StrictlyLogical

But the point is less powerful in the face of the rise in global and domestic authoritarianism. A mixed economy as a passive economic background (Milton had to contend with) is one thing… the beast (of whom perhaps we’ve only glimpsed the tip of its tail) we are dealing with now, and whose fetishes include all ESG stands for, is far more powerful a consideration… and corporate players are anticipating and cow towing to those who may take over… they aren’t blind to the currents of free market consumerism, they are blinded with terror of the authoritarian tsunami. I believe the people and freedom will prevail in the end… (we will own things and will not eat bugs)…but corporations are the cowards in the fight… and it might get very ugly.

Correct no one owns children, and children do not have the capacity to consent to certain things, the consequences of which they cannot understand ... until they reach an age when generally they can, and with respect to that particular issue... they are no longer children.

You must have someone else in mind ... I an not talking about abortion. I'm raising the absurdity and evil of the left's tacit approval of actual infanticide... which is the murderous flip side of the anthropomorphising absurdity and mysticism of the right proclaiming a single celled embryo is a person. The asymmetry here is that of mechanistic murder versus religious tyranny. After having raised the issue of infanticide, I am now having a discussion whose subject is how a person or society should deal with helpless infants who will die without care. Failing to understand and accept your nature or evading such questions out of fear or pride is precisely what I would call letting emotions stand in the way of cognition. Man is rational, but man is also emotional, man is social, man is sexual, man is brutal, a man many things far greater and deeper than the single part you single out as important... and it IS incredibly important almost as important as free will. Do not confuse the definition of the concept of man, relying ONLY on what capability distinguishes us, as some kind of summation of ALL we are.. it is but a thin crinkle of tissue paper compared to the vast depths and breadths of what each of us is. What are the ramifications of having that responsibility? Is it merely an admonition to a parent that they will feel bad if they abdicate that responsibility... merely a "you'll be sorry" if you murder or neglect your child and they die. What does it mean to "have a responsibility" with respect to the ethical;, societal, political (legal) context? Does reality or anyone in society hold them in any way to that responsibility? How? On what basis? Again, I am not talking about abortion in this discussion. I'm was talking about infanticide and am discussing the care of children.

A person of greater virtue and character would simply say they oppose infanticide if they do. Denying and repudiating one’s belief in one area out of fear that it might be used in an argument to attack them in another area is cowardly and undignified. Everyone knows his belief, no matter how much I may agree with him (near conception) at least he is standing on his hill on his principles.. not dodging and evading and trying to hide what hill he is on. The behaviour of the others is sneaky (as the kids nowadays say sketchy) and it disgusts me and reminds me of the worst kind of politician… the kind who will never give a straight answer… and the answers they give are full of empty misdirecting nothings…

I think there is more to "man qua man" than people who like to philosophize are willing to dive into. There are certain rational shortcuts and superficial calculus' we like to throw at things like the trolley problem or the definition of a human (recall the story of the throwing of a plucked chicken to ridicule "featherless biped" as the definition of man). IF man WERE cannibals, by nature, by flavor, by urge, by intuition, by evolution, culture, and institution, then what makes a person thrive should probably involve some cannibalism, as well as some virtues for avoiding being supper. BUT our nature is NOT cannibalism. Letting defenceless babies of our own nature, other individuals, other persons, other ends in themselves whose natural life includes parental or adult care, simply die for the want of it... when each and every one of us was provided... had to be provided with it ourselves... offends our very nature. It is not simply emotional... nor outside the realm of rational... it is part of what makes humans what we are. No matter what kinds of rationalizations people bandy about to support dehumanization , or inhuman existence... they imagine we can be anything, but an anything is nothing in particular. We have natures, and the order of nature is in us, we are human, and at the root ARE things like our our innate ability to respond and to care for children. So to be sane, to be healthy, flourishing humans... we are our children's keepers. Parents first, family second, friends and local people, and the rest of us at large if only temporarily, until someone takes over.

Is a straw man hypothetical... like asking what a moral society for psychopaths or cannibals should look like.

I believe a live human being in the position of a child has a right to life, and a right to the positive responsibility and duty of care by the child's parent, and in lieu of that (for whatever reason, ... death, disability etc), by family, friends, local authorities etc. (including a doctor or hospital) until a person willing to take on that responsibility officially and permanently can be found. A human is born with an unchosen absolute dependency upon those who caused its existence, including the doctor and hospital. Whatever part of leaving a helpless baby to die on a hospital room floor leads to flourishing and not its opposite, is not worthy of discussion IMHO.

Why don't democratic and left leaning medical/health "experts" come out definitively against (or for) infanticide? Why all the wiggling and refusing to answer? Aside from obvious lack of conviction or pride one must have to skirt direct questions about important moral questions... which many on the left suffer from...I think a refusal to answer such an important moral question is a clear indication of some support for the idea of a right for mothers to kill live babies AND they are simply afraid or ashamed of admitting it. The republican here is very clumsy and its excruciatingly cringeworthy how he asks, but he is asking for a direct answer about the morality of infanticide, and yes he is clearly is religious and pro-life (not just outside the womb) but the evasion by the witnesses to claim their OWN moral convictions is stunning. So California is one of the states ushering in the brave new world to come: https://www.californiafamily.org/2022/05/infanticide-bill-amended-after-huge-public-outcry-but-serious-problems-remain/

Texas or Florida?

Boydstun It does occur to me that there is a class of unknowables, in a particular sense of knowing, to any experiencing or knowing individual, and that is something along the lines of a “what it is like to be” of what one is not. A third person analysis of humanity and consciousness perhaps by a machine would never know what it is like to be human, although with its word strings and sophisticated pattern recognition it might come close to imitating the words a human might say. We cannot really every know or truly understand what it is like to be a bat. We could try to imagine it, but our not being bats is precisely why we never can know what it is like to be one. Is or can a first person experience, or any experience from a first person view .. ever be anything other than something in itself? I think this is a unique sort of thing.

I know from your previous posts that you are intellectually honest. You ask me if I am making a claim that life cannot be shown to depend on chemistry for its arising. First of all I am asking about a possible or purported trait of reality, specifically I am trying to identify it conceptually, if there is anything there. I am not making any claim about “showing” anything from anything else. In your specific question you talk of life depending on chemistry. If you mean the processes in reality which involve molecular and atomic interactions which we study and use chemistry to understand and predict, then I would say life as a thing and a process includes a lot of various processes and structures that include molecules and atoms which are interacting in reality and which we would, at that level of understanding describe and analyze using the science we call chemistry. I’m not sure any living organism depends on anything, it is what it is and does what it does. Our understanding of a dog depends on our understanding of biology, chemistry, physics… but the dogs electrons photons nuclei atoms molecules enzymes cells and organs simply all are being and doing continuously as a complex integrated whole. Different kinds of molecules behave differently. Chemistry has been around for over a hundred years… it never needed a concept such as this so called emergence. You need to point at something more specific. You cannot use the term emergence to define itself. The mere fact that different combinations form different things with different properties has been around forever.

How we view a system is not anything about the system and certainly nothing about a process or a property OF that system… how we view something is about us and our capacities and knowledge.

response above

No one word can capture all "they" mean when they say selfish. It is a combination of a whole host of possible vices combined with appearing to act for oneself (at least superficially). There is a misidentification of what the long term self interest is, so it is self-sabotage, misguided selfishness, shortsightedness, ignorance, idiocy? How to sum up a simpleton's selfishness?... no easy task. Rather than try to come up with a different word, it suffices to point out that "selfishness" in not the proper characterization and the specific instance is better described by [insert particular short term vice here].

Relative motion is a property of an object's velocity or change in relative position. An object with the property of relative motion with respect to you or any other object is an identifiable and measurable property. It is both qualitative, closer ... versus farther, as well as quantitative 1 foot versus 3 feet, 1 mile per hour versus 10 miles an hour, and it is also directional in three degrees of freedom in space. There real identifiable observable differences in reality between objects which are moving or not (relative to something else) are the observations in reality which GIVE meaning to the concept motion in the first place. If there were no observable differences... such as the observation "hey that thing keeps looking bigger and bigger in my field of view as it 'somethings' in front of me" ... then there would be no reason to use the concept. Yes there are different processes, that goes without saying, falling, exploding, expanding, rolling, eating, breathing, shining, freezing.. and they all different, usefully different concepts which are governed by causation. The class of identified processes are different from things which are not falling, exploding, rolling, etc. and they identify specific kinds of processes which may or may not coexist or happen concurrently. The very necessity of concepts come from something recognizable, even something as universal as "existing" (although not technically a special property of a thing in addition to its properties and attributes). If I point to something and say 'now THAT exhibits "Ish de triddle de plunkeblub"', I better have a REASON for making such a claim. At the very BASIC level that is why I am asking: How would a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is not “emergent” differ from a causal process or property (exhibited by a complex system) which is “emergent”? EDIT: Added brackets for clarity