Sisyphus

It's not as simple as reversing it, though. When considering the motion of an object, time can't be the dependent variable. An object can return to the same location at two different times, but it can't return to the same time at two different locations. So to speak.

Or just interrupt Hitler's parents the night he was conceived. They might still conceive a child - maybe even that same night. But it would be a different sperm cell, and hence a different person. You wouldn't have "killed" Hitler, and alterna-Adolf is not "dead" in our timeline. He just never existed. Or you could do the same thing with any of his ancestors. Or just cause some significant change in any of their lives. The likelihood of any particular "potential person" coming into being is ridiculously small, so pretty much any change would prevent history as we know it.

I suppose I'm "culturally Christian" too, in that I string up lights, drag a pine tree inside, exchange gifts, and have a big family party on December 25th every year.

My subjectively perceived reality is one of consistent rules and is shared with other beings like myself who observe the same. So you could say that reality is subjective, and therefore objective.

Or you could simply construct the house in such a way that it would float, and is resting on (but not attached to) the ground. Tie it down with a sturdy anchor chain with lots of slack, so it can't be washed away. However, I figure this can't be as simple as it sounds, because AFAIK nobody does it that way. There are a lot of buildings on stilts in flood-prone areas, though, like Mr Skeptic suggests.

I'd say it's vastly more likely to be measured by technology than by itself.

I guess you could say that if the hallucination is consistent, then you would experience what a person with a hole in their chest would experience, which would very quickly include oblivion. And if it was persistent, then that would mean permanent oblivion, which I suppose could be called death. In real life, though, there aren't any such hallucinations (unless one's entire life is hallucinated).

Your point is that abortion is a moral grey area? And what difference does that make? Bearing in mind that the difference has to apply to all "potential persons..." And see my response to it: In case that wasn't clear, my point is that it's only "dehumanizing" if it was a person to begin with. You can come up with as many absurd comparisons as necessary. "Sitting on a chair, huh? Kind of dehumanizing to the chair, isn't it? You know, the Nazis dehumanized people too, before they gassed them."

I have felt especially hurried the last few days. Good to see I'm not crazy.

Why would that be the case? At some point, society has to establish a general rule. "Pro-choice" simply means delaying that point in acknowledgement of moral grey areas. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Yes. Wrong about what? None of those questions are relevant to abortion, unless you have already decided that what you're destroying is a person. Yes, and I specifically used that as a counterexample. What is your favorite color? I haven't decided. What is his favorite color? I don't know. See the difference? Would I want to have an attempted murderer as a friend? No, probably not. What's your point?

I don't think the word "God" has any consistent, coherent meaning, so I don't have much use for the word atheist, except as shorthand.

I'd say that performing invasive medical procedures on people against their will is immoral, as a rule of thumb. I would also think the moral ramifications depend further on whether the person doing the terminating thinks of it as a person. If you destroy what you think is a person but isn't, are you a murderer? Not in the eyes of the law, but perhaps morally.

I was raised to be a Christian, so that's what I believed initially simply because it was what I was told. I stopped believing in it when I realized the world was full of religions and people who believed in them as fully as Christians believed in theirs, and there was no way to figure out who was right. At most one of them could be, but if that was the case you'd think there would be something different about it from all the wrong ones. So I figured they were probably all wrong, and secretly became a "probably atheist." Talking to religious people on the internet about it just reinforced that view with lots of other reasons, and I gave up thinking about it at all for several years. When I started studying philosophy seriously, my views on the matter became greatly elaborated, and I no call myself anything (although most religious people would still probably call me an atheist). The entirety of what I believe is too elaborate to go into here, but it's steadily evolved over many years of reading and discussion and thinking about as many different viewpoints as I could find.

Identical twins form from a single zygote that divides. So if the human life is created at conception, then twins have to share one life. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Did you read the rest of the thread? There have been a number of views expressed on that point. Yeah, I think you do.

Pretty much, yeah. It wasn't well received, so he tried to say the same stuff a different way. I don't know much about the historical context, to be honest.

It seems like implicit in your "perhaps" is that there is an objectively correct answer that we just aren't aware of. Blindly firing a gun into a darkened room is "perhaps" murder, depending on whether or not there is someone there for me to hit. But abortion is a different situation. We know what will happen. We just have to decide whether what will happen is acceptable. "Person" is human-defined. A bullet hitting or not hitting someone is objective reality.

I wiped out a group of roaches living in my apartment recently. It is true that I didn't think of them as people, and that it would have made it unacceptable for me to kill them if I did. I guess in that sense I'm similar to those dehumanizing genocide perpetrators, though associating me with them on those grounds seems like a fallacious emotional appeal.

We're throwing the word "perfect" around an awful lot, and I'm not sure what is meant by that. Is it "perfect in that it just is," which is just tautological? (My program "just is" too.) Is my program not perfect because it isn't an exact duplicate of our universe (which I made clear from the start it wasn't supposed to be)? Does "perfection" have to do with whether you like it or not? And if so, who died and made you God?

I'd say birth would be far more obvious than fertilization. I wouldn't pick it, though, because a newborn is "obviously" a person, and a just-about-to-be-born has so much in common with a newborn in terms of their physical attributes if not their circumstances. Some cultures would disagree. In fact, some don't even consider newborns to be "people." Similarly, I wouldn't pick fertilization, either, because sperm/egg and zygote both "obviously" don't possess personhood. If what you value about human life can include a single-celled organism, you're doing it wrong. (But hey, that's just my opinion.) Just because there are clearly defined stages doesn't mean that picking one isn't arbitrary. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Yes, indeed it is. Unfortunately it's not quite as simple as that, either. I'm not willing to let her decide that her five year old isn't a person yet. I am willing to let her decide that having her period, and thus wasting a chance at a potential life, is murder - I'll just think she's a crazy person.

Exactly. This is what it comes down to. The problem is of choosing at what point in the cycle a new "person" has arrived. And so you have to define what a "person" is, and decide what attributes of a person make it worth protecting, and decide when those attributes have emerged. I say "decide" rather than "discover" intentionally, because this isn't something for which there is going to be an objectively correct answer. Because of the cyclical and gradual nature of the process, any single cutoff point is necessarily going to be arbitrary.

It's not really an international concern, though. Air pollution is an international concern, because we all share the same air. Arms control is an international concern, because weapons cross borders to kill people. But building codes? A poorly constructed building in Haiti falls in Haiti. Sure, international visitors could be hurt, and the world economy is interconnected, but you could say that about anything. As much as I hate to say it, ultimately, it's just not our business.

A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume, is the work of his I'm most familiar with. My senior year thesis in college was actually about this book, and how it can lend some persective to early problems in quantum mechanics. (If you can believe that.) I didn't find it dry at all, personally, but by that time I was used to reading some far more dry philosophy. If you want to know where science comes from, I recommend The New Organon, by Francis Bacon. Or A Discourse on Method by Rene Descartes, if you don't mind obnoxious Frenchmen. Other philosophers that might be of particular interest to the scientist or science enthusiast are Leibniz (probably better known as the simultaneous inventor of calculus with Isaac Newton) and Spinoza (of the frequently invoked by Einstein). But honestly, they might be more of the "don't try this at home" variety for curious laymen. Guys like Kant, Hegel, Nietsche, etc. are going to be more important to philosophy generally, but I don't know they could really be approached without a background in all the earlier philosophers they are responding to.

Why the bolded part? I can program a physics simulation of a closed system. But I can assure you that I am not omnipotent in our universe, practically or otherwise. And I'm not literally omnipotent in the "universe" of the simulation, either. I'm fallible, I'm limited by the programming language and my skill in it, and I don't know what's going to happen (which is why I'm running it). I am an entirely different class of being than any AIs living in the simulation, though.

When you get hit by a bus, you aren't killed by sensory input. You're killed by your organs getting smashed. So whether your friend lives depends entirely on whether the machine's "motor input" includes similarly smashing his organs. That's not really a philosophical question.

It isn't REcovery, though, because the person has never existed. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged If you're being sarcastic, don't. I'm talking about an egg cell and a sperm cell considered together, not a zygote.