Jb,

A sure sign that an opinion is unfounded is when the person who holds it resorts to ridicule and/or talking about the authors rather than what has been written. That is what happened in your response to me. There was nothing within it that addressed what I wrote, including the comments about chickens and eggs. What I've put forth is a simple concept to grasp, and it has nothing to do with chickens and eggs or the lack of our ability to know which of those came first. It's common sense basically.

Prior to apple pie crusts comes apples, apple trees, dirt, sweetener, flour, water, etc. Those are all a part of apple pies, and thus without them there could be no apple pie crusts.

There is overwhelming evidence that supports the notion that life began in simple forms and evolved to become more and more complex. To deny that much is to deny our current scientific knowledge base. Granted, sometimes what we once thought/believed to be true has - at times - turned out to be not and we have revised our knowledge as a result, better known as a paradigm shift. I mean, we have been wrong in the past. However, that and that alone is not sufficient reason to deny the current knowledge base without overwhelming evidence to support such a move in thought. It does not follow from the fact that we have been wrong about some things that we have and/or wrong about everything. As I first stated...

The question in the OP is misguided. Any pursuit of an answer to that question is a waste of time. It's like searching for the crust of an apple pie by looking at an apple tree. Apple pie crusts are contingent upon flour, apples, sweetener, apple trees, etc. in the same way that meaning is contingent upon drawing correlations which is in turn contingent upon complex thought/belief formation, which is in turn contingent upon a physiological nervous system replete with a prefrontal cortex, etc.

One is entitled to their own opinions, but one is not entitled to their own facts. There are no relevant facts that support the notion that complex life forms existed prior to simple ones. There is no good reason given to suggest that meaning comes prior to life, which is what must be the case in order for life to have meaning other than what complex creatures attribute to it.

The bit about being separate is nonsense, and had no bearing upon what I claimed.

Meaning is an artifact of drawing correlations. All examples of meaning will involve it. That is because meaning does not exist - cannot exist - without drawing correlations. One example to the contrary would negate this. Your unsupported contradictory opinion cannot.

1.'Lower' life forms existed prior to their more complex counterparts.
2.Meaning requires drawing correlations.
C1.Life existed before the ability to draw correlations.(from 1,2)
C2.Life does not require meaning.(from 2,C1)

Not much more can be said here. Either you see this, or you don't.

Many folk do lie and think nothing of it.

However, no one likes being lied to about important matters. Society requires the opposite, or at least believing the opposite, in order to work.

I would say that all folk, at some level, intuitively know how important it is to keep one's word, which is at the basis of keeping one's promise.

Prior to speaking in only absolute truths one must first know them, or some of them, or at least ONE of them.

Do you? If so, care to set it out?

Indeed. I would say that the reason most folk are offended by the notion of not keeping one's promise is that they have trusted that the promisor would keep their promise.

A very interesting aspect of promises is that they are not like most other kinds of statements/sentences. Most statements in order to be true must match the way the world is, whereas a promise works the other way around. By keeping a promise we make the world match the words.

Oh hey, a reply!

Indeed, keeping a promise is a matter of integrity. However, I think that there are times when circumstances arise that were previously unforeseen that make keeping the promise difficult if not impossible. I would also say that sometimes things change in between making the promise and keeping it that would have otherwise caused us to not make it to begin with. In short, I supposes that I'm saying that it is best to keep them, but I can envision times where it would acceptable to not.

Hmmm...

Not sure how this ended up in coffee haus forum. Supposed to be in philosophy.

Egads!

If a mod sees this, could s/he puhleeeze move it where it belongs?

Nice stuff Jb.

Seeing how meaning requires drawing correlations, and life does not, it seems clear to me that the question is misguided.

This thread has promises as it's aim. Specifically, I'd like to discuss and/or debate whether or not one ought keep a promise if they make one and why or why not it is or is not the case that they ought. To begin, we must first have a good idea of what a promise consists of...

A promise consists in the performance of a speech act. During such an act, a speaker overtly expresses an intention to perform some future action. 'I promise to do X' always means that the promisor intends to do X. This holds good regardless of whether or not the promisor intends to do X. Of course, in these cases s/he is lying. If a promise is being made and the promisor does not intend to keep the promise as they're making it, then s/he is knowingly and deliberately misrepresenting their own thought/belief on the matter. That would be to say...

'I promise to do X, but I do not intend to do X'

The above is not self-contradictory. If that sounds odd then you're in good company, because it sounds odd to most folk. However, sounding odd does not make it self-contradictory. Let's look at this a bit closer, by separating the conjunction into it's basic sentences...

'I promise to do X'
'I do not intend to do X'

These two sentences can be true without the speaker contradicting him/herself. It offends our moral sensibility, but the statements are consistent with a situation where the promisor is being insincere. Thus, in cases like this the second sentence is not spoken aloud, but rather it is privately known and kept secret during the speech act. The question is why does this offend our moral sensibility?

There are many reasons for our being offended I would suppose. As many reasons as there are connections to be made. I wonder though if there is/are some basic fundamental reason(s) that underwite all of the specific ones.

I'll bite.





What you've set out is but a beginning and as such it needs a little more light shed upon it, for as it is written it creates an unwitting reader whose left a bit in the shadows regarding what was going on at the time.

The reformation of the mental health system in the U.S. was already in process prior to Reagan's presidency. When he cut mental health funding as a governor, there was already significant turmoil on the different sides of the issue at the federal(lobbying) level of which he was already in the midst, albeit on the state level. As president, he used this crisis in mental health as one of several key leverage points which allowed him to garner enough support to meet his bigger agenda:To change the overall political climate of the country. This bit we're discussing is just one facet of that. Interesting in it's own right, but just one sliver of a much larger chunk.

So, as I was saying...

In the early sixties, there were several initiatives passed in order to reform the mental health system. These reforms included the release of patients not deemed a danger to themselves and/or to society. However, the grounds and/or conditions of their release is equally as important. <-----That is important to consider, especially regarding how it diffuses a few of the rhetorical devices contained in your reply. On the federal level, in 1961, the Joint Commission on Mental Illness released Action for Mental Health, calling for the integration of the mentally ill into the general public with the aid of Community Mental Health Centers. The problem was that the centers were not fully funded as a result of financial woes such as Vietnam and the over-all economy of the 70's. The point is that many patients were being released into society according to conditions that were not being fulfilled. As a result, the patients were not getting the necessary treatment. There was no place for them to go in order to do so. This created all sorts of problems, both social and socio-economical. There is a virtual library of peer-reviewed papers shedding light on this very aspect.




Not exactly, but close. The bit about what "he felt should be left up to the states" is a thin veneer over a substantial substrate of things that he felt should be left up to the states.

Carter inherited the mess touched upon in my preceding paragraph, and aimed to fix it by offering the financial support that was already supposed to be there in order for the deinstitutionalization to take effect in a manner that was both economically smart, humane, and societally safe.

Reagan repealed that.

Are we in agreement thus far?

Redy,

I'm in partial agreement with the notions regarding the influence of Locke and Smith. The Wealth of Nations was ironically released in 1776 and it was largely overshadowed by the Revolutionary War. However, some of the more notable revolutionaries did not necessarily agree with Smith.

Thomas Paine comes immediately to mind. The problem is that history has Orwellianized some of those notions to the point that they no longer align with the tenets was held firm. That being said...

I was merely shining some light upon what will undoubtedly be a number of folk who've forgotten or chose to forget what the policies of the Reagan administration were, and will subsequently refuse or neglect to connect the dots. I'm hoping that some of our friendly neighborhood liberal members of the press will soon remember. However, I've not see that yet.

Not you silly. I was talking about the "feller" who has written much but said much of nothing.

Hmph...

Is there a valid point hidden in there somewhere?

Brilliantly stated. Impressive rhetorical devices. Eloquent. Concise. Perfectly perfect.

No takers?

Depends upon what "being friends" entails, what happened, and the kind of folk we're talking about.