Why so many bleeding-hearts?

[Hygro]

Fun fact: the "you get conserative when you older" ignores many logical considerations. It is a argument of great falsacy.

Forget logic here, it also ignores evidence.

 

[GhostWriter16]

If I had to guess I'd say that its not so much you get more conservative when you get older as it is that society becomes more liberal overall as time goes on, while you may well stay the same, becomming comparatively "Conservative."

 

[JollyRoger]

Yep - Mobby still seems conservative but his posting is more liberal than it ws when he started posting here. It is just that the world has become more liberal at a faster rate than he has, so he keeps falling further behind.

 

[Traitorfish]

You're conscious when you're dreaming ... I don't even know if you're sentient, not really. Usually sentience and consciousness can overlap in their definitions, but dreaming is a special case.

In all of the thread so far, I've been using the two terms interchangeably. That said, there is a LOT of the sleep period where you're not dreaming; dreaming is a subset of sleep, so if someone says "you lose consciousness when you sleep", their statement is true if you don't include the dreaming part. It's more charitable to just go with that axiom, even if you want to qualify-out dreaming. You should do that bit of distinction leg-work, just to speed on a discussion.

While sleeping, your brainstem can re-initiate consciousness and sentience; but you're not sentient during deep sleep.

To say that a sleeping person has sentience is a lot like saying that a standing person has a lap. If I told you a rock does not have a lap, you'd just agree. If I declared that a standing person has no lap ... you kind of squint for a second and wonder if you'll suggest that they have a lap ("right there! you can slap the front of your thighs! that's your lap!") or if they merely have the potential for a lap that a rock cannot ever have.

Is "sentience" anything other than a description of potentiality to begin with? It seems unhelpful to conflate it with "conciousness", because the term is genuinely used to describe a certain type of mind, rather than a specific set of mental activities.

 

[Leonel]

Forget logic here, it also ignores evidence.

I know I've became more liberal as I've grown older. Definitely not as strong as when I was conservative, but I certainly lean to the left.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I recall that the research of Rob Altemeyer seems to indicate that individuals typically become increasingly liberal (at least socially) as they age. However, they also typically become more authoritarian for ever child or grandchild (or great grandchild, etc) that they have (at least if they take part in raising and see themselves as authorities responsible for their offspring). Most older people have more descendants and are more conservative, but childless octogenarians tend to be quite progressive.

I'm not sure that he did enough to prove causation though. Much of the difference could be caused by conservatives having bigger families.