There is a theoretical level of (dis)advantage that would deem (in)competence to be a very small factor in comparison. I believe this is the case for an extremely large number of people.

Obviously if you are born wealthy you have an advantage but thats just it, its an advantage, not a gurentee. The same goes for someone being poor, just because they are at a disadvatage doesn't mean they wont find success. Luck is always a factor but the main factor still is competence.

Well yes you would expect the people that are born into wealth to become wealthy more frequently than those who arent born into wealth. Life isnt going to be statistically perfectly balanced so you are always going to get anomalies and outliers. You could even attribute that to americas unique culture when it comes to people being able to become wealthy.

Of course a person in power doesn't ALWAYS "deserve" to have said power but most of the time they are, at least in western countries. Who are we to say who doesnt and doesnt deserve what anyway.

Logically just having intelligence isnt going to guarantee success. But it does already greatly increase the chances of success and is large reason why a majority of the rich have the positions they do.

That might be the case if levels of wealth weren't inherited. In most cases it seems that luck is the main factor at play, instead of mental fortitude or any kind of competence. If you are born into wealth, survival is easy. If you are born into poverty, working just as hard as the born-rich will be unlikely to get you anywhere near as far

It's our thumbs.

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Ofcourse any kind of law is something we ourselves create.

Deconstruct this universe to atoms and sift those atoms through the finest sift.

Show me now the atom that is supposed to represent justice or equality.

Its our fantasy that makes these things real.

It’s not dumb at all. “Opposition” isn’t an accurate way to put it. I think your description is pretty good. I might summarise it as Empiricism, or sense, informs us of data or experience, while Rationalism, or reason, consists of the principles by which we order that experience. Judgement, interpretation, speculation, and others, are associated with and tend towards Rationalism; observation, experience, and so on are associated with Empiricism.

Which, I think, is the point of this article. Lower animals might be thought of as purely experience, appetite, and impulse-driven. In contrast, humans are far more capable of interpreting information from a limited set of experience.

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I'm not trained in philosophy, so excuse the dumb question, but it seems to me to be obvious that rationality and empiricism are not in opposition. They answer different questions. Empiricism tells us what is. Rationality lets us make predictions about what might be. They are two unrelated tools, and it is only by using them together that we best acquire something we might call knowledge.

What does "fully explained" mean? By definition, an explanation is less accurate than the thing itself. An explanation that was without simplification or omission would simply be the thing being explained itself. Put another way, "all models are wrong, but some models are useful." An explanation is just a model.

Another problem with your formulation is that it takes a lack of knowledge, and just asserts that there must be something more than spacetime at play. But every phenomenon ever explained sufficiently has turned out to be "merely" spacetime. It would be foolish in the extreme to take an unexplained phenomenon and say "I know that everything else has turned out to be not magic, but this time, maybe it's magic!" Every single thing that keeps you alive and able to participate in our society - farming, medicine, the internet, cell phones, cars, airplanes, manufacturing, just to name a few - only work if the assumption is that the world works only via the cause and effect of physical processes. Every one of these fields requires millions of tests of that hypothesis a day. And every single one of those tests has come back as a success. Not once has anyone documented an instance where the cause and effect of the physical world didn't work. Out of, collectively billions of instances a day, not once.

So why would we, even for a second, take seriously the possibility that human cognition is the one exception to that rule? Especially when all of neuroscience increasingly can make accurate and dependable predictions that rely on the physical nature of cognition. To assume that we are special in that way, contrary to all evidence, would be the height of arrogance.

Isnt it the logical conclusion that those who have become so wealthy are wealthy because they were competent enough to forever escape the need for basic survival? They are the ones with high mental fortitude and they used that to gain their wealth.

And that those who are poor are that way because they lack the mental fortitude that is required to climb through the ranks of society?

I’m not taking about the right to be happy.

The problem is that those of wealthier upbringing get to think about survival less than poor people. It gives an advantage.

It’s actually about trying to find ways to reward people with high mental fortitude, but their poverty keeps them from really gaining the momentum to intellectualize their minds.

The goal is to see the wealthy and weak willed displaced from power

Of course intellectualization comes after survival. That’s my point!

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”- Stephen Jay Gould

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I can think of at least one

you're not very spiritual for a philosopher

Ortega y Gasset would have said that he's on the right path, but needs to go a step further. What makes humans unique is not reducible to our brains or biology, but why we try to make sense of things. In a sense the how is not very interesting, after all when you try to do something all the time, you're bound to get good at it. But what was the motivation from the start?

I am not an article author, all I said was that two things are not the same, but article argument does make sense to me, since even an executable file on a computer cannot be reduced to the states of bits on hard drive despite hard drive encapsulating it entirely.

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Can't you say the exact same thing about the brain of every species? they are all unique enough to differentiate from the rest of the animal kingdom.

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The right to feel any way you want I dont think is the same as having something given to you that would make you feel a certain way. For example you have the right to feel happy, but not the right to be given happiness. Before intellectualization must come survival. So i'd think the inherent rights people have should be focused on first. The rights people are born with that cant be given or taken away in a vacuum.

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Are We Ourselves?