Anyone who hasn't seen this yet needs to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoS52fVtVQM

Quote from: Troglodactyl on January 27, 2015, 11:52:42 pm

Thanks Pascal.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

Never underestimate the tremendous cost of denying yourself the ability to live life according to your own principles, values and beliefs, driven by fear that you will disappoint any of an unlimited range of beings that humans could conceive of, any of which could make our lives heaven or hell on the back of a prescribed code of behaviour.

Indeed.  I don't like Pascal's Wager as a defense, I was just labeling it since I saw it in Stan's response about bears in the woods.

Quote from: arhag on January 27, 2015, 05:52:54 pm

Quote from: Stan on January 27, 2015, 02:27:58 pm

Quote from: arhag on January 27, 2015, 06:31:38 am

You already answered yes to the first question. I'm particularly most interested in your answer to the second question more than any other, in particular the "how are humans supposed to discover them and prove their veracity" part.

You can't discover or prove things which are not observable.
If there are such things, you can only know them if they are taught to you by someone you find credible.
There are many who claim to have been eye-witnesses to such teaching.
Like any juror, you have to decide whether you find such eye-witnesses credible.

I have never seen a strange quark.
I have no capability to observe one.
I have to decide whether the group of physicists who say they have observed them are credible.   

The scientists who claimed to have observed a strange quark do not merely state their claim. They also provide a procedure that anyone with sufficient resources could recreate in the present to repeat the observation for themselves. Their claims are falsifiable. This means that they are putting their reputation on the line if the make false claims. Other scientists are waiting to repeat their observations to check their work. The more the original set of scientists' claim is accepted by society, the more significant it would be for the second set of scientists to disprove the claim. Checking each other's claims is possible and the incentives for checking the claims are in place. The rest of us can rely on this mechanism to trust falsifiable claims that have been verified by many independent groups and have not yet been disproven even though we won't be making the observations and calculations ourselves. It would take a very elaborate and difficult to maintain conspiracy for a large set of scientists to intentionally propagate the belief in false scientific claims (assuming they would even have any personal motivation to do so in the first place).

Let's compare the above to alleged eye-witness claims of divine teachings and phenomena. We are forced to base the belief off books which are translations of other books written many years ago of stories that were passed down verbally which originated 1000s of years ago allegedly from eye-witness evidence. There are many places along this process where the information could be corrupted (think of the game of telephone). The most significant of which is the original observation of the "evidence" by potentially flawed observers as well as the original reporting of the observation to other people. And we have no way of proving whether these observations were accurate or not because we cannot go back in time to observe it (and even if we somehow could we would need a sufficiently decentralized and unlikely to collude group of individuals to all go back and observe it so that they could corroborate on their story).

Furthermore, there can be many reasons why the reporters of this evidence would have incentive to lie about their claims. They may wish to obtain fame and power (claiming you are special enough to be a prophet that God decided to directly present and speak to could be a good way of achieving that, although it can also backfire and provide notoriety instead and result in one's death for blasphemy and heresy). They may wish to control populations through religion (claiming certain rules you want populations to follow have authority not because you say they do but because a higher power than you does gives it more credibility to significant portions of the population). Also, keep in mind that the eye-witness observers may also not be intentially lying but rather subconciously exaggerating their claims and seeing what they want to see (we know the human mind tends to do that). Since a belief in supernatural phenemona has been deeply buried in the human subconcious for a long time (our pattern seeking brains tend to observe natural phenomena that we cannot explain scientifically through all kinds of imaginative stories), it is not odd to think that the observers of "novel" divine "evidence", which was in reality nothing special or significant, saw something there that confirmed their expectations of what they hoped to see (think Virgin Mary on a piece of toast).

Given the above realities of the human condition, we should be skeptical of these claims. We should be skeptical of radical scientific claims as well, of course. But the scientific claims are falsifiable. Furthermore, people don't really take new theories very seriously if they are not going beyond the currently accepted theory in some way. If the new theory explains all evidence that is already explained by the current dominant theory, and nothing more, then it is not interesting. If there is evidence that seems to contradict the current theory but a new theory explains it as well as all the other evidence explained by the current theory, then it is interesting enough to scrutinize. If the novel predictions the new theory makes are then later confirmed, it then stands a very good chance of replacing the current theory. You can see many examples of this in science but just to give one example, look at Einstein's general relativity replacing Newtonian gravity. While the process is not perfect and wonderfully rational always, it at least continually improves upon itself based on evidence observed in the physical universe and through the scientific method.

I think the same processes should be applied to divine claims. There is no reason to consider a new theory of how the universe operates unless there is evidence that doesn't fit the current theory and the new theory explains it (or explains it much better). But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A claim of divine powers existing in the universe that had never been observed is an extraordinary claim. It is not sufficient in my opinion to consider the testimony of a single person (or even a small group of people) who claimed to have had a first-hand experience of the phenomena as "extraordinary evidence" (especially for all the reasons I stated two paragraphs above). It is certain that our current theory of the universe is incorrect (even if only slightly) and it may even be possible that the correct theory includes a subset of divine phenomena as reported in religious scripture, but it makes no sense to jump to that theory based on the faulty evidence we have supporting this new theory as of today. If extraordinary evidence did present itself in the future, and we were to skeptically and scientifically study this evidence using critical reasoning, then the theory should (and very likely would) change. So far, it has not.

But I want to go a bit further. Even if we found the evidence of divine phenomena reported in religious scripture to be compelling (of course we have to ask which of the many conflicting religious scripture we are talking about in this case), I would argue that it is not sufficient evidence of an afterlife, dualism, or objective morality. A being with abilities that were, up to the point of us observing them, considered supernatural (if we reach a  consensus that they actually exist in the natural physical world, it is no longer accurate to call it "supernatural"), is not necessarily also a being that is omnipotent and is the creator of the entire universe. Humans with our current technology would look like magical wizards compared to humans a few thousand years back in the past. It could be plausible that extraterrestrial beings with their advanced technology (potentially exploiting laws of physics we were unaware of) could exhibit actions that most of us humans would be unable to interpret as any other way than "divine". And just because such an advanced being might claim they are the omnipotent creator of the universe, that there exists a human soul that will after biological death either experience eternal paradise or eternal torture based on the judgement of the omnipotent being, and also here are the list of criteria by which the being will be judging humanity, doesn't necessarily make any of it true. It could just be a prank or a means of claiming higher superiority than they already have to further quell any resistance to their claims of control and power.

Yep, you should consider all of those things when determining whether any unfalsifiable teaching is credible.

But the burden of proof that there are no bears in the woods lies with the person who wants to go there unarmed.

Thanks Pascal.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

I prefer to take that logic a bit further back.  We must assume (if possible) that we have real, non-illusory free will, because choosing not to make that assumption is absurd.  Likewise, we must assume that objective value exists, and that our decisions can have objective value, because this is either true, or by definition no value can be lost by choosing to believe it falsely.

Having established that objective value exists, I take the consequentialist approach to morality, though accepting the existence of objective value leaves plenty of room for debate regarding its exact nature and what actions may create it or destroy it.  Depending on the standards of value incorporated, I think a consequentialist framework can encompass any other moral system.

I am Christian, but I believe that God is "good" not simply by arbitrarily defining the term as a self reference, but because what God is as an entity is defined by the creation of real value.

It's basically a mesh structure, and users host the content they care about.  Content that's valued will propagate, and junk will die off.

Each user has a PGP key pair, with peer discovery through distributed hash tables, like BitTorrent or Tox.  When you add a contact's public key, you form a connection with that user.

So each user is a node in the mesh, and files, forums, and email style messages are shared peer to peer.  The incentive to run a node is the use-value of the network at this point.  I'd like to see further partnership between RetroShare and BitShares eventually, but using it is a good place to start with that.

Quote from: Stan on January 27, 2015, 03:44:38 am

Rights are not granted by governments, they are inalienable.

If so, there are no property rights, because ownership of property, even purchased property, can always be philosophically challenged. Nature does not grant any person any right to any mineral, goods, quality of health, basic income, or even life itself. These human conceptualisations can only be granted by a consensus willing to enforce it, whether that apparatus is called state or not.

It's a subtle point. I'm saying block-chains do not enforce anything except the ability to control. Ownership rights exist separately if they are enforced.

We're getting mixed up on moral rights versus legal rights again.

The fact that moral property rights can be challenged and questioned philosophically doesn't prove that they don't exist.  Claiming that a human's right to life does not exist without a consensus is true of the legal right to life, but I reject the idea that the moral right to life is nonexistent without consensus.  I assert that objective value exists, because there is literally no value in supposing that it does not.

If by "rights" you mean moral rights, then enforcement is irrelevant to their existence, because they only describe that which it is morally justifiable to enforce.

If by "rights" you mean whatever status is enforced, then I don't see how it matters whether that status includes the presence or the absence of a state.

Or is the question whether morality exists in any real sense, or if it's just an artificial projection of the desires of the strongest or most violent group?

Using money to pay for mining hardware and electricity is burning stake.  Proof of work can be validated easily, while validating direct proof of stake is more difficult.

*weekend bump*