• Can humanism be made compatible with evolution?
    They can base their values on whatever they like. — Coben

    An ethical system is typically named after its core value. The core value of humanism is the human being. If they are basing this value on something else, then they shouldn't be called humanists - they should be something else-ists (rationalists perhaps, if they claim to have purely rational foundations for their values).
  • Can humanism be made compatible with evolution?
    ↪Tzeentch
    You are making it sound like cooperative behavior is motivated entirely by self-interest, which just isn't true. I don't even care to argue the point, I think it should be obvious if you think about it for a moment.
  • Can humanism be made compatible with evolution?
    Yes, humanists value human beings in a way they do not value other animals, but they are unable to justify this special treatment if they base their philosophy / ideology on evolution. — Matias

    But where are you getting the idea that humanists are basing their ideology on evolution (thereby committing the naturalistic fallacy)? This is not a rhetorical question: I don't know much about humanism as a contemporary movement, although I suspect that it doesn't have anything like a unified, theoretically motivated ideology.

    Truly moral and virtuous people are exceedingly rare. — Tzeentch

    Oh sure, No True Scotsmen Moral and Virtuous People would be favored by evolution! Which isn't far from the truth, for what that is worth. Evolution is not so much an optimizing process as a satisficing one: it doesn't need to create a population of Truly Moral and Virtuous People, it only needs to create a population of people who are, on the whole, moral enough to get along together in common circumstances - which, not coincidentally, is just what we are.


    i suppose i often dont have too much to say — Frotunes

    Then don't.
  • What is the probability of living now?
    Seems well put. There seems to be some problem with the doomsday argument, but it's not a simple mathematical problem but one that has to do with more basic considerations. You can probably say that the problem is not that the math is wrong, is that the math doesn't provide a good model for reality in this case. So if we were just talking about the graphs as graphs, it might be fine to conclude that graph 2 is more likely. — Echarmion

    @fdrake pointed that out back on page one.

    Of course, the matter is not so cut and dried as to be dismissed out of hand, as evidenced by decades of arguments over The Sleeping Beauty, Doomsday, Simulation, etc. And the issue is not confined to abstract philosophical puzzles either: it lies at the heart of some conundrums in modern cosmology as well (typicality, fine-tuning).

    For more on the general form of the issue look into self-locating beliefs.
  • Illusionism undermines Epistemology
    Right, but then he uses this to argue like Keith Frankish that subjectivity is an illusion. — Marchesk

    Dennett's definition of consciousness is purely objective: functional, behavioral or neurophysiological with no additional experiential properties or stuff to go along with it. The colors, sounds, feels, are a trick of the brain. — Marchesk

    Dennett's objection is to reflexive ontologizing of naive psychological notions of subjectivity. In the linked essay he gives a quote of Searle (also cited by Frankish) whom he holds guilty of just such a practice: "where consciousness is concerned the existence of the appearance is the reality."

    Now, being skeptical of first appearances may sound like a sound principle at first blush, but when you think about it, we hardly ever practice such skepticism, and seem none the worse for it. When it seems right to be skeptical is when first appearances suggest something totally out of the ordinary. And for a naturalist like Dennett, that is just the case with how the likes of Chalmers treat consciousness. Their ontologizing of "qualia" and other half-digested items of folk psychology seem very much like magic ("real" magic, as opposed to stage magic). And not just because of their spookiness, but because philosophically, they are nothing but lazy, magical pseudo-explanations.

    Yes, he wants explanations with some meat on their bones, not just fancy names for stuff we don't understand.
  • Illusionism undermines Epistemology
    Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett are too proponents that conscious experience is an illusion produced by some yet to be discovered mechanism in the brain. By this, illusionists mean that we're being fooled by a cognitive trick into believing we have experiences of color, sound, pain, etc, leading some philosophers to propose there is a hard problem of trying to explain those experiences inside a scientific framework (the terminology of physics, chemistry, biology and neuroscience or cognitive science). Consciousness is compared to a magic show, where the brain fools us using some slight of cognition we're not aware of. — Marchesk

    This is a caricature of Dennett's position. Dennett does not say that conscious experience is an illusion, in the sense of being unreal. He is saying that our intuitive, unexamined folk theories of "conscious experience" should not be trusted and given a privileged status, simply because they are ours.
  • Is there a more complete scientific model than Anaximander's?
    What Hollywood likes is Virgil's reinterpretation of the Iliad, making the Trojan Horse a clever trick rather than an ignoble deception, and ending the story with Troy's successful demolition rather than the horrible fates of the victors. Mostly now Hollywood tells Virgiil's Aeniad, with Greek names, glorifying war rather than imparting wisdom as to its folly. — ernestm

    You have never read either Homer or Virgil, have you? You got it exactly backwards. Virgil takes up the Trojans' narrative (for obvious reasons), and for him Greeks are the enemy, and the story of the Trojan Horse is a story of low cunning. Later Dante, who was raised on the Latin tradition, picked up Virgil's narrative and went so far even as to put Ulysses not in Limbo, with other heroes of antiquity, but in the lowest region of Hell, with liars and fraudsters.
  • Wholes Can Lack Properties That Their Parts Have
    ↪Terrapin Station
    Two cells are not identical to one cell. So you can run the same argument in that case as well: one cell has a property that two cells lack: its numeric count, for one, or the property of occupying a continuous volume of space (also its total weight, volume, surface area, etc.)
  • Wholes Can Lack Properties That Their Parts Have
    ↪Troodon Roar
    You've posted the exact same argument before. You didn't get much of a discussion, because the idea is trivial and there is not much to discuss.

    If A is not identical to B then there is a property that A has and B doesn't, and conversely, there is a property that B has and A doesn't. So if a part is not identical with a whole, then it trivially follows that the part has something that the whole lacks.
  • Will Polling ever recover?
    ↪orcestra
    You cannot put the blame on polls for not getting the result right a year or two before the event. What do you think pollsters are - oracles? How would you distinguish inaccurate polling from people inaccurately predicting their choice two years into the future?
  • What's your ideal regime?
    ↪csalisbury
    Though in general I dislike the idea, sometimes I do wish for an upvote button.
  • The case for determinism
    ↪MattS
    There are a few common responses to such challenges. One is to bite the bullet and deny free will. This is a very common response among amateur philosophers: free-will-does-not-exist is one of the most popular topic starters on internet philosophical forums. It seems to be much less common among professional philosophers. Of the latter, one of the most forceful exponents of this position is Galen Strawson: a typical example can be found in his 1994 paper The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility. (Here he takes on moral responsibility, but he may as well be talking about free will.) He exemplifies reasoning that you will find familiar, and takes it to the bitter end.

    Libertarianism is one of the less popular alternatives. It is often caricatured and rejected out of hand in internet discussions, but the positions of some of its contemporary proponents are rather nuanced and, at the end of the day, can be seen as not that far apart from some compatibilist accounts. Timothy O'Connor is a typical representative of this cohort, and he is the author of the SEP entry on Free Will, where he, understandably, gives a sympathetic outline of libertarian accounts. If you are interested in philosophers' take on free will in general, you can start from this article and drill down from there. (Libertarianism seems to be more common among religious philosophers, and O'Connor is typical in that regard as well. But his SEP article is far from partisan and, in my opinion, well presented. He gives a helpful breakdown of constituents of free will and shows how various positions deal with them.)

    Then there is compatibilism, which in its more narrow form states that free will is compatible with determinism, but often comes to this conclusion by way of a broader argument that says that the question of determinism vs. indeterminism is irrelevant to free will. Note that compatibilists are not necessarily committed to determinism; some of them do not take any position on this question, and some may even be indeterminists. This is by far the most favored position among contemporary philosophers, if the survey linked above is to be believed. You can read about it in another SEP entry on Compatibilism.
  • The case for determinism
    ↪Andrew M
    Right, but still, we, with our macroscopic sense organs, would never know about quantum effects if they did not propagate to our scale. So although the world at our scale is mostly classical (for most practical purposes), it is not entirely so.

    Indeed, even before quantum mechanics, some held out hope that micro-level indeterminism might rescue human free will (it is a little-known fact that indeterminism is possible, in principle, even in classical Newtonian mechanics). And nowadays some similarly speculate that the apparent paradoxes of free will can somehow be resolved via (quite real) neuronal quantum effects.

    But as I said (and I am not the first to make this fairly obvious point), randomness, whether quantum or otherwise, is not a solution to the challenge to free will that is posed by determinism: if anything, it makes things worse. No, the only positive resolution of the problem (i.e. one that does not end up denying free will) is to invalidate the challenge itself, as compatibilists try to do.
  • The case for determinism
    To continue with my initial example - how can we actually have control of our thoughts/actions when these thoughts/actions are driven by chemical reactions at a level that we can't possibly control? For instance, I can't trigger a chemical reaction just by my will alone - it's just something that was set into motion by the close proximity of those molecules, and those molecules were where at that moment due to external impacts that I also did not control. In the end, I didn't have direct control over that chemical reaction that produced the electrical impulse in my brain that eventually materialized into a thought/action. — MattS

    How would macro-level indeterminism help? It wouldn't give you any control - on the contrary, it would make your actions erratic, out-of-control. Your actions would be nominally "free" in the sense that they would not be due to anything external to you. But you still wouldn't be able to take ownership of something over which you have no control - and by definition, you cannot control random events. So those erratic actions wouldn't be freely willed by you.
  • The case for determinism
    Determinism has become very compelling to me. I understand that many believe determinism to not be true, and I'd like to understand better why (because frankly, I don't like the idea of free will not existing). Here is the line of thought that has made it so compelling to me: — MattS

    I don't see a line of reasoning here. You just make statements to the effect that determinism is the case "in your mind" and leave it at that, without providing any reasoning.

    P.S. Same goes for
    ↪Grre
    's assertion of indeterminism.
  • Advantages of a single cell organism over a multi cell organism
    I'm not sure its rational for a single cell organism to partner with other single cell organisms. I think undirected evolution is an irrational concept. — christian2017

    What is irrational is this argument from ignorance. No rational conclusion can follow from "I haven't a fucking clue."
  • Will Polling ever recover?
    I don't know how "facts and figures" help. I am sure that someone more mathematically gifted than I am could give the probaility curves for the margins of error and show how they shouldnt have come into it so often. — orcestra

    Well, facts and figures are obviously of no help to you - that was my point. When the margin of victory is as thin as that, margins of error will come into play. Really, when you see polls clustered tightly around 50%, even without inquiring after margins of error, you should realize that, as far as predicting the winner, a typical poll is pretty much a crapshoot.

    One interesting thing about the election polls cited above is that, while any poll on its own was not wrong (or was not too far off), their combined result was. This is because when multiple polls of similar quality are averaged, their combined error margin is smaller than that of any single poll.

    So if we take the average of the latest 5 polls in the table above (discarding the earlier Newspoll result), they give 48.6% for the coalition that ended up taking 51.5% of the vote. Assuming that all the polls had a similar margin of error (2.3% in the case of Ipsos), their combined margin of error is about 1%, which results in a gap of about 2% from the actual result.

    Still, like @Baden said, a gap of a couple of percentage points is nothing to be hysterical about. The lesson for you is that when two competitors are going neck and neck like this, nothing short of a time machine is going to give you a very reliable prediction.
  • Will Polling ever recover?
    ↪orcestra
    Please explain how the polls were a failure. Preferably with facts and figures.
  • Will Polling ever recover?
    ↪orcestra
    I just looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_Australian_federal_election

    Both polling results and election results were very close:

    18 May 2019 election 	       51.5% 48.5%
15–16 May 2019 	Newspoll       48.5% 51.5%
13–15 May 2019 	YouGov/Galaxy  49%   51%
12–15 May 2019 	Ipsos          49%   51%
10–14 May 2019 	Essential      48.5% 51.5%
10–12 May 2019 	Roy Morgan     48%   52%
9–11 May 2019 	Newspoll       49%   51%

    Without doing an in-depth research, I could only find figures with error margins for Ipsos:

    The two-party result is based on preference flows at the last election, allocating second preferences from One Nation and United Australia Party using a split of 53 per cent to the Coalition and 47 per cent to Labor.

    When voters were asked how they would allocate their preferences, the survey produced the same result of 51 to 49 per cent in Labor’s favour in two-party terms.

    The poll is based on 1842 respondents who were surveyed from Sunday to Wednesday, in the wake of Mr Morrison’s official campaign launch, the announcement of his scheme to guarantee part of the loans made to some first home buyers and Mr Shorten’s promise of $10 billion in funding for a Melbourne rail loop.

    The survey has a margin of error of 2.3 per cent and was conducted by telephone with 46 per cent of the sample based on mobile phone calls.     — Ipsos

    Their margin of error was 2.3%. Their result was off by 2.5%. "Total failure," really?


    I don't see what this has to do with logic, mathematics or philosophy. At most, this is yet more evidence of innumeracy in the general population. By the way, the same hand-wringing accompanied Trump's election victory, where quality polls conducted close to the election were mostly right (i.e. their deviation was within their margin of error).
  • We're conscious beings. Why?
    If you're not convinced, tell me what WOULD convince you that the consciousness is simply a passive observer of goings on over which it has no control? — Unseen

    I don't think we can have much more than a layperson's analysis of consciousness. I think it's probably a so-called "primitive" (primary, unanalyzable concept, known directly and in no other way). — Unseen

    Some sort of empirically informed analysis, not just your say-so. But you have already dismissed science and philosophical analysis as suitable tools, and your entire pattern of posts in this thread consists in repeating the same primitive slogans over and over again, so I am not holding my breath.
  • We're conscious beings. Why?
    ↪Unseen
    You haven't "SHOWN" either the science or the logic. In my very first response in this thread I advised you to have a closer look at the science of consciousness and its evolution, but you haven't demonstrated any interest in that matter. When you inadvertently touched upon the logic (that would be the epiphenomenalism bit), you immediately dropped it like a hot potato.

    Cut the jibber-jabber. Put up or shut up.
  • We're conscious beings. Why?
    ↪Unseen
    You were the one that went "down a sidebar about epiphenomenalism" when I challenged you on your assertions. Now you got cold feet and doubled down on the assertions. I think we are done here: it's clear that you have nothing intelligent to say. All you do is repeat yourself.
  • We're conscious beings. Why?
    ↪Unseen
    Oh so epiphenomenalism is what you were about all this time? Well, dualism is not the only alternative to epiphenomenalism. Indeed, I don't think dualism even answers the challenge posed by epiphenomenalism; on the contrary, the latter only highlights dualism's problem of interaction.

    No, I think epiphenomenalism is better addressed headon and shown to be a non-issue. The principle of causal exclusion, which is what is often used to justify it, is misapplied here.
  • We're conscious beings. Why?
    The proof that we can go without consciousness is that it actually does nothing. — Unseen

    That's not proof - that's just the same baseless assertion.
  • We're conscious beings. Why?
    But intelligence doesn't need consciousness. If I were to create a successful Turing machine, it's absurd to suppose that it's anything other than a successful simulation, not a being having experiences. — Unseen

    These are nothing but bland assertions. How do you know that human-like intelligence can go without consciousness? Why is it absurd to suppose that an artificial intelligence can have experiences?
  • Was Hume right about causation?
    In a way, his epistemology was his metaphysics - what is known is identical to what is. — Merkwurdichliebe

    I am by no means an expert on Hume, but I don't think this is true. Where does he say this?
  • Was Hume right about causation?
    Hume said that it was possible for events to not have causes. — Dusty of Sky

    "We can never demonstrate the necessity of a cause to every new existence, without shewing at the same time the impossibility there is, that anything can ever begin to exist without some productive principle" (Treatise of Human Nature, Book1, Part 3, Section 3) — Dusty of Sky

    As you can see, Hume didn't say anything of the sort. His thesis is that we can never demonstrate the existence of a cause. Again, Hume wrote about human understanding - how we come to know, whether we can know - not about the nature of things. He didn't actually have much to say about metaphysics and ontology, he was mainly concerned with epistemology.
  • What made the first viruses or bacteria (single cells) organism have the desire or ability replicate
    We could guess that the initial method of reproduction was reproduction through cell division — Bitter Crank

    There is an even more basic method of reproduction, and that is what a lot of origin of life research focuses on: self-replicating molecules, which are fascinating yet entirely "mechanical" (or in this case chemical) things. Going up the scale there are more complex self-replicating systems, which still don't require anything as complex and anthropomorphic as desires and intentions to work.

    ↪christian2017
    Origin of life (OOL) is a fascinating field of study. If you have an interest, there's lots of material that you can read, from short online articles to entire books.
  • Was Hume right about causation?
    Hume's beliefs about causation are antiquated. He didn't consider that there might actually exist natural law. — Relativist

    On the contrary, Hume appeared to support the notion of a necessary connection between events in nature. All that he said about uncertainty and probability had to do with our knowledge of those connections, as others have pointed out.
  • Is there any Truth in the Idea that all People are Created Equal
    ↪Dusty of Sky
    Context and history do matter; the phrase "all men are created equal" is too ambiguous otherwise. You can speculate all day what it means to be "equal" without getting anywhere.

    That's not to say that the framers of the American constitution had a very sharp and robust meaning in mind. But they were writing these words for a quite specific purpose and within a certain tradition of thought as regards natural human rights and the principles of governance that were well known at the time.
  • We're conscious beings. Why?
    You don't think AI comes close to human intelligence? — Unseen

    No. You don't even need to develop AI in order to have a computer that can solve certain problems as well as or better than people can - that's what calculating devices were developed for in the first place, starting with slide rules and mechanical adding machines and on to modern "non-intelligent" computer programs that do all sorts of calculations, data manipulations and decision-making orders of magnitude faster and better than people can. But none of them approach the complexity or the functionality of human intelligence.

    Most AIs aren't even intended to emulate the way people think; the goal instead, as with "non-intelligent" programs, is to solve specific problems by any means. And even with the most advanced research programs that do have the goal of eventually creating something approaching human intelligence, there is no agreement as to whether they are on the right path.
  • Is there any Truth in the Idea that all People are Created Equal
    The point I was making wasn't "haha, some people are blondes and some are brunettes, therefore inequality". I agree, that would be stupid. The question I was trying to raise was whether all people are of equal value. That's why I used the examples of Abraham Lincoln and the Sandy Hook shooter. — Dusty of Sky

    It is stupid. Again, I have to ask, do you have any idea about the context and the history of the phrase? Any idea at all? If you don't then the obvious thing would be to find out before attempting to philosophize. Post the question in Questions if you don't know how to use Google.
  • We're conscious beings. Why?
    Science doesn't even know what consciousness is or how it's produced, so science isn't much help. — Unseen

    That's another glib statement that doesn't help the discussion. Sure, science doesn't know everything there is to know about consciousness, but who does? I don't think laymen or philosophers are more privileged than cognitive scientists in this respect.

    Meanwhile you are asking a scientific question when you are wondering why consciousness evolved and what fitness advantages it might have offered. (Or rather you are not asking but already presuming to know the answer, without offering any reasons for it other than sheer incredulity.)

    Meanwhile, we can see that AI is developing rapidly with no hint that intelligent devices have experiences of any sort, so it seems that consciousness isn't a function of intelligence. — Unseen

    Your conclusion doesn't follow. What we fancifully call "artificial intelligence" does not come anywhere close to emulating human intelligence, so why would you expect it to have comparable experiences? And how would you know whether an AI is having a subjective experience? Just because we create it doesn't mean we know all about it.
  • We're conscious beings. Why?
    Humans behave as evolutionary forces molded us, but being conscious of what we're doing, experiencing it, seems gratuitous. — Unseen

    Just exactly WHY are humans (and higher animals as well) conscious at all? It seems totally unnecessary and seems to have no survival value, either. — Unseen

    But is it really? How would you know without a detailed study of the role that conscious experiences play in our functioning now and in our evolutionary past? Such rhetorical questions are too glibly thrown around in philosophical discussions that are far removed from their proper scientific context. And it's not like scientists haven't taken a crack at answering them.
  • This forum
    many old-timers tell me the hay-day of online forums was i the mid/late 90’s — I like sushi

    As an old-timer, I concur.
  • Voting in a democracy should not be a right.
    ↪thedeadidea
    You are still talking about "democracy" as if it was synonymous with "the best form of government." If you remove what makes democracy a democracy, you may or may not end up with a better form of government, but what you won't have is a democracy.

    I have exactly NOT done what YOU ACCUSE me of which is blind prejudice. Nowhere have I said 'black people should not vote because they are black' or anything to the effect. — thedeadidea

    Where have I done this?
  • Voting in a democracy should not be a right.
    ↪thedeadidea
    You don't understand what "democracy" means, do you? As @StreetlightX points out, the sine qua non of democracy is that the governed have a say in how they are governed. You are saying, in essence, "I want democracy without all that democracy stuff." If you don't like democracy, then say so.

    It's funny how words acquire such stable positive or negative connotations that people forget about their meaning and remember only the connotation. It's like someone saying "I am not a racist, I just hate niggers."
  • Is mathematics discovered or invented
    But would this argument have the same force if applied to, say, wheels? Would we be surprised - or not - that aliens also have wheels? And would this mean that wheels (the quintessential 'invention') are therefore discovered? Do wheels have 'objective reality'? — StreetlightX

    For a long time there prevailed a sense of a metaphysical or a logical necessity of our mathematical constructs. Pythagoreans, for example, went so far as to put numbers at the center of their metaphysics. Closer to our time, logicists hoped to give traditional mathematics an a priori foundation. Recently though these notions have come under attack and have been significantly weakened if not altogether defeated. But there may be a sense in which the privileged status of certain mathematical structures can be recovered. If so, then when mathematicians describe those structures, it can be said that they are making a discovery, in the same sense in which explorers and scientists - and yes, inventors - make discoveries.

    A wheel is a device that is well-suited to a very specific set of constraints: the constraints of physics, scale, local environment, etc. And when something that has such specific objective constraints is produced, we are justified in calling it a discovery. Likewise, evolution discovers adaptations (albeit through a blind process of trial and error) - it does not invent them in an act of pure creativity, because nearly all such inventions are doomed to fail in the face of objective environmental constraints.
  • Is mathematics discovered or invented
    So, if an intelligent culture completely independent from ours happens to create the same concepts out of the infinite quantity of possible logical games, that would be a strong indication that there is some meaning in these concepts that is not related to logical games. — Mephist

    Surely, we don't need the example of another civilization independently "discovering" mathematics to assure ourselves of the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in describing the natural world (as Eugene Wigner famously put it)? I think our own example provides plenty of evidence of that. The question is, how far can we take that conclusion? When we develop mathematical theories and construct mathematical models to explain the regularities in our observations, do we thereby discover some objective truth about nature?
  • Is there any Truth in the Idea that all People are Created Equal
    ↪Dusty of Sky
    The popular wisdom says that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. Philosophy supplies a forceful counterargument to that sentiment: the best philosophy is all about asking good questions - the corollary of which is that there are inept, stupid questions. And yours is a prime example.

    I suppose that if you came from a background where you never encountered the phrase "all people are created equal," and you then encountered it outside of any context, then your confusion would be understandable. But I am pretty sure that that is not the case with you. And so I enjoin you to think about that context, and think well next time before you post an new topic on this forum.
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