PHILOSOPHY: There are absolute standards about human behavior.

Thursday, October 15, 2026

https://tuckercarlson.com/live-show-october-7-2026

Charlie Kirk Was Right About October 7th. Dave Smith on This Generation’s 9/11.
The Tucker Carlson Show
•Premiered 5 days ago•95 mins
<< EDITOR ADDED DATE 2026-10-14>>

FROM BEHIND THE “tuckercarlson.com” PAYWALL?

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Tucker [00:00:00] Today is October 7th, 2026. It’s the third anniversary of the most horrifying, certainly the most widely publicized attack on mainland Israel in its history. Three years ago today, of course you remember, forces of Hamas, the militant group, also the, at the time, government of Gaza, the Israeli-controlled, semi-technically independent area south of Israel, taken by the Israeli government in 1967 and run ever since.

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The idea that it is okay to murder innocents. Well, it’s of course not okay. Morally, it is always wrong, always and everywhere. But it is also a guarantee of your own destruction. Because what you do to others will be done to you. This is not simply a religious precept. It’s of course a Christian idea. It’s an Eastern idea, often called karma. It’s very close to a physics principle. It is just always true. You will be treated as you treat others. And so if you murder innocents, you can look forward to a very tough future in which people you care about are murdered despite the fact they are innocent. And so wise nations don’t behave this way. They also calculate threats on a realistic basis. They don’t become hysterical, they don’t go insane. They understand that, yes, it’s a dangerous world, but not everyone wants to kill you. And your entire gross domestic product does not have to be taken up with preparing for some war or other. And if it is, you will guarantee having that war or either. These are obvious things that wise people understand. That, of course, you need to be prepared. And of course it’s true to some extent that… You know, strength is a good defense. You want to deter opportunistic attacks on your nation.

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How about a war on the people who are putting fentanyl into our society? How bout a war in behalf of the hundred thousand people or seventy thousand last year died of drug ODs? Why don’t you fight a real war against the people that are killing our citizens? But instead you’re lecturing us about our bad attitudes about a foreign country and you’re going to go community to community on some kind of tour that we’re paying for. To tell us that we’re the problem, our bad attitudes are the problem? It’s hard even to talk about this without using obscenity. You wanna use obscenities in response. No government official has a right to tell you what attitude you can have, ever, in a free country. You can have any attitude you want and come to any conclusion that you want. What you can’t do is commit violence against other people, and you shouldn’t. And you should oppose the use of violence against innocents, always, including the use violence by Israel. Against the Palestinians, including the use of violence by the United States government, the Trump administration, against fishermen off the coast of Venezuela, against girls going to school outside Tehran. That is wrong. It’s wrong when it happens here. It’s right when it happen there. It will always be wrong.

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And that’s why we have absolute standards about human behavior that apply to every person, regardless of whether he is Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist, regardless of he was black, white, or Asian. Those standards remain in place always, they are immutable. People didn’t think them up, God laid them down. And we have one job, which is to obey them and to judge others by those standards, regardless of how much money they have or how much they’ve given to Donald Trump or whether they’re friends with Attorney General Todd or not. And on the basis of those standards, what happened to Israel on October 7th is wrong. It’s immoral, it’s disgusting. And what Israel did in response to what happened to Israel October 7 is also wrong, disgusting and indefensible. And that will always be true. And calling it hate does not change the fundamental truth of that. But failing to acknowledge those absolute standards will destroy this country. And we hope that we get back to universal standards soon. 

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While many of the things Tucker has said, I’m not so sure that are “absolute truths”.

BUT, (and there is always a BIG butt), I believe he is right that somehow someway sometime  somewhere — around the globe — humans developed certain “moral principles” for the thriving of the species.  Eventually, everything devolves back to the principles of individual liberty.  However they came to be.  And like the “Law of Gravity”, they are as immutable as any physics principle.

What’s right and moral is the guiding principle.

Any politician or bureaucrat who advocates policies that would or do break those “laws” deserves our scorn.

Dona Nobis Pacem

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PHILOSOPHY: Is there “free will”?

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

“We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” — Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky

https://bookfreak.substack.com/p/book-freak-202-determined?publication_id=1194226&post_id=184457506&isFreemail=true&r=1uhcoe&triedRedirect=true

Book Freak #202: Determined
A Science of Life without Free Will
Mark Frauenfelder
Mar 17, 2026

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Core Principles

  • You Are the Sum of Luck You Didn’t Choose
  • Your Brain Decides Before “You” Do
  • Childhood Sculpts the Adult Brain
  • No Justifiable “Deserve”

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If there is “free will”, then is it in the small choices we do get to make? 

If there is no “free will”, is anyone ever “responsible” for what they do?

If there is no “free will”, are we all just NPCs (Non-Playing Characters) in a totally random pin ball game?

Determinism feels wrong.  We’d like to believe we are “in control”.   But are we?

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PHILOSOPHY: I’m an injieeer; not a heavy thinker

Thursday, August 14, 2025

https://bigthink.com/thinking/the-thought-experiments-that-test-your-life-not-your-logic/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weeklynewsletter

Thinking — August 5, 2025

The thought experiments that test your life, not your logic

Why some of philosophy’s strangest scenarios are more than mental games.

A group of people in ancient attire react to shadows cast on a wall, referencing Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Key Takeaways

  • Philosophical thought experiments aim to test, stretch, or even shatter our intuitions about how the world works.
  • Some reveal cracks in arguments. Others ask for more than analysis — they press us to confront existence, question identity, and reevaluate what we live for.
  • Here, philosopher Shai Tubali explores three distinct types of thought experiments, including ones that can reshape how you live life. 

Shai Tubali

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A lone figure stands at the edge of the Universe and hurls a spear into the unknown, only to find the edge wasn’t an edge after all. A demon tells a chronically ill person that every moment of their life — every high, every hardship — will repeat forever, exactly as it is. A 16-year-old boy tries to travel alongside a beam of light, hoping to catch up, but no matter how fast he goes, it never slows. Someone is offered the chance to live in a simulated paradise, but there’s a catch: Once inside, they’ll forget it isn’t real. And a human falls in love with a consciousness that has no body, no boundaries, and no need for them.

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What captured my eye was in the email:

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 7 August, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

“Which do you prefer?” my fiancée asked me, pointing to wedding flowers in two vases, each one thoughtfully holding the flowers in a unique arrangement. Or so I was told. To my eye, they looked the same. In that moment of indecision, I became Buridan’s ass — the dim donkey in an old philosophical thought experiment stuck between two equidistant and identical piles of hay. With no reason to choose one over the other, the donkey starves.

Buridan’s ass is meant to satirically highlight the limits of rational determinism, the idea that we always choose based on the strongest reason. In real life, you don’t wither away in analysis paralysis; you just pick something. “The left one,” I said.

Thought experiments can refine and poke holes in your arguments and intuitions. But some go much further. As philosopher Shai Tubali writes this week, one particular kind of thought experiment can transform you by challenging not your logic but the way you choose (or don’t choose) to live life.

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I’d never heard of “Buridan’s ass” (i.e., the donkey starves between two equidistant and identical piles of hay).  To a fat old white guy injineer, it obvious!  You just flip a mental coin and who cares if it’s heads or tails.  

The article goes on to itemize a whole lot of philosophical thought experiments.  Some I’d heard of; some not.

  • Lucretius’ spear flung at the edge of the Universe 
  • Nietzsche’s vision of eternal recurrence
  • Einstein’s attempt to chase a beam of light
  • Robert Nozick’s 1974 Experience Machine.
  • Spike Jonze’s Her a bodiless mind.
  • Zeno’s paradox of a race between Achilles and a tortoise
  • Einstein’s elevator and train
  • Schrödinger’s cat
  • Heisenberg’s microscope
  • Plato’s cave
  • Wittgenstein’s beetle
  • Foot’s trolley problem
  • Putnam’s brain in a vat
  • Searle’s Chinese room
  • Avicenna’s flying man 
  • Thomas Nagel’s “food for other species”
  • Williams’s Makropulos’ living for 300 years

He categorizes these into: Clarifiers, Shifters, and Transformers.

The final quote is epic:

Thought experiments can walk alongside us, animating our inner lives. They aren’t merely tools of reason — they are instruments of reflection. At their best, they revive philosophy’s oldest purpose: not thinking for its own sake, but thinking that informs how we live.

This article gave me a lot to investigate. 

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PHILOSOPHY: Are we in a simulation or a drug-​induced hallucination?

Thursday, March 6, 2025

https://nautil.us/can-we-prove-the-world-isnt-a-simulation-238416/?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nautilus-newsletter

Philosophy
Can We Prove the World Isn’t a Simulation?

  • You might think we have definitive evidence we’re not in a simulation. That’s impossible.

By Dylan DiScenza January 26, 2022

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What about the other way around? Could we prove we are in a simulation? In The Matrix, Neo realized he’d been living in a simulation when he took the red pill and woke up in a different reality. He shouldn’t have been so sure. For all he knows, his old world was nonsimulated and the red pill plunged him into a simulation.

Still, we certainly could get very strong evidence that we’re in a simulation. The simulators could lift the Sydney Harbor Bridge into the air and turn it upside down. They could show us the source code of the simulation. They could show us private episodes from our past, along with the simulation technology that produced them. They could show me a film of my brain hooked up to wires in the next reality up, with an associated readout of my thoughts and feelings. They could give me control of the simulation, so that I could move mountains in the world around me just by pressing some buttons.

Even this evidence would fall short of absolute proof that we’re in a simulation. Maybe the world we’re in is a nonsimulated magic world, like the Harry Potter world, in which all-​powerful wizards are using their powers to convince us we’re in a simulation. Maybe most of my life has been nonsimulated but simulators have put me into a temporary simulated duplicate to fool me. Or maybe I’m having a drug-​induced hallucination. Still, I think that if I got evidence like this, I would probably be convinced that I am in a simulation.

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If we are in either, what difference does it make?  We still have to “live” with the evidence presented us.  And, why would it be this way?  Is a wizard, a god, a space alien, or the flying spaghetti monster just playing with the equivalent of a kid’s train set?

Makes my head hurt so I’ll just pretend it’s “real life” until proven otherwise.

Ockham’s razor (i.e., fewest assumptions) says it’s “real life”.

Sigh! 

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PHILOSOPHY: “Find joy” where ever you are and when ever you can

Monday, January 13, 2025

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/understand-other-people/202011/birthday-musings-life-is-learning

Beverly D. Flaxington
Understand Other People
Education
Birthday Musings: Life Is Learning
Seven practical insights.
Posted November 6, 2020 

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6. Find joy. 

It’s so easy to get down and out about what you don’t have. Things have changed dramatically in the world and in each of our lives these last few months. Dealing with isolation, sickness, loss of a job, or worry about how to pay the rent seems to permeate everywhere. These are real issues and they need attention and support, but even in the midst of the darkest days, there is joy to be found.

Are you breathing? Does your physical body work reasonably well to get done what you need to? Do you have even one reliable friend? Are you able to walk outside and feel the breeze, smell the air, and watch a bird fly? Joy is the emotion that comes quickly and often fleetingly, but in the midst of turmoil, it’s worth trying to glimpse it as often as you can.

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Well, I’m not sure about any of the other 6 but I guess “Find joy” where ever you are and when ever you can is a good one. 

In retrospect, it’s all too easy to see all of our “mistakes”.  But like they say “hindsight is 20/20”.  

“That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”  — Frédéric Bastiat

We can’t see what might have been.

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” – Jean-Luc Picard

“… checked the Eternal Possibilities Machine, which generates all the possibilities for use in creating the alternative worlds. In all those probability lines …” CHURCH 10●19●62 (Vol 1) 978-0-557-08387-9 page 45

Laugh!

One can only remember that at the time, you made a decision  — consciously or unconsciously  —  it was the “best choice” you could see at the time.

So there are no “mistakes”; only choices that worked out badly then as judged now.

Sigh!

So the philosophy going forward is “carpe diem” and don’t look back except for heuristics (“rules of thumb”) that can be useful in the future.  For example, don’t kiss metal poles in the winter.  Laugh!

Argh!

Ahh time is the thief that steals our life.

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PHILOSOPHY: Is it moral to torture intelligent animals for food?

Friday, March 24, 2023

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64814781?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter

World’s first octopus farm proposals alarm scientists
Published << 2023-03Mar-16>>
By Claire Marshall
BBC Environment & Rural Affairs Correspondent

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A plan to build the world’s first octopus farm has raised deep concerns among scientists over the welfare of the famously intelligent creatures.

The farm in Spain’s Canary Islands would raise about a million octopuses annually for food, according to confidential documents seen by the BBC.

They have never been intensively farmed and some scientists call the proposed icy water slaughtering method “cruel.”

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Prof. Peter Tse, a cognitive neuroscientist at Dartmouth University, told the BBC that “to kill them with ice would be a slow death … it would be very cruel and should not be allowed.”

Adding that they were “as intelligent as cats” he suggested that a more humane way would be to kill them as many fishermen do, by clubbing them over the head.

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Having seen how intelligent these animals are and how unique they are making them “food” is hard to justify.  Torturing them is just unacceptable.

Sigh!

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