Sisyphus

A single (as in unmarried) woman goes to her mothers funeral, whilst there she gets talking to a man who she really likes. When she gets home she decides she really wnats to see him again but can't remember his name or number. Two days later she murders her sister.

 

Why?

Because a man who went to her mother's funeral has a good chance to also go to her sister's, so she'll be able to see him again.

I don't know that they are.

I'm talking about Palin, Beck, O'Donnel, etc. Those are the big stars, right?

I think that's what a fringe group on the periphery of the tea party movement are.

So why are the crazies in charge?

Adrenaline does not give you energy in that way. I guess you could say that it makes you use your energy more quickly, via increased heart rate and the rest of the fight or flight response.

Indeed, there is no morality if there is no accountability to a higher authority.

I think that claim is demonstrably false, both empirically and logically. The closest statement that I would say is even plausible is that some people find it difficult to be moral unless they believe their morality is externally imposed by some authority holding them "accountable." (But is that even morality, then?)

Thus if there is a moral obligation to avoid murder then abortion cannot be practical and if there is not a moral obligation then it is.

Again with this "practical." The way needimprovement and now you are using it doesn't seem to make any sense. Would "morally correct" make more sense in that sentence? If that is what you meant, then I hope you realize it is only accurate if you've already equated abortion with murder.

I agree. Before conception, there are millions of potential people. Afterward, all but one (usually) are destroyed. If those are human beings, then even a sex act that results in conception is a massive holocaust ten times the size of Hitler's. I don't think of them as human beings, though, because they lack what makes humans important: minds.

At the moment of conception the fertilised egg already contains the information about the fully formed person that will develop. Its sex, hair colour, height etc.

All of that information exists at the moment before conception, also.

All this fertlised egg needs from then on is nourishment and protection.

And the same for the unfertilized egg and the sperm.

Every milestone along the way is just another step in its devlopment.

True enough, but that milestone is not the first, because there is no first. Life is a continuous process. It doesn't have rigid boundaries.

It seems illogical to me to chose some point after conception as a starting point for human existence.

I disagree. It was human life before that, and it was human life afterward. In the biological sense, which was technically the original question. When does a life begin? It doesn't. Not at one particular point, any more than a new species begins at one identifiable point. What we call a life is part of a continuum.

In the moral/ethical/metaphysical sense of being a person (presumably the agenda behind the original question), I think that's much foggier, but it's hard to see how a one-celled organism could qualify. I think that what makes humans more morally significant than an amoeba is the fact that we have minds. So I would say the human being, the "person," begins when the mind does. This doesn't happen at one precise moment, but emerges gradually.

Whatever point you chose will, at the least, be debatable.

Exactly. Exactly. Nature doesn't give us one point. Our customs do, and any single point is necessarily arbitrary.

 

If abortion is practical, murders should not be jailed. it works on the same principle

I'd really love for you to explain that logic.

I had always assumed that the extended life in science fiction was merely that the author presumed that by the point in history that we become space-faring we will be better at preventing and curing disease and possibly have some form of gene therapy to combat natural ageing in our genes (telomere extensions or some such) whilst avoiding cancer. Everything I have heard about life in zero gravity tallies with above posts that it is not particularly good for you.

I know I've read several stories specifically involving gravity's effect, for example in one Arthur C. Clarke story where it's discovered that the permanent moon colonists have about double the life expectancy of people on Earth.

I know it's a kind of a convention in science fiction. I'm guess coming from the idea that aging is gravity slowly killing you (which in turn comes from all the sagging, I would imagine). But I don't think there's any actual evidence for it, just because nobody has lived long enough in space to judge (but they have to develop bone loss, etc.). What kind of mechanism might slow aging?

Yes, the "left" definitely uses fear too. No, I don't think it's the same. I can't quantify it, but I think that psychologically, liberals and conservatives tend to be more receptive to different types of rhetoric. "We're under attack" rhetoric is, in my opinion, much more effective on and much more favored by conservatives.

I agree with all of the above regarding reasons the language in posts is different from text/IM speak. That said, I usually do not put much though into exactly how I'm going to say what I mean, unless it becomes an issue in a particular thread. I write in "first draft," and the actual language (as opposed to the ideas) of my posts generally takes about as much time to compose as it would to say out loud. This makes excessive IM language seem especially pointless, and generally prevents me from taking the message seriously.

 

Abortion is big business.

Yeah, it's all a plot of those fatcats at Planned Parenthood.

needimprovement, why is this in the ethics section? And is this topic about what the word "practical" means, or is it about abortion? If it's the former, then I can tell you that abortion is a terribly "impractical" example to use, since it will inevitably overwhelm the thread. And if it's the latter, then doesn't not knowing what practical means make it a nonsense question?

I would be wary of this for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I am skeptical that it would really be a "one off." If it works, eventually they'll do it again. And this kind of ad hoc taxation means much less predictability than an established system, and unpredictability is bad for investment. Finally, the precedent of milking a minority (albeit a privileged one, who will remain privileged) to feed a majority just seems like angry mob behavior. All should share the burden - not equally, but at least in part, so that it isn't just "free money."

That said, I think a temporary tax hike to pay down the debt combined with a freeze on budget increases is a good idea.

Merely not knowing the cause of something is not sufficient reason to say it has no cause, and nobody is suggesting that. The key points are:

1) Logically, there is nothing self-contradictory or otherwise impossible about uncaused events.

2) This is not merely an academic possibilty, because some observed phenomena have characteristics that suggest that their cause is not merely unknown, but nonexistent.

However, 1 is not dependent on 2.

You have to be letting air in AS you're letting liquid out. When liquid leaves, the volume it formerly occupied has to be replaced with something. With two holes, air can flow in one as liquid flows out the other. With only one hole, you have air and liquid trying to pass each other in different directions, and there is no smooth flow.

I think that a dog pissing on a pole probably is a conscious decision to add its own scent.

I don't really know what the op is asking, though. Depending on definitions, "unique to humans" could be anywhere from everything to nothing we do.

In order for something the size and mass of the moon to be hollow, it would have to be made of some material far stronger than anything known, or else it would collapse into a solid ball like everything else of large mass.

Luckily, though, we don't have to explain such a material or come up with some way such a structure might form, because the moon is solid.

I don't know about that. Each tribe had pretty much its own religion, most of these tribal religions are very unlike the universal religions in that they are very specific to the people or location. As with the languages of these tribes their religion will die out too. I do think we'll have more flavors of the universal religions though.

Sure, most location specific religions did not survive the rise of larger and larger societies and then globalization. However, as you say, the big religions tend to "speciate." And new cults arise and some take hold, well after the eras of global communication and science began. Case in point: Scientology. Even if we do somehow become more "rational" on the whole, there are also more of us, with more niches and more opportunity fr the like-minded to find one another.

I think that over the next few hundred years there will be more different religions, not fewer.

Islam and Christianity are both essentially offshoots of Judaism, so they have a lot in common. Other religions, like Hinduism, have totally different "stories."

To believe in the truly random is to believe in the supernatural. By definition the supernatural is "beyond natural law".

 

Supernatural

adjective

1. of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal.

If randomness is part of what naturally occurs, then it isn't supernatural, is it?

and miracle is quantum mechanics?

I don't know what this means.

Radioactive decay is hardly the only example, but it will do. We see no indication that there is any particular reason one atom decays and not another within a given time frame. Perhaps there is some unknowable hidden variable and perhaps not, but it certainly isn't necessary. Not scientifically, not philosophically.

To understand what is meant by "not necessary," it might help to really think about what it is we mean by "cause," and how we originally come to the intuitive conclusion that it IS necessary. We see that events we observe are in repetitive and therefore predictable patterns. That's it. Is there any reason such patterns are a necessary and unending property of anything that might possibly exist?

Obviously not that particular experiment, no, but it's a straightforward consequence of special relativity, which has a great deal of experimental support.

At first, it seemed like you weren't disagreeing with the physical reality of the situation, just saying that another description was equally valid. Was I mistaken, and are you in fact claiming that SR is wrong?

There is no logical necessity that everything must have a cause. In everyday life, we are just used to seeing consistency in the order of events we observe, and fallaciously take that consistency as some kind of law of existence. In fact, it appears that our universe does not operate that way, and strict causality is an illusion of statistics. Saying "the universe makes a choice" is a poor way of saying it, IMO, because it implies cause (albeit vaguely), when the absence of such is precisely the point.