Marat

You can't count ancient stories from a gullible age in which everyone was disposed to believe in gods and monsters as reliable accounts. After all, 10,000 people in the Roman Colosseum witnessed, according to historical records, a Roman Emperor fly over the stadium. Modern historians explain this away as having been performed by some trickery, probably involving the many ropes used to extend and retract the awnings over the Colosseum, but why not take this also as a genuine miracle, especially since most of the Roman Emperors were regarded in their own era as gods? So there are really two problems with the 'witness' theory of Bible miracles. First, the only evidence we have for witnesses having believed in the miracles reported in the Bible is the description of the responses of people described in the same text, which is an ancient text filled with fantastic and mythological stories, so it is probably not worth being regarded as a genuine historical source. Second, even if the stories of the witnesses' response to the miracles is true, they were superstitious people in a age disposed to believe in magic and miracles, so they could easily have been duped. That is the view Christians take of the witness responses to the miracles of the Ancient Greeks, Muslims, Zoroastrians, etc., so why exempt the Christian stories from this same scepticism? For example, the Ancient Greek historian Pausanius reported many facts about ancient temples, graves, and religious practice which modern archeologists and historians have confirmed to be completely accurate. However, the miraculous events associated with ancient religion he reported, such as his experience in the cave of one mystery religion, are simply scoffed at.

Queen Catherine, Henry VIII's first wife, although an extremely pious woman fully observant of God's laws, was discovered during the preservation of her body after death to have a black heart. Is this because she died of a rare form of cardiac cancer or because the laws of God were so densely inscribed on her heart as to make it appear black?

Caesura? Point of nutation? Turning point?

Is the line between 'feeling informed by thought' and 'thought itself reflecting on feeling' just a linguistic distinction or is there some measurable physical basis for it? If a conscious entity which is conceptually aware of its mortality feels lethal pain, is this pain experienced with an additional soupcon of terror because of the awareness that it can imply death, as opposed to the pure sensation of lethal pain in a salamander which has no notion of death?

Since under torture people have a motivation to invent things which they believe will get the torture to stop, or might still lie intelligently to fool their torturers, it seems to carry a high risk of yielding false information. The best information would be that obtained from someone who was in such a state that he lacked the capacity to exercise intelligent deception. This would recommend the use of those methods which are already known to encourage people to babble unreflectively and without intelligent management of their responses, such as drugs (Scopolamine and Versed) and keeping someone awake for three days running, which the Puritans found so effective in the 17th century. These latter methods have the advantage of not being strictly torture and so being more moral, although keeping people awake for so long is on the borderline of torture.

I guess the real problem is that your current existence is not the only thing you've got, since you also always know that you could commit suicide, so you always potentially have the possibility of your own non-existence. If we were somehow designed so that suicide were not physically possible, only then would we have to make the best of our existence rather than have the option just to reject it.

It's certainly a subtle issue. I suspect that any fear over any length of time, beyond an instant response, is informed by the intellectual capacities of the subject experiencing fear. Thus a human sensing fear over any length of time would color the raw sensation from the adrenal stimulus with feelings of dread, awareness of consequence, a sense of mortality, etc., which would greatly augment the experience compared with that of a salamander, who would lack the conceptual adornment and its emotional consequences. I remember once in an experimental lab someone had accidentally dropped a guinea pig, causing it to lose the capacity to control its back legs, which it dragged behind it. It was placed back in the cage and seemed stunned for a moment, but when feeding time arrived a few minutes later, it crawled towards the food, screeching in excitement, just as the other guinea pigs with it always did. I can't imagine that a human could override the negative emotions of being partially paralyzed a few moments before just because he was served a good meal.

Up until the mid-1960s having to abort unwanted pregnancies was a real problem for women, but the pill minimized that problem, and the AIDS scare has condomized the problem into an even more diminished threat. You could also just as easily say that an unwanted pregnancy threatens the male with child support payments, especially since he has no vote in the decision to abort. In all initially consensual activities which suddenly become non-consensual there is always a problem of interrupting events proceeding by cooperation and dealing with the consequences. There is a whole branch of contract law regulating remedies for breach of contracts initially voluntarily entered into by both parties, but where one or the other party suddenly suspends performance. Similarly, in other types of purely physical interaction, such as voluntary fights, consent can be withdrawn in ways that are difficult to detect and the law has problems dealing with the exact point of nutation where consent turns to non-consent and so the act goes from legal cooperation to illegal assault. (Cf. the Canadian Supreme Court case of R. v. Jobidon) But I'm not sure that sexual consent presents much more of a problem when it confusingly changes to non-consent and social responses are confronted with the challenge of dealing with this. Generally, if sharing sex were as casual as sharing a meal, all sorts of social tensions and conflicts would be vastly diminished, since where nothing is precious there is nothing to steal. We then have to 'follow the money' and ask who benefits and how from sex being made artificially scarce in a world where there are as many potential cooperators as there are people seeking cooperation -- and thus precious to those who exercise the gate-keeping role over distribution of this now 'commodified' natural activity. Ernest Hemmingway has a good phrase for this in 'The Old Man and the Sea': "The sea is like a woman, giving or withholding great favors."

To go back to my earlier examples, however, are any of today's cartoons any more violent and horrifying than the children's stories on which generations of children were brought up since the Middle Ages? Hansel and Gretel being captured and fattened up in a cage by a blind witch so she can eat them; Billy Goat Gruff having to race across a bridge so that he is not captured and eaten by a troll living right under the bridge; a demented dwarf, Rumpelstillskin, conspiring to steal away the infant of a young woman, who when thwarted commits suicide before her eyes by stamping himself into the ground, etc., are stories more truly hideous than those usually represented in cartoons, which tend to make violence comical in some way rather than dwell on its horror, as traditional folklore for children does. There is a lot to be said for the theory that what children most need to learn is how to face horror and find the best ways to deal with it, rather than be shielded from the fact that it exists. It seems that these ancient fairy tales recognized that, but now psychologists are trying to make an industry out of the few things they can do, so they have seized on the public's natural concerns about protecting children, and the media eager for anything to entertain people by frightening them dutifully cooperates.

I don't understand why you would say that capitalism hopes that people will reduce consumption to increase savings, since it depends on its ability to sell things in order to make profits. Why is capitalism so eager to spend money on advertising to stimulate demand and offer credit so as to increase borrowing to buy more goods if it really wants people to reduce consumption and save? The goal of capitalism is to make profit for those with capital to invest; the common good is not strictly a goal of capitalism, though that may be an acceptable by-product of the generation of profits. The problem of capitalism is that it is trapped in the cycle of investment-production-and profit that it creates. There is no point in investing and risking capital unless it can produce a profit by selling items for more than their true value and employing people for less than the true value of their labor to produce things. This process generates, over and over again, ever larger profit accumulations. These accumulations have to be profitably invested, since otherwise they become dead capital and are eaten up by inflation. But since there is now more capital for investment than before, more goods have to be produced -- and purchased by the public -- to generate sufficient profit to meet the increased return demanded by that additional capital. Yet at each turn of this cycle, the fact that goods are sold for more than they are worth, and workers produce more value than they are paid -- with the difference soaked up by the capitalists as profit, the profit and the wealth of the capitalists grows faster than the buying power of those who have only their labor to sell. Thus in 1960, real wages in the U.S. made up 52% of GDP, while by 2005 they had fallen to only 46% of GDP. In 1985, the richest 5% of Americans controlled assets worth 2.05 times the total GDP; in 2010, they controlled 2.74 times the total GDP. With workers whose incomes were making up a smaller proportion of GDP than ever, how were these even wealthier captalists going to find sufficiently productive investments for their surplus wealth? This created a top-heavy economy with too much capital for investment and not enough buying power to allow it to be invested at adequate return, so the market had to be artificially stimulated by advertising and easy credit encouraging increasing indebtedness of the poor and middle class (e.g., sub-prime mortgages in the U.S. in the early 21st century.) When the problem became extreme, capitalists contrived artificial profit-making vehicles, like bets on market performance (e.g., exotic financial instruments in the early 21st century.) Thus in 1945, 8% of the U.S. economy was invested in finance, while 54% was invested in manufacturing; in 2005, 40% was invested in finance and only 3% in manufacturing. When capital accumulation finally outstrips consumption power beyond the capacity of the market to adjust, there is a collapse, such as we had in 2008. This wipes out some of the massive capital accumulation so the cycle can begin over again with less internal strains -- at least for a while. But in all this we see that capitalism always needs increasing consumer demand to continue operating.

Although if you try to get a grip on this issue on a population basis, you have to explain why there has been a dramatic drop in crime rates everywhere in the developed world ever since violent video games came into popularity. I think we always have to be extremely suspicious whenever science, especially the science of pure statistical correlations without any demonstration of actual causal mechanisms, just happens to support programs of social control, censorship, and stultification desired by social busy-bodies. For example, the Hope Commission study in Ontario in 1950 'found' that mandatory Christian religious training should be maintained in Ontario public schools because it had been 'demonstrated' to be the best way to increase and maintain public support for democracy. Similarly, a survey in 1959 showed that half of all U.S. medical students believed that masturbation was physically harmful.

If someone prepares a banquet for you out of love, then that meal is certainly very much more special, rewarding, and emotionally signficant than just eating at a fast-food restaurant which only serves you meals for cold, hard cash. But just because banquets prepared out of love are so special is no reason to denigrate fast-food meals because they are not as special, or to argue that people should generally starve themselves so that banquets prepared out of love would be even more special. It is difficult to detach ourselves analytically from all the mythic reasoning associated with sexuality so that we can consider it more rationally, and this view that we should voluntarily limit our access to sex to make it more special seems to make sense only if we begin from the arbitrary cultural hypothesis that sex is magical. Moontanman: I agree with almost everything you say above, expect for your statement about prostitution being disapproved of socially because it takes power away from men. Were this the case, then men would be the greatest enemies of prostitution, but in fact we see that it is women who are really most upset about it. I think the reason for this is that prostitution takes power away from women, since it undermines their capacity to create an artificial shortage of heterosexual sex partners so that they become precious -- and thus socially powerful -- just for their monopoly control over relieving that shortage when their special demands (jewels, dating rituals, elaborate courtships, marriage, man playing the required father rule for children, etc.) are met.

But there is a drug, Versed, which is often used in surgery as an anesthetic, and it operates by preventing patients forming memories of their suffering during the operation, even though it leaves them conscious during the procedure. These patients report that although they could sense pain during the operation, they somehow didn't care about it, and after the Versed wears off, they simply don't remember having experienced anything they would characterize as pain. So this seems to be an instructive model for speculations about torture which the victim did not remember.

Wasn't it already written in the scriptures, or at least regarded by Jews in Judea circa 30 A.D. as having been written, that the Son of Man would have to die so that God's plan for the world could unfold? If we accept this position, then Christ's motivation may just have been to fulfill the predetermined, divine eschaton rather than to perform an act of suicide for self-aggrandizement. If we accept this interpretation, then Judas as well was just doing what was necessary to bring about the required cosmological evolution, rather than committing a sin, as he is often seen by Christians today as having done.

Elias and Becker, one of them a Nobel-Prize winning economist, estimated in the mid-1990s that in the United States a fair price for selling a kidney would be a mere $15,000, given the very small medical risks to the donor and the time lost from work. Selling a kidney for an I-pad is a bit cheap, but then again, in the common law courts typically refuse to invalidate contracts just because the exchange seems unfair.

When people perform relatively simple but highly routine tasks, such as driving home over a familiar route, they sometimes report that they were not aware of anything that happened during their journey. They seem to wake up when they get home and can't recall much if anything of what occurred. This state seems like a good candidate for the phrase, "X was in a state of diminished consciousness, or at a lower level of consciousness." When people awaken from anesthesia they can often report that they are aware that time has passed but they were not aware of anything that occurred during this time. Here again, this sense of vacuuous time duration seems another good candidate for a mental state being properly described as "a lower level of consciousness." In my work I often deal with hypoglycemic patients, who during these states report being aware of sensations in a dim way but of having no self-awareness or capacity for higher reflection involving memory, orientation to their present environment, or capability of making rational responses to what is happening, so here again, we seem to have a good candidate state for applying the phrase, "lower level of consciousness." Much of this discussion seems purely semantic, since the meaning of words is set by the conventions of the linguistic community, and 'semi-conscious' or 'in a state of diminished consciousness' are phrases we can all use and understand, and we find them useful either to describe our own states sometimes (e.g., on first waking up) or the apparent states of others. Philosophers might want to use 'consciousness' in some special sense for their own work such that it refers to any state of awareness of anything at any degree of clarity and reflection, even the lowest, and this strained definition would make it true that this minimal 'consciousness' was either present or not. But medicine would be unnecessarily restricted if it could only use that definition.

A further complexifying factor would be something analogous to the heightened death rate in bacteria when they grow in crowded circumstances causing the build-up of toxins to kill them off and thus restrain further growth. If the human population had been increasing at an accelerated rate because of the lack of deaths in World War II, there may well have been negative side-effects of this population growth which would have limited its impact, such as famines and more wars resulting from increased struggles for territory and resources. Another thing to keep in mind for calculations is that most of the World War II deaths were male, and the population growth of a community is much more dependent on the number of women than the number of men, given that a very few males can fertilize countless females, while females can only have a limited number of offspring, though in humans this is again complicated by social rules regulating reproduction.

The key issue in what you say is in the phrase, "what the physical evidence suggests," since the physical evidence always offers us only a limited analogy with what goes into producing human emotions. Thus if we see a rush of adrenalin in a salamander in response to the near approach of a predatory bird, the fact that the salamander's brain is entirely different from our own limits the reliability of positing that the salamander 'feels' the same things we do in response to a comparable adrenal rush. Sure, the adrenal spike may be comparable, but the ultimate translator of that chemical change into internal states of consciousness corresponding to our own sensation of Angst is the brain, and here the disanalogy is great. Maybe what the salamander experiences, if we could get into its head and directly feel what it feels, is more like "Move quickly away from the approaching shadow of beak and wings," rather than "My God! I'm going to die!!"

I remember one Spring seeing some immature dead birds in a nest on my balcony, and I realized that they must have struggled to survive and died during the Winter. This set me thinking that this is the essential rule of life: Species will always try to bring as many creatures as possible into existence, so there will always be a harsh dividing line between the ambition of the species to propagate and the resistance of the environment to that propagation. The result of this conflict is that terrible suffering is a natural implication of existence, since no species will ever voluntarily contract within parameters short of that boundary of suffering, but will instead have to be limited by a painful butting up against that boundary. Humans face the same fate, since their ambition will always extend beyond what their circumstances will permit them to have, so reality will always painfully limit what they feel they need. So the poignant story of the mother bird struggling to keep her offspring alive through the Winter and ultimately failing in the hideous death by starvation of her brood becomes universal. While it is true that many human lives seem to sail past many of the worst terrors, everyone most fears death and no one can escape that last, final horror. But given the very broad ambit of human imagination, anticipation, and awareness, everything awful is always present to our minds in the background. Martin Heidegger said once that the hasty way most people drink a cup of coffee already shows that they are at some level aware of death. Since good feelings are associated with successes which no longer require our attention, our minds tend to move on from them quickly and to concentrate on bad things, so the bad is magnified in our experience even beyond its actual magnitude. The actual occurrence of something bad often takes only a very short time, but the anticipation of it or the remembrance of it augments it enormously, again making life feel much worse than the objective dimension of misfortune requires -- yet still, we can't avoid those unpleasant anticpations, regrets, and memories. Doesn't it seem to be the natural conclusion from all of this that it would be better just to avoid the entire adventure if possible? Even if things turn out well, negative feelings about evils which have not (yet) materialized will still spoil things; and if things do turn out badly, they can be horrible beyond imagining. And the bad will naturally statistically predominate over the good, given that we are organized entities in an entropic world. I recognize that mine is the minority viewpoint, and I am puzzled why more people can't be persuaded to agree with it. But I certainly respect everyone who is willing to consider these questions rather than just lose his way in a world of trivial things.

You're no doubt familiar with the basic Marxist premise that the ideological assumptions about how people should 'naturally' and 'rationally' want to behave are themselves the product of the material relations of the culture in which those people form their attitudes and desires. If we live in a capitalist world that thematizes and encourages rapaciousness, competition, and selfishness as principles of rationality guiding sensible decision-making, then we grow up assuming that these are the only possible motivations for us which could make sense. In fact, however, many societies have operated on more altruistic principles. The ancient Egyptians may have built the pyramids out of service to religious values, as did those who built the cathedrals of medieval Europe. Female school teachers years ago used to work for ridiculously low wages because they received in return the emotional benefits of participating in the activity of raising children even though they were generally unmarried. Artists starve in garrets because they love their work. Amish build barns for other members of their community out of pure solidarity and for no pay. In an emergency, people eagerly pitch in to help without being offered money, even though the work may be dangerous and difficult, and people even try to exceed each other in bravery and exertion to ensure the resuce of those in peril. All these situations and more show that people can be motivated to work hard by things other than material self-advantage. If society were organized on principles of solidarity, like one giant Amish community, perhaps people would find it natural to want to help and would even be offended at the idea of personally profiting from their efforts.

There is an important difference here which is disguised by language, in that conceptually thinking that you are about to die from suffocation by drowing is an entirely different and much less horrible experience than physically sensing that you are about to die from suffocation by drowning. The second experience involves enduring the physiological panic reaction to the sensation of imminent drowning, whereas the former just involves the unpleasant concept that lethal drowing is about to occur.

Was the man blind from birth or had he just gone blind recently, say from cataracts, which I assume was the most likely cause, given that that is the major cause of blindness in non-technological societies today. If the man had not been blind from birth, then there would have been no problem of re-wiring his brain to interpret visual images. Generally, though, the Bible miracles are burdened with many logical problems. For example, could Christ be charged with being cruel for having decided just to cure some people but not others, which must have made those not cured feel rejected and denied an opportunity almost within their grasp? Also, the notion that someone tells people an implausible, magical story about his interpretation of the meaning of the universe and then, as the crowd shuffles away, muttering to itself in disbelief at the inadequate tale, the speaker shouts out, "Hey wait, look! I can pull a rabbit out of my hat, pull a coin out from behind your ear, and saw a lady in half -- that must prove that my story is true and that I'm the Son of God!" seems utterly childish in its attempt to substitute a magic show for a convincing argument.

As Hegel points out, the rule of 'an eye for an eye' can never be just, since the loss of an eye will always be of different value for different people, so it only apparently expresses a formula of equivalence in punishment. In the extreme case, if a criminal cyclops puts out one eye of someone having two eyes, what is the appropriate punishment for the cyclops? Utter blindness? So it hardly matters that there are contradictions of this initial rule in the Bible, since the rule is itself incoherent and fails to set any valid standard.

I'm not sure why we should worry so much about people living an extraordinarily long time when we also have problems like Moses commanding the sun to stand still, someone living inside the stomach of a sea creature, or a magical sword appearing in the air over Damocles. Since the whole foundational premise of the text -- an omniscient, omnipotent, ubiquitous, eternal, mind-reading father figure with a nasty temper commanding the universe or his son rising from the dead -- is contrary to both the laws of physical nature and of logic, why fret the details?

While I generally agree that it would be impossible for all people to go bankrupt at once, given that everything naturally has some value, which would in turn induce trade, which itself would create conditions of non-bankruptcy = prosperity, there is one extreme situation in which universal valueless might occur. That might happen if the world was known to be about to come to an end, so no one would have any reason to set a value on labor or capital.