The nature of consciousness and mind is an open question for philosophy as long as no attempt is made to quash it with pseudo-science such as determinism. — MondoR

If non-determinism at the scale of the brain function is negligible, this will be pertinent to those views that rest freedom on non-determinism. In the same way in which apparent Newtonian determinism is pertinent to a bridge engineer or a plane manufacturer.

@Olivier5

I apologize if I translated your suggestion of hidden ontology as theistic inaccurately. In either case, if you could elaborate what you mean, when you have the time, I would be able to respond better. Because I fail to understand what reason means as a more general concept, beyond human comprehension.
How is it different from lack of reason altogether? Because, as it stands, It is difficult to discern something tangible from something intangible, even if it may be just a speculation on our part.

And from this Determinism built this story about everything that occurs in the Universe can be prodicted with exactitude, even the choices were make. Isn't this outlandish?! — MondoR

I agree that this would be outlandish. At least in the sense of local prediction, we know now that this cannot be done. Globally, as I said, non-determinism and determinism are indistinguishable, but locally we cannot make fully accurate predictions at any scale, and the quality of prediction worsens for mircoscopic events.

What I was arguing initially is, that this doesn't make sense for the free will argument, because the neural processes are too macroscopic to be qualitatively determined by this non-determinism. Even if a single synapse could be affected and a neuron would arbitrarily fire every now and then, the human brain is so vastly meshed that I doubt if such occurrences would have sufficient psychological impact to affect our perception of moral accountability. I also argued, that even if those processes were somehow key, I still don't think that morality rests on a coin toss anyhow.

I actually agree with the reply: .

By this precept, the indeterminist nature of the universe is proven by the double slit experiment. — Olivier5

Please, check my next to last response. I don't mean to be impolite, but I don't want to double post it.
"Quantum uncertainty is not arbitrary non-determinism. ...
..."

I agree that it does not NECESSARILY conform to OUR analytical comprehension. That's an assumption that it does. But even if it is a false assumption, it does not mean the universe is ontologically absurd. It just looks that way to us. — Olivier5

Could you elaborate. I understand that ontology is not epistemics, but absurdity is about human logic. What do you mean by the "logic of the deity". Not that I object, but how do you discern it from "chaos of the deity".

There MWI interpretation. Try to grasp the exorbitance that Determinists have had to reach in order to justify determinism in an infinite number of universes. Yes, new universes are created for every quantum event. Yet, even stretching to the infinite universes, our Universe, the one we live in, remains probabilistic. Let the Gods live in their Universes (Heaven?) and we live in ours. — MondoR

I want again to stress that physics does not and cannot claim anything about determinism at the global scale of the entire universe. It only deals with epistemics concerning isolated systems, which are the result of spatial separation and observation of small vicinity of an object in a small amount of time. Therefore, there may be no coin toss involved at all. Maybe it is all scripted, and particle interactions register the various outcomes with frequency that conforms to a probabilistic model, but in reality there is nothing arbitrary. It is not possible to predict the outcome from the available local information. I am not convinced that we need multiple words to explain QM. We only need the mathematics that describes the regularity in the relations between prior and posterior conditions. For all we know, it may all be scripted. Or it might not be.

Regularity (habitual actions) should be confused with determinism. Nothing has ever been shown to be precisely deterministic. They tried, and then came Quantum uncertainty. — MondoR

Quantum uncertainty is not arbitrary non-determinism. It just changes deterministic induction with statistical induction, but it is not the same as lack of any predictive utility. Also, everyone who claims non-predictability appears to hang on QM, which appears to me to not be the core of your objection. Are you saying that QM non-determinism is your primary argument against predictability?

Also, things have been shown to have been sufficiently large-scale deterministic to extract value from the predictive behavior. We didn't predict and fail, we predicted and succeeded. That is why we are still here. This is known factual history. We can't claim that this will remain true at the large scale in the future, but the account of our past experience is set in stone and it shows that the world lends itself to prediction. Even if for small-scale phenomenon requires us to adapt from complete determinacy to evaluation of expectations and standard deviations, and risk assessment, we still assume that we will extract value from our predictions, based on anecdotal experience from the past (where it indeed worked.)

How do you propose to test the above conjecture that more then one possible outcome can arise from a given circumstance? It's not so easy, because if you demonstrate empirically that two outcomes can arise from the same initial conditions, a determinist can always say that you must not have exhaustively and perfectly replicated the initial conditions. — Olivier5

Healthy skepticism is justified, but doubt is not an argument. If we start doubting the exhaustiveness of our observations, we are not going to make any progress. A non-determinist could similarly argue that when the the outcome is perfectly predicted, it is only because not all hidden features were measured, and if they were, some of them would turn out different every time. Which turned out to be true in the case of QM. But that didn't change the fact, that in its scope, Newtonian mechanics did make progress for humanity, and pragmatically speaking was correct. I hinted in my (rather longish) reply that we apply determinism and non-determinism with respect to some narrow amount of conditions, not with respect to all there is potentially to know.

The universe appears indeterministic to mainstream science and to common sense. But we can't check. We don't have another universe, that we could watch in fast forward to check that everything always happens the same manner as it did the first time around... — Olivier5

The universe of QM is not just non-deterministic, but probabilistic, which I paraphrased as inclined non-deterministic. This is not the same as arbitrary non-deterministic. Propensities are counter-factual phenomenon, because they are not testable from finite amount of measurements. If you don't accept statistics as prima-facia instrument of reason, they remain untestable, whereas range-based non-determinsm (either/or outcomes) is confirmable by some amount of measurements. At least retroactively/retrospectively as I explained.

So to me, the question is metaphysical. It matters not. It's like invisible unicorns, all-knowing daemons and hidden variables. Maybe the gods know what the future holds, or maybe not... We certainly don't know. — Olivier5

This is what I call absurdism. I consider this different from non-determinism, even when the range of prescribed outcomes of the latter is trivially all-inclusive. A demonstrable statement should be reproducible to some extent, recurring to some extent, and empirical non-determinism should be demonstrable. Whereas absurdism claims that both determinism and non-determinism are deceptive, transient, incidental. As Shakespeare wrote in King Lear - "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." Absurdism claims that the universe does not conform to analytical comprehension. A form of contention to reason.

We want to know, and it's a good idea to try to know what the future holds. But we also sense confusingly that we will forever be unable to predict the future, if only because any advanced prediction of a certain outcome may change our response to the situation that would give rise to this outcome, and thus change the outcome itself. Predictions of the future affect the future... — Olivier5

We consider what the future holds under the hypothesis that we react and that we don't react. If we predict that the future is adverse when we withdraw, we react and thus change it. We evaluate our possible choices - actions and inaction - in accordance to the prediction of their effects. If we predict right, we will change the future precisely as we expect to.

I still want to stress, that induction is not rationally justified. It is pragmatic instrument, that we can infer from retrospective observations is the product of very early natural selection. That still does not verify it.

A point I would make is that the kind of self-knowledge that philosophy wants to impart doesn't necessarily require any special scientific apparatus. I would say that the aim of philosophy, generally, is to attain a state of equilibrium and disinterestedness, to enable you to always act as the situation calls for and to realize your true purpose, whatever that is. — Wayfarer

Science is not unquestionable and empiricism does not axiomatically exhaust all that we can call our experience. But at least we are compelled to science by more impeding necessities. I realize that you can claim that the need for purpose and origin are similar to some extent, but science renders their existence suspicious not just by its exploration of the inanimate universe, but also because it conveys to us about our mental fragility and our addiction to self-affirmation. Those higher-order needs might turn out to be vanities. That is why, one needs to be skeptical.

Even if our cerebral motivations to ask the questions are vain, that does automatically mean that the questions are non-sensical,

But there is a wide range of possible answers. And it seems to me that theism is cherry picking them. The "endemic reason" might be just some narrow range of experience and in the grand scheme of things it might mean nothing. That is absurdism. Or the universe might be all the explanation there is. It might be its own reason. But even if you cannot accept absurdism, because it appears counter-anecdotal to any experience that you have with the universe, this still leaves the question - do you accept any ecocentric (i.e. non-antropocentric) or self-denigrating forms of theism - dystheism, panpsychism, pandeism, etc. To me, it appears that most theists are comparatively optimistic. Why? Isn't that indication for bias?

I'm not telling anyone to believe me. I'm just saying that if you look at the history, Determinism was just a story concocted by some people with zero evidence to support it. Believe it if you want, but let's not pretend there is any science behind it. — MondoR

That is true for anything relying on inductive inference, not so much specifically for determinism. Non-determinism and determinism can be both empirical, in that both can specify the possible range of the outcome. There cannot be any science behind inductive inference itself, because science stands on top of it. We have faith in the reproducibility of nature's relations that is not founded on science. Science is founded on it.

There is as much science behind Determinism as they is behind the Sun God riding across the sky. That people believe it, gives lots of insight into the nature of human beings. Mythology exists throughout history. People choose to believe what they want to believe. — MondoR

That is not precisely true. First, we should come to terms that we cannot talk sensibly (as in by virtue of sense experience) of global determinism vs global non-determinism in a meaningful way, because the two conditions are epistemically indistinguishable. That is, whether the universe tosses dices all the time or is a scripted story is undetectable by observation on a global scale (looking at the entire present and prior spatial configuration of matter). I guess, we could discuss the proposition of global non-determinism metaphysically, but it will be a tenuous conversation with rather uncommitted intuition inspired terminology. And to quote Wittgenstein, although there might be all sorts of invisible forces at play, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." At least epistemically and scientifically, that I think should be the case. Let's focus on the facts for the moment and leave the nebulous area of metaphysics aside.

What we are actually concerned with is local predictability, and more specifically the constrained sort of predictability that extrapolates the conditions from the vicinity of an object in the recent past to the same location in the near future. Again, even then, whether we actually have a rule for any kind, even probabilistic extrapolation, is unknown. We cannot verify that by definition, because the future contains the events that have no consequences for our moment in time. There is no evidence to be had that our laws will continue to work. The future cannot phone in and tell us whether we are right that nature is going to be always regular. (Even if retrocausation is true in the interpretational sense of QM.)

However, inductive inference is retroactively confirmable. What I mean by that claim is that our expectation for regularity of the natural law in the distant past can be evaluated in terms of the recent past. That still says nothing about the future, but it proves that if the people of the distant past did not think of nature as regular and consistent and did not use their predictive capacity to anticipate the outcome based on precedent anecdotal experience, they would be at a disadvantage. In fact, in the extreme case of complete skepticism to any predictability, they would stall even their routine existence and be extinct. This shows that inductive inference was a good thing for us, retrospectively, and more so explains while we are compelled to trust it. Anyone who didn't trust induction died and left no offspring or culture to reproduce their behavior.

Now, as a philosopher, I cannot tell you that induction and therefore scientific empiricism is right. But being a philosopher is expensive proposition. It is life threatening. Being a pragmatic human being, which is more affordable as a lifestyle choice, I would tell you to trust it and suggest that you will perish if you don't. (In fact, if you didn't trust it at all, I am willing to speculate that we wouldn't be having this conversation.) Yes, I know that I am biased by my culture and genetics, and that philosophically the idea of trusting the future still makes no sense. But I cannot refuse those staples on which my existence thrives anymore then I can refuse to eat. That is, I can, but I dare not think what will commence. This features of faith in induction and statistics are mine to have.

Now, there's something else. In the end, it is through remnants of the past, not direct knowledge of the pas that we understand of our anecdotal experience with nature. You could, I would claim rightfully, in philosophical terms, suspect that those are also taken on faith. You could mistrust even your own memory, written records and artifact history, and doubt whether science was indeed used at all. That immediately implies radical solipsism. Because, if you cant trust anything that has already transpired by the indirect evidence of its occurrence, then you cant trust even your senses. They are also indirect and are not instantaneous. So, philosophically commendable, but self-defeating.

Except determinism makes enormous claims, like the idea that this post I am now writing was predetermined since the Big Bang. When you make such a gigantic claim, you got the burden of proof.

Beside, science has decided on this issue. Modern science is undeterministic, on the whole. — Olivier5

Lets make some distinction between factual non-determinism and absurdism. What I mean by factual determinism is the experience, or at least the conjecture, that more then one possible outcome can arise from a given circumstance. And by saying possible, I mean it in the positivist sense, as in something that will happen at least once someday. Or we are again dealing with nebulous metaphysical statements in some intuition inspired terminological space. With only epistemologically positive considerations in mind, non-determinism has the burden of proof. So does determinism. There is no point of passing the burden around, because both are empirical statements and can be treated on their own. Both are stating something concrete that is subject to sense experience. Inclined non-determinism is different, because it deals with hidden propensities. It is even more presumptuous statement than determinism, because it relies not only on induction, as a prima facie concept, but on statistical induction as well. Both need to be taken on faith, before propensities/inclinations can even be considered as empirical realities. It still has the burden of proof in those new terms.

Absurdism is not epistemic statement, because it is a counter-epistemic attitude. There is no point of talking about burden of proof for absurdity, because it rejects the notion of effective logic. I do not object to the sentiment philosophically. I am tentatively absurdist myself. I just see no value coming from it in epistemic discussions and therefore would refrain from bringing it up. It is just a conversation ender.

For the purpose of conversations (and to use a visual arts analogy), da Vinci might draw the Vitruvian Man or a stick figure - it depends on the details that need to be transferred, the amount of shared conceptual knowledge we can rely on between us, and how much attention and effort each can spare in the time available. — Possibility

Yes, the underlying concept doesn't change, but just its expression or application. Although, not just in relation to communication, but also its personal use. Concepts can be applied narrowly by the individual for recognizing objects by their superficial features, but then they are still entrenched in full detail in their mind. The concept is subject to change, as you described, because it is gradually refined by the individual and by society. The two, the popularly or professionally ratified one and the personal one, need not agree, and individuals may not always agree on their concepts. Not just superficially, by how they apply the concepts in a given context, but by how those concepts are explained in their mind. However, with enough experience, the collectively accepted technically precise definition is usually the best, because even if sparingly applied in professional context, it is the most detailed one and can be reduced to a distilled form, by virtue of its apparent consequences, for everyday use if necessary.

The example I gave, with the zero-dimensional inhabitant was a little bloated and dumb, but it aimed to illustrate that concepts correspond to partitionings of the experience. This means that they are both not completely random, because they are anchored at experience, direct or indirect, and they are a little arbitrary too, because there are multiple ways to partition the same set. I may elaborate the example at a later time, if you deem necessary.

To a more complete disclosure, I want to make another example. But I hope that you will answer the above question. Lets say there are two puppets governed by the hands of a puppeteer. One puppet beats the other one. Are they morally responsible, if all their mechanical actions are governed externally. I wold say, sort of, but not when seen merely as a puppet, but when considered in their extended self, which is connected with the master. The puppet doesn't have description of their personality on their own. Their agency, scripted as it may be, is embodied in the master. Thus, the master is responsible, yet, it is evil only in character of the aggressive puppet, not the victim puppet.

I am "in character". If there is will of some sort, in the natural law, in any sense of the word, whichever it may be, determinism or not, intelligent or not, I will be still "in character", even if by virtue of that governing overarching will. My responsibility stems from being the very boundary of the features of this character. I understand your idea of morality, because it requires independence of state, and physical non-determinism can afford that. To you, moral delineation without physical delineation makes no sense. But, first, I don't think that there is enough independence in QM to call for moral accountability, considering what we know about character development and how it is very compellingly affected by the conditions early in life of an individual. And it still remains just a physical nuance, about some spatio-temporal relation, which fails to translate into moral tone for me. After all, non-deterministic outcomes can be scripted, but just not scripted by locally acting physical laws that allow prediction. Even if we are together in this play, and are merely aspects of the same big idea for a script, like with the puppeteer case, even if I am ultimately not truly independent from you, because we are moved by the same forces, I am "bad puppet" by virtue of my connection to the will of the master. I am evil in their mind. Someone has to be evil in their story, and there is no excuse for it, or the story will turn into non-sense. If the master decides to throw a dice here and there, or it seems to me that the story is full of unexplained dice-like turns of events, it doesn't change my character. I am still me, or they are me "in character", whichever our case might really be.

Sure, there must be quantum indeterminacy for freedom to be actual; if everything were wholly causally determined there would be no freedom in the sense required for the idea of moral accountability to be rationally justified. — Janus

I simply... disagree. Not for pragmatic or legal moral accountability, not for abstract ethical one. I agree with you that QM non-determinism is necessary for freedom of the physical outcome, as in non-uniqueness of the relation between prior and posterior state in the temporal ordering. This type of freedom in the very definitional sense, is going to depend on non-determinism. But you are asking me to equate my personal accountability and responsibility to a coin toss, i.e. the aforementioned physical freedom. I think that the two are completely unrelated.

Even if physical non-determinism never existed, and life was just a scripted story, I would be agent "in the story". Because that is what characters are, they save damsels, frogs turn to princes, evil stepmothers try to poison their daughters, etc. Their decisions are what they are described to be, ant they are just as important as ever, accountable for who they are as characters. That is the purpose of the story - to make them accountable for their character. What if kids started to ask, why do we blame the evil step mother, when it is us who tells the story. It doesn't matter, because how the character comes to be is unrelated to who they are. The character is in our head, and they are guilty precisely by design in this case, but that doesn't change the fact.

Nonetheless, because I think that we seem to have fundamentally different idea of morality, I will still test you with a thought experiment, if you would oblige me. Imagine that the universe was completely deterministic with exception of one single fair coin. All murderers in the world have killed with complete physical predetermination of their actions, except one that tosses the said coin. Are you telling me that this person, for you, is the only one that can be held accountable for their actions, based on the flip of this single non-deterministic coin?

You seem to be arguing for definition of a concept as more important than identification of its instances, but this only reveals a subjective preference for certainty. There are variables that affect the predictive value of the concept map regardless of whether you start with a definition or identified instances. — Possibility

That is true. I rather cockily answered "yes and no". I do partly agree with you. There are many layers to the phenomenon.

I want to be clear that I don't think that a dog is defined conceptually by the anatomy of the dog, because it is inherently necessary to define objects by their structure. I don't even think that a dog can be defined conceptually exhaustively from knowing all the dogs in the world. It is rather, contrasted with all the cats (very roughly speaking). But eventually, there is some convergence, when the sample collection is so large that we can tell enough about the concept (in contrast to other neighboring concepts) that we don't need to continue its refinement. And that is when we arrive at some quasi-stable technical definition.

There are many nuances here. Not all people have practical use for the technical definition, since their life's occupation does not demand it and they have no personal interest in it. But I was contending that those who do use the fully articulated concept, will actually stay mentally committed to its full detail, even when they use it crudely in routine actions. Or at least for the most part. They could make intentional exceptions to accommodate conversations. They just wont involve the full extent of their knowledge at the moment. Further, people can disagree on concepts, because of the extrapolations that could be made from them or the expressive power that certain theoretical conceptions offer relative to others.

I was originally proposing how the process of categorical conception takes place by direct interactions of children or individuals, without passing of definitions second hand, or from the overall anthropological point of view. I think it is compatible with your proposal. Let's assume that people inhabited a zero dimensional universe and only experienced different quantities over time. Lets take the numbers 1 and 2. Since only two numbers exist, there is no need to classify them. If we experience 5, we could decide that our mental is poor, and classify 1 and 2 as class A, and 5 as class B. This now becomes the vocabulary of our mental process, albeit with little difference to our predictive capability. (This case would be more interesting if we had multiple features to correlate.) If we further experience 3, we have two sensible choices that we could make. We could either decide that all numbers are in the same class, making our perspective of all experience non-discerning, or decide that 1, 2, and 3 are in one class, contrasted with the class of 5. The distinction is, that if all numbers are in the same class, considering the lack of continuity, we could speculate that 4 exists. Thus, there is a predictive difference.

In reality, we are dealing with vast multi-dimensional data sets, but we are applying similar process of grouping experience together, extrapolating the data within the groups, recognizing objects to their most fitting group and predicting their properties based on the anticipated features of the class space at their location.

P.S.: I agree with your notion for the process of concept refinement, I think.

@Janus
What I mean is, assuming you are not a dualist, do you suggest that a quantum indeterminacy of some kind, by simply spurring a chance decision here and there in our development, could be more important factor in our guilt or our license to blame a person then the presence of elaborately expressed personality and its relation to the outcome after the development has taken place?

Yes, but the point is the convictions, values and intentions must be freely chosen or the person is not responsible for holding them. — Janus

Why are claiming that the person is not their convictions, values and intentions. Are you suggesting dualism? If you are not, what do you propose is the person?

I don't think this is true at all. People are not their values. People do have values, intentions and convictions, and sure they are judged on account of them, or at least on the actions which embody them. — Janus

I think that you are objecting, because a person could technically abstain from applying their personality. But that is again due to their convictions, values and intentions. So, the personality can have complex internal dynamics and we don't judge its pieces, but the overall effect.

@Janus
Just to clarify. When I say "transfer of the values within to actions without, which we consider your freedom", I don't mean to say that there is some possibility for in-the-last-moment sway on the process of this transfer. That is inessential. It is your character, and you are expected to practice it and manifest it as accurately as you can afford to. You couldn't abstain from living. But as much as we expect you to be yourself, you should expect us to oppose any detriment to us and to judge you for the effects from being you. Freedom is the relation between your personality and the effect it has on its surrounding environment, which is expressed in having involvement in the outcome.

If I couldn't bquoteut have had the set of convictions, intentions and desires then how can be held morally responsible, and fairly praised or blamed for having them? — Janus

They are what we identify you as. You don't really "have them" in that sense. We don't blame you for having them, we are more-so blaming them for having you, or having become part of you.

Lets say that you are decided on a life of crime because of your early life experience. We can explain how your lifestyle choices were determined by your past, yet we evaluate the character/personality/system of values for the decisions that led to the consequent damage. If your personality causes pain and suffering, we blame it, and if it causes comfort and happiness, we praise it. You either have a good personality or you don't. Your character is agent in the world. Its interaction with the environment, the transfer of the values within to actions without, which we consider your freedom, is what we evaluate and judge for better or worse.

But under determinism I have no control over what my desires are, and which are going to be the stronger in any situation. So, how can I be held morally responsible for something that was never under my control in the first place? — Janus

I am not sufficiently literate, but I can give you my perspective. I believe that according to your expectation, what we would credit for the moral character of our actions is some entity that sits in the control room of your personality, consults your system of values that is manifested partly externally in your brain and takes executive decisions that affect the outcome. My logic is different. We are actually evaluating your convictions, intentions and desires, and we don't care whether they are deterministically related to the surrounding phenomena. They are yours per-se. There is no control room. You are your personality and system of values.

This makes sense to me. Much of what you have written is difficult for me to follow, but I get the sense that we’re roughly on the same page here...? — Possibility

This reminds me of a Blackadder response - "Yes.. And no."

I’m pointing out a distinction between the linguistic definition of a concept - which is an essentialist and reductionist methodology of naming consolidated features - and an identification of that concept in how one interacts with the world - which is about recognising patterns in qualitative relational structures. — Possibility

I think that according to your above statement, the technical definition of a class does not correlate to immediate sense experience, nor the conception from direct encounters between the subject and the object, nor to the recognition practices of objects in routine life. If that is the claim, I contend that technically exhaustive definitions are just elaborated countours of the same classes, but with level of detail that differs, because it is necessary for professionals that operate with indirect observations of the object. Say, as a software engineer, I think of computers in a certain way, such that I could recognize features of their architecture in some unlabeled schematic. A schematic is not immediate sense experience, but my concept does not apply to just appearances, but logical organization, so the context in which the full extent of my definition will become meaningful is not the perceptual one. For crude recognition of devices by appearances in my daily routine, I match them to the idea using a rough distilled approximation from my concept, drawing on the superficial elements in it, and removing the abstract aspects, which remain underutilized.

If you are referring just to the process of identification, you are right, that if I see empty computer case, I will at first assume that it is the complete assembly and classify it is a computer. There is no ambiguity as to what a computer is in my mind, even in this scenario, but the evaluation of the particular object is based on insufficient information, and it is made with assumed risk. The unsuccessful application of weighted guesses to fill the missing features turn into an error in judgement. So, this is fuzzyness of the concept matching process, stemming from the lack of awareness, even though the definition is inаppropriate under consideration of the object's complete description.

Another situation is, that if I am given a primitive device with some very basic cheap electronics in it, I might question if it is a computer. Here the fuzzyness is not curable with more data about the features of the object, because it results from the borderline evaluation of the object by my classifier. Hence, I should recognize that classes are nuances that gradually transition between each other.

A different case arises when there is disagreement of definitions. If I see a washing machine, I would speculate that it hosts a computer inside (in the sense of electronics having the capacity for universal computation, if not anything else), but an older person or a child might not be used to the idea of embedded electronics and recognize the object as mechanical. That is, I will see computers in more places, because I have a wider definition. The disparity here is linguistic and conceptual, because the child or elderly person make crude first association based on appearances and then the resulting identification is not as good a predictor of the quality of the object they perceive. We don't talk the same language and our underlying concepts differ.

In the latter case, my definition increases the anticipated range of tools supported by electronics and my view on the subject of computing is more inclusive classifier. The classification outcome predicts the structure and properties of the object, such as less friction, less noise. We ultimately classify the elements of the environment with the same goal in mind, discernment between distinct categories of objects and anticipation of their properties, but the boundaries depend on how much experience we have and how crudely we intend to group the objects.

So, to summarize. I agree that sometimes the concept is indecisive due to edge cases, but sometimes the fuzzyness is in its application due to incomplete information. This does not change the fact that the academic definition is usually the most clearly ascribed. There is also the issue of linguistic association with concepts, I think that people can develop notions and concepts independently of language and communication, just by observing the correlations between features in their environment, but there are variables there that can sway the process in multiple directions and affect the predictive value of the concept map.

One of the questions to ask, is if the origin of life occurs naturally as a result of the concatenation of favourable circumstances, why doesn't it continue to happen? Why are there no examples of transitional forms of living cells emerging spontaneously in the host volcanic springs (or wherever it is supposed to have happened) and recapitulating the origin process? Why is it that it is not occuring spontaneously today? Whereas, in reality, all organic life seems to encode a linear memory going back billions of years to the single point of origin. That must mean something. — Wayfarer

@T Clark already pointed out that it may be due to the fact that the evolutionary stage is already saturated with complex self-sustaining life and there are dominating forces already present. The evolutionary analogue of the first-to-market phenomenon. Another idea I can come up with, is that it is easier to create symbiotic relationship and leech to or collaborate with other lifeforms then to go your own way. The only way that the stage can be reset and start anew is if some grand catastrophy destroys the present status-quo, such as a meteorite tosses itself to earth, or a multi-host viral pandemic kills the apex species.

I think that is a well-formulated question. The problem it articulates is that of intention - that life, even the very simplest forms of life, seem to possess an intentional aim, namely, to survive and propagate. And it's hard to imagine how 'the intention to survive' could even be concieved in terms of chemical replication. It is precisely with the emergence of living things that intentional behaviour begins to manifest - yet 'intentionality' is just the very factor that physicalist accounts want to dispense with, because of its association with purpose and the dreaded 'telos' of Aristotelian philosophy. — Wayfarer

If by intention we mean complex multi-layered behavior, such as immediate reactions, situational tactical (i.e. modal) behavior, long-term strategic behavior, I am not sure that physicalists should oppose it. I wouldn't, with a physicalist hat on. What may appear controversial is why the behavior ends up being constructive to the sustenance of the organism. Why the intention is indeed directed towards life sustaining behavior. But considering that the spectrum of possible choices ultimately sorts into life-sustenance and life-cessation, I think that it is obvious that if life of both intentions (i.e. forms of complex strategic behavior patterns) proliferated at one point, the latter category would have become extinct, leaving the former to assume reign of our hereditary genetic chain.

Skin color is only one tiny factor here, in classifying people between 'white' and 'black'. Otherwise most people on earth would be classified 'grey' or 'in-between' or something like that. — Olivier5

The designation can be attached to many other notions implicitly present in the context. The color designation can allude to whatever statistical correlations between ethnicity and living background are involved for the purposes of the discussion. Such as in my example, when talking about the access to and benefit from education, connection might be implied to the social strata, the culture (or mirco-culture) of upbringing, even the early exposure to crime of the individual. But there is nothing inherently wrong with recognizing the color of the skin, or those correlations, as long as it not weaponized to diminish someone. I think that considering all skin tones as non-white is just an excuse to censor the mention of skin color and sidesteps how we use such terminology in practice. If I say that someone has bright eyes, I don't mean a particular CIE colorspace lightness that we use to specify all "bright colors". It is a comparative term.

As EU citizen it hurts me to see the huge differences between our different nations. I do believe in Europe and the future of the EU. But in its current form it isn't really successful it seems. Perhaps in the future I want to move to Brussels, to see if I can make a political change there. Some people in North Western Europe actually do care about more than their own happiness — TaySan

People in developed nations want to keep their standards from being floored, which I can understand. The solution would require intricate maneuvers, because investment and labor markets are inherently adversarial. The issue will worsen with the advent of technological automation and there is another thread for this topic on the forum. But the EU states are experiencing political crisis on their own at the moment, and the overall global political situation is a fiasco, so it is unlikely to happen.

With all that being said, we are not entirely innocent.
About half of our citizenry hopes for the restoration of precedent political realities. Some feel entitled to portion of the tax from other sovereign states, while hoping that our country will divorce from its present political affiliations someday. You cannot play both sides against the center and expect to be loved by everyone.

Still, not all of the attitude towards my country is justified and there is some definite prejudice. I am glad that someone tries to remain open minded.

@TiredThinker
In review of some of the other responses, I want to clarify. Misuse of the term can always create the impression that it is a pejorative. it all depends on the context.

For example, as @javi2541997 remarked, few sensible people would qualify someone as "person of color" in direct interactions. But if some public outlet wanted to discuss the role of ethnic factors in the interaction with certain civic institutions, they might, if it was indeed appropriate, refer to them as "people of color". For example, in a discussion about the access to education. I wouldn't expect them to refer to someone in a specific personal story as being "of color". If indeed relevant, I would expect them to use Hispanic-, African-, Latino-, Asian- prefix, and then the national qualifier. As @Tom Storm also noted, saying "Non-Whites" might imply guilt ascription, so that might have to be similarly avoided.

What I am against is the idea that any skin color recognition is inherently racist and needs to be censored. That, in my opinion, even further cements the idea that skin color is a problem, and makes the issue worse then it is.

Skin color is the result of melanin production. It is a real genetic trait and has long evolutionary history. There is nothing inherently insulting about it, and if someone feels insulted, that is more so the problem then the term itself.

I am Bulgarian. Thus I am East European. East Europe is a region with inferior institutional and socioeconomic development. Which is true. I wouldn't want anyone to be ashamed from referring to my origin, if they had to discuss those problems and bore no ill will. If they wanted to inquire about the aforementioned regional specifics, it would be most pertinent to make the proper reference.

I am a pale skinned caucasian. In the past I would have considered such reference to be a pretty good first approximation of my appearance. It is interpretative and blurry, but all designations are partly fuzzy and inherently discriminatory. If I say that I am a male, you have no idea if I am muscular or skinny, virile or effeminate, rugged or metrosexual. You may conclude that I am fetishizing my masculinity to the discredit of the female population, but I'm not. All group designations are divisive. But that doesn't mean that we should deprive language of its generalized categories.

I don't care about politics. I want to be respectful, but if I need to refer to certain groups of people, I would like to be able to do that. I don't need to tiptoe my way around the subject, in a "that of which we cannot talk" style, just because certain discriminators are additionally reinforced in socioeconomic correlations that are such a difficult problem for society that it needs to be shoved under the carpet.

My personal view differs from the conventional in that I don't believe that free will should be concerned with the possibility of non-determinism, be it material or otherwise. It should be concerned with human agency.

For example, if I do something bad and you do something good to repair the damage, my action has provoked your counteraction. Your character demanded it, and now I have learned how to provoke you again. I will do something bad again and you will do something good to repair the damage again. Is that lack of free will? I don't believe so. Why? Because you act consistently with your personality, which seeks and attains involvement in the outcome.

In other words, to define free will, one has to think not solely about stimuli and responses, but about the participation of a character/personality that achieves its goals. As long as the individual is not confused factually about the nature of their involvement in a situation, and their personal agency acts as a determining factor in the outcome, then they are exercising their freedom. If they act under someone's command or are forced by factors that are beyond the scope of their personality/identity. they are not manifesting in correspondence with their character, and are not free.

But there are many obvious cognitive parameters that will be involved there. For example, a patient with mental illness might have difficulty creating consistent character and behavior, i.e. personality, and therefore will be at odds with exercising any freedom. Non-determinism wouldn't help at all, because it would only blur the presence of agency even further.

I have stated before, that if I was having a theist inclination, it would be pantheist/panpsychist. The hypothesis will be that I may be completely embodied, including all my consciousness. You can see how that creates a problem, since matter is governed by laws of nature, and many people will describe the freedom as either hanging on non-determinism in those laws or not being present at all, but I wouldn't. For a pantheist (even dystheistic one), the material laws, as grotesque as their consequences to human beings might be in terms of suffering and dissatisfaction (which is why people think of them as too profane to be the sole carrier for consciousness), are not necessarily unspirited. They are merely inhumane, because when given the latitude to evolve to high-entropy outcomes, which is the most frequently encountered condition in nature, they cause decay of organization and collide with our need for sustenance, our desire to apply our ethics and ideals. Consequently, the only counterbalancing factor is that nature is being sculpted by the interactions of low-entropy lifeforms like ourselves with their external environment, giving a properly justified perception that we are bound by nature and fighting it, rather then facilitated by it.

Our self-recognized, even if affected by genetics and development, boundaries are such that there is express conflict between the nature within and the nature without. This conflict makes us reject the universe as taking part in our free will, because it symbolizes pain and decay, the chaos, the enemy.

In reality, we are practicing those boundaries flexibly and they are emergently psychological, not always clearly physically defined. Outside of ideological discussions like this one, in routine life, people associate themselves with their body, but an ailing body part, such as a cancerous organ, might feel as a predatory hostile agency, while a separate person, such a family member might feel as an organic connection that we have with the world. For pantheism/panpsychism/naturalism, the natural law is not only limitation of who you are, it is description of all there is, and part of it is you, and other parts are distinct from you, and many of them are hostile to you and contest your existence, restricting your self-realization. Being able to realize yourself in the world, as you are currently determined, and to govern the outcome according to your convictions and/or need for personal satisfaction is having freedom. Free will is having your coherent personality behind this realization.

But from the perspective of Christian philosophy, perhaps that 'principle of self-organisation' is what has been 'bestowed' by 'the Creator'. That is what it means to say that beings 'borrow' their being from God. Hence, the freedom of will that is an essential part of the theistic model. All sentient beings are, as it were, recapitulations of being, within their capacity. In man, this capacity can come to full realisation, which is what Eastern religions call 'realisation'. — Wayfarer

I have to be honest. If I start to respond with inquiries on that paragraph, I will first ask what "freedom" is and how is it different from having your agency in the world physically present. I understand that there are physical laws that govern human beings, but that does not change the fact that they are separable as state. That is, what is the difference between having a mind of your own, and a physical state of your own. Do we need anything else that we get from transcendence - non-determinism, sense of investment, sense of involvement. Also, why is a deity needed, such that we can justify the existence of external factors, other then through intuition. I think that I am too skeptical, and I know that we differ in opinion in this regard.

So, in a sense, you can't 'explain' reason, because reason is 'that which explains'. The mistake of modern philosophy is to reduce reason to a Darwinian faculty. Reason, in modern philosophy, has become 'instrumentalised' - it only has value insofar as it serves ends, and those ends are determined by survival. — Wayfarer

If reason is how things are, then why look for it beyond the things themselves? I don't oppose the idea that the world is divine, as in beyond our personal agency, but why look beyond it? We have to have some, apparently presently unmet, criteria for "ultimate reason", or otherwise we wouldn't be talking about this. Can you elaborate on what such "ultimate reason" would provide for us - fairness, peace, vindication of effort?

That we are here for a reason. It’s not ‘a reason’ as in what, if you’re an actor, is given to you as a script. It may not be obvious or even meaningful to some other person. But there’s a reason why the universe gave rise to beings such as us, and even you in particular, and a large part of philosophy is in discerning that and responding to it. This is what the East calls your ‘Dharma’. — Wayfarer

Don't get me wrong. I relate to your suggestion as a feeling, but I believe that we are making projection of our ethical considerations into the world.

I am not just attacking you, but what 'reason' means for me, abstractly speaking, when I am trying to be detached from emotion and bias as much as possible, appears to be just a relationship that people explore while pursuing their goals. We have developed ethical considerations when evaluating the cause and effect connection in our surroundings, because we act as a community and protect our social fabric. We need to have ethical considerations, because we are pursuing ethical goals. But when we try to project them into the greater structure of the world, wouldn't that then appear to be, as such, a cognitive bias. Wouldn't that be merely trying to achieve intellectual consistency?

What do you mean by 'reason'? Is it something ethically immersed? What is your abstract definition of reason, or do you consider it a notion that need not be explained?

Physical theories produce many practical consequences, not least of which the one you’re looking at right now, but saying that modern physics has ‘simplified and harmonised’ is almost hilarious, considering. — Wayfarer

By simplified, I mean that distinct in appearance phenomena were consequently accounted for by interrelated causes, which reduced the number of cases that had to be dealt with conceptually (even if not so much practically). By harmonized, I meant that theories were unified, that is, explanations were reconciled.

You criticized science, but I was inquiring about something else. You said that 'science has no explanation why there are such laws'. What do you mean by "why". This question has various interpretations, some of which are empiricist. Empiricism does answer this question empirically, which is not expected to exceed a certain scope of relational material investigations. It may not be able to provide a foundational ethical framework for humanity, but it doesn't attempt to either. Apparently this is not enough for you, theologically speaking. What do you mean by 'why'? Could you elaborate what an answer to such a question should provide, to be considered meaningful, and what are your reasons to expect that the answer exists and thus the question is well posed?

Edit: That is, empiricism explains facts through constrained relations to facts, which I understand to be your concern here. If you want explanation for facts independent of any facts, how do you define the quality of such explanation and why you insist on its existence? For example, we can claim that there is a certain fact that needs no explanation, and call it deity. First, aside from the use of new nomenclature, what does such a hypothesis provide qualitatively? What does it describe? Is there some use for it, does it have any implications, does it foster new ethical considerations? In itself, saying that a fact is found without the need for explanation means nothing more.

Regarding the ‘laws of the Universe ‘ - important to recognise that science has no explanation for why there are such laws, or why the universe is lawful. — Wayfarer

I know that we should better agree to disagree. But I am a curious person. I try to understand or provoke different arguments and have always failed to fathom the essence of the perceived need for explanation. Not that I don't feel it. I do. But I think that it may not be what it appears to the person themselves. That I just need permanence and am grasping at air for immutable objective.Explanation for science means to simplify and harmonize, not to assume that something is foundational. Atoms are not more fundamental to chairs and stones, but they offer terms of understanding of the complex interactions that sometimes occur, such as burning and chemistry, without making every encounter with those phenomena a case by case study.

Obviously, the goal of the explanation for a theist is something else. I am critical of the idea, because I fear that is rather antropocentric, meaning that it is not a search for explanation in the same sense as physics (to simplify and harmonize), but loaded with preconceived expectation for personal satisfaction, for peace of mind. And if I have to be honest, expecting a peace of mind is something towards which I am very critical when it comes to philosophy. I may be opinionated for saying so, but I severely oppose the idea that knowledge should bring the person's mind rest. Awareness of the hidden complexity and adversity, yes, but rest, I cannot say.

I defend the plausibility of intuitive/innate belief, because science uses the same. But I cannot understand what we mean by "explanation". Let's suppose that we find a deity in some sense, but it is not humanistic - like the ultimate triangle or square or something such, and that is our deity. And suppose that we explain everything, but without giving purpose to life. We make everything fit together, but in an undignified inhumane way. Would that offer adequate answer, having your perspective?

P.S.: Obviously, the question is, about the nature of the explanation expected. Whether a triangle or square can actually explain the universe is not the subject of discussion, but we need to understand what we think an explanation should answer as a question, and why we think that it should.

I don't want to drag you back into a dispute. We can agree to disagree. I'll be fine with any compatible definition, proviso the ideas for its proper application are the same.

So there's some subtle philosophical difference between a coordinate system imposed on an object, versus the coordinate system being the object. — fishfry

Exactly, nomenclature or not. Not all philosophical differences translate to definitions and definitions are merely conventions. That is, there is always going to be some contention and heat on the issue, of who establishes the right linguistic terms for mathematics. I am contented to use either, as long as people understand the philosophical distinction and we can talk about that

As it seems to me space-time is equivalent to apple-dollars. — TheMadFool

Even if the Minkowski space were Euclidean, because there is room for disagreement on definitions (edit: its inner product is not suitable, so it shouldn't be), there is at least some pertinent relationship between time and space in it. There is specific distance that field interactions can traverse in a given amount of time, assuming no significant gravity.

In your case, if you say that an apple costs one dollar as a fixed market price, that would give some semblance of similarity. So, you have a company, you have active assets - in fruit inventory and in currency, you know how they translate to each other in value, and you are trying to guesstimate both of them by least squares regression. The distance measures by how much you are off. And the vectors are orthogonal, when they exert influence that is separable in some sense - no projection on each other.

Either way, it is difficult for me to imagine the idea of right angles. May be we are talking about noise vectors, and we are considering perpendicularly acting sources of noise. I know I might be talking with hand-wavy terms and be inarticulate here, but the point is to give you just a general direction. I doubt that I could invent a completely sensible real example.

Ok. I'm out of ammo. Maybe you're right. — fishfry

I can see that you are being polite. Thanks for not sending me out with a curse.

Can you at least tell me, did you come by your ideas solely from reading this article? — fishfry

No. In fact, it is one of the few places which concurs with the manner in which I was taught to think of analytic geometry. Not as working with numbers directly, but with coordinate systems that use vector bases to define numeric representations of the underlying coordinate free space.

I think that many people are opposed to the categorical style of thinking, that we are not defining mathematical structures to get the computations off the ground, but to abstractly define the conditions in which those computations are possible.

When you copy Wiki paragraphs could you please give the full link? I can't search every Wiki article on coordinate systems, vector calculus, Euclidean space, inner product spaces, and so forth in order to see what the context is. — fishfry

I agree. It was lame of me not to offer link, but it was from the same page that I referred to previously and it is the main article for Euclidean spaces in Wikipedia. My bad. The first paragraph was from the history of the definition, and the second was from the motivation of the definition.

But Euclidean space is in fact the coordinate system. Euclidean space is exactly the set of n-tuples with the usual norm, distance, and inner product. — fishfry

Many places define it this way. This is a hands-down concrete computations centric definition which bypasses affine spaces altogether, or considers affine spaces to be just useful for other types of computations (signal analysis and control engineering as you pointed out). It is how physicists and engineers usually think. They would similarly argue that real numbers are a particular set (such as Dedekind cuts in rational numbers), not just a type of mathematical structure - such as complete ordered field.

How are you detaching from the use of preferred origin and axial orientation then? Since, obviously, you are defining some point to be (0, 0), and some vectors to be (0, 1), (1, 0). For the universe, (0, 0) would be its center of gravity, or some other choice that someone deems excellent, for example. But in my variant, the choice is made by the use of Cartesian coordinate system which uses orthornormal basis and origin after the fact. The underlying space has no (0, 0) in it, just abstract locations, and there are no special orientations or planes, just abstract vector directions.

Despite the wide use of Descartes' approach, which was called analytic geometry, the definition of Euclidean space remained unchanged until the end of 19th century. The introduction of abstract vector spaces allowed their use in defining Euclidean spaces with a purely algebraic definition. This new definition has been shown to be equivalent to the classical definition in terms of geometric axioms. It is this algebraic definition that is now most often used for introducing Euclidean spaces.
...
A reason for introducing such an abstract definition of Euclidean spaces, and for working with it instead of R n {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} \mathbb {R} ^{n} is that it is often preferable to work in a coordinate-free and origin-free manner (that is, without choosing a preferred basis and a preferred origin). Another reason is that there is no origin nor any basis in the physical world. — Wikipedia

The emphasis is mine. And this last bolded statement is not really accurate. A lot of places, including many passages on wikipedia, use the old n-tuple defintion.

I should also say, that if I was having a practical problem, I would probably never deal with underlying vector spaces explicitly. I would only think about them. But if I was discussing semantics, in a question like this one, my investigation would be meta-mathematical, so I would talk about inner product spaces and fluid coordinate choices directly.

Sorry to hear that. — TheMadFool

It's not a big deal. You will live.

I'm asking you to relax, bend, ignore, contradict the rules/principles/whathaveyou that's making you think that there's

no actual geometric model — TheMadFool

I'm all for contrarian thought, but I don't think I can help. Distances in the Euclidean geometry, where the theorem applies, are supposed to have units that persist in all directions. Your units change with direction, pure apples and pure dollars coaxially, and some shade in between in all other directions. The angles are also arbitrary. If you rescale your dollars to cents, you will skew the space (shear map it) and thus change all angles, yet nothing in the problem domain changes. You have no native semantics for your calculations and that makes our interpretations kind of, sort of, futile.