Gah, installs

Bugger. Guess who's spent the best part of two days trying to get everything installed on the replacement laptop. Where 'everything' includes a lot of proprietary stuff and 'install' includes a lot of 'copy these files from foo's user directory'. It does all work, and there are useful guides on the notes database, but it's still annoying.

At least *this* time I made a note of everything I did so I can do it easier next time. And maybe even help other people. And possibly even include "download and install everything" in a super version of the weekly builds I'm about to organise.

OK, now I can actually get some work done. Plus, sorry to sally and flurble, thanks for thinking about stuff yesterday: I've been trying to compose my responses to moral-belief into one post this morning, but have been being distracted by thinking about work :)

Is-ought problem

OK, I haven't found the useful explanations that erika_freak hinted at, but I've found a discussion and official name for the discussion I reinvented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is-ought_problem, apparently famously raised by Hume.

I didn't find that page very clear, but it's probably a better place to start than my witterings. Apparently Hume thought it was normally a fallacy to go from saying something *is* to what something *ought* to be[1], which he found many people making.

"ought" statements, I think correspind to my 'belief-' statements, which I *think* are characterised by any statements that:

make a moral judgement
or say something ought to be
or people would make differently given the same information and reasoning powers
or you cannot make a decision without
or that if you had a book describing the universe at this moment in time you'd probably leave out

I still think these statements have something fundamentally in common, though apparently I'm incapable of describing what. Go and google Hume :)

That said, I will attempt to follow with a post tomorrow leading on from atreic's explanations making a start on what I *do* think ought to be.

[1] Possible exception: if you believe a universal morality has an objective existance. Though I still see no way of finding out what this universal morality *is* :)