I sort of wonder why people bother marrying in that case. Although even in our case procreation was only 50% of the reason and basically doing a big thank-you ceremony to our parents was another 50%, we felt we owe them a wedding. But I think this is related - the wedding as a thank-you ceremony is a signal of the end of childhood to parents (at 34 it was about high time) but also a signal that we will take over the mantle of child-raising from them from now on, now we take over the job of continuing the family for them. So it had a bit if retiring them as parents, and we do the job of being a parent and doing the duty to the family now. (Nobody actually called it a duty, but it still felt like one generation stepping in the role of the previous one.) So the idea of "thanks parents your job is over" and "we do it now" was related.

No because you need a theory of metaphysics to explain what "empirical equivalence" means.

If you have no interest in eventually procreating, is serious dating worth the massive time and emotional investment necessary?

Edit: part of the reason i am asking is for external belief checking

My serious point is that one cannot avoid metaphysics, and that way too many people start out from "all this metaphysics stuff is BS, I'll just use common sense" and end up with there own (bad) counter-intuitive metaphysical theory that they insist is "not metaphysics".

For unknown reasons, there is a dip in the circadian alerting about 8 hours after the beginning of the cycle. This is why people sometimes experience that “2:30 feeling.”

Hunh. That makes sense. I didn't realize that I was why I feel tired in the afternoon. I thought it was because of eating lunch just before.

I think this is addressed by my top level comment about determinism.

But if you don't see how it applies, then imagine an AI reasoning like you have above.

"My programming is responsible for me reasoning the way I do rather than another way. If Omega is fond of people with my programming, then I'm lucky. But if he's not, then acting like I have the kind of programming he likes isn't going to help me. So why should I one-box? That would be acting like I had one-box programming. I'll just take everything that is in both boxes, since it's not up to me."

Of course, when I examined the thing's source code, I knew it would reason this way, and so I did not put the million.

That was meant humorously. Obviously such things exist. But one could argue that these do not match some strict definitions of what a language is.

One aspect of the isolation is the construction of concepts, structures thereof and whole private languages that are tuned and specialized to the mind and interests highly gifted. Now private languages don't really exist but that doesn't mean that they don't hinder interaction with other people - esp. the exchange of ideas interesting to them.

If you don't even understand what it would mean, this could be a symptom that you are understanding "categorical imperative" differently than they do. I'm going to guess that you are assuming metaethical motivational internalism.

Therein lies your difficulty.

What determines whether or not you "should" do something?

My thoughts are that "should requires an axiom". You could say "you shouldn't kill people... if you don't want people to suffer". Or "you should kill people... if you want to go to jail".

In practice, I think people have similar ideas about how outcomes make them feel. Outcome X feels just. Outcome Y feels unjust etc.

When people use the word "should", I think they're implicitly saying "should... in order to achieve the outcomes that me/society feel are just".