I'm not sure the observer is actually necessary, though. We could talk about what would be the case in such a universe, even if no one were around to observe it.

However, I don't see that just any observer necessarily breaks the symmetry. One could appeal to a perfectly symmetrical observer, for instance, perhaps one who is himself spherical, and situated equidistant from each sphere. — Arkady

Right, assume a spherical cow observer in vacuum :)

I think what this thought experiment shows is that Leibniz's construal of identity cannot work with a view from nowhere.

Is this true, though? A person may possibly believe that mental states, while themselves immaterial, nevertheless supervene on physical states (or are otherwise emergent from them). In that case, the physical duplicate would still possess the same mental states.

Perhaps a sort of thoroughgoing substance dualist might deny that there is any connection between the mental and the physical, but I don't see how that view can be plausibly maintained once we accept some basic metaphysical assumptions (e.g. that there are material bodies) and scientific observations (e.g. that memories are neurologically encoded in the brain in some fashion, by long-term potentiation or whatever the exact mechanism is, and mental states at the very least correlate in some fashion with the physical state of one's brain). — Arkady

There are other reasons to deny identity of a duplicate - take Davidson's view of the Swampman, for instance. According to Davidson, who is an externalist, it is not enough for two creatures to be instantaneously identical: diachronic differences matter. A swampman may believe that he is Davidson. In fact, he cannot help believing that, since he is an exact physical duplicate of Davidson and his mental state supervenes on his physical state. And yet, unlike the late Davidson before him, Swampman's belief is false, because the truth-value of a belief is contingent on its causal history and Swampman's causal history has nothing in common with Davidson's.

I am not endorsing Davidson's view here - just pointing out how views on the same thought experiment can differ. And that is really the point of such thought experiments.

Now, with the spheres in the symmetrical universe, there is nothing which can be predicated of one sphere (call it "A") which cannot be predicated of the other sphere (call it "B"), and vice-versa, and yet any putative observer would clearly (I think) see that there are 2 spheres. If there are 2 spheres, then A and B are not logically (i.e. numerically) identical, and yet that conclusion contradicts our starting premise which defines logical identity. — Arkady

A putative observer introduces a point of reference, with respect to which some predicates will differ, e.g. left/right.

I disagree.

I said something similar in my counterfactuals thread. The more implausible a scenario gets the further it is removed from reality and the original premises. It is one thing for all the molecules in a gas to go into the corner of a container but what Davidson proposes goes way beyond that because matter would have to get itself into states of improbability that are supposed to have taken a whole life time and billions of years to reach. — Andrew4Handel

I don't understand the point you are trying to make. First, are you saying that the Swampman scenario is nomologically impossible, or just less probable than something else? Either way, the remove from reality may or may not matter, depending on the argument being made; you cannot just make this criticism in general. When using this thought experiment to probe certain crisp metaphysical stances on issues such as personhood, being improbable doesn't disqualify the scenario, though it may make it easier to bite the bullet.

And there is also the impossibility of a mental state being reformed that was derived from personal experience. For example say my boss at work calls me an idiot and that creates a nuanced mental state in me, then that mental state is inextricably linked to that event and can't be identically copied just by recreating a brain state. It is not the equivalent of making a square template and copying it to create an almost identical square, because experiences are not identical to each other or don't have this simplistic "copyability" structure.

In the end it just seems unclear what this thought experiment is saying. — Andrew4Handel

And that is why you should not offer your criticism without understanding the context in which it was proposed. The thought experiment doesn't say anything on its own - rather, it is reactions to it that matter. Your own reaction, which by the way is not unlike that of Davidson, who came up with the gedanken, reveals something about your metaphysical commitments. People with different commitments react to it differently. The experiment serves to highlight these differences.

"Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt. At the same time, nearby in the swamp another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules such that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death."

What about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics?.....I mean come on — Andrew4Handel

A thermal fluctuation is not out of the realm of possibility, at least from the point of view of classical thermodynamics (recall Boltzmann's Brain, for example). An updated version of this hypothetical involves a black hole emitting a fully-formed brain/human, and that too is supposed to be physically possible.

The thought experiment already concedes that the situation is extremely improbable. But why should it matter? Those who hold that there is a sharp, objective fact of the matter with regard to whatever question is being considered here (personal identity, mind, qualia) must accept any challenge, no matter how implausible. Plausibility is a red herring.

Please tell me, just how would we become extinct in 500 years? We are talking about the most adaptive animal that ever has lived on this planet. 1517 was a short time ago. — ssu

We have a much greater impact on our own environment. At earlier times this feedback was much weaker. In addition to exhausting easily extractable resources (which has happened before, albeit locally), we can now easily trigger a mass extinction event on the global scale.

lol, another thing to worry about.

Yeah, I am pretty sure that a population and civilization collapse is imminent, most likely due to a confluence of factors. It may not be one of the commonly imagined apocalyptic scenarios where everything disintegrates over a few days or weeks, but even if it takes decades, it will still qualify as a crash, given our species' total lifespan (which, by the way, is still very brief compared to a typical mammalian species' lifespan of a few million years).

Will this be the end of our species? Hard to say. There will likely be a mass extinction of other species (by some measures, a mass extinction is already underway). We are at the top of the food ladder, which is bad, but we are also highly adaptable generalists, which is good. So, hard to say.

I'm not sure how to take this. You don't understand the difference between saying what something is and saying why it's that way? — Pneumenon

Right, I don't understand this what/why distinction and how you relate it to explanation and causation. Also, I am not sure whether you think you are explicating preexisting meanings or inventing your own.

That is not to say that our models represent exactly what is being modeled, though. This is glaringly obvious in that we can model nature in such a way as to be intelligible to us only as deterministic, but modern physics seems to suggest that it is "really" indeterministic. — John

Physics constructs intelligible models (what else?), and some of these models happen to be probabilistic (stochastic). Quantum physics is not the first or the last physical theory to have stochastic elements - before that there was (and still is) statistical thermodynamics. Stochasticity is fairly common in applied physics and engineering. It is intelligible and manageable.

Explanation is only different from causation when you are explaining what something is. When you're explaining why something is a certain way, the lines become very blurry. — Pneumenon

I don't understand the distinction.

Your quest to reconceptualize causation is a little misguided, I think, in that the concept you are looking for is just explanation. Explanation is a general concept, and it takes different forms and uses different techniques. Cause is often used synonymously with reason, explanation. But, in physical sciences especially, it is also used in a more narrow sense - which is what you dismissively refer to as "billiard-ball causation" (or, less dismissively, as efficient causation).

Explanation in sciences takes the form of theories. A theory is wholistic, it does not come down to isolated causes and effects. Theories that describe a system's dynamics are often - but not always - causal (and not all theories are dynamical). Their causal character may owe something to our preference for a certain kind of historical narrative, as suggests, but it can't be just that: reality is not so flexible as to accommodate any mode of description for which we might have a preference. And where did this preference come from in the first place? The causal character of a lot of physical theories has to do with the causal character of interactions that occur in our universe: there is an arrow of time; interactions are local; and influences propagate at a finite speed. As a result, we can show how events are shaped by proximate events in their past.

(Quantum physics complicates this idea of causal interactions, but does not necessarily destroy it. It prompts us to think more carefully about locality, interactions, and influences.)

Efficient causation, I think, is basically a heuristic. — Pneumenon

Yes, in the sense in which we tend to talk about causation, focusing attention on the most relevant events (from our point of view) and bracketing out others. But, as I think is also saying, this is no accident, no mere whim. The world is such that, while being wholistic, it is quite non-uniform. Just as its material fabric tends to cluster into things, atoms, its interactions also often lend themselves to such heuristic analyses in terms of prevailing causes.

How about instead of "whatever begins to exist has a cause", "everything that I'm aware of has been brought into being by something else". The only problem with that change of premise (if it's true) is that you can't argue from me being aware of things having a cause of its coming to be, to there being a God. — Purple Pond

You seem to understand the premise (vague as it is) just fine. The only thing your reformulation does is it adds to the original premise an odd dependency on your awareness - an unexpected move that you did not motivate in your preceding discussion. The conclusion of the paragraph does not follow at all, since this is the first time you even mention God.

I don't know if that was intended to be ironic, but seriously, I am not sure what to make of it. I get a feeling that he may be missing the point, or else that the point doesn't amount to much. Dennett is not very clear as to what he is arguing against. That's part of his point: he makes much of the obscurity of the concept of qualia. But if the concept was too confused to analyze, then how could he build a case against it? He should have just stopped at conceding his confusion.

His intention though is not really to quine qualia ("deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant"); the title of his famous essay is ironic. He does not deny, in the face of the obvious, that there is something it is like to have a feeling, to undergo an experience. His beef is technical, having to do with specific philosophical analyses of experience, and to understand his case one must understand the context in which he makes statements such as "qualia do not exist."

Also, just to be clear, Dennett is not the pope of physicalism. There are many philosophers making arguments on both sides of the issue, or rather, on many sides of the issue, because there isn't even a general agreement as to what qualia are and what kind of account physicalism owes to them.

The problem is that some people deny that experiences are subjective — Marchesk

That cannot be right. I wrote "subjective experiences," but that's a tautology - I should have just written "experiences." Experiences are perforce subjective: they occur in a subject and are confined to a subject.

Dennett has stated that we are p-zombies and qualia do not exist. — Marchesk

I don't think so. I must say though that I have read little of Dennett, and what I have read I found surprisingly difficult to understand and accept, given the praise he is usually given for being accessible and persuasive. (Perhaps it is his smug, smart-alecky style that gets in the way.) What is clear from his writings and reactions to them is that he is not making ontological, metaphysical claims here. Rather, he is arguing that 'qualia' as a philosophical term of art serves no explanatory purpose, "cuts no philosophical ice, bakes no philosophical bread, and washes no philosophical windows" (as Putnam said on another occasion).

If I understood him correctly, he faults qualia precisely for their subjectivity. He refers to Wittgenstein's "beetle in a box" metaphor about private language to argue that because qualia are supposed to be inaccessible to anyone but the subject, the specific referent of the term "qualia" can play no role in the "language game" (in this case, the language game that is philosophy) - it is irrelevant and can be cancelled out. While we are talking about "qualia" - not behavior, not objective physical facts, but strictly private "facts" - we could all be talking about completely different things or no things at all, for all the difference it would make. That's the argument, anyway.

I really hate these semantic confusions. — Marchesk

But that's all this is: playing with words in order to finagle a cheap semantic victory. So subjective experiences are not objective physical facts, and physicalists only believe in objective physical facts, therefore... Therefore, there are no "physicalists," as you construe them, because no one in their right mind denies having experiences.

What does it mean to be conscious? Consciousness is synonymous with awareness. — Purple Pond

You are already begging the question with this definition.

Isn't that the same thing as redefining consciousness? Or are behaviorists merely claiming that certain behaviors are indication of consciousness? That you can't have a conscious organism without some resulting behavior, thus p-zombies are impossible? That it would make no sense for a p-zombie philosopher to be discussing qualia. — Marchesk

I am no expert, but AFAIK behaviorists see behavior (understood more or less generally - possibly even including neuronal events) as the explanatory terminus for psychology. Mental concepts, if they have any validity at all, should be reducible to behavioral concepts.

But I still think even the idea that there are people without qualia, who differ in some minimal functional way from those who do, is still one people rule out a priori. — The Great Whatever

Without some qualia, you mean. But then, our mental functioning differs in many ways as it is, so perhaps we should just talk about individual variability of qualia.

We have the reverse situation with synesthesia: there is a small minority of people, with respect to whom the rest are "partial p-zombies" in that they lack the qualia of associating colors to sounds. This ought to be a pretty overt trait though: after all, it is easy to describe and one can see how it might come up in a conversation. , when did you first realize that you did not visualize like most others did?

I don't see sounds in a automatic way the way synesthetic people do, although I mentally associate colors to some musical notes. D, my favorite, is blue. But this might also be a verbal association: having a perfect pitch, I am used to "hearing" the names of the notes whenever I hear them played.

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.