Note "say". — Banno

You can see it, but you can't put it into words?

No — Banno

I thought your argument was that you can tell by sight.

There's no debate, there's no discussion, there's only idiots raising their voices so high that it disturbs the public space to the degree that normally functioning people have to deal with it. — Christoffer

I think most people follow the bandwagon that fits their profile. Neither side tends to know much about science. But scientists can be wrong, so skepticism isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

However, I also think the sense of "contradiction" here is quite far from that invoked by religiously motivated dialetheism or those motivated largely by problems of self-reference — Count Timothy von Icarus

The situation Hegel is pointing out isn't paradoxical, if that's what you mean.

I have read a lot of Marxists but not much Marx, so I am not really in a position to have a strong opinion on that front. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The secondary source I read said that Marx didn't use dialectics much, but I'd be interested to see a case where he did.

At any rate, Hegel affirms LNC in its usual contexts, but I think it's fair to call him a monist if anyone is. The role he has for logic is deeply ontological. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sounds about right.

I agree with Wallace. I think the same idea is in Phaedo as the Cyclical Argument.

I think for Hegel a thing contains its opposition. So for redness, non-redness is part of what it is. Everything you think about is like that. You think in oppositions. But dialetheism would be a mystical state of mind?

I guess if we aren't committed to the LNC, we don't have to be committed to the principle of explosion.

Thanks for the follow up. :up:

Yet the objection is explosion? — Cheshire

Could you explain that again? Sorry if I'm a little dense.

You're saying that a monistic system has no constraints on truth?

:grin:

I can tolerate 'laws' not holding occasionally in a relativistic view of logical law. — Cheshire

Honestly, I don't think I can. If it looks like the LNC isn't holding for me, I'd wonder if I just had a stroke. :razz:

But, the assumption that 'if we had a really good one' it would have any actual implications to how reality is perceived strikes me as daft. — Cheshire

A really good one? A good what?

Why does it have to be "necessary" to be in effect. — Cheshire

I think we call the LNC necessary because we can't conceive an exception. It's not like we thought: "let's ordain this thing!". Right?

Yes. I'm a butthead. So are you.

So what if the LNC isn't really a law. It still applies enough of the time to consider it a constraint on any conclusions. — Cheshire

I'm not sure we can conceive an exception to the LNC. Think of quantum theory. All this time and no one has seriously considered it as an exception. We just assume there's something we haven't learned that would solve the problem.

Wittgenstein argued that since logical truths are necessary truths, they have nothing to do with the world, because if P is necessarily true, it's compatible with any way the world might be.

That's my stab at trying to grasp what you're saying?

aking a foundationalist approach and disregarding other things we think of as being known is explosive in the sense you have to disregard things you already accept. — Cheshire

Like what?

You guys need Planned Parenthood. These are small clinics that offer a range of services for women's health including abortion. Like a lot of stuff in the US, it's partly funded by donations, so it's able to exercise some autonomy in providing low cost services. Since abortion is something you feel strongly about, you should start a funding drive to open a clinic for those women.

eventually needed an abortion at 22 weeks. — Banno

Why did she need an abortion?

A human zygote isn’t a different thing than a human adult - it’s what a human being is when it is first conceived like the adult is what a human being is when it is grown. — Fire Ologist

It's true the acorn and the oak are the same species, so in that sense, the same thing, but the loss of an acorn is very different from the loss of a tree. The loss of an oak tree has a far reaching impact on the area in which it lived, just like the loss of an adult impacts children, friends, employers, etc., while the loss of a fetus is usually felt as the loss of what could have been. I'm speaking from watching people lose relatives in a hospital environment. Infants don't have distinct personalities, so when they die, though it may be devastating to parents, it's not like the loss of an individual with specific traits. It's the loss of what was hoped for, or maybe it's the loss of a potential person the parents bonded to prior to it's even existing.

The loss of an elderly relative is a matter of letting go of someone who has lived a full life. There's grief, but there's no sense that this shouldn't have happened. It's natural. The worst death of all is that of a child. It was an individual. He or she was a distinct person, and it's always counter to nature. It's never ok, and it can never be ok. This leaves me with the sense that we value real personhood over potential. Potential isn't something we can hold in our hands. It's only in our minds, you know? How would you address that?

For my part the focus on blastocysts shows the absurdity of claiming equality between two things that are so different. — Banno

Ok. I think you might not realize that there are 8 US states that have no restrictions on abortion at any stage. It's legal to abort a fetus that could easily live outside the womb in those areas. That's part of the story of abortion in the US. I think it would probably make you ill to witness that kind of abortion. It would me. So here, it's really not limited to a story about blastocysts.

I'm trying to avoid even "right" or "wrong" as the moral/ethical/social aspects of this are to me, just a total mess of a conversation. I'm just trying say what an abortion is, like what a car is, or what keys are. — Fire Ologist

Are you a progressive Christian? Is that the right term?

My question would be this: an acorn is a potential oak tree. We wouldn't identity the acorn as an oak tree, though. Destroying an acorn is not equivalent to destroying an oak tree. Do you see humans as differing from this?

Creeks are self cleaning. About every 100 feet, whatever you plopped in is now down in the sand. That's per a scientist friend.

It's addressing his position. — Michael

Fair enough. Others who used that terminology appeared to be reducing all abortion to zygote termination.

Dehumanization is the method. I’m curious what it does psychologically, as the behavior that commonly follows it is rarely moral. — NOS4A2

Hitler liked the word "vermin."

Warm showers? What decadence. You should have cold showers if you truly care about the climate. It's more healthy too. — Tzeentch

Wash in a Polish creek. Isn't that what you guys do?

Humans are single-celled for a few days at best. But no need to reiterate the position. — NOS4A2

I think the focus on the single cell is for the insult value. "Let me talk at you instead of with you. Zygotes aren't human and neither are you as far as I'm concerned.". It's not a strategy, it's just venting.

How long are you willing to wait to have a shower? — Agree-to-Disagree

I use an immersion heater. It takes about 10 minutes.

It appears that the threat from climate-change/global-warming can be greatly reduced without the need to stop using fossil fuels. A little bit of adaptation and conservation work can achieve amazing results. — Agree-to-Disagree

That would just delay the change by maybe a generation. Part of the problem is the ways people have adapted to a high energy lifestyle. So many people think they need a water heater continuously heating so they can instantly have a shower that takes 17 freaking gallons of hot water. A human doesn't need that extravagance, but people don't realize that.

Similarly, the majority of folks have concluded that an adult human mother's interests outweigh those of a human fetus' — LuckyR

And if the majority decided we need to have a human sacrifice to help the crops that would settle it for you? :roll:

Tell me what you think fo the notion of "overloading" logic with expectations. — Banno

It starts with the present King of France and why it's false that he's wise. How do we evaluate a proposition whose subject doesn't refer? Meinong attempts to help by inventing the idea of possible objects, which subsist instead of exist. The present King of France is such an object, and so the subject does have a reference. I actually like this view, but it was objectionable to Russell, who felt like this theory would cause the universe would become overcrowded, but also because this theory leads to misconceptions about what people actually think and intend to say.

Russell decided that it must be that this proposition is compound. When you start a sentence with The present King of France, you're asserting of the universe that it contains this object. And next, you're asserting of this object that it's wise. So now that we've broken the P down into q and r, we have a way to explain why P is false: because one of its parts is false. Everybody loved Russell for coming up with this way of looking at it.

@Banno
So one of the strawmen I think Peregrin is lighting ablaze is the idea that someone somewhere thought logic is the end-all to what goes on in the human psyche. No. It wasn't supposed to be that. I'd like to introduce Peregrin to analytical philosophy: the land of temperance and little tiny answers to little tiny questions.

what would you say is vibrating to produce the sound of music? — punos

I don't know. Maybe the piano is the universe.

But this is all happening because there is a kind of neural self-simulation still going on in the brain even when sleeping. — punos

What's odd is that we can detect this. The simulation has to be calibrated to the world. We can tell when it's off. Dementia is a case where the simulation is still working, but there's little to no calibration anymore.

Logic is supposed to describe the structure of thought, so pluralism is basically saying there are multiple ways to think instead of just one. Nihilism is saying there is no "way" that we think? Structure is applied post hoc?

Do you believe that this "phantom identity" is identical with what you call your identity, or is there another identity behind the phantom identity? — punos

I really don't know. Somewhere along the line I started thinking of identity as analogous to music. The bass notes are physicality, the middle tones are emotions, and the high notes are the intellect. Themes play out and change over time. The intellect is the only part that deals with ontology. To the rest of the psyche, everything encountered is real, so "real" is meaningless.

If so, then we may be in agreement, but to be sure: what do you think the nature of the mental property is? Is it contingent upon the physical, or can it exist in isolation from the physical? — punos

I think the mental is the high notes on the piano, present in some other animals, but more sophisticated in humans, maybe because of the big brain. It's a worldview mashup. :grin:

Your identity is formed in the context of your body, but once it is established, it can theoretically be separated from your physical form. — punos

This may be true, but I don't think we know enough about how consciousness works to make any assertions one way or the other.

But it's entirely conceivable that property dualism exists. That means that those who claim such a separation is impossible have the burden of proof.

Why do amputees experience phantom limb? Why does a limb they don't have anymore seem to hurt, and get muscle cramps where there are no muscles to cramp? — punos

I don't know. Why do you think it is?

:up: :up:

I'm still interested in the problem of consciousness, and slowly reading Sartre's B&N as an effort to think through the metaphysics of consciousness (cuz Chalmer's kind of just leaves it in the air) — Moliere

Ok. Please report back your findings.

So -- going into the transporter may turn me into light and recreate me on the other side, but my folk belief about the metaphysics of consciousness is that the "I" I'm experiencing now would cease to exist.

In that sense then only one person named Moliere has been on TPF, and the old PF. The ship of Theseus still belongs to Theseus -- but not because of the bits we can name. — Moliere

Is it because your body changes slowly, that your consciousness is unified over time? But an abrupt lack of body would obliterate your identity?

But your body is in a constant state of flux. Every seven years, all the cells (except neurons) have been replaced with new ones. So are you saying that you're constantly dying? How many people named Moliere have there been since .. not your birth, but that original birth?

I, for one, do not trust math — Moliere

Blasphemy!

We may be immortal for all that. — Moliere

Could be. Maybe we're uploadable.