so I don't get your "who cares" attitude? If it doesn't matter, the why are you even in this discussion? — Christoffer

The 'who cares?' isn't in response to the entire thread, it's in response to YOU saying YOU would like to have more fruitful conversations that aren't weighed down by the annoying problem of differing definitions of Art. My "Who cares?" response is to that - if YOU want to have those fruitful conversations, the definition of Art isn't stopping you, so why do you care so much? Just go have those fruitful conversations. You were talking as if the definition of art is stopping you from doing that - I'm letting you know, it is not.

Two people disagreeing on the criteria of if a Macdonalds ad being art or not is utter meaningless compared to even the minor meaning of them agreeing it is content and discussing the aesthetical appreciation of said ad. — Christoffer

You're saying the disagreement on the criteria of if it's art is meaningless compared to the discussion about aesthetical appreciation. And yet you're still sat here, post after post, talking about the criteria of if it's art and NOT talking about the aesthetical appreciation of said ad. It doesn't seem like your actions are matching your words, I think that's notable. You can stop talking about the criteria of art and start talking about aesthetical appreciation literally whenever you want.

I think my main point is, if you have a more interesting conversation you'd have, I genuinely want to see what that would look like.

I'm not really sure what you're defending here? What's your argument? That it's better to have lose definitions of terms rather than more defined ones? Why is that even a thing to promote? — Christoffer

Not better, just acceptable. And if you're reason for thinking it's unacceptable is that you get trapped in semantic conversations, I'm just pointing out that that's you're choice - you don't have to argue with anybody if ads are art, you can talk about the other stuff you said was more important anyway.

You could literally do it now. That guy that said a McDonald's ad was art... you could literally have the discussion you said was more important, right now, with him. The wishy washy definition of the word "art" isn't the thing stopping you from doing that.

Two people disagreeing on the criteria of if a Macdonalds ad being art or not is utter meaningless compared to even the minor meaning of them agreeing it is content and discussing the aesthetical appreciation of said ad. — Christoffer

So then why not skip the meaningless debate on if it's art regardless, and go right to discussing the aesthetical appreciation of said ad? You don't HAVE to debate with someone about if you semantically disagree with them when they call it art. You know what I mean? You can skip the pointless debate and go right to the meaningful conversation regardless of if you both call it art or not - choosing to focus on the word is up to you. Don't do it if you don't want to

Just because art can be a business doesn't mean the core values of art is driven by profit. And it doesn't mean that profit-driven content can't be appreciated by the receiver either. It just means that if we don't define art in this way, we run into the problem of "everything can be art", which just renders the term "art" meaningless to even define. — Christoffer

But is it really important that everyone agrees on what art is? I mean we disagree on what things qualify under what categories all the time, why should art be an exception?

Maybe it's okay that one person says "this McDonald's ad is art to me" and another one says "not to me". That doesn't necessarily mean the word has NO meaning, that just means these two people have different criteria, right?

As an aside, what's your criteria?

the picture, when seen by some one else or by the painter himself subsequently, produces in him (we need not ask how) sensuous-emotional or psychical experiences which, when raised from impressions to ideas by the activity of the spectator’s consciousness, are transmuted into a total imaginative experience identical with that of the painter. — R.G. Collingwood

I don't really like this definition particularly because of the word "identical". I'm not being pedantic, even if the above sentence were adjusted to instead say "similar to", I think it misses the mark.

When I'm looking at a painting, I don't have any pretense that how I'm experiencing it is identical to, or in any way similar to, how the painter does. I'm having a relatively unique experience, made unique by my own relationship to the subject matter and the colours and my cultural history and etc.

I don't even think the artists intentions have to be considered to be that important at all, really.

And I really don't think Laplace was trying to convince us that such a demon is likely, or possible. He was just saying, in a universe where everything is deterministic, anything at any point in the future would be, in theory, calculable. — Patterner

That's right

Why are we simulating? Where will Voyager 1 be in fifty years? We don't simulate it's existence for every moment of the next fifty years. We just calculate. — Patterner

Because Leplace Demon is supposed to be able to predict EVERYTHING perfectly, not just simple toy examples. Chaos, right? When a system is chaotic, you can't just do a simple calculation, you can really only find the answer with a simulation.

Here's a conversation on the topic elsewhere:

https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/s/nsfBtiBGE5

It's almost too intuitive for me to explain..

But think of the counter-consequences.

If a computer could simulate itself faster than it could run, then you could run a faster simulator inside the simulator, and in turn have an ever increasing speedup.

Anyway, the simulator has to do things like fetch memory, but fetching the memory in simulator always takes as long as doing all the prep work in the simulator, then doing a memory fetch in hardware equivalent to what is being simulated.. So basically every thing you do has to be done in hardware anyway, but with more overhead on everything

And here's another one that's probably even more relevant than the above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40071773

If you consider the physically optimal implementation of any function (e.g. the optimal NAND gate), that system cannot be simulated in real time: the simulation will always be slower, pretty much by definition. Insofar that physics optimally implements itself, you cannot simulate reality in general without a massive performance hit (think about the recursive absurdity of the simulator simulating itself).

A quantum computer, or whatever the next step would be, made up of enough particles could calculate the rest of the particles. If there are finite particles in the universe. — Patterner

No, it still couldn't. It couldn't do it faster than the universe. To represent the location and velocity of a single particle, you need MANY particles. Hundreds, probably thousands, maybe millions at minimum. So just to calculate what 100 particles are going to do, you'd need to have hundreds, at minimum, particles per particle you want to predict - and that's just for storing information about them, not even running computations on that stored information.

By the time you start your simulation, the particles you gathered the information for have already been evolving into their future, leaving the computer simulation in the dust, and the simulation will never catch up. It will necessarily be many many many times slower.

In fact there's a real example of this, an example of computing a universe within a universe - Minecraft. People built Minecraft in Minecraft, and that's an amazing accomplishment, but there's that catch - Minecraft in Minecraft always necessarily runs many many many times slower than the first layer of Minecraft.

You can't simulate reality perfectly, faster than reality can do it itself.

You can simulate it imperfectly faster - we do that all the time, it's easy. But not perfectly.

So, classical in-universe Leplace Demons are strictly impossible, I don't see any way around that - so if one wants to allow for a supernatural or extra-universal Leplace Demon, that shakes things up a bit.

If we had a demon outside of the universe, it could predict the future even given Quantum Mechanics - the catch is, if we live in a quantum universe (and I think we do), its predictions must be probabilistic (probably). It could in principle perfectly predict the probability distributions of various future states.

Although some interpretations of quantum mechanics go a step further, like Bohmian Mechanics, and say that actually underneath it all there's a true single deterministic path to the future, so if that were the case, that type of QM would still allow for a normal Leplace Demon, who can still perfectly predict a single future.

It's a supernatural being in a thought experiment — Patterner

So it doesn't sound like you're disagreeing with me then, when I say "it can't exist in the universe it's predicting". If it's predicting a universe of atoms, it can't just exist in that universe as a thing made of atoms and also be able to perfectly predict the future faster than it happens - it has to be "super natural" - super meaning ABOVE, meaning above the nature of the universe it's supposed to predict. I agree, it has to be SUPER to the nature of the universe it can predict.

did we not just say in a physicalist determinist universe? If this demon is in this universe, then yeah.

If neither of my guesses was correct, what is the reason you think that, even in principle, the demon cannot exist inside of the same universe it's capable of predicting, even if that universe is 100% physicalist and 100% deterministic? — Patterner

Let's imagine a super simplified case. Forget quantum mechanics, imagine the world is classical, space and time are Cartesian, the world is composed of atoms which are more or less like tiny little billiard balls bouncing around.

Why, in such a simplified world, could an LD not possibly be able to predict the future with perfect accuracy?

Well, our LD is made of atoms, is he not? Some fraction of his atoms are for his brain, the rest are for his body. Even just to calculate his own future, only 1 second into the future, he would have to know the precise location and velocity of every atom inside his own body and brain, and know the location and velocity of every atom that's going to interact with his body in the next second.

He doesn't have enough atoms in his brain to store all that information, never mind do calculations on it.

And then you've got the computing speed problem - you can't compute the universe faster than the universe can compute itself, from within the universe . I mean there are some scenarios maybe where you could jump ahead because you know this particular thing is flying in a straight line and won't interact with anything, but mostly you don't have a bunch of simplified things like that, you have thousands of things bouncing into thousands of other things all the time. Not a lot of space for computational shortcuts available.

So a leplace demon is impossible to exist inside the universe - you could have one outside the universe looking in, but not inside

I have no idea what the first thing is that you're disagreeing with

It should be noted, and maybe already has, that even in principle the demon cannot exist inside of the same universe it's capable of predicting, even if that universe is 100% physicalist and 100% deterministic.

It is just one way of thinking about the universe. It may be useful, but is it true? What is the evidence one way or the other? — Ludwig V

"Closed" just means "everything that matters for calculating the future of this system is here." So what's the evidence that, regardless of whether the physical universe is closed itself, there's SOME closed system that contains the uinverse? Well, I don't have scientific evidence, but consider this intuition: there is a set of things that are the answer to the question, "what are all the things, physical or otherwise, that go into deciding future states?"

Future states are, in fact, realized, so something must realize them, so there must be a set of things relevant to the process of realizing the future. That set of things is "the closed system", whether that's exclusively physical or also contains other "realms".

The alternative is the claim "there is no set of things that go into deciding the futre states".

he says it right after quoting me. If it's not for me, who is he directing the question "what is your evidence" towards?

"IF the universe is a closed system.." we can make all sorts of deductions and predictions. But is it? What's your evidence? — Ludwig V

That's... now what I said. That's not even a response to what I said.

meant to say strictly, and don't call me auto correct

Ty, fixed

it doesn't strictly have to, though.

Suppose something is casual on our physical world, but outside the physical world - perhaps a mind or spirit realm, wherein mental and spiritual events occur. And suppose there's bidirectional causality between the physical realm and this mind realm.

One need not think of specifically the physical realm as a closed system, one can instead imagine (physical realm plus mind realm) as a combined closed system. And an LD that's fully aware of what's going on in all the relevant realms of the combined closed systems is still conceivable.

There are many people who are unable to be clear even if they reflect on what they say. — Tom Storm

I guess there's a few general categories, right?

The people who actually try to be rigourously clear and are good at it (these people are usually willing to reword or work through anything unclear upon request)

The people who try to be clear and are bad at it.

The people who don't even try.

When people in the last two groups get pissy that their posts are being understood in ways they didn't intend... whew , frustrating times.

But how's this - I doubt most people deliberately aim for their points to be misunderstood. — Tom Storm

True, BUT in a philosophical setting it's fully possible that it's simultaneously true that most people don't put any significant effort into trying to be understood either. So even if they don't want to be misunderstood, they're not writing their posts with a mind to the question, "is there some way that what I'm saying now is going to not be understood the way I mean it?" They just write away and hope for the best.

It seems remarkably common.

I doubt anyone deliberately aims for their points to be misunderstood. — Tom Storm

Some people absolutely play games where they TRY to be as opaque as possible, and bait misunderstandings from people which they can pounce on - it gives them permission to attack and insult, they think.

In fact I recently spoke to someone who, in one thread, got upset people were trying to interpret her vague questions, "why are you trying to read my mind?", and then in the same goddamn thread, wrote half a paragraph and then tied it off with "yada yada yada you get what I mean".

So, she gets to belittle me for trying to interpret her vagueries, and then continues to produce more vagueries... I think the belittling is the point

If all is deterministic, then numbers and information, and consciousness and intent, are irrelevant. It can all be reduced to particle physics, just as thermodynamics can. I suppose it would know why brain states also feel like mental states to us. But if "feel like" is all there is, but they have no casual power, and are, themselves, determined by the physical events, then it doesn't matter. — Patterner

This is why pluralism and process philosophy are so important - you don't have to take this "nothing matters, nothing is real" view, EVEN IF you accept that everything is fundamentally caused by the lowest-level physical rules.

Just because all of the components of a clock are governed by physics doesn't mean "the cogs don't cause the clock to work" - no, to the contrary, the fact that the cogs are made of fundamental particles doing what fundamental particles do is what MAKES the cogs work, and in tandem what makes the clock as a whole work.

It's not one or the other, it's one because of the other.

The casualty of your mind can be similar. It's not "my mind is acausal because it's just physical stuff in my brain obeying the laws of physics", it's "my mind IS CASUAL and works how it works, and interacts with the things it interacts with, precisely because it's made of physical things following the laws of physics".

Your view kind of makes it seem like anything that's not fundamental isn't real - I understand that intuition, but I think that's why concepts like emergence are so important to understand. The fundamental is real, and the emergent things that emerge from the fundamental are also real.

What, in your opinion, are some reasonable inferences one can draw from these examples?

You are the one who is correcting me and highlighting my grammatical mistakes, mate… — javi2541997

Really? So it wasn't you who started the conversation about my use of "except"? I think it was.

On the other hand…

I pour milk for everyone in my house except for me. Who pours milk for me?
— flannel jesus

The premise is badly written. — javi2541997

You started the semantic conversation, and now you're crying victim.

Let's leave it there. Sure. You're the victim, let's all shed a tear for javi.

knowing that I am not a native speaker. — javi2541997

I didn't know that, and it's not meant to be an insult, but it is clear from all your language confusions in this thread. You're trying to correct me in ways you don't understand. If English really isn't your native language, then it would make sense for you to be a little more humble about your interpretations of these words, rather than latching on to some other persons confusions on stack exchange.

I never debated a paradox here, there isn't one.

The first means “plus”. So, is there a barber in Seville apart from the one who shaves the people and himself? It is cumulative. There could be the possibility that others could shave the barber. But who If he is the only one in Seville?
The second means “minus”. Is there a barber except for the one who shaves others and himself? It is excluding. There cannot be a paradox because we already take for granted that the barber is the only one in Seville. — javi2541997

I'm not getting the impression from these words that you're entirely comfortable in English.

I see your personal linguistic confusions, is that what you want me to see?

when I Google "define apart from" I get:

Merriam: Other than, Besides, except for

You're stretching really far for all this my man.

You haven't explained what is a paradox yet! :blush: — javi2541997

A paradox certainly ISN'T a simple story, ended with a simple question that has a simple answer.

I pour milk for everyone in my house except for me. Who pours milk for me?

someone from outside Seville, or someone who isn't a barber, or maybe there are more barbers in Seville but they aren't all called "the barber of Seville", and that title is reserved for him. All quite apparent solutions

Or maybe nobody shaves him, maybe he has a really long beard - or he doesn't grow a beard, because he's a trans man before the age of hrt

yeah I don't think you're making any interesting connections just yet

You don't have any clue about this linguistic paradox. — javi2541997

This isn't a paradox. The sentence of the op is clearly, plainly, easily possible. Nothing remotely challenging about imagining a man shaving all men in his village except himself.

the barber shaves all other than himself, Joe shaves the barber, but Who doesn't shave anybody. Russell gets shaved by the barber.

I'm not really sure how that connects to the theist stories Vera was talking about. I doubt very many of them feature cars.

No, Who doesn't shave anybody.

Joe

There seems to be a bit of a wave of this material about - an attempt at rebuilding a discourse on meaning from the wreckage of humanism/scientism/materialism towards transcendental matters. Is Vervaeke a Platonist? — Tom Storm

There was already some discussion on this previously, but I don't think anybody said this explicitly:

Regarding the mind, and the things the mind does, and why and how it does them, he's 100% a "it's all in the brain" type of guy. He's said as much explicitly at least once or twice in a podcast I listened to.

I think there's a lot of misconceptions about matierliasm - it's not the boogyman many of you seem to think it is, as Janus points out.