I guess I don't share the intuition that it's accurate. It doesn't seem to me to be the case that if something possibly exists with property X, that therefore something like that does exist. I'm not sure what the argument for it's plausibility is though. I think the converse for necessity is intuitive though, so if it's necessary that all things are X, then for all things, it is necessary they are X.

Sorry friend. I tend to be here when I have downtime at work...which there has not been much of the last couple days.

I see you got another thread going on accessibility. I assumed that would be the biggest question.

I mean, I can give a 30k ft. view, but there are whole text books that deal with developing the semantics for different modal systems.

The basic idea is that you introduce the concept of an order triple which includes a (set of) possible world(s), an accessibility relation and a value assignment to propositions in the possible world. The semantics of possibility and necessity are given in terms of the accessibility, "r", of different possible worlds to each other. A proposition, p, is possible w/respect to some possible world W, just in case W is accessible to some other possible world, W', such that WrW' and p is either true or possibly true in W'. Necessity is defined as the truth of some prop, p, in every world accessible to W.

Well, it's not that it doesn't reconcile, it's just that PL isn't sophisticated enough to capture the logic of counterfactuals. That's why you have separate modal logics which include PL + the modal operators.

I'm not sure you can quantify a counterfactual statement existentially. The nature of EQ is to assert that there is at least one object being quantified that exists. A priori, then, EQ should necessarily exclude counterfactuals.

Was there some particular counterfactual proposition and its formulation you were thinking about?

I'm sympathetic to the overestimation of the degree to which machines can be intelligent in the same way humans are, however I think the definition of "intelligence" is nevertheless going to be pretty fluid. I don't see why "judgment" has to factor into it and, in fact, that doesn't show up as part of the dictionary definition. "judgment" is also not etymologically related in any way to "intelligence" and neither connotes the other in any form of conventional language use.

It seems to me that the ability to compute is at least one form intelligence can take. If children respond to a math problem posed by a teacher, they have done nothing significantly different from what a computer does when it returns an answer in response to input. The ability to access "memory" is also going to be another factor, which both humans and computer share.

I think the crux of the issue is whether, as you admit, it makes sense to speak of "analogous intelligences". If your claim boils down to the intuition that human intelligence works differently than machine intelligence and that is the only proper sense in which we can speak of the term, you will be right, but you will be vacuously right.

I believe that's why we have the term "artificial intelligence" (≠ "intelligence").

It sounds like those guys could actually benefit severely from some alternative perspectives in their lives, but no one can blame you for staying away

That's obnoxious. If you live in the US, you should see if your state has anti-bullying and/or public accommodation laws. The psychiatry comment would arguable run afoul of either (the latter for discriminating against the mentally ill). Come to think of it, since disability is a protected class, it could even constitute a hate crime.

I'm not saying you should sue, but you could point it out to this clown. Or maybe you should sue...

Yeah, no, I totally agree that empirically we have no evidence that there are any rational beings in addition to humans, and would not insist there necessarily are any. However, my intuition is that given the shear scale of the universe even as we have discovered it so far, it is plausible to think that (it is possible) there are non-human beings - aliens, just to call a spade a spade - who exhibit and are capable of rational thought. If you agree, then would we have to assume that the only way they could possess morality is if they developed through biological evolutionary processes similar to those humans undergo? If we don't assume that, then it would seem morality could be untethered from biological development in some cases.

If you disagree that it is possible there are non-human rational being in the universe, I'm still curious whether you think a conventional form of morality is impossible. That is, suppose we do develop certain moral intuitions as the result of our evolution and develop rules related to those intuitions that form the framework of a moral system. If we agreed to change the rules so that they were no longer consistent with our intuitions but based on rational judgments instead (about what is best, most expedient, whatever), is it unfair to still call that new set of rules a moral system? If it's not unfair to say that, then how is that conventional system related to the supposed evolutionary developments of our moral psychology?

I think what @sign is saying is that every subject (i.e. person) is an essential part of the process of meaning and signification and, to that extent, transform their own nature in accordance not only with the signs/meanings they use, but in accordance with the very process of signification itself. Since the subject (in many continental philosophical thought-modes) is the epicenter of metaphysical inquiry, the process and nature of signification as a linguistic phenomenon can offer insights into the process and nature of the world itself precisely to the extent it is taken as transformative of the "ideal or pure subject." (I take "ideal", "pure" subject to mean something like the form of subjectivity itself. Perhaps in this sense it could be seen as akin to Kant's notion of the transcendental unity of apperception.) In other words, an important aspect of the world itself is that it is by nature intentional.

But @sign can correct me if that's not barking up the right tree.

I should also add, obviously, that I'm not endorsing what @sign says, just offering a possible clarification of what s/he's trying to say.

Morality is fundamentally a sense - ingrained into the organism by evolution in a tribal social context. — karl stone

So you think it would be impossible for rational creatures, whether human or not, to agree to a system of moral codes? Part of the question being whether it's possible some rational beings don't necessarily come about as a result of evolutionary forces or go through tribalism in the course of their social development. If it's possible there are such beings, then would they be prevented from having a moral system based on how you've conceived it here? Is that the best way to frame a concept of morality, such that it necessarily excludes some agents who intuition might suggest seem to be capable of acting morally?

The relevant distinction is the ability to feel pleasure or pain. If plants can feel pleasure or pain, then, other things being equal, we should not eat them. — Herg

This is different from what you had said here

What makes an action immoral, in the end, is that it adversely affects ... any sentient being. — Herg

I supplied the emphasis here to draw attention to the gist of your original claim, the one I was responding to.

My argument responding to the original claim, which is not addressed in your subsequent post, was that

(1) Not all animals are sentient.
(2) If there are some non-sentient animals, a fortiori, they do not feel pain.

Consequently,

(3) if the claim that it is morally wrong to eat animals is completely grounded on the fact that they feel pain/pleasure, there is no moral reason for people to abstain from eating at least non-sentient animals.

In addition, even assuming your position is really that the morality of eating animals depends on pain/pleasure and assuming further that sentience necessarily entails the capacity for having pain/pleasure (a claim I don't think is true, but whatever), that still does not end the inquiry since, as I pointed out in another post on this thread in response to @chatterbears, a utilitarian ethicist can accept that animals feel pain/pleasure but still conclude that eating them is ethically allowed provided that any pain their slaughter causes is outweighed by the utility derived from products created as a result of that slaughter. That is, there is at least one ethical system where arguments that it is morally acceptable to eat meat can easily be formulated.

Maybe you reject utilitarianism. Fine. But then you will have to argue for (1) why that whole system is flawed and (2) why any proposed alternative system is justifiable before you starting arguing about the morality of eating animal meat. Otherwise your arguments will simply be aimed at cross purposes with a significant number of relevant moral agents, i.e. utilitarians. (I should point out that not all utilitarians agree that animal exploitation is justified from a utilitarian perspective. Peter Singer, for example, advocates utilitarian reasons for vegetarianism. I don't think that changes the fact that animal consumption can in theory be justified on utilitarian grounds.) The OP here was directed at the claim that there are no moral or ethical justifications for eating meat. I believe I have provided at least one such justification in the form of utilitarianism, making the absolute claim posited in the OP false. None of the posts have given me any reason to think otherwise at this point.

A secondary issue for the pain/pleasure position is that (1) it would be obsolete provided we implemented pain free methods of animal husbandry, which seems entirely possible and (2) since it only would prevent a person from causing an animal pain in order to exploit the resulting meat for consumption, it does not absolutely prohibit humans from eating meat provided they were not the ones who caused the pain. That is, there would be no moral prohibition against eating fresh road kill, for example, or scavenging the meat freshly felled by other animals. In other words, even if pain/pleasure is what made animals relevant moral agents, that would not form the basis for an absolute moral prohibition against eating meat. Consequently, there is no universal justification for strict vegetarianism.

Not true. I take my dog to the vet to be inoculated because it's in his best interests. Having interests is nothing to do with having self-awareness. — Herg

It seems to me the attribution of interests in this case is an anthropomorphic displacement to your dog of YOUR understanding of interest and what the dog's interest might be. The dog itself is not "interested" in doing anything. It behaves purely on instinct. If there were no humans around to conceptualize interest, animals would have none in a state of nature, and I do not think it makes sense to term purely instinct based behavior "interested."

Further, it seems to me that at some level the only interests being served are your own since you have made the decision to keep a domesticated animal. You don't take the dog to the vet to further its interests (since it doesn't have any). Ultimately, you take it to the vet to further your own interest in wanting to continue to derive whatever pleasure the company of an animal companion brings you. I mean, the dog would never take itself to vet so I don't see how it is possible to say that that is in its interest if it's not a behavior it would ever engage aside from being forced to engage in it by a human. Generally, then, any interest it may have is derivative of and maybe even entirely constituted by YOUR interests.

The fact that we sometimes impose decisions on other humans on the grounds that it is "in their best interest" can't be used as an analogy for animals because when we do that for people, the implication is that the person for whom the decision is being made, for whatever reason, can not decide adequately for themselves what is in their best interest. This comes up most often in the case of the elderly or children who, respectively, have either lost or not fully developed the ability to reason about what their interests really are. In those cases, we decide for them in a way we think they would have decided were they not incapacitated in their decision making. When we decide for them in this way, though, there is some analogous subjective experience we can base our decision on because we believe that any reasonable person would want to promote their own interest. There are no analogous sets of experience we could look to in order to determine what animals interest really are since (1) they do not have the ability to deliberate about their decisions in the first place and (2) we have no way of reasonably believing what their experiences are like such that we could form a conception of what they take their interests to be.

However, the fact that animals are not capable of having interests doesn't necessarily implies that animals are not entitled to some moral agency. It is simply to say that you cannot assume that whatever moral claims may hold between humans will hold among humans and animals since the fact that they may have some claim to moral agency does not end the question. In particular, you can't assume that the moral prohibitions (if there really are any) against eating other humans necessarily apply to humans eating animals.

It's been a while since I studied Aristotle — Pussycat

same here.

efficient, formal, final and one more I think, which eludes me. — Pussycat

I think those are right and that the 4th one is the 'material' cause - basically, the 'stuff' a thing is made from.

What makes an action immoral, in the end, is that it adversely affects the interests of a being that is capable of having interests, which means any sentient being. So there is no line between humans and other sentient beings, e.g. other animals — Herg

1. The equation of being capable of forming "interests" with sentience is totally unjustified and probably unjustifiable. Having an interest requires not only sentience but self-awareness. Almost no animals beside humans exhibit conduct consistent with attributing to them self-awareness.

2. Not all animals are sentient even. Insects for one are not. Do you think it is morally acceptable to eat crickets?

I see. Now supposing Neanderthals were still around, would it be okay to eat them? How about homo habilis, or australopithecines? I infer from what you say that you'd be okay eating a gorilla, chimpanzee or orang-utan, but in terms of our direct ancestors, where exactly would you draw the line? — Herg

why stop your slippery slope at animals? Why are we morally justified eating/exploiting plants? Maybe we shouldn't be eating anything and just letting ourselves starve to death.

In other words, if there are no relevant distinctions anywhere among these species, then there will be no grounds for basing any morality, positive or negative. Consequently, it wouldn't make a difference one way or the other whether we consume animals across the board or not. Whether anyone wanted to eat other homo sapiens, then, would just be a matter of personal preference; there would be no moral implications to their decision given the lack of any real difference among species.

I guess if you could give an example of how you think his cosmological argument is formulated, that would be helpful for making sure we're on the same page in terms of understanding what argument we're talking about. My concern is that in the formulation I give you can't avoid a contradiction without introducing ambiguity into the terms of the argument/ The relevant term in this case obviously being 'cause' which means "efficient cause" in one context, but "final cause" in another in the same argument. That is not a valid form of argument, even for Aristotle.

"trickery" is admittedly unfair since it suggests he is being dishonest somehow, but is only meant to convey the illegitimate semantic dance he does as described above in order to make the argument go through.

1a is probably false, depending on what you mean by intelligible. Lots of worlds are presumably unintelligible if their structure is such that it runs very counter to our own universe. So say a universe where objects are clearly distinguished would probably appear as very unintelligible to most or all people. But if by "intelligible" you mean "coherent" (i.e. not logically trivial) then 1a is true. — MindForged

I mean as little as possible by it so as to leave open to interpretation what it could mean. Most generally, I take just to mean "capable of being understood" whether by humans or any other rational creature. My intuition for its truth is that any "world" that were completely incapable of being conceptualized in any way by any kind of rational creature would not qualify as a world at all. It would essentially be chaos.

2 & 3 are suspicious because there are different ways of assigning quantity to thing. Numbers are not the same thing across all mathematical formalisms, and so it does not follow that some numerical system that is apt to one particular possible world is applicable to all of them. — MindForged

Agree about the math formalism, but I don't see why the premise wouldn't work with whatever theory of numbers you accept, whether platonic, intuitionist, whatever. Are you suggesting it makes sense to suppose there could be different possible worlds where, say, constructivist , platonic, etc. interpretations hold in each? I guess my assumption is you would first have to decide what you think numbers are before running off to look for them in different possible worlds.

I'll say that I find A's taxonomy of causes interesting and reasonable (although not rational). I think it also tells us something - maybe even a lot - about what a platonic "secret teaching" might have looked like, if you accept there was such a thing. However, when all is said and done, I do not understand (and that is the pejorative "i don't understand") how one type of cause can affect another type cause such that the explanation for how that happens is not either contradictory or question begging.

Do you believe that any agency can occur in absence of motive(s) for that which the agents perform (think, act, etc.)? — javra

I was merely attempting to provide a very coarse, formal outline for what I take a cosmological argument to look like and was not advocating for the soundness of any of the premises.

He doesn't have it both ways. He differentiates between an efficient cause and a final cause. If the prime mover was an efficient cause, it would be an uncaused caused and he would have it both ways. That's why in his system motion is eternal as are prime movers which are final causes, not efficient causes. — Πετροκότσυφας

I don't disagree with this as a reading of what A wants to say, and in particular that he differentiates final and efficient cause (among other types of cause, I believe). My only point was that it does not seem to me that the distinction b/w final and efficient causes in fact tells you anything about how efficient cause comes to be in the first place, except by introducing a tertium quid the sole (or one main) purpose of which is to avoid an infinite regress. The OP said that the concept of an "unmoved mover" seemed contradictory to him/her. I was merely trying to point out that one reason it seems that way is because it may in fact be so, despite A's complex efforts to make it otherwise.

It's pure actuality. That's why their activity is thinking; Aristotle does not considers activity a motion. — Πετροκότσυφας

In terms of just Aristotelian interpretation, this is is probably as good as you're going to get. @Mattt

1. The whole immaterial/material thing is kind of what I mean by saying you can engage in a lot of interpretative trickery to try to get this argument to work. However, when all is said and done, you can substitute "cause" for "motion" in the above outline I gave and get the same contradictory results, w/o having to posit any distinction b/w material and immaterial. The argument outline holds just as well for "immaterial" causes as for "material" one. That is why it is contradictory no matter how you interpret it.

Suffice it to say, on an intuitive level it seems to me that if you think immaterial causes explain material causes, like motion, but behave differently than material causes, that is an obvious begging of the question. The question begged is "how do immaterial causes bring about change to material objects without themselves being subject to causation?" The "unmoved mover" is no answer to this question, it is simply the claim that "well, they (i.e. immaterial causes) just do affect them". Either it is true that every cause itself has a cause (as A seems to think), or it is not. Aristotle can't have it both ways and maintain logical coherence.

2. w/re to causa sui, if A accepts such things, then he's failed at his own project. Causes are introduced in order to offer explanations for why things are the way they are (the Aristotelian "dia ti" question). A self-caused cause is no cause at all because it doesn't offer an explanation for why it whatever it is.

This gets to why I didn't get into what I was calling his "technical philosophical machinery". You can restate the cosmological argument in terms of causes that don't necessarily reference motion, but that's not what the OP was focused on. You still get the same contradictions when you try to give the argument just in terms of causes. However, in that case you won't be able to invoke an arbitrary distinction b/w material and immaterial to try to save the day since causes for A could be either.

wherever x is. If x is here, then here. If x is there, then there. If x is everywhere, then everywhere.

In other words, at some spatio-TEMPORAL location, call it "y". In that case, x is at y.

How does it matter if they are?

1. One has a memory of some thing, call it "x".
2. The thing that the memory of "x" is about or refers to is x.
3. Therefore, the memory refers to wherever x happens to be.

What's the issue?

Simply put, the unmoved mover is contradictory. There is obviously a lot of technical philosophical machinery regarding causation that Aristotle develops independently from the cosmo argument he makes that underlies it, but sticking to just the concept of motion, here is a simple summary of the argument:

1. Motion exists
2. Anything in motion must have been brought into motion by something else
2a. A thing cannot cause itself to move (this needs to be either an assumption or inference from 2 in order for Aristotle to avoid obviously circular argumentation)
3. However, there cannot be an infinite chain of agents causing movement
4. Therefore, there must be something that causes motion which itself is not caused to move.

The conclusion at 4 contradicts the proposition in 2 from which it is derived. You can engage in all sorts of interpretative tricks to try and tease some deeper truth out of the argument, but at the end of the day it is simply illogical and does not work as sound human reasoning. The issue, of course, is the tension b/w premises 2 & 3. Aristotle is committed to both, but at least in the context of this argument they are neither coherent or compatible together. He is committed to 2 because he is scientific/empirical and cannot deny the obvious truth that there is motion in the world. He is committed to 3 because he believes that if there is no final cause (the unmoved mover in this case) then you can never give an explanation for the phenomena you're investigating, which in this case is motion.

Then that by logic, everything is a product of nature. Which makes the term useless, and it shouldn't be something we point to as a way to live our lives. — chatterbears

at least we agree on this

Factory farming isn't a product of nature. It is a product of humans who abuse their power in immoral ways. — chatterbears

1. Anything that a product of nature produces, is itself a product of nature.
2. Humans are a product of nature.
3. Humans produce factory farms.
4. Therefore factory farms are a product of nature

Would you be saying the same thing if alcohol was solely produced on the back of tortured children? That the only way alcohol could be produced was child slave labor, would you still say "prohibition isn't necessary, we just need some control of it." - Meaning, child slave labor would still exist, but we should just lessen it, correct? — chatterbears

You keep making analogies to immoral acts committed on people to those committed on animals in the context of animal consumption. I suggested in another post that while it may be true that animals are moral agents to some extent - such that they are not completely irrelevant w/re to our moral calculations - they are by no means moral agents to the same extent people are. As a result, I think you need to give some explanation about why you think there is a one-to-one equivalence between people and animals that justifies these analogies. The examples you give of extreme human exploitation are immoral. More moderate examples of human exploitation are not necessarily going to be unacceptably immoral (an inefficient labor market, for example, where people are not able to get a fair wage in exchange for their labor). Similarly, if animals are not of the same moral equivalence as people, then exploitation of them may be totally justifiable, even to the point of consuming them in some way or to some degree.

Also, I think it would be helpful to the discussion to take the environment and health risks from over-consumption of meat off the table. If you don't, then your argument is going to depend on industrial animal consumption producing these externalities. Even assuming you are correct about them and that they are significant, it is possible that we could find ways to harvest animals that did not produce significant environmental damage. People could also moderate their animal consumption so it was not detrimental to their health. If both of these things happened, then they would no longer provide a justification for abstaining from animal consumption. in other words, what is the argument for abstinence if you don't make these consequentialist assumptions?

Here's another:

1. Necessity is determined by truth in all possible worlds
2. However, possible worlds are conceived as discrete entities
3. Discrete entities are countable
4. Counting requires numbers
5. Therefore, the concept of necessity (necessarily!) implies (because it assumes) that numbers exist.

1. Any possible world that is intelligible is such that it contains some structure and form.
1a. All possible worlds are intelligible
2. At least some aspect of all structure and form is inherently quantifiable
3. Anything quantifiable is capable of being expressed numerically
4. All possible worlds contain aspects that are capable of numeric expression
5. The capacity for expressing numbers is sufficient for numbers to exist (whether or not anyone uses them or has discovered how to use them)
6. Numbers exist in all possible worlds
7. Therefore, numbers necessarily exist

If you agree the above argument is valid, which of the premises do you think is questionable?

The philosophy of science also concerns science, but it's not science. The sentence "this computer here" concerns this computer here, but it's not this computer here.

For purposes of the discussion, consider quantum indeterminacy to entail ontological indeterminacy, not just a measurement problem. — Relativist

OK, how does that change anything I said?

meh, I think it's actually quite similar to what Leibnitz said about monads back in the day

Although, yeah, it is pretty strange

My understanding is that QM is just describing physical nature. Part of that nature according to QM is that it is indeterminate, that is, there is a degree to which it cannot be measured. It's unmeasurability is taken as constitutive of physical nature itself by QM. QM does not attempt to explain - except perhaps as conjecture - why physical nature is so indeterminate. It is primarily concerned with describing that indeterminacy. One explanation, though, for why it is indeterminate is because matter or quanta or whatever fundamental physical "stuff" there is, in some way, makes free decisions. Obviously, it probably does not do this in the same way we do at the macro-level or with the same level of complexity, or w/ regard to the same kinds of possibilities. Nevertheless, a possible explanation for indeterminacy is that quanta do make decisions about how to behave.

Yes, one just needs to translate "Why the purpose of the human species is probably to create artificial general intelligence?"" — Kippo

yup, and of course, interpretation is not the exclusive prerogative of science.

here's generally what quantum indeterminacy is from Wikipedia:

Quantum indeterminacy is the apparent necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, that has become one of the characteristics of the standard description of quantum physics.
Prior to quantum physics, it was thought that
(a) a physical system had a determinate state which uniquely determined all the values of its measurable properties, and conversely(b) the values of its measurable properties uniquely determined the state.

So, all quantum indeterminacy is is the claim that all the MEASURABLE properties don't fully map out all of the characteristics of a physical system. I take this to meant that at least one thing QM is potentially concerned with are the UNMEASURABLE values that might determine that state or system. Call the object of that concern "X". At least one possible candidate for what "X" is, is an adequately defined conceptions of LFW. Consequently, not only is LFW compatible w/ QM, it could, in fact, be precisely what QM scientists are looking for.