It is not a disdain for sociology - I quite like the field - I just don't think what they do is really scientific. While they purport to use scientific method conceptually, it is only in the very loose sense you described. The nature of the field is such that it cannot use maths to make proofs. The best it can do is collect empirical data samples (usually small due to lack of funding) that usually have poor variable control and conduct statistical analysis to make some conclusions. It is far from giving the same level of certainty in its claims as physics or chemistry - while even those do not give 100% certainty, we can send people to the moon with them. I can't say the same for sociology.

As to your second point, why something 'is' in a scientific sense is because something else 'is'. It is the examination of why in a causal sense. Apples fall from trees because gravity exists. It is not because things ought to be that way or because apples have some moral trait. That is no longer the realm of science.

Science can tell us whether humans feel positive or negative emotion from certain stimuli. That is an 'is' proposition. Science however cannot tell us how to create a moral framework UNLESS we take the starting step and say something like 'any moral framework must maximise the positive emotions felt by the people in it'. And at that point, we have pulled an ought statement from absolutely nowhere!

Regarding the paradox - you have described the 'is' / 'ought' problem outlined by Hume and the limit of how much science can intrude on philosophy. Real scientific facts can cause us to consider new moral questions - developments in technology commonly do this. But they do not automatically create moral predicaments. That requires someone to think about whether a situation is moral (unless youre an objectivist).

Science can give us new options in responding to moral questions. It can create situations that are themselves new moral questions. But it cannot answer those questions for us by itself. Science in a pure sense is amoral.

Distinguishing man from animal isn't a strawman but that's kinda funny.

I think that the issue is deeper. If you are facing a vote of 2 candidates both of some evil, you should of course vote for the one of lesser evil, then you should run yourself the next election.

The vet should not euthanise animals, should quit, and start a ground-level campaign to create a shelter which does not euthanise.

How else will society change?

While competition is a basic component of life, cooperation is not a basic component of competition. Some forms of competition require cooperation and some do not.

When two hunters are competing for the same animal, they don’t have to cooperate for one of them to win. When two trees in a dense forest are both trying to reach the canopy to get more sunlight, they do not cooperate. If they are side by side and there’s only room at the top of the canopy for one, there will be a winner and a loser without cooperation playing a role.

Corrupt data

Isn't it equally a delusion to reason that by restricting data (i.e. constraining and adding a lens or a sampling decision) that the patterns produced are true patterns and not merely the effect of sampling?

It's actually worse.

Since there is a finite pool of available voters, removing your vote from a viable candidate, either by not voting or voting third party, is basically a default vote for the candidate you would least want elected.

Grown-ups understand that there are no perfect choices.

To discourage voter participation. I sense a trend in the articles posted here lately.

Kojima nailed it in 2001.

Checkers requires cooperation, under the rules of the game. To an extreme, it's war. In competition, cooperation is a requirement to keep it civilized.

All strawman arguments and whataboutisms. You have no actual counterarguments.

Watched a fantastic 8 minute video essay about Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It posed the question of what if you interpret it as the opposite of its accepted interpretation and it is actually Adam creating god? It really made me stop and think and is honestly a great video essay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPk0Gng2oTM

Computer science is moving so fast that the other disciplines are kinda lost when it comes to it.

How do animals facilitate their survival? How does a human facilitate their survival? Why bother using the animal as a primary? Animals don't wear clothes, humans are animals, therefore humans don't need clothes?

Also doesn't this fall into a naturalistic fallacy? Just because man can act for their survival doesn't mean they explicitly should. As opposed to an animal which lacks the means to merely sit around, wallow in filth and choose to stagnate and die.

Why not though?

If I can prove that a certain flow of ions in a certain region of brain results in a certain belief why isn't that valuable?

It being a basic component of life doesn’t change a friendly game of checkers.

Humans are animals and animals' main function is survival, which does not require morals. Hence, a human being does not need morals.

I have a couple of questions that I would like to be debated about.

* Why is assisted/suicide due to mental illness still not accepted and illegal?

I know that there are countries (famously Switzerland (*1)) in which assisted suicide is legal, but a person that wants to make use of such services must meet a series of strict conditions (*2). In particular, among others, this person must suffer from an unrecoverable or highly disabling physical impairment or must be just old enough. It follows and is even explicitly stated that assisted suicide can't be offered to people with mental disorders.

I would like to understand the reason for such a broad exclusion. I know that a person can potentially recover from a mental condition and eventually achieve a fulfilling life. But, as far as I see it, as there are physical conditions for which there is no known cure, something similar might be said for mental illness.

I want to state a few reasons: sometimes (*3) a person doesn't fully recover from mental disorders. sometimes (or in some places) there isn't enough medical expertise to cure a illness that would be otherwise treatable. sometimes people are just broken beyond repair. sometimes a person just doesn't have the resources to obtain appropriate treatment.

And I'm noticing that these four reasons can be equivalently applied to physical conditions too.

Footnotes:

(*1) In my country (Italy) assited suicide is illegal and we happened to have a few cases of people going to Switzerland for the service. Marco Cappato helped people travel to the clinic and subsequently challenged the Italian law by self-reporting for some specific crimes which such law mentions.

(*2) This might be a whole other topic, but I always wondered how ethics and laws choose thresholds for various classifications.

(*3) I just use "sometimes" because I didn't research any known precise statistics.

* How is civilization dealing with the flaws of the legal system?

There have been many cases of people unjustly sentenced to prison or even with death penalty. It's clear to me that often there can't be a total certainty that the defendant was really responsible for the crime. Conversely sometimes it's obvious that the defendent is guilty, but by a glitch of the law it happens to be walking free.

I'm not talking about "moral standards of civilizations". I'm asking whether an individual alone needs moral standards at all - not specifically the standards of civilizations you refer to.

Yes and no. It's means our commonly held moral axioms are derived from biological drives, it doesn't mean those axioms are correct or incorrect in any meaningful way that isn't self referential.

>Competition is a basic component of life. That’s not going to change for the foreseeable futur

Elevating it as one of our most sacred cows, on the other hand, mutates decently enjoyable competitions into something else entirely.

You will never encounter a situation where your ideals align directly with those you are voting for, unless you yourself are on the ballot. Challenges to your subjective values and integrity will always be inherent in this system.

You're not protecting your integrity, or furthering your own projects toward certain aims, by taking an anti-participatory stance in electoral systems. On the contrary, you are eliminating what little effect your actions do have on the system.

So, how does not voting result in the protection of your integrity while voting does not? If voting harms your personal aims and integrity, then clearly, not voting harms them both to a greater degree.

Honestly, what is the point of this paper?

So just give up all your data to throw them off the trail? I find that difficult to fathom.

consumerism and the collapse of authenticity

Identity, as per existentialism, must follow existence and must thus be causally posterior to exposure to an empirical world. The identity itself is constructed reflexively in response to the material realm.

Impoverish the material realm, and you equally Impoverish the repository from whence identity is constructed. Homogenisation equals such impoverishment. So, totally administering the empirical life world must lead, causally, to a commensurate administration of identity formation. People become the same intellectually.

The loss of epistemic distance between people also marks the loss of conditions conducive to sustained dialogue. For dialogue, to survive, requires difference and asymptotic vascilation (similar to socratic inquiry).

The resultant collapse of epistemic distance positions people so closely together that the distance required for meaningful debate, and by extension true relation, is lost and people become alienated from each other.

The consumer industry totally administers the empirical life world. Authenticity, thusly, is lost...