lol So, Kurt Godel who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century didn't know propositional calculus existed? — h060tu

Godel proved that first order logic was consistent and complete, you dummy. This discussion has nothing to do with Godel's theorems.

What about chemistry is supposedly not reducible in this way? — Pfhorrest

There is a bewildering variety of notions concerning reduction and emergence in the philosophical literature, but I think that the sort of hand-wavy weak emergence that you outline is not very controversial. However, anything stronger or more rigorous than that - such as ontological reduction that the OP brings up - is rife with problems, starting with just setting out the precise meanings of these terms.

I intentionally slipped in chemistry in the list of examples, because it is often pointed at as a reductionism success story. But this is at best partially true (as with some of the other examples, e.g. reduction of continuum to statistical thermodynamics and molecular dynamics). When you dig below the surface you find that the challenges in the quest of reduction are daunting even in this case - see for instance Reduction and Emergence in Chemistry article in IEP.

More to the point of the OP, @Yuting Liu singles out the problem of ontological reduction: "the biological distinction of life forms from lifeless forms." But ontological reduction is generally problematic in inter-theoretic relations, and even chemistry-to-QM is no exception (as some works referenced in the above linked article argue). So my point remains that there is nothing special about biology in this regard. The inter-theoretic reduction program is difficult and contentious at just about every level.

It seems to me that you are rather arbitrarily drawing your partition at biology. Why not chemistry, for example? Or meteorology? Or just different areas of physics, such as quantum mechanics vs. hydrodynamics? Just like biology, all of those other sciences have distinctive ontological or nomological commitments that are not shared by other sciences. In a few cases a reduction can more-or-less be achieved for some special cases, but by and large these sciences are, for all intents and purposes, autonomous.

Perhaps more precisely it means that all we know of reality comes in the form of measurement, and so if we cannot measure anything as being infinite, then the infinite does not occur in our knowledge of the world. — A Seagull

And what qualifies as 'measurement'? Can we measure our way to having a good idea of what the inside of the Moon consists of, for example (without having to hollow it out to find out)?

If you postulate that time must have a starting point, then you trivially get the conclusion that the past cannot be infinite. — SophistiCat

The idea of time, I believe, presupposes a starting point from which to measure its passing. So I doubt that the past is infinite. — Sir2u

Whether it is trivial or not is only a matter of your personal beliefs, because you have no evidence of it being either the correct or incorrect conclusion. — Sir2u

This is puzzling. Are you now doubting your own conclusion? The way you originally stated it gave me the impression that you yourself thought it to be straightforward.

You could say that beer is just what we postulate 'beer' to be, and you could then postulate it to have an origin. But a more honest and satisfying approach would be to take 'beer' as referring to something beyond mere postulation, something empirically known and do the bloody research to find out where it came from. — Sir2u

Your mocking misses the mark. Indeed, we don't presuppose beer to have an origin - we know this from experience, inference or reliable report. Not so with time. I feel silly even having to explain this to you.

Ok, from there lets define an infinite past. An infinite past is all the events that have occured from the present. Present is defined as simply the event that is. Event is a complete description of reality.An example being the first instant of today and all statements that are true along with it. Time is simply all events ordered from the present. A past event is an the present that longer is. Any problems so far with my defintions? — BB100

Yes. If an event is a "complete description of reality," full stop, then what is left to describe? You probably want to say that an event is a "complete description of reality at a point of time," but that would make your definition of time circular, since you want to define time in terms of events. And even if we allow that, then by defining the whole of time as the sum of all events, you end up defining time as a "complete description of reality" that was, is and will be, and that doesn't seem right.

Anyway, I don't think it's worth yours or my time for you to frog-march me through your proof, because believe me, I am thoroughly familiar with such proofs.

When I were lad... (spoken in best Yorkshire brogue)

We all had a copy of Being and Nothingness on our shelf, and went to see No Exit every second month. — Banno

I saw Nausea, and the book is on my short(ish)list. I doubt I'll ever read any of his philosophical writings though, his is not the sort of philosophy that captures my interest.

Yeah, apparently during his lifetime he was far more influential than Einstein, then he quickly went out of favor and nowadays is mostly remembered by academics who make a career of him, and a few cult followers.

Jimena Canales' s article can be found here: Einstein's Bergson Problem

If I I have one then name the first one you find and we can start from there for me to clarify. — BB100

Don't have to go far. Take this, for instance:

If have an infinite past, then there exists an event in the past that is an infinite events away from the present — BB100

Nope. Doesn't follow and doesn't even make sense. But to understand why you need to have basic mastery of the mathematical concepts at play (a couple of weeks of freshman calculus should do, if you are diligent).

Other problems are not so much technical as philosophical, like when you take it for granted that time is granular, being composed of moments of finite duration, even though this is not something that is immediately evident to the senses or well-established by science.

Don't worry, it's not just you - these are very common mistakes. At a guess, someone somewhere attempts an argument along these lines once every few months or weeks even.

I wasn't replying to you. You have other problems, but they are too many to sort through. You have a non sequitur at just about every step.

No measurement can ever be infinite, ergo there is no infinity in the real world. — A Seagull

There seem to be some steps missing before "ergo..."

If you postulate that time must have a starting point ("The idea of time, I believe, presupposes a starting point from which to measure its passing"), then you trivially get the conclusion that the past cannot be infinite. Of course, no one who does not already believe the conclusion would be satisfied with that postulation, and even those who do ought to be leery about getting their prize without honest toil.

You could say that time is just what we postulate 'time' to be, and you could then postulate it to have a beginning. But a more honest and satisfying approach would be to take 'time' as referring to something beyond mere postulation, something empirically known.

(The original quote was in the context of Russell's work on Principia, where he objected to defining mathematical entities as already possessing all the desired properties, as opposed to constructing them from more primitive elements. But the sentiment behind that quip applies just as well here.)

Well, no. "I believe the probability is 50/50." This statement is not a probability — Pneumenon

I give up. Either you are trolling me or you really are that dense - either way, there is no sense in going on.

The idea of time, I believe, presupposes a starting point from which to measure its passing. So I doubt that the past is infinite. — Sir2u

The method of ‘postulating’ what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. — Bertrand Russell

This isn't a "koan." Insisting that this is somehow cryptic or hard to grasp is disingenuous in the extreme. — Pneumenon

It's not cryptic, it's banal.

You appear to be confusing "I can always ask about probability" with "every belief has a probability," which I never said. — Pneumenon

Of course you did. Reread your OP. The only out that you leave is not knowing the probability, while presumably accepting the question as legitimate (and even that you appear to regard as dubious). Now a thoroughgoing Bayesian in Isaak's vein would insist that you do know, even if you are not conscious of your knowledge at every instance. But like I said, these controversies are still located within the broad epistemological framework (sometimes informally referred to as Bayesianism) that associates probabilities with beliefs more or less tightly.

I don't see what these koans have to do with what is being discussed, unless you insist on interpreting my words super-literally.

I think you can always ask a person what they believe a probability to be — Pneumenon

No, that is not a given. Outside of a limited colloquial usage, insisting that any belief can be associated with a probability is characteristic of a particular philosophical position: an epistemic interpretation of probability, and conversely, characterizing confidence with probabilities. (This I earlier labelled as Bayesianism, although this is not entirely accurate.) This is a popular enough view, but it is not universally shared. Some will say that talking about "degree of belief" or characterizing it with a scalar metric is incorrect some or all of the time, or that probability specifically is ill-suited for the task. Some (e.g. likelihoodists) will say that probability is fine for e.g. evaluating the support that beliefs derive from a particular piece of evidence, but not for expressing one's total confidence in a proposition.

Did I? I think you can always ask a person what they believe a probability to be, but that doesn't make their belief a probability. — Pneumenon

If you did not, then what is this question supposed to mean?

What is the probability of the invisible miniature dolphin's existence? — Pneumenon

You already channeled the discussion towards Bayesianism when you identified beliefs with probabilities. If you want to have a broader, less theory-laden first approach, you might want to step back from that. Do you want to talk about a specific theory or family of theories, or about phenomenology, or word usage? (I realize that these subjects are not entirely separate.)

Bayesianism though has many varieties, including austere ones that eschew prior probabilities. @Isaac is appealing to a thoroughgoing, Dutch book subjective Bayesianism, in which there is no such thing as being uncommitted: you can't decline a bet. His identification of beliefs with dispositions makes this position more plausible, but I suppose such an identification is itself contentious. In any event, if we are considering the way we actually think, then it is fair to caution that we are not perfect Bayesian computers.

yes please and thank you

We evidently have different definitions of "brute fact." For what it might be worth, Wikipedia states, "In contemporary philosophy, a brute fact is a fact that has no explanation. More narrowly, brute facts may instead be defined as those facts which cannot be explained (as opposed to simply having no explanation)." The whole point of formulating scientific and metaphysical hypotheses is to explain the facts. — aletheist

I don't think that we have different definitions of "brute fact." It is just that by its nature, science is pluralistic and dynamic. There isn't a single coherent and unchanging scientific picture of the world; instead, there is a patchwork of theories that are only partly compatible with each other, and those theories keep evolving. What that means for brute facts is that they exist within the context of a particular theory, and that they are not carved in stone. Philosophy is not any different in that regard.

In any case, whether we are talking about science or philosophy, it is a truism that nothing of any substance can be explained away without residue. Any explanation takes some things as given, the explanation essentially consisting in reducing everything else to those things.

In religious explanations the brute facts are the dogmas of theology and sacred history. That God made the universe just so is a brute fact.

On the contrary, a brute fact is something that is deemed to be inexplicable in principle, thus closing off further inquiry as allegedly pointless. — aletheist

No, this is just completely divorced from reality. In every scientific theory there are brute facts: they are the assumptions and postulates of the theory, be they laws, constants or whatever. That doesn't mean that scientists, the scientific community are committed to treating them as eternal, unchanging truths. For one thing, there are many theories, and their postulates are not entirely compatible with each other, or else a postulate in one theory may actually be obtainable as a result in another theory (e.g. the 2nd law of continuum thermodynamics is more-or-less reducible to statistical mechanics).

Besides, it would be absurd to deny that theories have evolved and continue to evolve in response to new findings and new thinking, and that certainly goes for fundamental physics. The so-called fine tuned constants of the standard particle physics and Big Bang cosmology, which are seen as unsatisfactory by some theoretical physicists, have prompted a search for better accounts that would replace these constants with something more 'natural'. Of course, whatever theories come next will have their own unexplained postulates - it is only a question of which postulates are more epistemologically or metaphysically satisfactory.

On the contrary, modern science largely has its roots in cultures that affirmed divine creation and were motivated by this belief to study nature more carefully. — aletheist

That is a questionable interpretation of the history. One could instead make a case that natural philosophy has always had to struggle against religious dogma and conservatism. In any case, this is irrelevant. The fact is that, as I explained above, scientific postulates are not on the whole treated as dogmas. The entire process of scientific research is set up expressly in order to promote change. One can hardly publish a paper or obtain a grant without the promise of finding something new or at variance with what is already known. But a religious dogma is, well, a dogma. If a thing is postulated to be a divine creation as a matter of faith, that isn't going to change in a hurry.

But my first sentence is talking about the idea that if there is a pattern or constant then it is either eternal or does not change in whatever finite time we have. — Coben

Well, I already explained why "changing laws" are an oxymoron. Laws are revised or retied if evidence calls for it, and not otherwise. Anyway, I won't pursue this further, since this has little to do with the OP.

The spirit of scientific inquiry should preclude us from ever simply accepting something as a brute fact. Like anything else that we observe in the universe, the particular values of the constants call for an explanation, and the FTA poses the hypothesis of divine creation. — aletheist

You have it exactly backwards. Leaving something unexplained (which is what "brute fact" means) leaves the matter open for further inquiry. Contriving a pseudo-explanation such as "divine creation" prematurely forecloses the inquiry.

I don't think that's parsimony. It's just an assumption. There is no need to make the assumption that laws are eternal. We can work with what seem like rules now, and black box whether these rules may have changed or may change. You do not have to commit to something you don't know. Further there is evidence that constants and laws have changed. — Coben

Your last sentence contradicts what comes before it. If we can have evidence that constants and laws have changed, then we can have evidence for the contrary. And the balance of evidence for the known laws and constants is so far on the latter, although as I said, every once in a while someone proposes that some constant is actually non-constant (e.g. the cosmological constant). Such proposals are settled by evidence, because as Faulkner famously said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The role of "surprisingness" has been discussed in the context of fine tuning, drawing on more general epistemological considerations (e.g. in the work of Paul Horwich). White, whose discussion of the inverse gamble's fallacy I think you have mentioned, comments on it. I'll see if I can dig up more.

Not only that, but scientists generally assume that the laws of nature as we observe them operating today have always operated that way; or at least, that they have operated that way ever since very soon after the alleged Big Bang. What justifies this assumption? — aletheist

Parsimony, obviously. If an explanation works well enough, why complicate it without reason? More importantly, if a law is changing over time, then as long the change is itself regular, it simply becomes a dynamic component of the same law.

Why not consider the alternative that the laws of nature have evolved over time, and perhaps are still (very slowly) evolving? What would count as evidence either way?

They are being considered. At various times changes in fundamental constants have been hypothesized. For example, Dirac, in an attempt to explain the enormous disparity in coupling strengths in the present-day universe, proposed as part of his Large Number Hypothesis that the gravitational constant has changed dramatically over time. But such changes (and even much subtler changes) leave their marks in the universe, which is why Dirac's hypothesis was quickly falsified with data. But other such hypotheses are considered even today, so it's not true that this is some kind of taboo.

By the way, I brought up Dirac for a reason, because, unlike the theistic argument, scientific discussion of fine-tuning is framed not so much in terms of "gee, how lucky we are to live in such a special universe," but in terms of the so-called naturalness of physical laws - which is what bothered Dirac so much. Already back then the seeds of the problem of fine tuning were planted, well before Carter et al.

Can't stop listening to Arvo Pärt - so good!

Sleeping Beauty, Doomsday, etc. — SophistiCat

Though debates about these frequently seem just as intractable as those around theism. Answers to these problems rely so heavily on your basic epistemological stance that it's hard to make a convincing case to someone who doesn't have the same background. — Echarmion

I don't actually take a strong position on these puzzles. I suspect that there may not be a good answer to them, or what's worse, there may not be a good question...

One of my hobbies (or obsessions) is to debate theists on their Fine Tuning Argument for God — Relativist

I've been "guilty" of this in my younger years, but eventually I lost the appetite for arguing just for the sake of arguing. Apologists are often too quick to accept the desired conclusion, and lacking the motivation they fail to put up a strong argument.

Awhile back, someone on this forum posted a link to this paper: The Fine Tuning Argument. The author (Klaas Landsman) argues that the existence of life is not a good reason to infer either a designer OR a multiverse. — Relativist

Yes, I've come across this paper before. It continues a long series of debates (as can be seen from its references), of which I think the more interesting ones aren't even about God/designer (that one seems to be pretty hopeless). Selection bias, on the other hand, poses challenging epistemological problems in the same line as Sleeping Beauty, Doomsday, etc.

Who says life can't adopt as many different forms as existent universes? Maybe life can exist in many possible universes. The "laws" of physics are based on models of our universe, not every possible universe. — Enrique

Life is "fine-tuned" in the sense that

small changes in the parameters of physics produce catastrophic changes in the evolved universe. In particular the complexity of the evolved universe, and hence its ability to support life, would be undermined by small changes in the universal constants... Thus, parameter sensitivity is the claim that the target in parameter space which is compatible with a complex universe is small in some sense. — RAW Bradford, The inevitability of fine tuning in a complex universe, 2011

But here is the rub: as the paper above argues, this parameter sensitivity of complex structures is a mathematical inevitability. It will be true in any parametric system that is at all capable of producing complex structures (and most systems would not produce complex structures, no matter how you tune them).

Something slow and beautiful to take your mind off coronavirus.

Arvo Pärt: Spiegel im Spiegel

But supposing, contra the above, that we can meaningfully answer the question about the probability of the universe being fit for life, I do get what you are saying.

This seems similar to the "luck" of our improbable existence that is the result of the (presumed) low probability fact that the structure of the universe happens to be life permitting.

Thoughts? — Relativist

There has been a lot of discussion along these lines. John Leslie offered a now well-known firing squad analogy: You face a firing squad of trained marksmen. Shots are fired, but to your immense surprise, you find that they all missed. Are you justified in inferring that the marksmen intended to miss? Leslie argues that a similar scenario in the case of the universe's fundamental constants suggests two alternative explanations: God or multiple universes. Objections have been put forward in terms of gambler's fallacy and observation selection effect, among others. You can find many such debates under the heading of anthropic reasoning (see also SEP entry on fine-tuning). Although I believe that the considerations that I gave above preempt any such debates with respect to the universe as a whole, I still think that they are instructive.

Sure, the denominator of the probability is still finite - but it's so large that it makes it surprising that any actual person is alive. On the other hand, it's imminently reasonable that SOME people exist. This is the tension. It's erroneous to apply this to individuals to "prove" they shouldn't be expected to exist, because we should expect SOME people to exist.

In terms of the FTA, life (or intelligent life) is one sort of existent, but there infinitely many sorts of existent. So IMO the analogy holds.

I'm wondering if this can be described mathematically. — Relativist

Well, I brought up one difficulty with any such mathematical description: in order to be able to talk about probabilities at all, we need to have random variables and their probability distributions. And there had better be good reasons behind the choice of both the variables and the distributions.

Already in the case of the "lottery" of being born we can see many difficulties in this regard. Depending on what we consider to be the chance circumstances and how we treat those chances, we can get wildly different results. For example, we could, like in so many romantic comedies, consider the first time the two future parents met due to some happenstance. What were the chances of them being in the same compartment on the train on that day? We could go on and estimate those chances using some simple probabilistic model of ticket sales, which might give us a small probability, but not inconceivably so. But we could take a completely different route - like, for instance, in your OP, and get a result that differs by many orders of magnitude.

There is an endlessly variety of such probabilistic models at our disposal, each giving a different result, and there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to prefer one over another, if all we want is to estimate the chance of being born in some very general sense. This uncertainty exposes the meaninglessness of such probability talk even in this intuitively suggestive example: there is no "general sense" of the probability of being born. There can only be a sense relative to some chosen model. Generally speaking, the choice of the model is dictated by our interest in the matter: what is under our control, what isn't, what we know, what we don't know, and what we wish to know.

In the case of the universe's fitness for life the situation is that much worse. Nothing is under our control. We know nothing about the reasons for the universe being the way it is, nor whether such reasons even exist. (And if they did exist, that would only push the question further, forcing us to ask about the reasons of the reasons, and so on.) We can't infer distributions from observed frequencies, because we only have this singular instance. If in the previous example we could at least idly pick among many possible probabilistic models, here there aren't even any models to pick. What are the random variables? How are they distributed? It's impossible to answer. So what could the probability of the universe being fit for life even mean?

Not actually true: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/annual-flu-reports — I like sushi

You should look at how these figures are actually arrived at and you will see that there is a good deal of uncertainty. Just read any study of flu morbidity/mortality.

Read a couple of novels by George Sand. And staying with female writers named George, now reading George Eliot's Middlemarch.

The deliberate element was what threw me off as how can one do something deliberate if they are not given a second choice? That is, having patience isn't something you can practice because nature forces you to wait, you have no other options. However, it is the reaction and the emotions you feel in moments where great patience is asked of you. — Lecimetiere

But you can also be patient, practice patience - as opposed to losing your cool and acting rashly out of frustration and anxiety. Or lashing out at those who "try your patience." That is an active, effectual kind of virtue. Is this the sort of patience that you think characterizes you?

We could say that John is lucky in some sense, but not in any analyzable sense. Therefore no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from it. This seems similar to the "luck" of our improbable existence that is the result of the (presumed) low probability fact that the structure of the universe happens to be life permitting. — Relativist

The "probability" of John being born as a result of chance circumstances is a rather iffy concept: you have to make a pretty arbitrary choice of random variables and their distributions in order to estimate it. But at a stretch one can perhaps make some sense of it.

With the fundamental physical laws the situation is much worse: what probabilities could possibly mean in this case is anyone's guess. We only know about this one universe; there is no statistics, no generative model. What probabilities could we be talking about?

You could say Finland is prepared. While its neighbors are scrambling, the country is sitting on an enviable stockpile of medical supplies dating to the 1950s. It includes personal protective equipment like face masks, but also oils, grains and agricultural tools.

Finland is now tapping into this supply for the first time since World War II, positioning the country strongly to confront the coronavirus. — The New York Times

@ssu

Either way, if so, why claim to be retreating to syntax? — bongo fury

I am deliberately "retreating to syntax," because that is the most basic function of things: as (grammatical) subjects. We can talk about "such things as unicorns." What, if anything, we mean by such talk is a secondary question, and the answer to that question will vary from case to case.

Trouble is, a unicorn can be the first but not the second. — bongo fury

I had the same syntactic sense in mind in both cases. We can refer to unicorns in thought and in speech.