I suspect that's a no on some of them. But of course there are different types of realists. Most people are realists, and there's plenty of types of people in the set of "most people"

some realists are Christians or Muslims or Jews or Buddhists or Hindus or etc. Some realists are atheists. I don't see how realism implicitly makes any claims about spiritual things - spiritual people are also frequently realists

I don't understand how what you said has to do with realism being a type of skepticism. Realism itself makes no claims about God or souls or unicorns or Santa clause

If we can throw it by the wayside when it doesn't suit us, why have it in the first place? — Echarmion

But to many, the point of morality IS to suit us (us being the larger picture, humanity as a whole - morality exists to improve our lives).

So if some moral rule is making lives worse and not better, would it not be a worthwhile argument that we should put it to the side?

I'm not saying this particular situation is necessarily like this, but it COULD be.

The thought experiment about Solipsism is, of course, endlessly relevant because it can't be disproven. As far as I know, there's no sequence of experiences or observations one could have to prove this isn't all a figment of your imagination, or a virtual world full of NPCs created to keep you entertained and docile, or any number of other infinite fake-world ideas.

But what is your proof that what you are seeing, and going through in your life is not a long vivid dream or some realistic illusion or hallucination? — Corvus

This seems a very unfairly asymmetrical question. Why would someone need proof that it's not a dream, but not need proof that it is a dream?

huge numbers of universes popping into existence all the time is a huge violation of Occam's Razor. Why don't the people who believe in the MWI just believe in idealism instead? — RogueAI

Because the mwi interpretation is simpler by some metrics than other interpretations - namely, it has fewer postulates than most of its competitors. It literally takes fewer bits to describe many worlds in QM than, say, Copenhagen.

I don't think George Floyd deserves the sainthood bestowed upon him by popular opinion, but I couldn't agree more about everything else.

I think he's referring to this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_George_Floyd

To see what other folks think about this issue, I have opened this thread asking what is your reason to believe in the world, when you are not receiving it? — Corvus

Occam's razor, for me. It is a simpler model of the world that the world always works one way, than a model of the world that it works one way when I'm looking and another way when I'm not looking.

What if a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to you: "This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy... — Vaskane

I think there's a pretty good chance that's just reality. Without the creepy demon.

sure, any spot on a board could be 0,0, so choose a spot to be your 0,0 and then throw the dart.

E.g when probability theory is interpreted as saying that a dart must land somewhere on an infinitely divisible dart-board, at a location that has probability 0. One the one hand, we want Pr(1) to mean surely, and Pr(0) to mean never, but this 'exacting' demand conflicts with our other demand that it is possible to choose any member of an infinite set. — sime

Ooh I really like this thought experiment. Good food for thought. Thank you.

Fun fact: if you did throw a dart at an infinitely dividable board, and you got the x,y coordinates of the point it landed, you'd be more likely to land on irrational numbers than rational

The people of Gaza did not try to get rid of Hamas — schopenhauer1

To some extent, it seems Hamas has terrorised their population into compliance. At the same time, it's not infeasible that a sizable portion of the population would agree with Hamas anyway. The truth of the matter seems... impossible to get to the bottom of. Some people say the truth of that question doesn't matter anyway, but I think it matters.

As I understand it, such a teleological process is directed by divine Will — Gnomon

It doesn't say anything like that in the wiki you linked. Where are you getting that from?

To be sure, QFT has been made to fit with smallism — Count Timothy von Icarus

To the contrary, QFT was literally invented in the first place to be compatible with the most fundamentally smallist theory there is: relativity. QFTs reason for existence is smallism.

In physics, the success of QFT, and the ideal of fields (wholes) being fundemental, not part(icles)s, and the rise of pancomputationalism both seem to have hit smallism quite hard. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It would seem you and I have different ideas about smallism. To me, QFT is the very essence of smallism. To me, when a smallist says "big things happening are the consequence of small things happening", QFT is PRECISELY the sort of thing they mean by "small things happening".

QFT is a specification, a model, of what happens exactly to the smallest things in the universe and how they interact.

too vague of a statement for me to agree or disagree with.

all macroscopic phenomena are the direct consequence of microscopic phenomena — flannel jesus

I think more than 50% (but certainly not all) people especially in physics would agree with this statement in particular.

That doesn't mean it's a TRUE statement, but you asked if anyone actually endorses it - yes, they do, and it's probably more ubiquitous in some sciences than you think. (I guess that's an easy bar to pass, if you think there's 0 and there is in fact more than 0, but still)

yes, effectively, if you could match the physical arrangement of a previous period in time, there's not much distinguishing that from time travel I suppose. I mean, to do it fully you'd have to reposition every atom in the universe, but you could I suppose do it at just, say, the scale of a planet and it would be good enough.

It's of course not practically possible.

smallism is probably the majority view of most people in the hard sciences - if I'm interpreting what it means correctly.

"Smallism" to me looks pretty interchangable with the statement "there's no strong Emergence", or in other words "all macroscopic phenomena are the direct consequence of microscopic phenomena"

That seems plausible to me. But even if some sort of substance dualism were the case, it would still seem to me that what determines our choices must exist before we choose in order for our choices to be truly "ours." So, even if I entertain the idea of "nonphysical souls," compatibalism seems more right. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree - whether choices are purely physical or happen in some sort of "soul realm", the picture doesn't change at all.

and it does not require that we are free to do other than we did. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think anybody's concpetion of freed will literally requires the ability to change past choices made.

We do know that if someone could take detailed knowledge of the antecedent state and correctly predict the resultant state (the decision) 100% of the time, most, including myself would take that as proof of Determinism and a refutation of the concept of Free Will. — LuckyR

The thing I don't like about this framing is that it's impossible in a practical sense - we'll never get to a point where we can do that perfectly, and in fact any physical system in any possible universe prohibits predicting the future perfectly faster than the universe calculates that future itself.

So even if we did live in a deterministic universe, predicting the future perfectly faster than the future comes is necessarily impossible.

You could predict it imperfectly faster, of course - we can do that now for many scenarios - but that can't have 100% accuracy and we could do that even if there is some genuine randomness.

So basically, what I'm saying is, realistically our ability to predict things doesn't actually tell us if we live in a deterministic universe or not. I mean, it does mean at don't live in a COMPLETELY random universe, but it doesn't tell us if we live in a universe with 0 randomness or some randomness

it doesn't seem so far like any of your takes about compatibilism match what normal compatibilists think. Most compatibilists don't rely on any sort of retro causality. They don't argue determinism and free will can't be defined.

It might have been better if I had never used the term. What is of underlying importance to compatibilism in my view, isn't the existence of retro-causation (whatever it is supposed to mean), but the treatment of material implication as being symmetric, i.e. of the form A <--> B, which can be interpreted in a number of ways, including Bertrand Russell's directionless "no causality" view, super-determinism and circular causality. In these cases, it is accepted that there exists synchronisation between a so-called "cause" and a so-called "effect", but where the control between "cause" and "effect" is either considered to be bidirectional, directional but a matter of perspective, or directionless in both directions. — sime

None of this seems connected in particular to compatibilism. Compatibilism is perfectly compatible with the idea of causality moving exclusively forward in time.

but I do think it's an important conversation to have. I mean if we're talking about free will and causality, really we're talking about when it makes sense to hold someone responsible for something.

If you make a choice based on information told to you, and that choice turns out to be really damaging, you might want someone to blame. Sometimes, it's the person who gave the information. Sometimes it's the person who made the choice based on the information. Sometimes it's both, sometimes it's neither.

no one thing causes human choices. It's always a complex network of causality, and sometimes it becomes unclear where the buck really stops.

But part of the network of causes can absolutely be information someone tells you, that seems pretty clear to me.

Good on all you posters for not just giving him a reading list of "books to read to agree with me".

well, I've read many thousands of words about compatibilism, written by compatibilists, written against compatibilists, written about compatibilism in general, I've had many dozens of conversations, listened to many hours of podcasts about it, and I am a compatibilist, and this is the very first time I've ever heard anyone say retro causality has something to do with it.

You said it like the compatibilist model of the world has retro causality, but I think instead it's more accurate to say that your model of compatibilism has retro causality.

Which is fine, if you're a compatibilist and you believe it makes sense with retro causality, that can be the kind of compatibilism that works for you. But it's not what compatibilists think in general.

exactly, the op doesn't spell out enough information to even start to judge it. Is the painter god and can always tell the future? Is he just really really knowledgeable, and guesses right 99% of the time because he knows people's psychology really well, but is sometimes wrong?

The story is meaningless.

Compatibilism doesn't make sense as a concept unless the past is in some way considered to be ontologically dependent upon the future. — sime

Why? Says who?

I still have no clue why you think compatibilism and retro causality have anything to do with each other

but what does retro casualty have to do with any of that? I know a lot of compatibilists, and they don't have a model of the world involving retro causality.

so .... just the same things trump did then right? Is that bad?

I’m surprised there are still some adults in the system, to be honest. — NOS4A2

Same, can't believe trump didn't get rid of em all.

I'm sorry I should have been more precise, I mean why do the arguments for moral nihilism conclude that there are no moral truths? Because the best arguments for moral nihilism don't seem to point to no moral truths. — Lexa

Yes, I think op was poorly phrased.

Models of causality that are "compatibilist" are those which appear to be retro-causal due to rejecting the antecedent-precedent distinction. — sime

What does "compatibilist" mean in this sentence? It doesn't look like it means the usual free-will/determinism kind of compatibilism, but I'm stumped at what else it could mean.

no, I think that's really unlikely. I think there's probably some base structures that are pretty damn similar between humans, but those are things that are pure instinct - all babies, for example, might have extremely similar brain structures for mothers and nipples and milk, and maybe even for processing visual information - you know, things you have out of the gate.

Anything learned is learned dynamically, and an apple is most certainly something learned.

I wish I knew HOW the brain structures dynamically learn things. I know that, even if I store an apple in this part of my brain and that's where you store a tennis ball, that WHERE it's stored matters a whole lot less than what it's connected to. In fact if you moved your Apple storage from here to there, but kept all the connections in tact, it probably wouldn't matter much that you moved it.

Connections are everything. Not location.

Probably.

I think you'd need to start with an exploration of what it would mean for a moral fact to "exist"

bingo bongo. Hell, people without free will might answer as they please too.