leo

The thing is, you can't prove being a vegan causes less suffering, whatever proof you come up with will be based on some untestable belief. Sure most ...

If you believe something is good for the community, and you believe someone acts in a way that goes against this common good, then you may want to mak...

Sometimes we can find logical justifications to why we want such or such thing, someone may want to become a movie star because they want to be admire...

But then, why do you so badly need a logical justification to do something? You go grocery shopping because you expect to get something you want there...

If we follow your assumption that the more animals live the more plants die, then if you wanted to reduce the total sum of suffering over time you cou...

I think mental health practice would benefit greatly from an in-depth critical philosophical analysis. Mental health professionals are not bearers of ...

You just know that you feel pain, and you know that other beings with brains appear to feel pain but you have no proof that they do feel pain either. ...

How can you attach any probability to it? How would you know that a brain is required to feel?

I think the desires and beliefs we have are closely linked to the mental state we're in. If you desire something strongly but believe you can never at...

But then one could say it is no more arbitrary than invoking an additional eternal entity.

But how do you know whether eating an apple from a tree doesn't cause immense suffering to the tree? If you don't know how other beings suffer, how do...

As Carl Sagan would say, why not just say that the universe always existed, instead of saying that some God that always existed created the universe?

That's all fine and dandy in theory, but then in practice how do you know when an hypothesis is untrue? You may say, if an observation doesn't match t...

Yes, either it's possible to live without eating any other being in a way we haven't found yet, or we have to cause suffering to other beings to live....

I wonder how it would feel to get eaten alive. Is it the worst experience one can possibly have, or does the mind becomes somehow disconnected from th...

What is meaning? It is some sort of a feeling that drives us. When we feel it there is nothing to explain, the feeling is the whole meaning, the 'why'...

In the example: All winged horses are horses, All winged horses have wings, Therefore some horses have wings. If it is assumed that there are winged h...

You don't understand that the trajectory of light is pure assumption, it cannot be observed directly. There are theories where light travels in straig...

You seem to have a lingering hate for idealism though. I don't even consider myself as an idealist or as anything, I just follow observations and thou...

On the surface the Earth looks approximately flat. From a distance the Earth looks approximately spherical. That the Earth looks spherical is an obser...

Why the hate? Do you see elementary particles with your eyes? Or do you imagine them to be here, making up what you do see? Do you see the elementary ...

Indeed, all of our concepts stem from what we experience, the concept of a brain and of neurons stems from what we experience, so how could we ever kn...

Probably anyone attempting to understand the universe will be confused by it at some point, unless one doesn't mind about inconsistencies. We talk abo...

At times I am able to see a complex world in my mind, with my eyes closed but while being awake. At times while sleeping I dream of things that seem a...

In fact, these elementary particles that make up everything according to the standard view, they exist in our imagination, in our mind. We invoke them...

That follows directly from my last message, the standard view in physics assumes that the rock's properties you described are completely described by ...

Being forced to do a mind-numbing repetitive task for 8 hours a day every day, being treated more or less badly by some superior who tells you what to...

Yes okay. Actually I believe that these properties result from the interaction between the mind and the rock, I don't believe they reside solely in th...

That answers both with some effort. The standard view in physics is based on the two premises I stated earlier. These premises cannot possibly account...

The standard view in physics is that for instance quarks move each other in a way that with rough instruments make us detect them as single particles ...

That they are called properties doesn't change the fact that all they dictate is how the particles move relative to each other, you could make the who...

These properties have no ability other than dictating how these particles move relative to each other. Instead of saying that particles have propertie...

These properties only dictate how the particles move relative to each other, be it mass, charge, spin, what have you.

Yet that premise is at the root of our current fundamental theories of physics, general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and so on.

Of course the problem is not the environment alone, it is the combination of the individual plus their environment. When I was saying the problem is w...

But precisely the argument is what some refer to as the "hard problem of consciousness". This is how I would formulate the argument: Premises P1. Ever...

Sorry, I wasn't being arrogant, I have been rejected enough in my life that when some important idea I cherish and that would make the world a better ...

I see what you call "convenient speech patterns" as sources of endless confusion. In all these speech patterns energy is reified as some sort of thing...

Yes sorry I misinterpreted your comment. I agree that 3D is more intuitive than visualizing in 2D, but maybe it could be possible to train our minds t...

It's easy to get discouraged when most people believe we can't change the world, and because of all the resistance you are faced with when you attempt...

But the society is made up of individuals. So if it is how we behave with each other and how we interact with each other and what we force each other ...

Did you react the same way the first time you heard the Earth isn't flat?

No it's not, all it implies is you don't see an elephant. What you're saying is, when we hadn't observed Neptune there was evidence it didn't exist. W...

Yes that's arbitrary, but I find it harder to visualize a 2D universe where we are moving in the same instances that we interpret ourselves as moving ...

Arbitrarily fast is not infinite, and the universe can expand arbitrarily fast too.

In the Lorentz ether theory light does not travel at infinite speeds, but can travel arbitrarily fast depending on the direction. Again, absolutely ze...

Then look into the Lorentz ether theory, it is empirically equivalent to Special Relativity, no experiment distinguishes between the two, yet in the f...

We talked about that on the 2nd page of this thread, I thought I had convinced you, I addressed all your points regarding that.

Do you agree that without change there is no time? If so, the temporal beginning of the universe would be the beginning of change. That beginning of c...

But what if there is a way to change it, and that to find it we first have to believe there is?