Agent Smith

Why?

Are orchid mantises plants?

People care about (from a TED talk) 1. Health 2. Love 3. Money (I'm not sure about this one).

That didn't cross my mind at all! Thanks a million for letting me know. Thank you and goodnight. 😰

Why not?

Can we reduce all machines (from smartphones to advanced robots) to some combination of these 6 early machines? For example, a vehicle = wheel & axle + pulley + screw + inclined plane! I may have missed something of course; feel free to improve the equation.

That all religions have a reincarnation chapter is news to me. Perhaps I didn't get the memo or, as is the usual, I'm the last one to find out. 😄 (How come the emojis on this forum are black and white?). Buddhism is famous for its reincarnating high lamas, but if you ask a Buddhist scholar about the subject, their reply is rather cryptic: they don't believe that there is an imperishable soul that transmigrates from one body to another; au contraire, the karmic debt/fortune is carried over to another person who is then treated/considered as the reincarnation of the dead person to whom the karmic debt/fortune belongs to. Reminds of how debts pass down from father to children back in the good old days and, in some places, even now! 😰

A distinction without a difference, yes! Some people do commit this error without them realizing it.

I can think of one scenario in which yes and no are the same thing: Imagine a stick that's 1 foot long (12 inches). Is the stick 1 foot long OR is the stick 12 inches long? If you say no the stick is not 1 foot long, then it's 12 inches which is to say yes the stick is 1 foot long.

Reincarnation isn't an exclusively Eastern (Hindu/Buddhist/etc.) idea. Pythagoras was supposed to have espoused the transmigration of souls, known to the Greeks as metempsychosis. A story goes that Pythagoras intervened a person severely beating a dog because he recognized a long-dead friend in the dog's yelps. Pythagoras was a strict vegan. It gets better as Empedocles went further and included plants too as legitimate homes for souls.

The quotes are from my notes from the section on The City of God in the book An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy by an Anthony Kenny.

That would mean laws & the very detailed and severe punishments that accompany them are not enough of a deterrent. The same is true of censorship, where and when it exists. Some people, usually when backed into a corner, will fight talk back, law/no law. These are the exceptions you're referring to.

That's true. However even actions are similar in that respect, and we have laws specifically forbidding certain acts (murder/rape/theft/etc.) The question then is should we have laws that prohibit certain kinds of speech i.e. is censorship justified? Somewhere between a quarter and three quarters of the world's population suffer this. Is that good/bad?

That would be censorship. In most cases, censorship is accompanied by some form of legal action (e.g. incarceration). Then censorship should have more appeal than it does.

Everybody agrees that you can't do whatever you want, but only a few agree that you can't say whatever you want. In other words there's a difference between speech & action. Why else the lack of consensus on these two? Thought ➡️ Speech ➡️ Action. Thought police: A big no-no! Speech police: Yeah/No/May be! Action police: Yes! Absolutely! It is as expected! Oui? Shriek doin' her thing! ⬇️ https://youtu.be/zulYWSjrqb0 How do I post videos?

Everybody agrees that you can't do whatever you want, but only a few agree that you can't say whatever you want. In other words there's a difference between speech & action. Why else the lack of consensus on these two? Thought ➡️ Speech ➡️ Action. Thought police: A big no-no! Speech police: Yeah/No/May be! Action police: Yes! Absolutely! It is as expected! Oui?

Yes, very funny!

A very interesting comment as far as I'm concerned. Engineers have to live with guilt on that score: due to constraints (material, and mathematical, cost), s/he has to design/build structures (houses/bridges/etc.) in a way that each element in a structure is multi-functional (doing two/more jobs at once), the exact inverse of redundancy where two/more elements serve the same purpose (safety first). The engineer has to do a fine balancing act between multi-functionality (cost) and redundancy (safety). 👍

Dreams bring to my mind the psychiatric phenomenon multiple personality disorder. In both cases the "individuals" (the dream person vs. the awake person and one personality vs. anothee personalityl are separated by a hole/gap in memory: one usually doesn't remember one's dreams and the two/more individuals in multiple personality disorder don't remember/know each other. On occasion, when one is aroused during a dream, one can recall one's dream, but, from my own personal experience, the recollection is imperfect: you're left with only the thought that one had a dream without any idea or memory of the details thereof; it's the same feeling/experience as realizing one has forgotten something without ever finding out what exactly it is that one fails to remember.

In line with the OP's observations, the only way I can eff since is by saying science isn't about the correspondence theory of truth, it's more about the coherence theory of truth. In short, all of science could be one big fat lie!

Just wanted to provide a (different) perspective from which all life is valueless, not equally valuable. 😁🤭🤯

The riddle of reincarnation: 1. I have $100 in this life. 2. I save it for my next life. 3. Go to step 1 I can never spend my $100. 🤭

😁 Sorry, not exactly an expert here.

Yes, if you're talking about abductive reasoning/argument to the best explanation. Given some info in re a particular situation/circumstance, one generates multiple hypothesis that fit with the info. However, one can't know which hypothesis is the correct one since all square with the info. That said, the hypotheses in question may entail certain observables. When these are not found, the set of hypotheses that entail these observables is considered falsified. Sorry then for the poor quality post. I hope it isn't a big deal. When I make mistakes or when others do, I comfort myself/others by saying "Even Aristotle (the father of logic) made mistakes." I like Mr. Spock! I read up on him and it seems Leonard Nimoy became so deeply involved in the character of Spock that, on many occasions where he had to make (tough) decisions, he used to ask himself "what would Spock do?" 😁