• A Wittgenstein Commentary
    Name and Sam is not part of the backdrop of non-linguistic reality, but a hand is part of the backdrop.Sam26

    The problem of course, is that natural language is it's own meta-language; it is therefore incapable of expressing a distinction between the publicly linguistic and the privately non-linguistic. This is why, contra-Wittgenstein, I think natural language is inappropriate for discussing philosophy. What you need is a special notation for signifying your pretheoretic and private sense of "hand".
  • Is Physicalism Incompatible with Physics?
    What is it about realism that you think commits it to believing these "mysteriously lie elsewhere"?Isaac

    By realism I mean the idea that the meaning or truth-makers of a proposition are fully transcendent of the process of it's verification. For instance, take Hooke's Law.

    The realist is the person who thinks "The elastic deformation of this spring is governed by Hooke's Law"

    The anti-realist is the person who thinks "The elastic deformation of this spring is part of the definition of Hooke's Law"
  • Is Physicalism Incompatible with Physics?
    Consider all that happens when teaching a physical law:

    i) We write a statement which expresses a physical law.
    ii) We demonstrate the meaning of the written statement by performing an experiment.
    iii) We summarize the result of our demonstration: "Performing action U in state A resulted in state B, in accordance with the law"

    According to realism, we've demonstrated the truth or coherence of the law as well as the meaning of the written statement, but the meaning, agency and whereabouts of the law itself mysteriously lie elsewhere.

    In contrast, according to anti-realism our demonstration is part of the very meaning of the physical law. That is to say, the physical law is in part an anthropological description of what physicists do in certain situations to achieve a sense of coherence.

    Of course, the anti-realist shouldn't forget the role and responsibility of the environment in the truth of experimental outcomes, that is to say the construction of such outcomes. The difference is, the anti-realist includes the very actions, perceptions and mentation of the physicist as part of the very definition of the physical law he is verifying.
  • Should the future concern me?
    All you have is an intuition that you call your "future self", an intuition which you currently experience and which is therefore a part of your immediate present. So planning to avoid opiate withdrawal is rational in the present in order to satisfy your present intuition called "future self".

    Conversely, suppose that you are presently benefiting from a sense of well-being that you attribute to giving up opiates many months ago. All you have is a present intuition called "my past self giving up opiates", an intuition which is again part of your immediate present.

    I think of myself this way:

    Yesterday, any notion I had of 'tomorrow', including of my "tomorrow's self", in fact referred to yesterday and only to yesterday, since today didn't exist yesterday.
  • My biggest problem with discussions about consciousness
    Compare the following statements

    A: "Such and such is consciousness"
    B: "I can relate to such and such".

    Notice that nobody disagrees with you whenever you use B in a situation, because they tend to view B as an assertion you are making about yourself, rather than an assertion you are making about 'such and such' in itself.

    On the other hand, whenever you say A in a situation, people normally interpret it to be an objective assertion you are making about 'such and such' in itself, regardless of whatever personal feelings and intuitions you harbor towards such and such.

    In my opinion, this common realist belief that A and B refer to different things, which is itself a consequence of assuming an ontological distinction between subject and object, is the root cause of philosophical skepticism about the existence of other minds.
  • Bottle Imp Paradox
    What if a buyer of the bottle believed 100% in the curse, but had a 'non-standard' understanding of "eternity", whereby eternal hell was understood to eventually end?
  • Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris
    The natural concept of depression isn't descriptive of the state of the individual per-se, but of the individual's behavioral relationship to society. That is to say, the natural concept of depression is holistically irreducible to the individuals themselves.

    On the other hand, the medical concept of depression is merely a description of the neuro-anatomical correlates of individuals who tend to be judged by society as being depressed in the natural sense. Consequently, a medical diagnosis of medical depression is neither necessary nor sufficient for establishing a diagnosis of natural depression.

    The natural concept of depression should be compared to the legal concept of guilt. In both cases, judgements are sought for political reasons, and hence both concepts are inherently political. In being political, the outcome of such judgements often refer more to the state and needs of society than to the state and needs of the individual.
  • Why do atheists ask for evidence of God, when there is clearly no such evidence?
    When a Christian or a person of another theistic religion says that their God exists, the truth is that they are saying this because they believe that God(s) exists. Regardless of how sure they claim to be or what "evidence" they give, the fact is that is simply what they believe, because no one knows if any God(s) exist, which is the exact reason why no evidence has been provided for the existence of any God(s). I personally do not have an opinion either way regarding God(s) or their presence, so I guess you could call me agnostic, but I am simply pointing out that no one knows if God(s) exists. If Christians actually knew that their God exists, then they could easily provide irrefutable evidence and there would not constantly be disputes by atheists asking for said evidence. I'm not arguing for atheists or theists, I'm simply saying that theists don't actually know if God does or does not exist, and therefore they should not claim to know this or try to give atheists reasons why God(s) does exists as opposed to simply accepting that they don't know if God exists.Maureen

    It isn't as simple as that, because the debate isn't purely an epistemic dispute over the possibility of theological knowledge. Rather, the debate between atheists and Christians is to a large extent a debate over the very meaning of evidence, god, and their interrelation.

    There will be theists, the immanentists, who will say that one's immediate experience is all the proof one needs of gods existence, effectively eliminating the concept of evidence by identifying experience itself with divine presence. And on the other extreme there will be atheists who insist that the evidence for god is zero in every possible world, effectively eliminating the relevance of experience to the concept of god, leaving the idea of god empty. Both of these positions constitute 100% certainty in their respective beliefs.

    The key is to recognize that their definitions of god are incompatible and that they are talking past each other in incommensurable dialects.

    I suggest that to understand what a person means by "god", you must ask them to describe the experiences they are prepared to accept as constituting "god's" existence. After hearing the person's answers, is there anything more to discuss?
  • Houses are Turning Into Flowers
    Californian houses can in fact metamorphose into flowers; by digesting themselves with fire to produce a large quantity of heat that can germinate flower-seeds within the house, which are then fertilized by the ash.
  • Houses are Turning Into Flowers
    In the mathematical subject of topology, it is joked that donuts are coffee mugs and cows are footballs; because their shapes can be morphed into one another without the cutting or gluing of substance.

    Likewise there is a similar geometric sense, albeit involving cutting and gluing, in which a "house" could morph into "flowers" or even be regarded as equivalent.

    The author is possibly conflating natural language semantics with formal semantics. Any formal definition of transforming type A into type B requires a notion of similarity, which in turn requires that A and B can be projected into a common conceptual space.
  • Is Kripke's theory of reference consistent with Wittgenstein's?
    As i see it, the notions of linguistic reference, causation and rigid-designation are part of an irreducible triad, in that each of these concepts cannot be understood without understanding the other two concepts. Therefore, whilst the concepts of linguistic reference, causation and rigid designation have practical validity in real-world application, they cannot be meaningfully used by philosophers to explicate one another, nor can they be used to justify epistemological foundations, due to vicious circularity.
  • Propositions and the meaning of speech acts.
    Going back to the discussion, note that the two situations you described are not symmetrical. We have a reasonable well-developed semantic theory for declarative sentences (say, Montague grammar and extensions thereof). But we don't have a well-developed semantic theory for questions (and other "moods") that is independent of truth condition semantics, or of declaratives more generally. So we may hope to extend our analyses of declarative sentences to other types of sentences, but there is little hope of going in the reverse direction, since we don't even know where to start in that case. That's why we try to understand questions in terms of "answerhood" conditions, whereas no one (that I know of!) has tried to formulate a semantics for declarative sentences in terms of "questionhood" conditions.Nagase

    To my way of thinking, the meaning of a question is trivial by way of causation; a question refers to whatever answer the questioner finds acceptable. And if the questioner comes to later reject the answer he previously accepted, this is a situation in which the semantics of the questioner's question has changed - to referring to whatever new answer the questioner is now prepared to accept.

    By this trivial cause-and-effect account, I don't see a hard distinction between questions and answers.
  • Philosophical Investigations, reading it together.
    Suppose "pi" defines the perfect circle. Do you think that striving to resolve the exact mathematical value of pi would be a case of striving after the ideal? We all think that pi has no end, and to prove that it has no end is a fruitless task, like proving infinite has no end. But what if someone found the end?Metaphysician Undercover

    When writing pi as 3.14159... the dots "..." do not abbreviate the numeric result of an algorithm, rather the dots express that pi is a sequence generating algorithm, as opposed to referring to a particular numeric result of using such an algorithm. Hence "pi has no end" is true in referring to a sequence generating process.

    All that said, Wittgenstein wrote remarks on several occasions that indicated his recognition of a theological sense in which mathematicians like Georg Cantor thought of the infinite cardinal numbers as representing platonistic "completed " infinities; namely in Wittgenstein's acknowledgement of the "giddy feelings" that accompany thinking about set-theory from the platonistic perspective, and that have psychologically motivated it's development. Wittgenstein, while clearly recognising this theological motivation and use of mathematics, forewarned that it led to the unnecessary development of confusing and over-complicated formalisms of logic that were misleading when it came to the practical application of logic and mathematics.
  • Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris
    Isn't the Hippocratic oath and the entire practice of medicine a political practice? Accusations that the practice of clinical psychology is political therefore require nuance and elaboration. The very ethical notion of "harm" is relative to metaphysical ideas about the self, the state and personal mortality. In a world in which everyone rejected the idea of personal mortality and prioritized the health of the state, a painless suicide wouldn't necessarily be recognized as harm.

    If the practice of clinical psychology was politically "neutral", psychologists would able to prescribe financial gifts, holiday cruises and supermodel escorts as remedies for treating depressed patients, as opposed to prescribing them "numbing" medications and talk therapies ....but this runs up against society's need to prioritize it's finite resources. So there cannot be a politically neutral practice of psychology.

    The notions of mental illness, diagnosis and treatment, are better understood holistically from a utilitarian perspective. It is never the lone individual who is diagnosed and treated for a mental illness, but the individual as part of a wider cross-section of society whose broader interests are often in conflict with the individual. The particular interests of the psychology profession are but one component of this greater good.
  • There Are No Facts. Only Opinions. .
    Consider the game Cluedo. Who killed Dr Black?

    - The "fact" as to the identity of the murderer refers, by convention, to a single name within the envelope in the middle of the board.

    - The fact is constructed to be a hidden element of a finite set of suspects that is also decided by convention and known a priori to all players.

    -The fact is decidable within finite time.

    -At any time during play, a player's belief-space consists of the finite set of cards he knows of, but has not so far personally witnessed during this game.

    So in this game, there is a clear convention for distinguishing epistemology from metaphysics, that is to say, for distinguishing 'belief' from 'fact'. The question the OP raises, as i understand it, concerns the extent to which the Cluedo model of truth applies in the real world.

    Consider for example, what if two names were placed inside the envelope? Does this modified game denote epistemological uncertainty, or metaphysical ambiguity as to the culprit? Doesn't the answer to this question depend upon whether a second game will be played as a decider?
  • Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris
    the practice of psychiatry isn't politically neutral, either on the side of the patient who requests a diagnosis due to failing to conform to the social values of modern society
    — sime
    It sounds like your concern about psychiatry relates to its practice in the criminal justice system, where the subject is not the doctor's client. That will always be problematic, just as it is with forensic pathologists and police surgeons.

    But we can't avoid having that involvement, can we? What would be your preferred model for dealing with someone that is alleged to have committed a brutal crime and who pleads insanity or is suspected to be suffering from severe mental illness?
    andrewk

    If we accept that individuals are not self-causing agents, and therefore if we understand the concept of guilt pragmatically, in other words we define a person's guilt in terms of the social benefits of sentencing the individual, then we certainly need much more than mere analysis of the subject's brain, and in many instances the status of the subject's brain is irrelevant.

    And exactly the same logic applies when diagnosing the average depression.

    If psychiatry is a science which t accepts that individuals are not self-causing agents, then I cannot see how psychiatric evaluation as currently practiced is particularly relevant to establishing guilt.
  • Subject and object
    Those linguistic conventions are presumably shared expressions of our belief. And here I am trying to use your terms.

    Are you suggesting that we cannot have a conversation in which we both talk about the same thing?

    Because I know that's wrong.
    Banno

    How is disagreement possible if we really are talking about the same thing?

    By "the same thing" I include any intuition or phenomena that the observer experiences as a result of their mental state. So if we look at the same sky and disagree about tomorrows weather due to having had different past experiences, we aren't looking at the same thing by my definition.

    Suppose someone says "Only the sky we share before us is objective, and our private intuitions are subjective and irrelevant". This isn't a deep epistemological statement about the world we experience, this is merely a statement about a linguistic convention that ignores the private facts of each person.
  • Subject and object
    It might have practical significance. What if the equation in question controls a piece of machinery, and getting it wrong means the machinery fails? Rocket fails to launch, bridge collapses, patient dies. That kind of thing. I think I would be correct in saying that it then becomes a matter of objective fact.Wayfarer

    Right. But does this necessitate the concepts of truth and falsity? Don't all statements refer to objective facts, even the so-called "false" or "subjective" ones?

    What if we interpret an engineer's words as being necessarily correct whatever he says and whatever happens as a consequence of his words? In other words, we understand an engineer's words in the same way we understand a photograph generated by a camera, that is to say idiosyncratically as a snapshot of the time and place the words were uttered.

    To my understanding, the philosophy of trivialism understands falsification in terms of miscalibration; a person's words can be taken-wrongly by a community as a consequence of the person disobeying a linguistic convention. And his words are taken-rightly by community once it identifies the causes of his words.
  • Subject and object
    If someone looked at an equation on a blackboard, and said ‘that’s wrong’, is that a matter that can be explained in terms of stimulus and response?Wayfarer

    If all stimuli impacting upon the individual accounted for, both external to and within the individual, then I am at a loss to know whatever else "that's wrong" could refer to.

    It is only by linguistic convention that the shared expressions of our beliefs are said to refer to the same object, and our conventions fools us into thinking that "right" and "wrong" have deep epistemological significance.
  • Subject and object
    It isn't clear a priori what the object of a belief could be, other than the immanent and immediate stimuli that provoked the expression of the belief.

    If someone looks at dark clouds in the sky and says "it is about to rain", the object of the belief is on any scientific explication of subject's stimulus-response, nothing more than the presence of dark clouds in combination with the subject's mental state, making the belief a necessarily true statement concerning only the present. A contradiction of a belief by a future course of events is then a contradiction obtained via post-hoc revision of linguistic convention.
  • Is it self-contradictory to state 'there is no objective truth'?
    "There-is-no-objective-truth" is self-inconsistent if understood to be a universal proposition. The same is true of any negative universal proposition that is self-applicable, since this leads to a liar sentence.

    Rather than viewing the liar sentence as a proposition possessing inconsistent static meaning, instead consider it to be a performative speech-act that when repeatedly applied to itself creates a dynamic alternating sequence of unstable outcomes. This way the liar sentence is no longer interpreted as being in conflict with itself, but as merely yielding instability.
  • Does “spirit” exist? If so, what is it?
    The "spirit" of any word isn't it's definition.
  • Why are most people unwilling to admit that they don't know if God does or does not exist?
    Suppression of doubt is critical for a good performance, especially when hecklers are in the audience. And the sense of any proposition is in relation to it's performance.
  • Philosophical Investigations, reading it together.
    An image is ideal if it is the image of one's striving.

    For example, this imagined polygon doesn't satisfy my striving for symmetry and smoothness. So i imagine a "limiting polygon" that I call a "perfect circle", where "limiting polygon" is my vague imagination of the Sun which is sufficiently vague and unstable that I cannot make sense of counting its sides. The image satisfies my craving, but not the striving.
  • Philosophical Investigations, reading it together.
    I can certainly imagine a "perfect circle", an "infinite extension", an "ideal body" and so on.

    But "perfect", "ideal" and "infinite" aren't passive and objective descriptions of my observations, rather they are expressions of active speech-acts I commit (including cravings I may have) in relation to my observations. For example, If I am hungry then A Big Mac might seem the "perfect" burger.

    Presumably, this is how the later Wittgenstein understood ideality. Any advice he gives is therapeutic advice whose objective is to prevent cravings for cravings sake.
  • Solipsism question I can't get my head around
    I think therefore I am. You think therefore you are. Hence solipsism is wrong. Simple.Devans99

    To me, your thoughts exist in a different sense to mine. Certainly the word "solipsism" does not possess a shareable public sense (hence the lack of solipsism conventions), but that is of course of no concern to the solipsist.
  • Solipsism question I can't get my head around
    What valid reasoning/logic allows for solipsism to not necessarily be true?gsky1

    Well, can't you fathom the vibe of the extrovert's mindset when he says "the world exists without me"?

    Is there really more to it than that? (The issue here being about the sense of an expression rather than truth)
  • Presentism is Impossible
    I am under the impression that those who discount presentism do so, because they interpret presentism as a variant of realism about time and causality, where the ontological basis of that temporal realism is the present.

    But if so, this is a strawman argument, for there is no indication that presentists are realist about time and causality. I think that a presentist can interpret any statement presently, including any statement asserting temporal realism and eternalism. So in some sense I think the presentist would find debates about presentism pointless. For he would interpret both sides of the debate as a construction of the present.
  • Presentism is Impossible
    Presentism is certainly a dramatically different viewpoint upon the meaning of the past. But in a sufficiently simple universe, presentist understanding of the past would be perfectly aligned with physical understanding of the past.

    For example, suppose we lived in a very simple universe in which only the earth and the sun existed. Then looking at the appearance of the sun through a telescope, a presentist and a physicist might both say "We call this appearance of the sun "eight minutes ago". "

    In reality, the reason why neither the presentist nor the physicist are prepared to say that "eight minutes ago" is the merely a name for the appearance of the sun, is because "eight minutes ago" is a holistic and open-ended collection of inferences in relation to our entire lives and anticipated experiences that we cannot call into mind simultaneously. Hence we are unable to define "eight minutes ago" in terms of our experiences, even though we are readily prepared to judge some of our experiences as referring to "eight minute ago".

    Yet in a sufficiently simple and closed universe, "eight minutes a go" would be definable as an adjective referring to immediate experience, like "reddish", "circular", "rough-looking" etc.

    Realists are right to point out that the meaning of past-contingent propositions transcend individual acts of verification or constructions out of sense-data. The anti-realist (including the presentist) should concede this, without feeling forced to conclude that the concept of the past transcends the entirety of experience.

    Hence like the logical positivist Ayer, the presentist ought to be skeptical of any particular doctrine of verificationism, but not necessarily the spirit of verificationism.
  • Presentism is Impossible
    If you look at the difference between past eternity and future eternity, the the first is a completed infinity whilst the 2nd is not.Devans99

    If the present is considered to be the origin of one's spatio-temporal coordinate space, then there is no reason to consider past eternity to be any more complete than future eternity.

    For example, a constructivist and anti-realist interpretation of time might consider both the past and future to be ongoing constructions that are semantically reducible to sense-data and memory. This view does not imagine time to be a completed and directed cartesian axis, with the past and future occupying opposite ends.

    The same is also true of certain models of cosmology, for example the Hawking-Hartle Model that does not single out any point of space-time as being the unique causal-origin.
  • Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris
    What is the point of that question? You could play that game with any profession: what is a lumberjack without their cutting down of trees, what is Chris Froome without his bicycle, or Serena Williams without her racquet?andrewk

    What distinguishes the practice of psychiatry from the above, is that the the reason for the practice of psychiatry isn't politically neutral, either on the side of the patient who requests a diagnosis due to failing to conform to the social values of modern society, nor on the side of the psychiatrist who is diagnosing according to an illness ontology that is based on a narrow conception of an individual that serves capitalist interests in endorsing a particular system of moral judgement.

    In the criminal justice system and the welfare state , psychiatrists and psychologists play the role of priests who in effect deliver a moral judgement of an individual in the guise of the presence or absence of a mental illness diagnosis, that is largely subjective with respect to unreliable and incomplete proto-scientific evidence. Of course the psychiatrist will claim to be only giving the best possible objective psychological diagnosis, but he is rarely paid for this reason, for his diagnosis is used by other institutions and juries to reward or punish a 'weakly performing' individual in relation to society's values.
  • Philosophical Investigations, reading it together.
    In case anyone hasn't read Quine's Word and Object, I'd recommend reading it simultaneously with PI, especially for the clarity of Quine's behaviourist arguments regarding the indeterminacy of translation. The challenge is then to reconcile the two philosophers. (I think any conflict is mostly a style issue, for Quine's definition of "science" was a very broad and immanent church)
  • Why are mental representations semantically selective?
    It sounds like you are describing the problem of clustering; for any collection of elements that are pairwise related by some measure of similarity, how many clusters are there, and where are the boundaries?

    One potential criticism of this formulation, is that it assumes the notion of an element as an axiom from which the cluster-membership of elements is inferred, as well as an a priori metric of similarity. It is a logically atomic model that models clustering as a type of induction.

    Perhaps this could be circumvented by treating elements as being another type of relation that is itself a relation between similarity relations(!), such that every subset of relations is understood to be a sub-configuration of a semantically inseparable whole structure. I'm thinking of Tensor Algebra here, as is used in Quantum Field Theory to describe entanglement between an undetermined number of particles that are themselves defined in terms of a global field fluctuation.
  • Presentism is Impossible
    I think of potential infinity as iterative processes carried out in time and then as actual infinity as the result of carrying on these iterative processes 'forever'.

    Or potential infinity is like the limit concept from calculus and actual infinity is like an infinite set.

    Potential infinity is unbounded, actual infinity is out of bounds.
    Devans99

    What does imagining "forever" consist of? For example, I imagine walking for some time along a row of trees that has no end in sight. Then I say to myself "this is forever", and then I abruptly stop imagining walking along the row of trees in order to get on with the rest of my life.

    But i could have imagined exactly the same thing when imagining potential infinity. Perhaps the only difference, is that in this case I might include my stoppage of the imagined scene as being part of my meaning of "potential infinity".

    This seems to imply that the distinction between potential vs actual infinity is arbitrary.
  • Presentism is Impossible
    It is the term 'Potential Infinity' that comes to mind when thinking of computers. I don't have a problem with potential infinity, its 'Actual Infinity' that is the problem.Devans99

    But is it even possible to define a difference between actual vs potential infinity? Supposing you were confronted by a skeptic who doubted the semantic distinction between these concepts. How can you force the skeptic to accept that there is a semantic distinction without appealing to circularity or falling into infinite regress?
  • Presentism is Impossible
    have you considered interpreting infinity to mean an under-determined finite number?

    For in practice, (as in the software engineering application of infinite loops), infinity is only used to denote the absence of an a priori stopping condition. But an a priori absence of a stopping condition is not the same thing as failing to stop in practice.

    This paradox is related to Markov's Principle:

    "if it is impossible that an algorithm does not terminate, then it does terminate."

    Sounds undeniable right? But then what does "does not terminate" mean exactly? After all, the phrase "does not terminate" has only ever been uttered in the presence of an event that is interpreted and verified according to a linguistic convention - therefore, according to constructive semantics "does not terminate" must refer to something observable (for example, the C syntax while(true) {...} )

    Conversely, an event which is literally absent, namely termination, cannot have caused the utterance "does not terminate". Therefore according to constructivism, "does not terminate" can only refer to the absence of an a priori predictable stopping condition, for example as in the piece of syntax as in the example above, which when actually executed is invariably terminated eventually.

    So if "does not terminate" is interpreted to mean "termination is not predictable", then we can rephrase Markov's Principle to mean:

    "If the non-predictability of an algorithm's termination isn't predictable, then the algorithm terminates"

    Which is clearly a deniable assertion, since that the premise is purely epistemic in nature whereas the consequent is actual. Consequently, infinity should, at least according to constructivism, be interpreted as a purely epistemic notion in reference to finite numbers or iterations.
  • Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris
    No it doesn't. This is not how assessments work. We take into account all external as well as internal factors that could contribute to a persons dysfunction. I'm seeing a lot of you guys make assumptions here without any real support. When I evaluate my clients I take into account all factors.Anaxagoras

    But how is it possible to take these factors into account? What does this analysis consist of? Could an analysis of a patient's cognition, behavior and social welfare by any honest measure be called objectively scientific? Wouldn't you need to observe the patient in situ?

    In my personal experience as a psychiatric patient for ADHD and depression, "taking external factors into account" consists of the psychiatrist diagnosing purely on the basis of self-reports that cannot be crosschecked and that are potentially wildly inaccurate, especially considering the political pressure there is on the patient to obtain a supposedly "objective" medical diagnosis for obtaining sick-notes.

    Imagine if a dentist operated on teeth purely on the basis of questionnaires and self-reports...

    At least in the UK, my experience with the NHS tells me that the cognition and behavior of mental-health patients is not evaluated by clinical psychologists - not even a stroop test - and that psychiatrists only provide superficial consultation services with respect to googleable psychopharmacology.
  • Reincarnation and the preservation of personal identity
    If the question as to whether or not one's personal identity has changed over time is answered according to experience, then doesn't this demonstrate the philosophical uselessness of the idea of personal identity?
  • Anecdotal evidence and probability theory
    Isn't the Bayesian position that there is no qualitative distinction between assumptions and knowledge? It's all just probabilities with different values.Echarmion

    Even frequentist probability doesn't require a qualitative distinction between assumptions and knowledge, for assumptions can be represented as "pseudo frequencies" to augment actually obtained frequencies and applied to a given likelihood function. No frequentist statistician would reject to this, provided one can provide a real-world justification for those pseudo-frequencies.

    The reason Bayesian probability has been so controversial is in it's non-frequentist interpretations and usage of "prior" distributions, for when "prior" distributions are non-controversially applied they ironically represent objective posterior knowledge. And it makes no sense whatsoever to interpret flat priors as representing the state of ignorance of an experimenter, unless that prior is redundant in playing no role whatsoever in subsequent inferences.

    If an assertion of ignorance was to influence the calculation of an expectation, then by definition the assertion isn't of ignorance but of knowledge or assumption.
  • Presentism is Impossible
    The are two distinct ways of understanding timelessness and immortality. One is to identify timelessness as infinitely extended duration, which many point out is unthinkable or a contradiction. The other is to identity timelessness with tenselessness, designating propositions for which the assignment of a temporal index or duration is nonsensical.

    For example, every perceivable event (or even every conceivable event) might be regarded as necessarily having finite duration in being otherwise unperceivable or unthinkable; yet at the same time it might be conceded that the abstract types associated with such events are nevertheless tenseless.

    For example, it make sense, at least to my mind, to insist that the actual Elvis Presley, in the sense of a particular rock-star who grew fat bingeing on burgers while living in Graceland, was mortal. Yet the concept of Elvis Presley must be tenseless, for otherwise how can I currently make sense of the claim that "Elvis no longer exists"?

    An informal way of expressing this is to say that the King can never die... Perhaps a better way of expressing this is to say that one's private imagination only acquires tense indirectly through it's practical application in the world, via calibrating it's imagery to the world's public convention of temporal semantics.