When you go to the toilet, how can you say you are the same person afterwards as before? — SolarWind

Wow. That took an unexpected turn.

OK, I think we are done here.

You simply compare the set {A*,B,C,...,X,Y,Z} with the set {A,B,C,...,X,Y,Z*}, where the star indicates which life you would live in the corresponding world. — SolarWind

That's your dualistic premise-conclusion right there. For someone who doesn't already accept dualism there is no you that is independently assignable and separable from the body that it "inhabits."

Conflicted — jamalrob

Thanks for the recommendation. Here is the web page for the podcast (had to google it). The first season was very interesting, listening to the second season now.


You mentioned BBC 4. My favorite show there is In Our Time. The show covers history, culture, science, religion and philosophy. There is one host and three invited experts for each ~50 min episode - and they are all very good, very professional. What I like about the show is that it doesn't try to entertain or to talk down to the listener. Rather, it is an intelligent conversation between an interested layman (the host) and the experts. There are quite a few philosophy episodes that I have found well worth listening to.

The Forum is rather similar in its scope and its format, although it is a little on the lighter side - but only a little. Indeed, I found some of the episodes on the same subjects to be similar in quality.

As has already been pointed out in the very first response, an assertion is all you have going. You postulate a dualistic premise, then illustrate it with your two alternative worlds example. There is no proof here.

There is something about this argument that makes it especially vulnerable to this attack. If you try attacking other popular arguments like this, then you will probably have no luck. — TheHedoMinimalist

Deductive arguments, especially simple ones, are all subject to this seeming challenge: if you had good reasons to accept all the premises, then you should have accepted the conclusion at the same time. Conversely, if you had good reasons to reject the conclusion, you must have had good reasons to reject at least some of the premises (or if you didn't, then you will surely find them when your more certain commitments are threatened).

Abstracting from the specifics, let's consider a general case:

P1
P2
C

You say, in the first place, that if you didn't have good reasons to accept P2, but seemed to have good reasons to reject C, then it should be easy for you to dump P2 when ¬C is threatened. On the other hand, if you had good reasons to both accept P2 and reject C, that can only mean that you have good reasons to reject P1. Note that I didn't even say anything about what the premises and the conclusion were, and yet I came to the same conclusions that you did.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument:

P1: Everything that isn’t infinite must have a cause

P2: The Universe isn’t infinite

C: Therefore, the universe must have a cause

Let’s say someone accepts P2 because they reject the existence of actual infinities and they point to various thought experiments to illuminate their intuitions. P1 does not conflict with the reasons that they have for accepting P2 and neither premise of the argument implies that the other premise is less likely to be true than the conclusion that the argument is trying to provide evidence for. — TheHedoMinimalist

You are right in that the premises in the Moral argument are more tightly linked than in the Cosmological argument. P1 in the Cosmological argument makes a a general statement that happens to include P2, whereas P1 in the Moral argument makes a statement specifically about P2. But this is a difference in degree, not kind. The three propositions in a syllogism are like communicating vessels: if you apply pressure to one, it is immediately transmitted to the other two.

The fact is that when such arguments succeed, they don't succeed in stages. It is not like you are first persuaded to accept the premises, and then - oh dear, I guess I have no choice but to accept the conclusion, like it or not! No, if the argument succeeds, then by the time you are ready to accept the premises, you are just as ready to accept the conclusion. That is because the logical connection between the premises and the conclusion is so transparent that you cannot help but be aware of it, even as you consider one proposition at a time.

It seems that your reasoning would apply equally to any argument (including your own!) Did you pick the Moral argument as an illustration, or do you think there is something about that argument that makes it particularly vulnerable to this attack?

It seems like the only two plausible outcomes are that Republicans let their party be completely consumed by insane Trumpers, or else the party splits. — Pfhorrest

Party members at a gathering of the Republican National Committee endorsed President Trump as the man to lead the party forward, ignoring the turmoil in Washington. — NYT

There was the Tea Party (remember the Tea Party?), there was Trump in 2016, who at the outset was opposed by many in the Republican establishment - the party persevered. I don't see that changing now.

The Right are authoritarian by their nature. All their rhetoric notwithstanding, they have no higher principle than Power. They will support anyone who manages to seize and consolidate power - be it Trump or Putin or...

This sounds a lot like the old idea of a "philosopher king" - or "philosopher kings." There is a reason why this naive patriarchal fantasy was never a reality.

I think you'd have to order them the other way. — Garth

I can order them any way I want. Nothing wrong with ω* order type.

I couldn't find any counter arguments against the cosmological argument? — Varese

Well, the only way you could fail to find counterarguments to common versions of the cosmological argument is if you didn't look. But as for your formulation, I confess that I find it too confusing. For example, I can't tell what you mean by "immanent" - a word that you use a lot, but not in a way that I recognize.

I'll say one thing though. A common feature of cosmological arguments is that they rely on some kind of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), which I think you call the "deterministic principle." I think the most direct way to oppose a cosmological argument is to deny the PSR.

The two big objections to Platonism that arise from conversations like this are that Platonic objects lack clear identity conditions and that the ontology is profligate, a crowded slum, what Quine called Plato's Beard. Reducing every object to Math should answer both objections. — Pneumenon

Well, it is an answer, but why is it the answer? Why one object and not two or 42 or all of them? Why do you elect to be a lumper and not a splitter?

I think you need to back up a bit and tell us why the question matters. What difference would an answer make?

Do you know what I mean ? — Avema

Not really, you just restated what you already wrote earlier. Assuming you are speaking from experience, can you give a specific example where scientists fail to give an adequate definition and how that hurts their efforts?

And it is hard for scientists to do that because they're only used to defining notions that are quite directly related to experiments. — Avema

Well, yes, that's the point. Science is an empirical discipline, so it needs operational definitions.

For example, scientists could try to explain very global concepts such as life, intelligence, welfare, and expose the limits of science in understanding (or measuring, defining) these concepts. But that was never part of a discipline. Some scientists do have opinions on these concepts but they’re not knowledge, it stays at a personal level. And when philosophers try to think on scientific knowledge, well, they often lack the scientific background to do it right.

Does anyone think it would be a good idea to create such a discipline ? Or does anyone know such a thing ? — Avema

I am not sure I understand what you have in mind. Can you elaborate a little further, give a more specific example?

Thanks, I need to revisit that Reich era. Certainly not my go-to, but I'll revisit. — Noble Dust

Reich was new for me. I've been listening to his music for the past ten days or so.

My favorites so far (+ Proverb):

I only mention this, as relativity does not negate what I am saying about states. In fact, relativity is essential to my claim about states. Make the unit of time within whatever relative time frame you want. That doesn't negate the point. Regardless, lets not over complicate the issue and make this about relativity. — Philosophim

The relevance of relativity is not towards the relativity of duration, but towards the relativity of simultaneity. Your "snapshot" presumably includes all events that are simultaneous with each other. The problem is that in Relativity this designation is fairly arbitrary. Given a particular event in space-time, there are other events in space-time that are objectively earlier or objectively later than this event (events in its past and future light cones), while the rest are neither here nor there: they can be earlier, later or simultaneous, depending on the choice of reference.



There isn't a unique, objective way in which you can slice space-time into snapshots or slices. So "state" ill-defined.

Great! if we are in agreement on this point, then what do you think about my conclusion using the premises of the OP, that it is logically necessary that the universe's origin must have a first cause? — Philosophim

Some other time perhaps.

Now, can we write a definition of "identity" that allows us to treat either one of them as an individual object? — afterthegame

I am not sure what you are asking. Are the two balls identical? Yes, because that is a given. Are there two balls rather than one? Yes, that is also a given.

Is this a lead-up to questioning the principle of the identity of indiscernibles?

Let us think of slices of time as "states". — Philosophim

You would have to assume an absolute time for that, that is, something like a Newtonian universe. In a relativistic universe there is no fact of the matter about how the space-time is to be sliced along the time dimension (the technical term for this is foliation). Now, we don't have to commit ourselves to any particular physical framework, but in view of Relativity, neither can we take for granted the existence of an objective foliation.

Let us think of slices of time as "states". At its most simple, we would have a snapshot. But we could also have states that are seconds, hours, days, years, etc. We determine the scale. Within a state, we analyze the existence that has occurred. Causality is the actual prior state, not potential prior state, that existed which actually lead to the current state we are evaluating. — Philosophim

This won't do as a definition of causality. Rather, you could restate this to say that given a causal model, it is the case that every state is causally related to an earlier state, if there is an earlier state (but see my note above).

If there is no prior state, then there is no reason for the first state that is, to have existed. For the reason of a current state, is explained by the actual prior state. All we can say as to why a first state existed, is that it did. — Philosophim

You are conflating reasons with causes (you do that in the OP as well). They are not synonymous.

The only thing I can logically conclude from the above premises, is that there is no cause for the existence of any potential universe. Whatever universe exists, exists without prior explanation.

Lets examine this thought process before I move on. Does this clarify my position? — Philosophim

To the extent that this makes any sense, this was a very convoluted path to an uncontroversial conclusion: in a causal model with an initial state, the initial state is the cause of all subsequent states, and there is no cause for the initial state.

Do you understand that by "necessity", I mean actual, and not potential state? — Philosophim

I don't understand why you use modal language if you don't mean it. And if you eschew modality, then what is left of your definition? If we plug 'actual' in place of 'necessary,' we get something like this:

Causality - an actual prior state in time before the current state in time.

???

Before you had a counterfactual definition of causality, which has its problems (one of which I pointed out), but I think that in this basic form it captures a lot of the common-sense, "ordinary language" meaning of causality. With some work it can perhaps be made into something more robust.

But now I just don't have any idea of what you are trying to get at.

Let me clarify for you, as I worried people will interpret it that way. I did not mean to imply potential prior states by "necessary". I mean actual prior states. Sure, A could be caused by B or C potentially. But in this case, A is caused by B. Therefore B is necessarily the prior cause of the A. Perhaps a better set of terms would be B is the actual cause of the actual A?

Thus for a first cause, there is no actual prior causality involved for its actual existence. Does this make sense? — Philosophim

No, I am afraid you've lost the thread. Remember, you were trying to define causality:

Causality - a necessary prior state in time for the existence of the current state in time. — Philosophim

Now fiction aside, can we imagine a place without time? Would any events occur? Can memories form? Or do all possible events occur simultaneously? What is the lay of the land? — TiredThinker

I don't see any conceptual problems with a timeless world. We routinely construct such worlds in our minds. One of the subfields of mechanics is actually called Statics, and there are plenty of other theories and models in which time does not figure. Frankly, I am surprised that anyone with any exposure to science and abstract thought in general would have a difficulty with this concept.

Causality - a necessary prior state in time for the existence of the current state in time. If there is no necessary prior state that entails the current state, then the current state is a "first cause" without any prior causality. Does that make sense? — Philosophim

No, this won't work. Suppose A was caused by B, but it could alternatively have been caused by C. Neither B nor C are necessary for A to occur.

This is a well-known objection, by the way. I don't know why, but philosophers of the previous century loved thought experiments involving murder. So a counterexample might have run like this: Black arranged to kill Smith by dropping a chandelier on him. Instead, it so happened that the chandelier dropped and killed Smith on its own. So Smith was killed by a chandelier, but neither an accident nor a murder were individually necessary for this to occur.

I started reading your "puzzle," but like @Antony Nickles I immediately got bogged down in questions and objections and didn't even get to the "fun" part. I frankly find topics like causality to be more fun puzzles.

Well, this place may be slightly more expert than the general population, on average, but only slightly. There are hardly any professionals here, a few well-read dilettantes, but most aren't very knowledgeable.

Effectiveness is established in the labs in thousands of test tubes by mass laboratory techniques. Before they ever take a vaccine outside the lab effectiveness is already solidly established.
Biological testing with live animals and humans is different. This is where side effects, persistence, and other unknowns are expected to show up before a vaccine goes for approval. — magritte

This sounds like science fiction. Where are you getting your info? Since when is the effectiveness of anything is "solidly established" in vitro?

When the Russians claimed that they had won the vaccine race after supposedly observing an immune response in a small human trial, everyone thought they were nuts. But not even they were crazy enough to stake their claim before running a trial.

Curious, why would you want to solicit opinions from a few random people on the Internet? If you want to know who the best known or most influential modern philosophers are, you will do much better with Google.

A bona fide philosophical piece: Steve Reich gives an appropriately minimalistic treatment to a quote from Wittgenstein: "How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!"



Somewhat less typical in style, but one of his most beautiful pieces IMO.

Having read through the discussion, I still don't really know what you are getting at with all these Capital T's and Absolutes and so forth. Some examples that you gave (1=2, etc.) have to do with so-called analytic statements. On whether those can be doubted see e.g. Quine's Two Dogmas and the ensuing debate. More generally, the meaning and function of truth is a long-standing question in philosophy, one of the less tractable ones, but I am not sure whether your query has anything to do with that.

Perhaps instead of making vague, sweeping statements, considering some specific question would help.

I trust experience because it tells me that it should be trusted — znajd

The reason you trust past experiences is that you believe that the future will be very much like the past. If tomorrow things start falling up instead of falling down, then all your experiences of things falling down will be of no use to you. It is because you believe that things will continue falling down that past experiences can be useful in making predictions and decisions.

Now, why should not the people best suited to THINK make significant contributions to that? And who is more suited to think, than philosophers? — Ansiktsburk

Everyone thinks, and people of intellectual professions - such as engineers and managers - can think their way through certain kinds of problems better than most. Philosophers are specialists too. They are better than most at solving certain kinds of intellectual problems (most of which are, like chess, games of their own invention). They are not all head and shoulders above everyone else in any intellectual task that you throw at them. I wouldn't trust a random Plato scholar with making decisions about lockdown, I would want people with relevant skills and experience.

For me that depends on an odd sort of private language (maybe not 'private', but oddly technical). To claim that one's process is addressing 'moral' decision-making, one must already know what type of decision-making is 'moral' as opposed to any other sort. And to know if one's process works, one must know what a 'good' decision should be, which again one would learn from experience.

So in order to understand the meaning of 'morality' and 'morally right' one must have learnt it by example from other people, and the evidence we have of the process other people are using is varied in the manner I described. Thus one is inevitably talking about the decision-making we actually do. — Isaac

We learn how to use moral language from other people, but we don't necessarily learn how to be moral in the same way (although there is an overlap between these two learning processes). We acquire a common language, but we don't generally acquire a common morality with all language users - which, of course, is what makes moral disagreement possible.

One could, I suppose, having learnt how to use the terms say "scrap all that and decide thus", but what would make anyone do so aside from their moral desires, the satisfaction of which has just been described.

It would seem like setting out an algorithm which we've no intention of following to solve a problem we already have the answer to. — Isaac

The problem that you are pointing at is that of persuasion. How persuasion happens is not simple and straightforward, but we know that it does happen.

However, strictly speaking, it can't be both an empirical and phenomenological account? — jancanc

Can you elaborate on the contrast that you are drawing between an empirical and a phenomenological account? (I am not even going to ask about "metaphysical," because that is such a mushy category.)

Any moral 'system' which tries to claim moral decisions are based on a single metric is just pointless armchair speculation without any reference to the real world in which this simply doesn't happen. — Isaac

Whether this is a relevant objection depends on what one is trying to achieve. If your goal is to describe how moral reasoning functions in general, then of course you want to be "as close to scientifically accurate as you can get." But moral philosophy is primarily concerned with normative questions. Objecting to Peter Singer's utilitarianism, for example, on the grounds that it doesn't fit the moral profile of the general population would be missing the point.

The SEP article on Medieval Philosophy gives a short overview. I would start here. If you like podcasts, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has a section on medieval philosophy, with an intro episode.

Sounds pretty reductionist. — Marchesk

Yeah, OK, that does sound reductionist. But I must confess that there is a lot of muddle and controversy in this bundle of concepts: reductionism, emergence, supervenience, downward causation, autonomy, etc. Better philosophers than Sean Carroll have been trying to make sense of this mess and still there isn't anything like a settled opinion, not even on on their meaning.

I think when he agreed with Tegmark on our universe being mathematical, he meant it could be fully described by math without leaving anything out. Which means it can be simulated in principle by a full understanding of the microphysics. — Marchesk

That's not the same thing. This would be reductionism, which is a much stronger position than just holding that the universe can be described with mathematics. Proponents of strong emergence, downward causation, autonomy of sciences also believe that the universe is "mathematical" - they just think that the mathematical description cannot be built from the bottom up.

In Sara's podcast, Carol mentioned Bedau's paper on emergence, where weark emergence is anything that could in principle be simulated before it emerges. A mathematical universe would be computable, so that would make any phenomena weakly emergent. Sara says she doesn't think life can be simulated. — Marchesk

For there to be any kind of emergence, the universe must be "mathematical" in the weaker sense of having an all-pervading structure. The varieties of emergence are different takes on that structure. It would be safe to say that up to this point Carroll is on board with Tegmark (who does take a stronger position), but so is practically everyone involved in this conversation.

Sean thinks the universe is mathematical (from the Tegmark podcast), so naturally he thinks emergentism is weak, since all macro properties could in principle be computed in advance, given everything is math in his and Tegmark’s view. — Marchesk

Tegmark was on Carroll's podcast, but I don't think Carroll has endorsed his idea. Carroll is a good interviewer, in that he is receptive to all ideas and tries to get his interviewees to make their strongest case. But that doesn't mean that he agrees with everything they say.

Anyway, I don't see much of a connection between mathematical universe and weak emergence.

Sara’s views are a bit more complicated. It helps to take into account her views on information and life’s emergence earlier in the podcast. — Marchesk

I didn't find that it helped, to be honest. But I've looked at her publications; she has a number of papers on top-down causation in biology, some with Paul Davies, who has also been interested in this topic. That would probably speak to "strong emergence."

Emergence is a tricky topic, as evidenced even by the number of articles with titles like "Emergence," "What is Emergence?," "Making Sense of Emergence," etc. that have come out over the decades.

Sara then mentions math and the question of why it's so useful in physics. — Marchesk

She explored this theme here: The Descent of Math.

It’s about the logical contradictions of materialism. Logic is important for some. — Olivier5

Ah, how wonderful it is to be a self-assured fool. Everything is crystal-clear, and no question requires more than two seconds of contemplation.

I listened to that podcast, and I found that part of the talk obscure (and my impression was that so did Sean).

Do we have to have the same damn discussion year round in five different threads? "What does it mean? How can consciousness be an illusion? What is it an illusion of?" I mean, how hard is it to read anything by Dennett, Frankish, Graziano, Pereboom? Or a frigging Wiki article? The main idea is not difficult to understand, whether or not you agree with it.

I should note that of course there are other senses of "action," and one can also come up with their own definition for some purpose. I only insisted on this particular definition from physics because that was the context set by the OP (although he then wanders from it a bit).