Any chance this Jan 6 trial is over before the next election? I assume trump has the resources to delay it for an unreasonable amount of time.

All of the alternatives you listed seem to me to fit well within the "I am" category. They don't seem to be actual alternatives to "I think, therefore I am", they are just counter intuitive notions of circumstances that correspond to "...I am"

Yes I agree with that too. It's an insurmountable recursion looking at it either way. It doesn't do anything to discount determinism in my view.

The problem here would seem to be that in order for a machine to be able to calculate what itself is going to do, it has to have enough memory to model it's own memory, which is inherently impossible right?

It's like... in order to have a complete model of my own brain, I have to be able to conceive of pretty much every neuron in my brain, but there's no brain design where this is possible, there's no way for a brain to mentally model all of its own neurons.

Issue 1: What do you make of this thought experiment? Does it disprove determinism? — NotAristotle

In my view, no. The thought experiment is not just practically impossible, it is also in principle impossible in all conceivable deterministic universes.

I read your two objections, and I believe you rejected the objections prematurely.

Sorry if I'm treading old ground, just wanted to share my view:

Evolutionary psychology conceptually is perfectly fine. The general idea that we have psychological features that were developed in response to environmental pressures, like any other features we have, makes perfect intuitive sense.

But beyond the general idea of it, it seems very speculative, and it seems inherently so - I don't see a path out of the speculation for most hypotheses in the evo-psych realm.

I think that pretty much sums up what I think of evo psych - the basic tenet of it is pretty much obviously true, but any specific hypothesis is probably untestable, unverifiable, unsatisfiable.

“Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up into bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly … It is nothing jointed, it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is naturally described…”

and James’ stream metaphor strikes many as apt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

I agree that it doesn't feel that way, but it could just as easily be that way. Perhaps consciousness is a case of perpetual last-thursdayism, where every moment of consciousness is there for a moment and then gone, and the next moment is a consciousness that only feel as though it's connected to previous moments because it "remembers" those previous moments.

Would there be any difference between those two things? Between a genuine continuity and an illusion of continuity due to memory being persisted? Maybe not. But there is potentially an ethical difference, even if there's no detectible difference. The ethical difference between those two worlds is, the teleporter problem ceases to be a problem in a world where the continuous nature of consciousness is merely an illusion. Not that that matters anyway...

There's been a lot of talk in this thread about "duration of the present", has it been disambiguated anywhere what this actually refers to? I know what the concept of the present refers to, abstractly and experientially, but I don't know what it means when you add the word "duration" to it. What's the duration of the present?

As an aside, is the only alternative to "time is fundamentally real" some kind of block universe? It seems that way to me.

The unfortunately common claim that "physics shows that time is illusory," is quite misleading. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It'd be more accurate to say that "many physicists agree with philosophical interpretations of empirical findings in physics that suggest that the passage of time is illusory." — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's my current (and very subject to change) belief that "illusory" is not the right word to use, and what they really mean is "emergent".

I hear more and more that time, and even space time, isn't a fundamental feature of our reality. People take that and go straight to "illusory", but there are plenty of non fundamental things we don't consider to be illusions. They're just emergent.

Time isn't an illusion, time is emergent, and the experience we have of time isn't an illusion so much as it is an inevitable part of what it feels like to be a being occupying space time in the way that we do.

I think.

the most prudent thing to do is to announce he won't be running for another term — GRWelsh

Mental fitness tests for presidential candidates would be fantastic.

I'm really curious to see how that story plays out. Though in situations like this, if this guy does end up being found guilty, there will always be that conspiracy theory that he wasn't really.

It is actually feasible to me that there's a sort of consciousness even at the scale of single celled organisms. Maybe they do have wants.

want as a metaphor rather than literal might be agreeable. Even the most basic life forms have mechanisms for staying alive, and, mental states or not, they appear to "try" to live and propagate - try itself also being merely a metaphor, a narrative tool for us humans to make sense of these mechanical processes.

Life by definition wants to live. — Kaplan

I'm fairly confident most life doesn't have mental states one could describe as "wants", or mental states at all.

It seems like on the surface "obligation" means almost like a definitional obligation, rather than a normative one. In other words, "in order for a thing to qualify as being under the definition of life, that thing must be living". And if that's the case, there's an equivocation happening between the statement "must be living" into the normative statement "obligation to live".

I don't think it's easy to go from is to ought without similar equivocations happening.

Perhaps the conclusion to this tangent is, the op would benefit from clarifying what the definition of good, ought and should are.

Ah crap, my previous post lost all the emojis I put in, and now it's nonsense. I put in a bunch of banana emojis. .. edit, I figured out how to use flower emojis

The only reason I'd be wrong to point to a banana and say 'apple' is because my language community don't use the word that way, yes? — Isaac

Loosely speaking, yes. I'm sure there are much more rigourous ways of saying what I'm saying, and we're sort of no longer talking about morality, this is now about language itself, but loosely speaking, if you're not using words in a way that other people will understand, you're not using language in the way language is intended to be used (most of the time, with exceptions).

If you personally, individually decide that you're going to use the symbols or sounds of "Apple" to refer to this :flower: , you're very likely to be misunderstood. If you don't want to be misunderstood, then... you're not using the tool of language to achieve the goal of being understood very well.

There's no reason apple objectively can't refer to :flower: , symbols are not objectively linked to their referents.

I think I'm tangenting too far at this point. I don't know if this conversation would even benefit from this type of discussion on how people use words. I'm going to stop here for that reason.

Same thing for "good". I've never suggested that the DEFINITION of good is "whatever people say", but I have suggested that a way of trying to disambiguate what it might mean will (or can, at least) involve a process of looking at how people are using it. The process of figuring out the meaning is not the meaning itself.

Then how did you learn what the word meant, if not by listening to other people using it? — Isaac

Doesn't this logic apply to all words? So all words X are just defined as "X is whatever people say it is"?

No, I think what you do instead is you listen to what people are saying, you're figuring out what they mean by what they're saying, and at least in some cases you start constructing rulesets for categorising things. You're told this is an apple and that's an apple and that's an apple, but that's not an apple, eventually you start getting a good idea of what an apple is, and at some point someone points to a banana and says "that's an apple" but now "apple" is no longer "things people say are apples" to you, it's an abstract category that you can analyse and you can decide that someone can be wrong.

It's hard or impossible to do that as you're first learning the word, but you're confusing the definition of the word with the method for figuring out what people mean by the word. Those two things are separate.

I know that you're getting at, it's a very fun game lol, but the idea isn't "good and should are exactly only the things people say", what I'm suggesting is a way of investigating how to disambiguate what people mean by "should" and "good". People mean many different things, any SOME people most probably do mean "whatever is natural", I suppose.

Let's say you said that though, you said "what is good is what is natural". Are you defining good that way, or are you saying that good has a separate definition, but analytically it works out that everything good is natural and vice versa?

'what is good is whatever people say is good'? Since that would be undeniably how the word is used? — Isaac

I don't know of many people who use the word like that.

perhaps it's unsatisfying, but for me it's pretty straight forward to think of what good and should mean intuitively. How do people use the word? To what are they referring?

They're clearly not just referring to the world as it is. If they were, there would be nothing that isn't good, there would be nothing that someone could do to which you would respond, "they shouldn't do that".

So, whatever "good" and "should" mean, they clearly don't mean "whatever happens to be the case". If they did mean that, their utility as concepts would pretty much entirely evaporate.

I'm trying to go down a level deeper and establish the basis of life itself as the ought by default - does that make it clearer? — Kaplan

It's clear, I think, but it faces some problems conceptually like Tom Storm is addressing. It's like you're defining "ought" as "is" - like you can say "we know life ought to be, because we know that life is" - if ought and is are synonyms, then everything that is the case ought to be the case.

At least that's where it feels like it's going to me, perhaps I'm misunderstanding.

Embryonic development demonstrates that cellular machinery forms life if given the chance to. If cells do this, then the generic circuitry itself shows that to live is the default baseline to begin with, not a conscious choice - not a choice at all, it just is. But if this is simply hardwired genetic code doing its job, then by default the imperative is to live, because living is the first 'thing' an organism does and is what makes it an organism. Living is an obligation for life. Therefore one ought to live, as being a being implies this by default.

If one ought to live, then... — Kaplan

The facts in the above paragraph don't have any normativity to them. "This is a fact about life, this is what happens when life is created." It doesn't feel like you can derive any oughts from those is'es, it feels like you are leaping the ought-is gap in a way that needs more justification there. To me, anyway, respectfully.

As a complete aside, this is why Einstein was so concerned with "spooky action at a distance". Relativity of simultaneity creates some serious head scratchers in regards to the question of wavefunction collapse.

unfortunately I haven't figured out how to quote people appropriately, so bear with me lmao.

If we want to think of the world as having a "global clock" so to speak that always ticks forward, the problem relativity presents us is: which one? In relativity, different reference frames have explicit disagreements about which events happened simultaneously, and yet all reference frames are internally consistent and they're isomorphic with respect to each other (you can translate between reference frames, you can derive what the other reference frames see given what you see).

So if they're all mathematically equivalent and consistent with the physics, but yet they disagree on which events happened simultaneously, then how do you figure out which events ACTUALLY happened simultaneously in this "global now"? Well... you can't. As far as physicists know, there's no experiment that can tell us that this reference frame is the universal one that decides the universal now.

I'm not sure if relativity explicitly outlaws a universal now, or if it just means we could in principle never figure out which reference frame decides the universal now. That's something I'd like to hear an expert's opinion on tbh. It's a question I've had for a long time.

I think the major difference in ideas here is, is "the present" a global state? (Perhaps universal would be more clear than global) Or is it a "local" or perhaps even "personal" state?

People often intuitively think of the universe as this big 3d grid, and the universe, as a whole, moves forward one moment at a time, and the grid moves to its next state in unison. That's a really convenient and easy to digest way of looking at how we "move into the future". I'm not sure that relativity necessarily proves that view categorically wrong, per se, but it does at least bring it into question.

while I can appreciate that there are Christians who treat it this way, maybe even most Christians, it does make one wonder why prayer is practiced the way it is. Why do so many people pray to tell god about the things they want and need? I feel like this practice can leave people confused, divorcing them from the humbling part and giving them the idea that God acts as a genie for the deserving.

Some prayer structures don't have this problem.

yes, that's the idea. You lose the election and you peacefully transfer power

Hell, at this point it would be an improvement to have a republican president commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and then honour that commitment.