Now that I think of it... In light of Hashi's point about Hitler's later role in things... It's one of the weird things about truly totalitarian systems, that they have all these bureaucracies but there's also a hyper-mob atmosphere to all of it, so that in another sense what happens, what the syste...

... and know what levels of barbarity were drawn out of combatants on both sides... This question is, I suppose, what led me to my analysis. When I was much younger, my argument for my pacifism turned on a theory I'd come up with, I called it "the theory of equalized killing." The idea wa...

I suppose I would favor the top-down idea a little more than the other one, but just because of the bureaucracy involved (the special selection of the Einsatzgruppen and the diversion of the train system in service of the special camps).

Re: SRD's use of the word 'provident" and the like: this is in part him using that weird style he does where he takes a word with a relevant range of meanings and sets upon a sort of archaic one. It's like using the word "terrific" to mean "terrifying," i.e. technically corr...

If the broad idea in physics is to figure out the basic functions for the graphs of basic particle activity or whatever, the ones that in principle add up to us, the reduction question is whether there are some functions that get graphed, that are not just composite functions for quantum graphs. For...

Let's suppose you had a series of waystations for the transmission of information, where at each juncture an observer would either observe the transmission or not. So like an alternating, consecutive sequence of dual-slit experiments. The flow of energy in this would be like in a circuit, it seems, ...

Mere rituals, social as ever, don't seem... IDK... like, why don't we stand for the recitation of some part of the Constitution, or something? Symbolic respect for a symbol, as a semi-litmus test of something or other, well...

It gets worse than that--sometimes we get laws which are unconstitutional even with that system in place. All it takes for an unconstitutional law to remain on the books is a sufficiently convincing legal argument or enough people who are willing to cast a vote to keep it in force. I wonder if this...

I believe the goal of evil is to make us do harmful stuff to other or just to be mean. Due to the complexity of moral psychology, it is not always easy for people to readily do the worst. They have to make specific cognitive mistakes that affect their motivation, emotional mistakes that affect thei...

No one,* it's more like it's just in the form or structure of the mind. The universe writes and executes a code of some sophistication, but this is nothing more purposive than the automatic workings of a celestial algebra, I might suppose... But anyway as genes evolve, they do not propagate their pr...

The evil-meme doesn't need to propagate in general, though. If it comes from concepts preloaded in the mind, then only the particulars of its expression (individual "evil" events/acts in history) need to be "reimagined" as part of the "goal," that is the precursor conce...

I suppose it would be reducible to the "sensation" of beauty, and its identity as an object would be inferred more than less. It is like what Wosbald indicated, in a place between the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete.

A meme is a postulated unit of information, like a gene. Memes on the Internet are when these units "go viral" and propagate their "RNA" if you will. However, memes are firstly cognitive things, in theory, so they primarily exist as special information loops in people's minds. So...

I'm thinking of beauty as an object, in or part of the world, not an eternal standard against which things are measured. Just as a brick enters into all sorts of relations with everything else in existence, albeit mostly indirectly, so too does this "aesthetic object," and just as we would...

I have this idea that moral memes pseudo-coordinate the activities of people over space and time, and that if the "evil" meme were a person, so to say, it would have a "goal" of some kind. So the flow of history as inspired by these memes and their work would form a sort of story...

I guess the idea is that an object is beautiful to the extent that it is part of the Object of Beauty. Exemplars of Platonic Forms are not parts of the Forms, however, and here beauty is not like the Form of Red, attributed to all red things, but is an individual, concrete thing to which all beautif...

;) Well, perhaps. But perhaps the computations would be simple enough. Let's say ethics depends on free will and free will has a different mathematics of probability than other comparable (relevant) things. That is, it is not 50% probable that an agent faced with only two choices, will ever choose o...

So there is supposed to be this important distinction in types of ethical thought, namely between deontological and teleological systems. In the one case, people define their concept of goodness in terms of rightness, and in the other case they order these concepts reversewise. Or so the theory goes...

Having purpose might be associated with having the capacity to imagine something in some detail, so to attribute a purpose to the universe as such would seem to presuppose a mind-of-the-universe or something along those lines. Now there is an "outside" stance where we consider the minds in...

There's some specific moments of descriptive wisdom, of the "human condition" or at least the condition of the humans in the story. Ultimately, however, it's the first and the last sections that I was most impacted by, conceptually/emotionally/w/e. The scene in the gas chamber is horribly ...