03-16-2010, 06:02 PM | #391 | |
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03-16-2010, 06:09 PM | #392 | |
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03-16-2010, 06:16 PM | #393 | |
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Have you seen Ramachandran's presentations on cognition and visual art? They're interesting. |
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03-16-2010, 06:24 PM | #394 | |
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Excellent! Can a moderator please now close this thread and post this proof as a sticky so that this topic doesn't distract anybody else any more? |
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03-16-2010, 06:38 PM | #395 | |
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Do hope your post has brought this thread to a long overdue end - perhaps we should start one on the aesthetic value of literary works of art |
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03-16-2010, 06:46 PM | #396 | |
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Are you feeling guilty? Last edited by kennyc; 03-16-2010 at 06:48 PM. |
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03-16-2010, 06:51 PM | #397 |
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Kenny, Kenny, Kenny, we'd just got them to sleep and now you're going to wake them up again. Shhhh...
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03-16-2010, 06:52 PM | #398 |
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03-16-2010, 06:56 PM | #399 | |
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(Yes, I know—after all, I'm the one who submitted the hyper-linked copy of Spinoza's Ethics to MobileRead! The textbooks say it stands for quod erat demonstrandum, which means "that which was to be demonstrated," but I think it means, "So there!") Last edited by WT Sharpe; 03-16-2010 at 07:00 PM. |
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03-16-2010, 07:03 PM | #400 |
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03-16-2010, 07:06 PM | #401 | |
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03-16-2010, 07:31 PM | #402 | ||||||
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I'm sorry that this post is so long; I lack the clarity of mind to make it shorter and more concise
I feel that answering to all the posts in the last four pages since I posted would only complicate the discussion. So I'll explain what I mean by reasoning without using the concept of "right" and "wrong". As has been stated before, one can't reason in void, so one has to have a set of assumptions one believes are true. Descartes and Thomas Aquinas tried to get everything from First Principle, without using knowledge gathered by human civilisation - I don't think this is possible, unless the First Principle is the Unified Field Theory from physics, and we get everything right on the way. I take my assumptions, in order, from following disciplines: 1) Physics. I assume physical experiments will continue to give the same results in the future, so physical theories can be used to determine how everything in the world works. Mathematics can also be used, albeit one has to be careful to make sure it really works like the world does where one applied it - while maths is always correct, using it may give incorrect results otherwise. 2) History - with less certainty, but applicable to societies and human beings more than physics. The more something happens time and again in history, with the same results, the more I can trust it will happen again in the same way. There are disciplines that try to summarize historical results in theories easier to comprehend , like sociology and psychology, but those disciplines are full of contradicting schools and theories, and the concept of "right" and "wrong" is so often used in experiments and by test subjects that I tend to stay away from those, instead concentrating on historical accounts - which I admit I like to read a lot anyway Statistics can be a good source of information, but one needs to be sure how information was gathered before one can trust it - sociological surveys shove millions of variables under the rug (as those can't be accounted for, us being only human) and behave as if their results were as hard a data as data from physics experiments. Based on only this data, and various summaries of this data I decide to trust less or more (I only have one human life and can't double-check everything) I think I can draw a lot of conclusions, without having to use even once a word like: "good", "bad", "evil", "right", "wrong", "morality" or "ethics". I can, for example, understand the "free speech" idea by checking with history how it originated, that it basically means that some government or another organisation controlling some place says that it won't oppress people for speaking freely. Then I can check how it really worked in the past, what people could do, what governments did, etc. Nowhere in that reasoning I have to state that "free speech" is a "right", or worse, an "absolute right". Such things don't exist, don't have basis in reality, but it's surely nice to hear your government telling you you have an absolute right to something by virtue of being alive. Good commercial. If you happen to live in society that accepts slavery, then it's accepted and normal there - it's a fact of life. Now, you may feel you would feel better in a society where the slavery is not accepted, or that such society would be more efficient, better prepared for the future, or simply more people would be happier (as much as you can perceive their happiness), and thus you can work to steer that society in the desired direction, by changing people's minds about it. But saying the slavery is "bad", because people have a "right" to be free is gibberish. It sounds like speech, it looks like reasoning, but the words don't mean anything, so they mean a different thing to each person saying them or hearing them. Of course, skilled orator or politician can use such sounding words to maximize the number of people that support his ascent to power, but if you try to have a logical discussion with those words, soon you notice that you can prove or disprove everything ,and you're turning in circles instead of getting conclusions everyone can agree with (possibly with reservations), or at worst, getting a conclusion that something can't be proven, disproved or solved. tompe seems to use moral theories as a basis for reasoning, though complicated ones. I can't say I'm in the same boat - I tried to study various philosophical theories, but usually very close to the beginning of the reasoning I encounter one of those words that don't mean anything, and I don't understand anything they're trying to say from that point on. So I just keep to what I described above. Quote:
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2. I 'm not saying no one should make decisions based on incomplete information, or fuzzy, unwieldy representation of information which "right" and "wrong" is. I'm saying you shouldn't trust the conclusions from such reasoning. If someone completely unknown to me attacks my family member, I won't waste time to gather more information, but will jump to the rescue - with hope I'm doing the right thing. But when I have time to think, and a desire to write a philosophical essay, I won't employ such hacky reasoning in it. Quote:
But when you write about hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's, I feel compelled to check some facts - and I'm not sure we have enough information to judge. Wikipedia says the "that the total Iraqi violent death toll due to the Iraq War since the US-led invasion is more than 1.2 million (1,220,580)" and later "the death estimate was revised to 1,033,000 with a given range of 946,000 to 1,120,000". Additionally about 4.2 million (16% of population) have become refugees "fleeing systematic persecution and have no desire to return". However, it's not clear that all those casualties are the effect of war, and it's not known how many people might have died or lost homes, due to moves of Saddam regime, had the invasion not happened. So I generally try to avoid reasoning about current events, as with time more data comes, and it's gathered by less emotionally engaged people. The whole Iraq was, and is a country of fighting clans, there were lots of casualties there before the invasion, most refugees are now afraid of attacks by their own compatriots and not by American soldiers, and I'd argue the more direct cause for the majority of Iraqi deaths in the recent years are the beliefs and ethics (to use the most descriptive word) of the Iraqi societies. Quote:
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But on that point, you're probably right - there's no telling who might use nuclear weapons, and for what reasons. Even a very practical person might have some illogical but beautiful dream, like destruction of US, that leads this person in life. |
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03-16-2010, 07:58 PM | #403 | |||
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I stated that I am doing the same thing you have done in the past by asking you to provide some proof or data to back up a claim you made. That such proof or data needs be personal in nature is irrelevant to the fact that my asking you to provide data is no different to you asking another to provide data. Yes the data is different in nature but the asking is the same. Quote:
Cheers, PKFFW |
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03-16-2010, 08:15 PM | #404 |
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Society is often wrong every society. Slavery, segregation, sodomy laws, I'm not going to go all godwin's law here but that society was wrong too. The tyranny of the majority doesn't make them right any more than might makes right.
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03-16-2010, 08:18 PM | #405 | ||||||
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I'm stating that the mere fact that you believe the decision making process should be based on that information is an assertion by you that this is the "right" way to make decisions. Or the "right" information on which to base decisions. Ergo, you begin the very decision making process itself with a determination of what you think is "right". Quote:
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Cheers, PKFFW |
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