I tend to trust procrastination. It's happening for a reason. Wait for the wave of inspiration and then ride it. Although, sometimes finishing what I started is a toughy. I can reward myself for getting shit done...like I won't eat lunch until x is finished.

Yes, folks focus (overly focus, in my opinion) on the life vs death of the fetus when addressing the topic of abortion, whereas the crux of the issue lies elsewhere, namely whose autonomy should supercede the other's. — LuckyR

This is similar to an argument made for supporting slavery in America. It's not about humanity, it's about whose autonomy ought to prevail. Bad precedent to set.

I've only been harassing you about the AMOC for years now, mainly because if it shut down, you'd have to move to Montana.

Although you would then be just north of the Yellowstone caldera, which is due to destroy N America. :worry:

"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?" --Edgar Allan Poe

The second season of Hellbound is on Netflix. It's South Korean dark fantasy with grotesque manifestations of Christian beliefs with a side order of Chinese cultural revolution. It's a little hard to get into, and fairly difficult to watch, especially the first couple of episodes of season 1. But it's fairly philosophical.

I'd thought of Meno's "paradox" as a precursor to bits of Wittgenstein- that there are ways of understanding (knowing) that are not the result of ratiocination. These include such things as "seeing as" instead of "seeing that", "knowing how..." instead of "knowing that..." and my favourite, PI §201, that there must be a way of understanding a rule that is shown in implementing it rather than in stating it. — Banno

I think Meno's paradox shows that some knowledge is innate. The story we surround that with probably reflects worldview. For Plato, it meant transmission from another level of reality. We might be mysterian about it and call it hinge propositions, or we can decide it must have come from evolution.

My definition of logic via the Meno is something like, "That which creates discursive knowledge"
— Leontiskos
People create knowledge. I'm not following what his claims are here. Is he suggesting that we remember logic from our previous lives? — Banno

Could be. Meno is part of Neoplatonic project building which wouldn't get much more than a blank stare from AP.

@Banno
I think Leontiskos thinks logic is the Anima Mundi. Very medieval.

Because what it means to be "truth-preserving" and thus a "correct logic" will depend on what is being preserved. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it's ok for people to add on whatever significance they like to the word truth in truth-preserving. In the same way, if you lean toward ontological realism or anti-realism, you can add that onto whatever shenanigans you're doing. It doesn't change the shenanigans either way.

You can see the difficulty of equivocating or refusing to elaborate on what the "truth" in "truth-preserving" means here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why does it matter?

Maybe @fdrake will explain what logical nihilism is?

When people writing on this topic discuss "correct logics," what exactly is it you think they are referring to? If all logics are correct logics then nihilism is obvious. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In the same way moral pluralism is nihilism? Yes.

If you assume deflation, I don't get how nihilism isn't a consequence. Truth just is truth as defined by some system — Count Timothy von Icarus

Truth deflationists usually think of truth as having a social function. It's just something people say. That's different from using the truth predicate in a technical way as Tarski did.

The article made me think about this passage from an interview with physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:

Q. You claim that a person’s information, if we trust mathematics, is still there after death, dispersed throughout the universe, forever. Are we immortal?

A. If you trust the mathematics, yes. But it is not an immortality in the sense that after death you will wake up sitting in hell or heaven, both of which – let’s be honest – are very earthly ideas. It is more that, since the information about you cannot be destroyed, it is in principle possible that a higher being someday, somehow re-assembles you and brings you back to life. And since you would have no memory of the time passing in between – which could be 10¹⁰⁰ billion years! – you would just find yourself in the very far future. — interview with Sabine Hossenfelder

I think we probably do a certain amount of explaining by way of the dictates of math, but much more frequently, we make predictions with math. We assume that if our predictions are wrong, it's not math that failed, but our powers of reasoning.

Why is math so faithful? It may be that we can't know that.

The position I am aware of is that governments have the duty to protect natural rights. For example, my right to free speech isn't given to me by the government, but the government must recognize it and protect it else it's an immoral government. — Hanover

This idea is rooted in Stoicism. The idea is that when things follow their nature, they thrive. For instance, it's in a tree's nature to grow toward the light. If it does this, it will become healthy and green. If it goes against its nature, it will shrivel and die. The same is supposed to be true for individuals and societies. It's supposed to be in the nature of a society to protect the well-being of the citizens. If it doesn't do this, the society will suffer from internal conflict and it will shrivel. So basically, good and evil are the same thing as health and sickness.

So, if people have the natural right to respect in death, it's obvious the dead can't enforce it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means someone else must enforce it for the dead, just like an infant couldn't enforce its own rights without assistance. — Hanover

It just seems like this is pulling the idea of rights all out of whack. It's that tradition weighs in on what we should do with corpses. You can't violate the rights of a corpse. You can go against tradition.

Seems to me there are obvious limits here, but there also doesn't seem to be no rights. For example, if a person spends their life trying to protect an ecosystem by acquiring land to create a nature reserve, all else equal, it seems unethical to ignore their will and sell the land off to loggers. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I get what you're saying, but I wouldn't say that cashes out in terms of rights. With civil rights you have to be able to show up in court. Natural rights are enforced by nature, but not necessarily in a timely fashion.

Now, wills are a legal issue, but their presumably a legal issue because they have some degree of ethical valance. If people's identities and rights completely vanish at their death it's not even clear why their children should inherit their estate. But "dispossessing the widow and the orphan," is one of the key things railed against as sin/wickedness in the Bible and plenty of other cultural and religious contexts as well. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think Bob's point was that the corpse itself has natural rights. I think what exists are customs for dealing with the remains of a human. The corpse can't show up in court.

But that reminds me of a story I wrote once. This guy keeps seeing corpses, but the people around him treat them as if they're still alive. The welfare of the corpse is discussed while it's eyeball is falling out.

He goes in for a job interview and people are bustling around the boss, but of course the boss is a corpse.

The obligation to bury applies to every corpse, even criminals who have been put to death, the unclaimed slain, suicides, and strangers to the community. To be denied burial was the most humiliating indignity that could be inflicted on the deceased, for it meant “to become food for beasts of prey”. — Hanover

That's cool. It's like 'equality in death'. Thanks for the source.

For me, it is fundamentally about properly respecting life relative to the nature and Telos of each life-form (as best as possible). — Bob Ross

Scientists in the study of human origins place a lot of significance to burial of the dead. I've never thought through what that really means.

This is info from Wikipedia about fertility rates by country. The ones that are blue are negative. The darker blue countries are headed for demographic crisis where the economy starts shrinking due to smaller demand, and the birth rate drops even more due to a shrinking economy. South Korea, for instance, with a birth rate of 0.7, has passed a tipping point where they can't have a baby boom. They don't have the material means to reverse the trend. The cause of this population decrease is basically freedom and opportunity available to women. When women can choose not to have children, a pretty high percentage of them don't.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_Map_by_Country.svg

With a decreasing but high-tech country, mobility might not be as big a challenge.

The problem has always been the assumption of a foundation instead of lateral corroboration. It's like doing a puzzle, but taking all the pieces apart to put a new one in. We don't really confirm things against everything that's come before in a linear process. — Cheshire

You're saying it's like a bubble universe?

Yeah, as I mentioned, I recall reading somewhere where he says truth in natural language was "meaningless," — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think he meant meaningless, but definitely indefinable: too basic to define.

So, STT is originally/intended to be deflationary I guess, which jives with how it is often used. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In his paper he basically says that the concept of truth had disappeared from math. He felt like it could be brought back in some form, and he is ground zero for renewed interest in truth. It's just not correspondence, because that concept resists clarification sufficient for math and logic.

Deflation can be truth skepticism, which is what redundancy is. @Nagase explained once that some use the T-sentence rule without being skeptics, emphasizing that indefinable isn't the same as meaningless.

Well, if we follow the evidence it suggest that self-reference isn't a reliable source of truth, in the sense the system breaks down per Russell and Godel — Cheshire

I've always wondered if Russell's paradox is coming from the foundations of set theory: the contradiction of fencing in infinity. Maybe when I land on a deserted island all by myself I'll sit and figure it out. :razz:

Apparently the controversy stems from some comments from Popper. The fact that this is not the prevailing interpretation is reflected in two articles in the SEP about Tarski and his definition.

Notice that they don't use "correspondence" to describe his definition, but focus on logical consequences and satisfaction.

If you have university access you can read Susan Haack's article, which lays out explicitly how we know Tarski did not see himself as offering any definition for truth in natural languages. Just Google Haack on Tarski.

I kind of thought of Tarski's paper, that I still struggle with reading, was basically a correspondence theory of truth? — Moliere

I'm basing that on what Scott Soames and Susan Haack said about it. Tarski's truth predicate doesn't even mean truth in the common sense. It's more like satisfaction.

Either way, what I'm hoping to convey is that logical theories like Russell's are attempting to accommodate any metaphysics of truth -- else it would be begging the question on truth. — Moliere

I'm not sure, but it leads me to this question: Frege's account of the indefinability if truth is a logical brick house. Why couldn't a pluralist say, "that's not helping me, I think it would be more interesting to create a logic that eliminates Frege's concerns."

AP would have gone in an entirely different track, possibly into a ditch. How does that work?

It doesn't model correspondence theory. For Tarski, it was a way of handling the truth predicate in formal languages. Maybe he would have wished he could resurrect correspondence, but he knew he hadn't.

"P" is true IFF P is a formulation of redundancy among other things. It would be cool if @Nagase stopped by, for a number of reasons.

It's faith.

That wasn't reframing. We were talking about why a monist might insist on a logic for all cases when it's not clear what that logic would be.

"Keep your mind too open and it will fill up with garbage". — Banno

:grin:

Which means it's methodological - it's about attitude. Closed or open. — Banno

The saying is "Be open minded, but not so open minded your brain rolls out."

Monism, and authoritarianism, offer certainty. — Banno

Which means it can't be defeated.

My hypothesis is that there's a deep seated drive in most people to insist on logical monism. I think it's related to unity of consciousness: one self, one world, one logic. I think pluralists are using the term differently.

No, burying them is not immoral per se. This doesn’t violate any of their rights which are applicable to dead people. — Bob Ross

Thanks for clarifying that. How about cremation? Does burning in a furnace violate the corpse's fundamental human rights?

Bob. We burn corpses. We bury them. Are you saying this is immoral?

You said that dead people have no rights; therefore, your position necessitates that it is not impermissible, in principle, to do those horrific things. That was my point. — Bob Ross

You wouldn't be violating the corpse's rights if you did horrific things to it. We would check you in to the nearest psych ward for other reasons.

So you believe someone can have sex with a dead corpse? — Bob Ross

Uh ...

So you believe that a person's organs can be harvested even if they did not previously consent? — Bob Ross

I think that's a matter of respecting the wishes of the person who is now gone.

Also, I will say that, to your point, your example exemplifies a rare occurrence in abortion-situations in the West (if we were to map it over) because in your example the women are doing it solely for the benefit of the child—so it is a complete sense of respect for them (even though I think what they are doing is immoral). — Bob Ross

Yep.

Where it gets controversial, is what rights (if any) a brain dead human being has (and, likewise, a completely dead human being has). — Bob Ross

Probably none

There's a considerable ambiguity in natural language terms and concepts, which gives them a kind of cohesion through fuzzy boundaries, which can then be interpreted as a coherent unity, — fdrake

Maybe there's a basic imperative to gather everything into a single framework.

Could you flesh out exactly what you're saying about fully developed humans like yourself? I'm assuming it's not that you think you have some sort of divine grace. Why should you have legal protection? Is it a matter of sentiment?

Just a history note: in Jamaica, during the time the English used slave labor there, all the slave women who became pregnant aborted their pregnancies so that their children wouldn't grow up in the world they were living in. The same would have been true in Brazil, but there were very harsh punishments for abortion there

It's not true that all women who have sought abortions denied the humanity of what they were killing, and this is still true today.