(Part 3) Top products from r/philosophy

>I am the first to say that libertarian authors have frequently relied upon controversial philosophical assumptions in deriving their political conclusions. Ayn Rand, for example, thought that capitalism could only be successfully defended by appeal to ethical egoism, the theory according to which the right action for anyone in any circumstance is always the most selfish action. Robert Nozick is widely read as basing his libertarianism on an absolutist conception of individual rights, according to which an individual's property rights and rights to be free from coercion can never be outweighed by any social consequences. Jan Narveson relies on a metaethical theory according to which the correct moral principles are determined by a hypothetical social contract. Because of the controversial nature of these ethical or metaethical theories, most readers find the libertarian arguments based on them easy to reject.

>It is important to observe, then, that I have appealed to nothing so controversial in my own reasoning. In fact, I reject all three of the foundations for libertarianism mentioned in the preceding paragraph. I reject egoism, since I believe that individuals have substantial obligations to take into account the interests of others. I reject ethical absolutism, since I believe an individual's rights may be overridden by sufficiently important needs of others. And I reject all forms of social contract theory, since I believe the social contract is a myth with no moral relevance for us...

~ Huemer from Problem of Political Authority. (The book argues in favor of anarcho-capitalism, but will also give you a strong foundation for minarchism)

His moral philosophy is intuitionism. I also highly suggest his other book Ethical Intuitionism - it's a great intro to metaethics and spurred my interest in philosophy to begin with.

If you can't afford either, he has some chapters over at his faculty page.

It asserts a moral realist position (objective moral facts) on the basis of our intuitions - essentially common sense morality (see: GE Moore, and WD Ross). It is a respectable academic philosophy (as opposed to Objectivism) and has recently seen a resurgence.

Here is a good summary of what Huemer's approach lends itself to

> But most, if not all of these were not brought on by scientific knowledge

I do believe I may have misread your question a bit - I assumed you were simply asking for examples of questions that are traditionally philosophical.

In general, philosophy that arises directly out of scientific development is concerned with consequences of the application of that scientific knowledge. So, for instance, in the past twenty years or so, environmental ethics has had a huge surge in popularity - questions of how we should relate to nature, if undeveloped land has inherent value that should be protected, etc. etc. - all of which came about because of the changes brought from science and its application through industrial technology.

Increases in the faculty of economic production raise further questions about how we distribute wealth, and refinements in the social sciences create questions about human agency. If we can be persuaded through psychological cues to consume 20% less of this, or 20% more of that - what does that say about our robustness as individual rational actors?

Additionally, I could specifically cite the work of the late Herbert Dreyfus (a philosopher at MIT) who offered a critique of artificial intelligence and its limitations, some of which was actually incorporated into better machines going forward.

I'm a little under-qualified to address your question, though, compared to some others. I studied political science and philosophy, and as such, most of my secure knowledge comes from the interaction between the social sciences and philosophy, rather than the hard sciences. In general, I would say that there isn't any need for a 'turf war' between science and philosophy. (with the exception, perhaps, of philosophy of mind/neurology, where the contention leads to better work on both sides) I take care to respect claims of an epistemic nature, and to make sure I am verifying them with good science if I am incorporating them into theory. I think the only thing 'philosophy' wants is a reciprocal care from the sciences when they drift outside of what their data strictly supports.

Yes. Trust me when I say that you'll need second literature if you are willing to understand one line of, for instance, the Critique of Pure Reason. There are good introductory books on Kant out there that can help you.

If you know almost nothing about his philosophy, I recommend Scruton's or Wood's books that approach his whole philosophy without any details, making it accessible. A good start. At the same time you could give the Prefaces A and B, and the Introduction of the first Critique a try.

For what I call "intermediary literature", there is Gardner's "GuideBook", and having "A Kant Dictionary" by your side would help a lot.

Some might recommend Allison's defense of Kant's Transcendental Idealism, I think it is great, started to read it some weeks ago, but as well as Strawson's The Bounds of Sense or Heidegger's Kant and the Problems of Metaphysics, it is way advanced.

The most important thing is that you (or any other who is reading this and is also interested in Kant) are motivated, that you don't quit when read at the first time and understand barely nothing. With effort and persistence it gets better.

p.s.: I do not intend to advertise for Amazon, you can read the synopses and reviews and buy somewhere else.

It sounds like you'd like The Illusion of Conscious Will, which is not philosophically rigorous, but more of a philosophically inclined summary of psychological studies. You can find problems with some of the studies, and/or Wegner's interpretations thereof, but I think it will provide plenty of fuel for your thesis. Some examples: powerful magnets can be used to influence which hand someone raises when asked to raise either hand at random, while they still report consciously "deciding" which hand they raised. People tend to report "deciding" which direction a stranger's gloved hand moves when they believe the hand to be their own. Your brain fires neurons to start moving toward something you desire up to a second before you are conscious of desiring it, and so on. Wegner works through dozens and dozens of these examples and it's hard to walk away without feeling like "consciousness" is something of a movie our brains play us to keep us busy.

Related to this are all the studies on priming, which are more dubious (many have been discredited, or shown to be outright fraudulent), but connect more to your interest in how our tastes and opinions are structured by forces beyond our awareness or control.

Both of these, though, come from the field of psychology more than philosophy. Philosophically, it sounds like you may be a functionalist. Hilary Putnam and Daniel Dennett are two major figures I'd suggest reading up on, to see if they strike a chord with you.

> It does not fly in the face of physics, it is physics. If you consider for a moment that currently accepted physics isn't entirely accurate and more of an approximation, you should also be able to consider that there is more to the equation than what is currently being taught.

I have an degree in physics from an elite school, where I won an award for my performance in physics. From this same school, I also have an honors degree in philosophy - where I focused primarily on philosophy of science.

I don't know how to be any more clear about this. I have studied the shit out of both the actual physics and the philosophy of science that you are totally mangling when you say stuff like:

> It does not fly in the face of physics, it is physics. If you consider for a moment that currently accepted physics isn't entirely accurate and more of an approximation, you should also be able to consider that there is more to the equation than what is currently being taught.

All I can think of is the quote from Isaac Asimov:

> My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

You have yet to read, obviously, about any of realism, positivism, anti-realism, agential realism or any rigorous philosophy of science. You are taking a pretty "anti-realist" stance - which, again, is not terribly popular. And I am saying, time and time again, you are not even really doing so very well. Not only am I denying that the anti-realist stance is a very good one, I am saying that, even if it were, you are not doing a very good job of defending it. Your entire argument, at this point, is coming down to the exact same argument as the one people use when the criticize evolution or global warming for being "just theories."

Relativity is never going to be overturned - at least not the features of it we are discussing here tonight. Ever. End of story - full stop.

We may learn of theories that augment or supplement relativity, for instance, a way to unify relativity and quantum gravity - that explain areas that are currently not covered by relativity, such as where it breaks down, but for the cases that relativity covers now, it covers it with literally perfect accuracy. Check out the "fine structure constant." It has been measured to resolutions that approach theoretical limitation.

So, what I am saying to you is this: that space and time are parts are the same, objectively existing reality is really well fucking proven. You can, in fact, measure the fine structure constant with a fucking hydrogen spectrum tube, a strong electromagnet and a diffraction grating, which I have done, personally, in a physics lab, and derive the fine structure constant to alarmingly high resolution with even very crude instruments.

What I am telling you is this: the same equations that give marvellously accurate results in these circumstances are the same equations that have allowed us to engineer and power the computing device you are using, and they also underly and explain how space-time works. I don't know how else to put it. If our description of space-time was inaccurate, we never would have been able to perform the electrical engineering necessary to make nanometer-feature-size microprocessors, the large hadron collider or prototype nuclear fusion plants. Cathode ray tubes would not work. Just tons and tons and tons of modern technology simply would not work.

I cannot make this any more clear: this science is never going to be overturned. It is too well understood. If a paradigm changes (I urge you to read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions), it will not do so in a way that destroys the space-time identity. It can modify, enhance, or supplement, but it cannot supplant.

Is that making any sense? Just because science is fluid doesn't mean that extraordinarily well supported hypothesis get abandoned. The history of science is that poorly supported ideas get abandoned. I can think of literally no more rigorously proven and tested ideas than E=mc^2, and that is the fundamental basis of understanding spacetime.

Edit / Update: I have re-read your comments. I have to say I have been harsh, and you have been civil, and I apologize for that. Additionally, you are clearly grappling with some very tough concepts and are doing so on your own, or lagely self taught. This is laudable, and I commend you for taking the time and being intellectually curious. What informed my tone, however, was your manner of argumentation - your insistence, basically, that you are right and that the people disagreeing with you don't know anything. If we were in a classroom setting, I would have been more kind and tolerant, because that is the place for airing your opinions and arguing about them in a collegial setting. That is often lost on reddit. That in mind, I really encourage you to read about these topics. You are obviously curious about them, and there is no reason you cannot do this reading on your own and learn all about it.

I recommend http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Science-Very-Short-Introduction/dp/0192802836, http://projektintegracija.pravo.hr/_download/repository/Kuhn_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions.pdf and the lecture I linked above. Enjoy!

I think it's too early in the study of conscious awareness to offer a full-blown definition. We don't understand it well enough yet. It would be like Aristotle trying to define 'electron' (not the greatest analogy ever, but hopefully you get my point!). That said, we can say a bit about how to characterize conscious awareness. Paul Churchland does a pretty good job in The Engine of Reason. He lists 7 key features of consciousness: it involves short-term memory, it is relatively independent of sensory inputs, it displays steerable attention, it has the capacity for alternative interpretations of complex or ambiguous data, it disappears in deep sleep, it reappears in muted or disjointed form in dreaming, and it harbors the contents of multiple sensory modalities in a single unified experience.

He goes on to show that all these features have curious parallels in analog recurrent neural networks, and that there is one such network in the thalamus of the brain, which has been implicated in consciousness for other reasons. It appears that the thalamus may control or regulate synchronized firing in different regions of the brain, and neuroscientists think this may have something to do with conscious awareness, but ultimately, this is at least in part, an empirical question, and there's a lot more work to be done.

I'm still not clear on why changes to, say, orange juice or potassium are best described in terms of 'awareness' or "information processing." Yes, these things change, but I don't see why the pure physical/chemical description isn't sufficient.

Although this sort of historical approach may work for some people, and it will definitely give you a very good background, it certainly didn't work for me. I wanted to get ideas that were articulated in easy to understand contemporary terms that I could grapple with right away without having to worry about interpreting them correctly first.

I started in early high school, after being recommended by a friend who was majoring in philosophy at the time with The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law which gave a great and really readable introduction to a lot of philosophy problems. Depending on your previous knowledge of philosophy, it might be a bit basic, but even still it's a worthwhile read I think.

From then, I went on The Mind's I by Daniel Dennett and Douglass Hofstadter, which was a really good and fun introduction to philosophy of mind and related issues. After that I think you'll have enough exposure to dive into various subjects and authors that you come across.

If you haven't read Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting by Dan Dennett, I highly recommend it. It's a wonderful explanation of what we actually mean by free will, how it reconciles with what appears to be a deterministic world, and makes a great case for us actually having it.

> But why should a deterministic "choice" be 100% the good one? Or is it, say, deterministically the good one in only 70% of the cases?

If you'd actually like to learn about the ways deterministic and stochastic decision policies work, I recommend AI: A Modern Approach. If you're just saying that a deterministic decision policy of tractable size won't make the optimal choice in all real-world situations, I agree.

But we're not arguing about effectiveness. I can't really discuss the effectiveness of different decision policies establishing a lot of mathematical-ish background; and they're irrelevant to the question of whether contra-causal free will can logically exist.

> what I know as a fact is that I indeed have a true freedom of choice

Sure... the exact same way you know the top yellow line is longer than the bottom one. If a very simple argument shows that your intuition is logically impossible, you should distrust your intuition.

Since the Kierkegaardian corpus is so thematically wide-ranging, I would recommend flipping through The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard or, even better, The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. Find the areas of his thought that interest you most, and read the works associated therewith. E.g., for his treatment of existential despair, read The Sickness Unto Death; for his theory of the three stages of life or “existence spheres,” read Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript; and so on.

Otherwise, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, Postscript, Works of Love, and The Sickness Unto Death all have their merits.

Or you could start with an anthology. This is a good one.

Finally, for general intros to his work I would recommend C. Stephen Evans’ Kierkegaard: An Introduction and M. Jamie Ferreira’s Kierkegaard.

If you could provide us with a bit more information about the course, it might be easier for us to make recommendations. For example, is the course you're planning on taking an intro course or an upper level course?

Regardless of the content of the course, however, I think that something like The Philosopher's Toolkit would be a great pickup. Probably much more useful than any single historical work that you might think to pick up. You can also readily find PDF versions of it online, if you know where to look.

Ah good. But you've got an MA, no? Whereas both mine are undergrad and in subjects I don't care about (study science, they said. Commit crimes against the lower mammals. Study law, they said. Hang out with lawyers. Become a lawyer, do paperwork. What a dumbass.)

Yeah, I've got R&P. I just ordered The Groundwork earlier tonight. I ordered Practical Ethics yesterday, actually as well, I thought that was supposed to be the Singer? I'll get the other two when I get paid.

Also have you read Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism? Someone told me it was the best defence of moral realism of recent times.

Author here. Let me start:

First software company I founded develops software components for other programmers:
https://www.gemboxsoftware.com/

Our customers include NASA, MS, Intel, and US Navy:
https://www.gemboxsoftware.com/company/customers

Second company I co-founded screens programmers before interviews:
https://www.testdome.com/

We are used by Paypal and Ebay, among others.

I finished computer science at University of Zagreb.

I high school, I won 1st place at national computer science competition in 1997. Because of that I attended Central European Olympiad in Informatics, where I got a bronze medal:
https://svedic.org/zeljko/Competitions/ceoi_medalja.jpg

I have also been part of Croatian team at IOI in Capetown:
https://svedic.org/zeljko/Competitions/ioi_team.jpg

Here is my Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeljkos/

I don't work in AI, I got the idea while reading Peter Norvig's book:
https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approach-3rd/dp/0136042597

Hope I changed your mind about how certain you can be about something just based on the first feeling. My about page was one click away.

Although I really know programming and sell my software to thousands of companies, I have to admit I don't see how that makes my article more or less credible. It is a philosophical text, not text about software. I think you made "Appeal to Authority" logical fallacy:

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/21/Appeal-to-Authority

Every article should be judged by its arguments, not the credibility of the author.

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger may be a good one for your purposes. There is a talk by him on the basic ideas here.

Though he would probably not describe it this way, I think his view has a lot of similarity with buddhist psychology. One way of thinking about meditation is as a technique for learning to be more aware of the medium of your experience, making it less 'transparent' (in Metzinger's sense) and therefore reducing the illusion of selfhood. But just loosing the illusion isn't enough to be happy. You have to develop compassion as well.

The Philosophy Book is great fun for getting your feet wet with both the history and ideas of philosophy. It keeps the topics exciting and informative.

If you want a shorter, concise but very good introduction try Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction by Samir Okasha. I found it very useful at university. (www.amazon.co.uk/Philosophy-Science-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0192802836)

Honestly... I quite enjoyed DK publishing's 'The Philosophy Book'.

It's a broad overview primer on philosophy as it evolves... and while it doesn't really get deep on philosophy in general, it does do a good job of introducing you to a broad range of ideas and allows you an understanding of how philosophy in general has evolved across the centuries.

https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Book-Ideas-Simply-Explained/dp/0756668611

And from there, when you read the books from the philosophers introduced by 'The Philosophy Book', you'll get a much better sense of the context of their works.

Yeah, it involves a lot of trail and error. At first the network's output is just random noise. But every time the network gives a wrong output, you nudge the connection weights a little (or get a computer algorithm to do it since it's a tedious process). You keep doing this until the network is performing really well on the training set. Then you start giving it inputs from outside the training set and see how it performs.

The trained network's behavior might be describable in terms of a set of instructions, but it has no programming language, so it's mechanisms are not in the form of instructions, they way the mechanisms of a serial computer are.

The best resource I know for understanding neural networks and their application to philosophy is Paul Churchland's The Engine of Reason. This is one of my all-time favorite books.

As I said in my Hume comment, a good biography is often the best way to get to know a philosopher. Particularly when their own writings are difficult. Ray Monk's is a very good one for Wittgenstein.

I think S. Blackburn's Think is an excellent introduction to some of the major areas in philosophy. You might also what to look at some of the philosophical books in the "Very Short Introduction" series, for example the Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Philosophy of Science and Free Will ones, which as you can guess are good places to start.

A book I quite enjoyed as an introduction to the great philosophers was The Philosophy Book, which not only gave clear descriptions of each of the philosophers' views, but also often gave a clear flowchart summary of their arguments.

This post is quoting Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test, verbatim. It's a pretty awesome read.

While I agree with /u/Frentis, a good starting point for getting the pure basics down would be this book.
Keep in mind, this is bare bones stuff, I don't know how much experience you truly have.

Dennett's Elbow Room: The varieties of free will worth wanting is a good place to start.

The most insightful/mind-blowing book I've read in the past few years was "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It was phenomenal and challenges the long discredited in academic debate idea of cultural impact on our genes. How the success of certain religions/ideas/cultures has directly altered our genes in a far faster manner than had previously been thought.

The book also does a phenomenal job at describing the fundamental moral differences between the most divided people out there today in such an amazing way.

Highly recommend.

The Philosopher's Toolkit and The Story of Philosophy both seem like great places to start.

Sophie's World is a good recommendation. If you don't want fiction, I'd suggest (and have in other, similar threads) Simon Blackburn's Think as a good, high-level overview of Philosophy. I'd also pick up a text specifically about logic and/or critical thinking that covers basic argument structure and the common fallacies (perhaps The Philosopher's Toolkit ). After reading those, you should have a grasp on both how philosophers do their thing as well as an overview of the various topics in philosophy. From there, you can start reading more about the areas that particularly interest you.

>As of yet, we have not pinpointed exactly what morality is nor have we been able to provide definitive answers to some basic questions of morality

Sure about that?


https://www.amazon.com/Age-Empathy-Natures-Lessons-Society/dp/0307407772

Current hypotheses suggest altruism (ethics, morality) being a development originating from the maternal instinct.

Lots of non-human animals have morality. So either non-human animals have "abritrary vague social constructs" or morality is in-part biological. This isn't to suggest reductionism. There is a clear social aspect, and a clear social evolution in the development of ethics, but underneath those dynamic, evolving, constructs is biology.

I disagree that empathy is inadequate. Furthermore I would argue that empathy is the driving factor for human values. Empathy was not designed by human beings and had its start long before anything resembling humans walked this earth. Given the importance of empathy to the continued existence our species we can treat it as a meta-value system and derive other values and ethics from it. This argument is made more forcefully and in more detail can I ever hope to by Frans de wall. I would recommend you to read his short article The Evolution of Empathy and if your interest is piqued enough by his arguments to peruse his longer tome The Age of Empathy.

i remember it seemed to me, reading through this one, that molyneux's problem really just seems like one of those old things we like to drag along out of nostalgia or something like that. "seeing" is a skill that needs some sort of experience, just like everything else.

If you're interested in Consciousness read Thomas Metzinger's new book The Ego Tunnel. You can thank me later.

This is the best place to start:
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

Can I offer some other choice reads that will make you question your rational decision based on "how it feels" we make decisions rather than how they "actually are made"? We can now do brain studies that show our unconscious brain makes our decisions before our conscious brain is even aware of the choices. We rationalize our decisions based on our emotions, not logic. The beautiful thing is we feel like we are the ones in charge, the 'I", me, you, they, she, he, whomever, but every single person is as predictable as our Earth's rotation around the sun.

Let's see, some interesting books with hundreds if not thousands of sources in them each: Subliminal, Free Will, Incognito to get you started.

Feelings are only feelings, they are an old response before our prefontal cortex made its appearance. Don't let those get in the way of learning about how we work. Sure it feels like the earth is flat, it feels bad when we get rejected, it feels like your conscious mind made that choice to get a burger over the salad, but don't let feelings get in the way of what's actually happening. It's all an illusion, man..

Watchmen and Philosophy is a fantastic book.

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger is supposed to be good.

Alva Noe: Action In Perception

all your answers can be found here!

A study on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Conscious-Will-Bradford-Books/dp/0262731622

I've heard is said that even if we do not have free will, we must operate as if we do.

Do you have any sources? I read this biography of Wittgenstein by Ray Monk, and he said it was no longer being published.

Useless, conceited, futurist masturbation.

You want the theoretical framework of AI, go study math and programming, then go read Russell & Norvig, or if you want philosophy without the practicality, Hofstadter.

Abstract:
In this video, Brian of the “distillationsbl” philosophy podcast, reads a selection from "The Essential Kierkegaard" edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. The selection is from Kierkegaard's letters to a Peter Wilhelm Lund, written in his 5th year at Copenhagen University.
Brian draws a connection from Kierkegaard's writing on his confrontation with "the ordinary run of men" and "their coldness and indifference to the spiritual and deeper currents in man" to what Brian hypothesizes is a common experience had amongst those that are philosophically inclined.
The "so-called practical life" is something our peers might not recognize as it is 'the water they are swimming in'. For those with a disposition seeking deeper answers, it can be difficult to volitionally return to that state in which the water is indistinguishable from the environment. But that is exactly the skill required in order to attain social well-being and form meaningful relationships.

• more distillationsbl links

House and Philosophy

Seinfeld and Philosophy

Batman and Philosophy

World of Warcraft and Philosophy

Watchmen and Philosophy

Final Fantasy and Philosophy

Harry Potter and Philosophy

South Park and Philosophy

The Office and Philosophy

Star Wars and Philosophy

The Simpsons and Philosophy

X-Men and Philosophy

The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy

Family Guy and Philosophy

> This is why politics fails often, people can not let go of their dogmatic views.

It's not necessarily that their views themselves are dogmatic; it's often that their underlying premises are inflexible. For example, someone who holds the view that the U.S. should deport all undocumented immigrants may think that their position on the issue is fixed, but what's more likely to be fixed is their underlying moral philosophy, such as

• Fairness (immigrants should pay taxes just as citizens do), or
  
• Monoculturalism (preference against difference), or
  
• Purity (correlated to nationalism/racial supremacy).
  
  In other words, their beliefs on individual issues are slow to change no in themselves, but because they're consistent with a much less fluid set of underlying epistemic preferences. Jonathan Haidt makes a similar case in "The Righteous Mind" -- that political liberals and political conservatives disagree because they have different sets of moral "taste buds."

I have a suggestion.

[Rethinking Life & Death] (http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0312144016) from Peter Singer . The first link takes you to amazon.com, where you can read some of the book to get a feel for whether you think it will be of interest. The second link takes you to the wikipedia entry on Singer.

This book does not focus on the death penalty, but does focus on other cases involving killing (euthanasia, abortion), and on the question of whether life really is sacred. I have my copy in hand (apparently I bought it in 1995, according to my habit of writing name and date on the inside cover). It really is a nice read.

Edit: Leafing through the book, I have just found this bombshell:

>But, in the case of infanticide, it is our culture that has something to learn from others, especially now that we, like them, are in a situation where we must limit family size...for reasons we have already discussed, in regarding a newborn infant as not having the same right to life as a person, the cultures that practiced infanticide were on solid ground. (p. 215)

So if you think that killing is wrong, then I am sure that you will think killing newborn infants is horrific. The fun thing is trying to find out why Singer thinks this, and where you think he goes wrong. If you do that, then you will be doing philosophy.

> say "that's wrong" when it's not guided and manipulated by the media.

That's not what i'm talking about. Read up on neuropsycology, it's come on in leaps and bounds. This is a great starting point.

>to attack my personal character saying it reflects my emotional state.

Then don't say shit like:

>hoose to have morals. Choose to have ethics. Choose to give a shit about the life around you.

I mean, tell me that's not emotional and also an attack. I mean, you're saying this stuff and I'm accusing you of being emotional? That was emotional. I simply reacted to it.

>we're not superior is undermining what it is to be human

Not to me it isn't. People used to say that saying the earth/sun was the center of the universe was undermining what it means to be human. "superior" is illogical, given that there is no other reference frame to judge that by!

> no other piece of matter has: the ability to observe and name itself. This makes us unique.

Whoa, hold on there. We don't know everything about everything yet. Are sooo far from it that this statement is meaningless. There are things that make every species unique. If we judge my human stuff, yeah we're the "best", but if we judge by a ostriches, perhaps we'll find that ostrich is ostrich!

> All I'm suggesting is that, in the strict instance of animals, we try and see eye to eye. Treating animals with cruelty isn't right. There's no purpose to it.

Spot on. couldnt agree more

> We're better than that. We're better because we can choose to have morality. We're better because we can choose to not treat them with cruelty.

How does that make us better. Birds can fly, we can't wouldnt that make birds better than us too?

>We're better because we can choose to not treat them with cruelty. That's not wrong, or dangerous, short sited.

yup, course not. But that wasn't what i was talking about earlier.

> Is it so wrong to act as a society? Is it so wrong to compartmentalize individuality?

Again, of course not. In fact these thigs just are. we act as societies. We almost constantly contemplate the individual self. But acting as a society doesn't mean acting according to one person's drive. Societies structures are complex and - i repeat - they guuide us, more than we guite them.

>I'm clearly wasting my breath. Gonna take my crazy radical thoughts elsewhere.

Why do you feel that? Your thoughts aren't radical. THey're quite normal and thoughts that most of us share. It's the anger at the world and the tone that i was trying to point out. "Paragon of life" is all well and good, but it doesn't mean anything. In fact, i'd say that trees are the paragon of life, which is true from another point of view.

Look, i guess i'm being unclear: We should not be cruel to living things because cruelty is fucked up. There is no other justification. Because the bible says so, or because you'll go to jail or because of some idea of speciescial (i'm sticking with the word :P) superiority just is pointless to me. So if we were "inferior" we have lesser need to be cruel? How does that make sense.

Look i'm sorry i was harsh earlier. It's a bad habit i have that when i latch on to a point i speak very bluntly. I didn't mean to attack you personally and i'm sorry you feel that way, but they really were just honest observations.