Magnus Anderson

The point I am trying to make, which you seem to disagree with, is that most moral statements aren't mere expressions of one's personal preferences. F...

That's true. The statement is not a moral one. A moral statement would be something like "Lying is wrong". The above statement tells you how the unive...

Here's a moral statement: "The surest way to end up in heaven is by not lying to other people." When we try to simplify it, we get something like: "Do...

Whenever you ask someone a question such as "Is X Y?" you are asking for their opinion. If I were to ask you a question such as "Is Socrates a man?" I...

You did ask for his opinion. And his opinion is that murder is wrong. Maybe you wanted to ask him a different question, a question such as "Is murder ...

If what you asked him is "Do you agree that murder is wrong?" then he did answer your question, his answer being "Yes, murder is wrong". Even if he di...

It's moral and good because people think it's better to try and fail than to not try at all. In other words, they think that if you make 10 mediocre a...

A moral statement such as "It is wrong to kill" in the majority of cases means "If you want to maximize your chances to attain certain goal G then you...

Don't focus on the word "want". Focus on the word "ought" and the fact that the sentence is a perfectly legitimate English sentence. You ought to eat ...

If you want people to be alive and happy, you ought not to kill them or otherwise cause them suffering. In Kantian terms, that's still a hypothetical ...

Right. So what he's saying is that unrealistic expectations (i.e. expecting things to be the way they cannot be) are delusional. I agree with that. Ho...

There are "ought" statements, that's pretty evident. Animals don't have statements because they don't have language -- they don't speak. As for the un...

I am not sure what you're trying to say. I am not trying to criticize morality. I am simply saying that: 1) saying that one ought to do something or t...

It means you will die if you eat nothing within a period of one month. That's hardly disputable. Of course, you won't die if you eat nothing for a wee...

If you can get away with it -- yes.

It's not a good idea to kill other people if you want to cooperate with them. And it's a good idea to cooperate with other people because you can't su...

You mean, what if you can't be what you ought to be? Nothing. Just accept that you can't be that thing. An ought merely establishes what is the best t...

If you're hungry it means that if you don't eat something soon you'll starve to death. You have two choices here: 1) try to find food so that you can ...

I can't give you a precise verbal description of the meaning of the word "number". What I can do is I can show you that people define the word "number...

That's true. I refuse to die and prefer to live. But is that resentment? Most importantly, is that something negative? Consider the alternative, which...

The world is full of obscurantists.

The concept of infinity exists. That's what I meant by conceptual existence.

That's according to your own definition of the word "number". You defined the word "number" to mean "a finite quantity". That's not the standard defin...

I am hungry, I ought to eat. According to you, that's a sign of resentment, a rejection of part of the universe in favor of other parts, or more bizar...

Depends on how you define the word "number". If you define it narrowly, to mean "a natural number", then you're right, infinity is not a number. But t...

At the top of every hierarchy of goals there is a goal that is chosen freely in the sense that it is not chosen in order to attain some other goal. Th...

Well, just because we can imagine something, it does not mean it exists. Just because we can come up with a symbol such as "unicorn" does not mean the...

So if a symbol has no property called length assigned to it, it follows that there is no portion of reality that can be represented by it? The word "p...

We use abstractions, i.e. symbols, in order to represent reality. For example, the term "human being" is a symbol -- a written or a spoken word -- tha...

You can say that's a somewhat careless use of the equality sign. The clean way to do it would be something like lim(1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ...) = 2. On...

Forget about human faces. Let's take a simpler concept -- the concept of natural number. Is the concept of natural number undefined? If not, does that...

The set of all human faces is a finite one? Can you show it to me?

Is the concept of human face undefined? If not, how do you define it?

Apparently, the concept of human face is undefined, merely because noone ever listed every instance of the class represented by the word "human face".

Are you saying the universe has no temporal end?

A quantity is said to be actually infinite if it is temporally bounded from both sides i.e. if it occurs between two points in time. Quantities that o...

Yes, @"Devans99" is not merely arguing that infinity does not exist in reality, he's also arguing that the concept of infinity is meaningless, non-sen...

You need to understand what actual infinity is before I can do that.

I understand that you do not understand what actual infinity is.

We need to agree that: 1. Things exist whether or not we are aware of them 2. We can make an infinite number of predictions and retrodictions based on...

I think you should spend less time trying to prove other people wrong and more time trying to understand what they are saying.

Only in the sense that infinity is larger than any finite number. Otherwise, it is not true. Only in the sense that some specific infinite number plus...

I am convinced this thread has never been about empirical matters. Instead, it's entirely about conceptual matters (which is why OP talks about Zeno s...

What's wrong with that?

Humans can't perform an infinite number of operations because human consciousness is finite. But that does not mean that it is impossible for an infin...

You cannot arrive at infinity through a finite number of operations. If you want to arrive at infinity, you need to perform an infinite number of oper...

Yes, you will get a different number, that's true, but that's not the point. Noone is saying you'll get the same number. More than Two things + 1 = Mo...

It's nonsensical to you, because you don't understand it. When I say More than Two things + 1 = More than Two Things what I am saying is that if you t...

Yes, when you have two apples and you add another apple, you get three apples. You don't get three oranges or three bananas. But you nonetheless get s...

So if you have a number greater than 2 and you add 1 to it you don't get a number greater than 2? Interesting.