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@NotThatGuy you can spare us the strawmen, and wait until I actually argue that sex for pleasure is bad before you try to address it. If you pay attention, you'll notice that nowhere I even mentioned pleasure so far. You'll do good to address what your interlocutors are actually saying, which is why I didn't really bother reading your comments towards Peter - a lot is strawmanning and extrapolation.

@NotThatGuy I do find it questionable whether homosexual acts can be properly called sex. Is masturbation sex? What about masturbation with tools? What about when another person is used as a tool? That's what homosexual acts amount to, as far as I can see. But if they are to be called sex at all, it's still sex that's inherently defective.

@NotThatGuy of course homosexual relationships are more than sex, but sex will remain inherently frustrated regardless of everything else. And of course the end of sex isn't only reproduction, it's unitive as well, but only a heterosexual relationship can not inherently frustrate either end.

And what decisively refutes the idea that AI can understand anything is that to understand is to grasp a concept, but concepts are determinate, while AI are reducible to parts which are indeterminate and whatever conceptual information they have is always imposed by us unto them. For example, #FFFFFF isn't intrinsically white, it's a matter of convention. I can even define it to mean "triangle" in a database, and that's still not the same as grasping triangularity.

@NotThatGuy if humans couldn't understand anything, by all means this conversation would be pointless. And yet, here we are. Any such denial is similarly self-refuting (unless you don't purport for your argument to be true or for you to understand what the terms mean, in which case your argument is pointless), and that should be enough. Now, it should be clear that arguments presuppose understanding, while a Markov chain producing sentences that pass Turing tests does not.

@KristianBerry I don't see how any of what you said is again relevant, by the way. If there's an argument or counter-argument at all, it's just an ad hominem.

@user77058 indeed we can say there is an "essence" to homosexuality: same-sex sexual attraction. But it's a composite, and considering what sexual attraction is ordered towards, in homosexuality its end is inherently frustrated by the "same-sex" qualifier. So, unless you deny that the end of sex is reproduction (even though it is quite evident), you can conclude that homosexuality is inherently disordered.

@user77058 an LLM can't understand anything, it's just a symbol manipulator working off correlations. Basically no more than a very big Markov chain, which you'll realize requires no semantic content to operate if you've studied it. I once asked ChatGPT to translate a small sentence into Sumerian using cuneiform and it got stuck in an infinite loop of repetitive characters. As would be expected of a Markov chain delving into stuff it wasn't trained to deal with, but not humans.

@KristianBerry since the connection I posited was that essentialism leads to theism rather than the other way around, the existence of theistic nominalists doesn't really cast doubt on it. I don't quite see the relevance.

@KristianBerry "so apparently there's nothing essential to essentialism itself" if that were true then you wouldn't be able to tell it apart from the alternatives, and therefore you wouldn't even be able to contest it or contrast it to, say, nominalism, which you can recognize as not essentialism. Maybe the use of the phrase "what is" is avoidable, but recognizing what something is still is not, as is evident from your arguments.

@user77058 I don't know what exactly I should look at in this question. If good and evil are arbitrary, the utility of anything is just as arbitrary, since something is useful only insofar as it furthers some good beyond itself. And if there is anything inherently disordered, nothing can justify it, not even truly good ends. So either way utilitarianism can't replace moral realism.

@user77058 do colorless green ideas sleep furiously? Symbols can be arbitrarily meshed together, but if that was all there was to their content then we wouldn't be able to tell nonsense. A "properly four-sided triangle" is nonsense. A "properly three-sided triangle" is meaningful. We can tell the difference by knowing what a triangle is. Is it that arbitrary to recognize that a 🔺 is not a ⬛? Let alone that a chiliagon is not a myriagon. If that much is arbitrary, then truth itself is arbitary.

@user77058 you rely on concepts such as "patterns", "matter", "brains", "abstraction", or even "concept" itself. If these are still just "high level abstractions etc.", one has to wonder what is it they're being abstracted from in order to be meaningful. But if they or their references are meant to be objectively true, not only that's a weird special pleading, you still end up needing to presuppose essentialism in order to make a point against it.

@user77058 that's presupposing materialist atomism, not non-religiosity per se, because many atheists reject it. But even that assumption isn't self-evident - do you mean to say that we can only know what something is if we know about it down to the subatomic level? But it's not like we didn't know what plants or sex were before microscopes, for example. How do you even know what is (essences!) a "particle" in the first place? Essentialism is pretty much essential to making sense of the world, and if it is incompatible with atheism, so much the worse for atheism I guess...

@user77058 "But you haven't yet established the assumption to be true in the first place." But wouldn't that be a different question than your OP? Not simply whether there are evil thoughts, but evil actions at all in the first place. You might as well ask whether there are non-religious variants of moral realism, period.

@user77058 essence is simply what something is. If you want to contest the concept, you need to claim that we can't really know what anything is. In which case, you wouldn't even be able to recognize an OnlyFans or a physical law.

@user77058 if an intention would lead to external acts which you would regard as problematic, then again I ask: why wouldn't the intention itself be problematic? Is it because you presuppose that only an external act can be problematic? You need to analyze what exactly counts as a problem.

@user77058 that's the fallacy of equivocation. "Nature" in the relevant sense (i.e. what something is) is equivalent to "essence". For example, it is natural for plants to photosynthesize but not for rocks. If you know what sex is (and it's not rocks or plants) then you know its nature and what is in accordance with it.

@user77058 "if someone is capable of entertaining those thoughts without those thoughts leading to actions, then it's not clear why the thoughts themselves would be a problem" but isn't thinking itself an action? And wouldn't a disordered will be in itself a problem, even if the only one harmed is the thinker? It is not clear to me why you find no problem in entertaining thoughts which are, admittedly, evil, since that evinces the very character of the person.

@user77058 one determines what is proper sexual desire by analyzing the nature of sex, and the nature determines what it is. This is how we can tell that a withered plant is not properly following its nature as a living being, and that withering is bad for it. I'll let you work out the morality of homosexuality based on these premises on your own, since the conclusion is inconsequential to the soundness of the premises.

@user77058 in the OnlyFans example you gave, you're simply assuming that there's nothing wrong in lust. One does not need to presuppose religion to recognize lust as wrong (they simply need to recognize what constitutes proper sexual desire), but set that aside for a moment (I won't try to convince you to give up on your pornography) and substitute the thought for something that you yourself regard as wrong. If someone entertains thoughts of adultery or abuse, would you really not regard those thoughts as evil?

@JoWehler 2nd question: yes. In fact, Newton himself said that God was necessary for physical laws to exist, as they weren't immanent to the objects themselves (or so he believed), i.e. the objects didn't spontaneously behave like that by their own powers (that is, with gravity, exerting forces one upon another, etc.), and so the existence of the laws were unexplainable otherwise. His mechanistic metaphysics are at odds with Aristotle's, where the laws are immanent, but Aristotelian metaphysics again entails God. Nota bene: we're talking here about each thinker's METAphysics, not their physics

@JoWehler 1st question: because 1) evolution is contingent & 2) for the aforementioned reason that proofs from classical theism derive a necessity of God from even more basic aspects of reality, such as change and composition.

@JoWehler there still has to be something behind the processes of evolution, or so the theist can argue. Aristotle and Aquinas purport to prove that if something as simple as change (any kind of change) exists, then God exists (as an unmoved mover that is necessary for any movement/change to be possible). Other proofs from classical theism are similar. Of course, the atheist can disagree - but appealing to evolution, or any other law of nature or contingency for that matter, hardly helps his case.

@kaya3 your mistake is assuming my end is the same as yours. I'll be happy to learn what various philosophers thought, but as means for the sake of definite answers. Otherwise, that's not philosophy. You can read Plato to learn what Plato thought, or you can read Plato to learn what is true through Plato's thought. Socrates insisted so much that Eutyphro define piety because he wasn't content with simply knowing Eutyphro's opinion, but with learning a definite answer (the horror!) for what piety is. Now that is philosophy. I only denigrate putting undue weight on what's useful but secondary.

@kaya3 as for the answer I gave, would it enter the realm of subjective opinion if I proposed to (explicitly 😉) endorse a definite position there? The only thing left was to defend the premises, which wouldn't be any less "factual and logical" than simply presenting the argument (on the contrary). This task can be postponed sometimes, but not indefinitely - if one is actually interested in philosophy, that is, rather than opinions.

@kaya3 you're mistaking the means for the end. Learning history of philosophy may be a useful tool in the search for wisdom, but that does not in itself constitute philosophy. You may become an erudite, but not any wiser. Your analogy actually fails in an important aspect: for a mathematician multiple techniques may be equally valid, while multiple philosophical theories, specially mutually contradictory ones, aren't equally valid means for wisdom.

@kaya3 if we understand philosophy to mean love of wisdom and wisdom to be knowledge of first causes, what you describe is not philosophy, but history of philosophy. By analogy, it's no use knowing that some people thought you could square the circle and others that you can't, what matters is knowing who is right. Had mathematicians settled for simply cataloguing opinions, they wouldn't have proven that you can't.

I recommend for an introduction two books: The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius and Augustine's On the Happy Life. Also, as an even shorter primer for the primer, Plato's dialogues Eutyphro and Apology.

@lupe at most that shows that the brain is necessary for forming the concept of a circle, which Aristotelians would wholly agree (the peripatetic axiom is: "nothing is in the intellect which is not first in the senses"), but not that it's sufficient. The point about intellectual activity being irreducible to material processes remains.

This answer is equivalent to arguing that if a broken car doesn't move, it can't have a driver inside. Dualists demonstrate the immaterial aspect of the mind by showing things that the mind can do that aren't reducible to matter. Namely, being able to think the exact same unchanging concepts (e.g. a circle being always a circle) despite neurons, atoms &c changing in the meantime; or being able to grasp different concepts without forming meaningfully different physical representations between them (e.g. chiliagons vs circles).

This answer is either self-refuting or simply not correct.

The Dunning-Kruger effect indeed is strong with this one. On that matter, I'll recommend to passers-by the essay "The New Philistinism" by professor of philosophy and former atheist Edward Feser, which sheds light on plenty of the overt philosophical ignorance embedded in this answer.

"And once you raise them, you are firmly in modern philosophy if you can let go of the notion that your first principles are metaphysical presumptions, not universal truths. That's the dividing line between theology and contemporary philosophy." Author not only posits a false dichotomy, but also shows he's not at all versed in theology. Brilliant. Have a -1.

@nielsnielsen it's an equivocation fallacy because the physicist's "nothing" isn't the same thing as the metaphysical "nothing" of the ex nihilo nihil fit dictum.

Much like Krauss' book, this answer misses the point of the question and tries to sidestep it by redefining "nothing". It's a fallacy of equivocation.

@DoctorDestructo Of course I'm the sentimental one, I'm the one who brought "motherhood" into the discussion (read and re-read my comment until you notice that not once I went into this topic)... But enough with the sarcasm: I'm NOT the one trying to blur the objective distinction between the hostile relationship that a parasite has with its host and the mutually cooperative relationship that female mammals, specially human females, have with their offspring, so stop projecting.

@Luaan "A foetus is the woman's parasite." Oh, yes, absolutely, women have specialized organs for the development of a foetus and their whole body is prepared for this process to such a point that it actually causes them pain if it's not undergoing it, while it's the total opposite when it comes to, say, worms and viruses. It's totally the same thing. /s

Frankly, I came here to demonstrate why Russell's Teapot is a strawman, so yeah, I'm already done. Save your irony for some other poor soul, I'm sure that will be a nice display of rationality on your part.

It at least can't address it in its entirety. You'll need reasoning thrown in.

Yes, it is necessarily true.

I'm trying to bring this into the correct level instead of settling on strawmen.

@HWalters Homeopathic medicine is scientifically verifiable, for it deals with physical phenomena. Now try using the scientific method to verify whether you're not a brain in a jar - you can't, you'll have to rely on metaphysics. The point is that the scientific method only deals with descriptive facts, not with normative facts. The axioms of logic aren't scientifically measurable, and we can't throw them away because of that, because to do so would be to saw off the branch we're sitting in.

Well, if you want to ask whether he has an effect, just ask religious people and theologians.

@HWalters What is an illusion?

If God isn't some kind of physical phenomenon, like Russell disingenuously implies in his teapot analogy, then it can't be analyzed like a physical phenomenon. QED the teapot is a strawman.

@HWalters Well, Walters, I'm taking presuppositions seriously that's because I'm basically questioning the a priori judgement that the scientific method is the ultimate arbiter of truth, when in fact the scientific method deals with a very limited sphere of knowledge: physical phenomena, descriptive facts. If we assume God to be the creator of the universe then he can't be within the universe like a black hole or a planet would, he necessarily precedes the creation.