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Is Star Trek teleportation OK?
As I see it, teleporting works by creating an entity ('B') with the memories of entity A at some other point in space. From the POV of B, it appears as if he or she has simply and conveniently changed location, but what about A? A is completrly destroyed. I suppose that if you are teleported 'You' are 'A'... so is B also you, or a stranger with your memories?
If A has any awareness during the process and the teleport distance was just across the room say, then A could even be aware of B taking shape - would they think B was them as they felt themselves fading away?
It's a given that teleporting is not technologically feasible, but even if it was, would consideration of "identity" mean it could/should not be used?
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Philosophy
Stephen:
I would be very interested to read your speculations as to why the gospellers even took the time to write bible stories that "can be junked straight away." according to you.
Around 590 BCE the Jews were conquered by the Babylonians and began the 'Babylonian Exile'. It would have been easy for the Jewish people to disappear from history, as had the majority of Hebrew tribes after the Assyrian Exile 150 years earlier.
Clearly, that did not happen. I suggest the exiled YHWHist priests and scribes began writing the legends, myths and customs of the Jews (and the predecessors the Hebrews) in order to define, maintain and teach their version of history.
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Religion
I caught myself saying 'processeeze' today. It always used to be 'processez' - when did it change?
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Society
Mass shootings no longer merit a thread.
Just sayin'.
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Politics
Imagine a vast, clockwork machine. It has millions of finely detailed cogs and levers pulling and pushing on each other. I want you to imagine it is as beautiful and complicated as you can.
If we watch the machine we see the cogs turning and the levers pushing, but it doesn't have any purpose. It runs and ticks, the wheels and cogs spin and turn and the levers push and pull in complicated ways but all without purpose. It will continue to tick pointlessly until the day it breaks and stops forever, having done nothing except spin its cogs and push its levers. As far as we can tell the machine came from nowhere and having done so ticks in futile purposelessness to an end, all for nothing.
That is only an initial at a metaphor of the universe - no doubt it can be criticised and improved! The point it that I can imagine there are people who can and cannot accept it as a metaphor of the universe. If you can then you are probably an atheist - I suggest typical theists cannot accept that the universe is a pointless mechanism that runs for no reason with no purpose, no meaning nor goal to it.
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Religion
I propose that our brains contain a neuronal circuit that - when faced with alternatives - makes an estimate of
1 - benefit to self
2 - cost to self
3- benefit to others
4- costs to others.
That circuit does a 'weighted sum' of those estimates the result of which we perceive as how good (or 'moral') the alternatives are. I suggest that is all there is to 'morality'.
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Philosophy
No, not a thread about race!
How do I identify a tomato as being a red thing? It's certainly not a conscious process - tomatoes just look red! I have a 'colour sense' that tells me what colour objects are.
But the colour I see - that vivid, glowy sensation we learn to call the colour red - isn't a property of the tomato. The tomato is giving out billions of sub-atomic photons which have certain wavelengths and energies but they are not coloured red!
The colour I perceive bears a relation to the wavelengths of the photons, but wavelength and colour are only related - they are not the same thing. Someone with anomalous colour vision may well have a very diferent perception of a tomato from me, but we would agree on the wavelenghts of the photons involved - for that reason we often say colour is 'subjective' and wavelength is 'objective'.
So lets replace the tomato with a murder. I perceive it as immoral using my 'moral sense', and that happens as automatically and unthinkingly as when I perceived the tomato as being red. But - following the analogy - the murder is not objectively immoral just as the tomato was not objectively red.
But I perceived the tomato as red because its photons had certain objective qualities (eg more longer wavelength photons than short ones) - it wasn't completely arbitrary. Similarly there are objective aspects to a murder that - in an unconscious way - cause me to percieve a murder as something immoral.
I think its clear that just as people can be colour blind, people (such as psychopaths) have a faulty moral sense.
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Religion
PGA wrote:Morality to an atheist worldview is a relative thing. It is based on preference and behaviorism. You can't get an ought from an is, a prescriptive from a descriptive. You can describe what you like (subjectivism/behaviorism) but that doesn't make it good, and the problem with relativism is that no society or culture can be any better than any other. If you hold a materialistic worldview then truth and values are measured through the five senses. How can you measure goodness through those senses (the descriptive)? Values can't be measured by the same tokenRepugnant Hitler's Germany is no more wrong than Kim Jong-un's North Korea or Trump's USA.
My guess is that given this list
Genocide
Donating to charity
Cruelty to animals
Being polite
etc
there would be little differerence btween how an atheist or a theist would rank them for their 'moral value'.
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Religion
Suppose I release a toy balloon in Glagow airport and it end up at Heathrow.
Compare that to a scheduled flight between those two point.
At one level - arguably - there is no difference; both are the result of cause and effect. At least that is what I would suppose what an opponent of free to suggest.
I see the point of that 'no free will' argument, but it seems to ignore that there is a difference between a toy balloon ending up in Heathrow - prrrtty much at random - and the pilot of a plane who intendeds to go there and could - should he wish to get fired - go somewhere else of his choosing.
I'd say the 'no free will position' is the result either of over-thinking or under-thinking such differences. Airline pilots are not the same as toy balloons - I can see no reason not to say the difference is that pilots have free will and balloons don't; and that 'free will' is the difference beteen them.
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Philosophy
What are the attributes something has to have to count as 'a god'? I don't mean capital-G God, but a member of the class 'gods'.
For example, does a god have to be immortal or unkillable? Many myths invovlve entitities that have powers that fall well short of omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, but still get called 'gods' or 'godesses'.
Does a god have to be conscious or sentient? Must he/she/it be able to plan ahead and delibately act to bring about their desired goal?
As an atheist, obvuously I don't believe in capital-G God, but really I don't believe there is any thing 'god-like'. Mopac says God is 'ultimate reality', I'not quite sure what the differene between 'reality' and 'ultimate reality' is, but I do belive in reality! But does an atheist have to dispbelieve in reality because Mopac calls reality a god?
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Religion
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Miscellaneous
If you look at the night sky you might see Mars as a tiny red dot. A small dot is what Earth looks like from Mars. Go further out and the sun turns into one star amongst a billion otthers in our galaxy and Earth is invisible. All that we care about - our wars and petty problems - are happening on something no more significant than the microscopic events on a single grain of sand in the Sahara.
And even our entire galaxy is only one of a billion others. Our insigificance in cosmic scales is beyond imagination. I have no illusion of God's existence, but I think it is absurdly arrogant to suppose a god would have any concern for our trivial brief existence.
Once - not long ago - we believed we were the centre of the universe, that we were the hub and focus of all there was. A god's gaze would naturally fall on us, but in the cosmos we aren't at the centre of anything - except our own self-regard.
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Religion