Phi for All

Your motorcycle obsession has negatively impacted my business, since you chose NOT to spend your gathered money on the Martin & Lewis Coloring Books I'm trying to sell. I can see StringJunky's point, when people are content they don't need anything, almost by definition. Content people buy staple goods, but make do with last year's clothes and a ten-year-old car. Content people aren't good for the economy, so do we have to give up being content if we want to be prosperous?

Have you given any thought at all to the possibility that your willful lack of formal scientific study has left you ill-equipped to judge whether or not your ideas have merit? That you might be wishfully hoping your ideas are right, while you can't find any evidence to support them? I mean no disrespect. It's something every rational person should ask themselves when they find themselves swimming against the current. Is it likely everybody else is wrong? Personally, I'd want a whole lot more evidence to support my ideas if I was stating them the way you always have, assert them as fact, then sneer dismissively at anyone who doesn't agree with you. It's the very thing you accuse others of, only others usually have a lot more evidence to support themselves.

With the poor information you've given us, the only answer is, you can't. Considering the laws regarding medical information privacy, I'm a bit surprised you could even ask this without a great deal of qualification.

Argument by Anecdote.

And it seems only you think they are. And you haven't really shown that to anyone's satisfaction. There is an objective reality that can be measured. Please explain how that's a nihilistic perspective.

How does a conscious person's weight get lifted by its own power as you pick them up? They can curl their legs for a better grip, and wrap their arms around your neck, but once they're off the ground, the mass is the same. It's a matter of weight distribution, isn't it? A conscious person is going to help while being picked up, to reach an optimum position in which to be lifted/carried. Weight distributed evenly with legs and elbows tucked in. Imagine riding with someone on the back of your motorcycle. If they're unconscious, they aren't going to make it very easy going around corners.

! Moderator Note jlindgaard, I think you've made a mistake in choosing SFN to post your ideas. We require more scientific rigor than you're apparently willing or able to give. There are plenty of other sites on the web where non-mainstream wishful thinking and guessing are embraced, but we will always require evidence to back up any assertions made. Please reconsider your membership, or adopt a more reasoning approach to your scientific inquiries. What you're doing now isn't acceptable for our discussion forum. You're soapboxing if you aren't backing up what you say. Whatever this was is now closed.

It seems s1eep is conflating an ab initio perspective with narrow-mindedness. And then he claims scientists "anoint" and "demonize", but somehow doesn't think THAT is narrow-minded.

Do you want the specifics of the chemistry involved, or are you simply incredulous that something used in manufacturing explosives can be used in tiny doses as medicine? It's only unstable in liquid form, iirc, and the pills are solid, so no problems with jostling them. Also, there's only like .3-.5 mg of nitrogylcerin in a nitro pill, just enough to dilate blood vessels quickly, so even if it were unstable it's not enough to explode.

You ignored my answer to your question, and now I see why. You already have "correct answers" in mind. So this is not a discussion, it's a soapbox. Again.

This is an example of a fairly common tactic in politics, religion (especially creationism). You state a lie with such conviction that people don't bother to check. We've long known of several families of dinosaurs that had feathers, including archeopteryx.

I'd assumed you knew enough about nihilism to accuse all scientists of being somewhat nihilistic.

The scientific method is a set of tools for making sense of nature in a trustworthy way, precisely because of our seemingly unlimited imaginative nature. The only thing it suppresses is nonsense and ignorance. I think the pursuit of science is definitely not nihilistic by definition. That's an awful lot of study and hard work for someone who thinks it's all meaningless. For the moral aspect, a rational being doesn't need religion to define his morality. I'm a moral person, but not because I fear punishment from a deity.

You misunderstand then, possibly because you think there was a question in your OP. There wasn't, it was all assertion, starting with the title. My criticism was about the assertive statements you've made, in a discussion about the ideas you posted on a science site. I disagreed with most of them, I told you why, and I questioned some specifics about how you arrived at your conclusions, but I never questioned your motives. I always assumed you were generalizing your poor opinion of some people onto all people, and I was just hoping to point out some contradictions. You've possibly described a percentage of humanity, but not all. You paint your picture with too wide a brush, imo, and ignore efforts individuals make to become better. Now you're angry and frustrated that we haven't just agreed with you, and I can see why. You were thinking you could just ask "if anyone other than [your]self had considered this as an option" and only people with a similar opinion would join in, so there wouldn't be a debate (or even a discussion, really). Let me ask you this, do you think your perspective is due to looking at humanity as a whole, rather than the societies and individuals we really are? It would be easy to say humanity isn't doing enough to improve themselves, because we rarely act as an entire species, and the groups that represent the biggest drag on our humanity seem to get themselves in the news more often. Innovation and progress usually happen somewhere specific and then eventually spreads.

Perspective. It's how we learn new things. It's how we get "the whole story", so we don't make rash judgments that might compound the problem.

When you say "religion", which one do you mean?

Only when they stop producing entertaining movies....

Fish & Wildlife doesn't have the authority or manpower to do something like this, so you either give it to them, or you look to Homeland Security, who are already in charge of several hundred miles of fence in the US southwest. And historically, walls aren't built to restrict the builder's expansion. If you're going to expand the FWS, you won't need walls and wardens, because you'll be able to get an accurate count of how many mountain lions we actually have, and adjust limits accordingly, or do away with them altogether. Perhaps some science-types could convince the states to limit kills to males only. There are lots of things that would be a more efficient use of that kind of money. Ask Homeland Security how effective the Mexico wall is.

This is a big part of why I suspect this type of argument is agenda-driven. All these guys, Harold Squared, Tim the Plumber, Wild Cobra, they all start with the premise that there is no problem, ignoring what the data is saying, and then try to make everything fit that premise.

Please. Don't even think about suggesting this in the southwestern US.

Imagine you walk into a room. You aren't using any technology to do it, all you need are your senses. You see a desk with lots of stuff on top of it, and a chair in front of it. Every bit of data this picture has for you can be turned into useful and complex information; e.g.,there's no person in the chair but the coffee you smell is steaming in the yellow cup that says, "World's Best Dad", tickets to today's baseball game are laying in the pocket of a well-worn leather outfielder's glove, and a magazine is folded open to an ad for a cure for male pattern baldness. Can you picture that? The more I tell you about what's on this desk, the more you know about its owner, and the more you're able to build on the knowledge of each piece of data, turning it into useful information. Your intelligence, not your technology, allows you to do this. You can practically predict the future with that intelligence of yours, it's such a powerful tool. This is what we do here, we discuss ideas, mostly looking for evidence that supports or disproves them, and clarification of terms. Because most ideas are wrong, and none of us by ourselves is capable of looking at every perspective. No criticism is directed at you, you aren't your idea. Most people come here for a critical review. It's not really a debate, it's a discussion. Around a table, not at the podia. Then look at your OP again and tell me how it's the best metric to use for gauging whether our humanity is falling by the wayside. Perhaps you should define what you think humanity is, or what it means to be truly human. I'm not worried you're setting the bar too high, I'm worried you're setting the bar in a spot we could never reach. You talk about how we're all too short-sighted to change the evolution of the universe, and that dooms us to extinction. That's not a metric, that's a done deal. You've condemned us from the outset. See what I meant in my first comment? The metric you set is so sloppily defined (none of the progress we've made so far is good enough), there's no way for us to meet it. Crutches are tools, but tools aren't crutches. I think this is another metric you're judging us by that's unfair and unproductive. It's like saying the Great White Shark unfairly relies on his teeth to survive. It's what we do, what we got when we gave up the safety of the trees and started cooking our meat. We gave up claws and teeth for tools, we put up with back pain and worse to walk upright to free our hands for tools and support our huge heads. You say this isn't the natural/unnatural argument, yet you don't include tools as part of what's natural about us.

Oh come on, I'm sure if he'd read it thoroughly, he would've decided his argument was based on a (willful?) misunderstanding of the events. And there's no way he could think that would fly. Besides, isn't all the important stuff in the first paragraph of those articles? Do we really need context to understand the rest? Isn't it easier to just skim what I think is important and make my arguments based on that?

1 & 2. You're taking a subjective experience and claiming it applies to everyone, which is wrong by definition. 3. I can't unravel why you think this is interesting. 4. This makes no sense. You're assuming 1, 2 & 3 are true, and jumping to the conclusion that this proves 4. It doesn't. 5& 6. These are so generalized as to be essentially meaningless. 7 & 8. You're removing the most reasonable argument against your idea with this one. That some gain pleasure from the pain and suffering of others, or that guilt can sometimes taint pleasure, is a very real and rational argument which you try to invalidate with nothing more than a modified No True Scotsman fallacy ("If you don't agree with me, you aren't looking at this the right way"). 9. You start out by saying, "there might also be more complicated processes in the brain", a clear speculative statement with nothing to back it up, and then you start making assertions based on that. In short (hah!), you are confusing logic with "stuff that makes sense to me". It's VERY common these days, with so many popular journalists misusing terms like theory, evolve, and logic. You've jumped to far too many conclusions with this if/then style of forming an hypothesis. You should start with the beginning part where you claim that because we CAN create neutral images, ALL meanings for everything are automatically neutral (that seems like a huge leap to me). Try to stay focused on just that one part, don't go off on tangents, be very precise in what you say, and please try to link to evidence that supports anything you assert as true.

! Moderator Note Duplicate of this topic removed, please continue to discuss here.

! Moderator Note Moved to General Philosophy.