Matt

So far, I’ve seen nothing suggesting that ethics are anything other than relative… which is in line with my position of ethical relativism.

You talk about child sexual abuse being “wrong” across cultures, but ultimately, there is no absolute against which to judge… only other cultures. Child abuse isn’t “wrong”, in the same way that a…[Read more]

I was hoping for more of a philosophical introduction to ethics with/without absolutes. @Unseen, Why can’t we have ethics without absolutes? If we did have ethical absolutes, wouldn’t that mean that they are universal across all cultures (i.e. no child marriage)? Or if child marriage is acceptable by the ethical absolutes, why is it not allowed in…[Read more]

What’s a roof and some food going to do to make her situation worse?

I’m going to answer this in the abstract, rather than specifically about your sister… Several things: First, it’s going to mean that instead of buying food and shelter, the addict gets those for free and has more money left over to buy drugs. Second, easy access to a house f…[Read more]

consciousness, like hunger, or emotions, is a biological state

Citation needed! I see no reason that the machine (animals are basically an organic chemistry machine) bringing about consciousness needs to biological in order to do so.

Defining consciousness as the experience we have of ourselves each day between waking up and going to sleep is…[Read more]

Why would a conscious machine, which would have to understand that it’s a machine and has no human history, behave like a human?

Because one of its (possibly its only) connections to the outside world, it communicating with humans. If it behaves like a machine and gives us uninterpretable machine signals, it’s going to get shut off pretty q…[Read more]

Makes sense to me… the passage is relating the experience of a woman finding a lost coin to the experience of God finding a lost soul. The tenuous part is the assumption that because of this, God must be a woman… as if men aren’t capable of celebration over a found coin or something.

Overall, very poor “proof” of anything (as all other…[Read more]

Good topic, sorry I missed it when it was new…

There are two types of thought experiment: explanatory (used to explain a concept) and exploratory (used to explore a concept).

Schoedinger’s cat is explanatory… it explains the concept of superposition. Your example is exploratory: you build a model of the bridge in your mind, then test it…[Read more]

@Strega, It’s always bothered me that the bible talks about unicorns…. but are they like, horses with a horn, or are they just rhinos? Who knows !??!

I’d guess they couldn’t secure her insurance details…

Pretty fucking disgusting, really. I think universal health care is probably one of my criteria for choosing a country in which to live… Sorry USA, you’re too Second/Third world for me.

If it were all true, I’d have to ask “why?”.

• Why intervene so regularly in the biblical story times, but then nothing for 2000 odd years?
• Why make some people gay, but also condemn them for being gay?
• Why communicate to your creation (only) through a couple of books?
• Why communicate to your creation at all?
• Why have this weird situation…

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Wow Belle, that’s incredible. All you have to do is provide a convincing argument (probably including evidence) and you’ll make a lot of us believers overnight!

On the other hand, I’m guessing all you have is coincidental anecdotes which ignore all the times that prayer DIDN’T coincide with the prayer working. We have higher standards of…[Read more]

One might say that a belief in the “causal connection” between events is an axiom we assume to be true as the assumption has great utility.

1) Is ANYTHING truly random? Or does randomness mean nothing more (or less) than unpredictability?

Does it matter? What matters to me (typically in cryptography) is that the entropy source is unpredictable. So for all intents and purposes, unpredictable is “random enough”.

2) My friend declares he’s invented a random number generator.

2a) Is a r…

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Oh, I think human rights should be universal…. I just know they aren’t, and will never be, until we make it so. The people must demand these rights or they will never be.

I see the following in the video:

Human rights are… Universal, Innate

But, are they? Are they really? I have to disagree. Human rights are only universal if and when we make them universal (i.e. they aren’t innate, either. They come from us).

Either there is no god or god withheld knowledge that could have advanced science and the knowledge of man.

Well we already know God forbid eating from the tree of knowledge… It’s no surprise he would omit useful details from his book.

Is there anything else the bible forgot to include?

• Magnets, how do they work?
• quantum physics

…

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