Pfhorrest

But if a socially conservative majority of justices decide to rule against the legality of abortion in some case brought before them, on the grounds t...

There are relativists of all kinds in philosophy, thoughts I do think they’re generally wrong and counter to the spirit of philosophy itself. Relativi...

This is kind of tangential, but I had the thought recently, looking at the history of Supreme Court nominations, that perhaps instead of only appointi...

The presence of a state is the absence of discipline, if by discipline you mean something like governance. You've probably heard the adage "a governme...

So you're claiming that might makes right? That's tantamount to saying "there's no such thing as 'right', only might". And I already said that the onl...

The burden of proof is on the state to prove its legitimacy, and it has not done so. And that wikipedia article is a little unclear. Philosophical ana...

You asked about moral legitimacy, not what to do in practice about people doing morally illegitimate things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_anarchism

No states are morally legitimate; all any state ever has is its effective control over a territory. I think the simplest answer would be the empire fo...

Yeah I actually don't know what @"TheMadFool" means.

Yeah I’m thinking of this all as a philosophical thought experiment divorced from the practical details: basically “if you could directly stimulated p...

That’s the kind of thing I was thinking of. If it can be made so that just existing at all in and if itself feels like at least a slight net positive,...

That is a good point, but that’s really all mere a side-effect of my proposal, not the reason for it. The reason for proposing this isn’t to create an...

Maybe it helps some people. Most people I know have no trouble getting the drugs of their choice and no hesitation to offer them to me. Hasn’t made it...

“Drugs” is exactly the metaphor I thought of. I’ve gone my whole life without succumbing to the temptation to just drug myself into blissful oblivion....

Those who are, what, philosophical zombies, soulless automata that do nothing other than exercises in pure logic for fun? Sorry, not fun, that’s a kin...

No, as in someONE vs someTHING, which is the change they made. A person is someONE, but their face is someTHING, so if we are describing the beauty of...

Can I vary the amounts of stimulation? ‘Cause like... orgasmic bliss all the time sounds kind of debilitating, but a small trickle of “everything’s fi...

Your phrasing would suggest that the face is a person. The partner is a “one”, but her face is a “thing”.

I’m not suggesting that we replace all of those verbs with context-dependent versions of “to human”; it’s just a side effect of my broader proposal th...

To the right, anti-capitalist = communist = totalitarian = fascist, so if anti-fascist = anti-capitalist then anti-fascist = fascist, in their diction...

Thanks for trying to clarify, but that does sound pretty much like what his fans have said to me before. What they’ve told me is that Harris wants to ...

Like I said, this is the impression I've gotten from other people defending him, so I'm not surprised if some of his actual views have gotten lost or ...

Ethical naturalism, basically. Which wouldn’t be such a problem is all he meant was “not supernaturalism” or “not divine command theory”, because thos...

Yes, this is my stance on the ongoing argument in this thread. My view on creativity is not anti-platonic, it’s just platonism-agnostic: it doesn’t ma...

"To human" doesn't have to mean any particular conscious actions that humans may or may not choose to do. What is the definition of a human? You'll gi...

The little exposure to Harris that I have is his fanboys on Wikipedia trying to act like the idea of a "moral science" is a Harris original, and not j...

Therefore he does not shave himself, making him the kind of person who he does shave. Therefore he does shave himself, making him the kind of person w...

If everyone could gratify themselves in every way then the world would be quite a happy place. It's only self-gratification at the expense of others' ...

You are correct and SMBC made my overarching point better than me.

I don’t understand. That’s why I mentioned the process going the other way too: from the noun “a human“ we could back-form a verb “to human”, which me...

That’s because the photon doesn’t go through A1 OR A2, it goes through A1 AND A2.

On my model, the disputes can be internal to one person. There are multiple options and you're not sure which to believe: how do you choose? It's the ...

I'm not sure what you mean by that. What I mean is that, assuming some common background theory, an observation might imply that such-and-such is the ...

I’m basically a falsificationist, so if an observation implies one thing in the context of one theory, but is also consistent with some other theoreti...

Yeah I get real tired of people thinking quantum mechanics violates classical logic. Being in a superposition of two states is not the same as being c...

I hold only disputes about reality to be settled by EMPIRICAL experience specifically, but disputes about morality to still be settled by experience, ...

Possibly because my “spin” in much broader than any of the others you’ve mentioned, e.g. Quine pointing out that observations are theory-laden seemed ...

Rejecting empiricism means effectively rejecting criticism, because if there is no common experience against which to judge things, we cannot rational...

It’s not possible to “see behind the curtain”, so all we can do is assume that AI who are functionally identical to humans either do or don’t have the...

I’m not disputing the scenario, I’m making a judgement about it: programs that perfectly replicate human functionality COUNT AS people as much as huma...

AI people are still people, so if life in the virtual world is nice then enjoy it, and if it’s not... well that depend on whether life outside would b...

Clavius' Law says that "if (not-P implies P) then P". In this case P is it is impossible to invent an idea. So: If (it is not impossible to invent an ...

To learn (seeking knowledge) and to teach (making a change), both of them by talking with others, either of which gets me attention, and which justify...

Please keep going, you’re making lots of great points.

:up:

Not sure if you made a typo here, but objectivism as I mean it is context-DEpendent but observer-INdependent.

:up:

I always figured the religious prohibition against nudity was related to the broader religious obsession with sex as an object of moral concern. Naked...

The best thing is choice. To be able to live forever is good. To be forced to live forever is bad. And because dying removes choices -- you can't chan...