If you accept the premise that experience with positive or negative valence is real and that closed individualism is false, utilitarianism is the only option.

I guess most people have more issue with the closed individualism part

Can you link me something comprehensive about this? It seems ridiculous on its face. And improbability vs. impossibility and quantity of evil have nothing to do with induction vs. deduction.

That's the point. Even a thousand years from now or ten thousand, we likely won't have all the answers. And an answer is not right if it is even 1% wrong. That's why it's important to never try to prove the theory, but create a proper theory to fit the facts. We should never be saying 'time does this near the speed of light', we should be saying 'we believe time does this near the speed of light based upon the current available theory and information'. Going back to the original post topic, dark matter may not exist...eventually you have to start looking at the theory as the problem.

The deductive argument seeks to show that God cannot exist given the existence of evil. The inductive argument seeks to show that it is very improbable that God exists given the sheer amount of evil in the world.

Explain. I do not know what you mean by an inductive problem of evil.

Most philosophers agree that the deductive problem fails; it’s the inductive version that you should think about.

Their lack of assurance does not constitute a logical objection to the solution of the problem. The problem of evil is supposed to be an objection to the possibility of the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. It fails because of the reasoning in the post. That people aren’t sure God exists has nothing to do with the fact that the problem of evil fails to disprove God’s existence.

>I'm soo confused why they keep talking about the standard model in relation to gravity.

The standard model of cosmology (as opposed to particle physics) is the lambda-CDM model, where "CDM" stands for "cold dark matter" (and "lambda" denotes a positive cosmological constants, aka "dark energy").

>I think the main issues is that MOND by itself simply doesn't explain everything we see. So last I herd was that the only feasible MOND theories left were "MOND + dark matter" theories. I wasn't even aware that there were any major theories that didn't include dark matter of some kind.

From my own understanding (i.e. as a hobbyist with a background in philosophy, not physics), the entire purpose of MOND is to avoid having to invoke dark matter- the rough idea being that gravity works differently on the scale of galaxies/galaxy clusters, and that correcting for this explains the discrepancy between the observed rotational velocities of galaxies and galaxy clusters vs. their apparent mass without having to invoke a new type of matter.

Okay, the key claim is that God’s omnipotence does not mean the ability to violate genuine principles of logic, so God is in some sense limited. Thus, any evil must be necessary. Here’s the key quote:

“With the above, the classical problem of evil has been decimated. Evil is somehow necessary. God had to do it in order to make us. Why would an all-loving, all-powerful God put us in such an evil world and cause or allow such evil things to occur? The only answer is that he must cause or allow such things to occur. No, this does not diminish his omnipotence even slightly. He could have not created us. He could have created some other foreign existence. However, for this world of differentiation to exist, in which I am me and you are you and you are not me and I am not you, this world of evil is somehow a necessity.”

The problem with this is the one raised by Hume in his Dialogues. If we are assured there is an all good, all knowing, and all powerful God, then we may reasonably conclude that the evil we witness is somehow justified. But (many think) we do not have such an assurance. We approach the issue of God’s existence as a possibility, not a certainty, and the evil we witness counts against it.

I don’t claim this challenge is final, by any means, but I don’t think the author of this piece has really engaged with this aspect of the problem.

And the especially relevant bit, for this topic, is the "CDM" part, where "CDM" stands for "cold dark matter".

("lambda" denotes a positive cosmological constant, i.e. "dark energy", so the standard model of cosmology = a hot big bang + dark energy + cold dark matter)

I don’t think MOND can work by itself. So I think most MOND theories would require dark matter to work anyway.

So really MOND is both in practice.

> Ah, I see what's going on here: you're taking a centrist, "both sides" approach to a conversation about perception and reality.

No, that is your perception/model of what is going on, powered by the broadly distributed "both sides" algorithm.

> It's a position that only serves to enable and embolden the worst antisocial elements of our society.

What if you have it literally backwards?

> No, I won't be presenting "proof," as I'm quite confident you won't accept anything as such, regardless of how accurate or well reasoned it is.

Also because no proof exists - thus, it is a belief.

> > > > Good day.

Good day to you as well.

Ah, I see what's going on here: you're taking a centrist, "both sides" approach to a conversation about perception and reality.

It's a position that only serves to enable and embolden the worst antisocial elements of our society.

No, I won't be presenting "proof," as I'm quite confident you won't accept anything as such, regardless of how accurate or well reasoned it is.

Good day.

As given your argument isn't valid, but we can make it valid with some minor tweaks:

1. Philosophy is likely to demonstrate anything which is true.
2. (Assume for the purposes of argument that) Christian beliefs are true.
3. Therefore, philosophy is likely to demonstrate Christian beliefs.

As for soundness, (2) is meant as a supposition here so we can leave it aside.

But is (1) even plausibly true? Philosophy is certainly a search for certain kinds of truths, but not necessarily any kind. We can of course modify that premise to be at least a bit more specific, e.g., "philosophy is likely to demonstrate any truths which are knowable via reason." But would that include Christian beliefs? Only if we assume exactly what you mean to demonstrate, i.e., that these are not instead justified by things like divine experience or revelation.

And of course, even assuming that philosophy is engaged in the relevant kind of enterprise, are we warranted in thinking it's likely to succeed? What if Kant is right, and any philosophical attempt to demonstrate via pure reason, e.g., the existence of God or the immortality of the soul results inescapably in antinomies and thus fails?

> It is called the Theory of Relativity for a reason. It's unproven and unprovable.

General relativity has made predictions which have held up under a century of scrutiny. It breaks down as you get to very small distances but people are working on it.

>Until you have one theory that can unify all physics, on all levels, from subatomic, to celestial, you will have a flawed theory that is at least a little bit incorrect, no matter what name you give or how much it helps us understand the universe around us.

You've set a high bar, probably impossible. I think every physicist knows that we can't explain all phenomena at all energy scales and distances in a unified way, and I hope that no one is claiming that Lambda CDM is the theory of cosmology. But there is a lot of value in effective theories which are useful in some range. Like Newtonian gravity is sufficient to do space exploration, the Standard Model of particle physics is sufficient for running large scale experiments.

Well, technically there are some requirement for consistency, but they mostly boil down to a simple structure. As long as you are able to rank any two experiences relative to each other, the rest is sorted out by transitivity. The exact number of the utility score is not important, any order preserving transformation of the scale is equivalent for the choice/ranking. The question is therefore simply: can you choose between them? And indifference is allowed.

Multi-faceted experiences make such comparisons more difficult, for pretty much the same reason that comparing between experiences of different persons is difficult. There is not that big a conceptual difference between 'better in aspect A (food) but worse in B (pop song)' and 'better for person A (me) but worse for person B (you)'. The one thing I find so much harder about the interpersonal setting, there is no single actor to make the decision, while we can rely on the single actor to make the choice (even if it is indifference) in the multi-criterion setting.

In simplest terms, String Theory is wrong and a fools errand. Folks will give up on it eventually. Einstein was just a guy, a normal guy, with a decent theory. But he had an inkling he was on to something. It was decades before he really had any significant evidence to support it. For all the credit we give Einstein, he was trying to solve the math associated with gravitation for a decade and he couldn't. Hilbert and Schwarzschild both solved pieces of it with little effort before Einstein published his own answers after years of trying, and one of those guys did it while fighting WWI. Anyone who tries to claim Einstein is anything less than a god immediately gets shouted down in physics. He did some great things, but its time to build some new theories (that are not string theory). Remember, even Phlogiston theory was accepted science until it wasn't. I feel the critical flaw in Einsteinian physics is the idea that time is relative. Yes, critical to Einstein's theories, but the distinction that should be made a some point is between the 'perception of time' and 'actual time'. Some would say, what is time beyond what we can observe? Ultimately, that question makes as much sense as what is the world beyond what I can see? Time is real and absolute. Provable? Observable? Hard to say.

I would have thought that each of the competing theories could be tested in another way-by asking the question:

If theory X is true, how did the effect originate, and develop, in the Big Bang and its aftermath?

How does that help?

I think all of us would rather have "indifferent" experiences than have no experiences at all, which would imply that humans value experience in its own right, regardless of its "score" on this imaginary joy/suffering scale. In addition, all of these "indifferent" experiences can be distinguished from each other linguistically and cognitively, so they're not equivalent to one another. And people can have preferences from among these "indifferent" experiences along axes that are not obviously related to the concepts of "joy" and "suffering."

The point is that the evaluation and description of human experience is way, way more complicated than any utilitarian account can ever reflect, because people very often do not make their experiential choices based on a neatly articulable account of where they are located on the "joy/suffering" metric.

Let's go a bit further: how do we even distinguish "an experience" from a different "experience"?

Temporally? But we can experience a variety of different things at the same time.

Sensorially? But we can sense a variety of things at once, even with the same sense.

How about in memory? But our memories often are radically simplified narrative constructs of our experiences, with vast amounts of both sensory data and emotional response discarded, or they are inaccurate combinations of different events, or they include imaginary elements that we did not actually experience, etc.

I am eating a delicious steak dinner at Chili's. At the same time, I am listening to an irritating pop song on the radio. At the same time, I am thinking about a funny joke I heard earlier in the day. At the same time, I am looking at the ugly wallpaper in the Chili's. At the same time, I am being told by the waiter that a second plane has hit the Twin Towers. How many experiences am I having?

And then we have the further problem of varying levels of "reality" of experiences. Is remembering something very clearly a form of re-experiencing that event? If I intentionally, deliberately imagine something that did not actually happen, do I experience it? What about vicarious experience, when I watch something happen to someone else, and respond emotionally as though it were happening to me? What if I have a nightmare (that certainly seems like "suffering," but is it a real experience)?

So if we cannot even confidently define what "an experience" is, or how it can be distinguished from other "experiences," or how to assess the relationships between the different levels of reality of experiences, then how in the world can we rate them all on some kind of linear scale and assign points to them?

It is called the Theory of Relativity for a reason. It's unproven and unprovable. The downvoting only serves to prove my point. Blind devotion to anything is bad. What sound more logical, that physics is a vast and complex thing, many pieces of which we don't know and can't know yet, or that one guy figured out most of it's inner workings only a few hundred years after we decided that the Earth was not the center of the universe? Challenging our theories is one of the most important things we can do. If you want to devote all your time and energy to attempting to make the facts fit Einstein's theories, go right ahead. There are lots of things in physics that don't add up and we have created special rules to deal with them. Until you have one theory that can unify all physics, on all levels, from subatomic, to celestial, you will have a flawed theory that is at least a little bit incorrect, no matter what name you give or how much it helps us understand the universe around us.

“ Since only one (at most) of these two cosmological theories can be correct, you might expect that only one of them (at most) manages to achieve correspondence with the facts in the preferred way. ”

What rules out the possibility that both effects could be operating?

Occam’s Razor is a guide to theory making, not a rule.

My problem is more in the first paragraph you quoted.

>If we buy the self-evident fact that conscious valence is real, we get an ought from an is.

Nope. Nice paragraph but it's not an argument.

Yes I feel that valence for myself. It so happens I even want to end suffering for others. But that still doesn't tell me why I should want to end suffering for others.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to remain in the moral skeptic camp.

Even funnier is your inability to counter ideas you disagree with. You could prove my bold assertion incorrect in your reply, let's wait and see what happens.

From the sidebar: > > Argue your Position > > Opinions are not valuable here, arguments are! Comments that solely express musings, opinions, beliefs, or assertions without argument may be removed. > > Be Respectful > > Comments which blatantly do not contribute to the discussion may be removed, particularly if they consist of personal attacks. Users with a history of such comments may be banned. Slurs, racism, and bigotry are absolutely not permitted.

Is "Hahahahahahahahahahshahaha" compliant with those guidelines?

Is "Hahahahahahahahahahshahaha" the maximum of what you are capable of?

Thank you! I love what you took away from it. At the very least, I hope this furthers the discussion.

> Reality exists outside of our perception.

Also: our perception of reality exists within reality (which complicates things substantially, because it raises the question: just what is "reality"?).

> "Perception is reality" means "if I perceive something to be true, I will act as though it is true."

Agreed. It also typically means that the person considers their opinion of what is true to be synonymous with what is actually true.

Also: some people have much more powerful means of communicating their opinion about reality as if it is factual reality, confusing people further.

> This is a useful axiom for dealing with people, to be sure, but it's terrible whenever we need to deal with the real world. You might perceive an absence of cars on the road but that won't protect you from being struck and killed by one.

Agreed....so too with plenty of "facts" that spread throughout the memeplex. The Science has been on a big run for the last few years.

> Are you saying our "media, thought leaders, journalists, politicians, etc." have dominance over our society?

They have substantial persuasive power. Compare the general public's consensus take on affairs in Ukraine to what is broadcast as the state of affairs in Ukraine - I don't know about you, but I sense some pretty strong correlation between the two, enough that I think there may even be a causal relationship (which is further supported by the commonality of people linking to journalism stories as proof (in their minds) that something is necessarily true).

> Curious. I can see how that argument could be made but I think it's rather soft; that is, yes, certain persons on the internet have had a direct influence over me, personally, over the past few years; but I am not beholden to them.

Beholden: owing thanks or having a duty to someone in return for help or a service.

Perhaps. But would you go so far as to state as a fact that you have zero(!) bias as a consequence of the consumption of journalism or conversations on social media?

> Indeed, I no longer consume content from some influencers that, just a year ago, I would have considered high on my list of reliable sources.

Excellent - have you achieved perfect rationality?

> This isn't to say that they're not worth listening to, rather, that I don't see how this hegemony functions in practice. Further, I'm not convinced there is a hegemonic order (as the OP seems to think there is). I think there's a different kind of order, but it's certainly not hegemonic (though it is hierarchical, after a fashion, mostly because people tend to naturally organize themselves into groups with a hierarchy).

Do you form any particular conclusions as a consequence? Or: what epistemic status do you assign to the speculative proposition?

>> All humans view reality through various biased lenses

> True; but this fact has little bearing on the point I was making.

That your considerations here are biased by your lenses may have at least some relevance - "has little bearing" is your perception of what is true...but is it actually true?

> Unless you want to argue that a left-leaning bias is somehow equivalent to a right-leaning one . . . which is patently absurd, on its face, if we take the time to understand what the Left and Right (as political platforms go) actually believe.

The "both sides" algorithm seems to have been very broadly distributed - I often wonder if this is purely organic.

>> And if you are unable to explain it to a conservative thinker, do you know (as opposed to believe) that the problem is 100% on the receiving end?

> I do.

Excellent - please present your proof.

> Because I've been explaining these concepts to people for a long time. And I've found that, when someone refuses to understand the basics, it's usually because of a deeply held conviction (i.e. bias) about how the world works.

Ah, I see what's going on: your proof is your self-perception.