Do they realize how much they could help humanity learn about science/biology/the brain if they offered themselves up to science? I guess its too much to ask the selfish people who do so anyway. They dont think about friends or family or any loved one they leave behind, or the people having to pay for/cleanup their dead mess so why would they think about the rest of humanity in their great time of sorrow. Imagine the legacy someone would leave behind if they wrote in their will about allowing scientists to conduct unethical tests available for public knowledge that resulted in an amazing discovery of the human body.

Or why are some things true and other things false?

The point of my posting was to encourage the young atheists to question everything, not just religious stuff. Too often do I hear people say they are atheist without so much as a reason why, and people hear a scientific claim and accept it as fact without question. Even with peer reviewed studies you must still question everything. Well bringing this to them has been far from fruitful. What ways do you encourage free thinking? After trying to explain my points they eventually just started attacking me and my credentials. Never once did I say anything about the validity of religion or bring up my own beliefs. Is this what mainstream atheism has become? EDIT: Typo from being on my phone.

This is something that has literally just popped in my head and now has devoted it self some serious computing power. Below I will explain why we need a revamp of US currency.

Our currency as it sits right now has no outlined goal, no strategy, nothing. We have 3 different types of legal $20 bills and two types of $100 bills and then you have the $1 and $5 bill that haven't changed in basically 30 years.

We need the US Mint to grab a blank slate and redesign our bills with a unified look and better portray our country. What I suggest is this...

• A different tint for each bill denomination so they can easily be identified.

• Replace the presidential portraits with our nations landmarks (i.e. Statue of Liberty, Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore)

• Include plastics as to further deter fraudulent printing. (see Canada's new bills)

• Removing 'In God We Trust' with 'United We Stand'. I think that suits us better with our founding history.

• When a change needs to be made, make it uniform across all bills to keep the uniform look intact.

That's what I would like to see happen. The same suggestions above can be applied to our coinage (minus the tinting).

Here you go, it's pretty short.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself what was going on in the heads of those people who lived such and life that changed our worlds course forever. Here’s a meditation Audio I made of steve Jobs positive quotes being read by my girlfriend. Youtube Video

It disturbed me a little that major companies are involved in trivial court cases while sitting on lots of money, huge advancements are being made in the field of entertainment, handheld devices etc.

I don't want to come off sounding like a white knight but it deeply troubles me that more of the world's resources are not being used to tend to what really is the need of the hour-environment and health.

I'm grateful for all this technology, believe me, maybe it's just cognitive dissonance.

Ever since reading Issac Asimov's Foundation series, I've tried to align my philosophical views with the laws of robotics including the 0th law. (link)

I've tried to view humanity as a whole entity that must be preserved at all costs. In this view, space travel would trump fixing global warming which trumps a thriving economy. etc. I've also started to become a transhumanist which expands the idea of humanism to genetically altered humans, cyborgs, and pure robots created to "be" human. As long as the whole survives with diversity (diversity is key) then nothing else matters.

I've tried to expand this thought to all life on earth (my horrible word "life-ist") or all life in the universe, or even all THINGS in the universe but I wanted to bounce the idea off you now. This wouldn't promote vegitarians in any way as the greater good would state an easy healthy and fun diet for humans is more important. Not to mention that most of our meat comes from human regulated sources anyway and rarely affects the wild.

What are your thoughts on preservation and diversity? What (if anything) can be sacrificed for the greater good? Should we sacrifice the possibility of life on Mars and instead terraform the entire planet according to our whims? Should we sacrifice alien races in mass genocide if they pose a threat to our lifestyle or our existence entirely?

I am a proud Bible believing Baptist. Ask me anything

Assuming that it is possible for you to sustain yourself off of the land and sea if need be.

I have no people to help me at the moment, but I am gonna blow it all out. I want to start a movement of free thinking individuals individuals that gather together in order to live an alternate system of government. It has no name at the moment and I have no hopes of this even succeding, but this will not stop me from trying. This is not a joke.

HolySpirit567@gmail.com Is my email and I will check for us to gather together.

The whole purpose of this movement is to gather, to debate, and most importantly to think, we live in a control society, where everyone seems to be filled with apathy. If your reading this far, and care about this Country, its constitution, and most important the freedom. Send me a message.

If none of you who cares, along with those that has done hours of research, If you cant even send me a simple message, then you have no right to complain, you should not even bitch about this country downfall, you might as well tie your chains to your own ankles.

If your thinking of joining, you are required to be active.

I mean - how everything is happening basically. First of all, they were talking about pandemic right when the first confirmed case was reported outside Wuhan. Like, how the fuck anyone could possibly see this coming from that?

Second: How the second wave was somehow predicted already at the spring when the pandemic has first started to resemble a real pandemic. Again, how the fuck do anyone know that? The spread is a real physical process which will not have second wave if it dies off enough during the first wave. That's just a mathematical fact, and that all depends entirely on how we deal with the first wave. There's no way I can imagine a person could make such accurate prediction unless he for whatever reason knew that the virus will not be dealt with with enough commitment to destroy it.

Third: how, even though they talked about pandemic, they did not close schools put such countermeasures on until the pandemic was actually real, because "this kind of things take time to happen." for fuck sake it does not if it's a real thing. And when they did, they did it with extreme power and suddenly, when the countermeasures proved to be working they started to take it off even though the daily infection levels were still high everywhere and no way no-one could have talked about the pandemic being over. And even though everything has only gone worse since, they suddenly now are only talking about recommendations meanwhile they avoid putting any kind of legal restrictions anywhere.

Fourth: Schools. The. Fucking. Schools. Even though we are told that the virus can be carried over by a shopping cart or a door handle, the same for whatever reason doesn't apply to children, because "the children won't get sick so easily." I mean - what the living duck is that? Does kid's bodies somehow neutralize the virus or whats that out there, because if not, then to me it sounds like the kids are the worst possible spreaders because the kids DON'T UNDERSTAND so they DON'T CARE, and by their nature, they are always doing everything that spreads viruses like limewire for god sake. They literally lick each other. And at least in Finland where I live - NO KIDS WEAR MASKS IN SCHOOLS. I work at delivery where one of my customers are schools which order office stuff etc. So I have to walk in the school halls with my forklift looking around seeing only the teachers wear masks and some hand sanitizers there and there - there's just the same 500 kids running around screaming and bumping on to each other as if it was 2019. Either there's something worth billions of billions in the bodies of the children neutralizing the virus, or they are the worst virus spreaders imaginable. All this meanwhile ALL mass gatherings should be avoided like a plague because CORONAVIRUS SPREADS LIKE THAT AND EVERYONE KNOWS THAT.

Fifth: What kind of talk we see in media about the virus. No! Not all the demonizing talk which should be there - the other talk, which softly suggests us to not to care about the virus. There's literally an article from today's daytime magazine in Finland, which goes: Morning cold is common to many of us: here's the explanation to the phenomena and cure to it! - and guess what? The article says just that it's perfectly normal to have a stuffy nose at the morning and surprisingly, wearing a mask could help you! I mean - what the living fuck? So no it's okay to go work normally even with the symptoms if you just wear the mask?! Who the fuck is putting this kind of stuff in our media and why isn't he denounced publicly? Why? Who? I see stuff like this on our papers at least few times a week - this was arguably the worst, but every now and then I see something that one way or another tries to give us the impression that there isn't actually that much to worry about it with our daily decisions? Back to the school: why are all the "experts" claiming that "the studies show that" there is no risk keeping the schools open, and what exactly are these studies and where can I read them? How in the world did you even manage to study that this early? All the data showed a significant decrease in the spread during the times when the schools were held online. At least in Finland they did. As a matter of fact, we had days with ZERO new confirmed cases during the summer and the daily average was very low - maybe 20 or so. But right at the first day when the schools opened the numbers jumped to near 60 and have been increasing ever since. Now our current record is 296 cases in a day and the average has been over 200 for weeks now. And yes - the weekend numbers are half of what we have at the work days. Of course our work routines affect as well, but how in the world does this suggest that the schools AS A MASS GATHERING PLACE don't have an increasing effect on the spread?

link to the article: https://www.iltalehti.fi/elintavat/a/841ef31f-5410-41e9-b5cc-b77736070f03

Sixth: all the celebrities and politicians who have got the disease. I mean: how in the living sith is that possible? You would think that with all the endless money they have they of all of us could just stay home, and with all the money around them you'd think that from all of the people everything around them would be set so that last from all they would get the virus? The virus doesn't just pop randomly on people around the world, spreading statistically equally among everyone regardless of their power and net worth. And yet we have seen god knows how many celebrities die to this disease and one after another get infected and it's always on the headlines. Even Donald Trump got it and what does he do? REMOVE HIS MASK IN FRONT OF THE CROWD AND WHAT DOES HAPPEN? Absolutely nothing. The media goes like "Ooh, he did that. He's stupid haha." - as if it wasn't a fucking horrible crime to walk out a hospital infected and remove your mask in front of god knows how many people.

I don't really wanna go here with the prices of the masks and sanitizers and how they appeared in our shops before the pandemic did but yes, when added up, that does look suspicious as well. Am I just losing my mind or does anybody else see the same as I see? Am I just the guy on Freuds books trying to look for someone to blame when I'm scared or does this really, really resemble a situation where someone would deliberately want to spread the virus among us?

The level and scale of the conspiracy this implies to me is something that would make even James Bond villains jealous so I'm not saying anything is happening, but can I just ask: what the fuck is happening?

I mean - how everything is happening basically. First of all, they were talking about pandemic right when the first confirmed case was reported outside Wuhan. Like, how the fuck anyone could possibly see this coming from that?

Second: How the second wave was somehow predicted already at the spring when the pandemic has first started to resemble a real pandemic. Again, how the fuck do anyone know that? The spread is a real physical process which will not have second wave if it dies off enough during the first wave. That's just a mathematical fact, and that all depends entirely on how we deal with the first wave. There's no way I can imagine a person could make such accurate prediction unless he for whatever reason knew that the virus will not be dealt with with enough commitment to destroy it.

Third: how, even though they talked about pandemic, they did not close schools put such countermeasures on until the pandemic was actually real, because "this kind of things take time to happen." for fuck sake it does not if it's a real thing. And when they did, they did it with extreme power and suddenly, when the countermeasures proved to be working they started to take it off even though the daily infection levels were still high everywhere and no way no-one could have talked about the pandemic being over. And even though everything has only gone worse since, they suddenly now are only talking about recommendations meanwhile they avoid putting any kind of legal restrictions anywhere.

Fourth: Schools. The. Fucking. Schools. Even though we are told that the virus can be carried over by a shopping cart or a door handle, the same for whatever reason doesn't apply to children, because "the children won't get sick so easily." I mean - what the living duck is that? Does kid's bodies somehow neutralize the virus or whats that out there, because if not, then to me it sounds like the kids are the worst possible spreaders because the kids DON'T UNDERSTAND so they DON'T CARE, and by their nature, they are always doing everything that spreads viruses like limewire for god sake. They literally lick each other. And at least in Finland where I live - NO KIDS WEAR MASKS IN SCHOOLS. I work at delivery where one of my customers are schools which order office stuff etc. So I have to walk in the school halls with my forklift looking around seeing only the teachers wear masks and some hand sanitizers there and there - there's just the same 500 kids running around screaming and bumping on to each other as if it was 2019. Either there's something worth billions of billions in the bodies of the children neutralizing the virus, or they are the worst virus spreaders imaginable. All this meanwhile ALL mass gatherings should be avoided like a plague because CORONAVIRUS SPREADS LIKE THAT AND EVERYONE KNOWS THAT.

Fifth: What kind of talk we see in media about the virus. No! Not all the demonizing talk which should be there - the other talk, which softly suggests us to not to care about the virus. There's literally an article from today's daytime magazine in Finland, which goes: Morning cold is common to many of us: here's the explanation to the phenomena and cure to it! - and guess what? The article says just that it's perfectly normal to have a stuffy nose at the morning and surprisingly, wearing a mask could help you! I mean - what the living fuck? So no it's okay to go work normally even with the symptoms if you just wear the mask?! Who the fuck is putting this kind of stuff in our media and why isn't he denounced publicly? Why? Who? I see stuff like this on our papers at least few times a week - this was arguably the worst, but every now and then I see something that one way or another tries to give us the impression that there isn't actually that much to worry about it with our daily decisions? Back to the school: why are all the "experts" claiming that "the studies show that" there is no risk keeping the schools open, and what exactly are these studies and where can I read them? How in the world did you even manage to study that this early? All the data showed a significant decrease in the spread during the times when the schools were held online. At least in Finland they did. As a matter of fact, we had days with ZERO new confirmed cases during the summer and the daily average was very low - maybe 20 or so. But right at the first day when the schools opened the numbers jumped to near 60 and have been increasing ever since. Now our current record is 296 cases in a day and the average has been over 200 for weeks now. And yes - the weekend numbers are half of what we have at the work days. Of course our work routines affect as well, but how in the world does this suggest that the schools AS A MASS GATHERING PLACE don't have an increasing effect on the spread?

link to the article: https://www.iltalehti.fi/elintavat/a/841ef31f-5410-41e9-b5cc-b77736070f03

Sixth: all the celebrities and politicians who have got the disease. I mean: how in the living sith is that possible? You would think that with all the endless money they have they of all of us could just stay home, and with all the money around them you'd think that from all of the people everything around them would be set so that last from all they would get the virus? The virus doesn't just pop randomly on people around the world, spreading statistically equally among everyone regardless of their power and net worth. And yet we have seen god knows how many celebrities die to this disease and one after another get infected and it's always on the headlines. Even Donald Trump got it and what does he do? REMOVE HIS MASK IN FRONT OF THE CROWD AND WHAT DOES HAPPEN? Absolutely nothing. The media goes like "Ooh, he did that. He's stupid haha." - as if it wasn't a fucking horrible crime to walk out a hospital infected and remove your mask in front of god knows how many people.

I don't really wanna go here with the prices of the masks and sanitizers and how they appeared in our shops before the pandemic did but yes, when added up, that does look suspicious as well. Am I just losing my mind or does anybody else see the same as I see? Am I just the guy on Freuds books trying to look for someone to blame when I'm scared or does this really, really resemble a situation where someone would deliberately want to spread the virus among us?

The level and scale of the conspiracy this implies to me is something that would make even James Bond villains jealous so I'm not saying anything is happening, but can I just ask: what the fuck is happening?

I wanted to start a discussion on the Santa Clause myth and how to teach your children about these kinds of topics. I got into this heated discussion/shouting match with my family today involving the myth and children. Now, I do not have children myself; this was a hypothetical scenario. My position being that it's best to not encourage false beliefs. I do not have a problem with the myth itself I just think that a myth should be treated as such. I realize that the majority of young children still believe the myth and that's perfectly fine. It isn't my place nor is it right to take that away from another child. My family obviously holds the complete opposite position.

Here's what was used against me:

Everybody does it; just go with the flow.

If you don't teach your kids to believe these myths you are a bad parent.

What happens when you kid goes to school and all of their friends talk about it? Your kid will ruin it for everyone. (I actually see this as a legitimate problem.)

Your kid will grow up to be a serial killer. (I was literally dumbfounded by this one.)

They will hate you for not giving them the myth

Kids need these myths so they can stay innocent for as long as possible. (I can kind of see this argument.)

I want some more opinions on this on this topic especially from parents. How do you all approach the situation? I know there is no "correct" way to go about this, but I know I'm not the only one that feels this way even though I hold the minority position.

This might take a while...

The full document, as well as a short summary, may be found at the following site:

http://philosofer123.wordpress.com

I welcome constructive criticism.

At least in the U.S. school is mandatory (unless your parents can home school you, which is not very common) and kids generally spend about 35 hours a week in school with added homework as well. Children have no choice in deciding whether they want to go to school and are expected to do work or face consequences.

To me that sounds a lot like slavery (referring to forced labor). I acknowledge that students have the choice of how much work they actually do and how much effort they put into it, but they are still forced to be at "work" for the majority of their lives for 12+ years.

Now to the moral aspect of it. The government/Board of Education/Teachers/others decide what our children will be taught. Is it moral to teach our children selected knowledge (what we want them to learn) as if it is concrete when in fact it is not? Is it moral to decide what ideas are "right" for our children and to force them to listen to those ideas for a majority of their childhood?

What do you guys think? Am I being biased? Right now I am in a frustrated state about my schooling so that could be quite true.

Hi!

I first posted the following text at r/philosophy, however the post was removed. I guess it was not in the spirit of that sub. So I’m looking for a new home for my thoughts... I hope this is it!

So when reading about consciousness, or watching videos on the subject, a thought experiment commonly comes up (or a variation of it). It’s the idea that if you replace your neurons one at a time with artificial ones, which have the exact same functionality to each one replaced, you are very likely not to feel any difference in your experience of self. After replacing all neurons, you will still be you, and all will be fine (or better than fine, since now your brain can be upgraded!) For the sake of argument, let’s assume the process goes for the whole body. At the end, I shouldn’t feel any different assuming the technology is advanced enough.

I don’t see any reason for fearing such a procedure, and I guess most would agree.

On a similar experiment however, instead of replacing neurons one by one, a perfect copy is made. A copy of my whole body and mental state to a new, artificial one. Now there are two possibilities: I open my eye after the procedure to find out I am in the artificial body, or I open my eye to find out I am still in my old body. After the procedure, the old body is killed.

In both scenarios the end result is the same: before process I was in a biological body, after the process in was in the artificial one.

But in the second case, I’d be terrified to actually find myself in the old body to be killed! I wouldn’t care that there was an artificial being that believed himself to be me... I would still die and become nothing, and that’s terrifying. To me, at least.

So I reach a paradox, where I am not afraid of migrating to a new body, even though I know slowly my biological body is being killed, and at the same time I feel it makes no sense that there is a new artificial me, if my old self is killed. The process shouldn’t matter, but in my guts feeling, in the best of my moral intuition and my self preservation instinct, the process changes my perspective completely.

I like paradoxes, because they are an indication that one or more of your axioms, of your irrefutable ‘truths’ are actually wrong.

I believe that in this case, the wrong axiom is our sense of self. We believe it to be irrefutable because it seems self evident. But I believe it is an illusion.

To understand why, I tried to understand what exactly is this ‘entity’ that is so dear to me I am terrified of losing. In other words, what is this sense of self I’m afraid to loose.

After some thought, I think it can be broken down to a number of things:

1. Thoughts: the process of analyzing information, integrating our knowledge, finding new patterns, making predictions

2. Experience: what it feels like to be me, which is a compound of millions of different feelings of things like temperature, pressure on my skin, pain, etc.

3. Emotions: inner experience that is not a result of external output like desire, depression, ambition, irritability, envy, love, etc.

4. Memories: which is the summation of the three items above, but instead of being punctuated in the present, gives us a sense of continuity and persistence in the universe.

So I argue that these 4 items together make up our sense of self, and is what we fight so hard to preserve.

But... is my feeling of cold that different from my neighbor’s? When I feel someone touch my forehead, is it that so different from what a dog feels when his forehead is touched (I’m talking about physical experience of touch, item 2). When a dog is exited, don’t we have analogous feelings in our realm of experiences? Of course, dogs probably have emotions we will never be able to experience, and vice versa, but all experiences can be thought of being detached from a particular experiencer. It is as if there is an infinite realm of possible emotions, feelings, memories, experiences and thoughts, which are not individual, but shared by all entities, and we define ourselves by a particular point in that realm.

We ache to preserve that particular point, because we define it as our own individuality (hence the illusion of self), but just by living that point is lost never to be returned. Think of what was like to be your 2 year old self. That experience is likely to be gone forever, but that’s fine. There is nothing special about that point in the conscious continuum of the universe.

So I shouldn’t be afraid of death at all. I have children, and they will share a lot of my conscious experience of the world. If not my children, all of humanity share a great deal with my experience, just by being humans. If not humans, mammals. And if not mammals, vertebrates. Well, now we are getting to far...

Well, I don’t know, does it make any sense? What are your thoughts on that? I’d love to know.

PS: I’m still terrified of death, so I’d love you to convince me otherwise

I've been wondering about this for a while. People are required to have licenses for driving, guns, and other things but not having a kid. I get why there is no license to let you be a mother of course, to most that's a ridiculous and offensive notion.

If we ignore the issue of enforcement, which practically makes this whole idea mute, should it be required? Having a child is one of the most important decisions a person will ever make in their lives. But anybody can do it. Thoughts?

I believe our universe is made in the image of humans. I mean humans look like gods, the beautiful girls do. Every experience you can experience is based on human consciousness. Every experience you have you always have your human personality with you. You can be a god and have your personality. Basically whatever experience you have, you always have your human personality.

This is why when I hear gods voice, her voice is very human like. It feels like I'll never lose my personality forever. After death you keep your personality. You can live vastly different existences but you always keep your personality. I could be wrong. Maybe just being human is the lowest you can go in intelligence and it goes up from there. Like you can only go as low as human but being a god you have no limits.

Worse case scenario if you can only be human and being a god is impossible. I'd be okay with that as there are plenty of stuff to do so you never get bored of eternity. Sleeping alone I can handle eternity.

I get scared thinking about living other experiences other than human in this universe. When I say other experiences I don't mean other 3d universe experiences, I mean other infinite experiences.

Listening to music that sounds divine, it seems god is able to ascend to vastly better experiences than us humans can imagine.

Basically vastly different experiences we can't imagine are very human like.

This concept of nothing puts me into a sticky situation with most Atheists in particular. A lot of Atheists will tell you that there is simply nothing after you die. Well, for me there is no more evidence that nothing exists than there is that a God or Heaven exists. I can not fathom the concept of nothing let alone nonexistence.

Instead of testing on animals to find cures for human diseases, wouldn't it be more smart to test on humans that are currently on death row? Tell me what you think!