>>76311
>"What clicked in our dna and cells that made us intelligent"

I think what you're looking for is the dawn of agriculture, not particularly the dawn of intelligence.

I would say that would possibly be complex language.

Just guessin'

>>76329
So you're saying that complex language was the dawn of intelligence.

>>76330
Well, you need a sufficient medium to carry thoughts, ideas, and information.

When you can carry them across several generations in a physical medium, you have writing. As long as people can read your symbols, the message you have can be carried beyond your lifetime to people you never will know existed.

I'm sure intelligence existed long before complex language, but the ability to carry that intelligence between individuals, groups, and through generations requires some type of specialized communication system.

Based on the context of your question and your response to Royal Night Guard's analysis, I'm assuming this either isn't an official course in logic, or it's one that's focused only on introductory concepts. I've never taken formal logic in full, but I've taken a course in programming logic that required an understanding of how boolean logic works, so I can provide an alternate take on this. This shouldn't be inconsistent with what Royal Night Guard said, but it's taking a simplified approach to the question with a focus on the more basic core concepts of logic, without using too much terminology.

Logic is big on being able to make concrete statements. To work in logic, whatever statements you're assessing, they have to be broken down such that they can be evaluated as either "true" or "false", no wishy-washy in-between stuff. So the first question is always: How can you rephrase a question such that it can be answered with a series of true-or-false declarations? In this case we have the question:

Is this bad weather?

Fortunately, this question can already be interpreted as a true-or-false question on its own. But let's rephrase it a bit to make it clearer.

Is it true that this is bad weather?

The core question here is whether or not "this" can be assigned certain descriptors, in this case, whether it can be described as "bad weather". But "bad weather" involves the combination of two different concepts that operate independently of each other, "bad" and "weather", so you have to take that into account. You are asking whether or not both of these descriptors apply to "this" simultaneously, so actually you're evaluating the truth of two different statements:
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>>76551
>>76560

Yes, What we said is consistent, and you're probably right about what the professor wants. When the OP said that the problem came up towards the end of a philosophy class I misread that as meaning at the end of an entire class that had already been taken instead of at the end of a particular day's lecture.

A formal approach like I gave is more advanced than you'll see early on in a study of logic and meaning, though what Christopher was doing in >>76552 is basically this sort of approach without the formal syntax. By my denotations the correct statement would be represented b(W)(z).

It should be kind of intuitive that "bad" is referring to a set of things that are bad and "weather" is referring to a set of things that are weather, and that in the OP sentence they are combining to give "bad weather", which is referring to a set of things that are both bad and weather. Because "this" is referring to some particular thing in the context of the utterance, the meaning of the whole sentence is going to be true or false depending on whether that particular thing is both bad and weather.

This can all be represented by diagrams and sets: the intersection of the set of bad things and the set of things that are weather, or by propositional variables and boolean operators: b∧w = P, or by functions: as above. Anything representable in one of these can be represented in the others. If the class is going to cover a lot of logic and meaning the professor will likely give a handout or a text defining the notations he expects you to use.

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This isn't a math class so throw those greek letter formulas and long multi-part examples right out the window. This question can easily be answered in one sentence.

Yes, the weather is bad because it's making me uncomfortable.

Things like weather, movies, or food are so subjective that it's totally reasonable to base your answer on personal feelings alone.

>>74535
That gave me a good laugh, I guess its all relative.

Hi! As someone who's struggling with the same issues as you, I thought I'd share some of my insights in the matter. I hope they can help you! Picture related, because I thought you could use a hug. (I apologize for the possible typos, which are due to a combination of a new laptop keyboard, as well as the rambling, which is due to me being a derp)

Look, it's very simple. Pedophiles /want/ to have sexual conduct with children. They see it in a positive light, and see nothing wrong with it. If you don't, then you're not a pedophile. Having thoughts about something is not the same as wanting it. You've got nothing to fear, amigo.

As for the porn? Well, think of it this way. Some people, through birth, through nurture or just f-ed up odds, have some weird stuff in their brains. It's not exactly related to what they really want, it's just some obsessive-compulsive "brain bug" or summat. And they might have a compulsion to look up weird porn and masturbate to it, just to appease that brain bug. As long as you're aware of it and don't do what it wants, you'll be cool.

Also, there's nothing wrong with masturbation, as long as you're getting off to stuff you like instead of the brain bug. Masturbation's a normal and healthy thing, don't feel like it's somehow filthy because of these thoughts. Just try to disconnect yourself from them and keep doing your own thing.

To use a (pretty gross) extended metaphor: The brain is a city, your personal city. And on its streets, there are puddles of vomit. They've always been there, but you haven't really noticed before. They're stuck on the streets, and they can't really be scrubbed away. But the vomit is not the city, nor is it the streets. It's simply a part of them.

Sometimes, you'll step into the puddles. Sometimes, you can avert them in time, because no one really wants to step into. Sometimes, you'll see the puddles coming, but you might absent-mindedly walk into them anyway. Or, trying to walk around, you trip and fall face-first into the vomit. Sometimes, you might walk away from a puddle only t…

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obedmi Very neat blog article. Keep writing.

>>76505
>Honestly, the only trend there has /ever/ been, is up(pic related)
Attached is the population graph for Japan.

I think this is where most people are getting the "population will flatten out" thing from.

It would not be right to extinguish a life that decided to continue. It would not be right to convince a moron to want for their death. However, I bet I can kill one. I know I can.

Well, given that they don't completely discount everything you say on basis of pretentiousness. If they do, and they should, they will probably keep on living. Despite their many hypothetical failings that would deserve them be labeled "morons", it would hopefully be in a less despicable fashion than their would-be killer.

It's probably not an issue of gobmnt public v. private. It's probably more an issue of the general prevailing culture.

I remember when I was young I was playing around and asked my mother to pour a bunch of seeds on my head (weird, but whatever, young kids do weird stuff).

An hour later the police came by. :|

>>76511
haha this. the funny thing is that the one case where it was about a government policy, the issue wasn't a very big deal at all. The controversy started with the overreaction to confusion over specifics of the policy.

>>76517
>It's probably not an issue of gobmnt public v. private. It's probably more an issue of the general prevailing culture.

Yes. That.

>>76511
>I do find it ironic that two of your examples have hospitals as the primary source of the 'kidnapping', which are private organizations. Yes, the police got involved, but it was the hospital that got them involved, and is functionally no different than your spouse taking advantage of the law to get your kids taken from you.

The point is that the Police should have known better in all of the cases, but the culture's opinion of parents as the best guardians for their children has degraded to the point that they can be manipulated like that.

Someone, somewhere should have had the sense to just say 'Whoa, hold on. Lets do a bit of fact checking here and stop over reacting and risking tearing a child away from their loving parents.' I know for a fact that if the police and the DCF sat down with the parents for ten minutes, things would have gone differently.
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There are three major approaches to morality:

Consequentialism defines morality by the consequences of a state or action. You are a consequentialist who cares about outcomes for communities.

Deontology defines morality by whether an action follows certain rules. Religious people are generally deontologists who care about the rules that come from God.

There is also a third approach, which you missed :(

Virtue Ethics describes the character strengths and virtues that are the principles of living a good life. I myself am a Stoic virtue ethicist.

>>76475
What is a community?

>>76475
>Are good and bad qualities of states of existence, or qualities of actions?
That depends on the thing that the word good or bad is attached to. There is a spectrum of things that we put good and bad onto and they sort into different sorts of categories. I don't personally think that there are things that are good and bad independent of the presence of minds so strictly I would say that they are no universal goods and bads in a sense that might be equivalent to a deity saying that something is a good or a bad and "making it so".

But there are things that are very close to universal goods and bads due to historical contingency and biology. The existence of suffering is generally understood to be a bad, and creating suffering deliberately is thought to be a bad. Since group moral codes be definition require individuals to agree on things and have a reason to expect that the other person will be able to hold up an end of a bargain, we have systems that can assess these things. There is a biological basis to the "golden rule" and society is widespread in the animal kingdom. Note that if you get the right sort of upbringing you can pretty much kill the "golden rule" so whatever we are involves lots of possible rule sets, and the ability to repress some with respect to others in the right environmental context
On the other end though there are things we call "good" and "bad" that are named such due to random social taste. Is it really bad to use the wrong fork or to necropost?

So there is a spectrum to the thing that we think of as "good" and a spectrum for things we call "bad". We don't have enough words or frames of reference to make a more defined scale as a species because the definitions shift around from generation to generation despite the very broad differences …

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>>76484
Well I'm coming from the point of view that we can be. Though the human species may largely be immoral, that is no reason to deny our moral aspects and perservere to make ourselves or the world better. I would say it makes our moral duties that more significant. Big things have small beginnings.

>>76435
>Do you think having children is important as society seems to think?

No, but individuals do think it is important - and individuals do think it is important to not have children as well.

>Do you think the pressure for married couples to have children is overbearing?

I have no idea, but I do think there might be a bit of pressure on both men and women who don't want to have children, to have children. I suspect a great deal more men who don't want children are pressured into it by their wives than are women who don't want children and are pressured into it by men - at least in developed countries.

>Do you think the reward for having children is worth the responsibility and the hardship that comes with it?

Depends on the child, and perhaps more importantly, on the 50/50 chance of divorce.…

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>Do you think having children is important as society seems to think?

I think that society thinks that having children is as important as going to school and getting a good job. That would be important. Of course, having children is important. Without children the population dies. The species dies.

>Do you think the pressure for married couples to have children is overbearing?

If there is any pressure to have kids, then that pressure is overbearing. Humanity needs to take a good think as to what children they want in the each of the next generations to come. Then they need to think about what sort of parenting to administer to these chosen babies. But if the human race plans on doing the right thing and making themselves scarce, they are going to have to accept that most people will not be allowed to have children.

In my opinion, there should be pressure on married couples to NOT have children

>Do you think the reward for having children is worth the responsibility and the hardship that comes with it?
…

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>>76415
or we can invest in technologies that will be able to compact data better, like a Winrar on steroids

>>76413
Yes it is a solution. It's the one we happen to be using right now.

To consider changing the status quo I need two things:
*A list of the current problems.
*An alternative that is handed to me with specific examples for how it will solve the current and historical problems (the history necessitated the status quo).

I'm confused about how government regulation is supposed to be related to this problem of insufficient bandwidth. You suggest that we might consider some other means of regulation, but how are the problems with the current means of regulation related to this? Your video describes current problems but does not say anything about there being no answers within our current system. Your video also does not talk about alternates to the current regulatory scheme.

I just don't have a reason to think about what we are doing now without that sort of information. In the absence of evidence of a superior means of allocating radio frequency use, the rational solution is to convince the government to make another move similar to the move to digital from analog signals.

>Businesses that own slips of the Spectrum charge more and more money to use it because it's becoming a more and more uncommon and precious resource (Supply and Demand). To continue to ration it out is not a long term solution.…

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Stumbled on this article and thought it was vaguely related.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable-industry-finally-admits-that-data-caps-have-nothing-to-do-with-congestion.shtml?%3F

Yes, it can.

If you know exactly what task needs to be done, efficiency is always an improvement. If all that matters is completing task x, the person who can get x done faster with less resources is obviously the one you want to go with.

But in real life you never have a clear and certain idea of what the task is. The goal of a company is to run a successful business. Sometimes that means having a business model and completing the tasks associated with it as efficiently as possible, but sometimes it means investing a lot of money now in order to improve performance later, and sometimes it means paying close attention to the world and completely changing the nature of the business at the right time.

There is a parable about a company that hires an efficiency expert. The expert dutifully goes around talking to people at each step of the business and making detailed notes. He notices that every time he passes by the office of a particular well-paid employee he finds the man inside reclining with his feet up on the desk, his eyes closed or staring off into space. So the expert gets the big boss and shows him the relaxing employee, pointing out that he is adding nothing to the business and should be terminated to save the company considerably. But the boss replies, "that man once had an idea that made this company many millions of dollars and saved it from going under. And he was sitting exactly like that when he had the idea!"

>>76477
Thats an interesting parable.

One thing that worries me about efficiency taken to extremes is that it balances too much outcome on too little.

A couple of examples come to mind, though I'm not sure how 'real world' they are - they're just scenarios but they don't seem so far fetched.

Lets take Mark's example from the other thread, where in communist china they outlawed the use of mechanical mowers and made people use hand tools to trim lawns. While in many respects, the inefficiency of this kind of labor seems rather silly - on the other hand, what once took one person maybe 30 minutes or an hour to do ,now takes many people several hours to do.

Sure its more efficient to get it done faster, easier, with machines - but if you depend at all on people in the community or society to have money, making sure many people have some is better than making sure one or two get it all. If the lawn trimmers get paid a reasonable amount of money, then making lawn care less and less efficient generates more and more jobs, and more people have income. In a hyper-efficient scenario, these people are all out of jobs. In fact, maybe even the lawn mower mows lawns itself, and people just pay the company to send it out.

More efficient can mean less jobs, and a weaker economy, due to imbalances in work availability and whatnot.…

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It struck me as a "Flintstones 'it's a living' joke" gone too far.
Personally I saw it as a reaffirmation that you're as valuable and as useful as you choose to be. No one seemed very happy but no one seemingly wanted to change how they were treated.
Except for the lamp at the end!

>>76469
What struck me is how many people participated in the collaborative effort that produced what was essentially a doormat.

>>76470
I don't know, it seems to me that perhaps it would have been better to follow your own interpretation without first sampling other people's.

However, I want to point out that this video seems to have nothing to do with communist china. For that matter, I don't think I can make the connection with 'this one thing that is bad isn't so bad because of this other completely unrelated thing that is worse'. I don't think you are being purposefully dishonest, but comparing 'bad' to 'worse' in order to make 'bad' look better strikes me as a somewhat dishonest thing to do. Granted, almost all things lack a definite, defined value so must have their value estimated by comparison to another thing - however this thing should be similar or closely related.

I don't feel 'communist china' was similar or closely related enough to this video to be compared, but if you want to make a case for that I'd be willing and interested to hear it. If you want to discuss efficiency I will be happy to make a thread for it.

>>76471
Thats interesting. I would think the overall scenario in the animated short would actually be seeking to try to get the viewer to question and seek change in a situation they could call similar to what is in the animated short. The people in it though, didn't seem very interested in changing things. They actually seemed quite distant and disengaged.…

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It looks to me like they're showing how pretty much everything a person uses in an industrialised society is the product of someone else's labour, by replacing that produced item with the person who produce it's labour directly.

>>76470
That seems overly complicated, especially when all a sicle needs to be produced is a guy in a smithy, and all a sicle needs to be used is a person in a field.

Both of the examples you listed were essentially the same in practice. In both the lawns gets mowed, and in both people are doing allot of excess work. Except that in one a bunch of useless materials are being produced in addition to all the excess labour, just to accomplish the same task. Which is then worse?

So mow your lawn with a scythe, store the hay and use the extra time saved to tend your garden. No one will be unemployed if they're all employed in their own food's production, and if everyone has their food then they have no need for excess labour. Plus, then everyone's responsible for their own needs, not dependent on others. Ludd was right, smash the looms.

And when it comes down to it my responce would be why mow lawns in the first place? If you need an orchard cleared of grass in order to keep fruit pests down, then stick some geese in it. If you need to keep a field laying fallow free of brush, then stick some goats it in. By why go to the trouble of keeping a field cut for aesthetic purposes? There's lots of tasty things that grow on their own when you let a field grow, after all.

>MLP:FiM is reactionary to the core
Well, let's take a look. But right off the bat we should be suspicious of this hypothesis because we know that MLP:FiM was created by a feminist with the explicit goal of furthering the progressive concept of gender. If a show with that foundation ended up reactionary to the core, we ought to be very, very confused. It might even suggest that *gasp* neoreactionaries and progressives have some ground in common.

I think the greentext can be divided into two major points:

(1) The show is set in a medieval/feudal society
Does this make the show reactionary? Well, no. There is a difference between a show which is set in a feudal society and a show which supports feudalism. The political and economic setting of MLP:FiM is so far from the focus of the show that I'd say the show has no overall political philosophy. We don't really know how the government in Equestria works and despite how many times the OP mentions it we don't really know that the currency is tied to gold and we don't have any reason to believe there is a racial caste system. MLP:FiM simply doesn't care about these things, it doesn't have a message on this scale.

(2) The show illustrates behaviours that reactionaries like e.g. harmony as solution to inequality, national identity with ritual and ceremony
This point seems maybe a bit stronger, but still not compelling. We see division of labour across the three types of ponies, but essentially zero division of labour across species or the sexes. Equestria is pretty darn socially egalitarian. Group identity; duties to friends, family, and nation; and group bonding through ceremony are big themes in MLP:FiM and also endorsed by reactionary thought.

I'm not convinced. Calling any of these shows "reactionary to the core" sounds to me like someone getting a bit too excited about their favourite political philosophy and starting to see it in everything else they like. This is common in politics. "Marx's ideas are perfect. In fact, everything good must be Marxist! Name anything good and give me a few minutes and I…

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>>76419
All of these require such huge leaps of logic it's almost amusing.

>monarchic/feudal society

As we do not see any Lords or Ladies or Knights or anything of the sort, we can not support that it is a feudal society. In fact, we see the opposite. A Mayor, a position that is elected though popular vote even when it was first created in the 12th century, showing that there is an elective system in place.

Most headcanon accepts this and fills in some blanks by making the Equestrian Government something closer to England during the 17th Century with some modification. Celestia and Luna operate as Heads of State while different districts or cities elect representatives to serve on a sort of Parliament. As we see a judge standing next to Mayor Mare, we can assume that there is also a separate Judaical system.

>gold standard

A large portion of the world was on the gold standard until relatively recently. …

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>>76392
I don't really go in for the self-abasement as a moral law thing.
Shudder to contemplate the mind of a person who wouldn't find those laws thoroughly toxic either.

I sometimes wonder if humanity reached the Enlightenment then looked at themselves and just said "Nah, nevermind."

I could see that as describing a society I would enjoy, but not as a code I would follow. It's too people-focused to be a code I could follow.

>>76378
God dommit Ponk...

>caring whether 4chan raids us
>the year of our lord and saviour three-thousand and fifteen minus one-thousand and two

Shiggy, meet diggy
Diggy, meet shiggy

Last edited at Tue, Dec 3rd, 2013 21:04

Meh.
I've heard of people claiming there is going to be some kind of raid several times, but nothing ever comes of it.

The fact is that the whole brony thing STARTED on 4chan. It got so popular that a lot of infighting started between pony fans and the people who didn't like ponies. Almost every single thread was getting derailed instantly because of all the pony reaction images. Eventually the 4chan mods decided to ban ponies saying "If you want to post ponies, go start your own chan".

...And guess what, people did. They started dozens of them that started pulling huge traffic from day one. That combined with a drop in 4chans traffic from all of their visitors who were now going elsewhere for their pony fix, caused the mods to quickly reverse the ban and create their own pony board.

So as much as the 4chan pony haters would like to think they have lots of people on their side, they just don't. They simply don't have enough haters on their side to actually get anything off the ground.

>>76313
>I agree with the pattern and think that we are on our way to something very bad.

What are the solutions?

>>76339
>What are the solutions?
That could be its own topic. Since this is basically a rant about the nature of the problem, which should be defined first, I'll hide it and put the conclusion after that. I know some stuff about human behavior but am not an expert at history or economics so anyone who knows more about this should fire away.

Despite what some folks might think I don't "blame one Rich people". I think that what rich people are doing is instinct. But so is what the non-rich does. It's a matter of objective distribution of resources, ability to earn resources, people with the resources, suffering people and how why will act. The rich get attention because they are objectively a part of a screwed up system and they have to be studied to fix the system. You literally cannot fix this without pointing at the "group of humans with more wealth than anyone else", period. Some people are sensitive to that but tough.

This does not mean that how resources are redistributed should not be carefully studied. If a society erupts into violence and re-balances it's socioeconomic order that is a redistribution of wealth. If a society manages to tweak it's economy and regulation into innovation and job creation with the help of the existing wealthy that is redistribution of wealth. If a society chooses to increase the minimum wage, increase the corporate tax rates, create various programs for job training/education and more to redirect those unneeded educated elites, that is wealth redistribution. It will happen by some means.

Those concentrating the wealth.
Humans that accumulate resources (wealth) tend to want to keep them. They get used to a status quo and a standard of living and like many other humans they want to build on what they have, no matter how much they have (also with monopolies on political influence)

…

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>>76313
Here are some things I think might look like solutions in regards to this.

>A cap on financial wealth with a percentage decay penalty.

>example - you have more than X amount of money, it decays at a 1% yearly rate

This is essentially a greed tax that decays financial wealth. The goal is to encourage the circulation of money by capping it. Money already decays in some sense unless you move it around, adding a decay rate allows people to have a maximum budget without having to actually reduce their income (as they can use the extra money to purchase or invest in things).

>New forms of money. Regionalized, localized. This money can be given on merit, as welfare, or even set up to decay using time principals instead of greed. If exchanged locally by local communities, it can inject local currency into local businesses.

>A global carbon/emissions tax, equally redistributed among all people, to help pay for the carbon tax.…

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Good post!

>>76334
>The big one that I want to know next is what are the bacteria, archaea, and fungi producing and receiving that make this process work?

Yes that. Wow.

Most of our serotonin is in our gut, right?

Image from Enterotypes of the human gut microbiome [www.nature.com]

>>76336
>Most of our serotonin is in our gut, right?

Yes. ~90% of your bodies serotonin is in gut cells called enterochromaffin cells and it's not just digestion,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterochromaffin_cells
>In the gastrointestinal tract, 5-HT is important in response to chemical, mechanical or pathological stimuli in the lumen. It activates both secretory and peristaltic reflexes, and activates vagal afferents (via 5-HT3 receptors) that signal to the brain (important in the generation of nausea).
You could say that in the digestive system it acts as the final activation switch for various digestive/food related functions not limited to absorption of food. Neurotransmitters could be seen to have a "theme" due to historical contingency the themes if they exist are based on really old primary uses and get fuzzy as time passes and evolution plays with various biological networks and serotonin seems to be related to things related to interacting with and gaining resources accumulation, storage, absorption...whether expelling if contaminated (nausea>vomiting), moving along for absorption, or adding things to allow digestion to occur.

As far as emotional regulation is concerned a huge amount of our behavior is involved with resources at the individual and social level and the wikipedia link to serotonin outl…

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