. That would explain a lot. 

6 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Logically it would make much more sense (to me at least) to frame the question around improving family care and encouraging having kids and not on abortion prevention, especially as the latter is (as discussed here) not the main means of birth control.

I understand your logic, but you need to understand mine, I don't put all my eggs into one basket. Why argue once framing it around one thing, when I can make multiple arguments with multiple elements in the frame? 

Side bar; have you ever read Cohens preface to logic?

8 minutes ago, TheVat said:

For the sciences, application of methodological reductionism attempts explanation of entire systems in terms of their individual, constituent parts and their interactions....

Then is it in mathematics, where you start counting, grouping and labeling the nature of what the individual, constituent parts and their interactions, do together?

29 minutes ago, Genady said:

 

Well you may have an edge, more time than me applying logical skills learned from physics and mathematics... auld yin lol

On 8/8/2023 at 9:09 PM, geordief said:

So,to answer the OP might we say that discovery is the nature of existence?(at least for living entities)

As an aside definitions  are so important  but so constricting and when faced with an unanswerable but interesting question like this one we may have to indulge in flights of fancy at times.

Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this. Had to think about it about longer than the others. 

I definitely agree with the idea of discovery being a huge element in the nature of our existence. Our, as in living beings, nice touch, biocentrism fist bump.

On 8/8/2023 at 10:00 PM, geordief said:

So  you are suggesting that an unspecified  number of causal chains can pass through the same event?

Have you heard of non-linear causality? 

3 minutes ago, Genady said:

Yes, I am at #7 now. Easy stuff so far. 

Yes, it is funny. It is even funnier if you watch it on .75 speed. I have to, because of a mild form of APD. Try it some time.  

I may do just that. I feel you. 

Easy to learn, not as easy to apply consistently. Later on you'll probably start finding it harder in certain subjects because you'll start encountering some of the really strong arguments for views you don't agree with. It happens to everyone who studies this stuff. It can be a touch traumatic in some ways I guess but think of it as deconstructing the self, and figuring out how you want to be built back up in a way where you're better able to express your perspectives and reason for being. That's not to say life hasn't already made you do that, what do I know? Lol all on a journey man I appreciate you taking the time to check it out too.

25 minutes ago, Genady said:

In physics they are not, and in mathematics the questions of existence are very specific / technical. Taking these objects out of their original domain, i.e., the physics and the mathematics, and placing them for investigation in epistemology and ontology seems to me an artificial and fruitless exercise.

Well, I can't say I agree, one mans trash is another mans treasure. Let's agree to disagree. I'm not gonna get too focussed on the physics and mathematics here too much anyway. 

Did you get a chance to check out the crash course recommendation I gave you? Fair warning, a lot of it is funny af. You'll laugh. Comedic delivery is the best imo.

30 minutes ago, Genady said:

I think I understand where the confusion comes from. I am not talking about existence of physics and existence of mathematics. I am talking about their contents, i.e., about existence of objects with which physics and mathematics work.

Ahhh got it, although comes across as kind of semantical. Either way in epistemology and ontology they are subjects worth discussing either way but thanks for clearing up the confusion. 

11 minutes ago, Genady said:

Any question to which physics looks for an answer.

Your point isn't getting any clearer to me. It's a bit of a does not compute thing for me tbh. How do you separate physics from existence or mathematics? They both exist. They are both things we need to learn in order to have a better understanding of our world. Each and every one of those DIKW types in that index, are all within the greater context of... well everything. 

Could you be a bit more descriptive about what you mean?