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.

Pain is a cognitive ability. One of many.

Because those cognitive abilities are what determine ethical duties owed to that elephant. Being human is meaningless. If you go back down your family tree, parent to child to parent to child, back 5 million years, you'll have an unbroken chain, where each person on that chain is the same as the thousands on either side of it in that chain. But the end would not count as a human. It would be an australopithecine or similar animal.

The point is that species are artificial labels that have no moral weight. It must be emotional and intellectual capacity that creates moral weight. (Or divine command theory, but fortunately we have no reason to believe in that hellish possibility). To base morality off of arbitrary species labels is simply not intellectually supportable.

And because these traits are not fixed, but rather on a sliding scale, it stands to reason that personhood is on a scale as well. Just like how it's a crime to torture a dog but not to torture a flea. That distinction isn't due to some Platonic nonsense about how Dogs are imbued by the universe with rights. It's based on the individual traits of dogs, generally, compared to fleas, generally. If you found a flea that appeared somehow to have the mind of a dog, it's obvious to me that it would be due the same moral treatment that a dog is due.

Thank you for giving me flashbacks to the only class I ever flunked out of.

Good lord that stuff was hard. I could read the textbook and say "yes, I understand that." And then I could not repeat a word of it back to you 5 minutes later. It just didn't stick in brain at all.

My point is that however sustainable indigenous peoples were and are is usually due to accidents of technology, not due to some philosophy. And there was nothing sustainable about the Aztecs, for example. They were literally a colonialist empire like the British, consuming in similarly destructive ways. On the other hand, some farming societies, or hunter gatherer societies were relatively static, just like farming in Ireland or Poland for more than a millennia.

It's just an accident of technology.

And, for what it's worth, today there are people like you who care about sustainability, and have access to tremendous technology to help create sustainability on a scale that no Mohawk could dream of. You, today, can do more good for the environment than anyone living 1000 years ago. That's important to recognize, just as it's important to recognize our destructive power as well.

So capitalism is something we define only by how it's practiced, but socialism and communism are only defined by theory, and any attempted implementations should be called something else if they don't conform to theory?

Am I understanding you correctly?

And Smith is called the father of capitalism. His works are the foundation for the theory of capitalism, every bit as much as Marx is for communism. Just because the term for Smith's new system wasn't used in English until the 1850s doesn't change the historical lineage of that system.

So did Communism under Lenin, under Mao, and under Castro, so that's just not a useful definition.

You should actually read some Adam Smith. You might learn something.

No, your understanding of native cultures is ignorant. Heidegger can suck a rusty dick.

Native cultures are and were no better than we are at living in harmony with nature. Plenty of them were horrendously destructing to the environment. The noble savage myth is still a racist stereotype. Natives are people, and people are the same, everywhere and everywhen. We take from the environment as much as we can, and then write poetry about how sad that is. That's just as true for the 1700s Mohawks as for the 1000s Inuit, as for the 1800s British or the first people coming out of Africa.

Can we please not present as valid the work of people who helped work to kill several of my great uncles (and mostly succeeded)?

You want something that never existed. We have never had a more "romantic" relationship with Earth than we do today.

But that's a second order problem with your comment. The first problem that needs to be addressed is that we need to define "romantic" and we need to understand what outcomes that relationship with nature has that differ from the outcomes of other relationships, and then determine which set of outcomes is more appealing based on predefined criteria. If you say you want something, you need to provide evidence to support why that thing is desirable. Otherwise you're just stating an aesthetic preference.

Well, once you prohibit a class of people from participating in a marketplace, you're not practicing capitalism anymore. You're not letting the marketplace decide the efficient owners of capital.

So Naziism is, by definition, a critique of capitalism.

That's extremely ignorant.