Did you see my reply here? Link. — fdrake

Thank you. I missed that. I'll reply separately.

I remember a physics prof in university spending maybe 15 minutes scolding me when I said something like "the uncertainty principle says we can't know...", they responded "The uncertainty principle has nothing to do with how much we know about particles, it's not about our knowledge of the particles, it's about the particles" - not that exactly since it was a lot of years ago now, but that was definitely the gist. They were pretty mad at the suggestion it was epistemic, and their research was quantum theory, so I trust 'em. — fdrake

My own sense is that the very last people in the world who have a clue about philosophical issues are the physicists. I've personally seen big time, well-known celebrity physicists, make elementary errors talking about infinity, or whether what they study is real. Most physicists, or at least many, actually think their theories are True in some absolute sense. Or more commonly, they don't even think about it at all. They just "shut up and calculate," which is very wise advice.

When it comes to metaphysics. physicists are the last people I'd listen to; and celebrity physicists the least of all :-)

Edit: I have another story like that which is pretty funny. We had an analysis lecturer that was extremely eccentric, and one of the masters theses they were willing to supervise was on space filling curves. They handily included a "picture of a space filling curve in a subset of the plane", which was just a completely black square. I asked another prof if the eccentric prof actually wrote out code to draw the space filling curve, since it was the kind of thing he'd do if he could. The other prof got pretty angry and said "Computers can't do that, it's noncomputable, the construction relies upon the axiom of choice!". — fdrake

I'm not sure what was funny about that except that it's perfectly computable and doesn't require choice at all. Did I understand that and/or get the math right? And on a practical level we could input the resolution of the printer or display device, and calculate exactly how many iterations of the curve would show up as solid black. And it would of course be a finite number, so definitely computable and not needing any mathematical foundations beyond counting to a large but finite number. That's way less than the Peano axioms. An ultrafinitist, someone who doesn't believe in the infinitude of sufficiently large sets, would be able to compute the space filling curve to the point that it appeared black on the display. I'd be willing to guess you don't need that many iterations. Your eye couldn't make out the lines, it would all black pretty soon.

That's very ad hoc. It's much simpler to avoid the special pleading and just go with idealism. — RogueAI

I am the first to admit that believing meat is special is obviously false; in the sense that looking back, believing the earth is the center of the universe was obviously false. Though at the time, it was perfectly sensible. So I agree with you that the entire history of science argues the opposite of my premise. If we're special. why are we special? It's statistically unlikely for any organization of stuff to be conscious. Why should meat be capable of consciousness and nothing else?

Well I sure as hell don't know. I just believe what I believe but I can see that I can't defend it with logic. Therefore my position must be classified as religion.

I agree with you that consciousness isn't computable. That would be another case of special pleading: series XY...Z of switching actions/q-bit whatevers produces a conscious experience but series AB...C doesn't? That makes no sense. What's so special about XY...Z? Why should the order in which switches are pulled have anything to do with consciousness? — RogueAI

Perhaps it's something we're not ever meant to know. There is actually a name for this philosophical viewpoint, New Mysterianism. Wiki calls it "a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be resolved by humans."

That's what I think, too.

What sorts of intuitions do you have about cases like these? If the idea of teletransportation makes you uncomfortable, why is that? Is a fear of dying justified here? — Tarrasque

We have a perfect model of how this works; namely, processes in any process-based operating system such as Unix.

A process is an executing program. For example the executable code for your Chrome or Safari or whatever web browser is sitting on your hard drive not doing anything. When you click on it to run it, the operating system creates a process -- that is, a logical flow of control with a private address space -- and has it run the web browser code.

A process can create another process. They do this by means of an operation called "forking." When a process forks another process, the operating system copies over the entire memory space of the parent (as it's called) and copies of all open file handles. At that moment, the parent and the child are identical. But from that moment on, as they both run and continue to interact with their environment, their memory state will diverge.

I find this model very compelling in thinking about transporter thought experiments. Whether you transport someone by transmitting their molecular, atomic, or subatomic state; either way, it's the same principle. At the moment of transport, you have a new process with the identical state as the parent. The moment the child process or clone or transportee comes into existence, it begins an indepdendent existence. Not entirely unlike the creation of identical twins in biology.

The question of "which one is the real you?" is moot. At the moment of cloning they'll each feel like you. And as they live their lives they'll each feel like the original and not the clone. But if there is such a thing as the self, or the soul, then it must be the parent process that has claim to it.

There is no difference IMO between transporters and duplicators. Once you duplicate someone, it makes no difference if you kill the original (as in Star Trek) or now have two of you leading separate lives. But transporters themselves are logically incoherent. The transportee, or child process, is not the original, even though it subjectively thinks it is; simply because "thinking that I am me" is part of my memory state, which would be faithfully copied to my clone. You create a clone and kill the original. There is no other way to conceptualize it IMO. All you can transmit is the state of the atoms or quarks or whatever physical level you're working at. You can't transmit a soul or a self.

I can concede that "2+2" and "4" are equal but not the same. — jgill

They are exactly the same set. If you have some mathematical framework in which 2 + 2 and 4 do not represent the exact same abstract mathematical object, I would appreciate your filling in the details. Even though your area of specialization was far removed from undergrad set theory, I'm sure you must have had some glancing acquaintance with that material at some time in the past.

↪jgill
How can they represent the same Platonic ideal when "+" represents an ideal in itself, which is part of "2+2", but not part of "4"? — Metaphysician Undercover

Ah! My friend @MU I believe I have achieved a glimmer of understanding your position. Let me see if I can say this back to you.

* First, there's what Plato said. Nevermind that he may or may not have been right about the ultimate nature of things. He's got a lot of mindshare over the millennia. But still, he's just a person who wrote down some thoughts in a context very different from ours. So you are saying that according to Plato things are such and so; but that's not necessarily the case.

* If we accept Plato for sake of discussion; then there's an ideal or a class or a category of thought called "plus" and another one called "2". And when you combine 2 + 2 to get 4, you are stating a mathematical equality but not a metaphysical one; because the left side of the equation 2 + 2 = 4 denotes the combination of two ideals and the thing on the right is only one ideal.

Well maybe. I think that point's a stretch. Plato could be wrong. But more to the point, 4 already includes within itself the possibility of being partitioned into 2 + 2. or 1 + 1 + 2, or 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. This is in fact the mathematical subject of partitions. It's what Ramanujan was working on inThe Man Who Knew Infinity. IMO doing a good job of explaining the partition function to a general Hollywood audience is one of the greatest math feats in cinematic history.

Point being that if 4 is an "ideal" or whatever you call it by itself, it ALREADY CONTAINS the possibility of all its positive integer partitions.

Truly, 2 + 2 and 4 are the same Platonic object. I don't find your argument convincing for this reason:

Sure, 2 + 2 expresses the fact that 2 and + can be combined to make 4. But 4 already expresses the fact that 4 can be represented as 2 + 2. Partitions are a natural and built-in aspect of a number.

Am I at least representing your position correctly?

Simulation theory runs into the same problems materialism does wrt consciousness: how does opening and closing switches (or q-bits) in some special order produce conscious experience? — RogueAI

In my opinion opening and closing switches can never implement consciousness; for the reason that opening and closing switches essentially defines the capabilities and limits of a Turing machine (TM); and TMs can not implement consciousness. Searle and Penrose agree with me.

Materialism does not necessarily have that problem. Consciousness could be material but not computable. That's a great description of my viewpoint. Something about meat is special. Computer scientist and blogger Scott Aaronson would call that meat chauvinism. Turing would also. Turing said that since subjective experience is not accessible to others, the question's pointless. All we can see is behavior; hence a behavioral standard like the Turing test.

It isn't an epistemological limit. — fdrake

Hi, this remark has been on my mind. It's totally counter to everything I think I know, so I wanted to make sure I understand you. This is in reference to whether we can say that Heisenbergian uncertainty is epistemological or ontological, with my strongly taking the position of the former.

I did ask you about this the other day when I replied to your post ... if I did. I remember replying but who knows. In any case, can you explain this more please? I've told a lot of people online that it's epistemological, so if I'm wrong I want to find out.

This is exactly my point, such axioms are based in ontological principles, they are not "pure mathematics. You can insist that there is no ontology to them all that you want, refusing to consider the evidence, in denial, that's a matter of your own free choice. — Metaphysician Undercover

PA is a formal symbolic system no different in principle than the game of chess.

Do you think chess has ontological significance? Yes or no? If no, then why do you think PA does?

Note that as usual I ask you direct, probing questions and you'll respond by changing the subject. I dare you to prove me wrong.

Actually I demonstrated your faulty interpretation of the premise of extensionality. That two symbols refer to something of "equal" value is not sufficient for the conclusion that they refer to "the same" thing. Being the same implies being equal, but being equal does not imply being the same. You commit a fallacy of conversion. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps we're done for now. I tire of this game.

You are the one in denial, insisting that mathematical axioms are exempt from judgements of true and false, being "pure mathematics", and absolutely abstract, refusing to accept the truth in this matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no middle 'e' in judgment. Jus' sayin' but nevermind . Axioms are formal statements, strings of symbols that are well-formed according to specific syntactic rules.

You can have different axiom systems such as Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, or Abelian and nonabelian group theory, that are mutually inconsistent yet both interesting and valid; and both applicable in their respective domains.

Therefore there can be no "truth" in axioms; only logical consistency and interestingness. You don't want to understand that, knock yourself out.

I'm taking a break from our chats but perhaps we'll meet again down the road.

There's no mismatch in my discourse, you simply refuse to try and understand what I'm saying. — Metaphysician Undercover

On the contrary. I've made a concerted effort to engage with your ideas. I just can't discern any.

I believe that two plus two equals four. I do not believe that "two plus two" and "four" refer to the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well then you have no idea what a number is, what a representation is, and you're just flat out wrong both philosophically and mathematically.

Since you think that they refer to the same thing, you and I give "2+2=4" different meaning. We simply interpret this phrase differently. — Metaphysician Undercover

I could see that ... except that in all the times we've talked, I've never been able to understand what meanings you assign to the symbol "2 + 2" and "4". You have not succeeded in making yourself clear.

That you attribute this to my own lack of effort in trying to understand you reflects on your own lack of self-awareness regarding the incoherence of your position, whatever it is.

It is an ontological difference. So I reject some conclusions of mathematical formalism as unsound, based in unsound premises. — Metaphysician Undercover

You haven't made a coherent case that I could even agree or disagree with. You've made no case at all.

This does not exclude me from taking a look at some of these unsound conclusions. Comparing unsound conclusions with what is really the case helps in the effort to produce better premises. — Metaphysician Undercover

I say again: If you don't know that 2 + 2 and 4 refer to the same abstract entity, then you are in no position to have an opinion on Fourier series, which are far more sophisticated mathematical objects.

The premises, axioms, theories, are metaphysical claims. whether you recognize this or not. I know we disagree on this, and you think that such premises might be based in something called "pure mathematics". but I explained to you in the other thread why this is an unsound principle itself. There is no such thing as "pure mathematics" in an absolute sense. Mathematics is ultimately guided by utility, and even those who might seem to be engaged in pure math are doing what they are doing (choosing whichever problems they choose to be working on instead of working on other problems) for a reason, so utility cannot be removed from mathematics. — Metaphysician Undercover

You feel the same way about chess? Yet another of my arguments that you never bother to engage with.

Do you recognize that scientists, in their scientific endeavours, regularly employ metaphysical principles? — Metaphysician Undercover

Some do. Some just "shut up and compute," which is a well-known saying in QM. And Newton said, "I frame no hypotheses," and explicitly rejected metaphysical considerations in his theory of gravity.

In saying that "2+2" and "4" refer to the very same thing, you make a metaphysical (ontological) claim. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I'm making a claim of Peano arithmetic, a purely syntactic system. I presented you a carefully crafted proof that 2 + 2 and 4 are the same thing. You pointedly ignored my argument and wouldn't even engage with my having presented it. You didn't just say, "Oh yeah well I have it on good authority that Giuseppe Peano cheated at cribbage." You just ignored what I wrote entirely and you continue to ignore it to this day.

You only showed your own ignorance and terror of symbolic reasoning. Yet you persist in caring about it. You had a bad experience with a math teacher along the way and it's scarred you for life.

Lol, true. It actually says in the first paragraph of the Stanford article "It is this unique amalgam of both old and new concepts of the physical world that may account for the current revival of scholarly interest in Descartes’ physics." — Gregory

Oh from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-physics/, different article than I was looking at.

So there is scholarly interest meaning historians of science? Or actual scientists? I'd be surprised if the latter.

Sean Carroll explicitly says this. He says the world is a brute fact of quantum fluctuation, using Russell's old phrase btw — Gregory

I responded to this yesterday but this afternoon I happened to come across this article by philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci. He's debunking and ripping to shreds some bit of pseudoscientific woo from a guy named Klee Irwin, whose videos I've seen and who definitely strikes me as a crank. Pigliucci begins:

Physicists seem to be on a roll these days. Unfortunately, I’m not talking about a string of new discoveries about the fundamental nature of reality, but of a panoply of speculative notions ranging from the plausible but empirically untestable (and therefore non-scientific), such as Sean Carroll’s marketing of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, to sheer nonsense on stilts, like the idea that is the subject of this essay.

Thought that was interesting in the context of our conversation.

https://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/the-universe-simulates-itself-into-existence-and-other-nonsense-from-modern-physics-32e958b690b

It’s interesting that we want to understand. Why aren’t we content with the experience? Why believe dreams refer to something? I’m not saying it’s pointless, but why do we believe there’s something there? — Brett

Messages from the collective unconscious. Dreams are mysterious. Why think they mean something. Why think they DON'T mean anything? It's an arbitrary hypothesis either way.

I'm sure our primitive ancestors must have felt dreams to be real.

I know it leads into a hall of mirrors. But what else would you expect?

Some thoughts on knowledge/reality/the unknown. — Brett

What you wrote seemed interesting but a little off my beaten path so I will leave this as it is.

No way! I just tagged you because you were "openminded and pluralistic about math" in the past with me — Gregory

Yes thank you. People often don't like math because it's taught in a dogmatic way. But mathematicians themselves are very openminded, at least after a few decades when the new ideas start to sink in!

I only read it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Descartes Physics. It said people are having renewed interest in it. I watched a video once that showed how his definitions of forces and reactions couldn't work on a billiard table. The guy said he had another video on Descartes "flawed" optics, but I couldn't find it and even the first video isn't around anymore. Sad — Gregory

I'm not actually familiar with any of the details. I perused the SEP article but didn't see where it said people have renewed interest. May have missed it.

thank you for that link. actually I've just been reading about the Copenhagen interpretation on Wikipedia, and it seems that if I know where the waiter is I can't tip him anyway! — Kaarlo Tuomi

LOL That's a great theory as long as you don't plan to go back to that restaurant. Although these days none of us may ever go back to any restaurants. How did it all get so strange so fast?

↪fishfry

A caterpillar has a metaphysics.
— fishfry

What do you mean? — Brett

I posted this on some other thread recently.

There's a forest somewhere, and in that forest are trees, and one of those trees has branches and leaves, and on one of those leaves there's a caterpillar. The caterpillar knows when it's night and when it's day. It knows to go toward what it likes to eat; and away from what likes to eat it. It knows, deep in its DNA, that someday it will ascend to become a beautiful butterfly.

In short: That caterpillar has a metaphysics.

Meaning: That whatever level of reality or the intelligence hierarchy you're at; you have a theory about what's going on. Our nervous system supports a certain level of cognitive activity and we conceptualize reality to that level. There's no reason to believe we're nature's ultimate design. Not if you follow the news. Just as the earth turned out not to be the center of the universe; and man turned out to be one of the animals; there may well be forms of intelligence we can't conceive of.

So is this just psychology? — Brett

A caterpillar has a metaphysics.

You clearly do not understand, if you think that I accept the Fourier transform. I accept it as an example of an unresolved problem. — Metaphysician Undercover

I am surprised you've heard of it. Yet you don't agree that 2 + 2 and 4 refer to the same thing. In my prior conversations with you, you've convinced me that you utterly reject symbolic mathematical formalisms. And without those, there certainly aren't any convergent infinite trigonometric series. Those are very abstract gadgets. There's a mismatch in your level of discourse.

A couple of months ago you refused to except the notion of the finite field extension $\mathbb Q[\sqrt 2]$, the field of rational numbers adjoined with a symbolic square root of 2. That is a much simpler construction that Fourier series. It's illogical for you to complain about the one and then casually invoke the other to make some point.

And when that unresolved problem is united with the bad metaphysics of special relativity, the result is the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. — Metaphysician Undercover

But special relativity and physics in general need not be about metaphysics. "Shut up and compute," which they say about QM but which might just as well apply to relativity, special and general. Do theories explain the world, or just describe it's approximate behavior in our laboratory experiments?

We keep coming back to the same point. Nobody is making metaphysical claims except you. I agree that SOME scientists think their theories are True with a capital T, but I don't. You're fighting against someone's opinion that isn't mine.

Relativist seemed to be arguing that a metaphysician is better trained to do metaphysics than a physicist, yet there is some metaphysics, such as the metaphysics of time, which a physicist is better trained to do. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can't comment on these inside baseball conversations with other posters. I rarely even read my own posts, let alone anyone else's.

However, the uncertainty principle is clear evidence that physicists should leave the metaphysics of time in the hands of metaphysicians. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok, fine. I stipulate that. Science isn't metaphysics, science is not ontology. What of it? I've been conceding you this point for days. You won't even acknowledge that I've said that, you just keep coming back with arguments as if I haven't said it.

Thanks for offering your take on this. I think this is exactly where the unresolved problem lies. It appears like the size of a chosen base unit might be completely arbitrarily decided upon. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was describing how Cantor stumbled upon the transfinite ordinals while studying the zeros of trigonometric polynomials. Not sure how this applies.

Yet the possible divisions are not arbitrary because divisibility is dependent on the size of the proposed base unit. Take 440 HZ as the baseline, for example. From this baseline, one octave (as a unit) upward brings us to 880HZ, and one octave downward brings us to 220HZ. So the higher octave consists of 440 HZ, and has different divisibility properties from the lower octave which consists of 220 HZ. This results in a complexity of problems in music. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sounds a little handwavy to me.

I ask you directly: Do you understand that I make no ontological or metaphysical claims for science? I make only the claim of accurate predictions to the limits of the experiments that we can do and the observations we can make.

You know, like when Eddington came back from photographing the 1919 eclipse and proved that the observations were consistent with Einstein's special theory of relativity and not Newton's theory of gravity. That's science. If you want to claim that this doesn't mean it's "true" in some metaphysical or absolute sense, I totally agree with you. So what's your point?

Well I had a thread a few days ago that got closed because I claimed math maps out the impossible and that the opposite flip side is true of every mathematical statement. — Gregory

Oh I see. I don't generally read every post, just the ones that tag me, unless it's a topic I'm especially interested in. So I may have missed your other posts. I am not a moderator and have no influence on what posts get closed, or why.

So perhaps the negative numbers are positive and vice versa, e.g. I was trying to start a conversation but people got upset. I don't deny math's usefulness and it's beauty, but math might not be the last statement about math itself. — Gregory

I myself am very openminded and pluralistic about math. In fact mathematical pluralism is a philosophical idea that's coming into vogue through the idea of the set-theoretic multiverse. That there's not one right set of rules for math; but rather, there's a whole universe of different axiom systems, related in some overarching superstructure of some sort. It's all pretty far out there. But I'm perfectly ok with alternative math thinking.

That said, however, negative numbers can NOT be positive. The positive numbers can be defined as a particular set of real numbers that satisfy a formal property. If you called them the negative numbers you could do that, but they'd still be the positive numbers. The negative numbers are logically different.

By contrast, in the complex numbers you can't define positive and negative numbers. You literally can't distinguish between $i$ and $- i$ using any logical formula.

So yes, we are free to imagine; but our imaginings must still meet certain standards of logic and mathematical interest.

Well I tagged you because other people weren't responding to posts I was making here. — Gregory

LOL. I'm the rhetorical foil of last resort? I'm not sure how to take that ... :-)

But do bear in mind that I have not seen any of your prior comments on this topic so feel free to loop me in from the beginning and don't assume I have any idea what we're talking about.

I started out ny explaining what I meant about the math thing so you don't think I'm a nut. — Gregory

"They closed my last thread and nobody else will talk to me so I'll try my ideas out on you," may not be how to accomplish that. [Just joking, hoping you have a sense of humor].

The OP here, however, was talking about Aquinas, who said that the world was contingent and needed a necessary God. Physicist are now saying nothingness was before the big bang, making the world contingent without the need for "the necessary". — Gregory

I am ignorant of classical philosophy and can not comment on Aquinas or any of his contemporaries.

Sean Carroll explicitly says this. He says the world is a brute fact of quantum fluctuation, using Russell's old phrase btw — Gregory

I love Sean Carroll. I've watched a lot of his videos. I love his vocal delivery, I find it very soothing. His mathematical and physical clarity of exposition are wonderful. He is a lot like Feynman in that he's a great physicist and a great teacher.

Now, when Sean Carroll is doing physics, he's doing physics. And when he's doing metaphysics, he's doing metaphysics. I'm aware he advocates the multiverse interpretation. But that's a metaphysical stance.

So when I say I love Sean Carroll, I would add that when he's doing physics I believe him; and when he is advocating for his favorite interpretation of QM, that's just his opinion.

The entire business of interpretations is nonsense. Newton didn't have an interpretation or an explanation of why gravity worked. He only knew that his theory predicted the results of observations and experiments. The same can be said, and that's ALL that can be said, for quantum mechanics.

I think any mechanical theory can be resurrected in the search for a "theory of everything". I said quantum physics is answer to Descartes, but perhaps Descartes is the answer to QM. Newton replaced Cartesianism with a lot of forces. God was the ultimate one that Descartes had wanted one force to control everything and thought God could be found only in the mind. Perhaps that "one force" is pure leverage, as he thought. It's a thought that needs to be worked out for sure, but the Stanford Encyclopedia says there is growing interest into Cartesian physics again — Gregory

That's very interesting. The difference between Descartes's approach and Newton's was that Descartes gave a mechanism for gravity; and Newton only described how it behaved. I frame no hypotheses, a very famous instance of Newton's tremendous insight into the very nature of science. Sean Carroll and all other celebrity physicists by day and metaphysicians by night, should study it.

If Descartes's vortices are coming back that would be great news. Have you a specific link please?

Probably. There are studies that literally argue our brains control time. There are lots of Youtube videos that run with this and say we are in almost complete control of our "free lunch", given us by the universe. There might be some truth in these videos that the universe gives itself to us freely. And then there are Napoleon Hill types (the forerunner of The Secret), that say our thoughts are in complete control of everything. These ideas may have a kernel of truth still — Gregory

I like to read widely too, but I try to be selective in what I believe. Perhaps you might tune your filter a bit. Newton himself was a mystic; but when he wrote about science, he stayed with science. He was a mystic when he was doing alchemy or looking for coded messages in the Bible. In his science papers he's very straight up hard core math and science. You might find it helpful to make that distinction for yourself.

Well I think my point was that objects are finite on one side, but flip the coin and it's infinite was well. — Gregory

Sorry don't know which coin that is. You know Gabriel's horn? It's a cone that has infinite surface area but finite volume. It's a famous calculus puzzler.

There no end to the descent into an object. Imagine taking a spaceship (one that forever shrinks) into a banana. Only infinity is in there. This seems to be a contradiction of logic. I have had enough trouble trying to explain the problem to people, let alone getting a satisfactory explanation. Think about it: objects are finite and infinite in the same respect — Gregory

No I don't follow that example. Why would "only infinity" be in there? Say a guy has a blood clot in his brain and you want to fix it before it bursts and kills him. So you take a team of neurosurgeons, put them in a submarine type of contraption, shrink them down to tiny size, inject them into the body into a blood vessel, and have them navigate to the brain to repair the clot.

This was the plot of the 1966 science fiction movie Fanstastic Voyage. I mention it only because it's an example where you shrink a spaceship to the size of a banana, to the size of a tiny spec of dust, even, and all the people and equipment inside it would just shrink proportionally. Of course this may be physically nonsense; but it's at least conceptually feasible if only in a science fiction sense. We can imagine it. In particular, there's no infinity in there. Just tiny little people. And why not?

Thanks for your response man — Gregory

You're very welcome. I hope you got your money's worth. And thank you! There are some on here who won't speak to me at all.

But I was talking about computers brought up by accident, combinations of atoms, not by intelligence. — Eugen

I'm sorry, I'm being facetious about a galaxy made of junk and I did not mean to confuse the issue.

Assuming is not a good thing. — Athena

I agree with pretty much everything you say; and even with some of the same passion.

I'm not sure why you directed this at me, but I'll take the liberty of using your excellent post to add some of my own thoughts; as I say, mostly in complete agreement.

How about our trouble with Iran begins during the Eisenhower administration because he used the CIA to create a rebellion in Iran that took out the democratically elected leader and put in his place a tyrant because the US wanted to be sure it had control of Iran and not the USSR. — Athena

I am well acquainted with the CIA's deposing of Mohammad Mosaddegh and the installation of the hated Shah. I saw a documentary on tv once. Mosseddegh spoke for the rights of the people of Iran to control their own resources and their own destiny. Clearly he had to go. Leading to the people overthrowing the Shah and leading to the Mullahs and Jimmy Carter's hostage crisis and all the rest right up to today. Perfectly well aware. I hope I've made it clear that I'm a very longtime critic of US foreign policy and fan of Chomsky.

That was a disaster as we brought in our troops making matters worse until the Iranians rebelled again and threw us out. I would be glad to go on about the wrongs done by our military-industrial complex, and how screwed the taxpayer is and how completely powerless we are if that is what people want to discuss. But that conversation would only be pathetic venting and do absolutely nothing to make things better. I am so angry about the perversion of our democracy and the place to make a difference is education. — Athena

Yes. I agree totally. And one of my great frustrations is that the warfare state, as some libertarian blogs might call it, is deeply bipartisan. Joe Biden represents the warfare state. Trump, by the way, ran in opposition to it; and to date has not started any new wars and has kept John Bolton from starting one with Iran. Just to toss in a little politics.

Had we been paying the real price of oil from the 1950's until fracking, our gasoline would have cost at least as much as the Brits were paying for gasoline and many of us could not have afforded it because the real cost of oil is the military expense of controlling it and that went sky high during the Reagan administration when we took control of the Persian Gulf and granted arms to people like Sadam. — Athena

Yes. Agreed totally. Oil. "The Great Game" as they called it in the 1890s, when the movers and shakers and spies of the world realized that oil was the key to the twentieth century.

I will confess, though, that I've always enjoyed driving and that I am going to drive my gas-guzzling automobile till the last drop of fuel is extracted from the last pollution-spewing refinery in the world. So there's that.

Bin Laden did not attack the people of the US. He attacked the military-industrial complex and we should have thanked him and taken advantage of this moment to take power away from the military-industrial complex — Athena

That made me laugh. I'm as naive as you, I wish such a think were imaginable. I do not think Americans were quite in the mood to go, "Wow, you know, this is a good opportunity to throw out the military-industrial complex and the big predatory banks and start over." Nah, that wasn't gonna happen. Instead lust for vengeance, invade a couple of countries while not ever having a proper forensic and criminal investigation of the perpetrators. You know the fix was in from day one, right? I was there. I'm not saying the underlying events were anything other than what the 9/11 Commission says they were -- but from that moment onward, everything was a psy-op to whip up the country to march off to the list of wars specified in the PNAC document.

So Bush and the neocons. Bad people, right? But what of the Dems? Hillary, and DiFi, and Biden, and all the other so-called "liberals" who always seem to be on the yes side of every war. That's the thing. The endless warfare state is bipartisan. Mainstream GOPs -- which Trump crushed -- and the Dems. The entire GOP/Dem alliance wants war and Trump ran against the wars. People should try to remember that.

but really is that our biggist problem compared to global warming and doing to our water supply what we have done to our oil supply, and ----- — Athena

I'm afraid I'm not big on global warming one way or another. I like an open road and a tank full of fossil fuel. Tail fins. That's when America was great!

Does anyone remember when we thought our constitution prevented the federal government from controlling public education? — Athena

Yes, I read the paleo-libertarian blogs. And there's a lot to be said for the point of view. Have you seen the condition of public education? The kids can't read, write, or think.

Do you happen to know which demographic is the most in favor of school vouchers so that parents can send their kids to independent private schools? African-Americans. That's right. They know their kids are being set up for a lifetime of failure in the public schools and they want to be able to get GOOD educations for their kids. I think the federal government has done a terrible job with the public schools.

How about remembering when the government could not track us through education, banking, and medical care and now our cell phones? — Athena

Yes, I read the cosmo-libertarian blogs too. I oppose the surveillance state. I oppose greatly the social credit score system being implemented by China, and coming here soon unless people wake up.

What do you think of having to have a government-approved ID to ride public transportation? — Athena

I oppose a national ID and I definitely oppose having to show any kind of ID to ride public transportation. How'd we end up talking about this? I'm a libertarian, but some people think that has a bad connotation, so I call myself an independent centrist with libertarian leanings, if that helps to categorize me. I totally oppose any restrictions on anyone doing anything that doesn't infringe on others rights. You want to get on the bus, get on the bus.

Why do you ask?

And that wall we are building with taxpayer money walls us in and well as walling others out. — Athena

I sometimes defend actions and positions taken by Trump; and overall, I support Trump for reelection. I am hardly blind to his many faults, and I don't agree with some or even many of his positions. On the wall, I oppose Trump with all my might. I happen to have a high interest in US-Mexican relations. The wall is bad optics, it's disrespectful, it's provocative, and most of all, it's ineffective. Wouldn't stop drugs, wouldn't stop the flow of people, wouldn't stop anything. Just make more human misery and insult Mexico, which is our friend, neighbor, and third largest trading partner.

On the other hand, let it be noted that Obama deported more Mexicans than Bush or Clinton and even Trump did; and that it was Obama who built the cages and put kids in them. Remember: The screwed up government is bipartisan. Very important point.

No more fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft p/quote]

I was in that demographic at the time and seriously considered that option.
— Athena

and the No Child Left Behind bill mandates schools to give military recruiters students names and addresses. — Athena

At the time of its passing I heard it referred to as No Lobbyist Left Behind. Pork-laden politicized bill I gather.

Bring it on, dump your anger here, — Athena

Me personally? Did I miss something? Hope you'll clarify.

then maybe people will start taking discussion of education seriously. — Athena

People who take education seriously advocate for school vouchers and basically demolishing the publi schools and the teachers unions that have destroyed them.

This is supposed to be a philosophy forum and this thread is about the military-industrial complex and culture change. I didn't think this forum got political. — Athena

Oh ok well you're right. Same thing happened to me, I was trying to be analytical and objective in one of the Trump threads and got attacked for this and that, and decided that anything political here is basically like arguing on Craigslist or Facebook.

But I think there's nothing wrong using examples ripped from the headlines to illustrate larger points.

As far as the mil-ind complex, I am 100% with you and the passionate and eloquent words you wrote.

We were known around the world as a nation that stood against war. — Athena

Yes. And I guess you'd call this getting political, but as an old anti-war type from the 60's and 70's, I'm shocked and appalled at the way the Democrats and even the left have suddenly gone all-in on the wars and the intelligence agencies and the generals as long as they think they'll get Trump.

And yes it started the moment Hillary voted for the Iraq war. At that moment the mainstream Dems had to take a side; and they sided with the warmongers. And now 20 years later we're at war in seven or so Middle East and North African countries and Pelosi and the Dems keep funding. Did you know that a resolution to end the Afghanistan war was voted down a week or two ago? It's insane. The mainstream GOP and the mainstream Dems did this. Trump ran against the warmongers in 2016 and they will throw everything they've got at Trump to get control so they can have their wars again.

Hillary was the warmonger. Trump was the peacemaker.

Iran loved us because we helped them get rid of British control. Making America great again did not mean a military power controlled by neocons and paid for by taxpayers. — Athena

November 22, 1963 is the date that deal went down. And Trump is the first president since JFK to directly challenge the intelligence agencies. Make of that what you will.

And our education was based on the Enlightenment, — Athena

Haven't you heard? The wokesters and Antifa and BLM are opposed to enlightenment values. Free speech is "privilege." I assume you follow current events so that I don't have to cite chapter and verse here. Noam Chomsky's been #cancelled for advocating free speech.

not technology for military and industrial purpose which I have said is education for slaves and is destroying our democracy. — Athena

Right on. I agree. I just wish that I could explain better to people that everything you say is true; AND that Trump represents opposition to all those things; and Biden represents the restoration of the unholy neocon-neoliberal alliance that's led us to this point.

Well, thanks for such a stimulating post that got my typing fingers flowing. I'm sure I'll soon be in trouble for something I wrote.

The only way to encounter the unknowable is to quieten the mind, to not ask the question. I can only see two ways of doing this: action, which shuts down the cognitive mind, or sleeping, when the mind ceases to think and what we get instead are dreams, almost an unconscious language, which of course we don’t understand. — Brett

I have many dreams I don't understand. Plots, characters, situations, dialog, dilemmas for me (always the protagonist) to solve. I had one this morning. Perhaps it's a nonphysical realm trying to tell me something, if only I could understand.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is in any event an epistemological and NOT an ontological fact. It's a limitation on what we can know (with our current theories) and says nothing about what truly is.
— fishfry

That view assumes counterfactual definiteness; the belief that the possibility of stopping a moving arrow to construct a definite position implies that the moving arrow must have a real and precise but unknown position when it isn't stopped or it's position otherwise measured. — sime

I have not been talking about Zeno's paradoxes of motion at all. I don't understand why you're mentioning it.

Yet this unquestioned assumption of counterfactual definiteness is the reason why Zeno's paradox appears paradoxical. To my understanding, Zeno's arguments are perfectly sound, which means that i have no choice but to reject counterfactual definiteness in order to resolve the paradox, and is the reason why i believe that Zeno ought to have stumbled across the underlying logic of Heisenberg's principle (when it is interpreted ontologically). — sime

Oh I see the connection you're making. Perhaps Zeno was getting at the fact that the universe CAN'T be continuous, hence the Planck length. Something like that. Is that what you mean?

Of course, the rejection of counterfactual definiteness is only one means of making sense of quantum entanglement and which is also the view of the Copenhagen interpretation, which means that Heisenberg uncertainty is interpreted as ontological ambiguity/incompatibility, rather than as epistemic uncertainty. — sime

I don't know what counterfactual definiteness is.

I'll stipulate that uncertainty is part of nature in the Copenhagen interpretation. That's a good point to keep in mind, thanks. But interpretations are metaphysics and not physics. Nobody knows what's "really" going on. For all we know it's all been determined at the moment of the Big Bang; or, everything that can happen does happen in some branch of the multiverse. In those interpretations, there is no ontological randomness or uncertainty. Fair enough?

I had this in a signals processing/wavelets class a while back. There's a standard proof here.

The Fourier transform of the momentum operator applied to a wavefunction is the position operator applied to that wavefunction. There's a theorem in signal processing called the Gabor limit that applies to dispersions (variance) of signals; the product of the dispersion of a signal in its time domain representation and the dispersion of a signal in its frequency domain representation is at least (1/4pi)^2. Math doesn't care that time is time and frequency is frequency, it might as well be position and momentum. The Gabor limit applied to (position operator applied to wavefunction) turns into the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for position + momentum of wavefunctions. — fdrake

Great stuff!

It's illustrated in the link you provided, if you Fourier transform a Gaussian with variance xx, you get a Gaussian with variance 1/x1/x; the product of the two variances is strictly positive. If you scale the original distribution by k, the Fourier transformed distribution will be contracted by 1/k. Contractions in transform space are dilations in original space. When dilations in time result in contractions in frequency, it isn't so surprising that the product of "overall scale"/(variance) of time and frequency has a constant associated with it. — fdrake

Ok. I will take another look at that.

It isn't an epistemological limit. — fdrake

Uh oh I'm in trouble. This is the opposite of what I thought was true.

So first, I did not follow all the technical details you presented yet. My general understanding is that first, there are two things going on. One, the mathematical formalisms of convergent series, Fourier series, etc.; and two, whatever it is that nature itself is doing. Mathematical model versus reality.

My understanding is that, for example, the Planck length is the length at which our current theories of physics break down and may no longer be applied. So that we can't sensibly speak of what might be happening below that scale. We can't say that reality is continuous or discrete; only that our current theories only allow us to measure to a discrete limit.

So the Planck scales (space and time) are epistemological and not necessarily ontological. That is my understanding. Why are you saying that uncertainty is true of nature, not just a limitation of what we can know?

In statistical modelling, there's a distinction between epistemic and aleatoric randomness. Epistemic randomness is like measurement error, aleatoric randomness is like perturbing a process by white noise. One property of epistemic randomness is that it must be arbitrarily reducible by sampling. Sample as much as you like, the uncertainty of that product is not going to go below the Gabor limit. That makes it aleatoric; IE, this uncertainty is a feature of signals that constrains possible measurements of them, rather than a feature of measurements of signals. There is no "sufficient knowledge" that could remove it (given that the principle is correct as a model). — fdrake

More good stuff. I found an article that said that the outcome of a coin toss is aleatoricaly random before it's flipped; but once it's flipped, it's epistemically random. Someone who can see the coin has a different rational belief in the probability than one who hasn't.

This is a good distinction to make.

But I am still confused about your conclusion. You're saying that a situation is ontological if there's no knowledge I could have that would settle the matter. Whereas I seem to mean something different. There's what we can know, and there's what really is. Two different things.

Can you help me understand why you think uncertainty is ontological? What does it mean that reality itself is uncertain? Isn't it just our measurements that are?

But if objects are trans-finitely infinite, how can they remain finite as well — Gregory

The point here would be that transfinite numbers are an abstraction but not an isolated one. They're an abstraction that arose naturally from the study of heat; just as the infinity of natural numbers is an abstraction that arises from everyday counting.

When I say for example that 1+1=4, I mean it esoterically. When Hawking says time acts as a fifth direction of space, he is talking as a scientist. He says nothing was before this curve in spacetime, meaning I think that the free lunch is contingent. Quantum uncertainty may be the root of physics, the answer to Descartes's vortex of the universe. Any talk of the "necessary" is sitar music thinking, and if our brains control time we have access to the heart of contingency — Gregory

That's a very interesting post. I don't know if it's specifically aimed at something I wrote. It doesn't sound like it offhand. If you say that 1 + 1 = 4, what do you mean? Esoteric as in woo? Crystal healing and Rosicrucians? Better narrow this down for me else I don't know what you mean at all. I used to know of many esoteric practices.

What does Hawking have to do with this? I wonder if you mis-tagged me perhaps? None of this convo sounds familiar. Free lunch is contingent? What am I supposed to make of that? I apologize if I was at one point having the other side of this conversation and no longer remember. Descartes's vortex theory is a discredited and discarded theory of gravity that lost to Newton's. It has absolutely nothing to do with quantum uncertainty.

Quantum uncertainty may be the root of physics. Ok. What's that mean? Sitar music thinking? What is that? Like dropping acid listening to the Beatles? I am really lost here.

"... if our brains control time we have access to the heart of contingency"

Ok. I can't argue with you there! Is the heart of contingency near the root of physics?

Definitely style points, this was a great post. I don't understand it though.

if this were true, then there would also be an infinite number of galaxies made of nothing but pineapples and bananas. — Kaarlo Tuomi

Not necessarily. The sequence 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 ... has infinitely many 1's but not infinitely many fish. Not any in fact.

It is not true that "everything must happen" in an infinite set. For example in the infinite set of primes {2, 3, 5, 7, 11, ...} there are no composite numbers.

But I didn't understand your point. I do not need an infinite universe to have a galaxy full of old technology. I just need a large finite universe with enough scientifically advanced civilizations to have all gotten the idea to dump their old technology into the inter-galactic void. If enough civilizations do that, gravity will do its thing and maybe all the space junk will glomp on to itself. Just like the islands of garbage floating in the world's oceans. Same idea.

Do you have a source for this? I'd love to see the connection. — fdrake

I don't have any references saved but I Googled around and found these. No warranty is expressed or implied as they say. I found these links but did not read them. Some are behind academic paywalls, a practice I will abolish under pain of death when I am made Emperor. There were many more links out there if you Google "Cantor trigonometric series."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274008538_About_Cantor_Works_on_Trigonometric_Series

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41133323?seq=1

https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.06845

https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-cantors-on-trigonometric-series

The long and short of it is that by the mid 1850's, people were interested in trigonometric series because Fourier had shown that these highly abstract series were vitally important in understanding heat flow. So mathematicians got interested in them.

Now remember this is a little before the time that analysis finally got completely rigorized. And trigonometric series posed challenges to the handwavy calculus of the day. Questions of convergence weren't well understood. The efforts to formalize analysis were in part driven by these kinds of issues.

Fourier showed that a given function could be decomposed into a trigonometric series; by analogy, in the same way a musical note is composed of tones and subtones. A natural question is, given a series, how do you know whether it converges to some function: And given two series, how do you know if they might happen to converge to the same function?

That latter is equivalent to saying that the difference of the two functions converges to zero. We are naturally lead to be curious about the structure of the zeros of a trigonometric series.

My understanding is that the zeroes might be distributed in many different ways. There might be one at every integer, say. Or what if there was a zero at each of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc. But now what if there were those zeros, and you threw in at 1/4, a nearby sequence that converges to it: $\frac{1}{4} + \frac{1}{n}$. So the main sequence 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, ... could have little tendrils coming off it. And each tendril could have tendrils. Each tendril would be countable, but there would be a graph of unimaginable complexity to keep track of.

In order to notate and keep track of the tendril graph, one would inevitably discover the transfinite ordinal numbers. The transfinite ordinals arise more or less directly (by way of abstract math) from purely physical considerations.

As I say, this last bit is my own personal understanding of how trigonometric series must have led Cantor to the ordinals. I could be wrong. It's a belief looking for the written evidence, which is probably behind a paywall somewhere. (Note -- The Wiki page on trig series that I linked seems to confirm my theory in a general way).

Now at this point, Cantor, who was very religious, decided that after all the infinities he'd just discovered, the ultimate infinite must be God. So he dropped his work in real analysis and gave himself over to set theory. Today set theory has become the standard conceptual framework for mathematics; but Cantor's theology is long forgotten. I wonder if he'd be more happy or more sad at those two outcomes.

But he also says this (NYT): ''half-baked philosophy has sometimes gotten in the way of doing science." — jgill

And the converse!

By this I guess you’re suggesting that the mind is the source, or core, of what we are. But that doesn’t do it for me because the mind is still an idea. You equate “self” and “mind” in your quote by Descartes. Are they both the same thing? — Brett

I can already see that my own idea is pulling me into consequences I don't agree with. If the mind is the only thing that can NOT be simulated, the mind is the only thing that's inarguably real. Yes it must be the source. Or "It's all in my mind." In which case, what is the role of the outside world? None at all. I'm a Berkeley idealist. Which is a bit extreme.

So I guess my belief in the primacy of mind may lead me to problems. But if the mind can be an effect, then we might all be machines after all. I find that idea distasteful which is why I always argue against it strenuously.

This is an issue I've wondered about when people talk about simulation theory. Are they simulating my reality as in Descartes' deceiver? If so, then my "I" is still separate from my vat programmers. Do the simulationists instead mean that the computer not only creates my reality, but also somehow creates my "I"? So that my I is an illusion too? And Descartes was wrong? That's the argument for simulating a mind. That Descartes was wrong about the primacy of his I.

I agree that this is hard to take. You could just as easily substitute God in there. — Brett

Yes, some people have noted that the trendy "singularity" theorists who are into mind uploading and such are actually expressing ancient religious ideas in a modern technological guise. We'll be uploaded into a glorious heaven with angel subroutines, and the Great Programmer will care for us.

What happens if you have yourself uploaded by some company that hires a sadistic programmer who tortures the uploaded minds every night behind his employers' back? I'm not sure I'd want to take that chance. Like going to a bad dentist, but forever. There's a sci fi story in here.

My problem is that science is an idea, a fiction, of the mind. So many ideas coalesce that add up to science. Therefore it cannot be subject to science. — Brett

It's a fiction inspired by nature. And it seems to work very well. At the end of the day if we are physicalists, we must admit that if humans are made of atoms and humans are conscious, then piles of atoms may be conscious. There's a lot we don't know about how this works!

Yes, so there cannot be an “I”, true? — Brett

Well ... I have an I and you have an I. But didn't Jung talk about the collective unconscious? Many of the world's great religions see each I as a manifestation of a much larger universal I. We're all thoughts in the mind of God. Programs running in the Great Computer. Temporal manifestations of the Eteneral I, or the Eternal Eye as symbolized in occult symbology as on the familiar US dollar bill.

There is another angle which is that our behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapsis, rather than free will. — Brett

In other words: A bowling ball dropped from the top of a tall building has no free will in what it does. And if not, then how could we? We're just following physical law.

As far as hormones etc. that's just kind of a levels issue. The quarks make up the protons and neutrons which make up the atoms which make up the molecules up to the organs and hormones and complex emotional and physical regulatory mechanisms of the brain ... really it's all quite mysterious.

I disagree with anyone who says they have a clear and certain idea about how all this works! I distrust all of the clever thinkers of the day who think they've got this nut cracked. This nut ain't cracked.

So there is no “I” except the one created, the fictional “I”. — Brett

My I is not a fiction! But I have no proof; and if I assert the primacy of my mind then I'm halfway to idealism. I'm back with Descartes in 1641. Me and my vat programmers. Which is pretty much what I believe anyway. I think that I'm a Boltzmann brain, a momentary and highly statistically unlikely local coherence in an otherwise formless and random universe. It's just a question of time till I blink out and take the rest of you with me. Must idealism lead to solipsism? Could Descartes get out of his predicament without invoking God? Berkeley too, he invoked God as the reason we experience a coherent outside world. We moderns have no such rhetorical tactic at our disposal. We must think our way through this dilemma without God. Is that what Nietsche meant? That for modern man, God is dead. We have to figure this thing out for ourselves.

Out of idle curiosity, what exactly is your objection to quantum physics?
— fishfry

If you're interested, just go back and read the posts I made in this thread. They aren't large, and there isn't a lot.
— Metaphysician Undercover
Fishfry - don't waste your time. — Relativist

LOL.

Are you familiar with the frequency-time uncertainty exposed by the Fourier transform? Once you familiarized yourself with this uncertainty principle, you'll see that what it says exactly is that time cannot be measured precisely. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well this isn't so bad. I seem to recall that Heisenberg uncertainty comes ultimately from Fourier analysis or some such. The idea seems to be referenced here.

I'm not sure how this relates to your concerns regarding QM; but I will say that this particular remark of yours is quite a bit more sophisticated than your usual nihilistic denialism of basic symbolic reasoning whenever you attempt to discuss math with me. Odd that someone who denies that 2 + 2 and 4 represent the same thing, is willing to accept the Fourier transform.

I certainly agree with your point that Heisenberg and ultimately the theory of Fourier series imply that we can't measure time with absolute precision; and that measurement precision trades off between time and frequency. But we already knew this so I don't know the point you're making. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is in any event an epistemological and NOT an ontological fact. It's a limitation on what we can know (with our current theories) and says nothing about what truly is.

Which is the same point I made to you in my previous post. Science isn't making any ontological claims. You're fighting a strawman of your own imagination.

A historical note that I find interesting. What was Cantor doing when he discovered set theory? He was studying the zeros of the trigonometric polynomials that arose from Fourier's study of heat transfer.

That is: If you apply a heat source to one end of an iron bar under laboratory conditions, and carefully observe how the rest of the bar warms up; you will inevitably discover transfinite ordinals and cardinals.

Cantor's work arose directly from physical considerations. This point should be better appreciated by those who dismiss transfinite set theory as merely a mathematical abstraction.

Conventional epistemology makes a distinction between propositional/knowing-that knowledge and various other forms, such as knowledge-how, (e.g. knowing how to ride a bicycle, which you don't learn from a book), and knowing a person or a place by acquaintance. For a while, the leading response to Jackson was the ability hypothesis, which claims that, on her release, Mary gained, not propositional knowledge, but certain abilities, such as how to recognize, recall and compare colors. These are generally considered to be examples of knowing-how, not knowing-that/propositional knowledge. These days, the favorite form of reply seems to be "old knowledge in a new guise": when Mary sees colors, she does not gain any new knowledge, but sees her existing knowledge of physics in a new way. To me, this seems both implausible and unnecessary, an attempt to explain away something that already has a straightforward explanation, so I am disinclined to describe it further. — A Raybould

I'm in way over my pay grade here. I'll just say that I'm a big believer in the importance of qualia to any theory of mind, and opposed to those who say you can have intelligence without self-awareness. I'm sure I'm muddling many philosophical issues.

I don't deny quantum uncertainty. I just explained how it is the product of bad metaphysics. — Metaphysician Undercover

For someone who doesn't believe that 2 + 2 and 4 represent the same thing, and who essentially rejects the very idea of symbolic reasoning, I'm impressed that you've worked your way up to quantum physics. Out of idle curiosity, what exactly is your objection to quantum physics? After all, most physicists don't think about metaphysics at all; they just "shut up and calculate" as the saying goes.

Quantum physics isn't making any metaphysical claims at all. Its only claim is that it predicts lab experiments to a dozen decimal places. By that standard it's the most successful scientific theory in history. It doesn't need metaphysical justification. It's "only" science. Nobody (not me, at least) is claiming that quantum physics is reality. Some people believe that but they're wrong.

It's a model. A hell of a good one. But any metaphysical claims are just that, metaphysics.

So aren't you about to argue against a strawman here?

In fact it’s like there’s nothing there in the human mind at all. The idea, the fiction, is not the mind it’s a creation of the mind. So even the mind is a creation of the mind, another fiction. — Brett

Very thought-provoking essay.

I do not believe the mind can be a creation of the mind. The mind is the only thing that can NOT be a creation of the mind. I believe Descartes made that point in his Meditations of 1641. He said even if everything I experience is nothing more than an illusion created by a supremely clever Deceiver; even so, there is me, asking the question. Everything may be an illusion; but not my own self. Not my own mind.

This is something I believe. It's fashionable these days to claim the opposite, that we're programs running in a cosmic computer that has figured out how to implement an actual mind. Something we have no idea how to do because by definition, mind is subjective and is by definition not subject to science!

Even if I'm a brain in a vat; what is the "I" that thinks I'm typing on my laptop? I have sum suck-assed vat programmers if that's the case. "Ok, let's write the script for 2020." Thanks guys.

The "I" remains a mystery. Nobody knows how to create an "I", or even how to know if anyone else besides them has got one.

But that's an even worse scenario. If solipsism is true and I'm the only one here, then I'm the one who cooked up 2020. This is all my fault!

tl;dr: I believe that the mind transcends anything and everything else. I do not believe a mind can create a mind. We don't even know what a mind is or have any idea how to study it, since technically mind lies outside the realm of science, being entirely subjective. So it's the height of nonsense to say that a mind could create a mind. A lot of people believe it, but it's a category error.

Democracy is no more or less an idea, or fiction, than the idea of God and heaven. — Brett

I wanted to mention that Searle calls this kind of thing socially constructed reality. That is, there are things that are real only by virtue of everyone agreeing that they're real. Money, cities, laws, real estate, nations, commerce. All of civilization. The Construction of Social Reality.

Things like real estate or political parties are real. Nobody would say they're not real. But they're not real like a brick wall is real. A brick wall is a "brute fact," as Searle calls it. Democracy is a social fact. But a fact nonetheless.

is the ruling elite interested in destroying
the US? — Number2018

Arguably yes.

Your understanding is that all was initiated be Dems — Number2018

Surely that is nothing I ever wrote or believed.

Right now, if Dems
win the elections, will they try to stop the trend? — Number2018

I've asked myself that question. I'm of the opinion that the mainstream Dems (Pelosi and company) are using the leftist violence to further their aim of deposing Trump; and believe they'll be able to get the genie back in the bottle after they win the election.

On the contrary, I think they'll find that they've unleashed forces that they can no longer control; and that if the Dems should win, nothing they do will satisfy the radical leftist mob.

We'll all have to wait and find out. Personally I'm not optimistic.

The problems around the world are challenging and I am not sure what part in them the US should play? But we can know this is not the first time a democracy became a defender of the world. — Athena

You're defining current US foreign policy as defending the world? Our destruction of Libya and Syria under Obama? Our futile invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Our incursions into Somalia and Niger?

I'm afraid you and I will need to agree to disagree. US foreign policy is not benign, is not about defending freedom, is not helping anyone. On Bush's watch the US became a torture regime, and under Obama the torture became institutionalized. This is wrong. It's evil.

he knowledge of physics that Mary has learned from her studies is entirely propositional (i.e. expressed in textbooks or lectures as a series of sentences that are distilled into propositions), while knowing "what it is like" is not propositional — A Raybould

Ah. Nice distinction. Well I'm no philosopher so I can't go down this rabbit hole. But just because subjective knowledge isn't propositional doesn't mean it's not real, not part of the universe that needs to be explained. After all the logos isn't everything; there's also the mythos, right?

If physics is propositional and everything that's not propositional doesn't count as actual knowledge (or whatever argument is being made by the anti-Jacksons) then this IMO is scientism versus science.

If you reject everything in the world that's not propositional, you limit yourself to words and symbols and you ignore the rest of reality, the nonverbal part. The experiences you had as a baby before you acquired words. The experiences you have as an adult that go beyond words. Faith and qualia being two examples that come to mind.

I should add, if I haven't made it clear, that I'm in no position to hold up my end of an argument here. I know the Mary's room story but not any of the lengthy arguments and counter-arguments that arose from it. You've already educated me. Still, I'm not one who believes that all knowledge is propositional. That viewpoints dismisses the most important aspects of life.

Our present situation is ultimately different from China’s state of affairs in 1966 — Number2018

I'm glad you're so optimistic. My concern is that in contrast to, say, the Occupy protests of 2011, the current destruction and violence is approved of by Democratic leaders. I don't share your view but I suppose we'll all find out. I'm not worried because I'm not a statue of George Washington and they're only coming for the statues /s.

So I am trying a new approach, the following comes out of Chris Hedges's book Empire of Illusion. — Athena

I'm a big fan of Chris Hedges. I don't share his leftist outlook but I do appreciate his analysis of the warfare state and how it functions. I've noticed that while the US comes apart on domestic issues, there's broad bipartisan support on our awful foreign policy. Congress just decided last week to keep troops in Afghanistan past the election. We've only been at war there for 19 years. We're still in Iraq too. When does this insanity end?

To someone like me who cares about foreign policy, it's almost as if the domestic chaos is a smokescreen to take the public's mind off the wars, which continue unabated.

Nah, it must just be a coincidence. Pay no attention to the wars.

We do live in Ike's prediction.

Actually, galaxies are made up of lots of dust...some of which turns into stars which then turn back into dust. And planets and such also. — Frank Apisa

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Jackson's use of the word "knew" needs to be clarified. When Jackson claims Mary "knew everything physical about the color red" he refers to everything except the direct experience of redness and that implies Jackson is of the view that physicalism entails that knowing what brain-state corresponds to actually seeing red should evoke the brain-state of actually seeing red but that's an odd and false claim to make because the brain-state of knowing what brain-state corresponds to actually seeing red and the brain-state of actually seeing red are themselves two different brain-states and being different they can't have the same effect. To clarify further, suppose x is the brain-state of seeing the color red and y the brain-state of knowing x. Clearly x and y are different but, most importantly, both are can be brain-states i.e. Mary's room argument fails to achieve its intended objective of refuting physicalism. — TheMadFool

I was only able to follow the first couple of sentences then got lost.

My understanding of this fascinating example is that after her color vision is restored (or she goes outside for the first time, or whatever) she learns something new: namely, what it's like to see the color red.

The point being that qualia are a form of knowledge. Knowledge is not only about what's "out there," but also what it's like to experience the stuff out there. Therefore, qualia are meaningful and count as information about the world. Therefore, any theory of mind (computationalism, physicalism, etc.) must account for subjective experience.

In other words if someone claims that the world is a computer simulation or that the mind is a computer program that could be uploaded to digital hardware operating according to the laws of physics; my response is to challenge them to explain qualia and self-awareness. How does a Turing machine come to know what it feels like to compute? If they can't answer that, I can dismiss their argument.