MonfortS26

Thank you all for your opinions!

It seems most people are pro-predation in my opinion, but the relationship between parasitism and symbiosis is complicated to measure through the cont...

I think... it was John Lennon that said there was no such thing as an original idea, or something along those lines

In my area, kids start playing football when they're in 4th grade. Do you think that 9-year-olds should be allowed to do drugs and have sex? To vote? ...

How would you respond to your own question?

Find a single example of motivation that isn't caused by pain or pleasure. This could be done through brain scans.

If you view it from the perspective of psychological hedonism, that all motivation is dictated by pain and pleasure, then even if there is an amount o...

That's kind of my point. I don't think there is a misunderstanding when the statement 'God exists' is proposed though. Questioning gods existence is o...

This is why I separated philosophical and scientific inquiry. Even in cases like normative ethics, which seem to me to be statements based on the way ...

That part was more about adding structure to the abductive reasoning in hypothesis formation than it was about designing the actual experiment, but I'...

Yeah, of course. But I can't think of any way to create completely grounded axioms that aren't built upon an infinite regress. Am I missing something?

Questions like what is the meaning of my life?, or how SHOULD things be as opposed to how they ARE? can't be answered through observation. They can on...

How would you prove that it is possible to do so? Can you separate pain in the mind from visible pain on brain scans?

You don't need a complete picture to reason. It may not be as rigorous to only apply my studies to the human condition, but it accomplishes goals that...

Yes, but can you say that there is no pain or pleasure present in the process of desiring to know and understanding? Perhaps that the reason we are mo...

I said humans specifically because I wanted to limit the domain of the discussion to the human experience. I don't think that humans are the only spec...

So are you implying that it is possible to experience physical pain without experiencing mental pain?

Thats not a very specific definition, couldn't any emotion be considered a state of mind?

If you say I'm confusing happiness with survival, how are you defining happiness?

Perhaps something as abstract as saying happiness is a survival mechanism is unwarranted, but it is rooted in the belief that pleasure and pain are th...

So if happiness is created in the brain, what determines the amount of happiness an individual brain creates?

If this were the case, then every trait would either help or hurt the ability for an organism to reproduce. From a survival of the fittest mindset, tr...

Do you believe that the brain plays any part in the creation of happiness?

Happiness is subjective in the sense that different people value different things, but the only way that happiness could be unaffected by external fac...

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489

What evidence do you have to support your claim that happiness is based on mindset alone?

That just seems like an arbitrary boundary between the two definitions in order to make the statement that suffering is the result of desire true whil...

Then where does the correlation between income and happiness come from?

If happiness were entirely self-delusion, how could it be dependent on forces outside the mind in any way?

Are you implying that the benefits of adopting different attitudes and values are somehow exempt from the concept of evidence or proof? Just because s...

If we couldn't experience pain, it wouldn't affect us in any way.

That's fair. My generalized view of what Alan Watts does is take important concepts and present them in a confusing way in order to provoke thought in...

I disagree that happiness is not a form of pleasure and I don't think that this specific passage is about happiness. I used to read Alan Watts and it ...

I like the passage, and I can agree to an extent that everything is fruitless, but wouldn't my proposal break the concepts that he speaks of. Things w...

What if your passion is to reduce existential risk? In a world with a finite amount of resources, we can either dedicate them to a longer life or a 'h...

Because with pain and pleasure being the motivator, the default human state would be pain. If you were to do nothing, eventually you would experience ...

Just because a bird flies south for the winter doesn't mean that it doesn't 'think' it is doing that of its own accord. Just because a human thinks it...

But even if the (E) is the data of Gedanken experiments, is that not to some extent the result of abductive reasoning? If we define abductive reasonin...

I mistyped when I said pure science and went back and changed it to logic being pure logic and science being applied logic. Here is my understanding o...

When you say this, are you referring to deductive reasoning exclusively, or do you include informal logic as well? And if logic is separate from real ...

Is the act of formulating a hypothesis not just abductive reasoning, testing said hypothesis deductive, and developing theories inductive?

I'm not familiar with the axioms that you speak of, but if we define the scientific method as this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thu...

Ahhhh, the consequences of winning....

I'm still having fun. I didn't take away anyone else's ability to make rules, I just took away other peoples ability to take away my ability to make r...

That violates rule #18

Rule #22: Exempting rule #20 and #21 no rule never applies.

Rule #21:Rule #20 never applies.

It doesn't matter when rule #11 does not apply when another rule states that it itself applies all of the time. Rule #11 doesn't state that no rule ca...

Where is that a rule?

Rule #19: Rule #17 and Rule #19 apply at all times.