Now, if there are partial p-zombies demonstrably [...] — The Great Whatever

Ex hypothesi, the existence of p-zombies (partial or not) cannot be demonstrated, because empirically (behaviorally) they are indistinguishable from people. I would think that the capacity to visualize things makes some difference in our behavior, even if it is not easy to tease out. And obviously, in your referenced case the difference did come out, which demonstrably disqualifies the proposed example.

This is more than a quibble. Behaviorists are committed to the idea that exhibiting a particular behavior is a sufficient condition for being conscious, so for them a true p-zombie is an oxymoron.

but in normal case we never half our distance or velocity instantaneously — zoya

I am not aware of any version of Zeno's paradoxes that assumes that some distance is covered instantaneously, or that makes any extraordinary assumptions about velocity or acceleration.

There are two somewhat distinct questions that can be discussed in connection with the OP. A historical, philological question concerns Kant's own notoriously ambiguous treatment of the concepts that he coined. What Kant thought depends on who you ask, and different commentators will typically massage and harmonize the text to favor their own views on the matter. It seems to me that StreetlightX's referenced summary is rather too neat. It, for instance, glosses the issue of "containment," also raised by the OP, that Kant seemed to take seriously enough that he would not recognize even simple mathematical statements such as 2+2=4 as analytic (because, the argument goes, "4" is not contained in either "2" or "+").

Apart from specifically Kantian scholarship, modern discussion of the analytical/synthetic owes more to the way these concepts were framed later, when Western analytical philosophy took a logical and linguistic turn. And here the debate is not dead, despite Quine's valiant efforts. The reason, I think, the idea of analytic/synthetic distinction will not go away is that we intuitively feel a categorical difference between groups of statements such as the following:

I.

(1) Some doctors that specialize on eyes are rich.
(2) Some ophthalmologists are rich.
(3) Many bachelors are ophthalmologists.
(4) People who run damage their bodies.
(5) If Holmes killed Sikes, then Watson must be dead.

II.

(6) All doctors that specialize on eyes are doctors.
(7) All ophthalmologists are doctors.
(8) All bachelors are unmarried.
(9) People who run move their bodies.
(10) If Holmes killed Sikes, then Sikes is dead.
(11) If Bob is married to Sue, then Sue is married to Bob.
(12) Anyone who's an ancestor of an ancestor of Bob is an ancestor of Bob.
(13) If x is bigger than y, and y is bigger than z, then x is bigger than z.
(14) If something is red, then it's colored.

Until this distinction is not at least explained away, the work is not done.

The above examples are taken from the SEP article The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction, which offers a comprehensive introduction to the issue.

It's odd how often the placebo effect is trotted out as evidence against "materialism" of some description. Perhaps there is some argument to be made here, but prima facie, placebo effect provides intuitive support to the materialistic view of the mind. If mind is in and of the body then it should be entirely unsurprising and even expected that the state of the mind would produce effects elsewhere in the body - and that is more than can be said about most alternatives.

Adiabatic =/= reversible (in the classic problem of a gas filling an evacuated partition the process is adiabatic and irreversible). But you are right, like you said above, in the case of gravitational collapse, for example, entropy is created not by the action of gravity as such (gravity does not create additional degrees of freedom: it was there from the beginning and factored into the system's dynamics) but by the radiation of heat into the environment, which is irreversible, hence entropy-increasing. An even more important (for us) effect of gravity is secondary: in the Sun gravitational collapse creates conditions for fusion reactions.

Yes, this sounds a bit paradoxical when one is used to consider examples of low and high entropy restricted to systems that aren't dominated by gravity. Gases and liquids in closed boxes, for instance, display maximum entropy in homogeneous states. Yet, for gravitational systems characterized by a universal attractive force between the components, the opposite is true. — Pierre-Normand

In the early, radiation-dominated universe gravitational collapse could not occur (because reasons). The universe then was close to a (local) thermodynamic equilibrium. If global expansion did not occur and the macro-state of the early universe persisted indefinitely, it would have remained a very uniform, hot "particle soup". The entropy then was close to its maximum value - which is why it seemed weird to me to characterize that state as "perfect order". But then, characterizing entropy in terms of order is generally misleading.

Following rapid non-equilibrium expansion and cooling additional entropy was created first by nucleogenesis and later by gravitational collapse.

Sorry, that explanation was both too clipped and too dense for me to make sense of.

When thinking of inflationary theories, during the initial stages the universe began with low entropy and perfect order (how else could it be?) — TimeLine

Yeah, the universe had better begin with a low(er) entropy, but I don't know if I would call a homogeneous gas a "perfect order".

You can just bookmark the Categories page and it will look pretty much like the old forum.

On the old forum I only looked in certain categories that interested me. Here there are a lot fewer discussions, so I am content with just scanning the list of topics on the front page.

It completely backfires when we think of the 2nd law of thermodynamics too, because the CMB is practically homogenous in temperature and smoothness. What the heck happened to entropy? — TimeLine

What do you mean?

As your observe, it is transparently obvious that an axiomatic system cannot be complete and coherent simultaneously. — ernestm

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the reason you find these things "transparently obvious" is because your understanding of them is very superficial, to the point of being nonexistent?

If you read the intellectual biographical recollections of Heisenberg (or Schrödinger, or Einstein) you'll find that there are lots of philosophical and other a priori considerations that grounded their theoretical innovations. — Pierre-Normand

Of course, I didn't mean to imply that the development of new scientific theories is mere curve-fitting. Philosophical and even esthetic considerations played a role. But if that's the extent of the "profound similarities," that's not much.

There is a fundamental difference between the sort of reasoning exemplified by these Vedic philosophers - or for that matter by ancient atomists - and later scientific models like quantum physics (or atomic physics). The former is a priori reasoning, motivated by abstract (pseudo-)puzzles. It bears no relation to the motivations behind the later scientific models, and any resemblances between the two are accidental and superficial.

The first step is to recognize the primary limit of scientific theory itself, for which purpose I introduce one example: that of quantum mechanics. Contrary to most pundits on the subject, quantum theory was not at all some new revolutionary discovery. Several thousand years ago, Vedic philosophers watched motes of dust in sunbeams and asked "what is the smallest thing that can exist?" Thereon, they reasoned, however small a mote might be, it would still have an inside and outside. But the inside and outside would have have to be smaller than the smallest thing. So, if it were the smallest possible particle, it would then be impossible to determine what is inside it and what is outside it. THEREFORE, they reasoned, matter consists of compartments of space, inside each one of which there may be solid matter or not, and it is impossible to determine which compartments contain solid matter, and which not, because the ability to measure the distinction would require the existence of something smaller than the smallest possible thing. — ernestm

Which, apart from being poor reasoning, bears no resemblance to quantum theory.

Yeah, lots of things break down if you pull on one strand, such as speed of light or gravitational constant. Suddenly stable isotopes become unstable, familiar chemical reactions cannot proceed, you get black holes all over the place, etc.

Scientifically, I agree with molecular-panspermia (Extraterrestrial organic molecules).

Indeed, statistically it is plausible that organic molecules can be formed from dusts (and later meteorites and comets) in space. These molecules may have become precursors for life after crashing on planets. Amino acids was also detected in one of the comets, if my memory serves me right. — FLUX23

Spectral measurements indicate that amino acids and sugars indeed form in interstellar dust. They are all over the place, literally. I am by no means an expert, but that might suggest that simple organics didn't have to be seeded: if they form so readily everywhere, couldn't they have formed here on Earth?

It seems to me that we have to make a distinction of some kind between justification that warrants belief and justification that warrants knowledge. Otherwise, the two concepts would be indistinguishable, which is obviously not the case. — aletheist

Sure, but these would not be distinctions in kind - only distinctions in degree. There are no two things by which we can recognize knowledge - justification and truth - only justification: how much of it we have, how secure it is, and so forth.

I am not really singling out one particular belief, but one particular kind of belief - definitive scientific pronouncements about the very distant past. For the reasons that I just posted, I think that there is inadequate warrant for claiming to have knowledge in such cases. — aletheist

But why this particular kind of belief? The reasons that you give aren't very convincing. There are innumerable ways in which the world could be different from how we imagine it to be, and this goes not just for deep past but for immediate present as well. You would have to do more work to explain why you draw the line where you do.

Or maybe you don't have to. After all, you are just making a personal epistemic choice, and one where nothing much rides on it. The stakes are almost inconsequential: whether or not to call certain beliefs "knowledge".

(By the way, if the laws or constants did change in the past, there would have been evidence of it that we would have readily noticed. The structures of our theories are highly integrated and there's a lot of consilience in the observations, so that changing one or two things in the structure is almost impossible without conflict with already available evidence. But that's only if we change one or two things. There are still infinitely many ways in which the world could conspire to be very different while still maintaining the appearances.)

I asked you first. :) It was a sincere question — aletheist

I thought that my position was clear. JTB is not an operational definition of knowledge. While justified is operational, true is aspirational. When deciding whether some belief warrants the claim of knowledge, justification is the only criterion that needs to be met. We can't produce anything above and beyond justification that would signify truth. (Again, I am excluding the kinds of belief that don't fit the JTB model in the first place.)

No doubt every person has some beliefs that are justified yet false, which therefore do not qualify as genuine knowledge. Hence modesty seems to be the proper attitude about them. — aletheist

Most of us are on board with fallibilism. But that attitude ought to extend to pretty much all of our beliefs. When you single out one particular belief, surely you have more than this platitude in mind?

How do we distinguish justified belief from genuine knowledge? — aletheist

Well, how do we? If justification is insufficient to warrant the claim of knowledge, then what is? Super-duper justification?

Isn't Venter involved in "minimal genome"-type research (i.e. investigating what is the minimum number of genes an organism requires in order to sustain and propagate itself)? That line of research would seem to be at least tangentially relevant to OOL. — Arkady

Yes, this sounds like it could be relevant, but I confess I know very little about their research.

The justification warrants the belief, but not (by itself) the claim to knowledge. — aletheist

Oh but it does. What else could possibly warrant a claim of knowledge? (Other than the kind of knowledge that doesn't fit the JTB mold anyway, such as knowledge how.)

Just curious, what is your warrant for claiming that we know this? It is obviously a belief; and given certain presuppositions, it is justified; but what makes you so confident that it is true? — aletheist

That's a problem with the JTB definition of knowledge. You could ask the same question about anything we say we know. The answer, of course, is already contained in your question - the warrant is in the justification.

Great article, but it left me puzzled, not for the obvious reasons but rather why it did not mention anything about Synthetic Biology, and especially JC Venter. I understand that the people in the article you referenced are looking for the origin of life, how it could have happened and it sounds like it may be an emergent phenomena from what I read. I kept on waiting for the author to bring Venter's work his effort to create synthetic life, even if only in passing, seems like both searches ought to be related, but I don't know enough about it. So why, if you think there is a reason? — Cavacava

Why do you think Venter's work is relevant to the OOL research? In the classic Miller-Urey and similar experiments, researchers were trying to produce - not life, but precursor organics at least - under "natural" conditions that they thought were present on Earth when life began. Venter's team isn't trying to do anything of the sort. They are doing bioengineering using all the latest tools, materials and techniques.

And they aren't really producing life from scratch - there's rather too much hype about their results, impressive as they are. I suppose if someone did pull off such a feat - actually assembling a living organism from non-living components, as opposed to modifying and reassembling parts of living organisms - that would be a convincing argument against vitalism. But who takes vitalism seriously anyway? Not OOL researchers, for sure.

I'll repost this link to a BBC article that gives a popular overview of the history and the current state of the origin of life research:

The secret of how life on Earth began

It's interesting to note how the newly-fashionable anti-Islamism's efforts to villainize Muslims by tendentiously scrutinizing their holy texts parallel similar efforts from antisemites scrutinizing the Talmud. I wonder if the two groups have much of an intersection? I mean, there are, of course, plenty of people who are both antisemitic and anti-Muslim, but I am specifically interested in the amateur scholars who perform this sort of exercise.

Let's see if some rules help. It seems to me there are really just three ways to respond to rules:
1. agree with them
2. modify and improve them
3. demonstrate where they're wrong.

Of course one may also dislike them, but that's neither here nor there. — tim wood

Why? You have the unqualified "agree" option - why is there no "disagree" option?

Anyway, you don't have to start from scratch, you know. Truth

But it does seem like a good opportunity to bring up one of Paxton's big talking points: the self-explanations offered by fascists should be taken with a grain of salt. What they said isn't always in line with what they did (in fact, it usually wasn't.) — csalisbury

Were Mussolini's theories as quoted here all that far from the reality fascism?

"Such a conception of life makes Fascism the complete opposite of that doctrine, the base of the so-called scientific and Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history; according to which the history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various sodal groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production ... Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. ... And above all Fascism denies that class war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society. These two fundamental concepts of Socialism being thus refuted. nothing is left of it but the sentimental aspiration-as old as humanity itselftowards a social convention in which the sorrows and sufferings of the humblest shall be alleviated." — StreetlightX

"The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. ... 'For us Fascists, the State is not merely a guardian, preoccupied solely with the duty of assuring the personal safety of the citizens; nor is it an organization with purely material aims, such as to guarantee a certain level of well-being and peaceful conditions... — StreetlightX

Ironically, that's almost spot-on Soviet-style socialism as it really existed (as opposed to the far-fetched communist and socialist theories). The "class warfare" as such was only a socialist feature at the outset. But historically, both socialism and fascism find some out-groups to terrorize and discriminate against (that's where mobilization comes in).

Is this statement justified by a utilitarian or a virtue ethics?

Mendel theorized that genes were the units of inheritance, but he wasn't able to observe them. That had to wait until the discovery of DNA.

Neptune was predicted based on irregularities of Uranus's orbit that could be explained by the existence of another planet.

And atoms were theorized by the ancient Greeks. It's only been in the last few decades that they've been seen, and even manipulated to produce a short animation. — Marchesk

You provide examples where theoretical entities are associated with some more-or-less concrete, sensible objects*. And that's how it should be: any theory, physical or metaphysical, ultimately has to connect with the sensible world. But not all theoretical entities have a direct correspondence with something you can (sort of) see and touch. What is energy? What is a field? What is a charge? What is a wave-function? These things don't seem like "things" at all. But they are concepts that are instrumental in building our theories, which ultimately do connect to reality.

* Atoms are a red herring here, since they weren't theorized by Democritus and his followers - theirs was a groundless metaphysical speculation that just happened to superficially resemble the atomic theory that was developed much later.

Your original example involved momentum and impulse. Well, as your own analysis showed, some of the entities involved have fairly obvious experiential correlates. The one non-obvious entity among them is force - that is probably what you should have zeroed in on. What is a force? Feynman has a nice discussion of it in his lectures, and he frames the question not unlike the way you did:

Let us ask, “What is the meaning of the physical laws of Newton, which we write as $F=ma$? What is the meaning of force, mass, and acceleration?” Well, we can intuitively sense the meaning of mass, and we can define acceleration if we know the meaning of position and time. We shall not discuss those meanings, but shall concentrate on the new concept of force. The answer is equally simple: “If a body is accelerating, then there is a force on it.” That is what Newton’s laws say, so the most precise and beautiful definition of force imaginable might simply be to say that force is the mass of an object times the acceleration. Suppose we have a law which says that the conservation of momentum is valid if the sum of all the external forces is zero; then the question arises, “What does it mean, that the sum of all the external forces is zero?” A pleasant way to define that statement would be: “When the total momentum is a constant, then the sum of the external forces is zero.” There must be something wrong with that, because it is just not saying anything new. If we have discovered a fundamental law, which asserts that the force is equal to the mass times the acceleration, and then define the force to be the mass times the acceleration, we have found out nothing. We could also define force to mean that a moving object with no force acting on it continues to move with constant velocity in a straight line. If we then observe an object not moving in a straight line with a constant velocity, we might say that there is a force on it. Now such things certainly cannot be the content of physics, because they are definitions going in a circle. The Newtonian statement above, however, seems to be a most precise definition of force, and one that appeals to the mathematician; nevertheless, it is completely useless, because no prediction whatsoever can be made from a definition. One might sit in an armchair all day long and define words at will, but to find out what happens when two balls push against each other, or when a weight is hung on a spring, is another matter altogether, because the way the bodies behave is something completely outside any choice of definitions. — The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. I Ch. 12: Characteristics of Force

Where this all grounds out is observables, of course - whatever we can observe and measure. Everything else is a theory, a formalism to tie together the observations. Taking some isolated component of the formalism and asking what it really is makes no sense, at least to me. Do you know what it is you are asking for? What kind of an answer do you require?

Whatever, Wosret. It seems that you just aren't interested, which is fine, but you should just acknowledge that, instead of making tendentious statements. I am not saying that Skinner's behaviorism is the be all, end all of all psychology, but it's an influential enough theory to take it seriously.

By the way, no one was "tricking" the birds - the pigeons were fooling themselves all on their own. That was the whole point of the experimental setup: rewards were not correlated to pigeons' behavior in order to reinforce their "superstitions". The setup played the role of blind forces of nature that didn't care about pigeons' little tricks.

According to classic behaviorist theory, conditioned behavior needs reinforcement, otherwise it is gradually extinguished. Skinner's experiment demonstrated the extinction of pigeons' "superstitious" ticks when the regular stimulus of starvation and feeding that produced them was interrupted. When the stimulus was resumed at a later time, the birds often picked up different superstitions.

It demonstrates a basic psychological mechanism that at least partly accounts for the persistence of superstitions (despite it being fairly easy to disprove them with careful observation): confirmation bias, as we like to call it (described in more detail in Skinner's and other behaviourists' theories).

Things are more complicated with humans, I am sure (and probably with animals as well), but that mechanism is still a good first approximation.

There is a broader historical sense of superstition as all types of non-rational, magical-like beliefs - often including religious beliefs that we do not share and do not particularly respect.

There are also more private superstitions that Ann mentioned in the OP, which I would define as personal causal beliefs that are deemed to be both wrong and irrational.

"The idea of trying to explain a [religious] practice seems wrong to me"
"It will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity"
"Error arises only when magic is interpreted scientifically" — Cavacava

I don't agree that it is wrong to explain magical, superstitious and even religious behavior scientifically. Frazer is a dubious and outdated source, but psychology and anthropology (and, more controversially, evo biology and neuroscience) have produced some interesting insights.

Here is a classic Skinner work on the superstitious behavior in... pigeons! (Conducted long before Witty issued his comments.):

In the Summer of 1947, renowned psychiatrist Skinner published his study on a group of pigeons that showed even animals are susceptible to the human condition that is superstition.

Skinner conducted his research on a group of hungry pigeons whose body weights had been reduced to 75% of their normal weight when well-fed. For a few minutes each day, a mechanism fed the birds at regular intervals. What observers of the pigeons found showed the birds developing superstitious behaviour, believing that by acting in a particular way, or committing a certain action, food would arrive.

By the end of the study, three quarters of the birds had become superstitious. One pigeon, in pursuit of food, believed that by turning around in the cage twice or three times between being fed, but not just in any direction; the bird learnt to turn anti-clockwise and appeared to believe that this would mean it being fed. Now, it's easy to dismiss such behaviour as normal - a bird in a cage might be expected to exercise a little. But the other birds developed unique supertitious behaviours in an attempt to gain a meal. Other behaviors the observers discovered include what they described as a 'pendulum' movement of the head, and a regular nodding movement in another bird. — Psychologist World

(Full paper here.)

There is either a platypus in my pocket or not, so there's a 50% chance that I have a platypus in my pocket. Seems kind of high odds there. — Hanover

Let me help you out here. There is either a platypus, a piece of lint, or nothing in your pocket. It's equal odds (of course), but there's now only a 33% chance of there being a platypus in your pocket. Better?

If you are thinking about something along the lines of jumping from world to world, like in Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife and various other books and films, that's the realm of fantasy fiction. The real-world quantum mechanics is both more complicated (you can't really grasp it without those "fundamentals" in place) and more mundane.

Strictly speaking, you don't need mathematics as we have it in order to do philosophy. However, in its essence, mathematics is a systematic and disciplined approach to producing and thinking about structures and relationships, and as such its relevance to any reasoning is obvious. Moreover, the centuries of mathematical work have already produced a rich toolbox of structures, methods and insights, and it would be foolish not to use it.

(Ignoring apo's derail to address the OP quote)

We can question the is-ought gap by a couple of examples:

1.) Everything I say is true.
2.) I say having children is wrong.
3.) Therefore, having children is wrong. — darthbarracuda

This looks like a cheap trick, and it is. Here is an even simpler example:

1. The proposition "having children is wrong" is true.
2. Therefore, having children is wrong.

As in the original, the premise is ostensibly non-moral: the original premises both assert some facts about me, in my example the premise asserts a fact about some proposition. But of course, in my example disquotation yields a moral premise, and similarly, in the original example dereferencing yields the same moral premise. Indeed, we couldn't validly obtain the conclusion in either example if disquotation/dereferencing was not implied!

So the claim that by this sort of argument you can get a moral conclusion from non-moral premises is not true.

all right, there is something to the limited capacity that each of us has for moral concerns; however, I think that more importantly, moral imperatives are often in tension with each other (e.g. do not harm vs. punish).

Caring is not a zero-sum game.

Behavioral theories of mind are supposed to explain behavior. Panpsychism is supposed to explain something else - "the hard problem of consciousness," as alluded to by Moliere.

To my mind, there are two open questions here (that are probably related to each other): one is whether there is anything to explain (i.e. whether "the hard problem" is really a problem), and the other whether panpsychism constitutes an explanation (not just good or best explanation, but any explanation at all) - might it not be a kind of dormitive virtue.