dk

Its hard for me to fathom starvation as a reasonable course of treatment.

The Other Michael

dk,

As requested I've deleted winston_jen's two posts that were erroneously placed in this thread. You may wish to post your comment in the thread elsewhere in MF&P.

thanks,
Michael
MF&P Moderator (Maximus)

The Other Michael

[QUOTEOriginally posted by Alonzo Fyfe
There has never been a God to say that this is wrong. It has never happened. [/QUOTE]

Hello yguy,

Are you only contradicting Alonzo Fyfe's statement, or are you also implying that "There has been a God to say that this is wrong. It has happened. "?

Just curious,

thanks,
Michael

dk

dk: 1st The statement relies entirely upon appearances disconnected from an model of causation.
Alonzo Fyfe: Please translate into English.
Desires (with beliefs) cause intentions, which cause action. Desires are hypothetical constructs (like quarks) derived from theories that, themselves, aim to provide the best explanation to a set of observations, where the relevant observations are those of the agent's behavior.
dk: The best evidence science can offer is inferential or teleological, not causal. Rationalism, empiricism, positivism surplant metaphysics with psycholog. Psychology in the post modern era at best presumes to be a science. What meager successes the science of psychology can count has been offset by so many unpredicted side affects, contradictions, retractions and abuses it boggle the mind.

dk: 2nd Its ambiguous because "good" lacks any relationship to a suitable or meaningful outcome.
Alonzo Fyfe: I specifically related good to the fulfillment of desire. All (true) value claims describe relationships between states of affairs and desires. "Good" fulfills desires, "Bad" thwarts desires. Desires themselves can be good or bad according to their tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires.
dk: Sorry but you spun out of control. There’s no physical basis for your assertion. Clinical diagnosis tracks symptoms, not the underlying problem. A person's disire for junk food doesn't identify a glutton or bulemic.

dk: 3rd It degrades people to a zombie like automatons that play a copycat game.
Alonzo Fyfe: "Degrades" is a value-laden term. The use of the term presupposes a theory of value. No degradation exists, because it is not possible to make something of a lower grade simply by describing what is true about it -- without making an actual change to it.
dk: People change from one moment to the next, despite appearances. We grow and prosper by solving problems that arise in time. A moral society has the capacity to solve problems that can’t be anticipated. Civilizations, cultures and nations that encounter, or make, problems insoluble degenerate into ruins, be it quick or doddering. There are a plethora of ruins and relics left by dead civilizations that support the proposition.

dk: Morality serves as a platform to engage a reasonable person’s commitment so they might participate in life. In other words morality regulates conduct and relationships to empower people with the potential to overcome life's problems.
Alonzo Fyfe: Nothing I wrote contradicts this.
Morality regulates conduct by regulating the acquisition of desires -- so that people tend to acquire desires that tend to full other desires, and tend not to acquire desires that thwart other desires. Thus reducing the problems that people encounter.
dk: One can not solve problems by treating the symptoms.

dk: It seems to me a desire for a personal relationship with god represents a universal transcendent human desire. To bring this back on topic, its unclear to me that same sex attractions are the proper object of sexual desire. I can list a number of personal, familiar, health and social ills homosexuality engenders.


Alonzo Fyfe: Given a choice, it is best not to desire something that does not exist.
dk: As a practical matter false gods exist as a delusion, and the delusion presents a problem. Still, the human desire for god gives purpose to many people’s lives. I submit the thirst for god made science possible i.e. a quest for truth. A desire without an object defies reason. You’ve substituted human knowledge for faith to foster an egotistic perspective. The Bible cut right to the quick, and begins with a dialogue about the tree of life and knowledge. It is irrational to presume reason supersedes faith, or visa versa. Both faith and reason are needed to formulate a problem statement. Homophobia has proven to be an inadaquate problem statement, and an inadaquate remedy for the symptoms. I agree homosexuals suffer intolerably, and that's a problem a moral society in good faith for good reasons must address.

anti

I have no problem with homosexuals, and that's a good thing because I'm going into musical theatre

IMO, if religion didn't exist homosexuality wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal as it is. Those who are the most opposed to homosexuality seem to base a lot of their arguements on the bible, although those texts are pretty vague themselves and can be translated in several different ways.

yguy

I am merely contradicting it, though in fact I believe the opposite to be true. That's a debate for another thread, of course.

I will say though, that the principles underlying the 10C's were in full force before they were enunciated through Moses.

Dr Rick

Well, my friend; you are making this tough, I must admit, but:

Really? The physical, natural world follows specific, verifiable, and refutable mathematical representations; can you provide the same for a "happy brain"?
When I die, the mass and energy that are my physical being will still exist in a measurable and verifiable way; will my happiness do the same?
E=mc2; is there a similar representation for happiness?
Heat can be measured objectively; can happiness?

I suppose at this point that we can all agree that a Parmecium is neither a boulder nor happiness.

However unlikely, though, the right number of Parmeciums acting in unison could theoretically move a boulder. There is even a mathematical way to compute the number of these protozoa that would be necessary and their direction and force of movement relative to the mass of a boulder that would allow such movement; there is no such equation for happiness moving boulders, however.

Isolate all the C or any other neurons you want and stimulate them anyway that you can; they may "fire", but that doesn't equate with the subjective experience of suffering.

I challenge you to post any evidence to the contrary.



Fire-up the brain of a dead man, and then we'll see; for now, the seperation of mind and brain is still a philosophical and metaphysical issue. Science, the study of natural and physical phenomena, is inadequate to the task. Provide us with the equations, formulas, and protocals to make a dead brain happy, and then you will prove your point.

For now, and for all we know, forever, scentience, consiousness, happiness, and other non-physical stuff cannot be scientifically described and formulated. In fact, the precepts of science, which are materially based, have no exclusion clause that allows "scientific" evaluation of the metaphysical and non-physical.

That's a big "if", dude; ethics are abstracts, not material entities.

Please perish the thought ; I guess you aren't so familiar with me, but just ask a couple of your favorite theists, including one that has posted on this very page. They'll likely vouch for my atheistic and soulless pedigree.

In all seriousness, souls and spiritual essences do not exist, or at least there is no scientific reason nor any convincing non-scientfic reason to believe that they do; nonetheless that doesn't disprove their existence. That we can't scientifically measure something does not mean that the something is henceforth disproved.

Doesn't love exist? I have good reason to believe it does, there is some good evidence that it does, but yet not one shred of it is "scientific" nor can I defend it in a scientific way. Imo, that doesn't mean that love is unreal or just a fantasy; that just means that there are limits to the methods of science. If you disagree, prove me wrong and give me a scientific analysis of love.

No, the only requirement is that the entity, physical or otherwise, may have physical effects. Depression may have physical effects that we can and routinely do measure even though it is not a physical phenomenom

What's so "nonsensical" about claiming differences between non-physical entities? Neither love nor hate are physical, but they do seem to be profoundly different.


.

I see no scientific evidence for love, but I am not prepared to dismiss it as a mere fantasy, nor have you provided a good reason why I should; I'll divorce my wife if you do.

Is it your position that the only valid method of inquiry is the scientific method? If not, how would you ever distinguish non-physical entities from fantasy. It appears that you are absolutely excluding anything that cannot be scientifically analyzed, evaluated, quantitized, hypothesized, and verified.

The purpose of science is not to exclude everything that is not physical; it is to evaluate only those things that are physical.

To suggest that non-physical, non-scientifically demonstratable entities cannot exist grossly distorts the scientific method. The scientific method does not in anyway disprove the non-material; it merely allows us to evaluate the physical and material, and says nothing about anything outside of that limited realm.

The AntiChris

I disagree.

Assuming our moral opinions are based partially on our values and partially on our beliefs (apparent facts about the world), it seems quite reasonable to acknowledge that our beliefs may be incomplete or mistaken.

Chris

Alonzo Fyfe

Dr. Rick.

Are we going to get into a debate on the existence of qualia?

Ultimately, let me put the question to you this way. You have two people, completely identical in every way, down to the most minute (subatomic) detail.

Do you think it is possible for one to be "happy" and the other "not happy"? Or do these different states have to -- in some way or another (even if it is very complex and hard to pin down exactly) -- have to be reflected in some sort of physical difference between them?

And if it is possible, how would you tell which was which?

And if it is possible, and you could tell, how does this difference in nonphysical happiness cause the two bodies to behave differently?

Ultimately, whatever you may believe about these nonphysical entities, human behavior -- human actions -- is a physical phenomena. It concerns the movement of physical matter through space. These other types of entities we are talking about have to be a thing capable of altering the movement of physical matter through space (influencing human action).

If the theory one is advancing cannot handle its influence over physical matter, the theory has a serious definciency.

Alonzo Fyfe

Actually notice that this statement is different from your first statement, in which good and evil were defined as being logically equivalent to our subjective opinions.

Here, you seem to be saying that good is only partially equated to our subjective opinion and partially dependent on objective facts about the world about which we can be wrong.

Now, what is the ratio between these two? To what degree is the individual asking about 'our values' as opposed to asking about these relevant objective facts?

Two notes:

(1) Certainly, when we give our opinion, we are describing our subjective states. But it is just as true that we report only our own subjective state when asked our opinion about the nature of dark matter, or whether carbon emissions contribute to global warming. But the fact that we answer these questions by reporting our opinions does not mean that the right answer to the question is eqivalent (even partially) to our opinion. The same is true in ethics; the fact that we answer moral questions by reporting our opinions is no evidence that the right answer to the question is equivalent (even partially) to our opinion.

(2) Ultimately, I agree with you that the right answer to moral questions depends in part on our values and in part on objective facts in the world. Only, the ratio is such that if the 'our values' contribution is removed it would lead to an imperceptably small change in the final answer. The question, then, is one of ratio. Moral questions ask ultimately on opinions for the relationship between desires and other desires -- only a small fraction of those "other desires" are our own.