Philosophia

[EbonLore]

You aquire knowledge throughout a lifetime, although the chemical medium of memories is stored in the brain, the chemical medium (as with most chemicals in the body) produces an energy signature unique to that memory. This vibration is added to a collection contained within the spirit at the same moment. This spiritual memory accumulates power over a number of lifetimes. When one's spirit is strong enough, it can travel to the outer planes and thus ascend to a higher state.

At least, thats what makes sense to me.

[Deviant Kitten]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

Kitten!! I missed you. *hugs n' kisses*
....

The problem with the should is that it's all relative. Not being submitted to our creator would be heavily disputed by a Catholic for example (who would also speak in favor of the creature nevertheless). Plus, there will be some cynics that won't think being sentient gives an automatic right to life.

*Is very flattered to have been missed* Heya Jill, I missed you too! *smooches you back* Usually this place gives a headache (for obvious reasons which I'm not gonna start on...), but I was lurking around out of curiosity to see what had become of the place lately and your thread tempted me back in

Yes, I suppose there are plenty of people out there who'd deny that sentience in a being gives it certain rights. This is pretty much the root of the whole pro/anti abortion rights debate too, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if we should open that can of worms in here though... *hides the can-opener quickly* Eep!

[Godslayer Jillian]

The uncertainty reduction theory Roserougesang talked about will eat my thoughts if I don't talk about it.
The Uncertainty Reduction Theory states that people are motivated to gather information about others to reduce uncertainty about them.
Simple enough, don't you think?
The thing is that if this theory is true, it means that we create relationships out of a selfish indulgence. We don't like not knowing anything, so we try to learn more about people just to take the uncertainty out of our shoulders. We may create relationships with time, but what starts this relationships is a completely systematic thought process in which we would treat people as no more than a chest we're curious to know what it holds or a door we haven't opened yet.
It takes away the empathy out of knowing a person.
Nevertheless, I believe it's true.
How about you?

[roserougesang]

*feels incredibly unintelligent compared to Jillian*


So, what you're saying is that the more we know about a person and the less uncertainty we have about them, the less we're concerned about their feelings?

[Godslayer Jillian]

It's not that we're less concerned about their feelings. It's quite the opposite.
The uncertainty reduction theory only states that the true reason for us to want to know about other people is not because we care, but because we don't like not knowing.
(EDIT: thinking about it, this is not philosophy, but sociology. Should we start a sociology thread?)

[roserougesang]

Sounds like a good idea.....can I have sociology lessons from you?
*feels unintelligent*

[Don't Look Behind You]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

The uncertainty reduction theory Roserougesang talked about will eat my thoughts if I don't talk about it.
The Uncertainty Reduction Theory states that people are motivated to gather information about others to reduce uncertainty about them.
Simple enough, don't you think?
The thing is that if this theory is true, it means that we create relationships out of a selfish indulgence. We don't like not knowing anything, so we try to learn more about people just to take the uncertainty out of our shoulders. We may create relationships with time, but what starts this relationships is a completely systematic thought process in which we would treat people as no more than a chest we're curious to know what it holds or a door we haven't opened yet.
It takes away the empathy out of knowing a person.
Nevertheless, I believe it's true.
How about you?

Yup. I have long given up the search of non-egoistical impulses in human behavior. I absolutely agree with this theory.

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

(EDIT: thinking about it, this is not philosophy, but sociology. Should we start a sociology thread?)

Better not...that would be a great mess (not that I have anything against a mess) since sociology can include almost anything if one tries hard enough...just like philosophy.

[Delkaetre]

... my personal philosophy runs that you should do what you can to be happy, as long as you don't hurt others while doing so. I don't think there's a life after death, don't believe in god. This is life, it's all we have, so we should enjoy it while can. You don't get a second round.
A tad depressing at times, but it works well for me. I'm not advocating mindless hedonism, since that can ultimately mess things up badly for you, but enjoy what you can while you can.
Don't really go much for deep philosophical debate and consideration. Terrible pragmatist.

[Deviant Kitten]

Originally Posted by Delkaetre

... my personal philosophy runs that you should do what you can to be happy, as long as you don't hurt others while doing so.

Reminds me of the Wiccan rede, which goes "An it harm none, do as thou wilt" (as opposed to Crowley's "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law")

[Sobeh]

The Rede is nice until you realize that 'an it harm none' is, like so many moral statements, so vague as to be useless. COuching it in terms of the Rede is enlightening: sustaining ones own life requires harm, whether animal or vegetable matter (and, vegetable/fruit harvesting kills rodents and insects). Starve yourself and harm the microbes within your digestive tract, suicide and harm the loved ones around you. Frankly, the act of birth for any living creature has with it a projected cost of harm done that, while not predictable, is nevertheless remarkable.

It's impossible to infer an 'ought' from an 'is', however, which means that however many facts are uncovered about what IS, value statements using words like 'should' and 'have to' and 'must not' can never be derived without baseless assumptions about deity, spirits, the nonexistence of such, or similar metaphysical statements that have nothing to recommend them to the rational observer apart from personal conviction, a shaky and fickle measure of reliability at best.

Convincing others of the rightness of ones own views is one of the most popular ways to distract oneself from the ugly truth that ultimate Meaning is forever a matter of mere opinion without a shred of translatable support.

I'll go back to not looking at the site now. Good to see you're all still drawing breath.

[Delkaetre]

"Convincing others of the rightness of ones own views is one of the most popular ways to distract oneself from the ugly truth that ultimate Meaning is forever a matter of mere opinion without a shred of translatable support."

Which is why I've given up talking to religious people. I can't prove to them their god doesn't exist, since they believe it does so strongly that all I say is as nought. Everyone has their own belief, and everyone finds evidence in their own mind for it, and no one has any more proof than anyone else. Everyone has their own version of ultimate meaning (or lack thereof), and clings to it.

(I prefer science to religion if I have to have a belief system for Meaning or lack of, but I feel both of them are belief systems- science is based on assumptions, beliefs, which have been put in place because they are necessary to explain things, but are themselves unprovable. Were it possible to disprove them, then the belief system of science would crumble just as a religious system would were its god to be conclusively disproved. It's impossible to completely prove or disprove anything, so both systems remain valid. I choose science because it appears more logical to me.)

[Godslayer Jillian]

It is completely possible to prove something.
You could prove the earth is flat, so long as you are convincing enough.
But proving something as true doesn't make it Truth; it only testes the validity of your statement.
(Sobeh's post made me nostalgic, yet I can't understand why would he care to write that single post.)

[Godslayer Jillian]

Haha, I said 'testes'.

Anyway, I just got an epiphany.

Ever heard that annoying argument about absolutes?
I, as a nihilist (or any ideology in favor of relativism), begin by saying
"There are no absolute truths in life."
It is simple and logical enough.
But then someone comes up and says
"Well, that statement refutes itself. Saying that there are no absolutes is an absolute in itself."
It makes a nice sentence to think about, but you instantaneously know there's something wrong with that, even if you don't know what it is; just as you know Zeno's Paradox can't be right, even if you can't word why it's not right.

Well, yesterday, I read a passage from the Republic:
Verily, Galucon, I said, glorious is the power of the art of contradiction!
Why do you say so?
because I think that many a man falls into the practice against his will. When he thinks that he is reasoning he is really disputing, just because he cannot define and divide, and so know that of which he is speaking; and he will pursue a merely verbal opposition in the spirit of contention and not of fair discussion.

Suddenly I realized what's wrong with the answer they give me above: They are giving authority to words as if they defined existence, rather than describe.

So, here's how the discussion would go:

Me- "I believe that there are no absolutes in life."
Him- "Well, that statement refutes itself. Saying that there are no absolutes is an absolute in itself."
Me- "You are assuming words have any authority in defining the world, when they are merely tools to describe it.
I could just as well say 'The only place you will ever find absolutes is in verbal statements' but I don't do that for the sakes of simplicity.
After all, by your same logic, words themselves are refuted.
You could say 'Anything that exists must have a place in the three spatial dimensions and in time' which is alright.
But by your logic I could say 'Well, words do not exist in any dimension. Ink does occupy the dimensions, but ink is not the same as words. We can say words, and those sound waves do occupy the dimensions, but sound waves are not the same as words. Words and the idea of words do not have to occupy space and time for them to exist. But if they do not, then they don't exist."

See, what I did there is give words a special characteristic, because the essence of words is more than merely sound waves and the way we interpret it. This is a logical inference if we are to believe that words have any authority over reality.
Yet we know that we are right if we say that anything that exists must occupy a place in the three spatial dimensions and time.

[HumanePain]

I think you started out well with relativism, but then lost it in maintaining words as acceptable tools for describing the universe. Without perspective, even words fail. If I look at my monitor sideways, the letters lose their shape and become a mere collection of bright lines, because I do not share the same perspective as you. So it comes back in an almost sophomoric fashion to the individual's view, which you touched upon in your rewrite of
"I believe that there are no absolutes in life."

Therefore, one may believe whatever they can accept.

[Blood blossoms]

Words are an abstraction of reality. Therefore, at least scientifically speaking, the closest one could get to placing them is somewhere in one's brain, where thought processes occur. But, it's not as though we can pry open someone's mind and extract letters dripping with gray matter, so you can make the argument that words themselves don't exist in three-dimensional spacetime. But couldn't you also argue that we create words, and we exist in three-dimensional spacetime, so the words are, for lack of a better word, located in us?

Then again, I suppose I'm transforming words into what creates them. But then, any thought we have becomes an abstraction of reality not located in three-dimensional spacetime, not merely words.

And why is it that we "know" something must be in the three dimensions plus time to exist? I think you yourself would refer to that as truth as opposed to Truth, for we don't really "know" the workings of the universe, at least not in the way its creator could be assumed to know them.

[Clockwork]

Atoms are the basis upon which all matter exists (excluding quarks and smaller particles... but that's a whole different matter. No pun intended), and electrons are not bound to three dimensions. To look at things three dimensionally is rather limiting. As for words, they are only vessels for ideas, a little more advanced than hieroglyphics. If they do physically exist, it's as electric discharge and gray meat in our heads, but even that isn't required to exist. Maybe existence is only a matter of degree? For example, imagining something you see, to actually seeing it, and then being able to feel it as well. It's just based on intensity. But of course, that's all just madness.

[Godslayer Jillian]

True, then I have to change the statement of 'everything must occupy a place in the three dimensions and time', but if we change that to something more accurate, the point is still there.
Let's say we agree that everything that is must physically exist, which is pretty obvious.
But still, I can argue that words, and more than that, concepts, do not physically exist.

[Blood blossoms]

So, for something to exist, it must be tangible?

This would suggest that vacuums don't exist because we can't "feel" them (although we might feel ourselves imploding upon stepping into one). You could also say that the air doesn't exist when it's not moving (isn't wind just air moving from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure?) by this argument. Air, yes, is composed of particles, but a vacuum is an area of no particles, basically, which means it has no "physical" presence and, thus, should not exist.

I think the question now is a definition of existence.

[Godslayer Jillian]

Not really; a vacuum is only something we call for space that has nothing. A vacuum is not really something; we just call that nothing a vacuum to give it a name, which is again describing it by words, not defining it.
My whole point in here is that I am just being verbally confrontational. Just because it sounds such way as words doesn't mean it behaves such way in reality (again, I mention Zeno's paradox)

If a discussion should begin here, it should be of other ways to respond to the apparent paradox in relativism, and later we can talk of a better example for my own response.

[Draconysius]

Ok, new discussion:
Is it right that a civilian man can face life in jail for killing another man, while a man enrolled in the military gets paid and worshipped for it?

[DeathChii]

Originally Posted by Draconysius

Ok, new discussion:
Is it right that a civilian man can face life in jail for killing another man, while a man enrolled in the military gets paid and worshipped for it?

No, it's not. =[

I think reading that just changed my life a little... o_o

[Clockwork]

Originally Posted by Draconysius

Ok, new discussion:
Is it right that a civilian man can face life in jail for killing another man, while a man enrolled in the military gets paid and worshipped for it?

I guess it depends on how many lives are saved in the long run by each of these actions, although neither of them save lives directly, in most cases.

[Drake Dun]

The easiest response to your friend is simply to deny the power of logic, but if you want to be a hybrid logician-nihilist, there is still an answer.

You: Nothing is known to be true.
Him: If we know that to be true, then we know something to be true. So clearly what you say is false.
You: If what I said were false, we would not be able to infer that we know something to be true, which removes your objection.
(rinse and repeat)

The flaw in this line of reasoning is actually pretty subtle... if you try, you'll find out that you cannot model the exchange in straightforward propositional or first order logic. You have already more or less identified the problem. There is a sneaky leap between abstraction layers, the same as in these two examples.

A: Nothing exists.
B: Then nothingness exists, so obviously you are wrong.
A: Oh. So my first statement was wrong, and in fact nothingness does not exist.

A: Everything is possible.
B: No. For that to be true, it would have to be possible for something to be impossible, which is definitely not the case if everything is possible.
A. Oh. So not everything is possible, meaning that we cannot infer that it is possible for something to be impossible... but wait, that removes the objection to what I said in the first place.

Notice that the problem isn't really the the distinction between reality and words. You have the same problem if you go from words to words about words:

A: I am so stupid. Everything I say is wrong.
B: If that's true, then something you say is true. So what you just said is obviously false, stupid.
A: See?!

You also have the same problem if you interpose a finer distinction, say percepts, between reality and words:

A: I perceive nothing.
B: You perceive your failure to perceive anything.
A: Oh. So I don't perceive nothing... but wait, then I don't perceive a failure to perceive anything.

The problem is caused by jumping abstraction layers. In the above examples the result is that the truth of the statement renders the statement false. You can also design extremely concise propositions which seem to cycle internally, so to speak, as in this famous case:

"This sentence is false."

Or another example, which is more difficult to understand but more illustrative of the problem once you wrap your brain around it:

"The set of non-self-membered sets is self-membered."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox

Get out a piece of paper and draw boxes to represent sets, and boxes around those to represent sets of sets as you walk through that article, and if you are patient enough you will end up with a very effective demonstration of what is wrong with this kind of thinking.

An exceedingly bizarre example of the same (or at least a similar) phenomenon is the infamous Anselm ontological argument for the existence of a god.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontolog...m.27s_argument

Here is how I would explain the issue. Any proposition attains to truth or falsehood as a function of the status of a domain to which it refers. The domain is populated by potential referents; the proposition is a reference. The domain does not include references to objects on the domain, which means it does not include the proposition at hand.

Let's boil your example down to the nitty gritty. You said that "there are no absolute truths". The best way to model that would actually be with modal logic, but that complication can be avoided if we make your statement even stronger - "nothing is true". If your friend's argument fails against the stronger form, obviously it will fail against the weaker form.

Let's take a domain of three atomic propositions. Notice from our modeling that your statement is not actually about reality... it is about statements about reality (no aspect of reality qua reality is true or false in and of itself; reality simply is). Therefore our domain is populated by undefined propositions about reality.

I = {p, q, r}

Now we'll throw in a monadic predicate T meaning "is true", and assign values for I(T).

I(T) = {p=f, q=f, r=f}
All three atomic propositions are false.

The size of the domain and the truth values of the propositions were chosen arbitrarily. I can get away with that, because what your friend is saying is not merely that your statement was incorrect on the domain to which it refers (which would require him to find a counterexample on the domain), but that it was false on its own terms, as a function of logic. "If that is true, then it is false." If this were correct, the statement would be false on any domain.

Nothing is true: ~(∃x)Tx

Obviously, on our chosen domain, the above statement expressed in English and in first order logic is true. What your friend is basically doing is saying, "Hey! Wait a second! '~∃x:Tx' is a statement! We should wrap that up as an atomic proposition and call it s, then add it to the domain. Once we do that we will find that we have a true statement on the domain, which renders s false."

This looks a hell of a lot like Russell's paradox. Logic doesn't work that way. References are references, and referents are referents.

A real logical contradiction is false on any domain. Here's a contradiction:

Every statement in the domain is both true and false:
(∀x)(Tx & ~Tx)

Now that's a genuine contradiction. It is false on any domain.

Hopefully that makes sense. Actually, faced with the claim that nothing is absolutely true, a still sneakier answer would have been:

"Either it is raining or it is not raining."

But that will also fall if considered closely.

Drake

[Drake Dun]

Originally Posted by Draconysius

Is it right that a civilian man can face life in jail for killing another man...

Of course! We need to be protected from evil by stronger, better people!

...while a man enrolled in the military gets paid and worshipped for it?

That's different. Soldiers only kill towel-heads, and besides, we want their oil.

EERrrr!!! I mean! It's okay for the soldiers, because they are... uhm. Protecting people from WMD. No, I mean! Uuuuhmm... hang on, just give me a second here. I'm thinking. Ahah! Spreading freedom and democracy!

Drake

[HumanePain]

Thank you for the free lesson in logic Drake! Very enlightening to see the fallacy of such verbal loops in improper logic. Fascinating.

As to Drac's question: personally, I see no right or wrong; the perspective should be at the macro-social level (I know I have made references to sophomorism in earlier posts, but bear with me a moment):

In war, two large social organisms touch and at the boundaries one will try to devour the other. Think of two large amoebas covering the earth. Where the edges touch, conflict arises and a battle for territorial domination and defense of territory will ensue. It matters not who is selected to fight the battle at the individual level, individuals will be found that comprise the organism to compose the "skin" or edge of the organism. War is not a matter for individuals; as long as society exists, there will be high level decisions and behaviors chosen that are above the individuals ability to control (at least directly). A different kind of morality must evolve to model the social organism's behavior. Currently, social organisms are very primitive. When preservation of constituent individuals finally happens, social organisms will have sufficiently evolved to adhere to concepts of "what is right or wrong".

In my humble opinion anyway.