Hot and Cold

That's a good question/point. There cannot be one without the other. And I would say that if the animal doesn't know any other life, then he doesn't perceive suffering. It is only in our mind that he suffers, because he doesn't have the comfy life of our dog or cat. Vegitarians are crazy. So don't listen to them. :-p

Re: Hot and Cold


Somehow, even in the face of hard evidence like the relativism of hot and cold, kids who have known nothing but child labor still know that a lash across the back hurts, or that 18 straight hours of work with one sandwich break is physically taxing. Philosophers still can't figure out how this works.

Hmm... tricky. I'd have to agree with shapeless that those kids still know what hurts and what is taxing. But they may not know that it is possible to achieve a better existence.

Still, we humans are always building higher, delving deeper and pushing further. This would be impossible if we the thesis presented in the initial post was true. Then we would not know that anything more than we already achieved was possible.

As for the caged animal, I would suspect that it's instincts would reveal to it that it was meant for other things than it's tiny cage. After all, it is able to percieve a whole world from behind the bars that it cannot reach.

Re: Hot and Cold


Well their bodies know that what is happening to them is not good for them.

What about the average middle class person who has been so all their life. They all dream about being rich (well most of them) and they've never known what it is to be so. This is because they look at wealthy people's lives and imagine themselves in those wealthy people's (very expensive) shoes. Wouldn't the same go for those children? Surely seeing how their masters live would be enough for them to know that their life is not as good as their masters'?

yes but those people are not 'suffering': they are not being denied fundementals of life.

I think Aperson's (and Cyracuz's) point was that you don't always have to have been in the other side's shoes to perceive your own situation.

Yup

Re: Hot and Cold


Of course they are! Pain is pain is pain. And misery doesn't know culture or status.

Well this is a very interesting topic. I think that u know when something isn't right even thought u haven't been exposed to the "other side" you always wonder ...what if... for example let's say person X has never had big boobs. She has never experienced that but she knows she want them and thinks that would make her look better. Even though she has never had them she still wonders how it would be. I think this is similar to the situations u are presenting. There will always be that "what if" and i think this is how the poor little kids that make our shoes feel =D

There is no cold. Only heat...and the lack thereof. They are not opposite things. All the other things could also be seen from similar perspectives.

Seems like it would be just as easy to say that there is no heat--only cold, and the lack thereof. It's probably a more useful model if you happen to live in, say, Siberia.

Yes, but it wouldn't be true.

Heat is energy, cold is a lack of energy.

Or cold is atomic stasis, heat is an excitation of stasis, no?

Re: Hot and Cold


The western tradition--partly because of the Greeks, partly because of the Jews--is obsessed with dichotomous descriptions of the world. However, it is a simple-minded way to look at the cosmos, and as with all oversimplifications, it falls apart on examination. Heat is a term used to describe the relative excitation of molecules in a subject material or set of materials. Heat is a reasonable term for a quality of matter. Cold, however, is simply a relative statement about the degree of heat--specifically, the absence thereof. Heat describes an energetic state of matter; cold simply makes a subject judgment about the relative "desirability" of the state of matter. The same analysis can be applied to light and darkness--light referring to a quantifiable and qualifiable property of the physical cosmos, dark simply being a subjective statement about the relative absence of light. Black and whie come closest as dichotomous terms, but, again, nothing in life is so simple that it can be described in terms as naive as white or black. White is the presence of all light in the range of radiation visible to humans: what is subjectively described as white could contain varying degrees of the presence of all visible radiations, and still be subjectively described as white. Black is the absence of all light--and humans rarely if ever experience "the perfection of black."

In case anyone's missing the point, dichotomous statements about life or the cosmos reek of subjective fiddling with the language used to describe reality. Such terms are simple-minded, and obscure more than they reveal. Therefore . . .



This is a set of simple-minded statements which are convenient to a simplistic argument. We cannot know what the author "hears" from anyone, and certainly have no good reason to assume that this is the sole reason why people choose to be vegetarian. All these examples are nothing more than the arbitrary and subjective statements from the author which seek to suggest a simple-minded criterion for judging the conditions of others.

Those who object to what they perceive as cruelty toward animals, or toward children, object on the basis of their personal values. It is completely reasonable to object to cruelty without reference to allegations of how it affects others, but because it offends one's own personally held moral or ethical values.

Altogether, i find this a poor effort.