RestoringGuy

That is a good observation. It's as much about mortality as it is about morality. We can whine all we want about justice and homesteading and absolute truth thinking property only has two objects (owner and owned). It seems to me, object A owns object B at the discretion of object C, at least until C is dead. C can be the state or really just anybody who weighs whether property exists. Property is a three-way relation, two of which must at some point be living objects (the owner and the recognizer of rights). We see this with estates and wills, that C has not yet died so C inherits property B from A by fictional contractual means -- nothing biochemical about it. By my thinking, parent cannot own child because we can substitute C=B and the assertion or property now fails because child denies the ownership. The only way we "self-own" is by substituting A=B and convincing all values of C to believe it. Ownership seems to require agreement more than it requires control. That is because borrowed objects are not owned by the borrower, so to be pedantic about meaning of words, you could say parents borrow their young children until children are returned to themselves. But hypothetically if some children die before they understand idea of property, how can we ever say they "self-own"? This has to be more naturally developed than a labor/control/neurobiological stance will admit. Because I can control my arm does not prove I own it. I have to understand why I control it and what the implications are.

It seems to me compensation also includes reputation and implied warranties. When you open the McDonald's bag there is quality of service being discovered long after payment was exchanged. Consumers do not buy from uniformly random vendors, and employers do not hire uniformly random people. There is a lingering chain reaction of compensation. I do not know how that can be removed from the pure idea of an instantly closed circle of compensation.

It won't work. Atheism without reflection is like vegetarianism without conscious avoidance. A meat-eater who eats an apple is not called a vegetarian during the eating of the apple. It is only coincidence the apple is vegetarian-compatible. Also, I am not a UFO-skeptic without first pondering whether alien UFOs might exist.

That is the most concise and perfect analogy I have yet encountered. We constantly have to deal with the argument that children have inferior rights because of their mental and physical incompetence, but somehow magically the rights of the elderly are elevated rather than diminished by their status.

That is good. Whether you're comfortable with my ideas, there is no obligation to overanalyze. Too much tit-for-tat on the board anyway.

It can sometimes hurt if there is insufficient remnant of skin on the shaft. I also had points along a keloid scar that healed unevenly and create extreme pinching sensation. Foreskin restoration has helped with both of these issues.

For confidence there is variation depending on how the experiment is designed. I agree with you totally about observational errors: a ruler or scale will have built-in error and my vision will introduce more error, and these always accumulate to larger error. But systematically these errors decrease only by repeating the experiments and averaging the results. But if you introduce an error in the design and the experiment is repeated, the error cannot be fixed and maybe that is the real confidence interval you are talking about?Anyway, my point here is the observer is part of the system and our estimate of the error could be wrong. Take for example the Monty Hall Problem. There are three doors. Two doors have goats behind and one has a car and you must choose a door to win the car. You choose a door, but first Monty reveals a different door that shows a goat. So there are two unrevealed doors (your original choice and another unopened door) and Monty asks "do you want to change your selection"? Most people say it doesn't matter, because there are two unopened doors and it should be 50/50 whether each unopened door has the car. Our intuition tells us this. But no it turns out 1/3 chance of winning if you stay with your original choice, and you should always change your mind. The amount of "error" in the system is not an obvious result.I bring this up because our estimate of experimental error can sometimes "seem" right. But depending on design of an experiment, there could be ways to improve the outcome by abandoning previous ways of doing things. By adopting a fixed percent certainty about knowledge (some call it "warranted belief") it seems we make assumptions about our epistemology that block our maximum capability. Knowing what percent is the right threshold and for what purposes is one problem, but sometimes we might all be too stupid to estimate our confidence correctly to begin with. Science attempts to expose this to us with a confidence level, but even knowing that objective confidence level seems subject to further mistakes. Maybe, due to systematic design, higher confidence is sometimes warranted without your knowing about it.

Your thinking seems good. I have thought the same thing about most words. I have heard things like "black is not a color" or the same thing about white or gray, and some artsy people suggest they are the lack of color. Yet they seem like colors to me. Maybe emotion is sometimes good evidence and could be caused by something valid, but it's not something easy to convey to others. I might say yes atheism is a religion but only in the way black is a color, zero is a number, and penguin is a bird. Things in the same category do not always have to share specific properties.

Smaller confidence than 100% works. But you sometimes must allow false things to be called "knowledge". I call these false beliefs no matter how compelling. You can close your eyes and throw 10 coins on the floor and say "one or more coins is heads up" is "knowledge" because it's better than 99.9% likely to be true.I will disagree that decrease holds uniformly. Have you ever not attempted to correct an "error", and suddenly discovered you did not actually make the error? Not like gambling -- but maybe there was an obvious good observable reason you should have been more confident? Or maybe a deduction you should have made but failed to do so in time. If the expected value of error can only be smaller, then statistically you have the wrong mean value. Not every sample can be above average, and our estimations of error are just another act of data sampling. Standard deviation, etc. provide us with this estimate, and our brains are part of the overall system doing the sampling. We will on occasion feel less certain of particular results that we should be, just as genetic mutation will on occasion not decrease the quality of the system, but instead improvement can sometimes be made..

To start saying a definition you have to use more undefined words, so there is always some frustration. I have found it useful to try adopting whatever definition the other person seems to imply, and then find extreme outlying cases which fully meet their idea yet lead to absurdity. Then they are put on the spot to initiate the sematics discussion.I know some people will say definitions do not have to be "perfect", they only have to work most of the time. We will allow exceptions. But exactly which exceptions are really allowed? Now everyone stonewalls, because everyone shuns perfection and it becomes necessary to invent new exceptions in response to our own uncomfortable conclusions. By everyone, I mean almost everyone.

I have often wondered about this, and it often seems we have no real access to "truth" in order to make a direct comparison to our beliefs. We only compare beliefs to other beliefs (I believe the sun is real, and I believe I saw it yesterday). So as devil's advocate, it could be said "knowledge does not exist", or more specifically we can't ever know which of our beliefs properly should called "knowledge". Science only talks about how consistent the beliefs are with one another, with some of those beliefs simply being accepted observations.On the other hand, finding consistency itself involves act of believing in the methods needed to detect consistency. So I can be skeptical and call into question the methodology needed to validate radical skepticism! Put another way, yes science is measured in confidence levels, but even confidence levels have confidence levels. If you believe you are 99% confident about some particular thing, that is still a belief and that estimate of confidence is probably wrong. You are probably confident by a slightly different amount. So the real confidence number could be as high as 100%. This reason enables truth to match belief, the match to be certain, and allows epistemology to function normally at least some of the time.

It is a pretty open question. Depends on what kind of attack, what kind of free society, and even depends on who you are (what prior arrangements you made).

There also seems to be a distinction whether god is even possible. Most strong atheist hold the belief that not only is god a bogus belief and "god does not exist" is the believed condition, but on top of that, god is a self-contradicting and nonviable concept. On the other hand, I think god could in principle exist (god is viable much as dinosaurs are viable) but just as a simple matter of the way the universe has emerged "god's existence" (or rather presence anywhere) simply has never came to be, and probably never will. I am not "neutral" on that belief, but quite certain. But in theory, a guy could invent god in a garage with power tools, if that guy had sufficient know-how.

I suppose it would be like McDonald's telling people they will starve to death without fast food. I think there is no way to oppose the state argument for land and natural resources because, whether public or private, it is always a race for the ability to fabricate boundaries and write the most convincing piece of paper to rationalize forced obligations. We all just try to convince people an absentee soul exists at places where property is thought to be held.On the other hand for constructed property one can make argument private ownership is correct because the "build" component is something the state fails to do. It is always by threat of violence the state's constructed property comes into being.That is why it's sometimes good to differentiate between forms of property (natural, constructed, and intellectual) because they have different causes and possible ethics.

To know complex things, we must use words to make things compact enough to grasp. Sometimes the words (as imperfect simple abbreviations for complex things) will introduce inconsistencies, because of the varying context they are used. I weigh myself on a scale. Fish have scales. But these are different scales. The inconsistency is explained away by realizing words are inconsistently used, and if somebody says something inconsistent it does not automatically prove any of the ideas are wrong. They are often just poorly explained.

Yes I agree the consequences are critical because it is easy to generate paradoxes. But I am believing true thoughts or information always ascribe physical and energetic traits by necessity. By my thinking existence is what's manifested physically, much as you say. But I am allowing for manifestations to be demonstrated temporarily or sporadically, so long as they can be relied upon. The things represented by words can be said to "exist" when they make reliable predictions about behavior of physical matter and energy. Information and thoughts are sometimes matter/energy, it's just not their full-time job. This is mostly based on the indispensability argument. If you need certain information to carry out a task in the physical world, as if the universe demands you discover and use such recallable entities, the information must exist and it's just as real as the objects the information describes The key point being that data can be independently reproduced, and that is good enough to justify the word "exists". Of course, that's only so long as we don't forget that notations and symbols needed to get to that point are all made up on a fictional basis (they are just optional shortcuts we take to make our brains work faster).If we go out in the world and say truths "do not exist" yet observe we have the power to reproduce exactly the same results over and over (eg. "2+2=4" minus the social/symbolic overhead needed to say all that), where are these truths being stored exactly? The answer must be nowhere if we by definition deny them existence. Just take an example: If you measure the speed of light by experimentation, would you believe the photons consult a local physics textbook to decide what speed they should use? And if they can't find the textbook, they are suddenly free to travel at any speed? No, I suspect you believe they are bound to some predetermined speed, textbook or not. It is a speed that seems to be "information" we humans can recall at any time by experimentation, even if our physical artifacts (books, etc) were all wiped out. If we do not give information "existence" as a defined characteristic, we humans have the power to reliably access non-existent information. My gut feeling is "access" makes it clear something exists, and instead of saying their existence is "nowhere" I will just say "everywhere" because the experiments can be done in any place we choose to do them. If you say truth information is "nowhere", then I am not sure how to interpret that. Information being nowhere just says the experiment is not being done right here and now, but does say much whether it could be done here and now. And if the results match previous attempts, I am sort of left wondering how that happened.I see what you mean about "words themselves do not exist" because you seem to be talking about words as more abstract and interchangeable. I think more about dots of ink being a "word". When I read that word, there is also now a word inside my brain. All of which might exist by your definition, correct? These are transformations, from "brain" to "brain+word", just as your carpenters build a chair in a room. To me it seems impossible to talk about adding or removing things without saying how it is done, even words. I don't know if wooden blocks spelling "thought" consititute a thought. Certainly not what I would call a "valid" thought, because that system in isolation probably does not make superior predictions about matter/energy compared a similar system of randomly situated blocks. Although when you move the blocks around I think you change their energy, even if in tiny amounts.

I suppose if you could simply stop thinking about elephants and at the same time not alter any energy flow of your body in any tiny amount, I totally agree that would be a violation of conservation laws. Your definition is fine. But then perhaps it seems very little in the world exists. Just quarks and stuff. Oxygen does not exist because it is only a named arrangement of particles and fields. Entropy and spacetime do not exist because there is no guarantee mass/energy must change accordingly. Here's the deal: I guess I do not know exactly what you mean by even including "presence or absence" inside your definition of "exists"! In your definition, what is "presence" if not equal to "existence"? Sure I would define them separately, but I am allowing for such differences (eg. numbers, gravity, oxygen, dinosaurs all exist in some real way even when not present). You seem not to permit this distinction, so you need to clarify, right? Or are you saying as an experiment you can toggle the presence of absence of a thing (to test whether it affects matter/energy) even though that thing being added and removed during the course of the experiment totally does not exist? In any case I am not supposing you meant you can magically remove something without changing it into something else. Does it not seem everything is transformation, and when anything is "created" it is simply transformed from other stuff? So if you are going to talk about things being added or removed from a system, my feeling is that you would need to suggest exactly what kind of transformation is taking place inside your definition.

On the use of force, it seems OK to use proportional force to stop assault of a child. They operate behind closed doors, and justice will take a long time. But whether force or literature, these folks are objectively worse than pedophiles and to get them to change is impossible. I think the only social momentum has been gained by informing expecting parents and telling them before it's too late that we are hurt. It also helps to make proof by contradiction airtight during social debates involving moral obligations. Somebody says "I am against X" (discrimination, taxation, rape, sexual harrassment, hate speech, child abuse, etc.), you can respond "OK fine but you do not speak out against circumcision, and X is less intrusive. Why the hypocrisy? You should defend X also." Personally, I do not think state/institutional attitudes will change much (though it does not hurt to try). There is a desire of bureaucracies to remain distant and compartmentalized.

Sounds good. Physics makes the ultimate decision. All patterns and abstractions that can be objectively tested by "logic" can be manifested physically, because physical objects must exist during the act of proof. When two marbles are moved apart, their distance from one another increases in opposition to their gravitational pull toward one another. So energy is added to the local system by another system. Arrangements and patterns are just levels of energy in these tiny amounts, so they exist. By that same thinking, all arrangements of matter, whether proofs on a chalkboard or thoughts in our minds, involve patterns expressed as energy levels. Entropy is increasing overall, but entropy can be moved around. We can find that two conflicting thoughts offer a physical distinction. One of the thoughts enables the correct physical predictions to be made. The other thought will have more entropy because it will fail to make correct predictions and therefore take on a more disordered pattern of activity. In that way, the concept exists. It works and it's viable as far as its temporary value in predictively accounting for energy levels and transformations that physics allows. But more than that, if a valid concept were totally destroyed in our minds and all human-created methods of recall (paper, computers, etc.), it can be later reproduced by independent research. So there is a sense that "recall" of true concepts can be done without resorting to any "medium containing our thoughts". Somebody would have discovered relativity, even if you build a time machine and go back and stop Einstein. So physics ensures certain thought patterns are likely emerge ("recalled" if you wish), just as those thought patterns describe what matter/energy is likely to do. The decreased entropy of "thought" is allowed at the expense of increased entropy of our other biological functions, and of course the total energy of a system with new thoughts created does not change. But that is a little bit like saying oxygen does not exist, because if you built oxygen by nuclear fusion the energy just moves around and no new oxygen can be added. A concept is not an addition to the universe. Like oxygen, thoughts and concepts are only formation and/or discovery of a new pattern.

I see what you mean. Although books do not contain people. They contain the names of people. Names are all made up at some point, whether the people are real or not. If I write an autobiography accurately enough, and then change my name, the book is now fiction? Or if I write a story that involves a made up character, but coincidentally matches the events of some real guy, the book is called "fiction" only because that guy's name does not yet match the one in the book? To me this is like using letter x in an equation. We know x is not a number, it's a letter. But we let it play the fictional role of a number for purposes of solving the equation. In that same way, I may write the name Santiago to describe a fictional character. Or I may as well have told the accurate story of a real person whose name is something else. Should we distinguish the story fiction vs. nonfiction depending how I choose to name people? Maybe that's like saying a solution to an equation might be different depending which choice of letters are placed for variables. This means the speed of light is c=3*10^8 m/s, it's nonfiction only if you use the letter c to denote it, and fiction if you use a nonconventional letter.

Yes getting rid of rules that are not logically provable is a good concept. What is identifiable as your property is maintained by verbalizations (written or otherwise) and are socailly conventional. There's no way to prove by independent validation. To remove me from your property, you must violate NAP. Without your legitimacy of free speech (an my acceptance of your rights), I will call it my property and you are commiting theft. This has been covered before. I am glad you agree some rules exist. Why property is said to be a proven rule I just can't grasp.

Very good ideas! I have never before seen written paragraphs so well tuned to these philosophical ideas. The last bit about evolution is slightly presumptuous and needs work. The state is just beginning influencing, leveraging and weaponizing the theory of evolution, I suspect only because it can't eradicate the theory in favor of more effective mechanisms of control.

It only takes athletic or medical tape to hold skin over the glans for a couple days to notice a jump in sensitivity. A simple experiment to try. There is a media blackout on foreskin restoration.

You demand much of categorization. By that thinking, I am in agreement with you. Brains and coin sorters are in different leagues. All I am saying here is that when you engage in human act of (what you call) categorization, you give things names. The layers you speak of present these names or tokens of reality. Even the highest level of conceptualization is merely a systematic compartmentalization of words that our neurons must sort though. In that specific regard I agree that concepts, numbers, etc. do not exist. "Three" does not exist as an absolute word with absolute reality. But once all those convenient fictions are formalized -- once you decide precisely what those named categories mean, the class of external objects that meets that condition can be said to exist and it always has existed even before you gave it a name. I am of the belief that helium had two protons and was an inert gas long before the word "two" was conceptualized. In that way the number two exists. It carries with it physical meaning and quantum mechanical consequences without regard for our mental concepts and words. Is that a fair statement?

I believe this notion "rights do not exist" is completely bogus. If it's true that all rights originate with human thought and social convention, then rights are subject to chicken-and-egg analysis. "Rights do not exist". Therefore you have no right to say that. I have not given you that right. As a thinker and grantor of what constitutes rights, I don't accept such things. And if I did accept it, my right to do so is now suspect. Since by this bogus idea, human acceptance is supposedly the only thing that makes rights manifestly present, there is no point of origin. There is no way to say "rights do not exist" because saying so with validity requires rights to begin with. For me, the only way out of the conflict is to say some rights exist without our personal consent or knowledge. If you expect to convince others that rights do not exist, you are implicitly making use of rights that exist apparently without your knowledge. If you believe rights do not exist and do NOT wish to convince others by logic (purposely keeping it a faith-based secret of some higher truth), then why not be quiet about it and conserve your energy. The whole act is a performative contradiction.