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Real Life

There has been a lot of talk recently about various aspects of artificial life - artificial intelligence, sentient machines, computers gaining self-awareness, and so on. It seems self-evident that we can easily distinguish between living and non-liv
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Farming

[Back to Physical Challenges]

Introduction

This is clearly a massive topic.

Because there are no clear boundaries, this topic will cover not only farming, but all food production and use of the land to deliberately grow things or raise animals.

Growi

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Gods, Ancient and Modern

People constantly talk about God, whether they believe in God or not, and they clearly have something in mind when they do so. But, when you move beyond the beliefs of a specific group, there is almost no agreement about what a 'God' (or 'god') is.
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Talking About Religion

All the usual principles of good practice on this site apply to discussion of religion too. Please be clear about the purpose of any contribution, and please aim to keep any response to a contribution relevant to what was posted.

God and Gods

There is a common assumption in many Western countries that if you are religious, then you 'believe in God', and that your choice of religion is all about believing in the 'right' God. However, while you will find a God or multiple gods in many reli

War

This is an attempt to identify the key aspects of war. Almost everyone agrees that war is bad, something to be avoided if possible, but we are not very clear what the ‘if possible’ might consist of: whoever you talk to, the responsibility for avoidi

Reason Alone

Neither science nor reason can guide anything, from individual choice a national strategy. Science can tell us the fastest way to get from A to B, but it cannot tell us whether we should go there. It can tell us the likely consequences of an action,

What does it mean to be human?

In Western thought, there are two traditional ways of understanding what it means to be human, associated with the two major philosophical traditions found in the Greek and Hebrew cultures: in the Greek tradition, a human is a soul trapped in a body,
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Pacifism and Ukraine

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Introduction and context

This article is written in response to a recent JustHuman meeting (February 2023), I attended but didn’t really contribute much to the conversation at the time - apart from my opening statement (something that

Human Nature

I believe that human beings are essentially good and rational, but we are pulled in two different directions because we are both social and selfish. Everything else, pretty much, comes from this basic starting point.

Three Kinds of Sex

One of the basic problems we face in talking about sex, is that we may be trying to talk about vastly different things. At the very least, we can distinguish between these three kinds: physical mechanism (the process of reproduction); social roles a

Science and Magic

Everyone seems to be familiar with the quote, "Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic," but I sometimes talk with people who appear to think that our inability to distinguish between the two implies that there is no real differ

Consent

In the messy details of human relationships, questions of consent are rarely clear-cut. We have pressures, preferences and obligations, we make assumptions about other people, their actions, beliefs and motives. We don't even understand what we do

Reality

This is an attempt to pull together the topics we have addressed from time to time which come under the general heading of 'understanding reality'.

Unrestricted Growth

Traditional economics relies on continual growth, an assumption which made little sense in the 1960s and makes even less sense now. Any plan which requires unrestricted (in effect, infinite) growth on a finite planet is unlikely to succeed. 

Am I Free?

You are not perfectly free - nobody is - but you are sufficiently free. You are sufficiently free to be able to choose how to act and the impact you want your actions to have on others, and you are sufficiently free to take responsibility for your c

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