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Empathy:
Well, I do NOT claim there is no basis for objective morality. I claim general empathy provides an innate basis for making decisions about social morals, ethics, values, purposes. I claim empathy among perspectives of consciousness is objectively innate (self evident). What I DO claim is that such empathy is subject to nurturing and that a subjective aspect for such issues cannot be eliminated. Certainly, not merely by defining a rug under which to try to sweep the subjective aspects.
I am less concerned with definitional contrivances than I am with how to sustain a decent, responsible citizenry for a representative republic. I do not think you addressed those concerns. I do not care so much about systems for definitions that do not relate to real world concerns beyond definitional contrivances. It is fine to contrive a definition of "physical health" (or even well being or welfare) to a system that avails measurables. But it is not so fine to pretend that a mere system for definitions or measurables can lead to resolution of real world concerns that such definitions do not address.
Weinberg made the inference to utilitarianism. For trying to prescribe an appearance of objective morality, one can substitute any word one may want. Utilitarianism, pleasure, happiness, greatest good for greatest number, well being, physical health, and so on. The problem will remain: How to apply an objective standard for one as a standard for all subjects. That is where nonsense tends to come in. I gave examples for that, which you seem not to have digested.
The nub is this: To what extent do we want responsible, competent, free thinking adults to participate in the assimilation of social morals, ethics, values, purposes, and to what extent do we want such responsibility to be surrendered to moral experts, for them to make decisions based on definitions contrived because they yield measurables? The "answer," I think, is CONTINGENT on what kind of society/republic we want and what kind of cultural competency the general citizenry has. Some societies are not especially competent or liberty literate, so rule under "moral experts" may be what most of them want (or deserve?).
Regarding sacred texts: I did not mean to imply that I take specific literalisms in any such texts to be sound for all societies in all places. Rather, I take them as guides for understanding historical ways of thought and as metaphors. I tried to point up how Jesus swept most of such literalisms under two general moral commandments. In modern parlance, I prefer Good Faith as a synopsis for the Great Commandment, and Good Will as a synopsis for the Golden Rule.
However, I subsume both under an innate tendency for being empathetic. The problem for a society is in how specifically to nurture and assimilate that empathy to particular and recurrent social applications. By no contrivance can any unfolding resolution of that problem be accomplished entirely free of either the objective (implicating innate empathy) or the subjective (implicating nurtured values). For such purpose, I think the objective and the subjective are inextricably linked. I think trying to untie that link is a snipe hunt.
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Well, what does "physical health" mean? Does it encompass the health of dangerous individuals, societies, or national rulers? Does it prefer mental prowess, emotional stability, or cultural purposefulness? How should it encompass goals for genetic and cyber engineering, and for which individuals? Or fitness to an assigned job? To be assigned or determined by whom? Does physical health favor conditioning for speed, or endurance, or strength, or disease resistance?
Is it objectively moral to improve the health of a despotic psychopath able to put his finger on the button? Should every person receive medical treatment to maximize "physical health," even if it leads to reduction of effectiveness of inoculations or susceptibility to pandemic because of lack of genetic or health diversity?
Nonsense, Per Steven Weinberg: "Now, Sam Harris is aware of this kind of counter argument [to utilitarianism], and says it's not happiness, it's human welfare. Well, as you make things VAGUER and vaguer, of course, it becomes harder and harder to say it doesn't fit your own moral feelings, but it also becomes less and less useful as a means of making moral judgements. You could take that to the extreme and make up some nonsense word and say that's the important thing and no-one could refute it but it wouldn't be very helpful. I regard human welfare and the way Sam Harris refers to it as sort of halfway in that direction to absolute nonsense."
IAE, what would maximizing the physical health for the greatest number entail? Whose health would be sacrificed so the health of the greatest number could be maximized? Who would decide? Some healthy people stay that way because they decline to live in antiseptic environments. That way, they harden their immune systems. Can any moral scientisimist say who should thus harden himself and who should not?
What resources should be sacrificed to pursue the greatest physical health for the greatest number? Should resources be sacrificed for developing technologies to defend nations or the world against artificial or natural asteroid attacks? What objective moral science based on physical health or well being can or should objectively answer such questions? Should the masses have no say against the "moral experts"?
NOTE: I do not oppose scientific research to find cures or to improve health. I think populations should seek to assimilate values for pursuing such aims. But to call such assimilations of values "objectively good" in the sense of being purely determinable by expert moral scientists is a reach too far. I agree with the idea of contingent morality. I agree that an idea of mutual empathy is both contingently and objectively valid. However, because such idea of empathy necessitates reference to subjectivity, I think moral issues, like existentiality generally, entangles both with objectivity and subjectivity. To me, that seems obvious.
To me, a notion that morality is entirely subjective is nonsense. And an idea that morality can be reduced to pure objectivity is likewise nonsense. Rather, the idea of morality is entangled both with innate empathy and with particular subjectivity. As Jesus said: Good Faith (Great Commandment), and Good Will (Golden Rule). If (CONTINGENTLY) we want a decent republic of free thinking and responsible adults, we need to stop teaching children that morality is entirely subjective (or does not exist), and we need to stop teaching children to believe, irresponsibly, that morality is entirely objective (what fake moral scientisimists say it is). And we need to stop ridiculing or reviling wisdom just because it may be found in ancient texts.
Btw, I suspect some neuroscientists believe they can objectively quantify pleasure. Problem: Do we really want a world of pleasure addicts? Maybe we can put everyone on the Cloud/Matrix after we divine algorithms to control AI to service our pleasures. Lol.
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Every sentient person can readily see how the political (as opposed to racial) demographic is shifting to a socialist/sheeple demographic that believes in and votes for insane free-stuff political promises. The faster we indoctrinate and import non-assimilating people from socialist cultures, the faster the electorate flips into idiocy. How many California's, Mexico's, Argentina's, and Venezuela's does the world need, before it can figure this out?
What kind of person can believe you can allow open borders and keep a republic? So how can anyone like Mueller call himself a Republican? Only by lying. He is not a Republican. He and the ilk he works for are Rinos. A step below dog poop. At least dog poop does not pretend to be something that it is not.
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As an institution, the Catholic Church has a severe problem, but it is a problem now facing nearly every institution of significant persuasive influence. Including many Protestant denominations, academia, media, banking, the judiciary, Congress, Hollywood. Many of our institutional leaders seem to have been selected for promotion precisely because they are the worst of the worst.
Useful idiots everywhere have been made soft in the head, so they are now tolerant of nearly every kind of perversion and depravity imaginable. Of course, this anti-civilizing and indecent lunacy was bound to lead to the grooming of children for abuse. And from there to the destruction of republics. And from there to the farming of the masses, as if they were of no more value than sexed up sheeple.
IOW, too many ignoranti and corrupti exchanged their decency and brains for their immediate gratifications. So now we reap this. In every institution. Even to the destruction of our borders and our republic. Among many people, good sense has simply been sucked right out their nether regions into the vortex. There will not be a nice way to come back from this rampant evil.
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When a pedophile gets political power, what moral code could he possibly have that would protect the public? Answer: None whatsoever. So, how many pedophiles are now being selected by our various institutions, such as the priesthood, academia, Scouts, Hollywood, media, higher levels of corporations, Congress, and so on? Where does the trans-perv agenda stop? When do people wake up and realize that our central institutions have been taken over by some of the worst of the worst? So why should such perverted femimen and feminazis be trusted, when they fund political agitation, open borders, and mass grooming of school children? When do ordinary, decent citizens begin to fight back? When we elect Pocahontas? S/
The Wussy Left has become so tolerant of every depravity that it has lost all credibility to claim a right to be indignant about anything.
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Far more abusive to children and nations are the useful idiots that believe they should help the "benign" oligarchs that want to open their borders and replace their republics.
Where is the evidence that any open-border adcocating oligarch ever had the best interests of the people at heart? Yet, Progs prefer to place their trust not in theirselves or an ideal of a higher Mind, but in oligarchs systematically selected for their people-farming proclivities.
So, who is the biggest abuser?
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No moral code is without some arbitrary subjectivity.
Most modern institutions of education, indoctrination, and information tend to be somewhat godless.
As I survey the condition of the USA, I do not sense much hope that it will be able to continue to abide as a representative republic or to be able to resist the machinations of oligarchic people farmers.
I do not sense such farmers to be benign, nor do I get why so many useful idiots actually believe there is any effective intention to usher in a new age of globally socialistic free stuff.
Whatever the "scientific" or "progressive" bent of modern educators, it seems more likely to promote human degradation and collective enserfment than it does enlightenment, dignity, freedom, or even humanity.
Most ideas about God tend to imagine a benign Reconciler that is interested in humanity. That aspect is neither entirely subjective nor entirely objective. Rather, it shares aspects of both.
Similarly, Consciousness objectively abides, but it functions subjectively.
The idea of God tends to be of a Conscious aspect or entity. Which entails subjectivity.
Many god believers take traditional religious stories to be metaphors. Like stories with morals. For moral guidance.
No responsible parent would raise a child to be without moral guidance.
The goal is to produce a responsible, free-thinking, caring child.
Without that, no representative republic can be sustained.
Militant atheists worry too much about literalism that most thinkers do not literally believe in.
Why else would we see so many child abusers, pervs, and deviants celebrated and promoted to positions of power, everywhere? Nowadays, responsible parents can hardly trust priests, teachers, journalists, politicians, and certainly not lying people-farming oligarchs that want to destroy the republic by opening wide its borders.
IOW, militant atheists tilt at windmills, while their republic is stolen beneath their feet.
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Militant Legalistas (femimen and social justice "warriors") want legalism out the wazoo to replace individual competence, dignity, and freedom. Their program translates into people farming by Big Brotha Sista. (There ought be a law for everything; there oughta be a scientific explanation for everything.) In their own countries, this fetish for legalism / elitism turns into fascism or totalitarianism. So they migrate to representative republics, where they spread their sickness --- too blind to see how sick it is, or too corrupt to forego its opportunities. Nasty parasites.
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E PLURIBUS UNUM:
Preserving a nation depends on preserving an assimilating culture. But to encourage permanent minority enclaves would be to encourage permanent division. To encourage multiple permanent varieties of such enclaves would be to encourage multiple permanent divisions. People acculturated to such enclaves would tend to become biased in favor of them and sometimes biased against those outside them. No doubt, many such enclaves persist year after year. (I rode to Harlingen several days ago and got trapped in traffic after an accident ahead at about 1:30 am. People were standing outside their vehicles, and I could find no one who could speak English.) Yet, the very people encouraging such permanent divisions seem often to blame others for dividing Americans. To me, this makes little sense.
A key to cultural attitudes about assimilation may be in how children are named. Here is an article that shows some insights (even though I think much of it is squishy political correctness): See https://publicpolicy.stanford.edu/news/what-history-tells-us-about-assimilation-immigrants.
Regarding how likely a group of immigrants is to remain an alien presence inside America's borders long after settling here: "[F]or immigrants who arrived in the 1900s and 1910s, the more time they spent in the U.S., the less likely they were to give their children foreign-sounding names."
"By 1930, more than two-thirds of immigrants had applied for citizenship and almost all reported they could speak some English."
Compare http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-immigrants-0515-md-20170515-story.html: "Right-wing nativists believe Mexicans won't assimilate, and the far-left multiculturalists think they shouldn't." "It's no surprise then that overall assimilation rates for Mexican-Americans do not match those of other immigrant groups...."
So, what happens as each enclave sees others claiming special entitlement to reparations or special favors? Well, human nature is that, soon enough, all begin to claim entitlement to special favors. After all, if they don't whine first and loudest, some other group will. (Kurt Vonnegut's short story about Harrison Bergeron may be of interest in this regard.)
However, entitlement-minded groups seeking special favors need a common scapegoat to unite them. It tends not to be effective to make the oligarchs that own the media and most of our politicians and institutional leaders the scapegoats, because they have the money and means to punish and deflect. So, the scapegoat to which deflection is made needs to be a softer target. Such as a demographic that has been trained to naively project its good faith and good will to assume those values are held by everyone.
The demographic most obviously targeted by opinion-shaping oligarchs nowadays consists of white Christian males with responsible jobs. They are expected to accept that unjust attitudes of extreme privilege and supremacism must be in their skin color and genes. But, of course, not in any others. So, white Christian males with responsible jobs must be made to atone to everyone else.
Problem is, good faith and good will do not necessarily apply to practiced whiners, narcissists, sociopaths, or wannabe people-farmers. Rather, many able-bodied "minorities" are taught to believe social justice entitles them to special favors in perpetuity --- not because of the content of their character or the merit of their talent or work, but almost solely because of the color of their skin, the "fluidity" of their gender, or the ancestry of their national origin. There seems to be no statue of limitations on such claims. The expectations are not for a one-time adjustment, but for special favors in perpetuity. So how can such a mindset consider itself in any way to be decent or principled?
How helpful are affirmative-action special-favors? Has welfare as promoted by our rulers really helped Black families? 77% of black births are now to single moms, 49% for Hispanic immigrants. What is causing this? Not enough welfare or socialism? Too much coddling of entitlement-mindedness? Or something else?
MUSING: I think America needs more control over immigration, more assimilation and a better means-tested safety net, socialism that does not impede the work ethic, less entitlement-mindedness, more respect for individual competence and responsibility. Much less focus on race and ethnicity.
It's not that I do not see the plight of poor people or people of broken homes. It's that I think such people should be fairly treated --- REGARDLESS of skin color. But what do I see? Special pleading by Blacks (BLM), Hispanics (La Raza), Gays (men in women's bathrooms; school children being groomed).
This is based on a culture of Division, based on scapegoating. But who is being scapegoated? Not the real culprits. Not the oligarchs that want to destroy the borders and the republic. No, the scapegoat chosen by the oligarchs to deflect attention away from their divisive hate agitation consists of white Christian males with responsible jobs (now called "White Supremacists").
Yes, there is divisive hate being stirred! But for goodness sake, get the right culprit!
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SMART ATHEISTS: Well, I've been around awhile. So I think the density among militant atheists has more to do with self-selection. I doubt *smart atheists tend to be so militant. I suspect what drives militant atheists is often some weird sexual and drug proclivity. But that's just a suspicion.
*Actually, I suspect smart atheists tend to believe in an idea of "higher mindedness" (they often respect moral codes), but they have somehow become conditioned so that the word "God," laden as it is, leads them to shrink from the light.
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I am saying I don't think people that hate the idea of an assimilating culture and instead prefer a salad bowl of contending groups of imavictim types are equipped to preserve a Constitutional Republic. Dems tend to defend the permanent salad-bowl-divided-status of various minority communities. So it's a bit nervy for them to blame such divisiveness on Repubs.
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Sadly, like every other corruptible institution, a lot of organized churches have been enticed to put their dogma in the service of encouraging exploitation and destroying representative republics. It did not have to be this way. They could have actually stood for something.
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Too many naive people project their good faith, as if it were shared among everyone else. However, there is definitely a class of narcissists, sociopaths, and self-godding people-farmers that sees nothing wrong in using every contrivance to seek personal gain. Such people have distinct advantages in finding ways to promote one another to higher levels of social and political influence. I think they have put the republic to risk perhaps greater than ever before. If we ever had a citizenry capable of preserving government of, by, and for the people, I am by no means confident that is still the case. I think every institution has been corrupted against the Constitutional Republic. Including academia, media, the civil service, the Church, and certainly the political parties. They are all infested with fiends or stoolies for oligarchic people-farmers utterly lacking in human decency, empathy, or good faith.
I am not a Republican. I loathe both Rinos and Dinos. I consider myself a Conserver of Liberty. I think anyone who does not see the need to defend the borders from being flooded with liberty-illiterates is seriously duped. Of course, a lot of such people probably think it would be just fine to eliminate borders and republics and just trust to the "fine, noble, olgarchs" funding most of this division. I don't.
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It is impossible for any society to tolerate, fund, and promote every thing. I do not care in the least what you do with a consenting adult in your bedroom. I do care when you want to force me to fund the grooming of my children to your lifestyle, as if it were normal. Forcing children to celebrate transgenderism and anal sex is not normal to a representative republic of limited government. However, it is normal to a goose stepping society that wants to replace individual freedom and dignity with a system of gov totalitarianism as ruled by demented deviants. If that is what you want, take yourself to one of those nations. Caligula would have been proud.
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My evidence is Qualitative. By my sense of being, I sense my conscious identity. I sense my identity is dependent on a feedback system. I sense that system consists of an immeasurable quality or aspect of Consciousness, a measurable aspect of Substance (matter and energy), and a cumulation of Information about previous sequences that is stored with presently manifesting Substance.
I am unable to conceptualize how any of the three (Consciousness, Substance, Information) could abide without the other two. If the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) carries any truth value, then the aspects of Substance and Information could conceptually be collapsed into a math-based algorithm. That would still beg the question: Out of all possibilities within algorithmic parameters, how does any one sequence happen to become manifestly vectored? (Some people may pose the question as what collapses the wave function? Or, as Hawking mused, what breathes fire into the laws of Nature?)
So I would conceptualize the Godhead as consisting of three different faces for one reconciling reality: Consciousness/Substance/Information. None of those fluxing aspects or faces can exist by itself.
A mere appeal to chance is not very satisfactory. Nor a notion that all possibilities are made manifest in some algorithmic universe. That does not answer why mere math should ever "math itself." Moreover, it is perhaps even less parsimonious than a notion that Goddidit.
But even if math does somehow on some meta level factor itself (or undergo factoring by a Mathematician), that would seem to be a rather spiritual kind of math. IAE, IT is apparent that the system as a holism is one of dynamically fluxing feedback. IOW, what we think and do is factored by IT.
Of course, this is not a concept that can be empirically tested by going outside the cosmic system. We do not have access or power to conduct a double blind experiment on an alternative cosmos that is in all other respects kept the same. Rather, it is only a concept that seeks to be as consistent, coherent, and complete as reasonably possible. That facilitates ideas of empathetic connection, reconciliation, good faith, good will, and individual responsibility. All needed to facilitate a decent civilization that respects human freedom and dignified purposefulness. In that regard, the Bible is seen as a commonizing source of inspiring metaphors that connect us to sacred stories and ideas unfolding from the past.
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FORCE? Where? People have social preferences. Everyone does.
For example, I prefer a representative republic that avails decent freedom and dignity for its citizens. That entails respect for borders, less centralized bureaucracy, more respect for traditional families, tolerance for tolerant faiths, less tolerance for anti-American creeds, education for competent free-thinking responsible adults, assimilation to American ideals, wariness of egg sucking able-bodied haters of America.
Problem is, what we now have is a crush of pinkie waggers, to wit: Entitlement-minded wussies, legalism out-the-wazoo knowitalls, self-godding people-farmers, college partiers molded to be useful idiots, and sex deviated maniacs that have no higher-minded faith bent on FORCING everyone else to recognize them as "objectively normal."
IOW, pinkie waggers that do not believe in any objective standards, even as they want to force society to recognize them as being objectively normal. These people are completely incapable of standing up to defend against real fascism. They are the grease for rotting us into totalitarian enserfment. Now, that would be FORCE.
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The War is between people raised to have a semblance of good faith, who know they are not perfect little godlings, versus people twisted to have no faith, who want to be their own gods.
In pursuit of whatever happens to gratify the people of no good faith, there tends to be no line that they will not cross and no outrage that they will not perpetrate.
Until experience teaches otherwise, people of good faith tend to give everyone else the benefit of the doubt and presume they also are of good faith. But experience eventually teaches that such is not the case. There are many incorrigibles, narcissists, sociopaths, and non-empaths whose only raison d'être is to pleasure themselves. Unfortunately, freshly minted graduates can do much harm before they finally wake up and walk away from the evil.
Stand for something or fall for everything. Being unable to stand for anything may have something to do with the War Against Masculinity. Or individual competence and responsibility. This is The War that has been going on since time immemorial.
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Libs love America so much they can't wait to tear down the borders so the land can be flooded with ever more entitlement-minded liberty-illiterates. The better to produce a worldwide neo-plantation. To be governed, of course, by elite socialists that have only our best interests at heart. Gag!
In reply to Lincoln, asking whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal can avoid perishing from the earth, Libs say, "Here. Let me help it perish."
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TRUTH V. CONCEPTUALIZATION:
Except for trivial things, like things that are tautologies or true by definition, or perhaps reliably tested laws of nature, I doubt there are many "truths" that can be known as such with regard to human values and purposes.
Rather, there seems to be a good deal of self-fulfillment regarding such matters, which seems to differ among persons depending on many circumstances in their genetics, history, culture, and situational opportunities.
I doubt any accurate method for assigning numerical values to all such factors can determine the "truth" about what any person should most value for his life's purposes. Often, a person will have made a choice at a subjective level before his conscious self is even aware of it. In such cases, his conscious self may rationalize a reason after the fact. But that rationalized reason will be less a truth than a conceptualization.
So, to argue that one should base his life's choices solely on truths seems silly.
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Maybe you are using the words "cost-benefit analysis" in some kind of business actuarial way. If so, you're the only one that seems to be thinking in those terms. When I decide whether to take a vacation, I think about the cost, but I also think about intangible benefits. You know, like fun. Was the expense too much for the fun. Was the risk too much for the excitement. And so on. You seem to be making this harder than it is.
I'm not concerned with intellectual prowess. I was just correcting you concerning Pascal's Wager. Nor do I think you rebutted Dan. Certainly, not with any analogy based on Pascal's Wager.
Concise enough for you?
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UNPRINCIPLED ANTI-AMERICANS: If Obama and the people-farmers that fund him had any principles, they would be encouraging people to value one another based on the content of their character as individuals, rather than as pawns for a collectivist movement for creating a worldwide plantation under the boot of neo-elitist-fascists.
Let's face it, all these people-farmers and group-identity mongers may as well be contending factions of the KKK. None are any better than the KKK, but all accuse the others of being like the KKK. So now we have numerous collectivist-groups (blacks, hispanics, feminazis, femimen, gays, pagans, jihadis, indoctrinated students, incompetent entitlement-minded malcontents, etc.) all uniting against one group goat: White male straight Christians with responsible jobs, i.e., "White Privilegeds." Whiteys.
Those so-called Whiteys are presently too bewildered to fight back, such as by punishing the people-farmers that fund this, or by working to inspire people to return to decent principles, or even by resisting the trends for bestowing a crazy quilt of new political and economic benefits and entitlements on every conceivable kind of group that can cry-bully for victim status.
If people of all colors, genders, and orientations do not return to good sense, then Lincoln's test, whether this nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, will indeed be failed, and government of, by, and for the people will indeed perish from the earth.
There are forces at work trying to entice the nation to civil war. To try to ruin the nation conceived in liberty in order to replace it with a world conceived, divided, and ruled by greed, lust, profanity, perversion, and inhumanity. Goons, thugs, and sub-humans are heating the situation to dangerous temperatures, far beyond the remotest comprehension of the usefully idiotic, history-illiterate, special snowflake, tools of the Neo-Fascist People-Farrners.
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Re: "My comments about the Wager was clearly tongue-in-cheek"
Aha! I see. You were sharing a private joke, even though it did not pertain to the Op.
IAE, I don't think you understand Pascal's Wager as well as you think. Pascal argues that a rational person should LIVE AS THOUGH God exists and seek to believe in God. I capitalized to help you focus. IOW, it had to do both with belief and with living a moral life under God. That would be a life of rectitude. Rectitude -- definition: Rightness of principle or conduct; moral virtue. So, you see, you're wrong again. Rectitude did enter his moral equation.
I suspect you wanted to share a laugh at Pascal's expense. Which is easy with regard to the irrationality of his Wager. But how was that Wager pertinent, except to take a cheap shot at Pascal?
Regarding heavenly salvation: That was the whole basis for Pascal's wager. And you were the one that brought it up. But I agree with you: Pascal's wager had nothing to do with the Op.
Regarding fun: Was not Dan talking in part about a cost-benefit (rewards and detriments) analysis for one's life in taking risks? "Fun" was just my tongue-in-cheek way to summarize that analysis.
I suspect you probably have some ideas worth sharing. However, I think you should take more care before assuming that someone's else's viewpoint has no bearing. Or before presuming to know something you clearly did not.
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IRRATIONAL CONCEPTUALIZATIONS ABOUT GOD:
I agree that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually exclusive.
Too many people define a word, like omniscient, and then assume it must apply to God. IOW, they try to prove an assumption by assuming it. "Proofs by definition" tend to be circular in that way. But what if, instead of knowing all that will be or can be, the Godhead "only" knows all that is? What if, instead of being able to perform impossibilities, the Godhead is "only" able to do all that is possible?
What if God inhabits math to pull zeros apart to put equations on each side, to facilitate and inhabit algorithms that define and limit our universe and the cosmos of possibilities? What if a Godhead of Mathematician and Math avails the system wherewith all our experiences as human consciousness, measurable substance, and accumulating information are facilitated?
Given such a *system of algorithmic feedback, why suppose any conscious aspect of the Godhead could not be surprised on account of feedback within the system?
When matter and antimatter are put together, should anyone suppose there abides anything more than the possibilities of math, as it is actively sequenced with a mathematician? Among all possible algorithmic expressions, why, but for interest in feedback, would ours be selected?
Atheists imagine they have an answer: That all possibilities must be expressed somewhere sometime in some universe. But they still have no answer to this: Why should mere math be or become activated to express transposing sequences of algorithms? Why should fire be breathed into mere math, to inhabit it?
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*The range of algorithmic systems may be open, but the parameters availed within a particular algorithm may impose finitude within such system. This would impose conservational discipline, i.e, equations that have to balance, i.e., laws of nature. Still, whatever could possibly unfold within such parameters would be allowed, if by some means selected. So what is IT that selects each actual manifestation from within an entire array of possibilities? By my conceptualization, IT is a meta-mathematician operating in appreciation of feedback with a selected algorithmic system. But I do not imagine that must be anything more than a conceptualization.
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GOD'S INTEREST: I suspect God would be pretty bored if He were the lonely end all be all, with no capacity to entertain or appreciate perspectives apart from Himself. Sin seems an overly laden term for being interesting to God.
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1) You are wrong about Pascal. See "Blaise Pascal", Columbia History of Western Philosophy, page 353: Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas they stand to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).
2) An is-ought argument in the context of here and now goal seeking does not necessarily pertain to seeking heavenly salvation.
3) You did give an example. Here: "We see that all the time in politics where the need is a validation of a worldview and the "truth" is anything that meets that need."
4) True, you did not use the word fun. Perhaps because your world is limited to fact and truth seeking? I took that to be your idea of fun. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps there is no fun in your world.
I ignore your analysis, because it begins with such a patently false understanding of Pascal's Wager.
The problem with Pascal's Wager does not have to do with everyday choices for their own sake. It has to do with irrationality of seeking eternal salvation based on choice of what kind of God to believe in. Which does not define the topic of the Op.
See https://www.iep.utm.edu/pasc-wag/:
"According to the many-gods objection, Pascal’s wager begs the question and hence is irrational. It assumes that if God exists then God must take a rather specific form, which few open-minded agnostics would accept. Pascalians reply by invoking the notion of a genuine option (which is not defined), by devising run-off decision theory (which is not justified), by claiming that Pascal was understandably unaware of other cultures (which is not true), and by appealing to generic theism (which does not solve the problem)."
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FASCIST INEFFICIENCIES: Fascist inefficiencies need to be fed. They may begin by feeding and cannibalizing on targeted citizens at home. Such as Jews. Now Whites. When that fuel is exhausted, fascism often elicits kickbacks through corrupt deals abroad. Clinton cash. When that is exhausted, fascism looks to cannibalize or replace weak neighbors. This may continue until the world reverts to mass serfdom. Because equality and fairness. S/
Lysenko tried to force science. But science often depends on bursts of insight and chance. It tends to resist blunt force. Maybe Musk is too much a blunt force kind of guy.
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PURPOSE OF UNIVERSE: To entertain possibilities to infinity.
PASCAL'S WAGER: Did not Pascal's Wager pertain to trading earthly rectitude for possible eternal heavenly salvation, no matter how improbable? However, the Op does not pertain to heavenly salvation, but to how we go about trying to get the most out of everyday life.
For that, I don't think you are avoiding the Wager. In the example given, you seem to be making your own wager: That the potential fun of not cowering at home would be worth the risk of uncertain dangers. I also do that, often, when I ride my motorcycle at night.
My calculation is, I did not do that when I was responsible for two young daughters. But now that I am retired and my wife has a pension, the fun I get from riding seems worth it. But that is not a calculation I make by trying to put math values on facts or pluses and minuses.
Bottom line: We have no choice but to make choices, and the most important or enjoyable choices seem often to have to do with much more than calculable facts or truths. Concerning such everyday choices. invoking or denigrating Pascal's Wager seems generally pointless.
FACT ROBOTICISM: If all we sought were facts, we would be little more than data crunching machines. Or memory recycling machines, watching the same movie over and over. We seek to appreciate life. To enjoy music, art, literature, experience, travel, friends, adventure, stimulation. What we appreciate changes when the old and familiar grows stale. When new experiences beckon us to even newer adventures.
That seems to be inherent with an feedback system that is finite but unbounded. Is it true that even God can be surprised? We can't know, but the truth is I hope so. Otherwise, what a pointless, boring chap.
The truth seems to be that we are bound to a system where antimatter matches matter and sums to zero, it it were all brought together and summed. Yet, math, in itself, would seem a lifeless thing. Something seems to break it into variously experience-able sequences of transitioning equations and algorithms, perhaps of infinite potentiality. It is for our conscious imaginations to revel in experiencing and appreciating those. Beyond the mere fact that they ultimately, by themselves, would sum to zero.
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JEWISH TRIBALISM: I would not agree that it's expected or ok to act tribally with regard to corporate, governmental, or academic opportunities. I especially would not agree that it's ok for Jews to act in that way while claiming that other Whites should not! Educated and decent Americans ought to strive to behave better than that. This is the road for replacing representative republics with socialistic banana republics and it needs to be stopped. It is a very poor excuse for identity politics (salad bowl reasoning against e pluribus unum).
I would agree with this: The mix and number of new immigrants allowed should be carefully monitored to ensure they adopt and assimilate to the values as described in the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, it may now be too late for that. Our population is now too swamped with people that want to play identity politics, provided they exclude one targeted scapegoat group: White Christian straight males with productive jobs. That group is branded so as to be disallowed from playing the identity politics game. Except to hang its collective head and accept blame and recrimination.
The norm is not something the best society should strive for. That's why Civics should not have been sacrificed as a course of study. Now, it may be too late. Unfortunately, salad-bowl people think it's time to replace the Constitution and the founding ideals. They want to call it the product of dead white men, while failing to appreciate how experienced and well read those men were.
I think Jordan Peterson detests identity politics. Whether or not that's the case, I do. I think identity politics is a tactic the most corrupt among us use to divide and rule us. We condemn Hitler for it. I think we are right to do so.
But you may be right. It may be too late to restore decent assimilating values. We may be unable to avoid circling the drain all the way down to the banana republic. Because of our new "enlightened" salad bowl people.
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But for idealizing a reconciling Consciousness, I seem unable to imagine how there could abide an objective center for any abiding physicality, or even a subjective center for any perspective of packages of information. Were there no way to idealize, imagine, or project an appearance or experience of a center, how can any physicality be idealized to be real-in-itself?
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ENTANGLEMENT OF DIALECTICAL IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM:
Regarding the "science" (dialectical materialism) of socialism: Writing and studying history, philosophy, and literature can be more honest approaches for seeking a moral worldview than cherry-picking science. The more a study intertwines with subjective human consciousness, the less amenable it becomes to the methods of objective science.
Unless, perhaps, the people are fitted, like rats, to a long series of scientism as propaganda, until a culture can be fashioned for which the scientism seems for awhile to fit. Then a despot can train hordes of true-believing profs, students, and agitators. At least, until the world page turns.
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FITTING PEOPLE TO THEORY INSTEAD OF THEORY TO PEOPLE:
Global Warming is people-farming in search of scientism. Its proponents will change the "theory" until, by dividing and diversifying and pressure cooking enough people, they can select a people that will adopt the scientism religion.
This technique is a favorite of people farming fascists. That's why diversity and multi-culturalism are propagandized as strengths in themselves. When you throw a lot of diverse cultures together, and throw various schools of scientism at them, they can be more easily kept off balance while they are farmed and their republics and assimilating traditions are destroyed. Meantime, the points of scientism can be adjusted as needed, like a chef adding seasoning as he taste tests his stew.
Fascism:
1. Everything in the government.
2. Nothing outside the government.
3. Nothing against the government.
4. I would add: The government consists of bureaucrats obedient to a fluxing hierarchy (legalized mafia) of corporate profiteers, that profit by printing money to fund the government, that tax the outlays back from the people to run the government, that exact favors and fees to enrich and empower themselves.
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What about Man Caused Climate Change Theory, Anarchist Theory, Divide-And-Rule Theory, Might Makes Right Theory, Critical Race Theory, White Privilege Theory, Victim Reparations Theory, Fair Distribution Theory, Righting Past Injustices Theory, No Justice---No Peace Theory, Open Borders Theory, Diversity Enrichment Theory, Political Agitation and Mind Manipulation Theory, Man-Splaining and Man-Spreading Theory, Well-Being Utilitarian Morality Theory, Big Lie Theory?
Are you agreeing that there is little or no lasting science entailed in any of that?
If a professor for a college course attempts to brand any such course with an honorific of "science" (or of the science being settled), should that be sanctionable as fraud against the republic and its citizenry?
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Well, have you not noticed the urge by fascist corporatists to open our borders in order to swamp the votes of competent free-thinking Americans and make them irrelevant? That seems pretty fascist to me.
When they intimate that their program is consistent with science-based morality, instead of simple greed and lust for power, that is what I mean by fascist moral scientism.
A fascist may use corporate power to influence gov to dictate how people are allowed to live their lives. He may claim he has access to the best empirical information and the best experts trained to apply it. Based on his experts' scientific studies, he may claim that everyone else that has access only to their personal experiences and judgment should therefore, in respect of "science," defer to him --- even concerning political and social issues. This would in effect substitute rule by elites for representative governance.
Elites intimating that they have expertise in moral science will tend to argue that a citizenry, for its own best good, should, based on science (as perhaps told to us over and over again by corporate owned media), put aside their reservations and accept what the experts have scientifically determined. If parts of the citizenry balk, the fascist hierarchy can say, well, the science is settled. Or, our opinions are based on science, while yours are based only on personal experience and judgment.
The intimation appears to be that, because of elite determinations based in science, the general citizenry (flyover people) should just trust:
That open borders will lead to better economic results worldwide and more peace and stability.
That the more the multi-culti diversity, the stronger and better the society.
That eventually forced conversion to electrical cars will lessen the polluting emissions to our environment.
That gov-imposed speech codes are a good idea.
That society would be improved by replacing traditional families with gov supervision to ensure every child is availed the right to determine his or her own gender.
That it is good to import and indoctrinate people from third-world countries, because they will appreciate the benefits that scientifically run central gov can provide, and therefore make irrelevant the votes of people-that-think-for-themselves (science deniers).
That anyone who disagrees with the science as announced by corporatists running the gov is a deplorable, phobic, racist, bigoted, misogynistic, chauvenistic, science-denier.
And so on.
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Well, you first had to make an assumption about oughts: That a society that avails freedom of thought, expression, association, and enterprise ought to be considered to be a "better" society than one that finds it necessary in its circumstances to suppress such freedoms in order to provide better security for deserving people.
My evidence is Qualitative. By my sense of being, I sense my conscious identity. I sense my identity is dependent on a feedback system. I sense that system consists of an immeasurable quality or aspect of Consciousness, a measurable aspect of Substance (matter and energy), and a cumulation of Information about previous sequences that is stored with presently manifesting Substance.
I am unable to conceptualize how any of the three (Consciousness, Substance, Information) could abide without the other two. If the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) carries any truth value, then the aspects of Substance and Information could conceptually be collapsed into a math-based algorithm. That would still beg the question: Out of all possibilities within algorithmic parameters, how does any one sequence happen to become manifestly vectored? (Some people may pose the question as what collapses the wave function? Or, as Hawking mused, what breathes fire into the laws of Nature?)
So I would conceptualize the Godhead as consisting of three different faces for one reconciling reality: Consciousness/Substance/Information. None of those fluxing aspects or faces can exist by itself.
A mere appeal to chance is not very satisfactory. Nor a notion that all possibilities are made manifest in some algorithmic universe. That does not answer why mere math should ever "math itself." Moreover, it is perhaps even less parsimonious than a notion that Goddidit.
But even if math does somehow on some meta level factor itself (or undergo factoring by a Mathematician), that would seem to be a rather spiritual kind of math. IAE, IT is apparent that the system as a holism is one of dynamically fluxing feedback. IOW, what we think and do is factored by IT.
Of course, this is not a concept that can be empirically tested by going outside the cosmic system. We do not have access or power to conduct a double blind experiment on an alternative cosmos that is in all other respects kept the same. Rather, it is only a concept that seeks to be as consistent, coherent, and complete as reasonably possible. That facilitates ideas of empathetic connection, reconciliation, good faith, good will, and individual responsibility. All needed to facilitate a decent civilization that respects human freedom and dignified purposefulness. In that regard, the Bible is seen as a commonizing source of inspiring metaphors that connect us to sacred stories and ideas unfolding from the past.
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FORCE? Where? People have social preferences. Everyone does.
For example, I prefer a representative republic that avails decent freedom and dignity for its citizens. That entails respect for borders, less centralized bureaucracy, more respect for traditional families, tolerance for tolerant faiths, less tolerance for anti-American creeds, education for competent free-thinking responsible adults, assimilation to American ideals, wariness of egg sucking able-bodied haters of America.
Problem is, what we now have is a crush of pinkie waggers, to wit: Entitlement-minded wussies, legalism out-the-wazoo knowitalls, self-godding people-farmers, college partiers molded to be useful idiots, and sex deviated maniacs that have no higher-minded faith bent on FORCING everyone else to recognize them as "objectively normal."
IOW, pinkie waggers that do not believe in any objective standards, even as they want to force society to recognize them as being objectively normal. These people are completely incapable of standing up to defend against real fascism. They are the grease for rotting us into totalitarian enserfment. Now, that would be FORCE.
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The War is between people raised to have a semblance of good faith, who know they are not perfect little godlings, versus people twisted to have no faith, who want to be their own gods.
In pursuit of whatever happens to gratify the people of no good faith, there tends to be no line that they will not cross and no outrage that they will not perpetrate.
Until experience teaches otherwise, people of good faith tend to give everyone else the benefit of the doubt and presume they also are of good faith. But experience eventually teaches that such is not the case. There are many incorrigibles, narcissists, sociopaths, and non-empaths whose only raison d'être is to pleasure themselves. Unfortunately, freshly minted graduates can do much harm before they finally wake up and walk away from the evil.
Stand for something or fall for everything. Being unable to stand for anything may have something to do with the War Against Masculinity. Or individual competence and responsibility. This is The War that has been going on since time immemorial.
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Libs love America so much they can't wait to tear down the borders so the land can be flooded with ever more entitlement-minded liberty-illiterates. The better to produce a worldwide neo-plantation. To be governed, of course, by elite socialists that have only our best interests at heart. Gag!
In reply to Lincoln, asking whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal can avoid perishing from the earth, Libs say, "Here. Let me help it perish."
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TRUTH V. CONCEPTUALIZATION:
Except for trivial things, like things that are tautologies or true by definition, or perhaps reliably tested laws of nature, I doubt there are many "truths" that can be known as such with regard to human values and purposes.
Rather, there seems to be a good deal of self-fulfillment regarding such matters, which seems to differ among persons depending on many circumstances in their genetics, history, culture, and situational opportunities.
I doubt any accurate method for assigning numerical values to all such factors can determine the "truth" about what any person should most value for his life's purposes. Often, a person will have made a choice at a subjective level before his conscious self is even aware of it. In such cases, his conscious self may rationalize a reason after the fact. But that rationalized reason will be less a truth than a conceptualization.
So, to argue that one should base his life's choices solely on truths seems silly.
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Maybe you are using the words "cost-benefit analysis" in some kind of business actuarial way. If so, you're the only one that seems to be thinking in those terms. When I decide whether to take a vacation, I think about the cost, but I also think about intangible benefits. You know, like fun. Was the expense too much for the fun. Was the risk too much for the excitement. And so on. You seem to be making this harder than it is.
I'm not concerned with intellectual prowess. I was just correcting you concerning Pascal's Wager. Nor do I think you rebutted Dan. Certainly, not with any analogy based on Pascal's Wager.
Concise enough for you?
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UNPRINCIPLED ANTI-AMERICANS: If Obama and the people-farmers that fund him had any principles, they would be encouraging people to value one another based on the content of their character as individuals, rather than as pawns for a collectivist movement for creating a worldwide plantation under the boot of neo-elitist-fascists.
Let's face it, all these people-farmers and group-identity mongers may as well be contending factions of the KKK. None are any better than the KKK, but all accuse the others of being like the KKK. So now we have numerous collectivist-groups (blacks, hispanics, feminazis, femimen, gays, pagans, jihadis, indoctrinated students, incompetent entitlement-minded malcontents, etc.) all uniting against one group goat: White male straight Christians with responsible jobs, i.e., "White Privilegeds." Whiteys.
Those so-called Whiteys are presently too bewildered to fight back, such as by punishing the people-farmers that fund this, or by working to inspire people to return to decent principles, or even by resisting the trends for bestowing a crazy quilt of new political and economic benefits and entitlements on every conceivable kind of group that can cry-bully for victim status.
If people of all colors, genders, and orientations do not return to good sense, then Lincoln's test, whether this nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, will indeed be failed, and government of, by, and for the people will indeed perish from the earth.
There are forces at work trying to entice the nation to civil war. To try to ruin the nation conceived in liberty in order to replace it with a world conceived, divided, and ruled by greed, lust, profanity, perversion, and inhumanity. Goons, thugs, and sub-humans are heating the situation to dangerous temperatures, far beyond the remotest comprehension of the usefully idiotic, history-illiterate, special snowflake, tools of the Neo-Fascist People-Farrners.
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Re: "My comments about the Wager was clearly tongue-in-cheek"
Aha! I see. You were sharing a private joke, even though it did not pertain to the Op.
IAE, I don't think you understand Pascal's Wager as well as you think. Pascal argues that a rational person should LIVE AS THOUGH God exists and seek to believe in God. I capitalized to help you focus. IOW, it had to do both with belief and with living a moral life under God. That would be a life of rectitude. Rectitude -- definition: Rightness of principle or conduct; moral virtue. So, you see, you're wrong again. Rectitude did enter his moral equation.
I suspect you wanted to share a laugh at Pascal's expense. Which is easy with regard to the irrationality of his Wager. But how was that Wager pertinent, except to take a cheap shot at Pascal?
Regarding heavenly salvation: That was the whole basis for Pascal's wager. And you were the one that brought it up. But I agree with you: Pascal's wager had nothing to do with the Op.
Regarding fun: Was not Dan talking in part about a cost-benefit (rewards and detriments) analysis for one's life in taking risks? "Fun" was just my tongue-in-cheek way to summarize that analysis.
I suspect you probably have some ideas worth sharing. However, I think you should take more care before assuming that someone's else's viewpoint has no bearing. Or before presuming to know something you clearly did not.
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IRRATIONAL CONCEPTUALIZATIONS ABOUT GOD:
I agree that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually exclusive.
Too many people define a word, like omniscient, and then assume it must apply to God. IOW, they try to prove an assumption by assuming it. "Proofs by definition" tend to be circular in that way. But what if, instead of knowing all that will be or can be, the Godhead "only" knows all that is? What if, instead of being able to perform impossibilities, the Godhead is "only" able to do all that is possible?
What if God inhabits math to pull zeros apart to put equations on each side, to facilitate and inhabit algorithms that define and limit our universe and the cosmos of possibilities? What if a Godhead of Mathematician and Math avails the system wherewith all our experiences as human consciousness, measurable substance, and accumulating information are facilitated?
Given such a *system of algorithmic feedback, why suppose any conscious aspect of the Godhead could not be surprised on account of feedback within the system?
When matter and antimatter are put together, should anyone suppose there abides anything more than the possibilities of math, as it is actively sequenced with a mathematician? Among all possible algorithmic expressions, why, but for interest in feedback, would ours be selected?
Atheists imagine they have an answer: That all possibilities must be expressed somewhere sometime in some universe. But they still have no answer to this: Why should mere math be or become activated to express transposing sequences of algorithms? Why should fire be breathed into mere math, to inhabit it?
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*The range of algorithmic systems may be open, but the parameters availed within a particular algorithm may impose finitude within such system. This would impose conservational discipline, i.e, equations that have to balance, i.e., laws of nature. Still, whatever could possibly unfold within such parameters would be allowed, if by some means selected. So what is IT that selects each actual manifestation from within an entire array of possibilities? By my conceptualization, IT is a meta-mathematician operating in appreciation of feedback with a selected algorithmic system. But I do not imagine that must be anything more than a conceptualization.
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GOD'S INTEREST: I suspect God would be pretty bored if He were the lonely end all be all, with no capacity to entertain or appreciate perspectives apart from Himself. Sin seems an overly laden term for being interesting to God.
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1) You are wrong about Pascal. See "Blaise Pascal", Columbia History of Western Philosophy, page 353: Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas they stand to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).
2) An is-ought argument in the context of here and now goal seeking does not necessarily pertain to seeking heavenly salvation.
3) You did give an example. Here: "We see that all the time in politics where the need is a validation of a worldview and the "truth" is anything that meets that need."
4) True, you did not use the word fun. Perhaps because your world is limited to fact and truth seeking? I took that to be your idea of fun. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps there is no fun in your world.
I ignore your analysis, because it begins with such a patently false understanding of Pascal's Wager.
The problem with Pascal's Wager does not have to do with everyday choices for their own sake. It has to do with irrationality of seeking eternal salvation based on choice of what kind of God to believe in. Which does not define the topic of the Op.
See https://www.iep.utm.edu/pasc-wag/:
"According to the many-gods objection, Pascal’s wager begs the question and hence is irrational. It assumes that if God exists then God must take a rather specific form, which few open-minded agnostics would accept. Pascalians reply by invoking the notion of a genuine option (which is not defined), by devising run-off decision theory (which is not justified), by claiming that Pascal was understandably unaware of other cultures (which is not true), and by appealing to generic theism (which does not solve the problem)."
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FASCIST INEFFICIENCIES: Fascist inefficiencies need to be fed. They may begin by feeding and cannibalizing on targeted citizens at home. Such as Jews. Now Whites. When that fuel is exhausted, fascism often elicits kickbacks through corrupt deals abroad. Clinton cash. When that is exhausted, fascism looks to cannibalize or replace weak neighbors. This may continue until the world reverts to mass serfdom. Because equality and fairness. S/
Lysenko tried to force science. But science often depends on bursts of insight and chance. It tends to resist blunt force. Maybe Musk is too much a blunt force kind of guy.
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PURPOSE OF UNIVERSE: To entertain possibilities to infinity.
PASCAL'S WAGER: Did not Pascal's Wager pertain to trading earthly rectitude for possible eternal heavenly salvation, no matter how improbable? However, the Op does not pertain to heavenly salvation, but to how we go about trying to get the most out of everyday life.
For that, I don't think you are avoiding the Wager. In the example given, you seem to be making your own wager: That the potential fun of not cowering at home would be worth the risk of uncertain dangers. I also do that, often, when I ride my motorcycle at night.
My calculation is, I did not do that when I was responsible for two young daughters. But now that I am retired and my wife has a pension, the fun I get from riding seems worth it. But that is not a calculation I make by trying to put math values on facts or pluses and minuses.
Bottom line: We have no choice but to make choices, and the most important or enjoyable choices seem often to have to do with much more than calculable facts or truths. Concerning such everyday choices. invoking or denigrating Pascal's Wager seems generally pointless.
FACT ROBOTICISM: If all we sought were facts, we would be little more than data crunching machines. Or memory recycling machines, watching the same movie over and over. We seek to appreciate life. To enjoy music, art, literature, experience, travel, friends, adventure, stimulation. What we appreciate changes when the old and familiar grows stale. When new experiences beckon us to even newer adventures.
That seems to be inherent with an feedback system that is finite but unbounded. Is it true that even God can be surprised? We can't know, but the truth is I hope so. Otherwise, what a pointless, boring chap.
The truth seems to be that we are bound to a system where antimatter matches matter and sums to zero, it it were all brought together and summed. Yet, math, in itself, would seem a lifeless thing. Something seems to break it into variously experience-able sequences of transitioning equations and algorithms, perhaps of infinite potentiality. It is for our conscious imaginations to revel in experiencing and appreciating those. Beyond the mere fact that they ultimately, by themselves, would sum to zero.
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JEWISH TRIBALISM: I would not agree that it's expected or ok to act tribally with regard to corporate, governmental, or academic opportunities. I especially would not agree that it's ok for Jews to act in that way while claiming that other Whites should not! Educated and decent Americans ought to strive to behave better than that. This is the road for replacing representative republics with socialistic banana republics and it needs to be stopped. It is a very poor excuse for identity politics (salad bowl reasoning against e pluribus unum).
I would agree with this: The mix and number of new immigrants allowed should be carefully monitored to ensure they adopt and assimilate to the values as described in the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, it may now be too late for that. Our population is now too swamped with people that want to play identity politics, provided they exclude one targeted scapegoat group: White Christian straight males with productive jobs. That group is branded so as to be disallowed from playing the identity politics game. Except to hang its collective head and accept blame and recrimination.
The norm is not something the best society should strive for. That's why Civics should not have been sacrificed as a course of study. Now, it may be too late. Unfortunately, salad-bowl people think it's time to replace the Constitution and the founding ideals. They want to call it the product of dead white men, while failing to appreciate how experienced and well read those men were.
I think Jordan Peterson detests identity politics. Whether or not that's the case, I do. I think identity politics is a tactic the most corrupt among us use to divide and rule us. We condemn Hitler for it. I think we are right to do so.
But you may be right. It may be too late to restore decent assimilating values. We may be unable to avoid circling the drain all the way down to the banana republic. Because of our new "enlightened" salad bowl people.
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But for idealizing a reconciling Consciousness, I seem unable to imagine how there could abide an objective center for any abiding physicality, or even a subjective center for any perspective of packages of information. Were there no way to idealize, imagine, or project an appearance or experience of a center, how can any physicality be idealized to be real-in-itself?
*************
ENTANGLEMENT OF DIALECTICAL IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM:
Regarding the "science" (dialectical materialism) of socialism: Writing and studying history, philosophy, and literature can be more honest approaches for seeking a moral worldview than cherry-picking science. The more a study intertwines with subjective human consciousness, the less amenable it becomes to the methods of objective science.
Unless, perhaps, the people are fitted, like rats, to a long series of scientism as propaganda, until a culture can be fashioned for which the scientism seems for awhile to fit. Then a despot can train hordes of true-believing profs, students, and agitators. At least, until the world page turns.
**************
FITTING PEOPLE TO THEORY INSTEAD OF THEORY TO PEOPLE:
Global Warming is people-farming in search of scientism. Its proponents will change the "theory" until, by dividing and diversifying and pressure cooking enough people, they can select a people that will adopt the scientism religion.
This technique is a favorite of people farming fascists. That's why diversity and multi-culturalism are propagandized as strengths in themselves. When you throw a lot of diverse cultures together, and throw various schools of scientism at them, they can be more easily kept off balance while they are farmed and their republics and assimilating traditions are destroyed. Meantime, the points of scientism can be adjusted as needed, like a chef adding seasoning as he taste tests his stew.
Fascism:
1. Everything in the government.
2. Nothing outside the government.
3. Nothing against the government.
4. I would add: The government consists of bureaucrats obedient to a fluxing hierarchy (legalized mafia) of corporate profiteers, that profit by printing money to fund the government, that tax the outlays back from the people to run the government, that exact favors and fees to enrich and empower themselves.
*****************
What about Man Caused Climate Change Theory, Anarchist Theory, Divide-And-Rule Theory, Might Makes Right Theory, Critical Race Theory, White Privilege Theory, Victim Reparations Theory, Fair Distribution Theory, Righting Past Injustices Theory, No Justice---No Peace Theory, Open Borders Theory, Diversity Enrichment Theory, Political Agitation and Mind Manipulation Theory, Man-Splaining and Man-Spreading Theory, Well-Being Utilitarian Morality Theory, Big Lie Theory?
Are you agreeing that there is little or no lasting science entailed in any of that?
If a professor for a college course attempts to brand any such course with an honorific of "science" (or of the science being settled), should that be sanctionable as fraud against the republic and its citizenry?
*****************
Well, have you not noticed the urge by fascist corporatists to open our borders in order to swamp the votes of competent free-thinking Americans and make them irrelevant? That seems pretty fascist to me.
When they intimate that their program is consistent with science-based morality, instead of simple greed and lust for power, that is what I mean by fascist moral scientism.
A fascist may use corporate power to influence gov to dictate how people are allowed to live their lives. He may claim he has access to the best empirical information and the best experts trained to apply it. Based on his experts' scientific studies, he may claim that everyone else that has access only to their personal experiences and judgment should therefore, in respect of "science," defer to him --- even concerning political and social issues. This would in effect substitute rule by elites for representative governance.
Elites intimating that they have expertise in moral science will tend to argue that a citizenry, for its own best good, should, based on science (as perhaps told to us over and over again by corporate owned media), put aside their reservations and accept what the experts have scientifically determined. If parts of the citizenry balk, the fascist hierarchy can say, well, the science is settled. Or, our opinions are based on science, while yours are based only on personal experience and judgment.
The intimation appears to be that, because of elite determinations based in science, the general citizenry (flyover people) should just trust:
That open borders will lead to better economic results worldwide and more peace and stability.
That the more the multi-culti diversity, the stronger and better the society.
That eventually forced conversion to electrical cars will lessen the polluting emissions to our environment.
That gov-imposed speech codes are a good idea.
That society would be improved by replacing traditional families with gov supervision to ensure every child is availed the right to determine his or her own gender.
That it is good to import and indoctrinate people from third-world countries, because they will appreciate the benefits that scientifically run central gov can provide, and therefore make irrelevant the votes of people-that-think-for-themselves (science deniers).
That anyone who disagrees with the science as announced by corporatists running the gov is a deplorable, phobic, racist, bigoted, misogynistic, chauvenistic, science-denier.
And so on.
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Well, you first had to make an assumption about oughts: That a society that avails freedom of thought, expression, association, and enterprise ought to be considered to be a "better" society than one that finds it necessary in its circumstances to suppress such freedoms in order to provide better security for deserving people.
I happen to agree with your assumption. If that assumption is taken on faith to be true, then recommendations for how to pursue it seem to follow readily. Even so, I think you only "derived" what we ought to do based on an assumption about what would be "better." Not every society has produced members that tend to be competent or desirous of being responsible to think or do for themselves. Some have to contend with fascist religious practices and ingrained habits that preclude much room for individual freedom or responsibility. When a society lacks literacy and competence, the primary concern for its members will tend to relate to security for getting water, food, shelter, medicine, rather than freedom.
Musing: Why do corporatists want to import so many desperate people? Well, they know such people will skew in their attitudes to prefer security over freedom. They are easier to farm. So long as the corporatists do not allow them to improve their situations so they feel less desperate about their security. IOW, to preserve their farm, corporatists will promise, but never actually deliver, such people out of desperation. Ask: What Dem run city has actually improved the lives of minorities?
Moreover, there are unforeseeable consequences to every kind of worldview. A free thinking society that decentralizes technological competence to most of its citizenry has to contend with this problem: What happens when an individual with access to WMD or AI technology goes bull goose looney and decides he needs to subjugate everyone else before they subjugate him? IOW, as technological power increases, how can it be distributed without risking mass destruction because an irate madman got access to it? To survive, will we have to lose our privacy? If everyone is made privy to the thoughts or actions of everyone else, then could anyone still claim to be a free-thinker?
Musing: Why do corporatists want to import so many desperate people? Well, they know such people will skew in their attitudes to prefer security over freedom. They are easier to farm. So long as the corporatists do not allow them to improve their situations so they feel less desperate about their security. IOW, to preserve their farm, corporatists will promise, but never actually deliver, such people out of desperation. Ask: What Dem run city has actually improved the lives of minorities?
Moreover, there are unforeseeable consequences to every kind of worldview. A free thinking society that decentralizes technological competence to most of its citizenry has to contend with this problem: What happens when an individual with access to WMD or AI technology goes bull goose looney and decides he needs to subjugate everyone else before they subjugate him? IOW, as technological power increases, how can it be distributed without risking mass destruction because an irate madman got access to it? To survive, will we have to lose our privacy? If everyone is made privy to the thoughts or actions of everyone else, then could anyone still claim to be a free-thinker?
Regardless, yes, I share your faith that human freedom is "better." But I don't think that ultimate faith that freedom is better is based in ultimate fact or science. I think it is based in an assumption, that is based in good faith and good will. To me, to have a human brain and not be allowed to think for oneself would be to be sub-humanized.
****************
Op -- Fascist Moral Scientism
A good primer is here: https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_scientism.html. However, it may require several approaches to get the link to work. It provides a conceptualization about scientism.
SCIENTISM: Scientism can be conceptualized as the broad-based belief that the assumptions and methods of research that are used for the physical and natural sciences are equally appropriate (or even essential) to all other disciplines --- including theosophy, philosophy, humanities, and social sciences. It is based on faith that natural science has authority over all other interpretations of life, so that the methods of natural science form the only proper elements in any philosophical (or other) inquiry.
Proponents of Scientism often assert that the boundaries of science could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science. In most extreme form, Scientism consists in faith that science has no boundaries, so that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavour will be dealt with and solved by science alone
SELF-ANNIHILATING: Scientism, in a sense, is self-annihilating because it takes the view that only scientific claims are meaningful --- which is not itself a scientific claim. Thus, Scientism is either false or meaningless.
MY COMMENTS:
OBJECTIVE SCIENCE: Generally, a field of science tends to be most objectively subject to investigation when the field is one in which the factors of significance can be readily identified, precisely measured, and subjected to double-blind experiments for which all factors except those being tested can be kept the same. Even then, various concerns may impede the investigation, such as if the act of observation in itself affects the result being measured, or a sufficient number of confirmation tests cannot readily be done. Bearing that in mind, studies of physics and chemistry seem usually most conducive to reliable science.
SUBJECTIVE FEEDBACK: For other fields, such as where subjective elements are unavoidable, complete reliance on science or supposed scientific experts, as opposed to experienced judgment, may often lead astray. For example, the practice of medicine is often thought to require both science and art. Same with politics. Other fields may also depend on tinkering with the imposition of various artificial and filtering parameters.
To study what empirically follows after an imposition of artificial parameters is not necessarily to shed light on what should be expected but for or beyond those parameters. For example, to study how a medicine may help a chimp may not reliably indicate how it may help a human. Or even subgroups among humans. To study how a governmental device or regulation may affect one kind of personality, habit of conformity, culture, or state is not necessarily to shed light on how it may affect another.
So, for fields of biology, sociology, psychology, education, advertising, journalism, and politics, the results of some scientific investigations can tend to be considerably less reliable. Or reliable only because, like Captain Picard, someone was instructed to "make it so." Sometimes, the results may tend to confirm reasoning in circles to predisposed biases.
In any event, such results will not shed light on the kinds of life purposes to which a society or person should aspire. In other words, they cannot, based on what objectively is, instruct us concerning what we subjectively ought. They may shed conditional light, given a chosen ought, on how practicably to go about tinkering to achieve it.
NO OUGHT FROM IS: Moral issues inherently entail subjective consciousness that will bedevil attempts at objectification. The more the entailment and feedback of consciousness (subjectivity), the less the entailment or reliability of the methods of science. The more the subject person being studied suspects about the purpose and methods of the study, the more he may fudge in his responses. (Political polls, anyone?)
As the feedback effect from subjective entailment becomes more significant to a study, it may become less appropriate to confer the honorific of "science" --- except sometimes to short circuit further thought in order to farm the minds and politics of weak or compromised thinkers. And that is the technique now favored among wannabe people-farmers: To convince ordinary people that they should subordinate their common sense and personal dignity to the phony superior "science" of fascists that want to live their lives for them. Indeed, many people have probably become conditioned to prefer to leave the driving of their minds to someone else. Problem is, with importation and indoctrination, they seem to be becoming the new majority.
SURRENDER TO FASCIST OUGHT: If Americans do not want to surrender their personal freedom, dignity, responsibility, autonomy, and judgment to fake fascist elitists, they need to wake up to the fact that much that is being offered by compromised academia, media, political agitators, and moral scientisimists has little to do with science, but much to do with nudging the free-thinking republic under the boot of divide-and-rule fascists.
COMMON SENSE: Common sense indicates areas that are beyond scientific kin, and perhaps more appropriate to the methods of philosophy and individual conceptualization. Such as for determining or measuring precisely what existed "before" the "beginning" of our measurable universe. Or for speculating that our universe could arise or be sustained out of nothing more than math, without the qualitative involvement of any Activator. Or for prescribing what is ultimately good or bad in purely scientific terms. Or for prescribing the best form of government for a particular society or culture. Or for prescribing or even defining equality of economic results among all people of the world. Or for deciding which groups should be "scientifically/morally entitled" based on superficial traits (such as color or recent status of invasive-"immigration") to gang up politically to take the stuff of other people. Or for pretending to make spiritual concepts irrelevant merely by imagining an infinity of untestable parallel universes or bubbles.
For those areas, good faith philosophical conceptualization with models and metaphors may provide at least as good an approach as over-greedy scientism and anti-theistic scientisimists. For such areas, much depends on choice of worldview.
Not every political philosophy is necessarily appropriate to every society or culture. If I were from a failed culture or nation, I may be tempted to imagine I was victimized, so that natural justice gives me some kind of "natural right" to invade a neighbor to "ëqualize" his stuff. However, I don't think that kind of philosophy is suitable for sustaining the modern world. Nor do I expect it inclines to raise economies. Rather, I suspect it tends more towards equalizing poverty and misery. People fixated on righting their victimhood by taking from others tend to waste time that could be better spent finding ways to be productive. Focusing on victimhood may even drain opportunities for real science from being deployed to repel that asteroid that has Earth's name on its trajectory.
But I do not base that judgment on science. I base it on my judgment and experience concerning human relations and history. By experiencing much and reading much. I do NOT call that judgment "science." In some cases, I may call it coming together to reason in good faith and good will.
For example, I happen to value a Constitution-based representative republic. Which I do not think can be sustained by importing or indoctrinating a flood of liberty-illiterates that can be easily bribed (and not to their long term good) by nefarious, godless, self-godded, people-farmers.
MORAL CONCEPTUALIZATION: Moral conceptualism (theosophy?) can help on conditional bases. For example, if I decide to identify with the idea of a representative republic, then I can make conditional recommendations. Such as, don't swamp the nation with a majority of imported voters that value instead electing politicians that promise free stuff, often elevated based on gang identifiers (such as race, etc.)
However, if I decide I just want to suck off the work of others, then I may prefer a gang, culture, or nation where the rulers have specialized in that sort of thing. And once they have sucked their own nation dry, I may want to emigrate with them to "spread my love" to another nation, to bless it with my "special sense of fairness."
It's not for nothing that many liberty-illiterates want to emigrate to the West.
*********************
Not a study of empirical, replicable, scientific, precise, cause-effect --- in which all other pertinent factors remain the same or are known in the mix to be insignificant.
More like a fishing for, and manipulation of, correlates --- bent towards farming the people.
Pb: Does NOT and cannot account for all pertinent and significant factors, and often cannot do double blind or ceteris paribus experimentation, because we do not have at our disposal any alternative universe/state/city/or even person in which all untested factors remain the same.
IOW, we need to take responsibility to develop capacity to appreciate and apply judgment, to think for ourselves about what we really want to cumulate, do, or pursue. Based on innate intellect, insight, intuition, experience, self-knowledge, and history. Unless we are content to be used as farmees.
*************
***************
CORRELATES: &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
******************
SELF FACTORING INFINITY:
Is there some self-factoring infinity, to factor ordered algorithms out of infinite capacities of chaos? If so, is that self-factoring infinity itself a mere algorithm, a mere chaos, or some innate entanglement of consciousness with the possibilities of mathematical structures? Who can say? All that seems to lead to too much reasoning in a circle, trying to prove assumptions by assuming them. Why not simply begin with direct experience of subjective consciousness?
If God encompasses capacity to express consciousness, to be meaningfully conscious and receptive to feedback, then some aspect of the Godhead can be consciously (subjectively) surprised. If God can be subjectively surprised, then a subjective aspect must permeate and be entangled with all apprehensions of moral right and wrong. Subjective Consciousness must be entangled with every presentation of objectively measurable Substance and Information.
In that light, the Godhead is a source of appreciative feedback and guidance, not a pre-determining or robotic judge of any objective math of moral right and wrong. In that case, we have a feedback system of good faith and good will in respect of which to come to reason together. A Worthy to consult and, in calm meditation and good faith and good will, to seek reason in respect of. Not a precise or robotic instruction manual for the best response to every situation. Not a dead how-to book for objectively measuring poetry.
For a subjective appreciator to expect to quantify objective values for the quality of his experience makes little sense.
****************
Op -- Fascist Moral Scientism
A good primer is here: https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_scientism.html. However, it may require several approaches to get the link to work. It provides a conceptualization about scientism.
SCIENTISM: Scientism can be conceptualized as the broad-based belief that the assumptions and methods of research that are used for the physical and natural sciences are equally appropriate (or even essential) to all other disciplines --- including theosophy, philosophy, humanities, and social sciences. It is based on faith that natural science has authority over all other interpretations of life, so that the methods of natural science form the only proper elements in any philosophical (or other) inquiry.
Proponents of Scientism often assert that the boundaries of science could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science. In most extreme form, Scientism consists in faith that science has no boundaries, so that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavour will be dealt with and solved by science alone
SELF-ANNIHILATING: Scientism, in a sense, is self-annihilating because it takes the view that only scientific claims are meaningful --- which is not itself a scientific claim. Thus, Scientism is either false or meaningless.
MY COMMENTS:
OBJECTIVE SCIENCE: Generally, a field of science tends to be most objectively subject to investigation when the field is one in which the factors of significance can be readily identified, precisely measured, and subjected to double-blind experiments for which all factors except those being tested can be kept the same. Even then, various concerns may impede the investigation, such as if the act of observation in itself affects the result being measured, or a sufficient number of confirmation tests cannot readily be done. Bearing that in mind, studies of physics and chemistry seem usually most conducive to reliable science.
SUBJECTIVE FEEDBACK: For other fields, such as where subjective elements are unavoidable, complete reliance on science or supposed scientific experts, as opposed to experienced judgment, may often lead astray. For example, the practice of medicine is often thought to require both science and art. Same with politics. Other fields may also depend on tinkering with the imposition of various artificial and filtering parameters.
To study what empirically follows after an imposition of artificial parameters is not necessarily to shed light on what should be expected but for or beyond those parameters. For example, to study how a medicine may help a chimp may not reliably indicate how it may help a human. Or even subgroups among humans. To study how a governmental device or regulation may affect one kind of personality, habit of conformity, culture, or state is not necessarily to shed light on how it may affect another.
So, for fields of biology, sociology, psychology, education, advertising, journalism, and politics, the results of some scientific investigations can tend to be considerably less reliable. Or reliable only because, like Captain Picard, someone was instructed to "make it so." Sometimes, the results may tend to confirm reasoning in circles to predisposed biases.
In any event, such results will not shed light on the kinds of life purposes to which a society or person should aspire. In other words, they cannot, based on what objectively is, instruct us concerning what we subjectively ought. They may shed conditional light, given a chosen ought, on how practicably to go about tinkering to achieve it.
NO OUGHT FROM IS: Moral issues inherently entail subjective consciousness that will bedevil attempts at objectification. The more the entailment and feedback of consciousness (subjectivity), the less the entailment or reliability of the methods of science. The more the subject person being studied suspects about the purpose and methods of the study, the more he may fudge in his responses. (Political polls, anyone?)
As the feedback effect from subjective entailment becomes more significant to a study, it may become less appropriate to confer the honorific of "science" --- except sometimes to short circuit further thought in order to farm the minds and politics of weak or compromised thinkers. And that is the technique now favored among wannabe people-farmers: To convince ordinary people that they should subordinate their common sense and personal dignity to the phony superior "science" of fascists that want to live their lives for them. Indeed, many people have probably become conditioned to prefer to leave the driving of their minds to someone else. Problem is, with importation and indoctrination, they seem to be becoming the new majority.
SURRENDER TO FASCIST OUGHT: If Americans do not want to surrender their personal freedom, dignity, responsibility, autonomy, and judgment to fake fascist elitists, they need to wake up to the fact that much that is being offered by compromised academia, media, political agitators, and moral scientisimists has little to do with science, but much to do with nudging the free-thinking republic under the boot of divide-and-rule fascists.
COMMON SENSE: Common sense indicates areas that are beyond scientific kin, and perhaps more appropriate to the methods of philosophy and individual conceptualization. Such as for determining or measuring precisely what existed "before" the "beginning" of our measurable universe. Or for speculating that our universe could arise or be sustained out of nothing more than math, without the qualitative involvement of any Activator. Or for prescribing what is ultimately good or bad in purely scientific terms. Or for prescribing the best form of government for a particular society or culture. Or for prescribing or even defining equality of economic results among all people of the world. Or for deciding which groups should be "scientifically/morally entitled" based on superficial traits (such as color or recent status of invasive-"immigration") to gang up politically to take the stuff of other people. Or for pretending to make spiritual concepts irrelevant merely by imagining an infinity of untestable parallel universes or bubbles.
For those areas, good faith philosophical conceptualization with models and metaphors may provide at least as good an approach as over-greedy scientism and anti-theistic scientisimists. For such areas, much depends on choice of worldview.
Not every political philosophy is necessarily appropriate to every society or culture. If I were from a failed culture or nation, I may be tempted to imagine I was victimized, so that natural justice gives me some kind of "natural right" to invade a neighbor to "ëqualize" his stuff. However, I don't think that kind of philosophy is suitable for sustaining the modern world. Nor do I expect it inclines to raise economies. Rather, I suspect it tends more towards equalizing poverty and misery. People fixated on righting their victimhood by taking from others tend to waste time that could be better spent finding ways to be productive. Focusing on victimhood may even drain opportunities for real science from being deployed to repel that asteroid that has Earth's name on its trajectory.
But I do not base that judgment on science. I base it on my judgment and experience concerning human relations and history. By experiencing much and reading much. I do NOT call that judgment "science." In some cases, I may call it coming together to reason in good faith and good will.
For example, I happen to value a Constitution-based representative republic. Which I do not think can be sustained by importing or indoctrinating a flood of liberty-illiterates that can be easily bribed (and not to their long term good) by nefarious, godless, self-godded, people-farmers.
MORAL CONCEPTUALIZATION: Moral conceptualism (theosophy?) can help on conditional bases. For example, if I decide to identify with the idea of a representative republic, then I can make conditional recommendations. Such as, don't swamp the nation with a majority of imported voters that value instead electing politicians that promise free stuff, often elevated based on gang identifiers (such as race, etc.)
However, if I decide I just want to suck off the work of others, then I may prefer a gang, culture, or nation where the rulers have specialized in that sort of thing. And once they have sucked their own nation dry, I may want to emigrate with them to "spread my love" to another nation, to bless it with my "special sense of fairness."
It's not for nothing that many liberty-illiterates want to emigrate to the West.
*********************
Not a study of empirical, replicable, scientific, precise, cause-effect --- in which all other pertinent factors remain the same or are known in the mix to be insignificant.
More like a fishing for, and manipulation of, correlates --- bent towards farming the people.
Pb: Does NOT and cannot account for all pertinent and significant factors, and often cannot do double blind or ceteris paribus experimentation, because we do not have at our disposal any alternative universe/state/city/or even person in which all untested factors remain the same.
IOW, we need to take responsibility to develop capacity to appreciate and apply judgment, to think for ourselves about what we really want to cumulate, do, or pursue. Based on innate intellect, insight, intuition, experience, self-knowledge, and history. Unless we are content to be used as farmees.
*************
***************
CORRELATES: &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
******************
SELF FACTORING INFINITY:
Is there some self-factoring infinity, to factor ordered algorithms out of infinite capacities of chaos? If so, is that self-factoring infinity itself a mere algorithm, a mere chaos, or some innate entanglement of consciousness with the possibilities of mathematical structures? Who can say? All that seems to lead to too much reasoning in a circle, trying to prove assumptions by assuming them. Why not simply begin with direct experience of subjective consciousness?
If God encompasses capacity to express consciousness, to be meaningfully conscious and receptive to feedback, then some aspect of the Godhead can be consciously (subjectively) surprised. If God can be subjectively surprised, then a subjective aspect must permeate and be entangled with all apprehensions of moral right and wrong. Subjective Consciousness must be entangled with every presentation of objectively measurable Substance and Information.
In that light, the Godhead is a source of appreciative feedback and guidance, not a pre-determining or robotic judge of any objective math of moral right and wrong. In that case, we have a feedback system of good faith and good will in respect of which to come to reason together. A Worthy to consult and, in calm meditation and good faith and good will, to seek reason in respect of. Not a precise or robotic instruction manual for the best response to every situation. Not a dead how-to book for objectively measuring poetry.
For a subjective appreciator to expect to quantify objective values for the quality of his experience makes little sense.
*********************
Even those that claim not to believe in a higher source of purposefulness tend religiously to find their purpose in something. Otherwise, it would be hard to lead a sapient life.
FACTORING PROBABILITIES AMONG PERSPECTIVES OF CONSCIOUSNESS:
Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of measurable conditions that might be related to the event. For example, if cancer is related to age, then, using Bayes’ theorem, the measure of a person’s age can be used to more accurately assess the probability that they have cancer, compared to the assessment of the probability of cancer made without knowledge of the person's age. With the Bayesian probability interpretation the theorem expresses how a subjective degree of belief should rationally change to account for availability of measurably related evidence. Bayesian inference is fundamental to Bayesian statistics.
Subjective Consciousness functions as if measurable events of the past should be a guide. This is how "if-then" reasoning proceeds, as it filters to select for the most reliably measurable factors to guide subsequently desired results. This can help Consciousness more in the "how" to achieve a desired result, but not so much in the "why" to desire a particular result.
The combined effect of various perspectives of Consciousness (subconsciously functioning as if commonly confirmed perceptions concerning the past should be assumed to be a "how to" guide) seems to function towards making such assumption self-fulfillingly consistent.
*****************
For example, the speed of light is not fixed as a thing-in-itself, but as a constant relationship to every perspective. To whatever the extent needed to preserve that constant, every perspective will have a differently "curved" (or reconciled or renormalized) experience of its space-time frame of reference.
Apart from co-dependent flux of relationships, there are not things-in-themselves, there never has been any such things, and there never will be any such things. Every relationship that we experience, sense, measure, appreciate, or communicate concerns Information about fluxing relationships --- not any "things" in themselves.
***********************
THEOSOPHY:
Regarding the link I provided, the online source apparently does not support its direct use. I have encountered that kind of difficulty before. When I'm really interested, I simply search the first clause of the first quotation from the link. Which I provided, along with other salient quotations.
Regarding scientism, I don't think it is honest to suggest I have used the term to condemn all scientific endeavor. Rather, I have specifically advocated that the method of philosophical conceptualization not be used if it impairs science.
Otoh, I think common sense indicates areas that are beyond scientific kin. Such as for determining or measuring precisely what existed "before" the "beginning" of our measurable universe. Or for speculating that our universe could arise or be sustained out of nothing more than math, without the qualitative involvement of any activator. Or for prescribing what is ultimately good or bad in purely scientific terms. Or for prescribing the best form of government for a particular society or culture. Or for prescribing or even defining equality of economic results among all people of the world. Or for deciding which groups should be "scientifically/morally entitled" based on superficial traits (such as color or recent status of invasive-"immigration") to gang up politically to take the stuff of other people. Or for pretending to make spiritual concepts irrelevant merely by imagining an infinity of untestable parallel universes or bubbles.
For those areas, I think philosophical conceptualization can provide at least as good an approach as over-greedy scientism and anti-theistic scientisimists. For such areas, much depends on choice of worldview. Not every political philosophy is necessarily appropriate to every society or culture.
Now, if I were from a failed culture or nation, I may be tempted to imagine I have some kind of "natural right" to invade a neighbor to "ëqualize" his stuff. However, I don't think that kind of philosophy is suitable for sustaining the modern world. I do not believe it would raise economies. Rather, I suspect it would tend more towards equalizing poverty and misery. It may even impair real science from being deployed to repel that asteroid that may have Earth's name on its trajectory.
But I do not base that on science. I base it on my judgment and experience concerning human relations and history. I do NOT call that judgment "science." In some cases, I may call it coming together to reason in good faith and good will.
For example, I happen to value a Constitution-based representative republic. Which I do not think can be sustained by importing or indoctrinating a flood of liberty-illiterates that can be easily bribed (and not to their long term good) by nefarious, godless, self-godded, people-farmers.
I do not believe you have thought through any point about "theosophism" or non-scientism "insights." I hope you do not believe that conceptual assimilations concerning social values are devoid of insight merely because their truth values cannot be proved in ultimate logic or science, outside of self-fulfilling experience. I hope you do not believe that nothing is of value unless it can be utterly reduced to 1's and 0's.
Moral conceptualism (theosophy?) can help on conditional bases. For example, if I decide to identify with the idea of a representative republic, then I can make conditional recommendations. Such as, don't swamp the nation with a majority of imported voters that value instead electing politicians that promise free stuff, often elevated based on gang identifiers (such as race, etc.)
Now, if I decide I just want to suck off the work of others, then I may prefer a gang, culture, or nation where the rulers have specialized in that sort of thing. And once they have sucked their own nation dry, I may want to emigrate with them to plague another nation with my "special sense of fairness." It's not for nothing that many liberty-illiterates want to emigrate to the West.
*****************
SCIENTISM:
I am surprised that, for someone so apparently dedicated to science, you seem unfamiliar with the now common term of scientism.
A good primer is here: https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_scientism.html:
Scientism is the broad-based belief that the assumptions and methods of research of the physical and natural sciences are equally appropriate (or even essential) to all other disciplines, including philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. It is based on the belief that natural science has authority over all other interpretations of life, and that the methods of natural science form the only proper elements in any philosophical (or other) inquiry.
....
Proponents of Scientism often assert that the boundaries of science could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science. In its most extreme form, Scientism can be seen as a faith that science has no boundaries, and that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavour will be dealt and solved by science alone
....
It has been argued that Scientism, in the strong sense, is self-annihilating in that it takes the view that only scientific claims are meaningful, which is not itself a scientific claim. Thus, Scientism is either false or meaningless.
Certainly, it requires the almost complete abandonment of any metaphysical or religious discussion, (and arguably also any ethical discussion), on the grounds that these cannot be apprehended by the scientific method, which is very limiting for a supposedy all-encompassing doctrine. Some would say that proponents of Scientism merely avoid actually engaging with many important arguments.
*************************
Since you seem unfamiliar with the concept, you probably have not thought much about tendencies loosed when corrupt or fake elites indoctrinate a citizenry into radical scientism. A society so indoctrinated will be trained to defer to so called scientific experts in every field, including morality, art, and politics. This is what I consider to be very dangerous to any citizenry that values and wants to preserve itself as comprising a representative republic. If you refuse to appreciate that, then I agree, we have very little to discuss.
*************
THE RUB:
Does potential for manifestation that is not presently manifested "exist"? If so conceptualized, then perhaps we should imagine the Universe at its simplest as a superposition of presently appreciated manifestation and potentiality of non-presently appreciated manifestation.
I agree that given an infinite number of yes and no answers, 1s and 0s (yin and yang?), such would carry potentiality for simulating an infinite number of realities. Question: Would that implicate an activating and involved Simulator? Would that Simulator retain capacity to intervene (or remain involved) in guiding the unfolding simulation?
The rub: What turns math into a functioning Algorithm? What can use mere math to avail interpretations or appearances of measurable sensations? I do not think science can provide or test for such an answer. I think whatever IT ultimately is, IT is beyond the reach of mortal science, but perhaps not beyond the reach of mortal appreciation.
**************
Everything Mueller does is calculated to please and collude with all the people that want to destroy the borders of the USA. Mueller is only a pimple on mountains of ooze that want to destroy the nation and the key ideals under which it was founded: Self reliance, individual responsibility, dignity of work ethic, resistance against gangster tribalism, equality of opportunity (not outcomes), color blind assimilation, family values, resistance against elitist despots, individual freedom of thought and expression. Mueller is O'Brien, working his way towards pushing Trump to Room 101. And all the while expecting that we should all love him for it. We have seen the face of collusion against the republic. It's face is Mueller's.
******************
FACTORING PROBABILITIES AMONG PERSPECTIVES OF CONSCIOUSNESS:
Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of measurable conditions that might be related to the event. For example, if cancer is related to age, then, using Bayes’ theorem, the measure of a person’s age can be used to more accurately assess the probability that they have cancer, compared to the assessment of the probability of cancer made without knowledge of the person's age. With the Bayesian probability interpretation the theorem expresses how a subjective degree of belief should rationally change to account for availability of measurably related evidence. Bayesian inference is fundamental to Bayesian statistics.
Subjective Consciousness functions as if measurable events of the past should be a guide. This is how "if-then" reasoning proceeds, as it filters to select for the most reliably measurable factors to guide subsequently desired results. This can help Consciousness more in the "how" to achieve a desired result, but not so much in the "why" to desire a particular result.
The combined effect of various perspectives of Consciousness (subconsciously functioning as if commonly confirmed perceptions concerning the past should be assumed to be a "how to" guide) seems to function towards making such assumption self-fulfillingly consistent.
*****************
For example, the speed of light is not fixed as a thing-in-itself, but as a constant relationship to every perspective. To whatever the extent needed to preserve that constant, every perspective will have a differently "curved" (or reconciled or renormalized) experience of its space-time frame of reference.
Apart from co-dependent flux of relationships, there are not things-in-themselves, there never has been any such things, and there never will be any such things. Every relationship that we experience, sense, measure, appreciate, or communicate concerns Information about fluxing relationships --- not any "things" in themselves.
***********************
THEOSOPHY:
Regarding the link I provided, the online source apparently does not support its direct use. I have encountered that kind of difficulty before. When I'm really interested, I simply search the first clause of the first quotation from the link. Which I provided, along with other salient quotations.
Regarding scientism, I don't think it is honest to suggest I have used the term to condemn all scientific endeavor. Rather, I have specifically advocated that the method of philosophical conceptualization not be used if it impairs science.
Otoh, I think common sense indicates areas that are beyond scientific kin. Such as for determining or measuring precisely what existed "before" the "beginning" of our measurable universe. Or for speculating that our universe could arise or be sustained out of nothing more than math, without the qualitative involvement of any activator. Or for prescribing what is ultimately good or bad in purely scientific terms. Or for prescribing the best form of government for a particular society or culture. Or for prescribing or even defining equality of economic results among all people of the world. Or for deciding which groups should be "scientifically/morally entitled" based on superficial traits (such as color or recent status of invasive-"immigration") to gang up politically to take the stuff of other people. Or for pretending to make spiritual concepts irrelevant merely by imagining an infinity of untestable parallel universes or bubbles.
For those areas, I think philosophical conceptualization can provide at least as good an approach as over-greedy scientism and anti-theistic scientisimists. For such areas, much depends on choice of worldview. Not every political philosophy is necessarily appropriate to every society or culture.
Now, if I were from a failed culture or nation, I may be tempted to imagine I have some kind of "natural right" to invade a neighbor to "ëqualize" his stuff. However, I don't think that kind of philosophy is suitable for sustaining the modern world. I do not believe it would raise economies. Rather, I suspect it would tend more towards equalizing poverty and misery. It may even impair real science from being deployed to repel that asteroid that may have Earth's name on its trajectory.
But I do not base that on science. I base it on my judgment and experience concerning human relations and history. I do NOT call that judgment "science." In some cases, I may call it coming together to reason in good faith and good will.
For example, I happen to value a Constitution-based representative republic. Which I do not think can be sustained by importing or indoctrinating a flood of liberty-illiterates that can be easily bribed (and not to their long term good) by nefarious, godless, self-godded, people-farmers.
I do not believe you have thought through any point about "theosophism" or non-scientism "insights." I hope you do not believe that conceptual assimilations concerning social values are devoid of insight merely because their truth values cannot be proved in ultimate logic or science, outside of self-fulfilling experience. I hope you do not believe that nothing is of value unless it can be utterly reduced to 1's and 0's.
Moral conceptualism (theosophy?) can help on conditional bases. For example, if I decide to identify with the idea of a representative republic, then I can make conditional recommendations. Such as, don't swamp the nation with a majority of imported voters that value instead electing politicians that promise free stuff, often elevated based on gang identifiers (such as race, etc.)
Now, if I decide I just want to suck off the work of others, then I may prefer a gang, culture, or nation where the rulers have specialized in that sort of thing. And once they have sucked their own nation dry, I may want to emigrate with them to plague another nation with my "special sense of fairness." It's not for nothing that many liberty-illiterates want to emigrate to the West.
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SCIENTISM:
I am surprised that, for someone so apparently dedicated to science, you seem unfamiliar with the now common term of scientism.
A good primer is here: https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_scientism.html:
Scientism is the broad-based belief that the assumptions and methods of research of the physical and natural sciences are equally appropriate (or even essential) to all other disciplines, including philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. It is based on the belief that natural science has authority over all other interpretations of life, and that the methods of natural science form the only proper elements in any philosophical (or other) inquiry.
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Proponents of Scientism often assert that the boundaries of science could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science. In its most extreme form, Scientism can be seen as a faith that science has no boundaries, and that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavour will be dealt and solved by science alone
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It has been argued that Scientism, in the strong sense, is self-annihilating in that it takes the view that only scientific claims are meaningful, which is not itself a scientific claim. Thus, Scientism is either false or meaningless.
Certainly, it requires the almost complete abandonment of any metaphysical or religious discussion, (and arguably also any ethical discussion), on the grounds that these cannot be apprehended by the scientific method, which is very limiting for a supposedy all-encompassing doctrine. Some would say that proponents of Scientism merely avoid actually engaging with many important arguments.
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Since you seem unfamiliar with the concept, you probably have not thought much about tendencies loosed when corrupt or fake elites indoctrinate a citizenry into radical scientism. A society so indoctrinated will be trained to defer to so called scientific experts in every field, including morality, art, and politics. This is what I consider to be very dangerous to any citizenry that values and wants to preserve itself as comprising a representative republic. If you refuse to appreciate that, then I agree, we have very little to discuss.
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THE RUB:
Does potential for manifestation that is not presently manifested "exist"? If so conceptualized, then perhaps we should imagine the Universe at its simplest as a superposition of presently appreciated manifestation and potentiality of non-presently appreciated manifestation.
I agree that given an infinite number of yes and no answers, 1s and 0s (yin and yang?), such would carry potentiality for simulating an infinite number of realities. Question: Would that implicate an activating and involved Simulator? Would that Simulator retain capacity to intervene (or remain involved) in guiding the unfolding simulation?
The rub: What turns math into a functioning Algorithm? What can use mere math to avail interpretations or appearances of measurable sensations? I do not think science can provide or test for such an answer. I think whatever IT ultimately is, IT is beyond the reach of mortal science, but perhaps not beyond the reach of mortal appreciation.
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Everything Mueller does is calculated to please and collude with all the people that want to destroy the borders of the USA. Mueller is only a pimple on mountains of ooze that want to destroy the nation and the key ideals under which it was founded: Self reliance, individual responsibility, dignity of work ethic, resistance against gangster tribalism, equality of opportunity (not outcomes), color blind assimilation, family values, resistance against elitist despots, individual freedom of thought and expression. Mueller is O'Brien, working his way towards pushing Trump to Room 101. And all the while expecting that we should all love him for it. We have seen the face of collusion against the republic. It's face is Mueller's.
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