Rationalism claims another victim. Hume was right.

You haven't shown any logical argument for your point. When it is logical arguments, you would have evidential or hypothetical premises before your conclusion. You haven't shown any of that. — Corvus

You have to look up what "logical necessity" is.

"Think" and "Exist" are totally different type of entities. — Corvus

Yeah, and one implies the other. As Descartes and the editors have already explained, you can't think without existing, one thing begets the other.

Think is psychological and Exist is ontological. There is no logical or any type of correlations between the two. It is so obvious, but you seem to be not able to see the point here. — Corvus

Just because you arbitrarily put two verbs into two boxes that are just adjectives, it does not mean anything. If it were obvious you would be able to explain yourself very easily, but there is no argument.

Nothing obscure in there at all. :nerd: — Corvus

You would be surprised.

I Wouldn't say we are using 'conscious' in the same sense in the two sentences:

"Tim is conscious and in the hospital"
and
"Human's are conscious due to their brains" — 013zen

Well, I would.

In the first example, its clearly being used synonymously with being aware, and in the second sense, which is the sense I believe OP to be using, we can't simply substitute "awareness". — 013zen

That the substitution sounds funky in that one phrase is a matter that the language relies on pragmatics more than semantics in that case. The two words pretty much mean the same thing, just like "fast" and "quick" mean the same thing.

You said that your claim — Corvus

I said no such thing. My statement was that it is not logically necessary that there is life in Mars, which it isn't, all you need to do is acquaint yourself with the meaning of logical necessity.

What were you thinking of? — Corvus

It doesn't matter, it can be anything, that is the point. I walk therefore I move. "Well but you didn't say where you are walking so the statement is illogical". It is a nonsensical argument.

And "Cogito" is not sufficient or necessary logical ground for existence. It is epistemic perception of existence, which is the ground for the existence. Existence cannot be deduced logically. — Corvus

I also have no clue what this means.

I believe that "consciousness" is a spectrum of capabilities — 013zen

That much is not needed: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/conscious


Things without a mind are not conscious/aware.

"The earth is flat." had more plenty of backings for far longer time. — Corvus

And there is nothing necessary about the Earth being flat or otherwise.

I was just pointing out "I think therefore I am." is illogical.
The "think" has no content. — Corvus

That it is illogical does not follow from it having no content, that is nonsensical especially when logic deals with syntax, not semantics, content is irrelevant. Even then, neither of those two are true, it is both logical and think has content because it means something. You are denying something that is self-evident.

Except Deepak? hehe — AmadeusD

Deepak is not serious either, but as in a serious person.

Evidence or arguments or whatever. Your claims don't have any backings. — Corvus

My claim that there is no life in Mars has plenty of backing.

If you think you don't exist, therefore you exist, is a contradiction. — Corvus

Good thing that was not Descartes' argument.

What are the evidences for the claims? — Corvus

Logic does not use evidence.

If cogito content was "I think I don't exist." — Corvus

What?

Yeah, pretty much. America does not have much to with that. Biden's country (then Bush's) however used it as an excuse to inflict decades of suffering upon Iraq and other countries, where no weapons of mass destruction were found, and the Saudis — Bush's buddies — were to blame instead.
Nine eleven was not for any reason by the way, 9/11 was only surprising because they managed to hijack and hammer 3 airplanes into VIP locations without being taken down. But that someone (be the Taliban or the Al Qaeda) would try to retaliate is completely expected. Yankees and the Soviets used and abused the Middle East for a long, long time before nine eleven happened. And then they play victim. Whatever the motivation was, it is evil through and through.

Since alcohol is the topic: wine. I love wine. In fact I am drinking it right now.

Some poeple think such a being walked the Earth some 2000 years ago. Some stuff happened, from some perspective not a lot, but surely not little. In any case we killed him — the pharisees.

Thank you.

Nietzscheans are like a hydra, cut one head down, two more pop up.

A need? Yes, otherwise we would not be organising tens of conferences every year to discuss whether Kant meant Anschtiszchirenung or Schschschschschung when he used the word Gügügügüheit in page 198 of Pferthoch auf der Klëugschein — note that these humorous non-words are not a mockery of the admirable German language.
A will? Obviously not. Back then, people were smart enough to abstract from the words they were reading (or at least the survivalship bias deceives me so), but today they are eager to spend hours debating a concept when they are not even thinking of the same thing when they use the same word.
It is the problem that comes when people think that philosophy reduces to language and yet don't think that all the answers lie in a dictionary.

Sure, but I think that Cartesian metaphysics or epistemology are not relevant when speaking of Forms. I think Count was referring to Platonic forms, which was my point that being in a simulation is just a bit deeper into the cave.
I have to brush up on my Plato — eventually.

I'm not at all sure we are disagreeing here. — Banno

I'd refer you to yourself:

This is said without irony? — Banno

In Chess, it is true that the bishop stays on it's own colour. — Banno

Without the bishop staying in one colour, it wouldn't be chess. Because of that, the above is simply an analytic statement of "If the bishop stays on its own colour, it is true that the bishop stays on its own colour", which is non-informative. I could raise an issue about analytic statements, but when I say nothing is set in stone I am referring mostly to a posteriori judgements. Every "it is true that..." has implicit "ifs", each "if" is a drop of uncertainty. Skepticism is a problem, a problem must be recognised before it is overcome.

Stressing about Skepticism is futile, agreed. If Hume cannot overcome it and Kant cannot defeat it, what hope do mere mortals have?

Still, it's worth keeping it in mind as a problem. For ignoring it completely defeats the point of what is right about it, that we cannot attain certainty - in this world at least. — Manuel

Well put and case in point.

Physically no, but metaphysically and logically? May be or why not? — Corvus

Because... it is not logically necessary that there is life in Mars, and we know there is none there.

Cogito to "I exist" is a deductive leap, tautology or just monologue. Problem with Cartesian cogito is, it lacks the content. Lack of content in cogito allows even denial of Ergo sum. What if, the content of cogito was "I doubt" or "I deny"? Does "Ergo sum" still stand? — Corvus

You say the cogito lacks content, which doesn't make sense, then you say "what if the content was...", implying it has a content different from what you were about to say, meaning it has content.

Are you serious my guy? — AmadeusD

No one making Deepak Chopra-like claims is serious.

No clue what you mean by that, but I have a clue that Amerigo Vespucci is rolling and gagging in his grave.

And at any rate, it makes far more sense to replace "Israel" with "Saudi Arabia," given both who the benefits of removing Saddam immediately served and the relation to oil — Count Timothy von Icarus

Israel and oil are metonyms for whatever wicked interest it is at the time. Whichever example we choose, no matter how ludicrous, is still more sensible than the Adam Sandler-tier comedy that the biggest war criminal in the world is drone striking Lybia to generously spread the values of democracy and sexual liberation — values that were hammered upon Europeans in WW2. I don't think it can get more evil than that, "we are bombing your civilians because we care about you!".

Categorical proof that that they maliciously and dishonorably lie through their teeth: https://twitter.com/NuryVittachi/status/1762363106922049973

Let me make this clear enough: European do not step and dance on their own flags, Europeans do not kneel to social minorities, Europeans do not tear down their own statues, Europeans do not bring children to cross-dresser strip clubs, Europeans do not think social well-being is "socialism", Europeans do not look down upon other cultures, Europeans know how many continents there are, Europeans do not think sexual and racial classification is based on feelings. If these values are "western", fine, but remember then that Europe is a far far eastern continent.

As an addition to my previous post, Max Tegmark's mathematical universe would be an example of a naturalised platonism¹.
1 – Any view that takes mathematical objects to be simultaneously abstract and perceptible (Balaguer, "Against (Maddian) Naturalized Platonism", 1994).

I don't think someone who knows they live in a machine/simulation can truly be happy. — NotAristotle

One of the versions of the machine thought experiment is that you don't know you are in a machine, your memories of your previous life are erased.

Because forms are attributes of beings, not of simulations. — Wayfarer

Aren't beings simulations themselves?

17 pages each day is a very big figure. I had to do some interrogation work on ChatGPT and it gave me a figure of around 4040 pages for Sartre's books combined, not including essays and plays.
Here it is https://chat.openai.com/share/b09c2b41-b04f-4502-8133-373d9a68ffc6

Character.ai gave me this:

How do you know you are able to make synthetic judgements, that is taking two concepts and uniting them into one? And not that the new concept you summoned is a quimeric one that seems related but is completely unrelated to the previous two.

Not to say if Earth is Earth. Derrida’s concept of iterability involves the idea that every repetition is an alteration, every recurrence is a difference

Boethius argues that happiness is equivalent to being good, since virtue is what leads to happiness — Count Timothy von Icarus

This might be overly blunt, but if my wife dies in a failed conception, my nation's culture is being erased, and the water I drink being poisoned, I don't think I would be happy even with the greatest virtues. But that is me.

All in all, yes, I don't think Nozick's machine is compatible with that definition of happiness, exactly because you pointed out that the person in the machine is sucking up resources while adding nothing to the world themselves, but that is a bit besides the point of Nozick's thought experiment.

And if the real things of interest are Forms, it's not immediately clear why being in a simulation should hurt our ability to discover truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a good question. I would think it does not, as the simulation is just a bit deeper into the cave, but still in the cave nonetheless. It just might take a bit more effort to leave the cave than if we were in the real world.

If we look only at the military and paramilitary interventions of the USA after 1945, it becomes clear that this is not about morality or the defense of Western values — Wolfgang

It is always comical to me this "Western" label. French, German, or generally (Western) European values have nothing to do with Yankee values. Does anyone think that Hollywood and Biden's government is promoting anything that has to do with Europe when they do this?
Yankees use this "Western" label to associate themselves with European history while bombing the continent for their personal interest when it suits them.
Let's not even forget that their war on terror (more like war for oil and for Israel) has indirectly caused heinous crimes in Europe.

"I am still so secure and certain that I think there exists life in Mars. Therefore life exists in Mars." — Corvus

Because there is nothing necessary about life in Mars, physically, metaphysically, logically. The point of the cogito is that it always confirms itself circularly, you can't deny it, because by denying it you prove it.

I will leave you with some editor/translator notes from some translation of the Discourse to show what I am saying:

AT 9B. 7: ‘it is contradictory to suppose that what is thinking does not, at the very time when it is thinking, exist.’ Two other points emerge from this passage: the first step towards the cogito is in fact the dubio (‘I am doubting, therefore I am existing’). — Discourse on the Method Oxford World's Classics

More than anything, this is the key part:

Sobrou-lhe deste ato de generalização da dúvida apenas uma certeza, a de que o sujeito que duvida radicalmente não pode duvidar do ato de duvidar. E como o ato de duvidar é um ato de pensamento, ele extraiu a conclusão de que a proposição “Penso, logo existo” era verdadeira, constituindo um novo começo, o verdadeiro ponto de partida da filosofia. — Discurso do Método LP&M Editores

From this deed of generalising doubt there was only one certainty left: that the subject that doubts radically cannot doubt that he is doubting. And since doubting is a thinking action, he [Descartes] extracted the conclusion that the proposition "I am thinking there I exist" is true, the proper starting point of philosophy.

That's much better than the incoherent claim that we know nothing, or its inane sibling, that there are no true statements. — Banno

When someone says they "know" something, 'know' is a word with composite meaning, indicating at least an attitude (belief) and a state of affairs (being true). To say you know something implies a commitment to something being true, and for me that implies certainty, which is why I think it is faulty when people say they "know the sky is blue" like they "know" they "can trust their eyes", as one is reliant on the other.
But if you want to say that knowing is not the commitment that something is true but that it is much more likely than its opposite (not-X), I am happy to say we know many many things.

One can't play chess without the certainty that one's opponent will keep their bishop on the same colour. — Banno

One can hardly discern whether there is something "true" about the game they just made up to communicate or whether it is a useful fiction.


Are you trying to apply mathematical operations to English? Because
* "It is set in stone that there is nothing set in stone" and
* "It is not set in stone that there is something set in stone"
can mean completely different things, even though both are made of a negative with a positive.

Or we can accept skepticism and carry on from there without stressing about certainty, knowing that we will die is as likely or less than that we were born.

What drew me to the question, was 'what is the nature of number?' Without going into all the background, the idea that struck me was that numbers are real, in that they're the same for anyone who can count, but they're not material in nature. They exist in a different way than do objects, they're only perceptible to an intelligence capable of counting. And mathematics is also fundamental to the success of modern science. But it turns out to be a contentious debate. Naturalists generally disparage the 'romance of maths'. Another article I have on my links list is about the 'Indispensability Argument' for mathematics. — Wayfarer

Great links for that topic:
https://maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22/Allendoerfer/1980/0025570x.di021111.02p0048m.pdf
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-mathematics/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/

Lower-case platonists holds that numbers are abstract objects, non-causal, non-spatial, non-temporal objects.
But then Benecerraf's problem:

Benacerraf is skeptical that such an account exists. Thus, he thinks, we must either endorse a “non-standard” antirealist interpretation of mathematics or settle for an epistemic mystery.

And one may then wonder about the implications of each of these ideas. Obviously mathematics exists, I can do calculations right now, so, without ignoring the topic, someone must decide what it is that mathematics is about, and pick a side, be realist or antirealist. A physicalist cannot be a realist about mathematics¹, so he must adopt another view. But both immanent realism and conceptualism have a fair share of trouble, which leaves us with nominalism.
One might then seek the connection between these ontologies of mathematics and the foundations of mathematics. The paper linked claims that formalism is closest to nominalism, logicism to platonism, and intuitionism to conceptualism. But then there will be contentions still.

This debate is also intimately linked to the queston of whether mathematics is invented or discovered. For the intuitionist, for example, mathematics would be unarguably invented.

1 – Unless he adopts a naturalised platonism.

Speaking on animals fighting, I watched this recently:

Screw crocs, mammal power :strong:


Very nice.

At best, as Timaeus puts it, we have "likely stories" — Fooloso4

More on that?

Read 4th and 5th page especially.

mysteriously within endless discussions of Russell's paradox and something arising from nothing — jgill

:rofl:

Much of what I have read is inconsequential, like the pure mathematics I have enjoyed. — jgill

Art is almost always inconsequential. Perhaps philosophy, along with pure math and other things, is an art — they may be done for the sake of themselves.

Are you an existentialist? — Rob J Kennedy

Far from being my main interest in philosophy. But it could surprise me in the future.

Lakatos? — Banno

From the quotes thread.

Is it set in stone that nothing is set in stone? — Banno

Yes. Therefore something is set in stone. Therefore it is not set in stone that nothing is set in stone. Therefore nothing is set in stone. This is a paradox! Exactly. Further showing how nothing is set in stone.
No. Therefore that is not set in stone. So what is it that is set in stone? It seems no one has clarified it yet. Some might say it is the law of identity, but that one is shrouded in mystery.

You are clever enough to understand that we must start somewhere... — Banno

We can start from wherever we want. Knowledge can be like mathematics or logic where we can choose the axioms we want. But it is only certain axioms that give us good theorems. Some people start with the Christian God, others with PNC (but is it more fundamental than the PEM?), most people with a collection of brute facts ("I just know that gravity is 9.81m/s²!"). If we start with the negative that we don't know, we might stop worrying about being certain about things (as if certainty even exists) and start worrying about being less uncertain in general.

This is said without irony? — Banno

taking a dim view of what he described as the Wittgensteinian “thought police” (owing to the Orwellian tendency on the part of some Wittgensteinians to suppress dissent by constricting the language, dismissing the stuff that they did not like understand as inherently meaningless)

This excerpt for me comes off as strangely confusing. I am not sure what his point is, but trying to vilify Descartes ("blood brother of Descartes") even though most of the text is about English characters (Descartes never went to England) that were active after René's death and mentions of nameless supposed "Cartesians" (in England!???) leaves a bad taste in my mouth for whatever authority it is that the writer holds — an authority in lying as we will see.

But something from the webpage caught my attention:

He even arranged [in 1646] for the slaughter of a pregnant cow so that he could examine the foetus at an early stage of its development. (Clarke 2006:332)

This piece of text in the website is a quote, so I am not sure who he is quoting, if at all, but the quote references Clarke 2006, a book, not a primary source obviously. I was not planning to do any more source hunting, but Clarke 2006 is "Descartes: A Biography", I went to page 332 for the quote and the webpage is unsurprisingly dishonest, cutting out the book to make things seem other than they are. I will preface this by saying that the book does not give any source to the statement that follows, simply "iv. 555", which I will not bother to find out what it is:

He even arranged for the slaughter of a pregnant cow so that he could examine the foetus at an early stage of its development. When he noticed that Dutch butchers often slaughtered pregnant cows, he took advantage of their carelessness to further his investigations: ‘I arranged for them to bring me more than a dozen wombs in which there were small calves, some as big as mice, others as big as rats, and others again like small dogs, in which I could observe many more things than was possible in the case of chickens because their organs are larger and more visible’ (iv. 555).

The animal was already dead, Descartes simply took the remains for investigation. Clarke quotes what seems to be a letter or note by Descartes, but I don't know what iv. 555 refers to.
What a shock, English guy writes a webpage about a French intellectual, spends most of the text talking about England, and manipulates information to claim that Napoleon was 10cm shorter than he really was— while he was too busy introducing the metric system to the world.

I have seen many texts that mention supposed followers, apprentices, pupils of Descartes. Descartes was not a university professor, sometimes a private tutor, he avoided publishing some of his works and his ideas were instutionally banned a few times. I wonder if those "followers" of Descartes were truly students of his work from around his time, like the Hegelians of Hegel, or complete strangers who watched a lecture about animals having no soul and went "Hey, that is pretty useful".

If one really thinks that free will does not exist (and not even in the compatibilist sense), then they are being irrational by holding people accountable

I never claimed it was irrational to do what one is predetermined to do.

"What one is predetermined to do" being "holding people accountable".

Exactly. Further showing how nothing is set in stone.

I tried to verify the claim that:

He and his assistants would conduct public demonstrations in which they vivisected and tortured conscious animals -- often dogs. As the animal subjects writhed and cried out in apparent agony, Descartes would tell onlookers not to worry. The movements and sounds, he insisted, were no more than programmed responses. The animals were not really in any pain.

I found this:

Descartes had a sophisticated understanding of animal training or animal conditioning (classical or Pavlovian conditioning). For example, he opines that by beating a dog half-a-dozen times while a violin is being played, one will have trained or conditioned the dog to whine and run away at the sound of a violin (Descartes a Mersenne. 18 mars 1630 (Letter to Mersenne) (AT I: 134)) — Descartes' Tests for (Animal) Mind

Which seems like he is not speaking literally, but it raises some eyebrows. He is talking about building habits rather than vivisections.

According to Descartes's analysis of this example, the shock of finding on a single occasion something loathsome in meat that a person has been eating with relish can somehow establish a firm association between this type of meat and the feeling of disgust or aversion occasioned by the revolting item. That is, a single disagreeable episode can create a new habit in the diner that displaces or overrides his former disposition to savor meat of the given sort.

The thing about dogs in the village seem to come from father Gabriel Daniel's Voyage du monde de Descartes (1690) which makes a parody of a Cartesianist:

Avant que d’être Cartésien, j’étais si tendre, que je ne pouvais pas seulement voir tuer un poulet: mais depuis que je fus une fois persuadé que les bêtes n’avaient ni connaissance, ni sentiment, je pensai dépeupler de chiens la ville où j’étais, pour faire des dissections anatomiques, où je travaillais moi-même, sans avoir le moindre sentiment de compassion.

"Before becoming a Cartesian, I was so soft that I could not even see a chicken being killed: but once I was convinced that animals had neither knowledge nor feeling, I thought of depopulating the dogs from the city where I was, to do anatomical dissections, where I worked myself, without having the slightest feeling of compassion."

Though there was this:

Descartes ne nous a laissé aucun traité sur l'animal, mais cétait un fervent des dissections et des vivisections, qui s'est vu accusé, un jour, «d'aller par les villages pour voir tuer des pourceaux.»
Comme si c'était un crime, a-t-il répondu, d'être « curieux de l'anatomie». (À Mersenne, 13 nov. 1639, AT, II, p. 621) — La place de l’animal dans l’œuvre de Descartes

"Descartes left us no treatise on the animal, but he was an enthusiast for dissections and vivisections, who was accused, one day, of 'going through the villages to see pigs killed'. As if it were a crime, he replied, to be 'curious about anatomy'"

Apparently the claim about Descartes and his apprentices doing vivisections is taken from Gary Francione's "Introduction to Animal Rights – Your Child or the Dog?" — an idiotic title I want to add. I took a look into the book and unsurprisingly there is no reference for it. Here is the sensationalist piece from Francione's book:

Descartes and his followers performed experiments in which they nailed animals by their paws onto boards and cut them open to reveal their beating hearts. They burned, scalded, and mutilated animals in every conceivable manner. When the animals reacted as though they were suffering pain, Descartes dismissed the reaction as no different from the sound of a machine that was functioning improperly. A crying dog, Descartes maintained, is no different from a whining gear that needs oil.

The closest to anything like that is that Descartes admits in a letter to Plempius in 15/02/1638 to cutting open a live rabbit and possibly a fish:

Well, I once made a rather careful observation of this phenomenon in fish, whose hearts after removal from the body go on beating for much longer than the heart of any terrestrial animal.

For this is disproved by a decisive experiment that I have seen done several times and did again today in the course of writing this letter. [Descartes describes at considerable length a protracted vivisection—cutting open a live rabbit in order to see how it heart responds to various changes. We can spare ourselves the details of this. Descartes concludes:] This experiment is fatal to Harvey’s view about the movement of the heart,

Though vivisections were very common in the Early Modern Period it seems:

The striking usage of vivisection in the early modern period and its interaction with other techniques. — https://hpsc.indiana.edu/documents/faculty-articles/meli/dbmPaper_EarlyModernExperimentation.pdf

All in all, Descartes opened up live animals himself at least once, but he wasn't doing anything that is too different from the other scientists of his time, and his motivation seemed to be purely scientific. The outrageous claim that him and his followers (what followers?) boiled animals alive is yet to be proven. Descartes' philosophy recognised the concern of inflicting pain upon living beings and dismissed it as animals "don't have a soul", while other scientists might not have recognised the concern at all. Even at the time, many were troubled by the fact of the animals' pain. Maybe Descartes used his philosophy to cope with that discomfort.
In a letter to the Cambridge philosopher Henry More, Descartes said “The view is not so much cruel to beasts but respectful to human beings… whom it absolves from any suspicion of crime whenever they kill or eat animals”.

While some anatomists found the suffering of animals in artificial and cruel settings unbearable, many defended vivisection on the ground that it is permissible to treat animals the way we wish; paradoxically, Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno did both.

How did he know he thinks? — Corvus

https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/lecturenotes/DDM110%20CAS/Descartes-1637%20Discourse%20on%20Method.pdf page 28

You know that you know nothing. Therefore you know something. — Corvus

Therefore "I know that I know nothing" is incorrect, therefore I know nothing.

Beyond that, just like a determinist may have the impression of free will, a libertarian may have the impression of being causally chained to the past. When I am faced with the choice of having either cheesecake or apple pie for dessert, I could be choosing it "freely" or I could be choosing "determinedly", but I am still choosing what I want — for the determinists due to chemical reactions, to the libertarian due to the ghost in the machine. You can only know whether you made a choice yourself "freely" or it happened due to chemical impulses in your brain after you did it, after it is set in stone — one way or another, you have no control over it anymore. Perhaps the free will problem is not a problem at all but a confusion in perspective — or perhaps a consequence of the problem of mind-body dualism.

That is what I understood by "If one really thinks that free will does not exist (and not even in the compatibilist sense), then they are being irrational by holding people accountable". But if that is so, nevermind it.

I remember that someone being banned does not result in their posts being purged. If someone is banned, they may request their data to be removed by email, I am guessing?