notSimple

Simon PayntonParticipant
@notsimple – “trying to define moral concepts eventually leads to logical inconsistency.”

– it certainly does not.  I don’t know why you say this.  Morality has a very clear and logical structure.  Some of the details, the twigs on the tree, are still to be worked out, but the tree itself is very well defined.

“Th…

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The thing is with rights is that over time, they have been extended to more and more groups. This is part of the moral and ethical progress of the world, that Steven Pinker talks about. The right to being treated with respect is becoming more and more universal….

Ultimately human rights means to treat people with respect and dignity – this s…

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His point is that if you follow those qualities to their logical conclusion, it becomes absurd. Sure we can comfortably apply those stipulations to ourselves, to people one or two centuries ago, even thousands of years ago, but if you keep going back it starts becoming untenable

That is a potential factor with much, if not all, of our concept of…[Read more]

Belle Rose wrote:

In any event, I don’t believe this will lead to a world war – I do think it’s possible that we have a contained war, but China has already stated that that if North Korea initiate aggression against the USA, and the USA retaliates, they will remain neutral.

What no one sees is that Russia is poised to attack as well. That is ho…

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One may not like Trump’s policies, but one does not make billions in international real estate by being a poor negotiator.

He needed to provide a way for China to save face, and it looks like China (who is not happy about a nuclear NK) is willing to play along and step…[Read more]

Negotiations are not about truth, they’re about who will back down.

Strega

I basically agree.  The groundwork for this crisis was laid by the past 3 presidents who figured that by playing nice, he would come on board.

Obama made big mistake in Syria, by threatening Assad with serious consequences for using poison gas. He used it and nothing happened. Even though the ‘miniature’ nuke is just being confirmed now,…[Read more]

Perhaps only in mathematics can one construct a pure logical argument. Even that involves postulates; and as Godel proved, any sufficiently expressive grammar (logical structure) must by necessity have contradictions.

Most everything else in the world is not nearly so clear cut. You can apply some level of logic, but inevitably you’re starting…[Read more]

This sort of touches on the periodic discussions over at biologist Jerry Coyne’s blog (whyevolutionistrue) about whether we are fully deterministic or not (Jerry advocates for determinism). I’m comp sci, but not in the AI field. Nonetheless, I am still unconvinced that we are truly approaching artificial intelligence, instead we’re getting pretty…[Read more]

Friendships change for a variety of reasons, changing to religion or atheism sometimes does it, changes in life style, interests, etc also does it.

It’s not a catastrophe, it’s just part of human nature. Humans are dynamic creatures, constantly changing.