I think that's a horrible idea. I explained why. Not everyone is going to agree with me, no matter what I do. — Terrapin Station

But it's a practical necessity to form opinions and hypothesis based on testimony alone. Plenty of everyday situations reduce your opinion to the absurd. Certainly you wouldn't expect courts to let someone go free merely because only witness testimony is available. Given that there is no form of evidence that is beyond reproach in principle, I don't see how your reasoning is supposed to outweigh the utter impracticality.

that is a conclusion based on evidence. You a mis-understanding me - I am not saying science will not say something does not exist, but they will only say that when there is evidence that it does not exist — Rank Amateur

But the evidence in question is an absence of evidence. Sure there is data, but what's significant about the data is that it's random (indistinguishable from the control group) in relation to the connection being tested.

The grounding is that the facts can't be wrong about the facts. But a reporter can be, including that reporters can be dishonest/they can weave fictions (so that it would turn out that they're not actually reporters at all), they are biased in many different ways, etc. — Terrapin Station

OK, but that only tells me that testimony is less convincing as evidence, not that I positively need evidence other than testimony for a conclusion. I'd label this a quantitative difference (though I see that this may sound confused). If you see something with your own eyes there are fewer points of failure, but personal observations don't have any special qualities to them.

the entire purpose of drug trails is to establish evidence - — Rank Amateur

Sure. But if the drug trial fails to uncover any positive evidence, the conclusion will not be that we're agnostic about e.g. the effect of a drug. It will be that the drug is ineffective.

Testimony is fine as long as it's not just testimony. There needs to be "physical" empirical evidence, including evidence both that the people who originally testified had solid physical empirical evidence backing the testimony and then a chain of evidence that people who bought the testimony had some sort of evidence aside from only testimony to justify buying it. For example, having evidence that so and so won't testify to something unless they had solid physical evidence to support the testimony, even then the person removed from the physical evidence there didn't actually witness the initial physical evidence themselves. — Terrapin Station

What's the epistemological grounding of treating physical evidence as qualitatively different from testimony (ignoring for the moment that testimony is physical, so we'd need additional qualifiers)?

I personally believe plenty of things based on testimony alone, so does everyone else as far as I know.

The only thing any scientist would say about anything that lacks empirical evidence is that is lacks empirical evidence, that is it, that is the only judgment real science would make. Any other judgment you all make about the lack of empirical evidence for anything is not scientific, it either philosophy or theology. — Rank Amateur

That sounds precariously close to a no true Scotsman. Anyways, as a matter of fact we make plenty of determinations based on lack of evidence. Drug trials come to mind.

Not only that, only 100 years ago before Hubble 99% of the universe didn't exist. Hundreds of billions of galaxies, they didn't exist, poof, gone!

Absence of evidence is evidence of an absence of evidence. — Jake

Again, that's ignoring that empirical science relies on induction as well as deduction. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is only true in a deductive context.

Is the maxim the action itself or the will? — moralpanic

I'd say the maxim is the personal principle according to which the will is formed. It takes the form of a law, which is why it can be universalized as a law.

Why can't evidence of the overheard also be considered evidence of the content of the claim? — coolguy8472

By definition, a hearsay witness has no information on the actual event in question. Hearing a claim does not make that claim more or less likely (unless the claim is about being overheard).

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. — sime

Sorry, that's a bit too technical for me. In what way is a prior supposed to represent the ignorance of the experimenter? Why does this ignorance influence the expectation?

I didn't make up the term no seeum, that is the name of the argument you are describing. And, you may find this hard to believe, but at something as short as 125 -150 years ago there was nothing in physics that predicted the Higgs boson. — Rank Amateur

There is no need to be condescending. To the people a 150 years ago, would it have made sense to postulate a Higgs Boson because it might be discovered in the future? I can't see how. So, I conclude that the people 150 years ago would have been correct, given their empirical data, to think that there is no Higgs Boson.

All science says, about anything that there is no empirical evidence for, is that there is no empirical evidence. That is all. — Rank Amateur

If that was all, wouldn't science be rather useless? What about induction?

It is non-scientists who treat science as religion, who turn that into if science does not know it, it does not exist. And they believe this by faith, despite thousands of years of empirical evidence to the contrary. — Rank Amateur

I made a distinction between the purely empirical an wider, metaphysical claims though.

Okay...but we have to allow for an inability to do something via the "scientific method" at the current time. Right now...it is not possible for us to determine how existence came to be...or if in fact, it always has been. Our limited abilities in this regard to not require that we have a default of "then it cannot be" because we cannot determine that it does. — Frank Apisa

There are theories for abiogenesis. There are also theories for the formation of the universe. None of the commonly considered ones include a god or gods.

There is a very very big logic fault in equating the no seeum arguments for teapots and unicorns to god. Here is the flaw, all no seeum arguments say the same thing, we looked around, in all the places where we know how to look, and we haven't seen ( fill in the blank), and we would know it if we saw it. So it does not exist.

We know a lot about tea pots, and horses, and flying, and horns on foreheads. We have the ability to look in most all the likely places teapots and unicorns might be. We have no basis at all to know anything at all about what such a thing as God is, nor any reason to think we could even understand how to apply such a thing to a specific time space model we could even investigate. — Rank Amateur

What you call a "no seeum" argument is induction based on absence of evidence, which is permissible. It does not depend on us "looking in most all the likely places". We don't assume a god exists for the same reason we don't assume an arbitrary amount of hitherto unknown forces and particles exist - because they don't feature in our predictions. So we assumed the Higgs Boson existed, even before we could detect it, because it was part of a prediction. But the invisible teapot isn't, and so we don't assume it exists.

The entire wonderful history of science is finding stuff it didn't believe existed- until it did. Every generation believes its science has the answers, and looks with bemusement at what science believed just a few generations earlier. Pretty sure some future generations will be bemused at us. Science is just science. Science just does science, and it is wonderful, but be careful not to make a religion out of it. — Rank Amateur

I don't claim empirical knowledge is monolithic and immutable. I am just saying that for any given state of empirical knowledge, there is an answer to the question "does X exist empirically" according to the currently most favored (even if just barely) theory. The current answer for God is, as far as I can see, "no".

No it is for simultaneous occurrence of two events when you multiply.

I am combining evidence which is an additive process. — Devans99

My formula was nonsense, as I just realized. If you want to combine evidence, the formula to use is Baye's Theorem. It's not a simple addition.

I can if I want to perform a meta-analysis of all available evidence and arguments, assign a rough probability to each and then combine them. Its more refined than taking a wild guess. — Devans99

Just calling it a meta analysis won't turn arguments into evidence.

I'm not sure I follow you. If physical constants and laws are unchangeable and they are fine tuned for life then surely a non-zero probability of a creator is in order? — Devans99

The problem is that calling them "fine tuned" assumes they are changeable. You cannot "tune" something that is fixed.

Well I start at 50% probability, and then consider each piece of evidence for/against the proposition, modifying the probability for the proposition as I go. — Devans99

Yes but your mathematical operations don't fit. If you want to modify a probability P(X) of 1/2 with a piece of evidence that, say, only has a likelihood of occurring if not X of 1/3, you multiply. You take P(~X) times 1/3, in this case 1/6, and your new P(X) is now 5/6.

Well the first is the subject of the OP. Presentism ('Only now always exists') always leads to an infinite regress which is logically impossible. Only by having a start of time and something timeless creating time can we escape the infinite regress. So I think that rather strengthens the prime mover argument (by having a timeless prime mover - he does not need creating because he's beyond time and thus beyond cause and effect). I allowed 75% probability of a creator for this in my calculation. — Devans99

But this is an argument. It's not evidence. You cannot assign probability values to arguments.

On the second, there seems to be lots of evidence of fine tuning (for example here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/). I also allowed a 75% probability of a creator for this in my calculation. — Devans99

All the evidence depends on the notion that the physical constants and laws could be different. So in order to treat the physical constants and laws as evidence, you need to assume they are subject to change - for which you have no evidence. Since X * 0 is always 0, the value of your evidence is zero.

According to our current understanding, physical constants and laws are unchangeable (that is their definition), so they always have probability 1.

I'm thinking we cannot establish whether unicorns exist or not...using logic, reason, science, or math. Big universe. An equine with a single horn sticking out of a forehead is not that unreasonable. — Frank Apisa

Fair enough, I should have specified "on earth, currently". But the point is that the scientific method does provide a "closed system". It always has a clear answer on whether or not something exists. It's either part of our predictions or it isn't.

It also depends on one's understanding of what "belief" is.

In the area of religion...as in "I believe God exists" or "I believe no gods exist"...

...the words "I believe" seems to be used in place of "It is my blind guess."

Nothing wrong with guessing. — Frank Apisa

What I was getting at is that there is an argument that belief in God is reasonable, even if it's just a blind guess. @Bitter Crank hinted at that argument: Perhaps God is a necessary concept in human civilization.

BTW, it is possible to estimate the chance of the existence of a 'creator of the universe':

- Start at 50% / 50% for a unknown boolean proposition
- Allow for evidence of the Prime Mover argument: 50% + 50% * 75% = 87.5%
- Allow for evidence of the Fine tuning of the universe 87.5% + 12.5% * 75% = 96.875%

So 97% chance of 'creator of the universe' existing. — Devans99

I have no idea what you're doing here mathematically. Why are you adding probabilities together if you want to modify a prior using given evidence?

Furthermore, there is no evidence for either a prime mover or for "fine tuning". Both are merely thought experiments.

We can establish whether or not a god, or gods exist empirically through science. Empirically, whatever is not part of the current best explanation doesn't exist. So unicorns, invisible teapots and gods all do not exist, except as purely mental concepts.

This, of course, doesn't tell us anything about whether or not a god or gods exist outside of empirical reality. As a metaphysical question, the existence of god can indeed not be established by either logic or maths, which includes probability theory.

Whether or not reason compels us to believe in a god is a tricky question and depends on your understanding of what reason is.

So, if what I have just described to be the case is the case, then can it be argued convincingly that this abstract, isolated, sense-data based starting point of British Empiricism did not provide a veridical foundation for the epistemological investigations pursued by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume? — charles ferraro

Could you elaborate on why you think abstract, isolated "raw" sense data is the foundation (or part of it) of British empiricism? Of course the concept of sense data is part of that philosophy, but you seem to be getting at the question of whether raw sense data is real and not just an idea.

It's difficult to see how there could not be raw sense data, given that there is processed sense data. But even if we treat it as an unknown, it could still support the conclusion that our experiences are based not just on data, but also in constructions.

It's my best guess. Because the claim that claims more eyewitnesses has more persuasive power to some people. Double and triple hearsay is a persuasive enough topic for courts to at least discuss the issue before rejecting the idea of it being valid persuasive evidence. — coolguy8472

Hearsay only provides evidence of the overheard (or otherwise recorded) statement being made. It's not evidence for the content of the claim.

But none of that should detract from the fact that g together with h are synonymous with empirical knowledge + empirical assumptions ; for whatever we are ignorant about can play no role in our predictions or calculations. — sime

Isn't the Bayesian position that there is no qualitative distinction between assumptions and knowledge? It's all just probabilities with different values.

In the P("I own a car") > P("I own a red car") sense yeah.

More detail can increase the likelihood too like:

P("I own a red car given that I own something that's red, it makes noise, and has lights on it") > P("I own a red car")

But the original scenario is different than that example because we're dealing with claims and not "givens". — coolguy8472

Yes, the difference is between P(X and Y) and P(X, given Y). When we're looking at the content of a claim, we have P(X and Y). When we are looking at a claim within a specific situation, we are additionally dealing with P(X, given Y). The resolution of these will also depend on whether the probabilities are independent (as in your first example) or not (as in your second one).

But the original scenario is different than that example because we're dealing with claims and not "givens". But I'm thinking often times we can see that a statement is more likely to be true when it's claimed versus when it's not claimed if we can determine that it's more likely to not be fabricated. Maybe an example of that would be if I forgot what day of the week it was and asked someone then they told me "Wednesday", then that should raise the probability of it being "Wednesday" from 1 in 7 to something pretty close to 100% even though all that's changed is the introduction of someone else claiming it's Wednesday. — coolguy8472

When we evaluate the likelihood of a person being truthful, we need to evaluate both the content of their claim and the fact that they make the claim given what we know about the person and the situation. Given that there are no ordinary reasons why a random person should lie to us about the current date, their claim has a high likelihood of being true. This is a case of P(X, given Y). Mathematically, we take the chance that it's Wednesday (i.e. P(X), 1/7) and modify it with the chance a random person would lie (or be mistaken etc.) about the date (i.e. P(Y, given ~X), say 1/10). The prior likelihood was 1/7, the new likelihood is roughly 2/3 (1-(6/7 * 1/10)).

I would have thought the more witnesses with consistent answers adds credibility. Assuming honesty and the existence of the witnesses in order for them to be mistaken every witness has to be wrong. The likelihood of all witnesses being wrong approaches 0 with the more witnesses you have. — coolguy8472

But you just said that we are dealing with merely the claim of witnesses, not actual witness testimony. Only actual witnesses add credibility.

Do people correctly apply more likelihood of the event being true when introducing more facts like that? Whether the person expects to be fact checked, how disprovable the facts are, and how intelligent the person is all pay a factor too. — coolguy8472

People are generally bad at intuitively assigning correct probabilities. There is a tendency to evaluate how vivid and plastic a story is when determining whether it's likely. This is, however, a mistake. A naked claim is more likely than one with added details (such as alleged additional witnesses) because every detail is also an additional claim.

Except we don't know if the 10 people exists when considering the probability. They could just being saying there are 10 people that can verify and are making it up. That's the part I'm tripped up on the most: determining the likelihood that someone is being untruthful then the probability that they would make a claim like "1 other person can verify" versus "10 other people can verify" if their goal is to be as convincing as possible. — coolguy8472

Oh, the scenario was supposed to be just a claim? Well in that case the answer is that a statement alleging more witnesses is less likely to be true, by virtue of alleging extra facts. For a reasonable number of witnesses, the probability of the statements is roughly identical and only depends on the likelihood the person is lying in the first place.

And now you're the one just repeating what you already said without engaging with the substance of my reply. Perhaps I am fundamentally misunderstanding you. Could you rephrase the argument that you think I am not addressing?

conversely someone is more likely to have actually won the lottery and not be mistaken if more people look at the ticket can confirm it. — coolguy8472

Unless of course the ticket is fake or otherwise invalid. No amount of witnesses will modify that probability.

But it seems to me that if someone were trying to be dishonest, they would choose to be as convincing as possible making P(Person 2 did not win the lottery | Person 2 is not being truthful) > P(Person 1 did not win the lottery | Person 1 is not being truthful) for the same reason why someone who bluffs in poker might bet more if it's their goal to deceive others. — coolguy8472

But it's harder to find 10 people willing to lie for you than it's to find 2, so even if they were willing to forge more evidence, the evidence still increases the probability of them being truthful. You can always construct reasons to not consider any single piece of evidence convincing, but it's still evidence and you still need to take it into account.

Why do people offend on purpose? — Joseph Walsh

In addition to what others have said, it can be a show of dominance. Offend somebody and you express, to them and maybe others, that you do not need to respect their boundaries and are not afraid of the consequences.

This is why calculated offensive behavior can be a political tool.

Basically you're restating the common belief that witnesses matter re probability of something being the case. I'm aware of the belief. I addressed. You didn't address anything I said. You're just restating the status quo. — Terrapin Station

Your argument is that we'd need a large set of data. I say we already have a large set of data for everyday occurrences. Our knowledge of current events essentially relies on witness reports.

I also don't see how you can deny, in principle, that a witness report of an event is more likely in a world where that event happened.

Indeed, they aren't doing it consciously for survival, they are doing it for the feeling it brings them, what I am saying is that it seems the feeling is there in the first place because the feeling is helpful to survive. The love of wisdom is the desire to understand things, but where does that desire come from if not from the fact that the desire to understand helps us survive through its effects? — leo

I have two objections to this. First, evolution doesn't quite work that way. Not every behavior or feeling an evolved creature has is or has been helpful for survival. It's sufficient for it not to prevent survival. Plenty of behaviours, even complex physical and psychological traits, can be accidental. Arguably, consciousness itself is.

Secondly, even if we were to assume all our feelings were forged out of necessity to survive, that wouldn't invalidate them as feelings. The actual feelings and motivations of people are still real experiences. There is no justification to treat this as mere charade or illusion.

First, the only way we could establish that the number of witnesses testifying to something implies that it has a greater probability of being the case would be if we had a large set of data showing, for multiple scenarios, that there is some correlation to how many witnesses there are relative to whether something turned out to be the case, where the latter was checked via independent means. — Terrapin Station

While @fdrake has already provided a fairly in-depth post on the value of multiple accounts, for most everyday examples it seems fairly self-evident that multiple witnesses increase the probability of the event having occurred. It's unlikely that multiple people hallucinate similar observations.

Even with the frequentist data, however, there would still be a number of problems to overcome. That's because there are so many different variables that can come into play. Making a probability claim on this sort of frequentist data implies that we're parsing the witnesses as ideal--no sort of bias, no sort of hidden agenda, no perceptual problems, ideally intelligent and rational, etc., and it also implies that we're assuming they have a more or less ideal access to information. Otherwise there would be no way to establish that the correlation is implicational, and that's what you'd be looking for here. — Terrapin Station

The witnesses need not be ideal. It's sufficient that every individual witness account has a non-zero probability of relating the true event.

All of the attributes by which humans differ from all of the other primates--and by which all the other primates are like eachother—are attributes that humans and pigs have in common. — Michael Ossipoff

Aren't you forgetting rather significant attributes like a significantly increased brain volume?

Pigs and hominids had and have quite different lifestyles and modes of living. With apes as our immediate ancestors, the fact mentioned in the above paragraph calls for explanation. For all those attributes mentioned above to be convergent-evolution would amount to a humungous set of coincidences. — Michael Ossipoff

There is a fairly large amount of readily available evidence for similarly "humongous set(s) of coincidences" occurring. Convergent evolution is well documented. What evidence is there for the alternative?

I agree, what I meant to say was, it seems as if everything we do is geared towards survival in some way, even though sometimes some act that would help us survive in one situation is actually detrimental in some other. — leo

But there are clearly things like art that have no discernable value for the survival of the species.

I actually do not like that perspective, because it renders meaningless everything that had meaning to me, and I tried to get away from it, but what other perspective can we choose? Essentially all we do is spend our lives trying to survive better, we are driven by our feelings but our feelings drive us in that direction. — leo

You can simply choose to look at the surface goals like happiness, wealth, family etc. without linking them so some survival instinct.

People dedicate their lives to things whose end result is increasing survival chances for themselves or for those they deem to be like them. Some people will dedicate their lives looking for a cure for some disease, a feeling drives them, but the end result would be that someone they know or the species would survive better. Some will dedicate their lives for their children so their survival can be the most guaranteed possible. Some will dedicate their lives to understand the world, whose end result is being able to predict better to survive better. — leo

But those aren't their actual motivations. Those are your interpretations. Someone who studies philosophy for the love of wisdom does not do so merely to survive.

I'm desperately looking for another perspective, but if everything we do is linked to survival, what other perspective there is? — leo

You don't have to let biology or, in a broader sense, causality determine your actions or your perspective. Your inside perspective is just as valuable. You can simply choose to do things because you want to.

Is "Person 2"'s claim have a slightly higher probability of being correct due to the number of eye witnesses they claim are available? I'm just talking about the claim on its own, without doing further investigation like questioning the witnesses or any other analysis. — coolguy8472

According to a Bayesian view of evidence, the answer is yes. Though this of course does not alter the likelihood of winning the lottery in and of itself. An alternative interpretation is to say person 2 theory has higher predictive power (it predicts the statements of 10 people) and is easier to falsify (you can ask any of the 10).

And then it came to me, is everything we do geared towards survival? — leo

You can certainly put everything in that context. That is, essentially, what evolutionary psychology does. Doing so will provide you with some interesting perspectives on human behavior, for example the connection between altruism and survival. But it's still all based on a context, a perspective that you intentionally set up. You can choose other perspectives.

Are we nothing more than biological machines guided by feelings that tell them what to do to maximize their survival chances, spending their whole life attempting to maximize that function only to die in the end anyway? — leo

No, that'd be saying to much, even from an evolutionary perspective. That'd be claiming we are perfect survival machines, but we are not. A lot of behaviors are simply accidental from an evolutionary perspective. Consciousness itself might be a detriment.

I don't draw the ethnic lines, I let others do that for me, as westerners we are often ignorant of different ethnicities in Africa and the middle east but the people living there aren't. The middle east as you know is a far cry from a peaceful place, there are many ethnic disputes causing wars that are being waged, not just historically but they're going on right now. — Judaka

But this seems to speak in favor of the notion that considering ethnicity "interpretatively relevant" is a bad idea, regardless of any hypocrisy in arguing that point.

I do not know if it is accurate to say that Islam has unified the various ethnicities in the middle east, I don't think that's even close to true. Clearly, when I am naming continents, I am using a broad brush but the reason I said the alt-right had ideas which had to be contended with is that race is just significant to most people on Earth and for good reason. — Judaka

That race is significant to most people on earth is a brute fact, and not denied by anyone as far as I can see. That this is so "for good reason" is an entirely different claim, and one for which you have not provided an argument.

I don't think people are being pessimistic enough about racism, it's not as simple as disliking people who are different from you. — Judaka

Psychologically, it boils down to that though. Certainly it's very difficult to avoid altogether.

The alt-right are not being bested by the attitudes in the middle east, I think you'll find that the alt-right is considered more repugnant because of factors beyond the fundamental attitudinal differences towards race with other ethnic groups outside of Anglo-Saxon whites. — Judaka

I am sorry, but I cannot make heads or tails of that sentence. Could you rephrase?

Namely that the West is already filled with minorities, — Judaka

An odd statement to make and slip into a sentence. What does "being filled with minorities" even mean? "The West" has, for the most part, still a clearly discernable majority population.

that the West is hypersensitive to white supremacy and that many in the West don't even recognise non-white racism to begin with. — Judaka

This may be true, but as I have pointed out there are historical reasons for why this is the case. Ignoring that context isn't honest.

The alt-right does exist, they are not neo-nazis and their views actually kind of need to be contended with. Here's a good representation of the alt-right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3MvOSyE0ow&t=2126s — Judaka

If, within 5 seconds of opening that video, I hear the phrase "the great replacement of whites", you aren't really helping your point.

Einstein wasn't even white, he was a Jew. — Judaka

That view is usually only held in specific circles though. For all practical purposes, Einstein was "white".

The reality is that almost ALL countries in Asia, the middle east, Africa, Eastern Europe and pretty much the whole world think like the alt-right. Their culture is tied to their ethnicities and ethnic heritage and if their ethnic group were wiped out, their culture would be too. — Judaka

This is painting the world with a very broad brush. Yes racism is a "natural" condition, but your statement depends on where you draw the lines with ethnicities. The middle east, for example, is traditionally multi-ethnic, going back to roman times. Religion is a more powerful identity than ethnicities in many of these regions.

The West is unique, this is not recognised and the concerns of the alt-right are treated like toxic and hateful positions, despite the absolute prevalence of similarly minded people across the world and even within the West, they're just not white. — Judaka

Western culture is also unique in plenty of other ways, so what's special about this position?

The hypocrisy is that this is often celebrated by the left, this kind of behaviour is accepted and normal, this kind of rhetoric isn't considered racist or dangerous unless it's coming from white people. The alt-right aren't exactly the same but the similarities are striking to me. — Judaka

There are historical reasons for the difference in treatment though. You may not think these are good reasons, and I'd agree, but it's dishonest to treat it as naked hypocrisy. The alt-right is not arguing from a history of actual disenfranchisement, but rather from an imagined future one.

And that's easily explained by separate convergent evolution. — Michael Ossipoff

Convergent evolution is also the big problem for this hypothesis though. Since convergent evolution can only be ruled out via molecular and genetic evidence and all such evidence has been eradicated in the scenario proposed, there is no way rule out convergent evolution.

Which leaves us with a massively complex theory stacking improbabilities that does not have any predictive power, nor is it more general than the accepted version. In other words, we have a bad theory.

The fact that the start does not exist means the rest of the object does not exist (so my argument goes). So time seems to behaves like space in this regard (IE if an object has no identifiable start point in space, it is not an object). — Devans99

If that is your argument, then you should present it without referring to a start (except to exclude it). It's easy to demonstrate that an object with infinite extension cannot be perceived. But an object with no start need not be infinite (as the surface of a sphere is not bounded but finite). And even if we did need an infinite time, that we cannot perceive such a time doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Yes I was merely pointing out that 'a start of time' and 'only now exists' are incompatible. — Devans99

Then why does your argument concerning presentism even refer to a start of time?

4. And so on for next to, next to start, all the way to time start+∞ (IE now) — Devans99

Emphasis mine. Your argument refers to a "start" that doesn't exist.

If there is only now and then you take away that there is nothing left at all. Nothing to create/cause time to start. So that is an impossible something from nothing (no time even). — Devans99

But presentism doesn't assume the present started at some point. "Now" has no temporal extension, and hence neither a temporal start nor a temporal end.

1. ‘Can get something from nothing’, IE matter is created naturally. With infinite time, matter density would be infinite. So this is impossible.
2. ‘Can’t get something from nothing’, IE matter has always existed. Meaning the matter had no temporal start. So this is impossible too* — Devans99

Both of these arguments have been repeatedly rejected in other threads. Do you have any new justifications for them?

4. And so on for next to, next to start, all the way to time start+∞ (IE now) — Devans99

Here your argument assumes a start of time in a scenario without a start of time.

Eternalism is true

A. Assume only now exists (presentism)
B. So before the start of time there was nothing
C But creation ex nihilo / without time is impossible
D. So something 'other' than only now exists
E. The ‘other’ must be timeless (else we end up in a infinite regress of time1, time2, time3 etc...)
F. The ‘other’ must have created our time (at time=0)
G. So the ‘other’ ’sees’ time=0 and time=now simultaneously (its timeless)
H. Hence eternalism must hold — Devans99

B doesn't seem to follow from A. I also don't see the justification for F and G

In other words, there seems to me now no alternative to a second referendum (which of course implies extension). Do you agree with this, or do you think there's another option? — boethius

So far, there have been no signs of sufficient parliamentary support for a referendum. This may change if it looks like supporting a referendum is the only way to avoid a no deal situation. I am not holding my breath though, the second referendum is very dangerous to the individual careers of politicians.

I think that technology is revealing something about who we are, different from what we imagine we are, or want to be.

Even without the existence of God and the rejection of a creator, we still view ourselves as this ‘golden’ creature. Even in the mode of being conscious of our destructiveness, of all our faults, we view ourselves as being still ‘golden’ because we are aware of it.

So we are still the creatures from Eden; both creatures of nature and higher understanding, constantly watching ourselves narcissistically. From that we conceive of our nature, which has created and then thrived in a co-operative society. This narcissism is evident in the issue of climate change when people talk about ‘saving the planet’. We might die but the planet will not. We conflate ourselves with the planet.

But we have reason to think well of ourselves, because that caring and co-operative nature has created a world in which we’ve thrived. — Brett

That all sounds rather vague to me. It is perhaps natural for people to conceive of themselves as central to the universe. People are, of course, also able to question that conception. In terms of "human nature", my views are pragmatic: it's useful to try to figure out what causes people to make decisions and affect change. I am not convinced it's useful to speculate about "human nature" in a vacuum. So I wonder why this specific aspect is relevant.

Will that nature be lost by crossing a line?

That line, wherever it is, somewhere up ahead of us, will be when we throw that inviolate idea of ourselves aside and embrace our new selves. It will most certainly be lost when we chose the alternative. Why will we chose the alternative? Because the problems we find ourselves confronted with can no longer be addressed by a ‘human’ nature. Technology is confronting us with questions about how we live and who we are that go beyond the morality we have lived with so far. Technology is also the tool we have for solving these problems. Would we turn away from that? — Brett

But this seems to be a simple truism. We will change our nature when we change our nature. Technology certainly affects us, our customs and our social interactions. It also creates both novel problems and novel solutions. But what is it about recent or near future tech, specifically, that makes that technology qualitatively different?

There's an argument that possibility of P is entailed by actuality of P. Would you accept that without the argument? — frank

The argument seems fairly obvious to me. But, if that is the case, then my second question becomes relevant: are there qualitative differences between modal statements? Possibility is included in actuality. But is impossibility or necessity included in some non-modal statement?

Perhaps it is wrong to include statements of possibility in the same category as statements of necessity or impossibility. Or perhaps we are wrong when we think that actuality includes possibility, because possibility includes the possibility of counterfactuals.

Well Locke believed that the interests of individuals would naturally work together towards the common good. Economic activity is virtuous, leading to better circumstances for all. If you have much property, then you can be more economically active, so inequality is not unjust.

I am not sure what Aristotle said about property specifically, but I think that he considered wealth to be a prerequisite for virtue.

I think your topic has some implied premises that you could expand on. Your argument suggests that there is a human identity/nature ("who we are") that transcends just the description of what individual humans are doing/thinking/feeling. What do you base this nature on?

Further, this nature can apparently be lost by "crossing a line". Why is it lost, and how do we know where the line is?

The next interesting question is going to be whether May will be able to continue directing the process, or whether control will be taken by another faction. A three month extension would be another step towards a binary between May's deal or no deal, making both of these scenarios more likely. Anyone wishing a referendum must make a move.

Yes. P is true at some logically and metaphysically possible worlds. It's also true at some L and M impossible worlds. The point being: we might imagine that possible world semantics is reducing modality to something non-modal, but it isn't. It's an unnecessary distraction. Modal distinctions are just as primitive in distinguishing possible from impossible worlds as they are in sorting out small scale events, so we can dispense with possible world semantics. — frank

I see. But even if we accept that modal statements can be rephrased via possible world semantics to be non-modal, we still need modal knowledge. That is, we need to know what worlds are possible to judge the statement.

Good point. We probably won't be able to claim that knowledge of physical possibility is ever entirely empirical. But the problem of induction doesn't have a rational solution either, so it's a burden to both sides. — frank

My instinct here is to try to figure out what exactly my mind is doing when I go from a non-modal statement to a modal one. "Jack is at his house right now" is clearly a synthetic a posteriori statement. "It's possible that Jack is at his house right now" is also synthetic. What happened to the information in the statement? Part of it was lost, since the modal statement does not include Jacks current whereabouts. But we're still talking about Jack, and we still have some information about him (he's not dead, for example). So the statement must still be a posteriori. Have we just omitted some information? Made the statement more "fuzzy"?

But If that's so, does that imply that a statement of possibly is categorically different from a statement of impossibility? It seems that "it's impossible for Jack to be at home right now" contains information that is different from the non-modal statement.

Part of my issue with the distinction is due to this. Does the distinction require that we're realists on physical law? I'm not sure. — Terrapin Station

Interesting question. For something to be different it would have to have a fixed form in the first place, which might imply realism. Can we avoid that by referring to the structures that give rise to the apparent laws of physics?