There is a very real question of whether "Society" which enables individuals to be artists, philosophers, thinkers, creators, ingenuous inventors, and so forth can exist without a lot of excess labor. Again, I don't know.

In the present day and age, artists can struggle to make a decent living. In the past, the emperors and the elites in the society gave patronage to them. Labour is not bad in of itself as long as we work for ourselves, otherwise it is a form of chattel slavery. The term artists has been restricted to music,art and acting for some reason but it is supposed to be a broad term. There was a famous mathematician by the name of Erdos, who travelled around the world and was as close as we can get to an ascetic mathematician. I would consider him to be an artist of first order but it hurts my mind whenever people ask this question ; what's the use of this " insert mathematical terms " when l leave school ?
The society does not like those who learn for sake of learning. It has to be applied somewhere. The idea of a universal salary is naive and l doubt if it will stop people from participating in a rat race. Materialism is a spiritual sickness and progress always happens in ideals and ideas not in building skyscrapers and countless industrial units.

Bertrand Russell on Wittgenstein that is so misleading. Seriously, I really do not see what exactly would be so inspiring about Wittgenstein's own work.

The influence Wittgenstein had on Russell was partially due to the how wittgenstein approached problems. Russell wanted philosophy to be build into some kind of a grand theory and his logicism too for maths where we can have analytic tools to study problems and correct them but his famous student was trying to draw boundaries and to throw out any systematic attempts to build one. It also has to do with the environment around cambridge at that time maybe, since Hardy a close friend of Russell had found a genius in such a romantic way, Ramanujhan who was clearly on par with the brilliance of euler and gauss. Maybe that prompted Russell to declare his genius successor :wink:

Again, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in my opinion is very overrated, was clearly late in the game to start fretting over this problematic

Wittgenstein was influenced by Kant undoubtedly as the latter tried to draw boundaries on metaphysics by describing the limits of the mind and the former tried to draw boundaries based on logic and language.

I think this statement makes total sense. You will get circularity otherwise.

In my opinion, it has got to do with the semantics as in propositional logic , inserting f(x) into f(x) can cause us to have meaningless statements which may look paradoxical but aren't really. I believe wittgenstein made a an error here as the solution undermines the real reason behind the paradox.

F(F(x)) is allowed only if the co-domain is equal to or a subset of the domain of F(x). Beyond that, I don't see what the problem is with the repeated application of functions. There is nothing inconsistent in the practice of function iteration,

Yes, it is quite often used in mathematics and computer science, like the iterative function f(x)=x , hence f(f(x))=x and so on. I don't think wittgenstein defined function in set theoretic terms and a function was more or less considered to be a transformation , so f(x) was a propositional functions of the following statement
f(x) = x belongs to a set A, let x be any natural number.
f(f(x))= f(x) belongs to set A, but f(x) isn't a natural number. He was trying to show that it was a problem of semantics and I think this was a little of what wittgenstein was getting at, but it is hard to defend his viewpoint. Most philosophers reject his solution and pass over it casually.

The definition:

n>1: n! = n * (n-1)!
n=1: n! = 1

How about for n=0 : n!=1.
We can factorial using the gamma function too.
Gamma(n+1)=n! , interestingly we can use the integral to approximate values of (3.5) ! Or (5.7) ! but the real interesting part is how they extend the factorial.

What's your take on this statement in the tractatus

5.153 In itself, a proposition is neither probable nor improbable. Either an event occurs or it does not: there is no middle way

There was a recent philosopher who vouched for the validity of religious experience. His reasoning was along simple lines. We cannot even comprehend the mind of a genius and it is quite difficult to figure out what goes in their brain but nevertheless, their ideas have the power to transform the society. Similarly in the past, people believe that there were prophets who had religious experience on a whole different level, and their ideas or revelations transformed the society and such powerful ideas cannot come from delusions since delusions always lack a concrete matter or a firm direction.
The philosopher also managed to explain the difference in religious experience. It was due to two main reasons.
Firstly, most religious experience cannot be expressed precisely or lose their meaning once expressed. Therefore descriptions of religious experience fails to convey the essence of it. Secondly, the religious experience can be the same but the interpretation can be different due to personality,belief etc of the person going through the experience but there is a general theme behind all of the experience.

I was on their side once and l can understand their sentiments but most people in the world and by most l mean 98 percent people who believe in God do so for having a meaning in life and not for logical reasons.When l went through existential crisis , after contemplating how l will disappear from the world one day, l couldn't help but turn back to God for going through that time and forgetting it. Most atheist would rather embrace the bitter reality but it fails to work for many people.

Yes, absolutely. I hope that l don't sound like l am preaching.

I don't think you will ever understand what l said unless you see for yourself.

The problems with atheist is that they never have met a real mystic. By mystic l mean someone who has devoted his whole life searching for God and gone through the ascetism and all hardships of life. I think there is a whole different kind of experience waiting for us if we manage to completely disconnect from the world and have no other desire but to know God. I have met countless people like that and they have always said the same thing ; reason can never lead you to know God .

The belief in God is trancendental, it is not even in the field of empiricism or logical systems. God is beyond space and time and asking for a prove of God is asking the wrong question. Beliefs are more like feelings than reason.In sufism, we say that when a belief reaches it's perfection, it turns into love.

The debate wittgenstein had with turing was really interesting since both of them were at cambridge teaching foundation of mathematics. The content turing was teaching was drastically different from wittgenstein, so he attended many lectures of wittgenstein. The debate on contradiction reflects the differences of the approach towards understanding maths of Wittgenstein and Turing.Wittgenstein contended that we can allow contradictions in maths as long as we do not use it as a result but turing gave the example of a bridge that would collapse in case of contradiction. Wittgenstein would in his book ask the question on countable number and turing told him N, the cardinality of the set of natural numbers .Wittgenstein in response argued that a finitist wouldn't allow that and so one..

I agree with the logical positivists that a priori knowledge about the real, physical world cannot be justified; unlike a priori knowledge about abstract, platonic worlds, as in mathematics.

Logical positivist used the verificationism principle to regard metaphysical statements as meaningless, would you go along that belief ? Ironically, the principle fails to justify itself and the whole theory falls apart there.

.... statement is meaningful only if it is either empirically verifiable or else tautological (i.e., such that its truth arises entirely from the meanings of its terms). Thus, the principle discards as meaningless the metaphysical statements of traditional philosophy as well as other kinds of statements—such as ethical, aesthetic, or religious principles

Objective Reality is the absolute reality; it is what is, and that's all there is to it. It's the view generally adopted by analytic philosophers, sciencists, and the like. It's daft because we cannot knowingly access Objective knowledge, but that's part of another discussion, not this one

This reminds me of the opening lines of tractatus logico philosophicus.

1. The world is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.

1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

1.2 The world divides into facts.

1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

2. What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.

Is this view :up: or :down:

The freedom to do as we wish, constrained only by the world, and the way it is, and the way it behaves. So long as we accept that we can't change the world (with some minor exceptions), we can act as we wish within that world.

Since we are constrained by the world, how does that interfere with our freedom ?

The way it is. Just as Objective Reality is that which actually is, so the world, expressed in a rather less rigorous way, is what it is. It follows no laws, and acknowledges no constraints. It just is. So the way of the world is ... the way of the world. The way of the Tao, perhaps. :wink:

Can you explain objective reality and subjective reality as a concept, l don't really know what's going on here. :grin:

What do you mean by " freedom " in freedom to act ? :wink: :wink:

mean we can't avoid the way the world works just because, with our free will, we decided it should work in some other way.

:ok: l agree that it works in only one way but what is that way ?

Did I just cover that, in what I said above?

I never implied that it was your stance, l was just going about an extreme form of determinism.

Those who believe that we do not have free will should have problems explaining something that doesn't exit according to them. Similarly those who believe in free will should have problems explaining cause and effect 's relation to freedom.

How would you explain free will and what does it mean to have a free will ?
Absolute freedom is absurd since everyone interacts with the sense data provided from the world.

I would go with that too . :smile:
What is your take on the free will debate ?

People often connect determinism and causality but l think they are not that interlinked, we can have a indeterminate system ( if indeterminate system is a unpredictable system ) that is based on cause and effect relation.
Consider the example below , > represents cause.

A>B and B>C,D,E
C>F,G,H D>I,J K E>L,M,N
This system will be complicated as the cause and effect relations will grow exponentially. Let's say at a certain limit the computer cannot track the causes anymore and that will be quick. From that point onwards , we will have an unpredictable system but that which can be traced to a general cause.
For example it wont be correct to say whatever E causes will be caused by A. So we may approximate certain things. It will also be negligible since the systems will gradually become smaller or restricted under A.

Maybe empty space but space has no meaning if it is void or empty. In a way an empty space doesn't exit.
There is always a background or logical space where we can have different states of affairs.

Are you saying that scientists simply filter out the lesser contributors to cause so that they can focus on just the one (even if it is the biggest one)? Ignoring and 'simplifying' reality in favour of calculability (if that's a word)? Perhaps I have misunderstood?

Yes, l think that was my point. For example when deriving a equation, say PV=nRT. Physicist will make certain assumptions which will simplify the model. Like these assumptions which can be false in certain cases.
– Gases are composed of very small molecules and their number of molecules is very large.
– These molecules are elastic.
– They are negligible size compare to their container.
– Their thermal motions are random.
-- The molecules do not attract/repel each other.
Sometimes the results are not precise as in case of actual molecules ( they occupy space, hence affecting the actual volume, they have attraction between molecules affecting the pressure ) and there we need ,Van der Waals corrected equations. Later on there was Maxwells correction too.

I think the Planck time is the time it takes for something travelling at the speed of light to traverse the Planck length. From this we reason that nothing can happen in a time less than the Planck time. I think I have that right, but I'm open to correction

I think it is more like nothing can happen in less than plank time that has any meaning in the current theoretical framework of physics.
It depends on ones perspective in my opinion. If you regard the current theories of physics to being complete in explaining the universe, then plank time is the shortest time period. I think physics will have to develop a more complete theory which unites the macro world with the quantum world, so there is a possibility for time period being shorter than plank time. To be candid, the possibility is low.

With regards to a complicated system, l have found the following article whose link is below quite useful. From what l have understood partially is that, a deterministic system can be unpredictable because the uncertainty and the error in the initial measurement of the system will cause drastic change in the calculated outcome.

.... closer look reveals that determinism and predictability are very different notions. In
particular, in recent decades chaos theory has highlighted that deterministic systems can be
unpredictable in various different ways.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12166/1/DeterminismIndeterminismWordPittsburghArchiveWithF.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwift_CkjonkAhUL-2EKHSknAvwQFjABegQIDxAH&usg=AOvVaw3LDopPZI0btavaExsb5oik

As a disciple of Wittgenstein, l will fight scientism wherever l find it. :smile:

Why not ? I am not a physicist but casually browsing about plank time, l think that we don't have any theory currently in physics ( that which combines relativity with QM ) to use any time period shorter than plank time. It doesn't imply that plank time is the shortest time period.

As I said, it seems to me things get a lot less clear when we talk about more complex situations. I can flip a coin 1,000 times and the results will come out close to 50/50, but I can't predict exactly. That's probably caused by a lot of unknown factors which are difficult or impossible to predict.

If an effect has multiple causes, as in the case of the flip of a coin. There can be multiple questions raised to examine the behavior. If someone asked me what caused it to fall. Gravity as an answer won't suffice because my releasing of the coin enabled gravity to make it fall as it was there before l released it but not effective. I dont think science will have much of a problem with regards to the confusion behind the cause as scientists have some effective method of ruling out many causes to focus on the cause which is essential. With regards to predicting head or tail, it gets a bit complicated. If we get a computer that analyzes the behavior of the coin as it gets closer to the ground, we will have more accurate prediction as we get closer to the event and it will be more clear.

All of our computers work, so QM is telling us something right.

I would disagree with the following arguments simply for the reason that practical success indicates a good theory, not a perfect one. Newton's law work fine with average size objects traveling far slower than the speed of light.Once we get to really big objects or the really small ones, the errors are not negligible. QM is a mathematical construct and that's probably why they had to decide a physical interpretation of it and a philosophical one too in some sense.

If we leave behind cause and effect relation, most of the laws would be senseless. This takes me back to philosophers in the 11 century who thought of reality as being created in every instance with a tiny gap in time that is too small to measure. They used that theory to explain miracles or as they called it , the suspension of habit. If we continue with this theory, we will have to regards laws as describing a habit in reality, not the reality itself.

There is a Plank time, the shortest time in which anything can happen, and there are zillions of these times a second. Presumably, the discreteness of this and other quanta indicates a digital universe, casting Einstein's analog continuum into doubt—but it could still very well approximate a continuum.

I think the reason behind restriction on the shortest time as plank time is because that is the shortest time we can measure but mathematically speaking, consider " t " to be Plank time , wouldn't t/2 be shorter than that.

Identity politics isn't the main reason behind the protests but it is hidden deep within the movement.I am very pessimistic with regards to the success of this movement. It is is absurd to suggest that a bunch of teenagers are going to persuade the powerful CCP party leaders to change their minds. I doubt the sincerity of most western leaders.

I would give this discussion set-up a rating of one out of ten.

Not anymore. :wink:

I hope that l am proven wrong. The more one thinks about the current situation in hk, the more depressing it gets.

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This is the end.

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Non Cognivitism has many other positions which haven't been discussed here yet. I hope we can discuss them one by one as the article states that

Since non-cognitivism is a species of irrealism about ethics, it should be unsurprising that many of its main motivations overlap with those for other versions of ethical irrealism

It is possible that most non cognitivists support a hybrid theory with various ethical irealist ideas overlapping.

Prescriptivists suggest that moral judgments are a species of prescriptive judgement and that moral sentences in the indicative mood are semantically more akin to imperatives than indicatives.

Universal prescriptivism suggests that moral statements like " stealing is wrong " act as "do no steal" since the main aim of moral statements is that they should be followed. What differs moral prescriptions from other imperatives statements like " you should not litter here " is the universal character of the imperative. They act as a command to the agent,the one at whom it is directed and all similar cases in society too. There is another problem with imperative statements, while most philosophers find it difficult to strictly indicate what falls under following but they generally state " having intentions to carry out order " falls under it. I may have missed the specifics but this is the gist of it.

Quasi Realism as the name suggests, is another branch of counter realism in ethics which seeks to explain why we treat ethical statements as being apt for truth values, especially in the society without basing their grounds on cognitivism. They reject that moral statements can have truth values attached to them on epistemic grounds. The positivist rejected moral language as being outside the domain of logic and scientific statements and hence meaningless as the article hints

Hence they fail tests for meaningful discourse proposed by logical positivists.

Expressivism is akin to emotivism as they have taken similar lines of reasoning however there is a fine distinction between them.

In recent years, however, the term ‘expressivist’ has come to be used in a narrower way, to refer to views which attempt to construct a systematic semantics for moral sentences by pairing them with the states of mind that the sentences are said to express. Such expressivists hold that the meanings of all sentences containing moral terms are determined by the mental states that they serve to express.

While the emotivist may fall under two broad different categories such as behaviourism or expressivism. It is also interesting to note that mental states are not always emotions. They can have imperatives, indicative moods and much more. This theory is different from the ones that l have mentioned above in the sense that it describes them all by placing mental states of the brain as a foundation to determine the meaning of ethical statements.

I will write about the hybrid theories of non-cognitivism before moving on to ethical realism.

I wrote this earlier on but l think it addresses your statement here ,

. I would reject that such truths exist, but do not think that the parties who put forth such an argument are necessarily making an emotional appeal.

I would divide emotivism into two further categories.
1.Overt emotivism regards the utterance of moral statements as attitudes in a descriptive form.
Hence the statement "killing is bad" is a description of the statement "l hate killing". So according to overt emotivist we can replace these two statements. This theory is really week in my opinion.
2.Covert emotivism may be a little tricky since they tend to replace hate,despise, fear etc with bad , evil , immoral and so on in moral statements but they do not express attitudes as you have mentioned rightly.
, it seems obvious to me that people don't just express an emotion when they make moral statements.
Mind you, you can obviously disagree with the distinction but l think it's useful ( at least for me ) .
Do you think covert emotivism is really common among public especially when they tend to defend some moral statements with ridiculous arguments. If it is common with public, academic are only good at hiding it and justifying the use of truth values.

If "Lying is wrong" is the only moral assumption I'm making then it would bo wrong to lie to a murderer. To make it ok in that scenario you'd need something more detailed like: "Taking a course of action that can be reasonably inferred to incur a lot more suffering than other available options is wrong" for example would permit lying to said murderer.

I think that response is classical Utilitarianism. That maxim can also have problems in certain cases like the following one. Should a judge sentence an innocent person to death to avoid mass rioting that can cause 100s of death ? Most people would not justify that. There is also another problem with maximizing happiness and reducing suffering because the consequences may not be achieved and yet the deeds may still be noble and good. Consider a firefighter who tries to save a baby but fails in the end. He hasn't reduced any suffering in the end but the act was clearly moral and good.

No. I don't think you can assign absolute truth values to anything. Moral assumptions (as well as other assumptions) are statements you proclaim to be true which allow for further reasoning but that leaves them open to someone coming along and saying "But actually I don't agree with the statement lying is wrong and I personally prefer the statement lying is right" and there is nothing you can do about that. There is no assumption you can assign a truth value to in such a way that makes it immune to someone coming along and disagreeing with it.

I want to clarify my point on what turns a statement into a proposition. Non cognitivism asserts that moral statements are incapable of having truth values, and that means assigning truth values i.e true or false is meaningless. Non--cognitivism doesn't imply that all moral statements have to be accepted as either true or false and it also doesn't imply that people cannot disagree with each other. It is an issue of logic and language and not that of ethics .