By Intelligence I don't imply human-like in any way or form — staticphoton

The only intelligence that we know is human-like (or animal-like, if you want to broaden the notion a bit). This is where the word gets its meaning. If you are talking about an intelligence that is not human-like "in any way or form," then either you are talking about something else entirely and "intelligence" is a misnomer, or you don't even know what you are talking about and are using "intelligence" as a wildcard. But I suspect that the picture in your mind is nothing more than the bog-standard anthropomorphic deity, only slightly updated for modern secular sensibilities from its traditional archetype.

And "a closed system subject to fixed constraints" like you refer to, does not preclude the possibility that the universe was formulated through a conscious, deliberate process. — staticphoton

Well, nothing can preclude that possibility, seeing as it is left completely unspecified, so this isn't saying much. But wouldn't it be more parsimonious to say that the world just happens to be orderly, rather than that our universe just happens to have been made orderly by some Intelligence, which just happened to be there? If I am to take seriously the attempt at distancing from the traditional divine creation narrative, then I just can't see any attraction in this overcomplicated account.

When I come across and organized system/structure, it is easier to accept the system was constructed under and intelligent process than to believe it to be the result of random and disorderly interactions — staticphoton

But why set up such a dichotomy: either chaos or human-like agency (aka "intelligent design")? Aren't you missing the simplest, most obvious alternative: structure? "Structure" not as a house or a bridge, but in a more general sense, as a closed system subject to fixed constraints - what is conventionally called "laws of nature."

Hah, I can't believe I am the only one so far to have owned up to possessing no philosophical education. Of course, if this counts as education...

I have found Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Incerto series of books a really good read: "Black swan", "Antifragile", "Fooled by randomness", "Skin in the game", ... I have also read many of his blog posts. His focus is on epistemology, i.e. the question, "What is knowledge?", always centred around, and starting from the question of how we deal with randomness. — alcontali

You and I seem to have very different histories of our atheism, and given the religious demographics I suspect most peoples' is more like mine than yours. — Pfhorrest

The religious demographics are such that most atheists don't live in the US and don't have backgrounds similar to yours. But more to the point, I believe that even among those who were raised in a religious environment, most people don't become atheists through systematic, bottom-up construction of a comprehensive philosophical system, while setting aside their background beliefs for later reevaluation.

Allow me to go on a little digression. Textbook presentation of science is sometimes faulted for being sanitized and divorced of its historical context. Ideas are presented not in the order and the form in which they were originally introduced; justifications and relationships between ideas have been restructured in light of a more modern understanding. The end result is a "rational-communicative artifice" () that is thought to be - and most likely is - more pedagogically appropriate. But science has the advantage of having a fairly objective external standard of empirical evidence, of which we can avail ourselves at all times. (You can, of course, attack that standard in various ways, but you can't deny that there is a standard.) We are not constrained, once and for all, to reproduce the same historical approach: we can restructure our ideas and proceed to test them against empirical observations without any loss of legitimacy.

Philosophy doesn't have such a standard. You can judge parts of a system (and I am using the word "system" loosely here) against the background of the rest of the system, but the system as a whole is without anything like an objective foundation. (Any standard that you might propose, such as absence of contradictions, empirical soundness, etc. would itself be philosophical, and thus internal to the system.) Thus lacking an objective foundation, philosophy is something that just grows out of the soil of your temperament, life experiences, socialization, intellectual exploration. Having or not having religious experiences and an attitude or a position on the God question, which for most people predates having articulated philosophical ideas, is not an insignificant constituent of that soil. Nor is it something that you can easily shut off or compartmentalize while you cogitate on your philosophy. It will bleed through one way or another into the way you think and the choices you make.

If you want to engage people on this forum with your ideas, don't post a link to a video with a message that amounts to "go watch my video." There's absolutely no way I will go off to watch some Youtube video about god knows what made by god knows who. In fact, it's very unlikely that I'll go watch a video, period - and I am not alone in this. Short written essays are much better suited to philosophy discussions than rambling 'tube clips.

First of all, to get people interested (or not, as the case may be), write a one-two paragraph abstract summarizing the topic: what issues you address, what approach you take, and what your findings are. Then you can follow with a longer essay, or even a video, if you absolutely must.

I'm an atheist and it's an incidental consequence of the rest of my philosophy — Pfhorrest

I was tempted at first to pick this option, that is to say that my atheism is a consequence of my philosophical positions. But this suggests a causal history that never took place in my case - and I suspect in the case of many, perhaps most atheists. As a matter of fact, I was raised secular, and I was an atheist long before I had anything that could be meaningfully identified as a "philosophy."

As I thought more about this, I realized that my qualms went further than just the facts of my biography. Yes, I could reconstruct my philosophy along the lines that you suggest:

in order to answer questions like "Is there a God?" and "Should we do what he says?", we first have to be able to answer questions of forms like "Is there X?" and "Should we X?" more generally. Once you've done that, figured out some way to answer questions about what is or ought to be, then you have already built a philosophical system; all the philosophically important questions are answered. Now you can ask whether there's a God and whether you should do what he says, using that philosophy, and it might make a big practical difference in life, but it can't make any difference to the philosophy used to answer those questions. — Pfhorrest

As I already indicated, in my case at least, this reconstruction is not true historically. But is it true in any sense? You argue, it seems, that it is better to ground your God beliefs on more general epistemic, ontological and ethical positions than the other way around. This may be plausible, at least for an atheist, in the sense that such structuring would appear to be more balanced and parsimonious. But whence the grounding for those supposedly more fundamental philosophical positions? The fact that they are held to be fundamental means that they are not grounded in anything more than my temperament, my intellectual development throughout my life and the accumulation of experiences. But isn't this also what made me an atheist in my pre-philosophical years? And doesn't my atheism constitute part of that psychological and intellectual background out of which my philosophical leanings formed?

And so, answering this checken-and-egg conundrum for myself, it seems very plausible that my preexisting atheism influenced the development of my philosophical ideas (that is what you consider to be philosophical ideas, which seems to be mostly limited to basic epistemology, but let's set this aside for the moment). Did the influence go in the other direction as well? Very much so: the more I examined the God question philosophically, the more confident I grew in my atheism. But this is hardly an argument for the primacy of philosophy [epistemology]. We naturally seek to rationalize our preexisting beliefs. And given that my preexisting beliefs were partly responsible for the way I was reasoning, this could have been little more than a self-reinforcing cycle.

Therefore, my atheism could be said to be a consequence of my philosophy in the sense that, after the fact, my beliefs could be categorized and restructured so as to make atheism a consequence of some general philosophical framework that I endorse, but not in any other sense.

Why are you people in the minority? — 3017amen

...in the US (but it's not like there's anything outside the US, right? - not anything that matters, anyway.)

Why are people of color in the US on average poorer and less educated than white people? Something must be wrong with them, or they must be doing something wrong.

You can expand and strengthen your contact and interaction with the rest of the world by augmenting your natural senses with technology (something that we are already doing, of course) - that's as far as I would go.

As for your original thesis, it contains some problematic assumptions, chief of which is that there is something that "reality actually looks like." What something looks like is not just a property of the thing that is being perceived, but rather a property of perception, which involves both the perceiver and the perceived. So what "reality looks like" to the perceiver will be in part a function of the perceiver - including any technological augmentation that she employs.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We — jamalrob

Hah, that's an interesting choice. Nowadays the book is probably more name-checked than actually read, but I thought it was a well-written novella in the antiutopia genre (not to mention prophetic - it was written hot on the trail of the Bolshevik revolution, almost 30 years before 1984).

Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia — jamalrob

Apropo of nothing, I slightly know his father, a Russian poet, and I met the future author when he was still in school. Haven't read the book though.

I have a vague memory of S as Sapientia on the old forum. I eventually put him on ignore, but if memory serves, that was on account of high-volume inanity, rather than obnoxiousness. He must have changed over the years that I've been ignoring him.

I won't miss him, but I hesitate to say that I am not sorry about what happened. For someone who spent so much time on the site, it can be a hard blow.

Gaussian curvature
Curved Space

Be careful with Wolfram, I think he is a bit of a crank. At best, he is the proverbial man with a hammer who sees nails everywhere.

I would rather recommend John Norton articles, such as What Can We Learn about the Ontology of Space and Time from the Theory of Relativity?

Is the wording [irrational - SC] just used to express condemnation? — Rufoid

Yes, but not just any condemnation. One can, for example, condemn a decision on moral grounds without judging it irrational. Rationality is an epistemic standard. It's not easy to define what that standard amounts to, except by the method used by dictionary-makers, i.e. by observing how the word is being used "in the wild" and extracting a general pattern (or several) that fits most such usages.

If I think I have a good reason for following bird omens, aren't my actions rational? — Rufoid

Yes, acting on good reasons is close in meaning to acting rationally, though I think 'reason' is a somewhat broader category than 'rationality.'

So, do you think there is a meaning of rationality outside the narrow procedural sense? Or would you use a more general term like "reason"? — Echarmion

Yes, of course, I was only engaging 'rationality' in the stripped-down sense in which @Rufoid seemed to be using the word, as nothing more than rule-following. But rationality, as we usually understand the word, is more than just following some arbitrary rules; the rules have to be the right rules. Colloquially, rationality and reason are more-or-less interchangeable. Both have a normative component, in addition to structure and generality.

If we take the scientific method as an example, would you say the method itself is rational, or merely that we can rationally apply the method? And if the method is not itself "rational", then how do we describe it's justification? — Echarmion

The scientific method is a distillation of our "rational" (in the usual sense) epistemology, so of course, as with our less formal epistemic practices, the scientific method has a normative justification. It cannot be bootstrapped out of nothing.

Right, "checking their internal structure on the basis of shared human mental structures" would be one such reductive procedure. "Greatest happiness (or 'thriving') for the greatest number of people" is another - quite different - stand-in for rational morality (if you don't like 'objective'). Or you could, you know, decide on the basis of which kind of bird you see first thing in the morning, or use any number of other "rational," i.e. universal and consistent procedures that reduce the answer to some objective facts or events.

The thing about rationality, in the narrow procedural sense, is that it is completely sealed. It is a game that you play by the rules that you and your fellow participants agree to follow. You cannot get out of it anything other than what you put into it in the first place when you agreed on the rules. The choice of the rules and the decision to stick to them are not rational though (unless they are the outcome of some other rational game, but that only pushes the problem back one step).

This kind of brings to mind arguments over "objective" morality and the is/ought gap. What often stands for said objectivity is some consistent reductive procedure for deciding moral questions - even if, in a deductio ad absurdum, the procedure were as arbitrary as examining bird entrails.

Can specifically human mind understand the intentions of another abstract mind of unlimited thinking power, given human gets enough time? — IuriiVovchenko

"Understand" is too vague a requirement to give an answer. It's vague even in the usual context of human interactions, but if you want to apply it cross-species, I don't even have an approximate idea of what such understanding would involve.

Ok, you don't actually have an argument against my point. I meant occult to mean simply "hidden from view behind a paywall". — boethius

Yes, that was what I understood you to mean. It isn't so much paywalls that separate the masses from the latest scientific research, but years of training and immersion in the field. I take your point about people with some scientific education, some even degreed and with a bit of professional experience, who at some point left universities, research institutes and R&D departments where they had access to scientific publications in their field (indeed, I am one of those people). But I think you overestimate their numbers and their willingness and ability to actively engage in reviewing the latest research. Very few retirees, decades out of practice, would be able to polish their rusty education, however much of it they had in the first place, get up to speed with everything that's been done and published in the intervening years, and get back into the thick of it. (And, by the way, those who live close to a good university can often get a library access for their personal research, free of charge, not to mention municipal and national libraries. I have taken advantage of that at some point.)

And this is leaving aside the absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory that you have going about scientists hiding their research behind paywalls so that outsiders, untainted by special interests, would not be able to check their work. For one thing, scientists don't have much to do with the publishing industry. They don't get to decide the business model of the journals in their field, and few of them even care. Generally, they'll try to submit their work to the highest-profile journal that will accept it, other considerations being secondary (and among those secondary considerations are publication fees, which can be much higher in open access journals, for obvious reasons). The only examples of authors exhibiting a preference among traditional vs. open access publishing that I know are actually in favor of the latter, driven by grievances against traditional publishing or ideological considerations along the lines of alcontali's.

And then of course there are all the reasons why such an insanely massive conspiracy, involving millions of researchers and even more students all around the world, working together and in absolute secrecy for many decades, could not possibly hold together. Honestly, I feel silly even arguing about this.

No, you misunderstood whatever snippet that you have read. You need to read the article in order to be able to comment on it.

What these attacks seem to miss, is the fact that these experiments sought to better understand events that had already happened. — Tzeentch

No, this point wasn't missed either in the cited articles or in the discussion in this thread.

This seems like a reasonable thing to say, moderation in all things, but I think is insufficient to properly address alcontali's concerns. — boethius

Is fanaticism for justice a moral blemish? Is thirst for the truth savagery? — boethius

Fanaticism for truth and justice sounds very fine and romantic. Who could object to that? The naked truth used to be allegorically depicted as a beautiful and (obviously) naked young woman, apparently in order to ensure that the visceral (or whatever) truth of the allegory would be felt by every (or at least every male) viewer:



But the naked, unadorned truth is that truth in most nontrivial matters is far too messy and ambiguous and not infrequently unattractive (if not to say ugly), belying the seductive allegory. Passion is a double-edged sword (there is that dull moderation and evenhandedness again...) What a "fanaticism for justice" and "thirst for truth" often stand for is a passion for simplistic but attractive narratives - like conspiracy theories about corrupt whoever and big bad whatever - and easy fixes - "open source" this and "blockchain" that (or, to quote an earnest cri du coeur of a John Dos Passos character from much further back in time, "Why not social revolution?")

Me, I would prefer mealymouthed on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand, or barring that, admit ignorance and impotence, than be taken for a ride by phantoms. Maybe I am revealing my age too much here. But hey, if conspirology and populism feel right to you, then sky is the limit - or at least the so-called "most powerful office in the world," as has now been demonstrated.

Why do experts tolerate and provide non-evidence, non-good-reasoning based arguments for occult research, research that is not accessible and occulted by pay-walls, is I believe for exactly the reasons alconti is proposing: anyone can check. If data is analysed to come to a conclusion, it really is as alconti says: anyone with a computer can check if that analysis was done correctly. — boethius

The thing is, those who have the qualifications and the interest to check published research, for the most part can already do this, through their affiliation with institutions that provide subscriptions and library services. It's been a long time since I was at a university, but even back then I could get just about any paper, even from some obscure typewritten conference proceedings, if not from our own library or an online subscription, then through inter-library copy service. What makes modern science an "occult" institution is not so much physical access to scientific publications as the often high bar of competence and professionalism that is required to be even a good critic, let alone a good practitioner. Lacking that competence and professionalism, we get these "citizen scientists" posting detrended temperature graphs to prove that global warming is a hoax. (That's not an argument for hiding science from the unwashed masses behind paywalls, by the way.)

I am well aware that there exist legitimate criticisms of scientific institutions and of the publishing industry, but, for better or for worse, those criticisms usually aren't easily packageable into slogans and don't invite easy solutions.

maybe don't think too much into things. — Jimmy

That's gotta be the Philosophy Forum motto.

By "Objects", I mean physical objects. By "Cannot", I mean impossible. By "Why", I mean the reason behind that belief. I am guessing the reason behind that belief is seeing objects crash into each other or lightly bump into each other and instead of occupying the same space, they move away from each other, break or just prevent each other's movement. — elucid

In that case, the somewhat flippant answer that I gave you in the beginning still fits. There are plenty of things in our ordinary experience that fit this description (and you are not asking "why" such things exist, you take their existence and their properties for granted - which is fine, one has to ground the discussion somewhere). We refer to such things as "objects" in the English language. If we learn about certain entities that do not fit this description, such as rays of light or bosons or spirits, we may accept their existence, but we won't refer to them as "objects" in the same sense in which call chairs "objects." This is just a matter of categorizing and naming things.

The problem with this discussion is that no one, including, I am sure, the OP @elucid, quite knows what question is being asked, and what kind of answer is expected. Much of philosophy is about asking good questions and being alert and skeptical about assumptions, especially your own.

"why people claim that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time"

What is meant by "objects"? Are they bulky solid things that we can see and touch, as per one common meaning of the word "object"? Or anything to which one can refer, as per the grammatical sense of the word? Or something else?

And what does "cannot" mean in this sentence? Cannot in fact (in our world, to the best of our knowledge)? Or in principle - what principle? If we relax the grip on reality and allow other possible worlds, then we have to have a good grip on the trans-world "objecthood", lest the word loses its meaning.

And what does "why" mean? Are we looking for a reductive explanation in terms of some underlying physics? That would be a relatively easy question to answer. A metaphysical principle? Then we'll have to tangle with objecthood and counterfactuals.

In this discussion, I think the intuitive image that most of us have of what is actually being disputed is whether two pieces of actual physical matter can actually overlap while remaining distinct. As everyone who has taken high-school physics or chemistry knows, a temperature field is an abstraction that represents such things as the average kinetic energy in the particles of a gas at a given point in space. For our purposes though, we are talking about the actual stuff, the particles themselves, not a smeared-out representation of their average kinetic energy. — petrichor

Everything is an abstraction, elementary particles included. Physicalist reductionism - the position that only (some) entities posited by fundamental physics really exist, everything else being mere abstractions and pragmatic simplifications - is a defensible view, but it must not be assumed unconsciously, as a matter of fact.

You have very naive, black-and-white notions both about academia and about open-access publishing. The best of open-access journals are very much a part of the academic world that you so despise, just with a somewhat different business model than pay-for-access journals. The worst are crackpot publications like Journal of Cosmology, and what must be by far the largest open-access sector, so-called Predatory publishing - fake online journals with no real editorial or peer review that, for a modest fee, will publish pretty much any submission from naive authors who don't bother to check the journal's credentials, or unscrupulous grad students and young careerists who just want to pad their publication lists. (Do take a look at the second Wiki link for some sobering perspective.)

Like , and said, there are good and bad sides to Wikipedia and open-access publishing, as well as academic publishing and institutional science. Neither condemning them in toto nor unconditionally endorsing anything "open-source" like a bright-eyed fanatic is reasonable. You need to get informed and use good judgement.

There is no such physical thing as a temperature field. — petrichor

That's kind of a silly thing to say, on the one hand. A field is "a physical quantity... that has a value for each point in space-time." And temperature is, of course, a physical quantity. One can talk about temperature fields, and electron fields, and all sorts of other physical fields, and they all exist in the same place (all place) at the same time (all time). But they are not physical objects, you would object! Well, yeah, when we talk about physical objects, we usually talk about things like chairs and stuff. So don't call things that are not object-like objects, and you'll get the conclusion that objects cannot be in the same place at the same time. Or do call them objects, and you'll get a different conclusion. Whoop-de-doo.

Fundamental particles can occupy the same space at the same time. See identical particles.

I, at least, consider particles to be physical objects. — Andrew M

You are just making my point. You choose to include elementary particles into things that you call "objects." I don't think it's a conventional use of words, but whatever - the point is that your choice of whether or not to call something an "object" has no metaphysical implications.

Elementary particles are tricky if you want to talk about them being in the same place at the same time. The best you can do is talk about their quantum states and their superpositions. But then you might as well talk about superpositions of classical fields - here at least being in the same place at the same time is well-defined. If you want to call classical fields objects, then of course you will find that such objects can be in the same place at the same time, but again, this is just word manipulation, nothing more.

Here's the conventional usage:

1. A material thing that can be seen and touched.

1.1 Philosophy A thing external to the thinking mind or subject. — Andrew M

That's a different meaning of "object." Sumerian grammar can be an object of a study in this sense.

I am referring to physical objects. — elucid

So am I. Physical objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Things that can occupy the same space at the same time are not called objects. It's as simple as that.

On one now defunct forum that I used to visit they even made a sub-section of their philosophy forum specifically for free will discussions. I wish we had that here. Or just merge all the free-will-cannot-exist-because-determinism posts into one thread.

This is just what we mean be the word "object." If some entities - real or imagined - can be at the same place at the same time, such as fields or ghosts, we don't refer to them as "objects." There is no deep metaphysics here, it's just convention.

I would like to know how can you prove these laws, but not using devices that use the the same laws. — Fernando Rios

The basic hypothetico-deductive method works like this:

1. Assume that the system under consideration is described by some theory - in other words, it follows some laws, such as Newton's laws.

2. On the basis of this assumption, make predictions about the system's behavior under certain conditions.

3. Prepare the system and perform an experiment. If your observations are in line with your hypothesis, then your hypothesis, and by extension your theory, are confirmed, otherwise it is disconfirmed (falsified).

There are variations and elaborations of the above (with some, for example, prioritizing falsification over confirmation), but this is the basis of the so-called scientific method. For this method to work, you absolutely need your instruments to be predictable, i.e. to follow laws - including, yes, the laws that you are testing. You just need to consider the instruments as part of the system that you are testing and make your predictions based on that assumption. If the test fails, you could blame all or any part of the system for the failure, including your instruments. You could then try to isolate the problem by performing further tests. And if the test succeeds, and so do other tests, then you will have a high confidence that both the experimental system and your instruments act in accordance with the laws. There is no vicious circularity here.

Of course, in practice we often choose to simplify and neglect many things when modeling an experiment. Thus, we may leave the instruments and our own actions out of consideration. But these simplifications are not made willy-nilly: ideally, we make them only when our theory predicts that they will not have much impact on the result of the experiment. And when the experiment doesn't show what we expect, then one of the explanations that we have to consider is that our assumptions were overly simplistic. We may then have to go back and take into account factors that we thought we could neglect, such as the behavior of the instruments.

What are the experiments that Newton used to show their laws are true? — Fernando Rios

This question worries me a little. I hope that you are not under the impression that Newton's laws are accepted solely on the authority of Newton himself, much like a religious teaching is accepted on the authority of a prophet or a sacred text. How Newton convinced himself that his theory was correct is a question for a historian or a biographer, but it is quite irrelevant to a 21st century scientist. Newton's own thinking could be deeply flawed and his methods wholly inadequate, for all we care - his laws have been tested so thoroughly since then that it no longer matters.

It is certainly an interesting question to ask how music came about, and there can be different ways of answering it. The "easy" question is the descriptive one: How did the human cognitive capacity and disposition for music in fact develop? I say "easy" because it is amenable, at least in principle, to the kind of empirical enquiry that we know how to conduct - not that actually producing anything like a definitive answer would be easy! The "hard" question is the philosophical why question that I think you want to ask, and it is hard because it is not very clear what exactly we are asking and what (and why) we would take for an answer: the epistemic standards here are nowhere as well-developed as in the case of a scientific enquiry.

But what I think is not terribly controversial is that the question of humans' musical ability does not pose any particular challenge to the evolutionary theory. (I am emphasizing this because of the way you originally framed the topic.) It is not out of the question that music-making could have some adaptive value at some point in our development as a species, but even if it didn't, its emergence shouldn't be particularly surprising. Some traits are what evolutionary biologists Gould and Lewontin nicknamed as "spandrels": side-effects of other adaptive developments that don't have any particular adaptive value in themselves. Given the enormously complex furniture of our cognitive apparatus, some unintended "quirk" like musicality wouldn't be all too surprising, I think.

by the way what kind of cats do you own? I used to have a few himalayan's and I actually had a dream about baby Lions last night haha. — 3017amen

I was a cat in my past life, a Russian Blue I think ;)

I know, it appears that I have fallen and I can't get up!

If someone tells me these are just extra-chance-random features of consciousness, then I ask them for what reason? — 3017amen

The fact that our blood is red does not confer fitness advantage to us, so why is it red? The color of blood appears to be "just extra-chance-random" feature. Of course, in this case we know the answer: blood is red because of hemoglobin, and hemoglobin does confer fitness advantage. But there is no reason for the color as such: it could just as soon be blue or green. So do we have a problem here that cries out for an explanation? Maybe it's a metaphysical language of sorts?

‘Survival of the fittest’ is an extrapolation (or a broad generalisation) of the theory of natural selection. It explains a prevalence of certain forms of diversity in certain environments, but it doesn’t satisfactorily explain the emergence of all traits. — Possibility

Not only that, but the slogan is not a good representation of the theory of natural selection.

At least one point to made viz. Evolution; it's hard to see how diatonic music theory confers survival advantages in the Jungle!!! — 3017amen

You are still stuck on the idea of hyper-adaptationism - the idea that all and only those traits that confer survival advantage will emerge as a result of evolution by natural selection. This was never part of the theory of evolution, not even in Darwin's original works (and we have come a long way from there in the last century and a half).

I will try to explain what I am saying in a different way. — elucid

You are not trying to explain it in a different way. You are repeating the exact same truism ("a thing is what it is and is not what it is not") over an over again. Despite the thread title, you have not attempted to move on from here to discussing anything relating to change. You seem to think that the implication for the impossibility of change from that basic law of identity is so obvious that you cannot even spell it out. But in actuality it's because this one tool that you are wielding is inadequate for the job. You have confessed at the outset that you don't know how to define change. That is the root of the problem: you cannot reason about something that you cannot grasp with your intellect.

Here is my crack at it. The ordinary concept of change has two aspects to it: identity and difference. Change is possible because these two aspects are not in conflict with each other: a thing can preserve its identity through time, even if something about it is different from one time to another. For this to make sense the law of identity alone won't do; we need to have (at least) two identity scales: coarse-grained identity and fine-grained identity.

When we see a cup, we readily identify it as a single gross object - a cup. In our mind, this object preserves its identity through time by maintaining its structural and compositional integrity (within reasonable bounds), as well as by maintaining space-time continuity. A small chip or discoloration may not cause the cup to lose its identity, but being crushed or dissolved in acid will. A cup preserves its identity through the passage of time and through continuous translation and rotation in space. But another cup that simultaneously occupies a separate region of space constitutes a separate identity, even if it is otherwise indistinguishable from the original. We may mistake their identities at times, but we think that there always is a fact of the matter about which is which.

Our idea of what a cup is constitutes its coarse-grained identity that subsumes inessential distinctions - fine-grained identities. In other words, the coarse-grained identity (Cup) can be seen as a (possibly infinite) equivalence class comprised of fine-grained identities: Cup yesterday, Cup today, Cup on the table, Cup on the dish rack, clean Cup, dirty Cup, new Cup, chipped Cup, etc. That we can distinguish between these fine-grained identities, while at the same time lumping them all under the same coarse-grained identity is what makes change in the ordinary sense possible.

I am neither a follower of any religion nor an atheist. From my experience here and in other places, the parties most responsible for the poor quality of the discussions are the atheists. — T Clark

Even as an atheist, I am surprised that of all the garbage threads that are started here, @fresco chooses to pick on the few religion-themed ones.

But then of course, asking why so many of the threads posted on the forum are garbage is as pointless as asking why the world is such an iniquitous place. There's simply no non-trivial and satisfactory answer to that.

Personally, I'm comfortable with A. W. Moore's take on it, from his book, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: "Metaphysics is the most general attempt to make sense of things." — Jack-N

That's a good way to put it, if a bit vague. It makes sense if you are already familiar with various examples of metaphysics and are trying to generalize from that, but it probably won't be very helpful to someone who really doesn't know what metaphysics is, or has a distorted idea of it, for example, as something to do with the occult.

Don't automatically assume that what seems to you like an abstruse post is a sign of "intellectual posturing." A forum is not a school or a public service; no one here has an obligation to make their posts intelligible and accessible for the widest possible audience. All sort of people post here, with all sorts of backgrounds and motivations. If you don't understand something, just ask. Who knows, you may actually challenge yourself and learn something.

So, in short, do think there are alternatives to the "free will" model of personal responsibility which would be acceptable to the person in the street, i.e. be easy enough to understand and seem consistent with common modern notions of justice and fairness? — Janus

If you are interested in what people in the street (and perhaps also in courts of law and ethics committees) think about "free will", then perhaps, rather than trying to invent free will from scratch, deduce it from the meanings and etymologies of individual words, or from the agglomeration of historical writings and their exegeses, and then asking whether your model is acceptable, a better approach would be to try to first find out what free will, as well as related notions like agency and moral responsibility, mean to people.

To some extent, this approach has been taken by analytical philosophers in the latter half of the 20th century, although they were mostly posing rhetorical questions to themselves and to their colleagues - but nevertheless the intention was to take into account common meanings and real-life functions. A more empirical approach has been pursued in cognitive and social sciences in the last few decades, and it is at the interface with these areas where I think the most relevant philosophy is taking place.

We as humans have made many technological break throughs over the past decades, but having us rely on such technology is simply dulling the human brain essentially making us idiotic people who think nothing of world issues or even issues in our own government. — Lucielle Randall

It is, of course, an age-old plaint about people getting stupider, weaker, more corrupt, etc. etc. But if you are being serious and not just idly moaning, then have you actually bothered to establish the truth of this claim?