Olivier5

While it is possible to eliminate viruses or parasites that play no ecological role, to try and change a whole ecosystem is very risky. Perhaps you ca...

If we manage to survive the storm that's coming, that is.

Okay, I'll leave it there I guess. My main point is that to me, life is the supreme value. Not pleasure or the absence of suffering or sentience, but ...

I figured it is easier to destroy all Darwinian life first, and then reconstruct it better. Androids will dream of electric sheep soon enough.

You'd be glad to know, then, that "Darwinian life" is fast disappearing from our planet. The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Se...

I was dead serious (pun intended). I see a contradiction in hating life as it is (Darwinian life, which is the one and only life we know) and hating d...

Intelligent moral agents can do far better than bioengineer cats for the moral satisfaction of seeing them eat lettuce.

Sometimes, wisdom consists in not acting even when you could act. We should leave other species alone, to the extent possible, eg by way of nature res...

Strange... I wonder what problem they had with it. Anyway, I suspect felids are not particularly interested in your advice. You are welcome to change ...

What about the suffering tigers anihillate? When their prey is dead, the prey won't suffer anymore. That's chalked up as a positive, right? If life is...

A tiger does not apologize.

Freud wrote about sex, perhaps a little too much. Feminists have written tons of tomes about it, some of them interesting.

Well, until such a time when we can engineer every single life form on earth to do exactly what you think is good, I'm going to read the Dimension of ...

In this gem of a philosophical novel called The Dimension of Miracles, by Robert Sheckley, an average New Yorker, Tom Carmody, wins at the galactic lo...

People would take their lives in your ideal world too, if only because it'd be boring. Industrial farming we must abolish, I agree, primarily for anim...

Thanks for the response. I don't share your condemnation of "Darwinian life". I tend to like life as it is, suffering included. And then, we have made...

Not sure the middle class is that uniform but yes, maybe, on topics like the mind for instance. Assuming the mind is like a computer.

Here's a little song I wrote You might want to sing it note for note Don't worry, be happy In every life we have some trouble But when you worry you m...

If I understand well, this is a mash up of two songs... one by Cindy Lauper, the other by Whitney Houston. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efhoa0CDyXY

You mean like Bill Gates?

Life is a masquerade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zka753E9MM

David, You might wish to take some of the questions related to the possibility that the future may not be better but worse than the past. There is thi...

He would have credibility and legitimacy in dealing with computers, including in the general philosophy of computers. But he would be lost on a medica...

To the OP, it seems to me that losers are more likely to adopt extremely relativistic if not opportunistic morals, in order to justify their losing. T...

That strikes me as the kind of wishful thinking typical of people idolizing and idealizing science and technology. There are at present no such thing ...

Okay, fair enough. At least we agree that emergence does happen, that entirely new structures can emerge haphazardly, and that entirely new properties...

You keep changing your definition of strongly emergent. Make up your mind.

The capacity to suffer arises when matter without capacity to suffer is arranged the right way. Therefore, suffering is strongly emergent as per your ...

So how should a rock be, then? What's the proper ethic for rocks?

Typically, there are ethical consideration for human beings, which are not needed for rocks or even for plants and lower animals. This would need a re...

The important point being that there is no level having some greater causality or existence than another. Reductionism is needlessly micro-centric.

No disagreement there, as long as the specificity of each level is adequately and equally reflected, rather than abolished. There is no level having s...

Not really. The scales of reality are a view of the mind. Nature is one. The basic point Schrödinger was trying to make is that observers are not magi...

This is how it feels from my side: Olivier5: there exist donkeys. Pfhorrest: only weak donkeys exist. Strong donkeys are impossible. O5: ??? Pfh: stro...

The fundamental problem to "jump" from QM to chemistry is that we can't solve the Schrödinger equation for molecules. So we cannot predict, say, the V...

You might as well, because all this talk about weak and strong emergence is cheap. The main problem I see with reductionism (the actual name for this ...

Amartya Sen is an Indian economist who studied famine as a function of policy, hunger as a political issue. He went on to define poverty as a lack of ...

Read the link. Okay then. That is I suppose the crux of your argument. Factually speaking, it is NOT TRUE that we can model, derive or compute the law...

The rain does some tap dance On the sidewalk at midnight Sometimes I just stop there I admire her, I applaud I follow her hat slap Her vertical tailco...

Whether natural laws exist or not by themselves is a matter of dispute. But it cannot be disputed that human beings have identified regularities in th...

That is simply not true. Life created new laws, like the laws of genetics. It's how it is conceived by biologists.

I hear you saying: only the things that can happen do in fact happen. Which I agree with, obviously. If they happen, they can happen. What I am saying...

Physically, maybe, assuming that the laws of thermodynamics haven't changed since the bronze age. But historically, no, because you need a certain gra...

The Schrödinger cat thought experiment was conceived in order to refute the Copenhagen interpretation, specifically the idea that the act of "observat...

Actually Schrödinger's cat was an attempt to prove that observers cannot be the cause of anything quantic happening.

How come Schrödinger did not see that his cat was just as good an observer as he was, pray tell?

I agree that the possibility was always "there" for everything, somehow, but possibilities do not actually exist ontologically. It's not like the anci...

Thought experiments mean very little, especially when poorly thought through. E.g. what Schrödinger forgot in his famous mind experiment is that the c...

Okay so for you, all possibilities must have emerged at once, at time zero in the history of the universe, like in the mind of God. In my version, thi...

Correct, like all philosophy, like all art and all science... Like cars or computers, or zillions of other things.