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.

Not seeing much progress in this discussion. Might leave it there.

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".

You try to juxtapose an individual's liberty against their welfare, treating the issue as if it were only about that individual. Since you still show no acknowledgement of the place of other folk in the question, you have not yet entered into an ethical or political discussion.

Why should we leave you alone? One of us will have to clean up the mess.

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

In model theory, a model is a structure that makes a formal system’s sentences true.

I think we are at cross purposes.

The grand edifice.

But there's a difference in our methodological dispositions that may be irreconcilable. I have an allergy to explanations of everything. I think complete explanations are completely wrong. So I'll leave you to your mythologising, and muddle along. — Banno

I’ll stick with the patch I can walk on, the language I can play with, the practices I can follow. That’s enough to get things done, and more than enough to keep me honest. Your cathedrals are impressive, but I’m happier muddling in the workshop.

Because that's what politics is - community.

Added: Even “leave me alone” must be articulated and enforced through a common rule:
“We agree to leave each other alone.”

Since you haven't moved past talk of yourself, I would say you are not in the domains of either politics or ethics.

If conforming to a model solves the problem, then simply infer a model on the basis of the constant conjunction of the empirical evidence. — Relativist

So you would use model theory to explain induction? An interesting idea. What do you have in mind? There'd need to be a move from the preservation of truth to a preference between model, I presume?

That’s a lot to unpack, Apo. You’ve got Bayes, neural nets, and pragmatism all packed into one explanatory hierarchy. Impressive, but maybe overengineered? Bayesianism gives us a model for updating beliefs, that can be implemented in brains, machines, or whatever. But it's not a replacement for abduction but an elaboration. Bayes doesn’t eliminate the guesswork, it formalises it. We still need to choose priors, and those priors depend on the very same customs, habits, and shared practices that Hume, Wittgenstein, and Davidson were talking about.

So yes, it closes the loop, because we’re already inside it. The Bayesian calculus doesn’t tell us why we ought to weight one hypothesis over another; it just tells us how to do so consistently, given a prior. The “hierarchy of priors” you describe isn’t an algorithmic miracle — it’s the social, linguistic, and biological history of our talk about causes.

Rationality isn’t something we add on top of experience, but what emerges from doing what we do - talking, testing, correcting, and learning together. In that sense, Bayesianism is one more way of describing Hume’s “custom and habit,” not a transcendence of it.

All-round military hero, climate change denying anti-immigration anti-gay who wants us to prepare for war with China.

So yes, let's hope the Libs choose him and push themselves even further from the middle ground they need in order to get elected.

Perhaps we all can reach some agreement that Bayesian calculus of one sort or another is a rational response to Hume's problem?

We cannot justify it by deductive reasoning, but we can by inductive reasoning — Janus

I still do not understand this. "We can by inductive reasoning" just is "the future will resemble the past". It's re-stating, not explaining.


Added:

To put it another way, it is rational in a practical sense to assume that the future will resemble the past, because to our knowledge it always has. — Janus

That says that the future resembles the past, because the future resembles the past...?

Valid, I suppose, but I find it unsatisfactory.

Cheers, Apo. Tell me more about me. Yes, the representative vocab can be understood enactively.

Bayes formalises Peirce’s approach if you like. We can move on from the nineteenth century.

This doesn't imply we should all adopt extreme skepticism. — Relativist

I don't see anyone here suggesting extreme scepticism - including Hume. His point seems to be pretty much the one you are now making.

There is a normative element to deduction, of course, but it is well-bedded, model- theoretical. All that need be accepted is that a predicate is satisfied by the objects of its extension, and that truth is preserved under valid inference. The “normative” aspect here does not consist in a choice among alternatives, but in adherence to what follows from the model itself.

And this is to agree with Hume.

Here's the OP:

In Hume, legitimate beliefs exist. They occur in a process of recurrent association. A belief is legitimate when it is associated with a vivid impression. For example, the belief that one object will move after another is based on past experience of their constant conjunction. Hume concluded that fundamental beliefs, such as the existence of an external world or the existence of the self, are not rationally justifiable but are legitimate because they are the result of experience and custom. — JuanZu

Seems to me that JuanZu is pointing to the prima facie discrepancy between our being confident in a belief based on being "associated with a vivid impression" and a generalisation that is inferred therefrom. I'd understood that as much the same as Popper's basic statements. Hume didn't have a conception of the Duhem-Quine thesis, of course, so took "vivid impressions" as incontrovertible. I don;t see that we could maintain such a thing nowadays.