Baden

Creating conscious agents with testosterone and then falling back on free will is like giving toddlers hand guns and then falling back on the constitu...

Yes, or even testosterone and so on.

Don't worry about the currency. It's all good.

Ok, but you still haven't presented any evidence backing up your thoughts and doubts. I at least quoted "Rational Wiki". As I said, if you can find a ...

'Intelligent design' is a religiously inspired pseudoscience. It doesn't figure in the debate raised in the OP. If conscious agents cause changes in a...

Pretty much, and it can happen by 'natural' means including natural selection and lots of other stuff and various 'artificial' means. It's all equally...

(I didn't btw claim mechanisms aren't an important part of science or anything remotely close to that. I was talking about the adjective 'biological' ...

We could go on like this forever. If you find any evidence to suggest anything I've said is inaccurate or misrepresents the scientific view, let me kn...

You're conflating the 'what' and 'how' again. Anyway, what I've been saying is straightforward scientific orthodoxy. 'Biological' is about the 'what' ...

Scientists use the term to distinguish the evolution of organisms from other stuff. That's the 'what'. The 'how' is up for grabs as has already been e...

The term "biological" might be misleading you. It refers to the what not the how.

Cancer and the like is not evolution. Evolution results in heritable changes in a gene pool.

I might as well add that it's heritable change obviously in biological evolution.

See SX's post above.

It would just depend on whether changes were made to the genes in the process. If cats die out and we bring them back as they were, they wouldn't have...

"Artificial selection is an artificial mechanism by which evolution can occur." Rational Wiki

It's one mechanism. Don't get hung up on the "natural" idea.

Many thanks for the donation and the suggestion, jkop.

So? Nature probably couldn't have made a Chihuahua without us either.

Sure, human activity including technological activity could be a mechanism of evolution. Why not? Artificial selection is.

Evolution is defined by heritable changes in the gene pool from generation to generation. Doesn't matter how they get there. Genes come and go. That's...

Just to add to what @"StreetlightX" said, evolution doesn't primarily "care" what the best adaptation to an environment is. Any gene that offers a com...

It's all in the above. If you still don't see why your cherry-picked example can't be generalised to render only one half of the dichotomy incoherent ...

Sure, in practice, it won't necessarily matter much but the approaches have very different philosophical bases.

You observe what others call games and you call those types of things games too. There is no absolute "line". More a fuzzy boundary constrained by use...

God created man in his own image and so on. But I'm less interested in the theology than the psychology here.

In other words, what's sauce for the omnibenevolent goose is sauce for the omnimalevolent gander.

You could of course dispute the compatibility of omnipotence with omnibenevolence/omnimalevolence, but that wasn't what our disagreement was about ori...

By definition in that case (unless it serves a greater evil). Just as by definition an omnibenevolent God is obliged not to do evil (unless it serves ...

(I suppose presuming omniscience makes the second point inapplicable in this case, but the first point is sufficient disproof anyhow).

Doesn't work. Knowledge of good does not morality constitute. And further, consciousness of ability is not a necessary existential condition thereof.

If you think nothing people do is relevant to the problem of evil then that's a novel philosophical position to say the least.

And there it is, the horribly glib attitude of the bougeois religious in the face of evil. We ask how can an omnibenevolent God preside over, for exam...

An omnipotent X has the ability to create any particular thing but isn't obliged to create any particular thing. Absolute malevolence and absolute ben...

(So, like un, I don't consider this a serious position but rather a way to shut up the bourgeois religious freak whose response to the horrors of life...

This is one I came up with myself too a while back. I presumed some philosopher had advanced it, which @"andrewk" has confirmed. Anyway, the idea that...

Just joshin'. ;)

I sure hope the kids aren't reading this.

Or to be more exact, here. :-O

:D

Well, all roads in any conversation involving Hanover inevitably end up here, eh?

I'll defer to jamalrob on that. I don't claim to know what I'm talking about. 8-)

Can you speak up a bit young lassie? Can't hear you from up here with all the jazz and fish taco munching going on.

Fish taco jazz mountain sounds good. How's the price of real estate up there?

Sure, and a lack of character or a certain character could leave one unappreciative of others. Anyhow, if anyone wants to say one country is "better" ...

Neither did I until one of my Chinese students told me. There 's patriotism for you. Or lack thereof.

As I said, a matter of taste. Besides, paradise can quickly become stale for some. Where there be nothing rotten in the state, no Hamlets are there ei...

And so will ye end up choking on your own apple. But in fairness, it's fairly pointless comparing countries like the US and Holland. It's a matter of ...

Speaking of apples, are you sending all those poison ones in the Netherlands' direction because you've finally figured out the US isn't the fairest co...

Just more padding on the inside of the cell that marks the boundaries of the Hanoverse. ;)