I think you're conflating 'understand' with 'agree'. One of the options is that what you're saying doesn't make sense. If it doesn't make sense there's no 'understanding' to be had. You're looking for a measure which might not even exist, you're trying to judge whether I 'understand' your arguments presuming already that there's something there to be understood. Of course I'm going to fail that test because I don't agree from the outset that there's anything there to be understood.

If you want to discuss matters at a level where people might not even take for granted the coherence of your position, you need to be more open to a deeper analysis of it.

There are plenty of cases of shared agreement about things "seeming good or bad" as in sharing the same hedonic experience of the same phenomenon. Many of the same kinds of thing cause pain, hunger, etc, all kinds of hedonic experiences, in most people. — Pfhorrest

Yes, but there's is not a shared phenomenal experience that pain is 'bad'. Many people seems to expect the use of the term 'bad' to do something other than refer to pain.

Yep, thought I'd regret it. More "I'm arguing that..." where what you mean is "I'm saying that...". Pointing to even more people saying it does not turn it into an argument.

I just thought I might get a clearer insight into your thinking if you had some reason why you thought minds incapable of holding models which are efficacious, but I see you can't even back up that simple assertion without deflecting to a journalistic description of what people tend to believe rather than any actual analysis of it. Nevermind.

an analogous kind of investigation, appealing to experiences of things seeming good or bad — Pfhorrest

It's pretty evident I think that the matter of things 'seeming' some way or other ('good' or 'bad' in this case) is exactly the kind of matter where there is very little by way of shared phenomenal experience. What makes you think you'd find any here?

analogous methods for answering normative or prescriptive questions. — Pfhorrest

In defending why you should do science instead of something else, you're doing philosophy. — Pfhorrest

So by what should the correctness of answers to these questions be judged, if not common phenomenal experience (which we've just established is science)?

They can’t simply be in the mind, as they’re efficacious and predictive with respect to objective phenomena. — Wayfarer

I shall probably regret asking this, but to satisfy my curiosity, why can things which are in minds not be efficacious and predictive?

Sure.

The OP is based on a misapprehension of how physics deals with causation, and hence the argument fails.

But that will make no difference to its defenders, since the real point of this thread is to engage in mutual preening. — Banno


I disagree. — christian2017

I quite like olives.

Even if one supposes that there is no such thing as objectively good or evil, it does not follow that there is no such thing as good or evil, per se. — Banno

This hits the nail on the head. Something is done by using the terms 'good' and 'evil'. The task of moral philosophy is to clarify what that might be. The OP attempts to say that what is being done with those terms is to refer to what the most powerful decree. Three minutes spent in a pub conversation with a bunch of radical socialists will disabuse anyone of that notion. So time to move on...next suggestion.

Well then you're describing science, not philosophy. Science models phenomena and judges those models by their correlation which the sorts of phenomenal experiences we share (mostly sensory perceptions).

I'm not saying that philosophical questions should be settled by appeal to people's intuition from their life experiences, I'm saying that a core philosophical answer (that I'm not presenting an argument for here, just stating that it's the answer I settled on), an answer to a question about how to answer questions, is "answer them by appealing to phenomenal experiences". — Pfhorrest

So you're saying that the answer to the question "how should we settle questions" is "by reference to common phenomenal experience", which is science. Isn't that just positivism? Not that that's a problem, just that it seems a rather long way round of revisiting a prior philosophical tradition.

My core principles are...
That such a contest of opinion is settled by comparing and measuring the candidates against a common scale, namely that of the experiential phenomena accessible in common by everyone, and opinions that cannot be thus tested are thereby disqualified. (A position I call "phenomenalism", and its negation "transcendentalism"). — Pfhorrest

What possible reason could you have to believe that experiential phenomena are a 'common scale', when virtually all the evidence we have seems to point to the contrary with regards to the questions of philosophy.

1. No major philosophical question has been resolved to anyone's satisfaction despite over a thousand years of equally intelligent people attempting to do so. If equally intelligent people maintain these difference despite the longest examination period of any topic in human history, it is blind faith to conclude anything other than that our phenomenal experiences by which we judge the conclusions are actually different in this regard.
2. If (1) wasn't enough, psychological evidence working with neonates shows distinct enculturation of concepts even as simple as object permanence. Something as fundamental as the means by which we navigate 3d space etc might well be hard-wired, but pretty much everything else is an interaction between the child and their social environment.

For someone so opposed to fideism, you seem to have taken a massive leap of faith here, which makes the remainder of your anti-fideism seem rather pointless.

Thats why I'm here - to get your thoughts on these ideas. — Devans99

No, I'm not talking about the mere gathering of other people's thoughts. I'm talking about the judgement of them. How do you know they are wrong? Even when obviously intelligent and knowledgeable people, basically the vast majority of the mathematics community, have told you you're wrong, you still consider yourself to be right, so their conclusions, arguments and demonstrations have had no effect on you whatsoever. Yet they obviously did have an effect on you up to a certain point - you do the same maths as everyone else, it's not a naturally occurring mental activity, so you must have adopted the methods of others at some point.

It seems that at some point (or with some topics) you abruptly decide to no longer adopt your community's syntax. Like you've suddenly decided that 'table' should no longer refer to the flat, waist-high object we eat from, but instead should refer to your cat.

I have no objection to you doing this, of course, you can do what you like, but I am a) very interested in why you would then consult the very community you've already decided you will reject the wisdom of the moment it doesn't suit, and b) slightly annoyed that you're being so evasive about this, which makes me suspect you're motives are hidden and disingenuous.

Isaac, have you noticed this? Meta suffers a blindness not dissimilar to Devans99, in that both seem unable to grasp the mathematics of Limits. — Banno

Note also the idiosyncratic (to put it kindly) use of probability. Is it mathematics in general?

's merely a mechanical process. I can't remember all the details, modus ponens and so on. — Devans99

It's not the name of the process I'm interested in here. It's the fact that others will consider themselves to have gone through the same, or an equally valid, process. I'm interested in what's behind your reasoning in asking other people for their comments, knowing all along that you possess all you need to determine that you have the right answer.

If the axiom has a high probability of being true, I adopt it. If not, I reject it. — Devans99

But how can you possibly assess the probability of an axiom being true? To do that you must assess the soundness of the factors leading to it, in which case it's a conclusion, not an axiom.

How can you possibly quantify your level of belief in an axiom if it is not with a percentage? — Devans99

I wasn't criticising the means of measurement, I was asking about your motive for telling everyone what measurements you give it. As I said above, I you want critique or analysis of your method for deriving that probability, then it's not an axiom, it's a conclusion.

stuff I did not understand, I assigned a 50%/50% probability to - unknown. — Devans99

No you didn't. You did not proceed through your mathematics education acting as if it were equally likely that your teachers were wrong as it was that they were right. That's just a silly thing to claim.

I believe I have a proficient grasp of these areas. — Devans99

What gives you cause to believe that?

Belief cannot stem from what others say, only from strong conviction in a small set of axioms, and the act of deducing the required results, can we actually say we believe something. Other people make mistakes or may even try to deliberately mislead you (eg organised religion) - you have to think it through for yourself to have knowledge. — Devans99

Do you not make mistakes then? How would you know if you had without the knowledge held by the community against which to check it?

Sometimes there are logical errors in the actual deduction — Devans99

How do you determine a logical error, in cases where your interlocutor claims there is no error? How do you determine who is correct?

mostly it is bad axioms that undermine arguments — Devans99

How do you determine that an axiom is bad?

We have to accurately express our faith in our axioms. — Devans99

No. We don't. We may well have a degree to which we believe in an axiom, it does not follow that we have to express it, what would be the purpose?

I have a degree in maths. — Devans99

I wasn't asking about your qualification, I was asking about the means by which you acquired it. We're you born knowing all maths, or were you taught some of it? If the latter, then on what grounds did you believe your teachers prior to you yourself understanding the concept?

In general, if I don't understand, I ask — Devans99

Ask whom, and on what grounds do you believe what they have to say?

... or find out some other way. — Devans99

What is this other way?

@Devans99

Another way of looking at the issue. How did you learn maths? You must, at some point, have faced the necessity to be told something is the case which didn't, at that time, seem to you to be the case. Why did you decide to follow along with what your teacher was telling you, until such time as you understood it?

I use deduction and induction — Devans99

One can deduce anything from any premises. I'm asking you how, in cases where others have deduced something different, you determine which is correct - your deduction or theirs?

- I argue for things I think are greater than 50% likely to be true.
- I argue against things I think are less than 50% likely to be true. — Devans99

Arguing is the statement of your case and counter-case, it's not, in itself, a method of determining right cases from wrong.

I carefully consider everyone's counter arguments and adjust my probability estimates accordingly. — Devans99

Again, I can carefully consider the argument "my hands are made of jelly". Merely carefully considering something is not a means of determining right arguments from wrong ones.

If people show I'm wrong, I admit it and change my position
- If no-one shows I'm wrong, I continue to press my argument

Give me a link to where I was proved wrong about the math and I'll demonstrate to you that I was not. — Devans99

What method are you using to assess whether someone has successfully shown you you're wrong?

That's your, biased, version of events. My recollection is that no-one had any valid counter arguments. — Devans99

It's got nothing to do bias. People definitely told you where your error was, and you definitely did not believe them. You can't claim that didn't happen, read the thread. The validity of counter-arguments has only three possible sources (that I can think of) - expertise, ubiquity, or your own beliefs. Without doubt the people who engaged with you last time had more expertise than you, and more claim to ubiquity, so claiming their counterarguments were invalid means that you've no interest in the first two measures of validity. But it's only those first two which are produced in discussion. So if you know in advance that you're not interested in either it's impolite of you to start.

Literally nothing anyone is going to say to you here will make any difference. If it contradicts what you think is valid (which you've already made quite clear), you'll simply ignore it. So, again, what's the point in posting?

No-one rebutted that maths! Its fine! Tell me where the error is please. — Devans99

Five people rebutted that maths. They all told you where the error was. You refused to believe them. That's the point. If you're just going to refuse to believe anyone telling you that you've made a mistake, and you already know you're going to do that, because you did it five months ago, exactly the same way, then it is disingenuous of you to post on a discussion site. Start a blog.

1. Start at 50%/50% for the unknown boolean question ‘is the universe a creation?’
2. Time has a start. 50% probability of a creator due to this gives: 50% + 50% * 25% = 75%
3. Universe is not in equilibrium 25% probability of a creator giving: 75% + 25% * 25% = 81%
4. Causality based arguments. 25% probability of a creator giving: 81% + 19% * 25% = 85%
5. Fine tuning 50% probability of a creator giving: 85% + 15% * 50% = 92%
6. Big Bang 25% probability of a creator giving: 92% + 8% * 25% = 94%
7. Aquinas 3rd argument, etc... — Devans99

You posted the exact same argument 5 month ago where no fewer than five expert mathematicians told you that probabilities are not calculated like that.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/371473

If you're not going to listen to any counter-arguments, what exactly is the point of you posting here with the exact same errors? I know Tim and I have been a bit abrupt in our approach, but I think that it's grossly unfair of you to draw people into a discussion when you know full well from the outset that you have no intention of listening to, nor have the slightest interest in, anything they have to say. I don't think it's right that you get to treat the site like your personal soapbox. It's supposed to be for discussion.

Presumably, since you'd blame yourself if you destroyed and looted a local business then we can draw the conclusion that the rioters are also at fault. — BitconnectCarlos

No, I don't think so. Me blaming myself and us (as a society, or community) blaming others are two different things. Once we act as a community (you said 'we') we have to accept that we're as much part of the problem as the rest, because we're judging it at a community level. They can all blame themselves, and I bet plenty of them are doing so, but the only thing for 'us' to do as a community is ask "how the hell did we let things get like this?".

Please state your counter arguments if you have any. — Devans99

I've literally just said. There's nothing to counter. All you've done is tell us that something seems some way to you. It doesn't seem that way to me. What's to counter?

Can you not even summon up one counter argument? — Devans99

There's nothing to counter. You've told us what seems to you to be the case. I have no reason to doubt that it does seem to you that those things are the case. What's to counter?

you started it - you called my OP shite without any justification whatsoever. — Devans99

... but I guess [your OP is shite]

... seems to be [that your OP is shite] ..

My suspicion [is that your OP is shite] ...

... they just appear that way. — Devans99

There. I borrowed a method of justification from your good self.

Yes, I think that's true. I'd go as far as to say that some philosophical discourse is deliberately engineered to serve this function.

You are just name calling rather than offering any substantive counter arguments - not suitable behaviour for a philosophy forum :( — Devans99

You are a moron! — Devans99

Again, the fact that Popper highlighted falsification issues with psychoanalysis (I presume that's what you're referring to here, I find 'tests' condescending), is a reason to make psychology more rigorous - which is exactly what was done. It's not a reason to discard the whole thing and resort to whatever one 'reckons' from their armchair.

Your analysis of the issues with the sciences is absolutely on point. Your solutions are irrational.

Great. Let's see. Flight. Travel to outer space. To the ocean. Communicating with one another on the other side of the land. It's getting rather hard to think of an item taken for granted now that doesn't fall under this area quite frankly. — Outlander

You were talking about issues which were considered fairy-tales at the time but later turned out to be true. That we can travel to outer space at that time, was indeed a fairy story and in has never yet been shown that they could travel to outer space at that time. The idea that space travel might one day be possible, was always (to my knowledge) considered at least plausible, and it indeed turned out to be the case. Same goes for your other examples.

What's different about religion is that it has only been seen as increasingly implausible. It started out as stories, some people took them to be true, but gradually most reaslised they were implausible. The scientific knowledge we now have has not followed this trend, in fact the opposite in every way. It didn't start out as a story (it was intended to be an explanation all along) at no point in time did masses of people believe its propositions to be the absolute truth (they've mostly been seen as a work in progress), and theories have generally become more and more plausible.

The two sets of propositions are not remotely comparable.

I think Marcus Aurelius’ reputation nowadays is probably better than Freud’s. Many of Freud’s theories have been subsequently deprecated, if not dismissed, as being pseudo-scientific. — Wayfarer

Freud did a lot of detailed and painstaking work to arrive at his theories. Later, even more detailed an painstaking work showed them to be wrong and so they are, quite rightly discarded. The solution to this problem is to read the even more detailed and painstaking work that supplanted him, not return to some guy who just 'had a bit of a think about it'. The reason why Freud has been supplanted is exactly the same reason why Marcus Aurelius should be supplanted - lack of careful research.

They may have thought that they were in a discourse about mathematics, but they were in a discourse about Meta's certainty. — Banno

Yes, that's exactly it. Proving a theorem by the rules of mathematics is seen as irrelevant because the game is not to accept the rules and try to understand where they lead, the game is to take one's current understanding and construct rules which make it right.

It's obviously a triggered response at some point in their life. Children cannot develop at all if they were born with such an attitude, no understanding of anything would come about. It must therefore be something these people decide at some point in their life - "That's it, no more understanding, no more modelling, from now on the world has to change to fit what I already understand!".

What I can't decide is which came first. Whether the need to respond this way promotes that kind of philosophy, or whether that kind of philosophy entices people into responding that way. If there was no form of discourse in which one could appear to argue about what a number "really is", would they invent one to meet the need, or would they be out of alternatives and have to fumble by with only half understanding like the rest of us?

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. At a guess I'd say you're trying to make some point about the fact that many things we now think of as true were at the time thought of as fairy-tales? If so, I can't really think of any examples. Most of things suppressed as heresy (like the non-geocentric theory) were dismissed precisely because they had good solid evidence for them and the church were rightly very worried about it supplanting their storytelling.

I suggested elsewhere that the motive might have been a search for recognition — Banno

Yeah, I think that's true. I see it as part of the whole uncertainty issue. I mentioned this briefly on the Lazerowitz thread. Socially, the rise of science as powerful force, I think, results in a backlash rise in alternative 'expert' fields where they are immune to being demonstrably wrong. I think the same thing happens on a smaller scale here, and again is facilitated by the grammatical structure of philosophy-talk. Faced with a field in which it appears one can be demonstrably shown to be wrong, recognition is harder to come by and more fragile when attained. A simpler tactic is to set up an alternate set of rules and , regardless of their utility, raise oneself as an expert in those. One cannot be demonstrably wrong, one is instantly the world's foremost expert and one did not even have to leave one's armchair. Of, corse many see this as a hollow victory because the very public rejection of such rules is sufficient to pour cold water on any feelings of grandeur.

Many people are immune, or resistant, to updating their beliefs in the face of rejection by their peers. This is usually a good thing because it's how we get innovation and resistance to oppression etc. But again here philosophy-talk lets us down, it gives the impression that we can do this with language too - that we can reject the 'oppressive, conservative' use of terms to refer to A and insist they refer to B - ignoring the fact that language is a social endeavour, agreement is the substance of it, not a side-effect.

So yeah, I think you're right, people do maintain these very private structures as a kind of 'cheat mode' for the progression to recognition, and I think the means by which they do it is to mistake language for the kind of thing where innovation is bold and entrepreneurial and so become immune to the rest of their language community responding as if they were mad.

It's late guys come on. There's a box that says "live cat" on it. You got 2 people who say they did research and concluded there is no cat. Last they checked. And you got 2 who say there is a cat because they witnessed it's "power" I guess. Maybe they heard a meow.

Yet no group can show not just me but themselves even without relying on the hearsay they so selectively despise if there is or there is not a cat.

To me, that's 50/50. — Outlander

No. The mere existence of two possible outcomes does not in of itself make the probability space 50/50. Consider a coin flip. There are three possible outcomes - heads, tails, side. The mere existence of these three possible outcomes does not in of itself make the probability of any one 1/3.

How do you do that? — SophistiCat

Go to 'Categories', pick the one you don't want to see, scroll down to the bottom of the page and there's a little eye. Just click on that and the whole category no longer appears on the front page. It's brilliant.

If you are unable to do so, I'd assert the odds remain 50/50. — Outlander

I was prepared to let all this garbage about God as an explanation on a par with the Big Bang slide, but misuse of probability is where I draw the line. So it's 50/50 is it? Show your workings.

I mentioned before - I don't know if you noticed it - that this thread is not about mathematics so much as about the psychology of crackpots, of which Meta is certainly one. — Banno

I only really know enough about maths to enjoy the explanations given here, not to provide any of my own, but I do know about the psychology of crackpots (we prefer to use the term 'nutjobs' nowadays, in these more enlightened times, unless the patient is allergic to nuts, in which case 'fruitcake' is fine).

What goes on here, I think, is that a person develops a fear of that which they do not understand. I think it's born of the extent to which we are no longer in control of our livelihoods (but that's another story entirely). The point is that philosophy-talk - the grammatical form of the arguments that philosophy uses - acts like heroin, in that it supplies a way of distancing oneself from that uncertainty and complexity. Rather than words being used, as they really are, to fumble about in the dark trying to get other people to act in ways we'd like, they turn into containers to bind stuff to, to pin it down and appear to stop it from being so ineffable.

Dictionary definitions are the drug dealers here. Supplying a few thousand such strong-boxes in which we can lock uncertain aspects of the world we experience. Numbers are no longer a complicated product of our minds, slightly intangible in places, occasionally contradictory if taken out of context, with some odd consequences we can quite get our heads around (like i). They now become what the dictionary says they are (usually ignoring the second and third definitions) - tamed and chained.

It's a weird flipping of our rational capacity from being that which tries to make sense of an already existent world to that which creates that world according to its rules, and thereby regains control over it. Instead of trying to work out some way of modelling what we experience, we simply claim to only experience that which we have modelled. A good proportion of the arguments here could be summed up as "It seems that way to me, therefore it must be that way". Of course, one acting this way needs a filler, something to explain all that which is beyond their current imagination - hence almost everyone using this drug is also religious - God of the Gaps.

Anyway, thanks to the mathematicians here who do patiently point out the flaws in these 'solipsistic' arguments, they do make interesting reading for an interested non-mathematician.

However, to claim that there is no racist belief necessary in order to have systemic racism is like saying apples are not currently necessary to have apple pie. — creativesoul

No, you've just misunderstood what systemic racism is. Any system which disadvantages a culturally defined group who do not have the power to rectify it is systemically racist. It could disadvantage that group because those running it actually hold racist beliefs, it could disadvantage that group because those running will not correct injustices created from previous policies. It could even disadvantage that group simply by chance - random and unforeseen consequence. In each case it would class as systemic racism.

To say that systemic racism does not require racist belief is part of the definition of the term, it's not something which can be established by discussion, it's just what the term means in this context. If you want to isolate those systemic practices which do always result from racist beliefs, you'd have to coin a new term as 'systemic racism' is already in use to describe something else.

An entire community so furious - so even the rich white kids who decide to go into a mall in an urban area and vandalize it during the riots are just....the fault of the government. — BitconnectCarlos

What rich white kids are you talking about? The overwhelming majority of those protesting were from the affected community.

People apparently don't have agency, they're just little wind-up toys to be wound up and released and whatever damage they cause is clearly on whoever wound them up. I swear you could come across a man beating a pregnant woman and you'd be thinking "god, how could the evil forces of systemic racism/classism/capitalism/etc be doing this to her!" — BitconnectCarlos

This seems to be your only argumentative tactic at the moment - take a position to it's extreme and use the consequences there to suggest the position as it stands is wrong. This is such a well-known bit of sophistry it even has its own name. Taking account of the part society plays in in the behaviour of some population is not the equivalent of assuming it is entirely responsible for everything.

If the best you've got is to create strawman arguments out of taking any position to its extreme rather than deal with it at the level it's expressed, then we're done here.

Do you apply these standards/this account to yourself. If you were to destroy a local business, would you blame yourself or something else? — BitconnectCarlos

Both.

Plenty of these rioters are not from the community being vandalized, they're from outside. — BitconnectCarlos

Evidence?

Why hasn't this shite been consigned to the fairy-story section (or philosophy of religion, as it's optimistically called)? I usually have this stuff turned off so that I can pretend the site is a more serious one than it really is.

I’m not, and so far as I can see here nobody else is either. They’re just asking for sympathy for the innocents wrongly caught up in that angry reaction, in addition to sympathy for the righteously angry people. — Pfhorrest

Fair enough, but that's not the impression I've got from any of the arguments here. The focus on the protestors is out of place. The established political and economic system is to blame for the deaths that started all this, and they are to blame for the damage caused by making an entire community so furious and desperate that they resort to rioting. Absolutely none of the posts asking for sympathy for those who've lost businesses are laying the blame with those who caused the problem, none of them are understanding of the kind of degrading treatment that leads to such acts of violence. So no, I don't share your assessment of the motives of those seeking to raise sympathy for the businesses lost.