We certainly seem to have reason-seeking instincts, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that we cannot help it. Chance, brute facts - these remain conceivable concepts, even if some would like to deny their actuality.

If the only thing in nature that is naturally reasonable is man, then what right do we have to declare that the rest of nature must follow along and be reasonable? We know a very little of what is in nature, maybe there are areas in nature where the PSR does not hold, how would or could we know, unless we say reality must conform to our understanding. — Cavacava

If we just say "reason" and leave it at that, then either we are making PSR an epistemological principle, or we are making some rather extravagant claims about the world somehow being imbued with "reason" (well, perhaps not so extravagant if you are a deist or a pan-psychist of some sort).

The trouble with a purely epistemological, regulative PSR is that it can easily dissolve into a banality. "We should always be looking for reasons, always try to make sense of the world" - well, who is going to argue with that?

PSR only really gets its teeth when it acquires some metaphysical commitments, as when "reasons" are cached out in terms of causes or entailments (@MetaphysicsNow).

Oh, I am not faulting you for not laying out an entire epistemology right here and now. My point is that historically* the PSR has meant something stronger and more specific than just having some reasons or motives or inclinations for believing this or that. Why even talk about some capital-P Principle if it is something so broad and vague?

* and contemporaneously, although it seems that the PSR, at least its less restricted versions, has rather fallen out of favor outside the circle of Christian theologians.

What usually distinguishes a PSR from any old belief system are more stringent requirements for sufficient reasons. You cannot just give a half-arsed excuse or say "Screw it, that's good enough reason for me!" You are supposed to doggedly pursue the chain of reasoning until some satisfactory resolution - a necessary state of affairs in the strongest formulations of the PSR.

The PSR, as I understand it, covers both causes and reasons. — Janus

First, we shouldn't be talking about "the" PSR without further qualifications. The SEP entry that Posty linked has a good intro chapter that classifies the various ways in which a PSR can be formulated and analyzed.

One important question that can be asked of a PSR is what constitutes a sufficient reason. You seem to make your requirements so loose that your PSR becomes nothing more than a requirement for having a sound epistemology, good reasons for belief (where what constitutes good reasons is left unspecified).

As an untrustworthy American, I say de-escalation is having NK stop threatening the US mainland. That kind of talk is bad joo joo for everybody. Trust me. — frank

So, deescalation means tampering down belligerent rhetoric for a while? That's a pretty low bar you are setting, but then chances are, based on past experience and other considerations, that that will indeed be the scope of achievement in the present iteration.

The pattern has been that NK ratchets up the threat level, then at the height of the confrontation it suddenly appears to back down and offers talks. Lots of pomp and ceremony follows; NK extracts temporary relief from its opponents in the form of lifted sanctions, aid and investment, in exchange for a temporary change of rhetoric, vague promises, and concessions that later turn out to be hollow or that it simply refuses to deliver.

NK is a survivor. It doesn't play a long game - it executes these political maneuvers in order to prolong its existence for a few more years. And I don't see anything in the present iteration that would seem to be any different from the past ones. There is no reason at all for NK to give up its highly successful nuclear program (successful politically, that is) and every reason for it to keep it up. As for the unification of Korea, that would entail a suicide for the present NK regime. If a unification ever happens, it obviously won't come about as a result of high-level negotiations with NK in its present state. Before a unification can happen, the regime will either have to be toppled or weakened to a great extent, or it will have to undergo extensive reforms.

I take the PSR to be an epistemological, not an ontological, principle. So Thorongil is right to say that it cannot be refuted, epistemologically and logically speaking at least, because to do so would be to find reason that the principle does not obtain: a performative contradiction. — Janus

How so?

First, as has been discussed here, the scope of the PSR may be limited to events or entities and not include "things" such as rules, principles, laws, etc.

But even if it did, the denial of the PSR would state that there is at least one thing that does not have a sufficient reason. That in no way contradicts the statement that there is one thing (the denial of the PSR) that does have a sufficient reason.

If there are natural events which are absolutely random, those events could never be anything for us — Janus

What do you mean?

Would you say yes or no to a prize for Trump? — frank

Why Trump? This whole Korean "rapprochement," for whatever it is worth, has been Kim's show from the beginning to the end. Trump just let it happen.

If you have been a Fox viewer of opinion shows like The Five, Outnumbered, Hannity, Carlson and The Greg Gutfeld show — ArguingWAristotleTiff

...then you are beyond all hope.

If there is objective morality, then equal interests per life time for each sentient being should be the aim to achieve. — Atheer

1. How do you define "objective morality," and why?

2. What does "equal interests per life time" mean?

Hey, you’re making a lot of the same points I would make if I held your view. What’s your background? — Fool

Oh, my educational background is nothing spectacular. As far as physics, I only have a BA and some graduate courses from many years ago. So don't take my pronouncements too seriously ;)

It’s smart to distinguish frequency shifting from different sources. It’s standardly used to measure front-back motion within our own solar system, where inflation is negligible. The flip side is that the mechanics describing motion throughout the galaxy will entail increasingly precise frequency shifts. — Fool

Yes, we can and do observe redshift from peculiar motions of objects within our cosmic neighborhood. But that doesn't help with detecting cosmological redshift - on the contrary. Even ignoring the other issue to which I'll return in a moment, all this back-and-forth motion creates a background from which it would problematic to extract a tiny effect, even if it actually was systematic. (How would you distinguish a tiny systematic bias in the data from noise? Noise doesn't have to be perfectly unbiased!) But more to the point, bodies within our galaxy are gravitationally bound, and their free-fall towards each other counteracts metric expansion of space.

Could there be other ways by which we could predict and perhaps even detect expansion of space? Well, as I mentioned earlier, expansion was in Einstein's equations - in their (arguably) simpler, more natural form - right from the beginning, so that in order to remove that expansion, a term had to be added. So perhaps even without any observations to prompt it, the hypothesis would have already been on the table. And whether it would have been dismissed, as Einstein did before Hubble's discovery, or taken seriously, is a matter of historical speculation. To take another example from recent history, there is a sizable group of physicists that take the theoretical prediction of quantum "many worlds" seriously - simply because they seem to be right there in the equations, and it takes additional, non-empirical postulations to get rid of them. Some empirically inaccessible predictions of cosmological theories, such as "bubble universes," are also justified by the fact that they are inevitable consequences of a theory that is, or might be otherwise well-supported by observation.

Are there possible experimental ways of detecting metric expansion of space, other than through cosmological redshift? Perhaps you are right, and there could be alternative paths to discovery. But here I would rather defer to the experts. I don't think much about Krauss's philosophizing, but on this question he is undoubtedly an authority that ought to be taken seriously. He may be wrong, but it is far more likely for you or I to be wrong about this than it is for him.

So I'll meet you half-way: A civilization with no access to the same observations that we have might nevertheless entertain theories that predict those same observations, and might even in some cases find strong indirect support for such predictions. But this is by no means guaranteed. There is no good reason to think that scientific theories inevitably converge towards some fixed final shape. The less data we have in some area, the more uncertainty there is about theory choice. Moreover, observer selection effects can bias and lead us away from the "truth" (for lack of a better word).

I'm suggesting this evidence may not be necessary. Even if we had to rely on red or blue-shifted light, Doppler Effects within our own galaxy may compel the same hypothesis - not that I'm convinced we could only discover the expansion of space through shifted light. — Fool

The thing is, you need much larger scales in order to detect redshifting due to expanding space. On the scale of a galaxy gravitational attraction overcomes this effect. It's not just that the effect would be too minute to extract from the background (though it probably would), it is that gravity keeps objects within the galaxy together, so the effect is nonexistent.

The point is the mathematical nature of physics connects seemingly unrelated phenomena in unforeseeable ways, so it seems premature to rule out all possible evidence. — Fool

I think you are underestimating the underdetermination of theory by evidence in general, and the autonomy of physical theories at different scales/energies in particular.

From the perspective of theory, expanding space is just a parameter in Einstein's field equations. It is altogether absent in quantum physics, or any other theory that deals with scales much smaller than cosmological. Initially, when he didn't know any better, Einstein introduced his cosmological constant in order to make space static, rather than expanding. The constant was dropped, and then reintroduced again in response to further astronomical observations.

But what if such observations were not available? What form of the equations would we have ended up with? On the one hand, a static universe just seems like a simpler assumption. If it is not static, then is it expanding? Contracting? At what rate? On the other hand, equations would have been simpler without the constant. This dilemma aptly illustrates the difficulty of theory choice under insufficient evidence. Even if we are comfortable with using parsimony as a deciding factor, just how it should be applied isn't so obvious.

From the point of view of parsimony, we ended up with the worst of both worlds: we have the cosmological constant in the field equations, and the universe is expanding. Of course, plentiful evidence trumps parsimony, elegance, or any other such a priori considerations. But if we did not have this evidence, why would we have chosen such an inelegant, overcomplicated theory?

Our current theory of the fundamental forces tells us which structures/substances can exist, under what conditions they can come about and how long they would take to form. — Fool

Sure, theories at different scales (effective field theories) are not completely autonomous: they can constrain one another.

So no, the current situation (observable galaxies or not) isn't consistent with the universe coming about last Thursday. — Fool

Oh no, nothing can rule out Last Thursdayism :) This is where other, non-empirical considerations come in.

I heard Krauss say that, and it annoyed me. i’m sure they’ll eventually discover space is expanding and then put 2 and 2 together. — Fool

How would they figure that out? Expanding space is validated by precisely the sort of astronomical observations that would not be available in that hypothetical future.

Physics is so mathematical that laws governing nuclear chemistry have cosmological implications. — Fool

Oh no they don't. You can have all of nuclear chemistry and a static universe, no problem.

I have used this quote to argue with cosmologists over the years. We may live in a special time but how can you know if all the evidence of the universe's creation is still available? — Codger

The universe may have popped into existence last Thursday, complete with all of the evidence that points to a much greater age. How would you ever know that this is not the case?

This is not cosmology, this is just sophomoric philosophy.

As @LD Saunders notes, the quote has nothing to say about math. It is about empirical knowledge, which is in all cases circumscribed by available evidence. Here you have a rather dramatic example, but one can think of countless ordinary examples that illustrate the same point. How many coins do I have in my pockets right now? I can answer this question by taking them out and counting, while you have no way of knowing whether I even have pockets.

Speaking of cosmology and astronomy, our present situation is only relatively privileged. Yes, we can say with great confidence that there are other stars and galaxies and all sorts of other celestial bodies and structures. But as we probe further, our knowledge becomes less and less certain, until it dissolves into guessing. The large-scale topology of the universe; the universe "before" the Big Bang - we may never have more than speculative answers, and not because we are not clever enough, but because we just don't have the data necessary to test our theories.

Not, of course, that this in any way addresses the fact that it remains a case of appealing to the unexplained to explain the unexplained. — StreetlightX

P1. Quantum mechanics is mysterious.
P2. Consciousness is mysterious.
C. The two have to be related somehow.

You can't argue with the logic!

It's interesting to note though just how philosophical Einstein's thinking was throughout his work on relativity and quantum physics It wasn't just "let's find a mathematical model that fits the data better," which would have probably ended up with epicycles rather than with a radically new (and at the same time old as Galileo!) theory.

Fisrt up I want to talk about one role philosophy has in the progress of science - with a view to discovering others. — Kym

Well, I am still not seeing much of that in what you have posted. Unless you think that "Hey, here is a naive layman question about some complex science" constitutes an example of such a contribution. Those philosophers of science who are serious about their subject usually have a decent grasp on the science. If you are interested, I suggest you look at some actual examples. Perhaps flip through a philosophy of science journal, or look at some papers available online. Here is, for instance, a selection of philosophical papers about General Relativity on Philpapers.

I am not sure what it is that you want to talk about. Is it scientific puzzles and paradoxes in general? The three examples that you gave really don't have much in common, even under that broad topic.

Your black hole question most likely belongs to the category of layman misunderstandings of complex science. I am not saying this from a position of expertise - my own physics background is insufficient to answer your question - but from the position of common sense. An elementary question like that, if it was a genuine puzzle, surely wouldn't have gone unnoticed. Given your almost total ignorance of this difficult topic, the surest way to find an answer would be to learn more about it. Which is why you ought not assume right away that you have stumbled upon some paradigm-shattering paradox and, if investing years into the study of math and physics doesn't sound promising, at least go ask your question on a friendly science board, where someone might be able to give you a lies-for-children version of the answer.

Zeno's problems are more of a philosophical topic, and I encourage you to read the rest of the excellent SEP entry.

The Black Body Problem, aka the Ultraviolet Catastrophe doesn't really have much to do with Zeno. Whereas Zeno's problems, on their most generous reading, come down to the general metaphysical issue of super-tasks (performing an infinite number of actions in a finite interval of time), the black body problem was an indication of an inconsistency of a particular physical model. It did not go unnoticed and was not ignored. Physicists at the time recognized it as a genuine problem, but what no one realized was just how radical the resolution of the problem would be.

That's a fair point. I guess I am just not very serious about ontology: I am more interested to know what the world is like than what "stuff" it is made from or what "things" it ought to be parsed into - which puts me more on the side of instrumentalists and pragmatists. But I am also on the side of common sense and natural language in wanting to say that yes, there are chairs and cats and temperature and charge. That's just what "existence" means to us.

That seems question begging about how you would define "real" here. How does it not wind up sounding idealist or subjective - that is, anti-realist? — apokrisis

Well, I am not too concerned with how this sounds, but what question is being begged here?

And an even greater difficulty. The least action principle is an example of how science does appear to discover a unity, rather than a pluralism, at the deepest ontic level. — apokrisis

That to me suggests a structural relationship between theories. One is tempted to conclude that what accounts for this common trope is that in their different ways these theories all get a hold on the same truth. But one should always keep a bit of wary skepticism and not be totally seduced by theoretical elegance. That way lies dogmatism.

Science tends lead people to one of these views:

1. Reductionism: There is one true ontology (usually assumed to be something like that of the Standard Model of particle physics), while the ontologies of other sciences are useful fictions. This is mostly favored by physicists and others with "physics envy" (like chemists ;)).
2. Instrumentalism: All ontologies are useful fictions.

I would also add

3. Pluralism: Ontologies are dependent on theories that posit them, and they are all real just to the extent to which their respective theories are taken seriously.

I clicked on your thread, and spent maybe 10 minutes on the first page of Google results (most of which are this guy's sites or sites affiliated with him). That's about as much time as this crank warrants, sorry.

With titles like "Why materialism is baloney" I am not surprised that he is not taken seriously.

Yeah, sorry :blush: E. Nagel.

To disprove supervenience we would need to observe a change in mind state over a time interval in which the brain state did not change. Since brain states are always changing - think of all the subconscious processing necessary to keep our heart pumping and physiology regulated - there is no time interval in which brain states do not change. So it looks like the theory cannot be tested. — andrewk

I think your criterion is too strict - it would apply to any dynamical systems. We don't necessarily need to test supervenience in such direct, literal way. First of all, in order to even talk about supervenience, we need to have two commensurate theories, i.e. we need to have a theory of brain and a theory of mind, and we need to be able to relate these theories to each other, e.g. by relating mental states to neurophysiological states. If we could do that, then it might be possible, through theoretical analysis, to find an instance where the same neurophysiological state can correspond to two different mental states. How do we test that theoretical analysis? Not necessarily directly, as you suggest, but by validating each of the two theories against observations.

Yes. Supervenience assumes (or logically relies) on two assertions, (1) Reductionism and (2) determinism. — Kitty

No, it does not.

Well, the reductionism part may or may not be true, depending on how reductionism is defined. The loosest definition simply equates reductionism with supervenience, although most often something like Nigelian reduction is meant (i.e. deduction of the laws of the reduced system from the laws of the reducing system). If that is the sense of reductionism, then supervenience certainly does not logically depend on it.

And determinism is not relevant either. You can have a deterministic system supervene on a non-deterministic one (e.g. thermodynamics and statistical mechanics), and the other way around (statistical mechanics and molecular dynamics).

This is a dispute over land. That's what this is. If we accept Israel's right to the land it occupies, it stands morally right. If we don't, it doesn't, although I would not allow that the terroristic acts by the Palestinians are acceptable in any circumstance. — Hanover

Interesting asymmetry. Atrocities are conditionally excused on one side and unconditionally condemned on the other.

It's amazing how many crazy Jew-hating comments are on here. — LD Saunders

I stopped reading right here. If this is what you took away from the preceding discussion, then you are not in a position to participate in the discussion (for whatever reason; I am not going to speculate about the possible psychological reasons of such striking incomprehension).

sanctimonious — Sid

Please tell me that this was a drop of self-mocking irony. Because it would be sad if it wasn't.

The universe revolves around me, so should I not exist, it'd stop revolving. Yes, a revolving universe. That's what I said. — Hanover

The word is revolting. The universe is revolted by you.

According to Relativity there is no present moment because there are only different frames of reference in which time can run slower or faster relative to each other. — Ben St Clair

And to add to what @noAxioms said, you seem to be confusing eternalism, which the theory of Relativity does not assert, with relativity of simultaneity, which it does. But for your question, relativity of simultaneity is what you actually need, so no harm done.

Anything that can be described in the abstract, without essentially incorporating references to specific instances, would be substrate-independent. Anything that is usually referred to as a principle, mechanism, etc. would belong to this class. With a rich enough choice of available substrates, there's a chance that such a mechanism would have more than one instantiation.

There is nothing particularly unique about evolution in this regard. If you can describe evolution in such abstract terms, then it is ipso facto substrate-independent. But so is, say, the inverse-square law of attraction.

Nothing physical has changed - only your belief. — Wayfarer

As @Pierre-Normand noted, you need not appeal to such exotic examples as the placebo effect. One moment I was sitting on a chair, the next moment I decided to get up - and lo, I got up! "Nothing physical has changed" when I made my decision - or that is what a dualist would say, right? So it is a problem for the dualist to explain how a purely mental event could have a physical effect. For someone who says that the mental supervenes on the physical there is no such problem. "There is no difference without a difference" is the slogan of supervenience: there is no mental difference without a physical difference. So when I decided to get up, something physical did change.

Here is one nice example: Suppose a pigeon has been trained to peck on red objects and, thereafter, the pigeon is presented with a crimson object and pecks at it. The cause of the pecking behavior, one might say, is the 'event' that consist in the presentation of the specific crimson object. But the pigeon would still have pecked at the object if it had been scarlet, say. So, the antecedent event only can be said to be causative and explanatory of the effect when individuated with reference to the contrastive class 'non-red' rather than 'non-crimson'. And the same can be said of the contrastive character of the effect. — Pierre-Normand

You can also say that the cause of the pigeon's behavior was its prior training (contrasting it with untrained pigeons). Or the fact that it was awake and hungry (as opposed to asleep or sated). Or the fact that it was there and not elsewhere. And we've only considered the pigeon as an agent or an organism; we could go further into the various mechanical or physiological causes, and so on. There seem to be so many different causes of the same event operating at the same time, one ought to wonder how it is that they don't clash with one another! But of course they don't.

This ties in with what I said elsewhere about philosophers of mind: they sometimes seem unaware of the much wider context of their worries, such as that of epiphenomenalism. And just considering that wider context can serve, if not as a reductio, then at least as an important check.

Hence, for instance, the low-level explanation for the putative 'event' that was the occurrence of an upward movement of a hand doesn't constitute any kind of a rival causal explanation of the intentionally described event of someone's raising her hand. — Pierre-Normand

Yes. And to address the causal exclusion/overdetermination argument head-on, causation is contextual; there isn't some objective matter of fact about what causes what. Mental causation is in no way in competition with e.g. neurophysical causation because in each case causation is situated within an independent, self-contained explanatory scheme. Only other factors within the same explanatory context are relevant to it.

The question "what is the (morally) right thing to do?" is not a question which cannot be answered by science, it's a question which absolutely can be answered by science. — Pseudonym

Well, your one attempt so far in this conversation has been to replace the question with a different one (which, I contend, science cannot answer either):

"should we, as a species, kill our own mothers?" — Pseudonym

What you should have written, to be consistent with what you were saying earlier, is

"Do members of our species tend to kill our mothers?"

Which is even further removed from the original question.

Your stated position is that science can answer any question that can and should be answered, and that conversely, a question that cannot be answered by science, such as what is the (morally) right thing to do, consequently isn't meaningful or answerable. Whether the answer to the question seems obvious or not doesn't come into this.

If the question is "should we, as a species, kill our own mothers?" — Pseudonym

No, that's not the question. See, your tactics when in difficulty is to propose some different question that science can answer. This will not do.

Thanks for this discussion. I wasn't really impressed by the title paper, which trades in anecdotes that won't be very informative to non-experts, but in the end doesn't seem to express any clear vision; however, I'll be reading some of the linked materials.

By the way, Batterman has a topical article in the SEP: Intertheory Relations in Physics.

Other relevant overviews: Supervenience and Emergent Properties.

Perhaps some of you here wonder who these terrible reductionists are who hold such absurd and obviously untenable notions (not counting amateurs like Weinberg). Jaegwon Kim would be one such formidable foil (his work is discussed in above articles). His "Supervenience and Mind" is a locus classicus on the topic. But, to add to the general reviews cited above, he also has this short primer:

Emergence: Core ideas and issues

One point to note about Kim and some of the other authors who have written on the topic: Many of them come to it from the perspective of the philosophy of mind, and among their principle concerns are mental causation, epiphenomenalism, eliminativism (about the mental), and so forth. I find it frustrating that in their exclusive focus on the mental they often don't seem to see the larger context of such questions: science (not limited to cognitive science) and other explanatory projects. I am glad that this wider context is the focus of attention here, rather than the parochial questions of the "mental" vs. the "physical."

Neither of these things will help a person who has risen to the level of reflection in which they wonder whether the way they are currently living is the right way to live, or whether there even is such a thing as the right way to live. — PossibleAaran

Exactly. If a rational person is asking both of those two questions, then a rational person can see that the fact that there is sufficient doubt in the latter means that they cannot, with any certainty, answer the former. — Pseudonym

I can answer whether it is right for me to kill my mother; I consider both the question and the answer to be meaningful; and science has nothing to do with how I come up with the answer. Do you disagree with any of this?

President Trump repeated on Thursday his false assertion that the United States runs a trade deficit with Canada, the morning after privately telling Republican donors that he had deliberately insisted on that claim in a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada without knowing whether it was true. — Trump Repeats False Claim About Canada After Admitting Uncertainty Over Figure

Trump in a nutshell.

Russia, on the other hand, and Putin in particular, have a known history of imprisoning and killing opponents at home and abroad, and have suffered little in the way of consequences for it. — Baden

They probably figure that whatever consequences they are going to suffer this time have already been payed forward. Their reputation outside Russia couldn't get any worse than it already is, so nothing to lose on that count. And domestically this sort of thing is a sure win - both the assassination itself and the reaction abroad (it plays on the siege mentality).

Good post. Yes, taking what is commonly understood to be a Humean regularity view of the world*, "laws of nature" do not exist as some independently given ideal to which the world is bound to conform. The world just is regular - or not, as the case may be. Which makes it hard for a Humean to make sense of a miracle.

But even if we take a more hospitable approach by assuming the reality of the laws of nature, we then have to tackle those. What is a law of nature? It can't just be a precise specification of what actually happens, because no matter what happens, it could be specified, and that specification could be said to be a law. Thus, any purported miracle could be accommodated in a law that makes room for that miracle.

But that is an old-fashioned notion, because randomness seems to be built in. And randomness in radioactive decay, for example, seems to be unconditioned by the past. — unenlightened

It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to establish, just from observations and scientific models, whether there is "ontological" randomness in the world - or what that even means. Quantum mechanics, for example, has both indeterministic and deterministic interpretations.

I think, finally, that if there is any criterion for distinguishing the random from the miraculous, it must lie in the meaning/significance of the event. But that is a can of worms for another day, or another poster. — unenlightened

I think I'll follow you a little down this lane. I don't think that what is commonly thought of as miracles can be objectively, impersonally defined. The popular idea of a miracle is bound up with the idea of a miracle-maker. Hume wisely included God in his definition, though it could be any "miracle man." But man it has to be. Miracles are intentional and meaningful - that's the only way to understand them (quite apart from whether or not one believes in them).

* There is actually quite a broad and contradictory spectrum of views on Hume, for all his seeming clarity, but I don't want to get into exegesis.