I think in general culture is a pretty poor way to determine what behaviours are morally acceptable. Moral progress is often a matter of overcoming the moral defects of our cultural heritage.

For example the idea that women should be subordinate to men is/was very deeply engrained in Western culture for a very, very long time. But that’s not an argument against gender equality. It is, instead, an argument for improving our culture. So anyone who said “hey, we can’t have gender equality because it goes against our cultural heritage” would be missing the mark. Sure, it might go against our cultural heritage, but so what? We must change our culture to match morality, not ignore morality to preserve our culture.

And its not just our culture that falls into this trap, other cultures can be deeply flawed too. For example, in some cultures female genital mutilation and child marriage are the norm. Does that mean these behaviours are okay, simply because they are culturally accepted? Clearly not. Human rights are universal. If these behaviours were human rights violations in, say, Denmark, then they do not cease to be human rights violations just because they are taking place in a different country with different cultural attitudes.

Now regarding our attitudes to animals, it is true that there is a lot of cultural variation in which animals are acceptable to eat. In India, eating a cow would be largely be seen as disgusting and disrespectful. In Canada, for example, eating a dog would be an outrage, but in some Asian nations this is not the case.

Is this because the value of the individual animals lives shifts from culture to culture? Or is it because the pain these animals experience differs from country to country (does getting your throat slit hurt less for dogs in South Korea than dogs in Canada)? The answers to these questions are no and no. The only differences going on here is culture, and nothing more. These different cultural attitudes do not track any relevant moral differences; they are merely accidents of history.

It is no different than how different regions tend to be racist towards different groups. For example, in the US (to oversimplify a bit) the primary target of racism has been Black people, whereas in China the primary target of racism has the Uyghurs. Is this because racism against Black people is okay in the US (but not in China) and conversely because racism against the Uyghurs is okay in China (but not the US)? No, it’s not. The Americans primarily focus their racism against one group due to circumstances of history, and the Chinese primarily focus their racism against another group due to the circumstances of their history. But that’s all that’s going on. There are no relevant moral differences here, just differences in history and culture. Because in all circumstances, and in all countries, racism directed at any one of any group is morally indefensible.

It’s similar with animals. Causing significant unnecessary suffering to a being who does not want to suffer is morally indefensible. It does not matter who the being that suffers is. It does not matter if that being is a dog, cat, pig, chicken or human. If that being does not want to suffer, and there is no strong overriding reason as to why they ought suffer, then we have no morally defensible reason for causing them to suffer. Culture does not change that.

So, since farming and slaughtering animals with industrial efficiency causes animals significant suffering, the compassionate thing to do is to simply not partake in that system. And in order to not participate in this system one must have a vegan diet.

If you’re interested in this line of reasoning then I recommend checking out the paper All Animals Are Equal by Peter Singer. It gets into the ethics behind veganism with much more detail and clarity than I can provide here.

Thank you for your question, I hope you found this response helpful.

Reread my original message. I literally quoted your question in it word for word

I was literally just answering your question

Why do you assume omnivores have any “moral issues with meat”?

Would you have moral issues with factory farming and then slaughtering dogs and cats? If so, then you have moral issues with meat. For vegans, these issues persist regardless of the species, whereas most other people make arbitrary distinctions between which species they care about and which species they don’t

I get this too. I’m registered with Piefed.ca and Americans tend to assume they are talking to another American. It’s like, bro, just read the username.

Apparently owner of 4chan added /pol/ the day after meeting with Epstein. They called it a “great means of manipulation” IIRC. So I think there may be some truth to this. The whole Pizzagate thing may have been a way to make it seem like anyone who thinks the ultra-wealthy are child predators seem crazy

Wait, I thought you were tryna say that there are no aliens and its all secret government tech. Maybe I misunderstood

Piggy backing off of this: is there a way to show the total number of upvotes and downvotes separately, like how its done on Lemmy? I prefer that to the Piefed default if just seeing a single aggregate vote count

And a lot of it is clearly AI generated

Yeah. I bought my kaptop second hand. When it still had windows on it, it was basically usuable because jt was so laggy. I installed linux and, badda bing badda boom, works like a charm. Its been my main computer for a fee years now

Is there a setting that reverses this on Piefed? That’s the default on Piefed but I kind of prefer the good old fashioned lemmy way where you can see the downvotes and upvotes separately

​In philosophy, the axioms are exactly what is being debated so it isn’t as rigorous.

That’s not true. There are rules of logical inference that can be taken as axioms. These axioms are the reason why, as you stated, if all the premises in a valid argument are true then the conclusion must also be true.

Formal logic only guarantees that if the premises are true, the conclusion logically follows, it doesn’t guarantee that the premises are actually true in reality.

Of course. But this still gives us a lot to talk about. If someone makes an argument, they must defend the premises. If you disagree with the conclusion of the argument, you must find a flaw with one of the premises, etc

This is literally changing the definition. In biology and common parlance, consciousness is defined as an emergent property or function of a biological brain

This is not the definition, so I’m no changing anything. In all my years of studying this topic in an academic setting, the definition I have always come across is something like “subjective inner experience; the feeling of what it’s like to be something.” What you are doing here is you are including your preferred ontology into the very definition of consciousness itself, so when someone disagrees you claim they are wrong by definition. Its a sneaky move but its not going to work here

but I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to convince me of idealism without strong evidence

Can you convince me of materialism with some strong evidence? You can’t. And don’t say that I’m reversing the burden of proof here, because that misses the point: namely, that these are not ideas that you necessarily can prove using evidence. They are primarily philosophical/metaphysical views, rather than scientific hypotheses, and so they must be evaluated using different tools.

If we look at the cosmological timeline, the universe existed for billions of years before biological organisms evolved. If reality requires the “collective perception of many agents” to exist, how did the universe exist before agents evolved to perceive it?

This is a good critique, because it addresses the logical coherence of the views being discussed here. It is, in other words, a philosophical critique.

Recall that in my first message about this that I wasn’t trying to defend idealism, I was just saying that Bsit and you were trying to talk past one another. That was because his defense was philosophical and your rebuttal was scientific. But now there has been a shift, and your rebuttals are philosophical in nature. So now everyone seems to be on the same page.

This is exactly where I was trying to get things, so as far as I’m concerned my work is done here.

And of course theres no question I’m an elitist lol. It’s an easy reservoir of perspective to draw from if you want something controversial.

Yeah I guess I can’t complain too much since I did ask for it with the title of this post

What happened with the disposal of his body?

And this is why I mentioned it feels like a waste of time. Anyone can claim anything which can’t be proved or disproved so what’s the point in discussing it? I could come up with any old nonsense about the origins of the universe as many religions have done in the past and we could argue for centuries about it getting nowhere.

This again comes back to the pattern matching I was talking about. You associate something not being science with it being some psudoscientific nonesense. But that’s not always the case. Think of math: math is not science. There are no experiments you can conduct to prove that 10 x 10 is 100, for example; that’s just something you have to reason through yourself. Does that mean math is a crock of shit? Clearly not.

Philosophy is also like this. It’s not science, but it’s more rigorous then some woowoo speculations. Because philosophy is not just coming up with random ideas and speculations; it is a practice in testing the logical coherence of ideas. When I said that it was more like math than science in that sense, I wasn’t joking. Professional philosophers often use a specific type of algebra to manipulate ideas symbolically, allowing them to formally tease out their logical implications. We don’t need to go that far, but you get the picture. There are a lot of constraints you have to work with in order for ideas to succeed in this domain.

Even if you don’t like doing philosophy, you’ll have to do it implicitly. This was one of the points Bsit was making. Assuming a materialist worldview is taking a philosophical stance on the nature of the world. It is a mistake to treat materialism is a scientific theory; it isn’t. Think of it: what’s an experiment you could do to decide between materialism and idealism? It sounds quite plausible that no such experiment exists.

So then why do many people associate materialism with scientific thinking? Because it is a background assumption of science. And background assumptions like this are the domain of philosophy. If you don’t want to question these background assumptions, then fine. But just know that unquestioned assumptions are often a dangerous thing, especially at the foundational level. We don’t want to be building up from a shaky foundation.

So I addressed this in an admittedly rather tongue-in-cheek way with my universe-is-a-brain comment. You are stretching the definition consciousness to mean the universe itself, widening an already poorly defined concept in order to fit the idealist theory.

I am not stretching the definition, and I’m not saying it’s the universe itself.

When most people say “consciousness,” they mean the subjective inner experience of a biological organism which simply doesn’t fit your definition.

Even in idealism it is still a subjective inner experience. Except when you have a subjective inner experience of a biological organism that is how the organism exists. It is not the organism that gives rise to the experience, but the experience that gives rise to the organism. In idealism, consciousness and all of your other definitions are left intact, except the order of operations is reversed like this.

It might be helpful to think of this in terms of perception. What comes first: your consciousness, or your perception of the colour red? Well, your consciousness comes first, because your perception is a state of consciousness. In idealism, it would be like this not just for your perception of a thing, but for the thing itself. So, say a crowd has the perception of a big rock. The rock would exist because the crowd is there to have that perception or the potential for that perception.

You might think this makes no sense because the organism, a physical object, comes first, before the perception. So clearly physical objects cause these perceptions? But idealism would reject that claim. Because it would reverse the order of operations, as discussed above: an organism, even your own body, is just another object that in perception, so that organism exists due to those perceptions.

Note that this is not the same thing as solipsism. Idealism is not saying your personal, individual perceptions are causing the world into existence. Assuming a nontheistic reading of idealism, it would instead be the collective perceptions of many agents working in unison that bring the world into existence.

I hope that makes sense.

That’s certainly a possibility. But it would contradict most religious doctrines on the nature of God. If you want to believe in God in a nonreligious capacity though I think that’s the way to do it.

UK rock bands are a galaxy ahead or a galaxy behind?

If the US government did have tech for UFOS that would be a very significant technological development that they’re hiding from the public. So how far are you willing to go with the hidden tech side of this conspiracy? Do you think the government has free energy and they’re hiding it too, or are they only hiding these novel means of propulsion?

You’re sick

The truly controversial opinions may be downvoted