So just the usual game of duck and dodge. :up: — apokrisis

I'm here. Offer a clear critique, and I will reply.

Just to be clear, here's my opine on the abductive response to the OP, as stated:

What is abduction, and how does it help? And the answer is quite vague. Abduction is little more than an attempt to formalise confirmation bias. It's presented as "given some evidence, infer the hypothesis that would best explain it" where "best" is left ill-defined. This leaves it entirely open to arbitrarily inferring any explanation to be the best. — Banno

I stand by it. And I don't think anyone here has presented a clear enough account of abduction to give me pause.

By “we”, you mean you. You can’t admit in public to your errors of thought. And so you must thus construct a world in which I am in the wrong for most likely being right.

If you could poke a hole in my reasoning, you would leap at it. Instead you must feign a moral victory in the pose: “Well who could ever understand this guy anyway. Am I right guys? Hey, am I right!”. — apokrisis

More about me. What fun!

In order to address your argument, it would have to be clearly expressed. You have done so in other threads, and I've addressed it. But here - it's a mess. The bits that make sense I pretty much agree with. The rest, when you try to set it out, collapses under it's own weight. That's the problem with tinsel as a construction medium.


But now we have even more certainty, from Tim. In his reply to @unenlightened, that Hume claimed we cannot know anything...

those self-same premises preclude Hume's knowing that his theorizing is true. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course Hume would agree, if not in those terms - he understands that his own philosophy is based in the same empirical and psychological habits it describes. He's not offering a proof of scepticism, he's mapping out, with humility, what can be deduced and what cannot.

Completely arse backwards once more. — apokrisis

Perhaps.

In any case, you don't say why my "it's good scientific practice to change the laws so as to make the exception disappear" is arse backwards. Change "law" to "theory" if that suits your need to be rid of god, I won't object. So your claim is what - that we ought change the evidence to match the theory? Surely not.

Mumbling about patterns doesn't much cut it. The trouble perhaps is, like Dogberry, you are to clever to be understood. So we'll never know.

Perhaps that happens sometimes. — Janus

But hang on. Isn't it a methodological presumption in science that when we come across something that doesn't fit our expectations - an exception - that we change our expectations? That is, we modify the theory so as to explain the evidence...

So of corse there are no 'well-documented occurrences of exceptions to nature's "laws"", as you say... because when they happen, it's good scientific practice to change the laws so as to make the exception disappear.

So are we to say that "the laws of nature are not merely codifications of natural invariances and their attributes, but are the invariances themselves", while also saying that we can change them to fit the evidence? Hows' that going to work? We change the very invariances of the universe to match the evidence?

Or is it just that what we say about stuff that happens is different to the stuff that happens, and it's better if we try to match what we say to what happens?

Assume I do. How can Newton be proven wrong about light if you know only what is in your head? Newton and light are in your head?

It's your epistemology. So you say that we can be certain that Newton was proven wrong... but that

we know nothing outside our heads — Copernicus

I'm just trying to work out how you keep both those ideas in the same head.

He was proven wrong. — Copernicus

Proven? Are you certain?

But you said...

That sounds like a charge without evidence. — Copernicus

Well, no. It's the consequence of your approach.

Your every act is selfish - so you claim. So what we want doesn't count, unless it matches what you want. We don't count.

So why should we do anything for you?

At the very least, you need to learn to play the iterative prisoner's dilemma.

What's wrong with social interaction? — Copernicus

You tell us. You want to be here. But you tell us that we don't count for anything. You shit were you eat.

define it — Copernicus

Supposing that all you need is a definition.

I have a vendetta against poor thinking.

You're free to give feedback. — Copernicus

No, since I don't exist.

I'm forced to accept the social contract involuntarily — Copernicus

You love it. You keep coming back for more. You don't have to be here, after all - go play Counterstrike or something - oh, wait, those are team games... Patience, maybe?

I'm sorry your living arrangements do not meet your needs. Perhaps if you asked nicely...

Oh, that'd require taking others into account...

Remember this?

If you start with the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer. While ethics concerns what I should do, the philosophical question at the core of political thought, modern or otherwise, is What should we do? It's about communal action. That it is about us is the bit that libertarians miss. — Banno

Worse for solipsists.

which is a subjective expression of oneself. — Copernicus

But for you, that's all there is...

I'm not in the mood for trolling, — Copernicus

You seem quite adept at it, even when not in the mood.

I'm quite serious. Your ideas are a nonsense, the result of a failure to realise that you are, like it or not, a part of a community, a member of a group - the very fact that you are writing in English belies your excessive faith in individualism.

Your need to post your ideas on this forum probably indicates that you know this, and are looking for a way out.

The fly and the bottle. But you probably will not get that reference.

I don't exist, so I can't deviate from the OP. Nor can I "swim in solipsism", whatever that might be.

This is the very same problem you aimed at yourself in the The Libertarian Dilemma
thread - the failure to acknowledge the other.

Your own acceptance of solipsism in a post to other people brings out clearly why you are a bit of a dill.

Your version of solipsism is not the one I follow. Something like anarchism vs libertarianism vs liberalism. Close, but different. — Copernicus

It's not my version - I don't exist. It's the reality of your realisation that you are the only mind, closing in on you.

So you are certain that you are never certain about anything. Cool. I'd say that problem was with coherence rather than certainty.

What I argued was that you can't betray your self — Copernicus

You are betraying yourself, by writing as if we were here. We don't exist. There is only what you have in your head.

Again, people, this argument (OP) is not based on solipsism. Don't get distracted. — Copernicus

Yeah, it is. All those threads about not caring for anyone else - that's all part of your realisation that you are alone.

Or that you are mistaken.

I never know FOR SURE. — Copernicus

You seem very certain 'bout that.

That's the general way of arguing. — Copernicus

Sure is. But you have no one to argue with. It's all in your head. So why use the "general form?"

If you are taking letters coming through a screen, then there exist letters and a screen. But no, you are a solipsist. There is only your mind, so the stuff I write here is somehow just part of that.

What someone from other universe or dimension sees me taking and giving is unknowable to me. — Copernicus

There isn't any one from some other universe or dimension - there is only you, trapped in your head, making me up.

I see solipsism as the idea that we know nothing outside our heads, which creates the outside experience for us. — Copernicus

See that "we"? There is no "we" in solipsism.

There is just you. I'm not here.

Isn't it odd, that even now, as you read this, you seem to be responding to something new - something from "outside your head"? Something unexpected, novel, hopefully even quite annoying. What Banno does out here is changing what goes on "inside".

Or am I just you, doubting your sanity?

The only selfless act would be when you deny yourself gratification, gain, achievement, everything. Including your decision to deny self-interest to achieve the gratification of having the liberty of denying self-interest or to serve your adventurous desire to test yourself, and the idea of doing it all in your head by serving yourself an intellectual ride. — Copernicus

You are a solipsist. There isn't any one here for you to talk to. You are on your own. There is no one here to care about your opinion, or even to read your posts.

Oh - you are one of the solipsists who think other people exits? They are surprisingly common. But not that coherent.

I suppose, from the point of view of a solipsist, the very idea of an unselfish act is incoherent.

I meant that as a statement of fact.

Well, I'll just leave you to it. — Ludwig V

For him, we don't exist, so you already have left him to it.

I guess I'm just Copernicus laughing at himself.

As a solipsist, that's the core of my worldview. — Copernicus

You're a bit of a dill, arn't you.

we have no well-documented occurrences of exceptions to nature's "laws" (invariance) — Janus

Isn't that simply because when we find such exceptions, we change the laws?

Sure. The point was that she uses a model theoretical approach to set out Hume's scepticism formaly.

Leave it. I'll think about a thread on that article.

See the paper Hume’s Law and other Barriers to Entailment

Page seven is pretty clear.

An analytic delight! :party:

AI now writing your posts. — apokrisis

Something you'd never do...

I'll leave you to it, insults and all.

...the openness of beliefs closed under ontic commitment. — apokrisis

:nerd:

Have fun.

A trolly is that from which one serves tea.

The Tram Problem, as first articulated by Philippa Foot, concerned double effect; it's not an attempt to juxtapose deontology and utilitarianism. But that's how it is sometimes used in undergrad introductions to ethics. The problem with modal moral quandaries generally is that one can always make them impossible to solve.That's why they make for long and often tedious threads.

Cheers, Apo. More about me. Thanks!

It is about the openness of beliefs closed under ontic commitment. — apokrisis

:wink: The grand edifice is tinsel.

Friston’s Bayesian mechanics, like any Bayesian scheme, formalises rather than solves Hume's answer to his scepticism.

Friston describes how an adaptive system maintains itself by predicting and minimising surprise, treating say the nervous system as a hierarchical Bayesian network that continually updates its internal model of the world to reduce the gap between expected and actual sensory input. Neurons encode probabilistic beliefs; learning occurs through adjusting these beliefs (priors) to improve future predictions. This formalises pattern recognition as an inferential process: perception and action both serve to confirm or refine the brain’s generative model.

Relating this to Hume’s scepticism, Friston doesn’t refute it so much as operationalise it. Hume doubted that we can justify inferring the future from the past; Friston shows how organisms predict the future by continuously revising expectations in light of prediction errors. The model gives a pragmatic, mechanistic account of such learning, not a logical justification for it.

Friston’s Bayesian mechanics is widely influential but still speculative. It’s accepted in the sense that its core idea, the brain as a prediction machine that minimises error, has strong support across neuroscience, psychology, and AI. But the claim that all cognition, life or the universe as a whole can be explained as “free energy minimisation” is speculative, overly abstract or perhaps even unfalsifiable.

So his ideas are accepted as a powerful framework for modelling cognition and perception but speculative as a general theory of life, the universe and everything.

Adding Pierce and such looks good, but lacks substance.

Cheers. Semiotics seems to me to miss the point by treating all causal talk, all meaning, as merely codes or signs floating in abstraction. It's what we do!

You don't actually say anything here about why I'm wrong. That's why I tend not to reply to your posts.

You can't be claiming that Bayesian calculus is not about belief. So, what?

It's not easy stuff, but to my eye it's by far the most interesting thing going on in philosophy at present.

Sure. Our words are about the world. The true, ones, at least...

But I wouldn't put that in terms of necessity. Too loaded.

Bayesian calculus deals with our beliefs, such that given some group of beliefs we can calculate their consistency, and put bets on which ones look good. But it doesn't guarantee truth. So what it provides is rational confidence, not metaphysical certainty. It's in line with Hume's scepticism.

I suspect we are emphasising different aspects of the same issues, and that we do not have an actual disagreement. What do you think?

That's a good line of thinking, well put.

Where a vice may arise is if one of the premises asserts the conclusion — Clarendon

We must take care here - if an argument is valid, then asserting the premises taken together is just asserting the conclusion. Nothing novel comes from a deductive argument. So if your argument is valid, then the conclusion is present in the assumptions. (added: that's the generic flaw in arguments for the existence of a god).

So, where?

Well,

Look at the critical premise: Premise: “Physical essential properties (shape, size, location) are poor candidates; intrinsic moral value plausibly supervenes on consciousness or rationality.”
There's an implicit assumption: "Any essential property that grounds intrinsic moral value cannot belong to a purely physical thing." This is already what the conclusion asserts: that intrinsic moral value depends on non-physical features, therefore, the bearer (us) is non-physical.

The argument is valid only because this assumption is built in, even if it’s unstated. Without it, the argument would only show that intrinsic moral value depends on consciousness, but not that consciousness is non-physical.

_______
There's a difference between imagining a photon and thinking about one. Photons are considered to be physical. Yet they do not have a determinate location, nor a size, nor a shape... unless you are willing to interpret those terms quite broadly.


_______
Added: I really should emphasis that I think your intuition that values are not physical is correct. But your argument can't demonstrate that it is correct.

I'm not familiar with Gillian Russell's work...will check it out. — Janus

Came across this...

This book’s proof of the Strong General Barrier Theorem is a landmark achievement in twenty-first century philosophy. Not since Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921) has such an important contribution been made to philosophical logic. — Barriers to Entailment by Gillian Russell

It occurred to me when I wrote the above that I am addressing only our ideas (beliefs). — Janus

Yep. So Bayesian Calculus is about belief, but Russell's work is to do with models, and so truth. Looks pretty cool. It is a formalisation of the problem, and the "barrier to entailment" mentioned in the OP.

But I need to get into the detail.

However, though a physical thing's shape and size and location can change, it doesn't seem possible for it not to have a shape, size or location. — Clarendon

But think of a photon.

What bothers me about your argument is the "hedgehog" - we cannot infer hedgehog conclusions from non-hedgehog premises. If that we are non-physical things is the conclusion of a deduction, then that conclusion must be present somewhere int he assumptions of the argument. You've built in to your argument that anything whose intrinsic value supervenes on consciousness is non-physical.

I think the talk of essences distracts from that basic problem. The Aristotelian idea of an essence - "that which makes something what it is" - vergers on useless. If the argument could be reworked in model terms, using necessary properties rather than essences, the issue might be made clearer.

I'll leave you to it.

But they can be distinguished, at least for philosophical purposes — Ludwig V

A valid point - I do tend to use "warrant" and "Justification:" synonymously, which is a problem acknowledged in the literature. We've Plantiga's use of "warrant" for whatever it is that turns a true belief into knowledge, and again that's a whole new kettle of fish.

I'm not sure we have an opposition between warrant and justification so much as the one being a sub-class of the other. We are also justified in believing the forecast of a qualified meteorologist.

Are inductions warranted but not justified?

There's two approaches to this, and I'd like to look in to how they relate. The one is the already mentioned Bayesian calculus, which gives us a method for improving on our beliefs. Note that your examples concern our beliefs. There's a difference between the past constraining the future, and the past constraining our beliefs about the future. Bayesian calculus only allows the latter.

The other is Gillian Russell's recent work on logic, just mentioned. That is about the world rather than about our beliefs.

Model theory omits a link to ontology. It defines what truth is semantically, but does not relate it to anything in the world. — Relativist

Well, that's just not right. But rather than pursue the issue here, I'm thinking a new thread is needed. I'm thinking of starting a more general chat about one of Gillian Russell's articles on barriers to entailment, so I might leave this for now.

Thanks for the chat here. Let me know what you make of Against Method.

"The future will most likely resemble the past because as far as we can tell, the future has always resembled the past". — Janus

Ok. I still don't see that isn't a tautology - or so close as to make no nevermind.

Cool. I took that as read. I think the point still stands. "the future will most likely resemble the past, because the future has, as far as we know, always resembled the past" amounts to "The future will most likely resemble the past because the future most likely resembles the past".

Might leave this were it is. Check out the SEP link. The Model Theory to which I referred is a branch of mathematics.