Altruism is to favour sacrifice to one’s group for benefit in return.
If one personally gets a return , then it's not altruism. The return is to the group.
There is no benefit to me starving for people that aren’t in my group.
There's no personal benefit to you doing most of the things you are ethically required to do.
When it’s just us then people will aid their own group just fine.
Maybe, but not out of self interest.
‘Redistribution’ (ie. theft) is an exercise in pointlessness. As long as there is scarcity there will be haves and have nots,
You are assuming that the only possible purpose of redistribution is to bring about an equilibrium of complete equality. That is not the case. There are multiple justifcations for redistribution.
We are already achieving record rates of getting people out of poverty, not with handouts, but with capitalism.
Whom are you arguing against?
There’s little in the way of ethics here, it’s just individuals making pragmatic decisions to make their own lives easier.
Ethics is individual level altruism in pursuit of group level pragmatism. If it was just individuals making self-centered decisions, they would reject taxation as libertatianism advises.
The global warming meme isn't spreading far enough ..or is the denialism meme spreading to much?
Well, I wasn't nitpicking you. Friedenbach was assserting locality+determinism. You are asserting locality+nondeterminism, which is OK.
I am strongly disinclined to believe (as I think David Chalmers has suggested) that there’s a notion of p-zombies, in which an unconscious system could have exactly the same thoughts and behaviors as a conscious one, even including writing books about the philosophy of consciousness, for reasons described here and elsewhere.
Again: Chalmers doesn't think p-zombies are actually possible.
If I believe (1), it seems to follow that I should endorse the claim “if we have a complete explanation of the meta-problem of consciousness, then there is nothing left to explain regarding the hard problem of consciousness”.
That doesn't follow from (1). It would follow from the claim that everyone is a zombie, because then there would be nothing to consciousness except false claims to be conscious. However, if you take the view that reports of consciousness are caused by consciousness per se, then consciousness per se exists and needs to be explained separately from reports and behaviour.
Postulating hard emergence requires a non-local postulate.
That is not obvious.
Taking (2) to its logical conclusion seems to imply that we live in a deterministic block universe,
That was not implied by (2) as stated, and isn't implied by physics in general. Both the block universe and determinism are open questions (and not equivalent to each other).
One of the chief problems here is that physics, so far as we can tell, is entirely local.
[emph. added]
Nope. What is specifically ruled out by test's of Bell's inequalities is the conjunction of (local, deterministic). The one thing we know is that the two things you just asserted are not both true. What we don't know is which is false.
Becoming defensive and frustrated and retreating to vague language when asked for more specifics.
Subvariety: downvoting without replying.
You can figure out whether an algorithm halts or not without being accidentally stuck in an infinite loop.
In special cases, not in the general case.
You are implicitly explaining only one aspect or definition of consciousness: the existence of a subjective point of view. Other aspects such as high order thought or qualua are not dealt with.
Although you use the term "ontology" you are not attempting to explain what is ultimately real... both pattern ontology and object ontology as you describe them are phenomenological, from the perspective of the subject. A realist could still object that consciousness hasn't been shown to feature in the basic ontology.