1. According to the FTA, if some property x was not present at the conception of the universe, then the universe would not have existed. — Jjnan1

As a minor note, the argument is not that the universe could not have existed if it lacked some feature, but that it would have been lifeless if its fundamental parameters were not confined within a narrow range. I suppose this correction doesn't affect the logic of the argument, which, I confess, escapes me.

God is usually said to be both all-powerful and free. Freedom is only meaningful if there are alternative possibilities. If the world could not have been otherwise than it is, as a matter of metaphysical law, that would have robbed God of freedom and of power to choose and bring about one state of the world over another. Indeed, God would have been superfluous in such a world. For God to be free and omnipotent, it ought to be metaphysically possible for the world to have been different.

The view that I am contradicting is the one that claims that self-interest is rational, whereas altruism is irrational. You know, the founding principle of game theory. — unenlightened

"rational self- interest" — unenlightened

You are misreading this expression. In game theory, economic theory and such, the self and the interest in "rational self-interest" are taken for granted. Being rational here simply means being smart about maximizing personal gain, whatever it may be (e.g. getting out of prison as soon as possible in the famous Prisoners' Dilemma).

So I would like to know who is the actual target of your criticism? Can you give some real examples?

The view that I am contradicting is the one that claims that self-interest is rational, whereas altruism is irrational. You know, the founding principle of game theory. — unenlightened

You have labeled this view as a fallacy, but in contradicting it, you are following the same reasoning pattern. You are taking a different turn at some point, but that turning point is on the same path of reasoning from an is to an ought, so your view is not any less fallacious than the one you are attacking.

It seems to me that in light of this, it makes perfect practical sense for me to be concerned with feeding myself, and allow you to worry about feeding yourself - we each know our own needs. But it makes no sense at all for me to think that feeding myself is more important than feeding yourself. — unenlightened

I am still not sure what you are trying to say here, but this struck me as bizarre. I get a feeling that you are working within a rationalist framework where you believe that you can't take even such an elementary action as feeding without first rationally justifying it from first principles.

1.0 :cool: (whatever that means)

Just wanted to link this critical review of recent experimental meta-ethics research: Empirical research on folk moral objectivism (2019). Some interesting observations and a large reference section.

Or maybe deep in the bowels of Google's servers, my comments here are linked to other aspects of my online identity, and they factor that into my Youtube suggestions. — fishfry

This site uses Google Analytics, which places a tracking code on every page, so that every time you visit a page, Google knows about it. Google also indexes page content, and of course Google owns Youtube. I don't know much about this technology, but theoretically, putting all this together, it is possible that the pages that you browse affect the choice of suggested videos. (I block google-analytics.com, and I keep Google login confined to those instances where I actually need it - although Google also keeps track of IP addresses.)

Harris is superficially clever but lacking in depth; and ultimately intellectually unsatisfying. — fishfry

This.

The statistics for COVID coming from various countries are not directly comparable because collection and reporting of data depend on the cooperation of the population, the facilities, and the politicians. — magritte

True, official statistics underestimates COVID mortality almost everywhere, for various reasons (not necessarily nefarious), but the extent of undercounting varies widely. However, in retrospect we can always look at excess mortality (difference between this year's deaths from all causes and the average number over the same period in the last several years) and get a measure of what's going on. It's a crude measure, but when the excess is pronounced, it's hard to argue with. (Though some try: Russian authorities threw a screaming fit when several prominent news organizations published their analyses based on official mortality data that showed that Russian COVID statistics were way off.)

Excess mortality in 24 European countries by week

We can conduct experiments to determine a specific finite age of the Earth. But how would we test whether something was infinite in age, size or number as opposed to just really, really large? — Andrew M

Obviously, not by counting or measuring directly. We don't hold a stopwatch to measure the age of the earth either - we use other measurements to establish theories in which the age of the earth is a bound variable. Same with the size of the universe: it makes a difference to the theories that we use to explain astrophysical observations - their accuracy, simplicity and compatibility with other well-established theories. You can't just arbitrarily choose a size without breaking a bunch of stuff.

Bears noticing: ∞ ∉ R — jorndoe

I don't know why they think that. But if it's to be a thought experiment about the physical world, then we have no experimental evidence that there is, or can be, anything infinite. And what would such an experiment look like? How would it be measured? — Andrew M

Same way as how we establish anything in science: that Earth is ~4.5 Gyr old ("How could you possibly know? Were you there?!"), that pulsars are neutron stars, etc. We develop models and evaluate their closeness of fit, simplicity, and other epistemic and scientific virtues.

In the Edge essay Tegmark faults infinities for some specific outstanding problems in cosmology, such as the measure problem, and suggests that alternative finitistic models would do better. (Needless to say, this is not as simple and uncontroversial as it sounds.) Notice how this argument fits with the general theory selection process that I outlined above, as opposed to "Gosh! Infinities are so paradoxical!" or "Gosh! How could we ever measure infinity?!"

The language is always tricky around ontology and I want to say that horizons, like mirages, like like individuality, like desire, are not social constructs, not fantasies, and not material objects, but objective features of perception. — unenlightened

You can't even get a 'you' from an 'is' — unenlightened

But whether these things are deemed to be material or not (I don't much care), the boundaries of perception are still ises, they are facts about the physical world. It's just that when discussing the physical world we are more used to the perspectiveless view from nowhere, whereas perceptions are centered on an individual, they are indexical. This distinction doesn't counter the naturalistic fallacy though: you are still attempting to derive normative from non-normative.

I am obliged to use the language we have. Clearly we can and we do get a self and a sense of self from our sensual experiences and in describing how it happens, my intention was to convey that the distinction and identification we get is a feature of perception, not of reality as such. — unenlightened

There is a kind of materialistic presupposition here (for lack of a better word) that draws a hard boundary between impersonal physical facts like skin and light and neurons on the one side, and on the other - psychological and social facts that are sort of pretend, unreal. But are they, really?

Perhaps ontology is the wrong tool here, because the argument in question is epistemological. It says that reason cannot straightforwardly derive one set of facts from the other.

The normal version is 'you can't get an ought from an is', and it is usually used to deny the 'reality' of moral claims. My radical extension is to deny also the 'reality of identity claims:- — unenlightened

You make it sound like there is a dichotomy between the naturalistic fallacy on the one hand and moral skepticism (denying the reality of moral facts) on the other. But the naturalistic fallacy thesis is more narrow: whatever the status of moral claims, they cannot be justified by or reduced to non-moral facts alone. This leads to two possibilities: either moral facts do not exist, or they are epistemically autonomous.

You can't even get a 'you' from an 'is' - the self is a naturalistic fallacy constructed from the limitations of the senses, which do not make any real boundary or change in the world. This means that there is no difference in substance between what one ought to do and what one wants to do, because the 'one' is fictional in both cases. — unenlightened

Same thing here. The natural extension of the naturalistic fallacy thesis would be to claim that personal identity is essentially normative: it cannot be derived from or reduced to non-normative (material) facts about the world without recourse to some normative postulates. But that doesn't make the self a fallacy. Accepting the above thesis, one can still say that the self is a psycho-social construct. It is as real as such constructs are - which I think are plenty real.

I considered doing that and then deleted it. I knew if I wrote a summary then people would read that and jump to conclusions without reading the whole paper. — Malcolm Lett

Well, that's the point of summaries, in a way: to enable readers to jump to the conclusion of whether to commit to reading a largish text or to pass. But I know what you mean.

Different categories of science have different procedures and protocols and requirements to say that something is proved to be so. Technically they have not proven that smoking causes cancer because you can't ethically take nonsmokers with no tendency towards cancer and have them start smoking. — TiredThinker

Technically, they have, according to the very criterion of proof that you give in the first sentence - that is to say, the epistemic standards of proof have been met to the satisfaction of most practitioners in the field (of epidemiology).

Are you just concerned about (not) making metaphysical commitments when we write formulas? — SophistiCat

Yes. — Pfhorrest

I don't think that's an issue above and beyond the old realist/non-realist divide. Non-realists simply mean something different than realists when they say "there exists x such that..." - or so they say. I am not even convinced that there is a substantive difference between these positions.

That use is not contrary to what I’m saying at all. In fact it’s a great illustration of the alternative reading of the “existential” operator I’m suggesting: instead of “there exists some x such that [formula involving x] is true”, I suggest “for some value of x, [formula involving x] is true”. — Pfhorrest

I fail to see the difference. We are expressing a commitment to the existence of something from the variable's domain. So in what sense are we not making an existential commitment?

Reading your other comments, it seems like in my example ∃x∈R ( f(x) = 0 ) you would want to say that if there were such things as reals (and all the other things that are tacitly assumed by the usual interpretation of that formula), then some real would satisfy the formula f(x) = 0. Is that all? Are you just concerned about (not) making metaphysical commitments when we write formulas?

This reading is inconsistent with how ∃ is actually used in mathematical texts, at least the ones I am familiar with (which would be math textbooks mostly). — SophistiCat

Can you elaborate? — Pfhorrest

The way ∃ would typically be used would be to say things like "∃x (x∈R, f(x) = 0)", that is to say, "equation f(x) = 0 has a real solution." The way you would have it, that formula would say "equation f(x) = 0 may or may not have a real solution," which is trivially true. What would be the point of such an operator?

All existential operator does is assert existence. If you remove that, you have nothing left.

Both quantification functions, ∃ and ∀, only specify how many values of the variable they quantify make the statement that follows true, and the statement doesn't necessarily have to be asserting the existence of anything, so saying that there exists some thing goes beyond what this function really does. — Pfhorrest

This reading is inconsistent with how ∃ is actually used in mathematical texts, at least the ones I am familiar with (which would be math textbooks mostly).

Hexagrams are arrangements of six Yin/Yang lines, making for 2⁶ = 64 possible hexagrams .

DNA codons are arrangements of three bases, and there are four different bases, making for 4³ = 64 possible codons.

No deep mystery here, just a very simple structural property.

I know fuck-all about I Ching, but I suspect that the similarities don't go much deeper than that (without some very creative interpretation). Do some of the I Ching hexagrams mean the same thing? Because DNA "language" is highly redundant, with 61 codons specifying only 20 different amino acids. And the other three codons denote start and stop sequences - the equivalent of punctuation. Do I Ching hexagrams include punctuation?

Anyway, I think such numerology is very silly. As is this perpetual canard about "ancient wisdom" somehow prefiguring modern science. Despite numerous alleged connections, I can't think of a single instance in the entire history of human civilization where some "ancient wisdom" led to a scientific insight. The connection is invariably discovered in retrospect by some amateur numerologist with a book to sell.

Towards the end, Peterson did propose a very interesting view on an evolutionary mechanism behind the belief in God, and that proposition itself has some very interesting outtakes that the pair unfortunately failed to stumble upon themselves.

In my own summary of Peterson's explanation, the belief in god is an evolutionary stable strategy that codifies a heuristic for living life in a way that is beneficial to the community in general. — Malcolm Lett

Meh, that idea is at least a hundred years old, and has been the subject of a body of evolutionary, anthropological and cognitive research (some in support and some in opposition). Abstract ponderings from dilettantes like Harris and Peterson are of little value at this point.

Interesting, thanks!

You may be interested to know that at the time of declaring the end of the communist system at the end of 1991, what was known in liberal countries as "poverty" (i.e. having a lifestyle that would cost about $180 a month in a developed country, or less) was not even 5% of the Soviet population, and that because it had grown in the last five years. In the best moment of the Union it was less than 2%. The "misery" (people without housing, in street situation, without basic access to food and minimum means, etc.) practically did not exist. — David Mo

I don't know how these numbers were calculated. It would be impossible to do a comparison with other countries based on money income, because Soviet currency was nonconvertible and incomes and living expenses were not distributed as they would be in a market economy. No direct comparison with US or Western Europe would be accurate because of how different life was in the Soviet Union.

That disparity went both ways. Some basic foodstuffs like bread were heavily subsidized and distributed, so that as long as you were not institutionalized and had even a tiny income, you were unlikely to literally starve to death. But for all that, most people spent most of their income on food, clothing and other necessities. A Russian-made TV set could cost more than a month's wages.

Cars were not affordable for most people, but then people were not very mobile (in part due to artificial restrictions), and public infrastructure was built with the lack of personal transportation in mind. And if you were determined to buy a car, you would have to wait for years to get one, giving you time to save.

Average savings were just a few percent, but most people in the later period were guaranteed a pension at retirement. Medicine was nominally free, but gratuities in the form of presents or cash payments were common.

State-provided housing - for those who had it - was cheap. But if you were in a situation where you had to rent privately (and illegally), housing would be very expensive. Homelessness "did not exist" officially - indeed, it was criminalized. That doesn't mean it didn't exist in reality though, it just wasn't obvious to outsiders (not in the closing decades of the regime, when it was more image-conscious). And those who were not technically homeless sometimes lived all their lives in cramped, barely livable barracks and hostels.

What interested me about this was not the paper, nor the fact that a retired comp. sci. prof would start writing such papers, but the journal that published it. Journal of Mind and Behavior looks like a small, obscure journal, but it doesn't look like a predatory open-access publication that will publish any drek for a fee: it is indexed, it is associated with the University of Main and it is edited by respectable academics. Its content, however, is an odd mix of some psychology papers and some pretty random, nominally philosophical stuff (some of which may be OK - I haven't looked that deep).

I don't have that much experience with academic publishing, and none in this area. If anyone knows more about this - what's the deal here? How common are such journals?

I was going to respond, but as I was thinking about what I was going to say, I remembered that I already made similar points in this thread, which you largely ignored, as you also ignore most other objections, in favor of recycling the same talking points or digressing on various bits of pop-science. So I'll leave you to it.

So the problem that you identify is that scientific and engineering communication requires a common language. But whatever lingua franca happens to be used (nowadays it is most often English), it won't be native to all speakers. And when people are forced to use a foreign language for communication, that often leads to miscommunication and associated problems.

And your solution to this problem is to invent an entirely new language (never mind that a number of such languages have already been invented over the years) that won't be native to anyone and that no one today speaks at any level of proficiency?

Um, how is this going to help again?...

This group and this artist are amazing!

Roomful of Teeth perform Caroline Shaw's 'Partita for 8 Voices'


Roomful Of Teeth: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Framing utilitarianism as an imperative to promote human flourishing is actually quite common. — SophistiCat

I've been looking around to find anyone making the same arguments I am making here. If you can direct me to a source you are familiar with I'd be grateful. — Thomas Quine

Geoffrey Scarre's writes in "Utilitarianism" (Routledge, 1996) that "most forms of utilitarianism are welfarist, concerned that lives should flourish or prosper according to some specified criterion of well-being" (noting along the way that not all utilitarians are hedonists).

Or coming at the question from the other side, Gilbert Harman asks in "Human Flourishing, Ethics, and Liberty" (1983):

What kind of ethics do we get, if we begin with a conception of human flourishing and attempt to derive the rest of ethics from that conception? A number of writers have expressed sympathy for such an approach to ethics, although they disagree about details: Henry Veatch, Robert Nozick, Alasdair Maclntyre, John Finnis, David Norton, Philippa Foot, Tibor Machan, Elizabeth Anscombe, Ayn Rand, and Abraham Maslow. — Gilbert Harman

Harman critically assesses various approaches to ethics that fit this criterion, utilitarianism being one of them:

A second feature of this approach to ethics [after relativism - SC] is that it tends toward utilitarianism or consequentialism. The basic value is human flourishing. Actions, character traits, laws, and so on are to be assessed with reference to their contribution to human flourishing.

Hi András - this is an original approach of mine inspired by Aristotle and Darwin. It has no resemblance to utilitarianism apart from being consequentialist. — Thomas Quine

It is, of course, utilitarian in a general sense - not quite in the way Bentham and other classical utilitarians framed it, but then few modern proponents of utilitarianism would own its classical formulation. Framing utilitarianism as an imperative to promote human flourishing is actually quite common.

But yes, I neglected to mention the naturalistic fallacy used as a justification (good = adaptive = flourishing), which again is quite common. (Just as a note, Social Darwinism followed the same justificatory logic. I don't mean this as a smear by association, but I think the only reason you don't follow the same track is that you are unwilling to pursue the less appealing implications of your theory to their logical conclusions, which betrays extraneous moral considerations at play.)

It is a variant of utilitarianism, with some pop-science thrown in. The general approach was formulated by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, and since then the idea has waxed and waned, but never gone out of circulation. It has its proponents among modern philosophers, including pop-philosophers like Sam Harris - and of course it is regularly being put forward by non-professionals who may or may not be aware of the history.

you-all — tim wood

I am not "you-all." I don't care for Biden. But I am not of an opinion that if I can't get what I want right fucking now, then let the world burn and I'll roast the marshmallows. Unlike X, to me the lives of 1,000 children are not a trifle.

A degenerate ratfuck is one who doesn't care if 1,000 children get bombed.

Really?

Translation: where reality is negative there I bury my head in the sand. — JerseyFlight

What reality? For all I know, those "intellectuals" are strawmen, a figment of your imagination. You ranted a bunch, but didn't identify the target of your rant. Why should I care?

Such general wisdom as "there are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people" I can easily do without.

Nearly all of them are Elitist. — JerseyFlight

Who are them? "Intellectuals" is a vague concept. If you don't indentify the target of your invective, it loses whatever bite you think it has.

On the other hand, the Liar is introduced as a premise, but then behaves like an inference rule. ('Given me, you may introduce not-me.') You have to understand the inference rule to use it, that is true. But that's understanding-how, not understanding-that. Inference rules are deliberately empty, have no 'that' content. They don't say anything themselves; it's premises that actually say stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, exactly, there is nothing wrong with the syntax of the sentence, it is only its semantic content that seems to be a problem. But in order to come to this conclusion you have to parse and interpret the sentence, which means that the sentence is ipso facto meaningful, at least on some level.

It isn't often that practically every OP that someone posts is either jaw-droppingly stupid or nauseatingly disgusting or both.

Also, '... is meaningful' feels like a weasel-predicate. That is, '... is meaningful' deliberately avoids asking, for instance, 'What does it mean?' or 'What does it say?' Ask an average person about the Liar, and you can expect them to reply, 'Well that's stupid. It doesn't say anything.' — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think so. On the surface, the meaning is clear: First, the sentence asserts that something (presumably a proposition) is false. That's not a problem, we generally understand such assertions. The proposition, rather than being quoted, is instead indicated - also not necessarily a problem. For example, "The second sentence on page 23 is false" would be a perfectly meaningful thing to say (but what if the sentence indicated happens to be that very sentence?) It is only once we trace the logical implications that we realize that something is wrong, but in order to be able to do that, didn't we have to first understand what the sentence is saying?

If you refer to some other sentence P, then there is the assumption that P can be either true, or false. For it to have that possibility, it must make a claim against reality. If you say, "That sentence is false," and "that" sentence is, "This sentence is false", its still just nonsense. — Philosophim

Why not? You are just restating your position, but you are not giving reasons for it. What the liar sentence claims is the truth value of a sentence, which all natural and many formal languages are equipped to do.

This sentence is false, does not make any sense. False in what way? — Philosophim

You can state, seemingly unproblematically, "X is false" for any number of X, including X that are sentences of a language. Why does it not make sense in this case? Again, I understand why you want to reach this conclusion, but you are not giving any reasons.