I don't see why not if you have a source of "true" randomness like an unstable electrical field for example. But you could argue then that it would be the electrical field calling the shots, not the robot and its not for sure that there is truly such a thing as true randomness, but it is claimed. — Paul S

Well, how about this then. Imagine two tables X and Y.

At table X is a person who has complete information of the initial states of dice, the force fae will apply on the dice, and the role of the surface of the table but fae uses this knowledge to simulate randomness. In other words, the person at table X deliberately causes each possible outcome of the dice roll to be 1/6.

At table Y is a person who is faced with true randomness of the dice in which case, again, the probability of each outcome of a dice roll is 1/6.

You are the observer. Can you tell the difference between tables X andY based on the outcomes of the dice roll?

:up: :ok:

Thank you. Have a g'day.

Then what were you talking about?

I agree that Einstein would see a dice roll as deterministic, and he was using the analogy more to say that he doesn't believe God would allow true randomness or indeterminism to play a part in the roll so to speak. But the act of rolling a die manifests from the central nervous system so the question is whether that the human mind and central nervous system is deterministic or not. But if the human mind and nervous system are deterministic, you can't escape from the reality that free will would be an illusion. — Paul S

That's an intriguing twist in the plot but I think robotic hands can also manage "random" dice rolls...I'm not sure though.

We now return you to your normal programming. — fishfry

:ok: :up: By the way, what's "normal programming"? Do you have one yourself? And also, you haven't gotten round to pointing out the error, if there's one, in my argument. Please focus on the issue.

As a civil libertarian I am always conflicted. On the one hand, sobriety checkpoints are unconstitutional as they are a search without probable cause. On the other hand as a driver I'm perfectly happy to get some drunks off the road. — fishfry

Get to the point if you don't mind me saying. Either tell me where I'm wrong or stop wasting your time. :smile:

Go back and read your own post. You just slipped up there. Not a mistake, just an error, a goof. — tim wood

Sorry timwood because right now I feel like a drunk driver being asked to conduct a sobriety test on himself.

I expect @Harry Hindu to chime in right about here and endorse the great Albert Einstein's take on probability as simple a manifestation of (our) ignorance.

I'm beginning to lean, I suspect very dangerously, close to Einstein's view on the matter because it appears that ignorance of deterministic systems and truly indeterministic systems can't be told apart by us. Take the example in your OP - dice - which are, if you really look at it, deterministic phenomena - if one has complete knowledge of the initital state of the dice and also of the nature of the force that you apply as your roll the dice, you can predict the outcome with 100% accuracy - and yet they behave as if they're truly indeterministic processes when in fact they aren't as explained above.

To make the long story short, if you encounter a probabilistic phenomenon then you won't be able to tell for certain whether it's actually indeterministic or that it's deterministic and it just so happens that you don't have enough information to make an accurate prediction because both these situations will present themselves to you probabilistically.

My two cents.

Nonsense — jgill

:lol: Why?

obtaining something for nothing — synthesis

What is your opinion of a person who takes this idea, if I may call it that, and flips it on its head and is interested in obtaining nothing for something? Altruism is still a thing right?

5 apple-dollars

I don't think time is cyclical and it doesn't have to be for eternal recurrence to be true. All that's required is for matter to, well, recycle and time can go on, like it does, to infinity in linear fashion.

not essentialist — Possibility

What's the alternative? Anything goes? So, for instance, a dog could be defined in terms of non-essential features like fur, claws, ears, eyes, tail, fangs but then...event cats, bears, tigers have these and then every one of these essentialism-based categories would be dogs. Do you want to go down that road? I could be mistaken of course and that's where you come in I guess.

fuzziness — Possibility

Nec caput nec pedes. Can you clear the matter up for me? I don't see the relevance of fuzziness to The Problem Of The Criterion. For my money, the issue of vagueness comes much much later - after we've settled the matter of what truth means and which statements are true. Even if truth is a fuzzy concept there have to be propositions that are clear-cut truths.

I think it would be extremely extraordinary if life existed only on Earth. — baker

The Bioshock paradox.

1. It would be shocking if life existed only on Earth
2. It would also be shocking to find life somewhere other than Earth

I know the feminist "awakening" that has taken place over time has been lamenting the conspicuous absence of women in the scientific, philosophical and other intellectual fields for quite some time I believe.

I don't want to say this but those who take this route to girl power are sorely mistaken and if it reveals anything it must be that feminists, if I can call them that, are suffering from a very bad case of psychotic delusion. Why? One question: does the mind have gender?

Perhaps I'm deluded. God knows.

Not everyone agrees on these moral rules, and therefore apply a nearly instant exception to them. "Thou shalt not kill..." is qualified by adding exceptions "...except in defense of your life, or the life of another, or..." so really, it comes down to "Thou should not kill without reason", as do most other moral rules. Make a rule, create the exception. Only if the rule is universally accepted as 'Wrong", then would it really be rule? No one would do it anyway so no one would have to confirm its wrongness. — Book273

My only response is to remind you that morality is, at its heart, a plea, a desire, a hope in re how the world should be and not the way it is. That being so, moral injunctions and the codes that are built of them are not meant for the world as it is but rather for a world as it should be.

Consider the all-time favorite criticism of Kantian ethics - the lying to the murderer thought experiment. In the world as it is, there are murderers and there'll be dilemmas like these but in a world in which everyone practices Kant's ethics there will be no murderers and the lying to the murderer scenario is meaningless. In other words, exceptions to moral codes like the one you mentioned are a part of our experience precisely because some moral theory is being applied to a world that doesn't fully support it. It's like trying to play Diablo III (a video game) on Windows 1995.

Meno's paradox. — frank

:up: :ok:

Initially I was wondering whether Possibility's daughter's ability to identify dogs had something to do with innate knowledge but the matter is much simpler than that. Pointing to dogs and uttering the word "dog" is an act of providing instances to the audience (here Possibility's daughter) and if that's all that's being done, leaving the audience to figure out what the word "dog" means i.e. it's the audience's job to abstract the essence of a dog from the instances provided. It appears this is a valid method of defining words. That's that.

Defining truth may be similar too. We do a systematic survey of propositions and sort them based on different attributes and decide that propositions with such and such attributes (whatever they maybe) should be called true propositions and absent these attributes are not true.

However, there's an, for lack of a better word, intuition albeit vague as far as I can tell that truth has to be something specific i.e. there are constraints on what truth can be. The thorough study of the atrributes of porpositions don't result in truth being defined based on just any constellation of attributes. To the contrary, we're drawn to certain groups of attributes (correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, etc) - it feels natural to define truth in these terms - and this I consider as an indication of a preconceived, how shall I put it, idea of what truth should be.

In other words, it may look like we're trying to abstract a definition of truth from instances of truth, from a careful analysis of propositions but in fact we already possess a definition of truth and are simply looking for propositions that match that definition. That is to say that, at least on the matter of the definition of truth if not dogs the impression that we get of examining propositions so that we may extract the essence/form of truth is an illusion.

What say you?

Interesting question. To my knowledge, how elections are conducted - with debates featuring prominently (toward the end?) - gives us the impression that people vote with their brains and if that's the case then, yeah, an AI computer could, in principle, defeat a challenger to the white house and become the president.

However, it's what happens in between those live-telecast debates - the campaign trails are riddled with mudslinging, name-calling, and every conceivable underhand tactic a person can think of - that suggests a different conclusion viz. that people vote with, for want of a better word, their hearts, perhaps even their vaginas or penises for all we know. An AI could, in my humble opinion, never match a human in that department for it would be utterly oblivious to the emotional elements involved and if it did somehow manage to acquire this ability we wouldn't know the difference between an AI and a human president rendering the question moot.

To all

That there are different definitions of truth (correspondence, paragmatic, coherent, etc.) is suggestive...hints at some degree of arbitrariness...something I referred to in the OP.

If truth were abstracted from instances of truth this wouldn't be the case for then that which can be described as the form (Plato?) of truth would be constant, precluding, in my humble opinion, variety in the definition of truth.

I think your take on the matter has some merit but it breaks down on closer scrutiny. Your daughter being able to identify dogs (knowing dogs) without a definition of dogs (not knowing dogs) is an through and through contradiction as I've described in the OP - it's an impossibility! How can I find something when I don't know what that something is? Don't take my word for it...try it out for yourself if you don't believe me.

It's possible all these alleged transgressions you mention fall on my blindspot but I seem to have failed to notice them.

However, as they say, no smoke without fire and given we're all human, equally virtuous as equally depraved, I'm not in the least bit surprised by your pronouncements on this and perhaps other forums. To be frank, I've seen my fair share of hate but allow for the fact that "hate" maybe too strong a word in this context.

Anyway, my own experience informs me that when people attack and demolish some of my cherished beliefs it hits where it hurts the most because, as it appears to me, these cherished ideas form a framework of sorts that allows me to make sense of my experiences and when someone proves/insists sans proof that I've been holding the wrong end of the stick all this while, it's quite unbearable. I liken the experience to a physicist taking his beloved equations and applying it to a blackhole - you know what happens, right? The equations, those very tools that explain the rest of the universe, crash into a pile of absolute incomprehensibility. When that happens, chaos and you know what that leads to right? Pandemonium of emotions, I fly off the handle and in the heat of the moment, the tongue/fingers seems to have a life of its own, spitting/jotting out/down words that are a series of invectives/put-downs/insults/expletives designed for one and only one thing - derail the discussion to prevent any further damage to ideas dear to my heart.

This, of course, is not the full story.

My two cents.

I would like to add that any theory other than the correspondence theory of truth could, in principle, contradict reality.

issue of truth — EusebiusLevi

1.- How do you know? — EusebiusLevi

The Problem Of The Criterion:

1. To have a definition of truth we must know what truth is

2. To know what truth is we must have a definition of truth

It appears that the only way of escaping this vicious circle is to define truth arbitrarily - anything goes so to speak - because the moment we feel/believe there are constraints to what truth is/means, we're sucked into the circularity. That however has the drawback of reducing alethiology and by extension all epistemology to a frivolous game which has nothing to do with reality.

Indeed, the general justification for sentience seems rather poorly constructed, assuming that one even exists and that, for better or worse, seems to be the case given how the "we" of sentience is widely treated as an established fact even though the only real truth that "we" are aware of is the "I" of consciousness. How the "I" becomes "We" in this context is the single most pressing matter and whatever the reasons that are/may be involved, we must, in some sense of that word, ultimately rely on logic and its principles to come to a conclusion on the matter. Or is the reasoning backwards? As impossible as that sounds, there seems to be no contradiction at all as far as I can see and you might want to make a note of that before proceeding any further.

Coming to pantheism and papsychism, these mean nothing without first coming to some conclusion regarding the issue touched upon in the previous paragraph. My two cents. Hope you can think of some way of converting that into something worthwhile.

There's another way to approach this puzzle. Whatever a Gabriel's horn is, it can be approximated as a cylinder.

Volume V of a cylinder = pi * r^2 * h

Surface area A of a cylinder = 2 * pi * r * h

for a cylinder with radius r and height h

Ratio of A to V = (2 * pi * r * h)/(pi * r^2 * h) = 2/r

As r approaches 0, V too approaches 0 but, oddly, A doesn't.

Thanks for starting a thread with I question that I had asked.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, what's got me confused is how the convergence of ideas which is part of intersubjectivity seems to bear a resemblance to reproducibility in scientific objectivity.

As per scientific objectivity the convergence of observations by which I mean observations that have been made by many people is like a certificate of objectivity conferred on whatever the observation is - that it's not just a private, subjective affair.

Compare the above scientific principle if you will with what intersubjectivity is. Like scientific reproducibility, intersubjectivity too is about a convergence, a convergence of ideas, and yet the claim is that intersubjectivity and (scientific) objectivity are two different things.

Ziploc bags. An object with a given surface area can be collapsed and that can reduce the volume without affecting the surface are...if you do it just right, the volume can become zero but not the surface area.

If you deceive someone into consenting to something, then they haven’t actually given consent, as they were not fully informed — Pinprick

My point exactly.

I think most people are reasonably capable of figuring out what they do or don’t want to happen to them. — Pinprick

This doesn't jibe with what you said above. There are probably an uncountable number of times when people have been taken for a ride not because but despite being, in your words, "...reasonably capable...". All it takes is a twisted mind and a sharp eye and you'll see the loophole with which you can take people down the garden path.

All that said, I don't mean to lessen the importance of consent in moral issues and, by extension, in law but be warned that consent per se shouldn't be treated as the final word in moral judgments and legal matters for it can be, as you seem to agree, coaxed out of people using underhand tricks and gimmicks.

I'm not an advocate of free speech as it's understood - the liberty to say whatever you want, to whomsoever you want, wherever and whenever you want. As you can see such a conceptualization of free speech is basically hostage to people's whims and fancy and it has, if history is a reliable witness, caused more problems than solved them. I'm afraid going down that road will spell trouble for all of us.

What I would prefer is what I've labeled as freedom of expression and by that I mean allowing people to find something they're good at, everyone has a nascent talent that just needs the proper environment to flourish, and let them go to town with it. This is a much more healthier form of freedom for it, as far as I can tell, encourages personal development and, at the same time, enriches society. Yes, there are risks in such a policy too and we must not forget matters of feasibility but if it achieves anything it must be a readjustment of people's focus on the crux of the matter - we want to express ourselves, speech is only one way of doing that and if we provide the right setting for expression in the many ways it can be achieved, I'm sure we'll all be better off.

Thanks for the interesting link. Much appreciated.

All I'd like to say is that the Vatican department in charge of investigating miracles might be doing a great disservice to medicine by declaring inexplicable recoveries from fatal illnesses as miracles which are, by definition, instances of divine intervention and that, if nothing else, immediately slams the door shut as it were to medical scientists who would've looked for, following rigorous scientific protocols, a naturalistic explanation which, if found, could revolutionize medical treatment of fatal illnesses. If it were up to the Vatican, many possible cures would never be found.

Nevertheless, stories of miracles are heartening, uplifting, and fills us with hope and a sense of deep wonder that there's more to life and the universe than just what meets the eye.

I came across that video too but all these historical records of the collapse of civilizations have one thing in common viz. there was always a tehcnological link between them and later civilizations simply picked up the thread so to speak where dead civilizations left off.

The kind of global catastrophe I'm talking about is one that would, in the literal sense, wipe the slate clean - there would be a complete erasure of all knowledge (gained) and perhaps evolution itself would be reset and the entire process would have to begin afresh as if the present state of civilization had never even existed.

I suppose you're right but what if the relaxed criteria for the capacity to give consent, i.e. not having to be as rational as philosophical standards demand, is used for nefarious ends by unscrupulous parties. This, I believe, is the modus operandi of con-artists who lure people into seemingly lucrative deals, all with full consent, only to defraud them on the basis of some loophole that only the con-artist was aware of. Given these circumstances we must assume, to err on the side of caution, that people are, as of now, completely out of their depths on most matters that require their informed consent.

An interesting point of view but the way I see it, the world's technology is known to only a small segment of humanity, there maybe, at the most, only a few million (scientists, technologists, machinists, roboticists) of us who can, if forced to, rebuild the technological infrastructure from scratch and I haven't even mentioned those involved in the supply chain of raw materials; the rest, the majority, know next to nothing about technology. The chances are, if a global catastrophe does occur, those who survive will be technologically illiterate and hence the stone age scenario is a real possibility.

Anyway, what I really want to find out is a point in our history (culturally, socially, economically, technologically, scientifically, etc.), assuming that it exists, that can be taken to be a line of symmetry such that every point on one side of this line has an equivalent and indistinguishable point on the other side. Sudden events like asteroid impacts and nuclear holocausts are too quick for a real one-to-one symmetry by which I mean, the stone age was thousands of years ago in the past but the one that follows a quick-acting cataclysmic event will be just a few decades in the future; in short, asteroid impacts and nuclear holocausts bring about their effects suddenly instead of gradually like how it happened in the past.

Another point I want to mention is that our notion of progress maybe flawed. On what grounds do we come to the conclusion that stone age people were primitive and we're more advanced? Machines, medicine, lifespan, etc.? With such criteria, sure, the present is more advance than the past but if one looks at it in terms of harmony, equilibrium with one's environment, we get an F.

Just wondering if there's a reset button for the earth and even for the universe itself. K-Pg extinction event?

To All

One word, Atlantis. Ring any bells?

I'm not sure about this but I have a feeling that, contrary to what the law assumes, many, most, people are incapable of giving their consent and the proof is right under our noses - how many people can think for themselves?, and by that I mean, how many people are rational under the stringent criteria set by philosophers?

I'll give it my best shot. Here goes...

It appears to me that, in terms of temporal sequence, a certain aspect of nature has to acquire some kind of significance in and of itself and this significance can be in the cultural, social, physical, technological, epistemological, etc. spheres/domains before a question pertaining to it can make sense and questions have to make sense for them to be answered, right?

My preliminary investigation suggests that time (when?) and space (where?) were conceived of by the human mind before when? and where? became meanigful. When? and where? would be meaningless without a frame of reference in which space and time didn't/doesn't exist. Likewise, it's my suspicion that without an established sense of personhood, free will, and responsibility, among other things, the question who? would be devoid of meaning.

:up: Thanks.