"Physics is fun." my teacher used to say. But the German Science Guy is super excited about some new chemistry.

It's mainly Europeans who leave their countries and settle in America Australia, India, Africa, and the Far East, etc. And the way we generally do it is we don't ask permission of the locals, we just take what we want, and impose our culture on those of the natives that we don't get around to slaughtering. That seems the best way to resolve such problems.

As in the rock intended to start the avalanche that happened by intending to pursue gravitational paths of less resistance down the mountain just so?

That would make a rather extreme animist of you. Not even the spiritualists I've encountered hold such views. — javra

"Snow likes to be very quiet, and when someone disturbs it, it does its best to quieten them down."

The point I am making is more so grammatical. Of a living being, one can ask why they did something, and how they did something and get very different answers.

"Reasons why" ask for motives: The tiger killed the goat because it was hungry.

"How" asks for effective method: The tiger killed the goat by creeping through the pampas grass stealthily from downwind and springing suddenly upon it.

So I would rather suggest that my reasoning is that avalanches and snow do not reason, and therefore the question of why they happen is inappropriate. 'How an avalanche happens' one can ask, but 'why' is indeed the question of an extreme animist, or else a 'how' question in inappropriate and misleading disguise.

Thus 'why', asks about reasoning, about the mind in question, and 'how' asks about practicalities and events. I think this simple distinction can resolve much of the controversy. If there seems to be no mind, do not look for reasons why. Because it will only confuse and annoy. Because I said so! Because this is how the language works.

Answers to 'Why' questions all end up the same way, sooner or later— "Because I said so!" or the less responsible version, "It's Godswill!". Either are best said in a somewhat irritated and aggressive tone to convey the end of the discussion.

'How' questions seem to me to be more 'scientific' because they can end on the other side of the discussion when the questioner says "Show me!", after which the discussion hopefully turns to demonstration. Thus no science is done in discussions, but only in the laboratory, or the field.
And the distinction between good theory and conspiracy theory is also made there, and not in discussion.

Then explain by what you meant by "I believe in science." — Relativist

What I believe is that science is a sceptical endeavour, that progresses by means of demonstration. which is to say, that I expect scientists not to put their trust too lightly in the work of others, but require experiments to be repeated, and findings to be demonstrated, and theories to be treated as provisional whenever their scope is extended.

Science is not equivalent to what individual scientists say. I'm referring to commonly accepted theory. — Relativist

And individual scientists do not talk about commonly accepted theory? Really, what do you imagine needs your stalwart defence here? Are you having a battle to see who understands science better? Enough already!

Accepting science means you treat the body of scientific information as true, despite the fact that it is possibly false — Relativist

No it doesn't. Scientists are not all equally scrupulous, and are subject to peer pressure, the persuasion of big pharma et cetera, and the need to get funding. Some science is biased and some is slapdash, and some is bullshit. It's not supposed to be religion where you just believe what the high priests say.

Do you reject everything science teaches? Scientific theory is developed through abduction, and it has proved successful. — Relativist

That seems a rather strange, if not perverse, response from someone who thinks we should be guided by the science as to what to do about human-induced global warming. — Janus

Hume's attack is not on science here, and it is not on morality when he points out that you can't derive an ought from an is. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the two arguments are very similar, and what he is attacking in each case is a form of argument. Let me put it this way, he is not attacking rationality, he is attacking rationalism. He is attacking dogmatism. And when you are unable to defeat his logic, and also unable to accept his arguments, it is dogmatism that you are showing.

Yes, I believe in science, and I hope it will continue to provide a guide to the future and tools for the present for whatever future we may have. But I do not pretend that belief and hope are "rational" while unable to provide any coherent rationale. I also believe in trying to be truthful in communication, and kind to other people, and I wish you would too, but I do not pretend that it is rational, because it isn't.

Rationality cannot tell us how to live, or even what to think; to answer these sorts of question requires something else. it requires caring about something.

Suppose you have a retirement account and you're trying to invest the money to grow large enough to enable you to one day retire. Would you consider taking guidance from astrology, fortune cookies, and California Psychics? If not, why not - if all "rational" choices are simply acts of desperation? — Relativist

What is objectionable about this, is not just that it fails as any kind of defence of the rationality of induction, but that it takes astrology - the attempt to relate celestial regularities to human affairs as the opposite of pragmatism rather than the exact same principle and the father of science. Pragmatically, the origins of agriculture were founded on the connection of celestial events to the seasons and thereby to human affairs.

This is the desperation, to attempt to defend one's rationality by projecting one's irrationality. That and taking money and property owning to be an immutable reality rather than a fragile social construct. Who knows, next week Trump might pass a law that anyone he doesn't like forfeits all their assets and gets deported to Greenland. My advice for a secure retirement is to head for the hills and stock up on canned food and iodine tablets.

We use the past to predict the future because ...

... there is no other guide. — Janus

The difference between us is that you call that rational, and I call it desperation. We are desperate to predict because we want security, and there is no security. Such is the fall into knowledge.

He is not going to recommend that you abandon your science or your common sense. But he is going to ask you to abandon your arrogance and righteousness.
— unenlightened

This seems like kind of an arrogant and righteous comment. — T Clark

Yes, darling, but that's my comment, not Hume's.I am arrogant and righteous, so you can dismiss me with a casual projection like that.

The thing is, it used to be a necessary truth, "All swans are white." Philosophers dined out on it for years. And then there wasn't 'a black swan event'; that could have been dismissed as a sport, an aberration, the exception that proves the rule or some such. No, there was a whole fucking continent of overtly black swans, unapologetically swanning about like they owned the place and had always been there. Cue much coughing and mumbling into beards.

Look chaps, I can claim very little credit for any of this; it is seriously ill advised in my estimation to try and contradict Hume. he is The Man. He is not going to recommend that you abandon your science or your common sense. But he is going to ask you to abandon your arrogance and righteousness. Rationality is limited. It cannot manage on its own but stands in need of passion.

... some explanation is needed for the constant conjunction of past regularities. I judge that the "inference to best explanation" for this is that there exist laws of nature that necessitate this behavior. — Relativist

That is indeed a fine and attractive explanation for past regularities, and "as a rule" I myself have found that heads and tails come up about equally, and so on. But what leads you to apply this rule of the past to the future?

So what's the alternative? — Relativist

Indeed. And you call this 'rationality'? Not 'desperation'?

Abandon (the pretence of) rationality, all ye who enter here.

Suppose you and I reach different conclusions. We could then both profit from having a discussion to identify differences in background beliefs and the reasoning we each employed. We may then adjust our beliefs and/or revise the sort of reasoning we employ. — Relativist

That is what we are doing - having a discussion. You have taken the bet, and I have rejected the bet and we have laid out our reasons. Now I hope you will agree that the actual outcome is not decisive in this case. neither of us is entirely certain in our estimation of the odds, and even if we were, we might still be unlucky. We could do a much more detailed survey of the number plates that pass @T Clark's house, to see if there are patterns in the data and what the relative frequencies are over time. And perhaps a psychological assessment would be helpful in determining whether he is an inveterate gambler with very poor judgement, or a kindly chap that wants to give away some money without causing the beneficiaries any embarrassment, or a trickster, or something else.

But as things stand, we have made different decisions based on different rationales and the information we have.
Therefore, rationality is not decisive in this case. And if it turns out that we are all turkeys, and tomorrow is thanksgiving, then our reasoning about the kindly farmer that feeds us every day will be completely and catastrophically wrong; and perhaps the sun will not rise tomorrow because we are living in a simulation that is about to be turned off.

But what I have not seen in all this pragmatism is any answer to Hume. His claim is that one of our "background beliefs" seems to be that the future will be broadly the same as the past, and this is something we cannot have any evidence of whatsoever because the future is always beyond our experience. It is therefore plucked out of the total vacuum of unknowability and it is on this literally unreasonable assumption that all this "pragmatic rationality" is founded.

This principle applies just as much to probabilities and statistics like car number plates as to the orderly procession of the heavens and the rising of the sun. 'These are the plates we have seen -therefore these are the likely plates we will see next. But the 'therefore' has ZERO justification in logic or evidence. It's called "The problem of Induction". This is what you are calling 'rationality'.

But rationality is more likely to lead to truth than irrationality. — Relativist

My rationality or yours?

You provided rational reasons not take the bet. But another person might very well take the bet, on the basis of the probability and some good reasons to be confident he wasn't being scammed - that would be rational also. — Relativist

So rationality doesn't work as a decision guide.

Would your decision to take the bet be rational? — T Clark

I have already explained why it would not have been rational, viz. that your offering the bet in circumstances where you had expertise that I lacked, especially when you had been plying me with alcohol made me suspect a scam. Thus I had legitimate Wittgensteinian reasons for doubt in the particular circumstances.

Sorry, I really don’t understand this argument — T Clark

I'll just leave it there, and see if it appeals to anyone else. I think you didn't understand Hume's problem in the first place, so an argument that addresses it might likely be rather opaque.

I won't take your bet, because I'm a stranger and you're local and you might know that the ferry just docked and we're due a contingent of Rhode Islanders. Instead, I'll throw you what I hope is a more substantial lifeline/timeline.

So, imagine a world where the future is not always like the past.

You are watching a film, Death in Venice, say, and somewhere in the middle, it cuts to the middle of Bambi, and then it starts jumping every frame to a different movie, so that there is just a meaningless flicker of images changing without connection and too fast to even identify.

But there is still a continuity, which is the person watching.

So now remove that continuity, such that each frame, is seen by a different person. Now there is no continuity, but there is a problem: without any continuity, there is nothing to say one frame comes before or after another; there is no temporal order of past and future, just a heap of random watchers of random frames with no connection at all.

In other words, if the future fails to be connected to the past and related to it, it fails to be the future. The future is necessarily similar to the past, otherwise it is not the future. The timeline has to hold together, or else it is broken, and a broken timeline is not a timeline at all.

So, what’s the problem? — T Clark

The problem is that it is not rational, in the sense that no amount of past evidence can constrain the future in any way, logically. And you just saying it seems rational does not make it so either. It goes something like this:

The future will be similar to the past because in the past, the future was usually similar to the past, and the future will be similar to the past, because it generally was in the past, so it will be in the future.
Repeat without rinsing until convinced.

The doubt is justified on similar grounds. Might we be like the turkey? You might "remember" the sun always rising, but in virtue of what do you know that your memory is reliable? Plus, given Hume's disjoint bundle anthropology, the reliability of memory is perhaps more open to doubt. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is it? Do you doubt it on any of those grounds? Want to put some money on it? :wink:

This is Wittgenstein's suggestion. There might be reasons such as these on particular occasions and in particular circumstances. But because my memory is sometimes unreliable does not mean that I can or should never rely on it, because even the interpretation of immediate sense data relies on memory, and thus there is nothing at all without it. And Hume is similarly complacent in practice about such matters.

I don't see the value in this kind of distinction. How do you see it? — T Clark

You don't see the value of the distinction between rational and irrational? Or memory and imagination?

:gasp:

Huh? Your statistical claim makes no sense, but anyway statistics cannot answer Hume, whose argument comes down to 'you can't logically derive a proposition about the future from propositions about the past, just as his moral scepticism states that 'you cannot get an ought from an is.'

Given every morning of my life (that's more than 1,000) the sun has risen. Habit leads me to expect it to rise tomorrow. Now justify the doubt. Something like "I saw the devourer of suns starting to consume it last evening", perhaps?

The nearest thing to an answer to Hume comes from Wittgenstein, along the lines that doubt too stands in need of justification. Whatever can be known can be doubted and knowing and doubting both need justification. Can one justify the doubt that the sun might not rise in the morning? One can say that it might not, but can one really doubt it?

I think it is our business to distinguish sense from nonsense. I do not think it can be done without touching on nonsense. I suspect the line between laidback and stupid is even more difficult to navigate without getting one's mind dirty.

Here's something to make you glad you live in the fucked up US, God-forsaken Europe, or the La-la land of the UK. This is the real Big Brother.

I have to be charitable and conclude that you only mean to prove my thesis with this little display of uptight contrariety. So thank you. :up: — apokrisis

Well thank you for the reluctant charity. I certainly don't claim to be the incarnation of love, and my use of quotation rather than simple declaration might even suggest that to the charitable. But your suggestion

Still, instantiations such as the latter cases of rape do attest to the fact that some adult humans become utterly immune to it. Love is to them a false promise, hence an utter falsity, hence a wrong reality to uphold, or, more simply, a wrong. Notwithstanding, duly agreed with the proposition: (universal) love is that which makes the world go round. — javra

There is no place in the attraction between electron and proton for consent or dissent. The love of the rapist is the love of power which is the love of the feeble. Since 'love' is somewhat a trigger word, it seems, I will back-track to 'like'. One cannot object to 'like' with any vehemence surely?

'Kangaroos like to hop'. @apokrisis likes to disdain. Systems like to dissipate.

Any minute now I'm going to invent the law of attraction, so I'll stop while I still can.

Dichotomies. Always there lurking to bite you on the philosophical bum! — apokrisis

Herewith the lurking dichotomous bum biting alternative:

You can see it but you can’t see it. — apokrisis

Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
'Cause you don't love me any more — Skeeter Davis

Love makes the world go round, which nobody can deny who is born of two parents.

Say, what is the spell, when her fledgelings are cheeping,
That lures the bird home to her nest?
Or wakes the tired mother, whose infant is weeping,
To cuddle and croon it to rest?
What the magic that charms the glad babe in her arms,
Till it cooes with the voice of the dove?
'Tis a secret, and so let us whisper it low—
And the name of the secret is Love!
For I think it is Love,
For I feel it is Love,
For I'm sure it is nothing but Love! — Lewis Carrol

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." — John Keats

We’ve heard like nothing about any resistance, which is very odd. If Russia is so incompetent on the battlefield, wouldn’t their corruption and incompetence spill over into intelligence as well? Making it more likely to actually be able to organize an underground resistance — Christoffer

I guess the corruption and incompetence soaks in to the underground too. Or to put it a bit more sociologically, nazi Germany had another culture, and was close to going socialist/communist instead of to the nazis at that time. Russia has never really had the luxury of a bilateral culture in 'peaceful conflict' aka a democratic culture. The path in Russia is from incompetent dictator to collapse to anarchic struggles to competent dictator to incompetent dictator to collapse ....

My reference was to @NOS4A2 claim elsewhere that anyone could say anything because it was just words. Thus becoming inflamed at someone's words is entirely voluntary and should not lead to censure let alone censorship.

Not my own position. But my position in general is that the right to free speech is not the same as the right to free broadcast or publication. We appear here, or not, at the whim of the site owner and the running dogs he allows to control his territory. That's the constitutional position, and if folks want to change the constitution, or change the site owner, they have some work to do that won't be done by posting on this site - if you see what I mean.

ABC and Disney ended Kimmel because their local affiliates refused to air his inflammatory episode. — NOS4A2

Words? Infammatory? Have you seen the light and converted or something?

OK, this is definitely the Woo department, and I'm not sure how far down the rabbit hole I want to fall. But when a chap has to declare some commercial interests at the end of their woo, well that's interesting ...

What is its true function?
— Roke

To reduce violence and make ordinary people safer. — unenlightened

You’re saying this is the intended function or the actual function? — Roke

No. I'm saying it's the true function.

Are you deliberately fucking about, or is it just incompetence?

Meanwhile, in another part of the catastrophe:

This is not a very happy video. But Ukraine is losing more slowly than Russia. Not very consoling, really.

your not being here would profoundly matter. — Hanover

Well I totally wasn't fishing for compliments, but I expect you are, so - the feeling is entirely mutual. Nothing wrong with our mirrors, eh? Like a little echo chamber of love and admiration, we are.

One's existence is in the eye of the beholder, which in turn is reflected in the interpretation of one's own existent sense of being and becoming. — Jack Cummins

I'm not treating your topic with the respect it and you deserve; my apologies. But there is a sense in which your question is too profound to be approached directly. One retreats into theory, depersonalisation, or humour, because, according to one tradition, it is calling for The Last Judgement. It is said that at death, one's whole life passes before one, and one makes for oneself the judgement of one's worth. At that moment there is nothing to win or lose, and all the bias falls away and one makes the naked judgement from the position of full knowledge and impartiality. I'm afraid the almost universal report card from my school days still applies: "Could do better if he tried."

It wouldn't affect me in the slightest if I didn't exist; but look at all the pearls of wisdom the forum would be lacking! A tragedy to contemplate and thank providence we have avoided.

What would it be called if we weren’t caught in an Orwell-adjacent bizarro world? — Roke

A bullshit reduction measure.

What is its true function? — Roke

To reduce violence and make ordinary people safer.

The cat, as a stand-in for Wigner's friend, is presumably aware that it is not dead. — Banno

I'm not sure. Either I have never been in such a superposition, or I have but was not aware. Either way it is not clear to me that it cannot be or that my consciousness would in that case not function to collapse the superposition from within. Obviously in such cases, only the supercats that collapse into life will live to tell the tale, and those that collapse into death will not. Which is a bit problematic for the collapse. If the superposition of the cat is real. then the cat is aware that it is alive and simultaneously not aware that it is dead. Now Wigner's friend in a gas mask might collapse the cat into one state or the other, but I am not clever enough to elucidate how that relates to Schroedinger - I assume from Schroedinger's view, Wigner's friend is still entangled with the cat, and therefore getting ready simultaneously to report the cats sad demise and it's joyous survival.

Examples of measurements without consciousness:
A photon hitting a photographic plate and causing a chemical reaction
Cosmic rays interacting with particles in space
Radioactive decay triggering a Geiger counter in an empty room
DNA mutations caused by radiation

Each collapses the wave function. None involve consciousness. — Banno

Or, presumably, in a box with a cat. So much for Schroedinger and his diabolical cat experiment - as in

in a small vial is a tiny amount of a radioactive substance, so little that within an hour one atom may decay—but equally likely, none will. If an atom decays, a Geiger counter detects it and triggers a relay that releases a hammer, which shatters a flask of hydrocyanic acid. If this system has been left to itself for an hour, one would say the cat is still alive if no atom has decayed. The first atom to decay would have poisoned the cat. The wave function of the entire system would express this by showing the living and dead cat as coexisting in a mixed state.

(Translation of Schrödinger’s original text. Source: Wikipedia) — Jan

The problem with your @Banno, claim above is that various experiments seem to have produced at least somewhat macro superpositions. I grant that it hasn't yet reached the scale of a geiger counter, let alone a cat, but it's a lot more than a single radioactive atom.

Still. I'd like to see your evidence if you are claiming what you seem to be claiming above as established fact, that would resolve the question of Schroedinger's cat into a matter of fact that we merely do not know until we open the box. I can't find any hint in your link, which seems to think it is not so resolved.