Peterkin

Tell that to the victims of US airstrikes, CIA training camps for terrorists, arms exports to warring factions, and various intrusions in to Muslim countries since 1947. If you're so keen on the value of numbers, compare those. Violence begets violence; a culture of violence condones torture.

Long before birth, at about 6 weeks after conception, the foetal brain is receiving input and making neural connections, learning to operate body parts, interpret sensations and store memories. By the time it is able to formulate a question, the brain already has a great deal of information to ask questions about. No. It's main function is to stay alive. That's the goal toward which the most important questions are directed. Once survival is assured for a reasonably foreseeable period, it has the leisure to pursue secondary, then peripheral and finally frivolous lines of inquiry. Whether so or nay, there can never be a final goal - only the next goal. The only application I can see for such a technology is to achieve a specific, limited result. Like harnessing a team of 6 or 8 horses to a particularly heavy wagon, I can imagine linking a team of human brains to control machines that carry out some very complicated task far away - like building a space ship on an orbiting platform, while the human "construction crew" remains safely (and cheaply) on Earth. Kind of like Borg, except they all return to Unimatrix Zero at the end of their shift.

Yes, I think it was.

The extra plastic waste is certainly a concern. Not just from the protective gear, but from all sources. Fewer people going to work downtown, while bad for the coffee and street food vendors, also reduces the garbage from takeout food. At the same time, however, people are ordering takeout food at home, and ordering groceries and prepackaged foods online. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8166460/ In the first few months, our supermarkets gave out plastic shopping bags instead of letting reusable into the store. When it became widely known that the risk of transmission on surfaces is minimal, they went back to encouraging customers to bring their bags and pack their own groceries (a great improvement, to my mind; both safer and less wasteful). Other changes, like air quality, have already been mentioned. Here is a good overview What we don't know, and won't for a long time, is how the pattern of work, transport, industry, domestic arrangements and social activity will be affected in the long term. ATM, rents are out of control in North America https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-05/tenants-struggle-with-red-hot-u-s-rental-market and property prices are still increasing as well https://blog.remax.ca/canadian-housing-market-outlook/ So there will almost certainly be a building boom, with all its pollution and waste products. There will also be a major shift in the patterns of industry and transport. I'm hoping for more local production and small independent operations - especially in food and building material, but it's very far from clear how politics and disease will affect our decisions over the next couple of years.

Well, someone has to speak for the outsiders.

You never get rid of the memory of your transgressions. Nor does your society eradicate its wrongs by giving you a medal. What you put out into the world stays out there forever: your single act is incorporated into the collective actions, the collective conscience of your culture. If one such act is permitted in extenuating circumstances, it's a mere little stain on the social fabric. If one such act is celebrated, it becomes accessible in all circumstances deemed extenuating. If such acts are standard practice in a whole class of circumstances (i.e. national security) it becomes part of the social fabric. This was well explained on Page 1. Those are two very different questions.

Better limit your alcohol intake - not everyone on the turnpike is a donor.

In a heartbeat. There is nothing in my ethical code to prohibit causing pleasure. Indeed, if I could replace the pleasure all people like this "scum" derive from doing harm with a harmless battery-operated brain-tickler, I would do that, too. BTW, some chemical truth aids may be more effective than physical pain, with less residual damage - but ou can't count on them working, either. It's always a gamble.

*-------* done

From whom? For whom? How callously clueless does one need to be not to see how false that claim always has been for how many of their fellow creatures? If there is no god, who is handing out gifts of of life? You seem to have a restless army of ants in your ... bonnet... about dead people sitting around idle, but you never explain your objection to the idea, or what they ought to be doing instead. In this, too, you are mistaken.

No, just from cranks and soapbox orators - exactly the same way as science and philosophy. At the moment, it's mostly just you, but others come and go.

Sure.. So are their kings, generals, bosses, politicians, landlords and money-lenders. Heaven comes as a reward after a life spent working hard. What do you want to exploit ghosts for? In reincarnation, you work through more lives, but the reward at the end of it is still release from the physical grind. Both ideas are meant as an incentive for poor people with hard, mean lives to look forward to a vacation. Why do you so begrudge them that illusion?

It certainly did, to the working poor of Rome and the serfs of medieval Europe, who lived in squalour and privation, never knew security or freedom from oppression and fear, toiled all their waking hours, from the age of five till death in their mid-forties, at arduous, painful, badly paid labour, under abusive foremen and were subjected to daily humiliation and harsh punishment for every infraction of a brutal feudal code, that forbade even the final desperate escape under penalty of eternal torment and material as well as social consequences for one's surviving family. That dream kept them going a little while longer. Ideas don't just pop out of the ether: they have historical and anthropological context.

Why are you so concerned about the lack of productivity of insubstantial dead people? What would they be doing if they had jobs? Maybe you're just a scary dude?

Been done already. Better. And the dismissive language and facile generalizations don't make this a very strong exposition.

Why? If the first, you already experience yourself that way, so the only thing left to learn is the mechanism of you function. If the second, you can never understand anything anyway, so it doesn't matter.

How do you know? https://blog.oup.com/2017/08/electrons-consciousness-philosophy/ There is the operative phrase. You don't know. The particle doesn't know.

Obviously. But you don't have access to all that preceding information, so you can't know what-all is going into the current decision. You experience it as a process over which you have a degree of control (depending on external circumstances and available options), so it feels more free than it really is. You're still going through the process, just as if the outcome were not pre-determined. I could, for example, have sworn I cited this link before, but it was not reproduced in the external world the way I pictured it in my prefrontal cortex. https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofmanagementopenstax/chapter/how-the-brain-processes-information-to-make-decisions-reflective-and-reactive-systems/

All angles must be represented. I came late and got stuck with 178 degrees. Any more obtuse, I'd be a straight line.

Yeah. I can live with that.

You are aware that it's in the religion forum? You are aware that religious FAITH is not based on EVIDENCE? Nevertheless, the structure, intent and content of a dogma, or mythology, world-view or belief system can be discussed within its own frames of reference. Submitting it to the strictures of an alien discipline is entirely unproductive. Why do people insist on saying that? Most religions are scary as Hell and demanding and uncomfortable.

As a wise man recently said: Like mathematics, it exists and is absolute, whether we know about it or not. In this case, the outcome of the decision is pre-determined in the sense of having been determined by all the events pre-ceding the decision, before the decision is known by the decider.

It probably isn't true: everything that went before determines everything that comes after. But we don't know more than 0.00001% of all that; it doesn't figure in our decision-making process. We experience life as if we had free will. We make our assessments and judgments, pick our fights, partners and lottery numbers as if we had free will. We walk around thinking and acting as if we had free will. So, for all practical purposes, we do have free will. (Pay no attention to the predetermined physics behind the curtain!)

So the numbers are a deciding factor? That's all I asked. Why did you drag him into this, if you didn't mean to use him? In my example, you were torturing (bloodlessly - yes, there are more imaginative methods than hitting on the nose) a nineteen-year-old terrorist suspect, whom you had, seventeen years earlier, saved from a kidnapper by torturing the kidnapper's accomplice. How he shrunk down to 7, I don't know. Unless you torture a lot more frequently than you previously let on, or else you failed to rescue him and the terrorists brought him up to serve their own nefarious ends, so it took a lot less time to go from innocent toddler to weapon of mass destruction, or else you did save him, returned him to the hulkingly brutish father who tehn became a mad bomber, using his own child as a weapon.

Then mine would be very different.