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Well, what if a lunatic murderer with a knife barges into your house? You think you can avoid using force? This goes for politics, too. "Appeasement" didn't work with Hitler.

@Raymondbl The first rational thought comes to mind is home security infrastructure around home.

Most homes don't have security infrastructures - you can't pre-plan for every possibility, and it would be extremely time-consuming/financially taxing to plan for even a few possibilities. Usually it's in-the-moment, life-or-death. You could get mugged in the street. You could get attacked by a deer with antlers. And you didn't cover the Hitler situation.

I mean, even with a security infrastructure, the crooks are still going to get into your home and get the chance to attack you, right? Especially in homes with a couple glass doors and windows. The security only raises the alarm, and police will end up having to use physical force to restrain the lunatic.

I think most of us agree that if there are paths to avoid using force, such as with civil disobedience, we should take those paths. But ideals don't always stand. Even if you're rational, your logic is powerless if the opposing party doesn't use logic and instead uses force. Using force back at them is sometimes the option with the fewest non-desirable consequences.

Caught myself: the phrase "logic being powerless if the opposing party uses force" is different when your logic can invoke the threat of force from others, such as with civil disobedience using logic and emotion to unite society against an oppressive government.

@Raymondbl When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

How does the subject of the civilized characteristic of man tie into the use of physical force?

@Raymondbl Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons

@Raymondbl a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.

Excellent observation. Men do not have natural forms of lethal or disarming force - not the strength of a gorilla, not the teeth of a big cat, not the agility of birds. Nothing. We provide ourselves with sustenance through our constructs.

My turn. I don't believe in spirituality because I believe the sense of consciousness and self-awareness are simply simulations, virtualizations. Our brains are computers, machines with trillions of microprocessors (brain cells)

and RAM (short term memory), a hard drive (long term memory), and programming (DNA). Everything that goes on in our brains can be exactly defined by mathematical chemical reactions and pinpointed to particular areas of the brain.

So, true artificial intelligence, the kind where you have a computer start from nothing and "learn" all of its knowledge through sensory information, is possible. That's my career.

I also believe that all emotions exist for a reason. Pleasure obviously exists as an instinct for us to do something which our body thinks is good. Eat salt, for example. Or fat, or sugar, all of which were scarce back then in the mammal's evolution.

Anger exists to give us the motivation and power to set right something which is not going as you want it to - when things hurt us, anger gives us motivation to hurt them back and become stronger, allowing us to survive.

But anger is an outdated emotion because in a world where social relationships are of paramount importance to everything we do, anger often destroys those relationships - anger is no longer a viable emotion to have in the modern world.

I can spout proto-philosophical bullshit too!

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