exploration of what good and evil is

Started by Kate, January 02, 2011, 07:35:40 PM

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Shjade

Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 12:07:14 PM
Shjade, evil and good are measured by the amount of entropy.  It is in fact very scientific.  Up chaos and watch suffering increase.  Reduce chaos and watch peace ensue.  It really is just that simple.
Ah, so your assumption is that peace is good and disorganization is evil. That makes your argument a little more sensible.

I disagree with it, of course.

If you increase chaos - randomness - you will likely see suffering, yes. You will also see prosperity. Perhaps not in equal measure, but it could create more prosperity than suffering; that sort of unpredictable outcome is the nature of chaos. Likewise, order can be oppressive and create suffering in measure equal or greater than chaos depending on the source of that order and those over whom it extends. Consider your own example of the Holocaust: an extremely orderly and organized endeavor with the specific goal of mass extermination. It was in many ways the antithesis of chaos, but you don't seem to be arguing it was a "good" event, so I'm puzzled by your statements about chaos being indicative of evil and its opposite thereby being good.

Or, to put it more simply: chaos is different from evil; order is different from good. They are unrelated qualities.
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Cooper5362

Shjade, you give me an example of millions of bodies turned to death, a distinct increase in entropy, and then claim it to be order.  I'm sorry for being so rude, but that's just plain silly.  Good is order.  It is knowledge of reality and how to improve it.  Evil is disorder, it is lack of knowledge and the wild abandonment of pillaging order without putting anything back.  A rapist does not choose sand to take out its desires on.  It chooses a human being who has a sense of security, is not diseased, and is not infected by unwanted and bad genetics, and then does damage to those conditions of the human making them more chaotic for the pathetic gain of a few moments of sexual and anger pleasure.  If you don't understand true entropy and how it applies to reality, we are wasting each others' time.  Sorry, but that was just plain silly to say the holocaust added order.  Records, buildings and dead bodies rotting in filth do not have more order than live humans working on constructive projects.  If you can honestly show chaos is different from evil when it comes to decision making, by all means do, but be honest about it as well.  I hope you aren't just trolling me, because you really are wasting our time then.  Chaos also bleeds down to no more atoms and every scientist knows this.  To say good things come from chaos is a massive stretch that no one has ever seen.  To expect trees to fall into the form of a house is just plain silly as well.  Just because chaos can accidentally create order doesn't make it better than a decision maker ensuring the order happens.  We know by law of probability and order, you can't sit around waiting for food to drop into your lap, you have to go out and get it.  I'm interested in reality for this discussion.
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Jude

#27
You need to read this in its entirety Cooper:

http://principiadiscordia.com/book/1.php

It explains why good = order and bad = chaos is false.

One simple reason for you, chaos and randomness is the fundamental mechanism of evolution, which is why our minds (which are supreme works of logic and order) exist at all.

Cooper5362

Jude, quoting another person won't help you, especially when their conclusion is impossible to prove.  If randomness drove our evolution, I already know the probability of now is extremely close to zero.  My concepts are based on the more likely scenario that the universe is truly infinite and the probability of now is 1.  Furthermore, what you have to say is far more interesting than a paper.  I'll read it eventually, but the fact you didn't want to give your take on it speaks volumes.  You may as well as told me to shut up and quit posting with that move because I didn't bow down to a philosopher's opinion.  Sorry it seems personal to me, but I hope you at least understand why it seemed that way to me.  Anyway, I already know for a fact choice is the fundamental mechanism of evolution.  Genetics are generated by sexual choice.  To call people's decisions random comes across as a bit arrogant to me.  No one can even prove random exists.  Random is a concept perception generates to explain the output of problems so complex, there is no way to compute them with limited computing power.  Every scientist knows this simple truth.  You can no more prove random exists than you can prove God exists.  In fact, a tantalizing thought is that if random does exist, maybe God doesn't, because there would be no way to absolutely know everything.  Our fun is that we can't prove either and to say either is the engine for evolution is extremely dangerous to integrity of a position.
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Zakharra

#29
 Cooper, you're asserting that order is good and chaos evil. Yet when someone put up an example of an ordered society, you dismissed it. I'll give you three other examples of ordered societies that are not in any sense of the word, 'good'.
  Soviet Russia, an extremely ordered society, yet the leaders, especially Stalin, killed tens of millions of his own people for his 'order'.  Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung), he engineered the rise of Red China and killed tens of millions of his own people to create that order. Pol Pot wanted to create an orderly agricultural society and murdered millions of his own people.

Other examples exist. North Korea, Vietnam, and other dictatorial nations, all striving to create their 'order'. And the worst, Nazi Germany. A very orderly society that was and is named as evil incarnate.
Unless you throw out those examples, I do not see how you can stand by your claim that order is always good.

I'n not sure what you mean by random doesn't exist. You can't really prove that.

Noelle

Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 05:49:58 PM
Jude, quoting another person won't help you, especially when their conclusion is impossible to prove.

No more impossible than your own, I'd say. Where are your sources for any of your theories?

QuoteIf randomness drove our evolution, I already know the probability of now is extremely close to zero.

How do you know? Sources. Evidence. Show us that you know, don't just tell us. We already see evidence of evolution occurring all over (and there is a thread about it if you'd like to peruse it), but your "knowledge" of its probability has yet to be supported with equal standing.

QuoteMy concepts are based on the more likely scenario that the universe is truly infinite and the probability of now is 1.

Straw-manning gets you nowhere.

QuoteFurthermore, what you have to say is far more interesting than a paper.  I'll read it eventually, but the fact you didn't want to give your take on it speaks volumes.  You may as well as told me to shut up and quit posting with that move because I didn't bow down to a philosopher's opinion.

Cross-referencing is hardly telling you to shut up and quit posting. I realize you're new here, but when you make claims in a debate, it is almost essential that you show where they're coming from and the basis for your ideas so others have a good understanding of the foundation from which your points are coming so those sources may be dissected and examined for error. Disregarding another person's post because you don't want to read their resources is also insulting. If I make a claim about evolution and show where someone with greater intellectual authority on the matter has proven my point and you throw it away because it's not in my words...well, that...kind of doesn't make sense at all, and frankly gives me the impression that you're only interested in throwing your point of view out there and not actually making an attempt to learn more about the subject.

QuoteAnyway, I already know for a fact choice is the fundamental mechanism of evolution.  Genetics are generated by sexual choice.  To call people's decisions random comes across as a bit arrogant to me.

Again, where are your facts? Where is any of this coming from but your own self-confirming bias? I hate to say it, but well-established reality is against you.

QuoteNo one can even prove random exists.  Random is a concept perception generates to explain the output of problems so complex, there is no way to compute them with limited computing power.

...Except that we've already created random number generators that use mathematical algorithms to produce random results. There's no perception to it.

And I think Wikipedia has an awful lot to say about it, as well.

QuoteEvery scientist knows this simple truth.  You can no more prove random exists than you can prove God exists.  In fact, a tantalizing thought is that if random does exist, maybe God doesn't, because there would be no way to absolutely know everything.  Our fun is that we can't prove either and to say either is the engine for evolution is extremely dangerous to integrity of a position.

Your whole post is filled with logical fallacies, wildly unsupported claims, and things that are just plainly untrue. If you're unwilling to read the resources given to you to better understand what we're saying, then you really don't have any business trying to make other people understand what you're trying to say. The best I can say is that the next time you say "I KNOW" or "It's a fact" or "All X knows Y", you back it up with something tangible that demonstrates your point realistically rather than as a fabricated statistic to prove your own point.

Jude

How do you account for the randomness and furthermore inherent unknowability of some things in quantum mechanics, such as particle superposition and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?  To me, that singlehandedly annihilates your view of good, evil, and god.

Cooper5362

Jude, you are correct, they do.  The problem is, without a unity theory that brings together quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, we know we don't have a handle on quantum mechanics yet; so, none of those laws is absolute.  It didn't seem to me to be out of bounds in assuming if random parameters were present, then there was a high probability of lack of understanding.  All of those laws depend on a finite universe as well.  It is noteworthy that none of them can run back to the finite time line to the point of zero, and that neither of them can explain the source of gravity or explain the anomalies we see with it.  It is for those reasons I table those laws as theory and try to advance philosophical theory based on guesses since the whole thing is a great big guess anyway.  I do try to run the math.  When we run the math on the universe we see, none of it has quite added up.  Just from basic probability alone, now was highly unlikely given all of the random parameters in our laws.  This condition makes me guess the universe is actually infinite, rather than finite, and have tried to develop the concept of knowledge from there.  I also know from information theory that infinite knowledge requires infinite energy.  If I place my guess of an infinite universe, then the infinite energy required for infinite knowledge can actually be true.  It didn't take long to reach the guess that infinite knowledge was actually all energy and space.  Of course, this all comes back to if the universe is as finite as it appears to us, I'm flat wrong.  I hope this helps.
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Apple of Eris

Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 05:49:58 PM
My concepts are based on the more likely scenario that the universe is truly infinite and the probability of now is 1.

How do you know this is more likely? Source material please?

Quote
   Anyway, I already know for a fact choice is the fundamental mechanism of evolution.  Genetics are generated by sexual choice.  To call people's decisions random comes across as a bit arrogant to me.  No one can even prove random exists.  Random is a concept perception generates to explain the output of problems so complex, there is no way to compute them with limited computing power.

This just... simply is not true. Here you're using a fallacious arguement to prove your point. Random does exit. It's statistical definition is: "of or characterizing a process of selection in which each item of a set has an equal probability of being chosen." Mathematically this is an entirely possible concept. If it is possible, then random by its very definition, exists.

If you are using a different definition of Random, please provide that one, so that we are using the same terminology in this discussion.
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Cooper5362

SuperHans, you stated:

The idea of impact of actions brings out another point-is a person's evil measurable by their actions and level of consequences they entail, or their character itself? There are people who are perfectly capable of empathy but utterly reject it, who care nothing for others and have no inclination to act positively. If their actions, through no desire of their own, pan out in a way that isn't completely terrible, then it doesn't detract from who they are. In my opinion, anyway.

In my opinion, character, actions, and consequences all contribute to the amount of good or evil in anything.  If you desire to destroy the universe to your benefit and accidentally create a wondrous universe, you would still be evil because you'd just work at chopping down what you accidentally created.  If you have the best intention of trying to help someone, but end up killing 5 people without helping anyone, you would still be evil because you didn't take the proper time to know how to help.  People define who they are by what they do and how they do it.  Their actions give hints to their intention.  I would think it the good duty of a person to stop another who is going to do more harm than good.   For example, killing Garrido after he got caught red handed raping a woman was our duty.  We failed in that duty and now Jaycee Dugart has given birth to two children by him instead of by another person of her choosing that probably was going to have a much better parenting influence.  Those children are also carrying sociopathic genetics that are going to result in more of that kind of travesty in the future when males pop up in their family tree.  He has also given a lot of other bad people ideas on how to spread their evil.  Good failed to stop evil and now it is spreading in a way we can't stop.  The cleanup is going to be a mess.  I would say Garrido has good in him, but it was stupid to keep him around for that sake of the good he had given the damage he has done.  In the end, he must be laughing at us.
Cooper
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Noelle

I accidentally dropped a cup full of lemonade on someone's white shoes once.

Oniya

Actually, when entropy reaches its maximum, things get pretty darn peaceful.  *skitters out of thread*
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Serephino

Good and evil are human concepts based on perceptions and morals.  Morals come from religion, parents, and society.  If someone tried to rape me and I killed him, to me, that would be good because not only did I defend myself, but I rid the world of a rapist.  Another person may see what I have done as evil because most people perceive murder as evil.

I'm sure Hitler thought he was doing the world a great service.  He and his followers thought he was good.  The rest of the world doesn't agree.

It's all in how you as an individual see the world.  I've seen people justify all kinds of actions I would consider evil.  My spiritual teacher once said to me everything can change, and yet, nothing changes.  The best way I can explain that is say you didn't believe in ghosts, but something happens that makes you a believer.  The way you see the world changes completely, but nothing actually changed.  If ghosts exist, they did before you believed, and will continue to do so.  If your next door neighbor doesn't believe, and didn't see what you saw, then he will keep not believing, and seeing the world just as he did yesterday. 

She explained it better, but the point is, perception is a powerful thing.  I don't think good and evil exist in the way most people think of them.  I've met a few people who think Christianity is evil, but I doubt Christians would agree.   


mystictiger

If order = good and chaos = bad

Then:
Heat = bad

If heat is bad, then metabolic activity is bad.
If metabolic activity is bad, then life is bad.
If life is bad, then death is good.
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Cooper5362

Well, hate to rain on the hate parade, but the Nazis were the only country in the world besides Japan who were willing to shoot the people that claimed to own the earth and were letting 40% of the world's population starve to death on the footstep of their mansions in their muddy company houses.  So, while we are busy cursing them, we can pat ourselves on the back for forcing them to be the heroes of the day and break the power reign of the robber barons (much like Napoleon broke the royalty who pulled the same stunt).  The Nazi party isn't the great house of evil you are looking for as an example.  It should bother most that it took Nazis to end the evil of capitalism, which I define as 25% or less net taxes on the lower 75% tax brackets.  Yes, I have just defined the current U.S. system as socialist and stated WWII ended capitalism and that it turned out poorly because evil people ran it.  Don't get too upset though, it's not the capitalism that was evil, just the people running it.  As it turns out, capitalism, communism, and socialism are all great ideas until evil idiots start using it to get their own way.  Sorry if I missed insulting anyone.

Oh, and mystictiger, animals all create entropy (expend energy gathered by plants).  Plants actually create order (store energy), so you are actually onto something there.  It's way more complex than that, but you knew that when you posted the equation.
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Jude

Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 06:50:46 PM
Jude, you are correct, they do.  The problem is, without a unity theory that brings together quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, we know we don't have a handle on quantum mechanics yet; so, none of those laws is absolute.
Laws are never absolute, but Quantum Mechanics (whether it is unified with relativity or not) is the theory that best fits the evidence we have collected to date.  As such, I don't see how dismissing the parts of Quantum Mechanics that are inconvenient to your world view is particular logical on the basis that they are not absolute certain, when they are quite certain, and your world view is not.
Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 06:50:46 PMIt didn't seem to me to be out of bounds in assuming if random parameters were present, then there was a high probability of lack of understanding.
Yes, if random parameters are present there is a high probability that we don't understand something.  However, is it not more likely that our understanding of randomness, objectivity, and absolutes is what needs refining, not the law which is a consequence of good evidence?
Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 06:50:46 PMAll of those laws depend on a finite universe as well.
Do they?  I don't recall that ever being an assumption anywhere in any of the physics I've studied.  Even the cosmological principle doesn't assume that the world is finite.
Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 06:50:46 PMIt is noteworthy that none of them can run back to the finite time line to the point of zero, and that neither of them can explain the source of gravity or explain the anomalies we see with it.
... and?  The fact that I have a cup sitting to the right of my laptop right now can't any of that either, yet that doesn't mean I have reason to doubt that the cup is there.  Similarly, the aspects of Quantum Mechanics that are inconvenient for you are well-supported.  The unknown connection between relativity, gravity, and quantum mechanics that has yet to be illuminated is not sufficient reason to believe that it is false.  It is sufficient reason to believe that there is much we do not know.  It isn't unrealistic to think that some aspects of Quantum Mechanics could be wrong, but it isn't rational.  Reason implores us to keep our belief in a proposition proportional to its degree of confirmation, you're not doing that when you dismiss the aspects of Quantum Mechanics you don't like.
Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 06:50:46 PMIt is for those reasons I table those laws as theory and try to advance philosophical theory based on guesses since the whole thing is a great big guess anyway.
So you throw away fairly confirmed principles and make improbable guesses which conflict them?  That seems like a recipe error.
Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 06:50:46 PMI do try to run the math.  When we run the math on the universe we see, none of it has quite added up.  Just from basic probability alone, now was highly unlikely given all of the random parameters in our laws.  This condition makes me guess the universe is actually infinite, rather than finite, and have tried to develop the concept of knowledge from there.  I also know from information theory that infinite knowledge requires infinite energy.
Yes, due to the complexity of reality any particular outcome is highly unlikely, but consider for a moment an event where a million different things could occur, each with equal chance.  That means there is a one in a million chance that what does happen will happen; that is not special.  If you throw a dart at an impressionist's painting you're going to hit a tiny fleck of color.  Lets say you hit a blue dot.  That doesn't mean blue is magical or something fantastical was involved in your act of chucking sharp objects at fine art.  That aside, I don't understand how one thing you're saying logically flows from another, I feel as if that bit of argumentation is non-sequitor.
Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 13, 2011, 06:50:46 PMIf I place my guess of an infinite universe, then the infinite energy required for infinite knowledge can actually be true.  It didn't take long to reach the guess that infinite knowledge was actually all energy and space.  Of course, this all comes back to if the universe is as finite as it appears to us, I'm flat wrong.  I hope this helps.
Quite frankly it didn't help at all, but I fail to see how the universe being infinite really is at all relevant to this discussion to begin with.  I feel we're getting off topic here so I'm going to return to one of your earlier posts I didn't respond to in great detail.
Quote from: Cooper5362Jude, quoting another person won't help you, especially when their conclusion is impossible to prove.
Nothing being said on the subject of good and evil is going to be possible to prove.  The idea in linking you to the Principia Discordia was to expose you to a school of thought that believes Chaos and Order are both good and evil; destructive chaos is bad, but the Principia makes the point that chaos can actually be constructive as well.
Quote from: Cooper5362If randomness drove our evolution, I already know the probability of now is extremely close to zero.
Now had to occur regardless, the state that now took is what varies.  But it isn't like now had a choice of not happening or not choosing to land on some particular outcome (I already discussed this earlier in my post so I'll leave it at that).
Quote from: Cooper5362My concepts are based on the more likely scenario that the universe is truly infinite and the probability of now is 1.
Two unrelated and quite possibly contradictory premises.  In order for the probability of now to be one, you have to speak in what context you mean this.  What is the probability of now arising given the initial conditions that existed 3000 years ago?  If you believe randomness in no way affected things, then the probability is one.

However, if the universe is infinite then there are an infinite number of working parts to the universe which are all capable of affecting each other, and in turn causing a chain reaction.  An infinite amount of opportunities for this to arise over an infinite amount of space and time leads to an infinitely interconnected existence full of infinite possibilities for complications to arise.  Now, sometimes infinity adds up forever and never becomes 1 (consider the case of a series of numbers starting with .9 and being divided by a factor of 10 every turn for example), but the infiniteness that you suggest actually results in a more chaotic vision of reality, not less.
Quote from: Cooper5362Furthermore, what you have to say is far more interesting than a paper.  I'll read it eventually, but the fact you didn't want to give your take on it speaks volumes.  You may as well as told me to shut up and quit posting with that move because I didn't bow down to a philosopher's opinion.  Sorry it seems personal to me, but I hope you at least understand why it seemed that way to me.
There's nothing special about me, but I understand your point.  You came here to converse with another person, not read articles.  I wouldn't relish that attitude too much however, because if you debate topics without ever drawing on sources or reading what other people present as their sources, you're missing out on a lot of foundational knowledge and you have no way of knowing whether or not the claims they make are true.
Quote from: Cooper5362Anyway, I already know for a fact choice is the fundamental mechanism of evolution.  Genetics are generated by sexual choice.
Genetics are generated by a number of things.  Errors in copying of DNA, abiogenesis potentially formed the very first amino acids which became the building blocks of genetics, but of course radiation has been known to mess with the structure of genetics now and again, often resulting in cancer, but sometimes mutations that serve as advantageous. Without mutation there is no evolution and there is no "natural selection."  Natural selection is of course highly different than choice; natural selection is merely dominance occurring based on deterministic outcomes:  Genetics A results in an organism that is more successful in Environment A than a creature with Genetics B, therefore Genetics A are selected.
Quote from: Cooper5362To call people's decisions random comes across as a bit arrogant to me.
If there is no randomness to the decisions people make then they are completely deterministic and free will does not exist.  Be careful where you're heading with this, because the lack of free will annihilates any possibility of ethics being anything beyond a tyrannical code that exists to reign in human behavior for the success our species.
Quote from: Cooper5362No one can even prove random exists.  Random is a concept perception generates to explain the output of problems so complex, there is no way to compute them with limited computing power.  Every scientist knows this simple truth.  You can no more prove random exists than you can prove God exists.  In fact, a tantalizing thought is that if random does exist, maybe God doesn't, because there would be no way to absolutely know everything.  Our fun is that we can't prove either and to say either is the engine for evolution is extremely dangerous to integrity of a position.
Please note that in this bit, which I replied to previously, you say that "every scientist knows this simple truth."  I gave an example of a scientific theory advanced by physics which is in direct contradiction to what you said.  Either physicists are not scientists or you're making claims without really thinking about what you're saying very much.

Oniya

Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 14, 2011, 01:20:57 AM
Oh, and mystictiger, animals all create entropy (expend energy gathered by plants).  Plants actually create order (store energy), so you are actually onto something there.  It's way more complex than that, but you knew that when you posted the equation.

And roots break up stone (crystalline, ordered) into soil (particulate, disordered).  The plant itself takes in water (liquid, semi-ordered) and expels oxygen (gas, highly disordered).  If you want a less irreverent example than the Principia Discordia on how chaos can be constructive, I would be glad to point you towards some resources:  Benoit Mandelbrot, James Gleick, Aleksandr Lyapunov, and this particular scholarly article:  http://mat.ug.edu.pl/~pb/chaos/pdf/li-yorke.pdf should do for a start.
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Cooper5362

If choice is modeled as a random function, it doesn't really mean much does it?  Choice has to be a purposeful influence to have meaning, otherwise we are just random number generators.
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Ramster

Good and evil are considered such universal concepts because we've been hardwired to recognise them in order to survive as a group. The main idea seems to be: do not harm another person. What about euthanasia, you ask? There we see different opinions on how to define harm: does killing someone who wants to be killed constitute causing harm or suffering? As for abortion, the question there is: is a foetus of X months/weeks/days old to be considered an independent person capable of suffering, and with a right to life independent of the mother's? However, the basic principle of primum non nocere stands. This is how to debate ethics without invoking the supernatural: recognise that we all have a basic, evolutionary concept of good and evil, and define it. Does this make them moral absolutes, flowing from the very structure and foundation of the universe? No, but it does mean that as a species we agree on some basic norms of how to behave towards each other.
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Zakharra

Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 14, 2011, 01:20:57 AM
Well, hate to rain on the hate parade, but the Nazis were the only country in the world besides Japan who were willing to shoot the people that claimed to own the earth and were letting 40% of the world's population starve to death on the footstep of their mansions in their muddy company houses.  So, while we are busy cursing them, we can pat ourselves on the back for forcing them to be the heroes of the day and break the power reign of the robber barons (much like Napoleon broke the royalty who pulled the same stunt).  The Nazi party isn't the great house of evil you are looking for as an example.  It should bother most that it took Nazis to end the evil of capitalism, which I define as 25% or less net taxes on the lower 75% tax brackets.  Yes, I have just defined the current U.S. system as socialist and stated WWII ended capitalism and that it turned out poorly because evil people ran it.  Don't get too upset though, it's not the capitalism that was evil, just the people running it.  As it turns out, capitalism, communism, and socialism are all great ideas until evil idiots start using it to get their own way.  Sorry if I missed insulting anyone.

Oh, and mystictiger, animals all create entropy (expend energy gathered by plants).  Plants actually create order (store energy), so you are actually onto something there.  It's way more complex than that, but you knew that when you posted the equation.

Sorry to rain on that parade there, but Soviet Russia, Red China, N. Korea. N. Vietnam and other dictatoral nations would disagree. They did and regularlydo kill people, even their own citizens, to keep the order and get/claim land and property.

I do not see capitalizm as evil. Unchecked, it can be. The US in the 1800's and early 1900's is a good example of unchecked capitalism. But capitalism is well and alive today.

Cooper5362

Zakharra, what you call capitalism is obviously socialism to me.  Like I said, capitalism requires 25% or less net taxes on the bottom 75% income levels for a nation.  The U.S. is at about 40%.  The U.S. has been very tricky about hiding this, and this is of extreme interest to me.  Hiding is a good indication evil is present.  We have sales tax, city income, county property, state income, federal income, social security paid by employee, social security paid by employer, medicare, and tariffs that all add up to roughly 40% tax rate for people not at the top of the money ladder.  If you wish to call this new animal capitalism, so be it.  Just understand we are done discussing the implications of evil in economies because I'm not going to shift basic concepts so the U.S. can feel comfy calling its socialism capitalism.  Communism, by the way, is 75% or more taxing.  You can say, wait, socialism got 2 parts and the other 2 only got 1 part of the spectrum.  My reply would be ok, 33% and 67%.  Sadly, the U.S. is still socialist and still lying to me.  It is a prime indicator that the U.S. insists on lying while I am just trying to find out the real story.  It shows me evil is present in the U.S.
Cooper
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Zakharra

Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 14, 2011, 10:37:49 AM
Zakharra, what you call capitalism is obviously socialism to me.  Like I said, capitalism requires 25% or less net taxes on the bottom 75% income levels for a nation.  The U.S. is at about 40%.

Exactly what does that mean? 75% for what?

QuoteThe U.S. has been very tricky about hiding this, and this is of extreme interest to me.  Hiding is a good indication evil is present.  We have sales tax, city income, county property, state income, federal income, social security paid by employee, social security paid by employer, medicare, and tariffs that all add up to roughly 40% tax rate for people not at the top of the money ladder.  If you wish to call this new animal capitalism, so be it.  Just understand we are done discussing the implications of evil in economies because I'm not going to shift basic concepts so the U.S. can feel comfy calling its socialism capitalism.

The US economy is a hell of a lot more capitalistic than any in Europe I believe, and we are taxed less than most Europeans. The money is also spent somewhat differently too.  What is the US hiding? You haven't said that. Why is hiding evil?

QuoteCommunism, by the way, is 75% or more taxing.  You can say, wait, socialism got 2 parts and the other 2 only got 1 part of the spectrum.  My reply would be ok, 33% and 67%.  Sadly, the U.S. is still socialist and still lying to me.  It is a prime indicator that the U.S. insists on lying while I am just trying to find out the real story.  It shows me evil is present in the U.S.


Uum.. someone from Europe help me on this? Are there any nations that have a income/total tax rate above 75%? I seem to remember there being several that have very high taxes, but they are not communist.


Cooper, I think part of the problem people are having with you is that you use terms* only you understand. You already have a rock solid opinion and are laoth to share exactly what your terms are. You also seem to have a habit of dismissing facts and ignore source materia which contradict yours.  You've said that you are not getting through in communication, then seem to cut off the communication and go off on your own tangant.

* Evil, good, order and chaos are terms of yours that are confusing a lot of peole since you seem to have your own definition of them.

Jude

#47
Quote from: Cooper5362 on January 14, 2011, 08:27:12 AM
If choice is modeled as a random function, it doesn't really mean much does it?  Choice has to be a purposeful influence to have meaning, otherwise we are just random number generators.
I wasn't saying that choice is just a matter of selecting an option purely arbitrarily in a disordered, random fashion.  I think you misunderstand what randomness is.  Randomness is the bane of determinism; that is to say, if randomness is involved then you cannot predict the outcome of a system based on its initial conditions even theoretically (if it can be done theoretically and not practically then that system is deterministically chaotic [such as the weather, etc - this is chaos theory]).  The only way the probability of now can be 1 is if human decision making is a deterministic process, and thus free will does not exist because the outcome was decided before the act was ever taken.

Oniya

Quote from: Jude on January 14, 2011, 11:52:40 AM
(if it can be done theoretically and not practically then that system is deterministically chaotic [such as the weather, etc - this is chaos theory]). 

Adding to Jude here - the 'theoretical predictability' means that the initial conditions must be replicated exactly in order to replicate a given result.  Edward Lorenz's paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow". Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences
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Cooper5362

I think the points on randomness show that choice is a very interesting force in the universe.  It's impossible to predict, yet has direction provided by the being making the choice.  Good and evil are key components to a choice, because they reflect the quality of the decision making and how it plays out in reality.

Government control of an economic system and the spectrum of grades:  Pure capitalism would run all of a nation's services under private control and none under government control resulting in 0% taxes.  Pure communism makes all property government domain and has a 100% tax as a result (all money is controlled and issued to citizens by the government, the proverbial ration card for goods).    Neither exists in true form because government always has to do policing and black markets always exist in national systems where the government is supposed to have control over all money transactions.  For this reason, all economies have a mix of taxes and untaxed money circulation.  Socialism is the hybrid of communism versus capitalism.  It becomes necessary to get a real measure of a particular nation's economic control to determine just how much of the money flow is taxed.  I put socialism at the balance point of 50%.  My normal assumption is a 25% tax or lower for the capitalist end of the spectrum and 75% or higher for the communist end since both communities tend to be staunch in their idealism and loyalty to their systems.  33% or lower for capitalism and 67% or higher for communism is still a fair line to draw on the spectrum, giving each method of economic control a fair share of the spectrum, though.

U.S. History of Capitalism and Socialism:  The U.S. was founded under capitalism and the government only taxed citizens about 10% without using a federal income tax.  Federal income tax was in fact illegal.  It is interesting that the current U.S. tax system does not actually draw any authority from laws.  Many people have demonstrated that the IRS is actually unconstitutional, despite the fact it is necessary and the U.S. has no intention of dissolving the IRS.  The U.S. Civil War was extremely expensive and the U.S. had to up its tax rates to about 20% and introduced the federal income tax.  Though the hope was to get rid of it after war debt was paid off, federal income tax stuck.  The early 1900s brought about the company store, where business leaders discovered they could trap their employees in a false kind of debt by paying them less than they could live from and work for the company under corporately run communities.  They also discovered they could take unsecured loans (called stocks) from the public and then pocket the money by not paying back the value of the stock.  These two strategies under capitalism, in the interest of personal profit, created a very powerful money elite and put about 40% of the work force idle and starving to death since the elite had no use for them by the time of the Great Depression.  Roosevelt and the U.S. government responded to this crisis by socializing the U.S. economy in the 1930s.  Tax rates went up to about 35% with social security and other socializing programs.  The problem did not get solved though because the elite had already parked the lion's share of the national currency in their bank accounts.  The Germans, who were the worst off from the starvation, actually rose up and took the money not in circulation by force and put it back in circulation in their country.  They implemented a kind of communism called Nazism, but the strategy received a socialist label in the history books because the Germans did not want to associate their communism with the Soviets.  The financial elite were forced to spend a lot of their ill gotten gains to stop the Nazis when the Nazis decided to use their new found economic power to militarily try to take over Europe.  In the U.S., socialism stabilized for a time because of all the money put back in circulation to stop the Nazis and imperial Japan.  The U.S. has held that socialism in place to this day, with technology mitigating depressions and government debt building to create the illusion of maintained money flow.  The owners of U.S. debt are creating a pressure that will erupt at some point if they ever try to cash it in, but the interest rates will bring about that eruption at some point even without a cash in action.  I would guess the eruption will very likely involve war.

On Hiding and Evil:  If good is the pervasive force in decision making, hiding is a waste of time.  Most or all of the beings exchanging information are trying to cooperate and make the best of natural resistance to construction and determined purpose.  In that circumstance, it is best to share information accurately to determine the real situations and deal with them as efficiently as possible.  If evil is present, it is trying to "rip off" a neighbor and get more benefit from situations than the neighbor getting ripped off.  It is necessary to hide this activity, because good beings finding out about the contention introduced by this decision making will work to correct the situation in the interest of striving to be fair and cooperative.  This would reduce the chance a being practicing evil would be successful.  A fight involves hiding information from an opponent, and the presence of a fight indicates evil is present, though it does not explain which parties in the fight are contributing the most evil to the fight.  Good beings will not fight if it is avoidable, but evil beings will force a fight and can easily obligate good beings to fight them to prevent decay in society.

Randomness and Probability:  If we flip a fair coin, the chance of heads is 50% and the chance of tails is 50%.  This action also represents the basic unit of information, a bit at either 0 or 1.  If a universe only had 1 bit of information in it that was random, the likelihood of that universe is 50% because it could have been the other universe if the information turned out different.  Because our universe has such an intense amount of information in it, it's likelihood is very close to zero.  Now, if two of our 1 bit information universes exist together, one being heads, and the other tails, the composite super universe actually has a likelihood of 1 with both subsets sharing that likelihood, with the information condition merely determining which sub universe is the current position.  Basically, the likelihood of each sub universe becomes one and the likelihood of being in one of them becomes 50%.  If there are an infinite set of universes, the randomness in our sub universe wouldn't make a difference to the probability of our state of existence, it would only determine which of the sub universes we are currently in because they all are in existence despite being separate in the super universe (no set overlap).  It just becomes highly improbable of being in one sub universe.  I hope this explains my probability statements on what we can see as the universe right now.
Cooper
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