[K-Dog]

The definition exists whether people do or not.  Humanity exists as long as humans do.  It may be different humanity than contemporary humanity, just as Indonesian cannibals are different.  They are still humans though.

We can agree to disagree here.

RE

No the definition does not exist if everyone is dead.  Definitions do not have an independent existence apart from thinking brains.

[RE]

No the definition does not exist if everyone is dead.  Definitions do not have an independent existence apart from thinking brains.

Everyone isn't dead, we already agreed on that. Who says there are no thinking brains? Are you saying the people living on North sentinel Island can't think?  Can you read the mind of a Dolphin?  A Bonobo?  A Dog? How about the rest of the universe?  No thinking life anywhere?  What about the soul, reincarnation, other dimensions?  The concepts exist regardless of humans present to think about them.  Raccoon archaeologists may evolve if they don't go extinct, dig up human fossils and say "this species went extinct."



RE

[K-Dog]

Everyone isn't dead, we already agreed on that.

The North Sentinel Islands are at extreme risk.  The process of extinction is still at work.  The sea is rising as Antarctica continues to melt.  A fatal wet-bulb heat wave could wipe them out.  A bat flu pandemic could wipe them out if they leave the island.  The human bottleneck is sixth extinction tight.

The process of becoming extinct continues.  And considering the small number of islanders and the limited number of paths through the forests of their intellectual landscape, the notion of extinction might all ready be extinct.

* Thinking raccoons will think the same way we do is projection.  Their concepts will be different.  The probability of having the same concepts humanity had is next to zero. Human concepts do not exist without humans present to think about them.

[RE]

Of course the PROCESS of extinction is still at work.  Just as a person begins to die as soon as they are born, species begin to become extinct as soon as they evolve.  Nothing lasts forever.  The only question is how LONG before you die or go extinct?  Thus I asked the question of you on how long once you began to equivocate on the concept and said North Sentinel Islanders will survive.  You still haven't answered that question.

I am projecting nothing.  Math concepts are the same no matter what species comes up with them.  The extinction question is just binary math, 1 or 0 are the only choices.  There is no "partially extinct", either you are or are not.  0=Extinct, 1=not extinct.  End of story.

RE

[K-Dog]

You think concepts have an independent existence apart from humans.  That is classic utopian thinking.  I say we have no free will are no more than the sum total of our personal experiences.  All our ideas are no more than abstractions of experience.  There is no independent universe of ideas, and we have no free will.  Learning is the communication of experience but, without a human to learn there is no learning.
 

Without humans there are no ideas.

[TDoS]

It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It.
When the man is a scientist who's salary requires and depends on him studying topics to the best of ability....how can his salary require him to NOT understand it?

[K-Dog]

It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It.
When the man is a scientist who's salary requires and depends on him studying topics to the best of ability....how can his salary require him to NOT understand it?

In that case salary depends on not not understanding.  A negation is introduced but nothing is really changed because salary determines what is understood in both cases.

[RE]

There is no independent universe of ideas, and we have no free will.  Learning is the communication of experience but, without a human to learn there is no learning.

Without humans there are no ideas.

That is a very anthropocentric view of existence, that ideas cannot exist without people.  Actually, IMHO, people would not exist without ideas, they wouldn't become sapient.  Sapience is the ability to use your brain to discover the ideas and principles that govern the universe.  From your point of view the law of gravity doesn't exist until humans arrive and figure out what it is.  But that idea, that it's directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to their distance apart was true long before Newton came up with the idea.  It's been true since the Big Bang and the beginning of time.

RE

[TDoS]

It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It.
When the man is a scientist who's salary requires and depends on him studying topics to the best of ability....how can his salary require him to NOT understand it?

In that case salary depends on not not understanding.  A negation is introduced but nothing is really changed because salary determines what is understood in both cases.

Wow, that one has some interesting logic.

But if I understand, then a scientist's salary, paying him or her to do the best work possible, delivers the best work possible. No misunderstanding of anything....just high quality, unbiased and objective results.

Sounds reasonable. Sounds like what science is supposed to be.

[RE]

It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It.
When the man is a scientist who's salary requires and depends on him studying topics to the best of ability....how can his salary require him to NOT understand it?

In that case salary depends on not not understanding.  A negation is introduced but nothing is really changed because salary determines what is understood in both cases.

Wow, that one has some interesting logic.

But if I understand, then a scientist's salary, paying him or her to do the best work possible, delivers the best work possible. No misunderstanding of anything....just high quality, unbiased and objective results.

Sounds reasonable. Sounds like what science is supposed to be.

What the "best work" is depends on who is writing the paycheck and what they want the scientist to show.  So if the research is being funded by a Tobacco company and they want to show that smoking is safe, the best work comes from a scientist who does a study that demonstrates that.  The scientist working for a capitalist is a Hired Gun.  They hire the fastest gun money can buy.

RE

[K-Dog]

There is no independent universe of ideas, and we have no free will.  Learning is the communication of experience but, without a human to learn there is no learning.

Without humans there are no ideas.

That is a very anthropocentric view of existence, that ideas cannot exist without people.  Actually, IMHO, people would not exist without ideas, they wouldn't become sapient.  Sapience is the ability to use your brain to discover the ideas and principles that govern the universe.  From your point of view the law of gravity doesn't exist until humans arrive and figure out what it is.  But that idea, that it's directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to their distance apart was true long before Newton came up with the idea.  It's been true since the Big Bang and the beginning of time.

RE

"Sapience is the ability to use your brain to discover the ideas and principles that govern the universe."

No, we do not discover, we create abstractions from sense perceptions.  After abstracting the idealist goes on to fool themself that their abstractions are ideas with an existence outside themself.  That is an error.

It is not anthropocentric,  it is the opposite.  The universe has an existence independent of people, but ideas don't exist if people don't.  Ideas are only abstractions made by the human brain.  They have no independent existence.  This is proved by simply noting ideas can be wrong.

When there are no humans left on the planet, there is nobody left to say people have become extinct.  There is nobody left to define what people were.

[RE]

I already answered this argument, I'm not going through the whole exercise in epistemiology again.  We agreed to disagree.

RE

[K-Dog]

I already answered this argument, I'm not going through the whole exercise in epistemiology again.  We agreed to disagree.

RE

I wish they would give the story I wrote about the aliens finding the Porky Pig cartoon in a film can being the only surviving relic of humanity back.  That was a damn good story for being under 400 words.

Yes we agreed to disagree.  I am a materialist and you are a classic idealist.



I say it is all in your head.  You believe in the old man in the sky.

[RE]

I say it is all in your head.  You believe in the old man in the sky.

I never said anything about an old man in the sky.  You buy the propaganda of Christianity and anthropomorphize God.  Man was made in the image of God,  Jesus was the Son of God and all the rest of the ridiculous nonsense in the Bible about Adam & Eve and Noah's Ark, etc.

What I said was that the Universe shows too much evidence of Intelligent Design to be a random event.  The intelligence behind that design most certainly wasn't Human, whatever it actually was.  Since it's extra-universal, it's impossible to know what it was, since the only thing we can observe is the universe as we view it now from this place and time.  We can extrapolate what it looked like by measuring how fast it is expanding, but we can't go any further back than the Big Bang.  The Intelligence had to exist before that, which means before there was matter or energy or gravity or anything else stemming from those things we can observe.

Misquoting me with ridicule is a poor way to try to prove your point.

RE

[K-Dog]

It is the logical consequence of your universe of ideas.  If ideas have an independent existence, both man and god must have the capacity think them in the same way.  That creates man in gods image, and you get the old man in the sky.  No way around it.