Davis

@Jakelafort – I agree with the sentiment, but I am more optimistic (or naïve!) about the future. The pace of scientific and technological progress has far outstripped the average person’s ability or willingness to keep up intellectually with these advances. It is not so much that there is a growth in ignorance and stupidity but rather that it now…[Read more]

When i skim science headlines (and yea read some of the articles) and think back just 4 or 5 yrs. today’s headlines feel like sci fi. The richness of the prospect for improving our lives is staggering. At same time it feels like the norms and beliefs and stupidity are overflowing their toilet and depositing turds everywhere you look.

@Enco – It could be that Tucker Carlson made a balls of his testosterone booster with too much testicle tanning?

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Simon, the problem with JD Vance isn’t that he “respects” his wife’s atheism — it’s that he doesn’t respect her Hinduism. He’s implying she’s an atheist simply because she isn’t a Christian, which is a rather offensive way to erase a faith practiced by hundreds of millions in India. It’s disingenuous.

[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
What you’re describing isn’t moral realism but moral function: why we act morally, not whether morality exists as some external reality.

Thanks @Reg, that’s it in a nutshell.  Talking about morality is like talking about the middle east – the answer is always complicated.  The remit was to figure out morality so th…[Read more]

Good Website here.

Simon – I moved your update here so it does not disappear down the list.

I have been studying morality for about 16 years, and now I feel I have it all figured out. I can give a full and comprehensive answer for what justifies our moral beliefs: the question that is on every moral philosopher’s lips, and is the reason for the mistaken belief in m…[Read more]

@Simon –

Simon, the problem with JD Vance isn’t that he “respects” his wife’s atheism — it’s that he doesn’t respect her Hinduism. He’s implying she’s an atheist simply because she isn’t a Christian, which is a rather offensive way to erase a faith practiced by hundreds of millions in India. It’s disingenuous. What he’s really doing is getting…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
People on social media are very vexed indeed.

JD Vance respects his wife’s atheism.  That’s good.  But they bring up their kids as Christians.  Surely the kids should be allowed to make their own minds up.

Thanks Reg!

Toppings and droppings.

Those chimps can of course do that. It would be surprising were it not so. I knew when i was a kid how stupid the so called scientists’ approach to other animal intelligence. But that is not same as beliefs humans hold in Trump and lefty beliefs et. al.

If chimps are capable of that sort of ideological belief formation…[Read more]

Have a great week!

In the event some lurker is confused about the Israel and Palestine morality play this video is worth watching.

Strega,

Valid question and one that has occurred to me as well.

@Jake – your mention of Utopia touches a long-standing thought I have.  How do those Utopia Warriors behave, if they finally achieve Utopia on Earth?  What do they do?  They’re fighters, not bakers. What do the ‘Freedom Fighters’ imagine their role would be, in the Utopia they seem to be fighting for?

The AI faith and hope connection is a dodge. Probably reflects the biases of the public and the creators. Would not want to shoot anyone in the nuts with reality.

And yes of course there is as we all know a mundane usage of faith that is not at all the same as what is meant by faith in connection to religion. (That applies in my opinion to…[Read more]

“ Faith is a present-tense confidence and belief in something unseen, while hope is the future-oriented expectation and desire for something to happen
. Faith is often described as the foundation, or the “substance of things hoped for,” while hope is the confident anticipation that stems from that faith. Both are intertwined: faith provides the t…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Simon, you are still redefining “faith” to make it appear intellectually respectable. You are using the religious version, which explicitly praises belief without evidence, and you are stretching it to also mean rational expectations grounded in observation.

Yet, any day of the week, faith has a dual meaning of rel…[Read more]

I’m afraid the situation is worse than most of you realize. Here’s a “what if” for you: Forget rigging the election by all the ways people are discussing. What if he declares a national emergency and simply refuses to leave office? He already ignores the law and is on the verge of defying court orders, and all the means of enforcement come under…[Read more]