> don’t believe math exists in nature

I gathered that. So how do you explain why it works so well, and how is it not "in nature" by doing so? Do you think thoughts exist in nature? Do people exist in nature? Do words? This notion of "in nature", like the reality of numbers, is really not as simple as you appear to believe it does.

>I’d just like an explanation

You should just Google "why numbers are real" and dive down the rabbit hole, then. There isn't an easy explanation, on either side of the issue, which is exactly what makes it intriguing. (Note; such a quest will be made difficult because the technical term "real numbers" exists. You might find it easier to google "why numbers are not real", and paying attention to, rather than facilely dismissing, the counter-arguments.)

>I don’t find it particularly interesting at all, and I’d like to understand why you do, even if it’s a one sentence response.

Because I've thought about it (and learned about it) a lot more than people who respond the way you have and don't find it intriguing. As I said, anyone who believes it is a simple issue doesn't actually understand the issue. It explores epistemic and metaphysical uncertainty (and certainty) more completely than any other single question I have come across, and yet does not simply reduce to epistemic or metaphysical uncertainty.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

It’s more of a basic observation from watching how things‘ve spiralled the same in multiple countries that have voluntary voting vs how that’s been avoided in places with compulsory voting It’s also the most common opinion in my country so at minimum it’s a cultural opinion rather than a personal one

Only way to hold putin accountable is to drive all the way to Moscow and bring him back.

If we leave it at only discussing and studying, it seems unlikely that there would be any noteworthy change. However, if we were to go further and prosecute (for example: death sentence for people who are found guilty of adequately illegal crimes), it could plausibly change behavior.

Also, bringing awareness of these crimes to a broader spectrum of the public could increase the chances of similar extra-judicial punishment being carried out.

The US Military is well aware of how persuasive fear can be, I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if the management of that organization was on the receiving end of the transaction for a change. Perhaps they might find the experience as persuasive as their innocent victims do.

Have you any theories on how something substantial could be done towards improving this hilarious yet unfortunate state of affairs?

I would be interested in seeing this thread if you can find it.

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Great discussion points - thank you for your reply.

I agree, whenever a moral stance or ideological stance is at the top of the approval rating by mass media, social media, & the general populace you will have a entitled, snobbish, dismissive, even hostile attitude towards different stances.

The term that seems to best encompass this self-justifying attitude is egregore. This term signifies a thought form accepted by large numbers which persists over generations - a lot of definitions include an occult bit which I think is a symptom of the dismissive attitude of those immersed in the egregore).

Possible examples: 1) an economy must continue to grow, capitalism 2) electricity via solar power & wind power will reverse climate change 3) humanism 4) MAGA & Trumpism 5) systemic racism 6) systemic genderism 7) the monarchy 8) theism, 9) human rights, & 10) your last point from your reply, scientism.

> None of this is my idea it is all in an essay Richard Dawkins wrote a long time ago debunking the Gaia hypothesis.

Is "debunk" synonymous with "scientifically disproven"?

> I agree with the sentiment but I disagree with calling something that is a literary device a theory. If it's a theory it makes falsifiable predictions better than other theories of standard biology and I couldn't find any such predictions.

Are you perhaps accidentally conflating a theory with a scientific theory?

> This stuff is just as poetic as the pseudoscience in this article and it actually is real not some poetic musings.

Is this to say that the content of the article is necessarily incorrect (according to sound epistemology), in part or in whole?

> Again, I find real science more beautiful and poetic than pseudoscience.

Personally, I find internet armchair science and philosophy to be the most beautiful of all.

Hey y'all, I got a question that has buggin' me for a while.

How reasonable is a theist position (any, deistic, pagan, muslim, etc.) in comparison to the atheist position?

Tell me in detail, heck, use 1-10 scales if you want just to bring the point home.

There is a lot of context for that question I want to add as well:

First, I would appreciate your own personal answer, and also another of a more objective kind; what is the academic consensus? World-wide, European, and American.

Second, as someone who is not currently enrolled in any college program, or has any relevant college background, what are the best authors, books, sources, etc that I could study for myself and learn about the issue concerning both the academic consesus, and developing my own thoughts on the matter?

Third, the reason why I brought myself here to ask, is that after so many years engaging philosophy, apologetics, history, science, you name it (I just like to read a lot of shit), I find myself noticing quite a handful of figures in the public scene taking king of the hill stances. For example theist Jay Dyer and Atheist Tom Jump. Quite frankly, such attitude is just plain repulsive, even with my biases, and it leaves me bamboozled thinking what the hell frick of a book or thing did I miss that made these people so confident in their positions. Am I plain retarded? Or are such people enduring severe psychological issues?

Give me hope, Reddit.

(The term agnostic is acknowledged and put away for the sake of the question, so theist should be defined as belief in an immaterial realm, and/or transcendent being(s), while atheist defined as a position which stands in DENIAL to that. The definitons are as such whether the evidence that prompted both positions be either sufficient, or beyond doubt.

I'll not take an atheist position which defines itself fundamentally skeptical as atheist, because that's just plain agnosticism.)

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Most probably won't, look at the Iraq War for example. 72 % of Americans supported the invasion that killed over a million people, yet nowadays people act like they totally didn't support it and a) act like Bush was solely responsible, and b) treat Bush, a literal war criminal, like some sort of cute grandpa.

>I do not believe that morality exists independent of sentient existence, or what might be called consciousness

It is called consciousness, and you are saying you don't believe morality exists.

>For example, I do not think anything of moral significance occurs on Mars or Pluto or the Sun.

Nothing of moral significance occurs in the absence of moral agents. The events of the physical world are amoral, but the actions of moral agents are either moral or immoral.

>nothing left to assess the morality of that action,

So you're saying that murdering every human in existence wouldn't be immoral? That seems like an odd, and very immoral, position to take.

>a tiny sliver of time that wouldn't be relevant for the remainder of existence.

Much like everything we do. Oh well, everything will end someday and the world does not care, so might as well murder your family and all the witnesses, then you'll have done nothing wrong.

>threatened to launch the missiles unless you tortured them

When someone makes a threat and then kills someone by following through on it, they have killed someone, regardless of the demands they made or whether anyone tried to appease them. It can be a tough thing to accept, but that's just how it works.

>I do not think humans are the only animals capable of moral reasoning.

Humans are the only animals capable of any sort of reasoning. Humans can interpret the behavior of other animals however they like, the animals cannot know or care, they simply act in response to stimuli however their genetic programming causes them to, without thought or remorse.

>don't humans have instincts as well?

The real question is whether humans have anything other than instincts. Your ability to ask the question proves you have self-determination. You don't need to agree with this for it to be true. In fact, it is your ability to disagree which makes it true. Certainly, you can mischaracterize everything that every human has ever done as "instinct", but it seems more like a cross between semantic bullshit and hiding from reality than a reasonable intellectual position.

>I resolve these issues by placing perpetuating the species as the prime directive of morality,

That is the opposite of morality, just as choosing to do so is the opposite of instinct, despite the fact that it could (attempts to) replicate the results of acting on instinct alone would do, if every human did the same.

If only your immoral pretense of morality were actually as satisfying as you wish it would be. Then humans would just be apes, and nobody would have to spend any time considering your opinion about anything. 🙁

I'm not saying you are wrong, but this seems like little more than a personal theory.

I would argue that this kind of exercise is not intended for the Putins of the world but rather those who actually do the fighting. If we can convince them to be more disciplined and moral we might limit war crimes and violence against civilians.

There will be wars as long as Putins exist, but soldiers can nullify the worst of their effects by just refusing to participate in war crimes.

When only a select few vote, it’s safe (and indeed effective) to completely ignore the wants/needs of the non- voters.
This leads to extremism- the easiest way to get more for your chosen few is to take more from the groups you don’t care about. This creates a feedback loop where you’re now incentivised to make it harder for those groups to vote (since you know they already dislike you) which means fewer of them vote and they become more ignorable and more ripe for you to squeeze in favor of your chosen. It also means you can focus for support from a group that represents a smaller and smaller percentage of the populace, because all that actually matters is what percentage of the voters they are.
Alienating the more moderate parts of your original base doesn’t matter - they’ll just drop off the rolls (or be cleared off by you) hell your vote percent might actually improve.

When the populace and the voters are always the same demographic this kind of thing can’t work.
It’s pretty straightforward math.

Extremism profits from making the demographics of voters heavily skewed from the demographics of the populace. Why would you allow that to happen when it’s simple to prevent with mandatory voting?

The people who give the orders will learn nothing but the people fighting the war might be able to.

You start to see the point of why Socrates and others debate how a society should operate- in no small part, to produce citizens who are not repugnant nor deserving of scorn from others.

It's not inconceivable that you could look around yourself in a crowd and go "these are good people- I am glad to be among them."

I will reply later with more thoughts, but I think two folks who are best at making this distinction (why humans can be moral agents, but lions cannot) are Michael Tomasello and Stephen Darwall. If you are interested.

And thanks for actually listening to the content, most people just read the abstract!

>1000 years ago most groups believe women should have less rights than men, it changed over time as more and more groups are convinced that this is a bad idea and eventually it became the dominant moral consensus to give women equal rights, a few groups not agreeing to this mean little but to prove that morality is still a consensus, the only difference is localized consensus or widespread consensus.

By your definition, then, people 1000 years ago who believed women should have fewer rights than men were right, by virtue of the fact that their position held group consensus. They were also right about slavery, slaughtering their enemies, etc.

This to me is a preoccupation with what seems moral, to a specific group at a specific time, rather than what is moral. Is your claim that there is no actual morality, just preferences about what appears moral from a given perspective?

> Consequently we get far far fewer of the fringe extremists in our politics than we see in the international news.

This is what I am curious about: how is it that mandatory voting causes people to be less extreme, improve the political discourse, etc? Perhaps (or perhaps not) there happens to be a correlation, but what is the/any causality based on?

The ethics of war are not somthing putin cares about. Those fighting against him can and should still use them.

There is also the question of whether initiating a war is ever ethical/justified. It's not to hard to craft an example where aggressive intervention appears to be the only moral path forward. (And if we can do that, we definitely need ethics for war/intervention/occupation.)

I’ve never made the connection of individualism in Abraham religion to atomic individualism, the souls being the ultimate atomic individual. Another interesting piece of the reason that American Christianity being politically conservative

Good read over all

Antinatalism would say this is just prolonging the suffering of unlucky people, we will never solve suffering and its not worth it.

Upvoting because it's a good question, but I couldn't disagree more with the premise. In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault lays out an argument about why the criminal justice systems of the western world shifted from public torture and execution to a prison system. It's very well worth the read and I could not do it justice, but I'll try to lay out a argument from it. There are a few points from it worth bringing up. Public torture and executions were considered a right of the sovereign whose laws were broken. The severity of the punishment was not simply about the degree to which the law had been broken, but rather a display to the public of the sovereign upholding their end of the social contract. The power that sovereigns had to wield was justified by the notion that their laws and their rule protected those under it, and public displays were a signal that they upheld their end of the social contract, provided the order that they claimed to, and reinforced the notion that they had the right to employ that force. What ultimately abolished such displays was a change in the philosophy behind them. It was a deeper understanding of the inherent flaws of that system. It too easily evokes sympathy for the punished and may tilt public opinion against the sovereign. In times when the people do not feel the sovereign is upholding their end of the social contract, it provokes them, and directs their attention towards the sovereign. The shift towards gentler discipline, more private and less extreme forms of punishment, was the result of philosophical advancement, and the shift occurred in less than a century.

It's important to note that Foucault did not think that the shift was an effort to become more humanitarian, but rather a technological progression in our philosophy of power. But the advancement of this philosophy had a radical effect on how those subjected to criminal justice systems were treated.

Is it unreasonable to think that war crimes, which are also an application of power by rulers, for the purpose of control, could also change drastically in the way they manifest as a result of greater public understanding of the effects they have?