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?

So, what is a rational intuition? — T Clark

It's the point where reasoning stops and table-pounding begins.

And as you are more concerned with who defends a view rather than the defensibility of the view — Bartricks

I am more concerned with exploring those views, starting with learning them even in the most basic outlines. But I can see that you are not interested in that at all.

I don't think I misunderstand it at all. Which premise in which of my arguments are you disputing? — Bartricks

I just told you, didn't I? Why not read something about this topic if it interests you? You might want to start not with the identity theory specifically but with an overview of theories of mind, which will put things in perspective.

As for panpyschism having lots of proponents - er, no it doesn't, it just has a fancy name and is associated with a philosopher who has long hair and thinks he's a rock star.

Numbers don't mean anything, it is evidence that counts. But if you're (misguidedly) interested in numbers, then my view wins hands-down. The thesis that your mind is an immaterial soul and not your brain or any other physical thing is far and away the prevailing view among reflective people, now and throughout history. — Bartricks

You persist in misunderstanding this. "Self-evident" doesn't mean the most popular. Self-evident means that it is impossible to deny. This isn't just a quibble about words, by the way. You are too blithely dismissing positions without even trying to learn about them. That is not the attitude of a philosopher. At the very least, the fact that such positions are taken seriously by people who are not stupid or insane ought to give you a pause.

You are misunderstanding the mind-brain identity thesis. It does not say that your mind is literally a physical object that is your brain. Rather, it says that the mind is identical to the processes in your brain, and mental states are really brain states. That should satisfy your modest requirement that the mind should not be a thing that you can touch, see, smell, etc.

That said, mind-brain identity position is not as widely held as you make it sound: it is only one of a number of physicalist theories of mind and, at a guess, not the most popular. Moreover, a dualistic soul is not the corollary of denying mind-brain identity. Again, it is only one of a number of non-physicalists positions on the mind, and again at a guess, not the most popular, at least among philosophers.

Yes, I understand what panpyschism is. — Bartricks

Then you should also understand that it cannot be self-evidently false, otherwise it would not have as many proponents as it does.

And of course free-will is tainted by its theological roots - I'm not trying to 'insinuate' this: here's me being explicit about it: free-will is theological trash. — StreetlightX

Well, thank you for being so upfront, I guess - this will save me time and effort. By giving a caricature of your position I was hoping (though it wasn't much of a hope after seeing your earlier posts) that I might be proven wrong or that I might elicit a more nuanced take. But it looks like the caricature was spot-on. Oh well.

As for concepts being 'conflated with 'that which they purport to address', wtf else are concepts if not designed specifically for address 'what they purport to address'. — StreetlightX

Fortunately, that's not what I said.

Funny how an 'innate understanding' had to be invented by theologians a couple of hundred years ago before which it was nowhere to be found. — StreetlightX

It's not contentious. — StreetlightX

It's contentious, if you care to survey philosophical literature on free will, rather than just the works of one or two authors. And no, I am not going to get into a childish flame war with you over this; I am not that interested in history and exegesis, any way. My point of contention is that you are muddying the waters by conflating the intellectual history of free will as an articulated philosophical concept (and a very specific version of that concept, if you insist on tracing it to Augustin et al.) with that which this concept purports to address. What I particularly resent is the attempt to shout down the debate by the unsubtle insinuation that the concept is forever tainted and discredited by its history as an opium for the masses that was maliciously concocted by theologians. You can be critical and revisionist about free will without being stupid and dogmatic.

analytic truth truth by virtue of the meaning of the words of a statement, synthetic needs meaning and correspondence with reality as well. Here with this terminology I'm speaking about rule following which can even be of strings of empty symbols, so meaning is not involved here, however synthetic seems to be overlapping with receptive truths. I think that analytic is "meaningful consequential truths", so I think the term "consequential truth" is weaker than analytic truth, although of course you can object to this by holding that consequential truth is a kind of non-meaningful analytic truth or by saying that rule fellowship is a kind of meaning, you can call it meaning by having a role in following a rule, if so then we can subsume consequential into analytic. The new things is that KANT was saying that mathematics is apriori synthetic. Which this philosophy doesn't agree with. I more agree with Hume that mathematics is purely analytic nothing else. — Zuhair

Right, so your receptive/consequential distinction falls approximately along the same line as Hume's matters of fact vs. relations of ideas, which is now often aliased as synthetic/analytic, although one can certainly split semantic hairs and introduce further distinctions, like Kant's a priori/a posteriori. (For that matter, Hume's own treatment of relations of ideas amounted to more than just rule-following.) In any event, this is a well-trodden path - I was just wondering whether you thought you were bringing some fresh perspective and not just your personal terminology.

The idea that all there is to mathematics is manipulation of symbols according to fixed rules is true only within a comparatively limited, 18th century conception of mathematics, when mathematics was the mathematics, and it sprang from the same source as logic and rationality itself. Since then we have significantly broadened our ideas of mathematics - and for the matter, of logic and rationality as well. This is what @fdrake is getting at: the more interesting questions in the philosophy of mathematics revolve around the rules themselves, rather than the uncontroversial fact that conclusions can be deduced by following those rules.

That's a lot of words, but I am kind of struggling to understand what it is that you think is the original thought here. How is your receptive/consequential distinction different from synthetic/analytic, etc. - what has become known as "Hume's fork" (and has since been deconstructed and criticized by Quine, etc.)?

Unfortunately, the only Hugo I've read is "Les Miserables," which I read in French in high school. — T Clark

That's some assignment!

I read Notre-Dame de Paris as a teen, and even at that age his overwrought romanticism turned me off. The shear bulk of Les Miserables scares me. Not that I am intimidated by big books in general, but five volumes of that kind of prose...

"What it means" is where conceptual issues begin and end. What did you think I meant? Specifically with regard to causality, since that was the context, the issue is pretty controversial in QM. As you know, cause is not really a term in QM's vocabulary (and the same can be said about most areas of physics), so it is all about interpretation.

Certainly. Sorry if I've misunderstood you.

Reader here. I read every day, though since I am a slow reader, I don't cover nearly as much ground as some. I don't have a good idea of how much other people outside of my small social circle read, so I can't really compare myself to others. I take no personal credit for my literacy - it was inculcated in me by my parents.

I read mostly fiction - "serious" literature, with a bit of light fare for when I am too exhausted or distraught for more demanding stuff. I rarely read book-length non-fiction - I just don't value most of it enough to prioritize it over fiction. I was a bit surprised to see @Amity and others referring to reading fiction almost as if it was cheating at reading. On the contrary, I have always associated "reading" with fiction books, first and foremost.

Shakespeare’s language is, of course, “dramatic” stage language. It doesn’t make for easy reading. — Bitter Crank

I actually find Shakespeare's dramatic "high" style easier than his "low" style - all that witty banter, in which most of the witticisms and sexual innuendos you wouldn't even understand without a commentary that runs twice as long as the text itself. I think I learned (and have long since forgotten) a dozen euphemisms for penis and vagina while reading an annotated Much Ado about Nothing (starting with the title, of course). In Henry IV I struggled with Falstaff's scenes, uproarious though they might be, but when I would get to some princely monologue - whew! Smooth sailing at last! Here I could read a few lines without consulting notes.

Now of course this is a single interaction. — Coben

Which is impossible to judge based on the retelling of one of the participants. For all I know, you could be right, but to a rational observer who knows only that the argument was between a non-expert with a superficial familiarity with the research and the experts who conducted the research (because even before you squabbled with someone on a forum you were in a virtual argument with the authors of the studies in question), the balance of credibility is obviously not in your favor.

But that's not the important point. What was the point of this anecdote?

I just bring it up because it is a sort of classic philosophy/science encounter. — Coben

From what you have told us, it appears that the "classic encounter" consists of you presuming that scientists in general would not know anything about isolating principal causes of a phenomenon while accounting for relevant confounders. How could they, indeed? After all, 'cause' is a philosophical term of art, so they need an amateur philosopher with little knowledge of the subject matter to set them straight.

What is particularly perplexing about this encounter is that as a philosopher you weren't problematizing a concept that is commonly taken for granted, or bringing to light an unexamined assumption, or suggesting a different conceptual framework. Rather, you were challenging the science on its own turf - perhaps without even realizing that that is what you were doing. It could be that the researchers did not do a good job of accounting for all relevant factors and evaluating alternative hypotheses - I don't have enough information and expertise to judge. But that is precisely what is expected of them as scientists.

How do you think philosophers theorize about causality? How do they evaluate their own theories? They systematize and generalize causality by examining our causal thinking and practice. But toy examples like billiard balls colliding or stones smashing windows can only get you so far. Scientific practice provides a large pool of complex examples, from Newtonian dynamics to epidemiology, and here philosophers mostly learn from scientists, rather than the other way around. If a philosophical account of causality is contrary to the best scientific practices, this is usually taken to be philosophy's deficiency.

That is not to say that philosophers cannot contribute to the discussion of causality, but that would be more in areas where science runs up against conceptual difficulties, such as in quantum mechanics, for example. As for routine problems with the quality of studies and such, scientists and mathematicians are more adept at debugging those than most philosophers.

I thought Hugo was a Republican. — Bill Hobba

LOL you guys. Yeah, you could say that Hugo was a republican, though not in the way you think.

Have you heard of "blogs"? It's a hot new thing on the Internet - you should check it out!

From my perspective, what you say is mistaken. Any area with a mental component has philosophy somewhere in its foundations, if you grub around enough to find it. How could it possibly be otherwise? — Pattern-chaser

Did you read just this last sentence? I don't deny the value of philosophy, nor even its applicability to science.

Somebody in this thread said that part of the reason philosophy is looked down on by scientists is that the philosophers don't do or understand science. — T Clark

This situation is changing though. Just as science is no longer the province of gentlemen dilettantes, as it was until about the mid-19th century, philosophy is catching up and becoming more professional and specialized. It is not uncommon now for philosophers of science to have an honest-to-goodness science degree. And while such a formal degree is not a prerequisite for doing good philosophy, I believe that only those philosophers who demonstrate a decent grasp of their subject deserve to be taken seriously.

We should turn that around too, make people understand that so-called scientists who don't understand the intellectual underpinnings of what they do are just technicians. — T Clark

Some people here tend to arrogantly overestimate their understanding of science and scientific process and underestimate scientists' intellectual abilities. It is easy enough to find examples of uninspired or incompetent science (provided that you have the competence to judge!) just as it is easy to find examples of uninspired or incompetent carpentry, and for pretty much the same reason: when something is so ubiquitous, it can't all be excellent. (And how much excellence does hammering a nail require, anyway? A lot of research is basically hammering nails.) But there have always been outstanding intellectuals working in science, who could give the best of philosophers a run for their money, even if they didn't spend much time poring over their Aristotle and Kant. Frankly, the conceptual riches that have opened up in science and mathematics over the last 200 years make a lot of philosophy look shallow and insignificant in comparison.

I am embarrassed for those "philosophers" (not talking about you, T Clark) - nitwits and crackpots who come here to sneer condescendingly at the Borns and the Feynmans - those benighted bunglers! If only they listened to our sophomoric insights, science wouldn't have been in such a hot mess that it is nowadays! If any self-respecting scientist happened upon this forum, she would tell them where they can stuff their philosophy - and would be absolutely right. Philosophers need to step up their own game if they want to be relevant.

Beyond that, the question in science is rather: How did you test that? How did you take care of scientific controls? Has anybody else tested it again? These anti-spam measures neatly hark back to Popperian falsificationism, which in my impression, still rules as king over the epistemic domain of science. — alcontali

This isn't so much Popperian falsificationism as just empiricist principles that were around, more or less, since Bacon's time. Falsificationism is something more technical and specific - one analytical treatment out of many that were being developed starting from around the turn of the century in an attempt to formalize and precisify those widely shared ideas. Poper, Duhem, Hempel, Ramsey, Fisher, Neyman, etc., etc. - they weren't in disagreement about the general principles (except when they were trying to exaggerate their differences, as Popper in particular was apt to do) - they disagreed about analysis.

But while such analytical work still continues, I think the era of all-encompassing analytical programmes for science has been eclipsed over the last half-century by a more historical-sociological approach of Kuhn, Feyerabend, etc. that acknowledges science's messy, complex human nature. None of the simple analytical models that have been proposed proved to be a good universal fit for science's successes and failures. Instead, there are general, necessarily vague empiricist principles, and then there are many particular methodologies, protocols, techniques and know-hows that are being gradually developed and adjusted as we go along.

For myself, I am proud that I had loving parents, grandparents and grew up in a stable home with both a mom and dad present. — Teller

What exactly are you proud of? Choosing your parents wisely?

Unfortunately, NY Times has a policy of endlessly nagging for readers to create a "free" account and give up lots of personally-identifying data, in order to access the information linked to. I have a personal policy that says, if the only source is NY Times, then it has no source, and then the information simply does not exist. My policy works absolutely fine. We do not "need" NY Times. How could we "need" them, if they are not even convenient to use? — alcontali

You don't need a NYT account to read this article. If somehow, despite your policy, you've exceeded their free articles-per-month limit, you can just open it in a private/incognito window or delete newyorktimes cookies.

Anyway, there is a link there to d'Espagnat's 1979 article in Scientific American, The Quantum Theory and Reality. Apparently he was pushing for a link between consciousness and quantum measurement - not a new idea even then, but one that was and still is largely rejected both by physicists and philosophers. Still, d'Espagnat is given credit for the resurgence of interest in philosophical problems of quantum theory.

Interesting link:

But, as many in Munich were surprised to learn, falsificationism is no longer the reigning philosophy of science. Nowadays, as several philosophers at the workshop said, Popperian falsificationism has been supplanted by Bayesian confirmation theory, or Bayesianism — alcontali

I don't think it's fair to say that Bayesianism supplanted Popperian falsificationism. Bayesian confirmation theory was developed by Ramsey, de Finetti and others long before Popper came on the scene, and remains with its variations, such as likelihoodism, one of the dominant quantitative treatments of theory selection. Falsificationism, on the other hand, never really took off and isn't much talked about, except in connection with Popper.

In my opinion, anything based on probability theory and statistics must be treated with utmost scrutiny, because these things are core ingredients in the snake-oil industry. — alcontali

Statistics is a very tricky and philosophically fraught subject. Nevertheless, statistics is where the rubber meets the road, as far as philosophy of science is concerned. If your philosophy has no implications for statistical methodology, then it has little relevance to science.

32 mass shootings this so far this year - that's about once per week.

Looking forward to "debating" this for the next round of mass shootings! — Maw

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” — NYT

Do scientists have an irrational bias against philosophy, specifically philosophy of science? Or am I not understanding an obvious truth, such as that science doesn't seem to have anything to do with philsophy of science? — Shushi

Well, Science Forums has an explicitly stated narrow focus and tight moderation, so the fact that your thread was closed immediately and the earlier thread was short-lived as well is not an indication of anything. However, it has been my experience that people with scientific and engineering background do often display little patience for and a good deal of prejudice against philosophy. Unsurprisingly, this is mainly seen among those who know little about the field, or worse, have distorted ideas about it.

For example, outside of its specialized usage, the word "metaphysics" can mean "abstract theory with no basis in reality" (OED), and historically it has often been associated with the irrational and the occult. Is it surprising that people who are into natural sciences would tend to be allergic to such a notion? You yourself have confessed to thinking that "it was just pure speculative talk and nonsense that anyone could make up" - before you learned a little more about what philosophy was really about. And, to be fair, a good deal of philosophy has been and still is "speculative talk and nonsense" - but not all of it, as you and I agree (although to my mind, Penrose and Polkinghorne offer examples of the more disreputable kind of "metaphysics").

No doubt, some of the prejudice comes from ignorance and the sort of arrogance that people who are accomplished in their field often display for other fields (here, of course, I am talking about people like Hawking and Krauss, not just random Science Forum posters, most of whom are not even scientists). Physicists might be especially guilty of this:



There have always been scientists with an interest in and a respect for philosophy. Off the top of my head, a few of the prominent working scientists are George Ellis, Sean Carroll, Anthony Aguirre - perhaps not surprisingly, all cosmologists. I could also think of some theoretical physicists. But it used to be - I don't know if things have changed in the recent decades - that philosophy was almost a taboo subject in science departments. David Albert, who earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1981, says that after he developed an interest in philosophy he almost got kicked out of the grad school when he said that he wanted to write his thesis on foundations of physics. In the end he was forced to do a thesis on a very technical, calculation-heavy subject picked for him by the department, but eventually, after working with Aharonov at the Tel Aviv University, he became one of the more prominent philosophers of physics.

WTF? Will you just keep spamming these idiotic threads about infinity? One is not enough for you?

Sorry I was a little snippy in my response. That free will is undermined by a deterministic universe is an old and perfectly respectable philosophical position.

How would I feel about the free will that doesn't exist? I think it would make me happy knowing that I am fully responsible for my actions and that others would be responsible for theirs instead of being victims of circumstance we would be accountable in a similar sense you would be able to blame and be blamed for things but also take complete credit. I suppose the feeling of control is what the best thing about it would be. — AwazawA

I think the best thing about a real free will would be that I could truly be the author of my own thoughts and feelings and actions which makes them feel more real than having it all go according to a fate. — AwazawA

But don't you still feel that, when you deliberately do something, it is you acting on your intentions? Don't you still feel in control and responsible for your actions? Don't you still hold others responsible for theirs?

It is true that, when we learn about all the external factors that influenced or even forced someone's decision, we are apt to feel that they were less in control, that the decision was not fully theirs, and that they are therefore less responsible for it. Likewise, when we contemplate the environment and incidents that formed someone's character, we may blame them less for some offense that they committed, or, in opposite circumstances, tend to take for granted their good deeds. But by and large, that sense of people, ourselves included, being the source of their actions and making choices when there are choices to be made remains strong, no matter what.

don't want to reject mathematical models, far from being a mere philosophical point; if I thought that I would have to change job! Specifically, I think mathematical models really do allow us to find things out about nature. What I was trying to highlight was that the use of time in mathematical models doesn't really tell us much about it, as any smooth bijective function of time could be used to parametrise them. — fdrake

Well, there is this position, to which I am somewhat sympathetic, that the abstract (mathematical) entities that we find to be indispensable in explaining (modeling) the world thereby exist. Of course, as you point out, time may not even be all that indispensable, or even if some time was necessary, there is no one definite form of it that we are forced to adopt. But then the latter problem is basically what Einstein's relativity tackles, where time is quite substantive, even if it is very much a reference- and coordinate-dependent entity.

My love of the chain rule example is that it suggests one way to exploit the arbitrarity of the time variable to 'internalise' it to other concepts; of differentials of unfolding. While time and unfolding are probably interdependent, time is often seen as unitary whereas unfolding is a plurality of links which we know have affective power in nature. It invites an immanent thought of time, whereas the times thought in (A,B) and the hypostatised 'indifferent substrate' of time are both marred by their transcendental character. — fdrake

You don't even need a smooth function in order to convey this idea: really, what it comes down to is variable substitution: expressing one quantity in terms of another. This works even for ragged and discontinuous relationships. However, to return to my reservations about this thought as a justification for what is, I think, a physical and/or metaphysical thesis, the same abstract manipulation can be applied in ways that are less physically meaningful and certainly don't warrant a parallel conclusion. For example, in the famous predator-prey example, instead of looking at populations of wolves and hares, we could look at the population of wolves and the amount of manure excreted by hares, which of course is closely related to the population of hares. Does this mean that we can therefor dispense with hares in this system? Well, we could for the sake of modeling the population of wolves (or the amount of shit, if that is what we are interested in), but surely our ability to do so doesn't indicate that hares lack substance!

(By the way, for me the Lotka-Volterra problem was one of the more memorable experiences from learning mathematics. It becomes even more dynamically interesting in 3D, if you add another variable into the system, such as grass.)

Edit-imprecise summary: time is something empirically real, not just something transcendentally ideal. The empirically real component requires different methodology to attack than the usual Kantian/phenomenological interpretive machines, and is still of philosophical interest. — fdrake

Thanks for this, I know I haven't addressed much of what you've said - but that's because I would like to think more about it.

You are not answering the question. You don't need to tell me about how you think free will does not exist because I've heard this a thousand times, and so has anyone who has spent any amount of time on a philosophy forum. I am wondering, along with your OP, how you feel about the hypothetical real free will, the one you think we don't have. What would it be like? How would it be different from the one that you call "pseudo free will" and Dennett calls "free will worth having?"