Similar to your example, I get frustrated when people ask for a definitive yes or no answer to something I’m not sufficiently confident about, and won’t just take a statement of the reasons I’m aware of for and against it. I don’t want to have to say to someone else that something definitely is or isn’t the case when I don’t even think to myself that it is.

But aside from that, my general philosophical principle of “it may be hopeless but I’m trying anyway”, of simultaneous possibility and contingency, which underlies all of my technical philosophy, is something I practice every day, and realize especially in contrast to some very shy, anxious people I know who give up so easily because they think they will probably fail: “if you don’t try then you’ll definitely fail so there’s no reason not to try just in case.”

How could you learn things and achieve things if no one else existed? — Janus

What would you need others for?

Or, more likely, it's a complex matrix of creating trends and following them at the same time. — Noble Dust

:up: :100:

"moonbats". It seems so have a certain resonance with "loony" (< Luna, Latin for "moon") — Apollodorus

Yeah, that’s why I thought they might be related.

which of them would you say are more disruptive and annoying than the others? — Apollodorus

Definitely wingnuts. While there are certain a fair share of anti-science woo peddlers on the left too, they don’t have any significant political representation, meanwhile actual right-wing congresspeople are rambling about space laser and whatnot.

Something timeless is something independent of the popular fads or trends of any given time period. Someone continually reinventing themselves successfully is either riding the wave of ephemeral and unpredictable popular fads or trends, or else progressing toward timeless independence from them. Someone reinventing themselves without success is trying to do that but missing the wave. I smell a more complete surfing metaphor in here somewhere; I’m not sure what timelessness is in that metaphor; being out beyond the surf, or safe on shore...?

Why is “the Left” called “loony”? — Apollodorus

I wonder if it's related to how left-wing, erm, eccentrics, are called "moonbats", while their right-wing equivalent are instead "wingnuts"

If meaningful interpersonal connections are the only meaning of life — Kaveski

It's not only interpersonal connections that make life meaningful, but any connection. Teaching and helping other people are indeed half of the ways to find meaning, the ways that make you meaningful to the world, but the other half of the ways can still make the world meaningful to you: learning things, and achieving things, which you can do even if nobody else exists.

Everyone who does not commit suicide will die in a sudden traumatic accident. — darthbarracuda

Accidents are what backups are for. Frequent, widely distributed offsite backups.

Everyone will eventually die. — darthbarracuda

Challenge accepted.

Think about space for comparison. There isn't a place that is the first place, with a second place next to that, and a third place further in the same direction as that, and so on. We can assign numbers to places as a coordinate system, but that's just us making a map of the underlying space, and when we do that, of course we're inclined to put "zero" somewhere significant to us. If space is infinite, that just means that for each place next* to us, there is another place next to that in the same direction, and so on, without there ever being a place beyond which there is no other place. No matter which direction we're talking about.

Likewise with time. There's this moment, and a moment after it, and a moment before it, and each of those has a moment further in the same direction, whether future or past. There's nothing special about the fact that we're counting up from zero in one direction and down from zero in the other direction; the numbers are just ones we're arbitrarily assigning to them, we picked an arbitrary time to call "zero" and count forward and backward from there. If time is infinite, that just means that for every moment in the future, there's another moment in the future of that; and for every moment in the past, there's another moment in the past of that.

So worrying about metaphysical problems with an infinite past is basically the same thing as worrying about whether there's a most-negative number. Whether a point in time is labeled with a positive or negative number is completely arbitrary. If you have no problem with there always being a place further in the same direction as another place, or a time after any other time, there should be no problem with there always being a time before any other time.

Or course it's still possible, maybe, for there to be an end to any of those series. It's just not metaphysically necessary for any "woo infinity is scary" reasons.


*Yes, I know; all of this "next" talk is glossing over the issue of continuity, and speaking as though space and time is discrete, just for ease of discourse. If you don't know what I mean in this aside, just ignore it, this is just for the math pedants.

May I suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_rationalism#Non-justificationism

They have nothing to do with each other, and you haven't said anything here about pantheism.

Pantheism is a view that the entirety of the universe taken all together is God. You seem to be talking about something more like autotheism.

Personally, it matters to me whether my own hand -- as a leader responsible for that community -- signs my community's death warrant regardless of what happens afterward. — BitconnectCarlos

Right, and I get that, and even agree with it. I just don't see what that has to do with theism or atheism; it seems like one could take that same principled stand either way. (Or fail to take that stand either way, for that matter).

(Should we perhaps be having this conversation about your conversion and the holocaust etc in a different thread? I feel bad cluttering up this thread with it, but I'm really curious to understand your thought process more, as it sounds like others are too).

Because it’s scary to think about so people avoid thinking about it whenever they can. There are a lot of ways on both a personal and societal level that people avoid dealing with problems because then they would have to face the uncomfortable fact that there is a problem and that they need to do something about it. People seem to prefer giving up if the alternative is that they have to do work; at least until the problem is looming over them and it’s too late to do anything but regret not taking action sooner.

My views are already wacky enough, don't tempt me towards nihilism :lol: — Down The Rabbit Hole

I'm definitely not trying to; if anything, the opposite. My point here is that you're already a moral nihilist if you think there's no objective morality, and that the same arguments against objective morality would be just as effective against objective reality... except that there is a defense against those arguments, that salvages objective reality, but in the process it also salvages objective morality, because it defends objectivity generally, not just in one particular domain.

Even your own "Nonetheless I think it is best labelled as objective fact" can work just as well for morality: you can just decide that reducing suffering for everyone just is what it means to be objectively good. That kind of defense has some obvious weaknesses in either case, but it works as well for one case as it does for the other.

Under this strategy, they would just kill you and replace you with someone else. That's a big part of the logic of totalitarianism - your "noble death" is made out to be meaningless. — BitconnectCarlos

So how does being a theist help in that situation? They'd do that if you refused for religious reasons too, right?

I totally get the awfulness of totalitarianism and the ethical difficulties in dealing with it, I just don't see how believing in God makes any difference to them.

I don’t want to make this thread all about debating your choice, but I feel the need to note that you can change ethical principles out of strategic considerations without having to change your metaphysical beliefs. A secular moral code could just as easily say “don’t give them one single inch” (or however you would phrase the maxim against the behavior you see as detrimental) without having to believe in God. There’s far from only one secular morality, or even one religious morality for that matter.

I'm pretty much constantly making minor refinements, elaborations, etc. The most recent of those worth mentioning was the realization, some time in the past month or two, that the spectrum of philosophical positions within which I framed my own position was not one dimensional but two dimensional; and that the poles of that second dimension constitute, on the one hand, postmodernism, which merges the worst of both of the poles of the first dimension, and on the other hand, what postmodernists call "modernism", which is not my own position but an unstable opposite extreme that cannot help but collapse into postmodernism.

The last actual reversal of anything in my view came some time just over a decade ago. At that time my views had gradually been shifting more and more skeptical for a long while, and I was basically at a point where I thought there was no real good reason not to be a complete nihilist. I refused to actually go there because I just didn't want to, but I couldn't see any good reason not to, no way of arguing to anyone why they should accept the views I still "baselessly" clung to, if they didn't just feel like it like I did. Then I found a pragmatic reason not to give in to nihilism, and that reframed all of the views I had transitioned through, from the naive religious faith I had been raised in through the nigh-nihilism I was teetering on the edge of, as the first dimension of the aforementioned philosophical spectrum, with my own general position (the one I was "baselessly" clinging to at that time, and that I've been refining and elaborating on ever since) around the middle of that spectrum.

In an if-then relationship, the antecedent is sufficient for the consequent, and the consequent is necessary for the antecedent. So when one says "if I am conscious then I exist" (implied by saying "I am conscious therefore I exist"), one is saying that existence is necessary for consciousness. If you were to reverse it, and say "I exist therefore I am conscious", you would be saying that consciousness is necessary for existence, and that existence is sufficient for consciousness, i.e. that everything that exists necessarily must ("first") be conscious. Which seems the opposite of what you're aiming for, and what Descartes was saying, i.e. that everything that is conscious necessarily must ("first") exist.

And the only ultimate explanation for why "observation is reality" is because it looks like it is. In both cases we're appealing to our experiences: experiences of things seeming true or false, or experiences of things seeming good or bad. The only differences is that you accept sense-experience as a valid reason to believe something or not, but you don't accept appetitive experience as a valid reason to intend something or not. What reason do you have to accept one over the other? If someone just refuses to accept that observation has any bearing on reality, what then? NB that I think there is a sound response to that kind of skepticism, but then that response also defeats moral skepticism in the same blow.

I was going to say the same thing, or actually, just post this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis

So you believe that:

It is the case that X

because

It is the case that Y
and
It is the case that if Y then X

Why do you believe those latter two things? (Infinite regress incoming...)

And how is this any different than if I believe that:

It ought to be the case that A

because

It ought to be the case that B
and
It ought to be the case that if B then A

?

following the logic that makes that claim, Caucasians are Africans. :rofl: I think we have a strong case against racism! :smile: — TheMadFool

That is actually the standard argument against “race realism” (i.e. the argument that race is a social construct): none of the usual racial categories map onto biological reality, because if they did all Native Americans would be “Asians”, all such “Asians” would be the same race as Caucasians, and there would be a ton of different African races on par with them, or else if you tried to treat all Africans as one race, all humans would belong to that race.

How is that any different from the infinite regress that comes with “is” questions? At some point you just say “it just looks like it’s that way!” Observation is subjective too.

There is a new theory under development that replaces that set of different fields I talked about with a single field made up of a kind of hypercomplex number called octonions:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/

This is just an idea i came up with today — Ben Ngai

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis

I'm guessing not for the first time. — praxis

Only one person has ever been unbanned and it wasn’t him.

strong feminists are not welcome here on the forum — T Clark

Only if you equate feminism with transphobia.

this thread where we all say snotty things behind the backs of those who can no longer defend themselves sets a very poor example from the top. — Foghorn

Especially when it occasions that one of those people later returns and can defend themselves.

The best theories of physics we currently have represent the universe as set of overlapping kinds of mathematical spaces (differentiable manifolds) that obey certain rules that make them count also as mathematical objects called groups, where every point in the space is a specially symmetric square matrix of complex numbers, a different size of square for each of the different spaces.

We know already that that is not a perfectly accurate model, but it’s somewhere in the ballpark, and whatever the correct mathematical model of reality is, there’s no reason to think that there is anything more to reality itself than just exactly that math.

Objective-as-in-universal
as in not
subjective-as-in-relative

but also

subjective-as-in-phenomenal
as in not
objective-as-in-transcendent.

For morality just as for reality.

Absolutely Fabulous? — bert1

I try.

If sex were purely a social construct — Harry Hindu

Not sure if you think I was saying that, but I wasn’t.

I was saying, like you did even more thoroughly, that there are a bunch of different components to sex — and that some of those CAN be changed already, and for others the technology to do so is already under development.

We seem to be a long way off course - private meaning and so on. — Banno

I’m just responding to you, where you said:

nor on a notion of meaning as a subjective, indeed private entity. — Banno

Though now that you mention it I’m not clear why you brought that up on this topic.

People try to use words to do things. We call the thing they’re trying to use them for, or the thing they actually accomplish by using them (which might or might not coincide), the meanings of those words. Sometimes there is clear public agreement on what a given word is to be used for. Other times, one person tries to use it for one thing, and another person takes their use of it in a different way — they disagree on the proper use of, or the meaning of, the word. But they each still mean something by it — they’re trying to use it for something, even if there isn’t public agreement on what to use it for. What is that then, if not a private meaning?

Denying the ability to differentiate between men and women is surely and illness is surely disorder like prosopagnosia? — Andrew4Handel

I was recently playing around with a face manipulating app that gives you different options depending on whether (it thinks) you’re male or female. Depending on the picture it would identify me as male or female, and not because of clothes or hair, because my hair is the same in all of them, in some of the ones where I’m dressed en femme it thinks I’m male, and in others where I’m wearing an ordinary men’s t-shirt or no shirt at all at thinks I’m female.

Software trained on a bunch of male and female faces has some kind of disorder too?

if language is seen as mere conveying some state of mind from one person to someone else. — Banno

I did only say that that is one (implicitly among other) things that language can do. You seemed to be denying that that is a thing language is ever used for. But now you’re saying that it is happening here after all, and only denying that it is ALL that is happening here... which was never my claim, so I think we have no real disagreement.

But is a posted sign or a public announcement over loudspeaker meaningless because there is no opportunity to talk back?
— Pfhorrest
An odd retort. — Banno

You gave a thing built by mutual two-way communication as an example of building something giving the meaning of language, so I wanted to check that against the case where there is only one direction of communication to see how your account of building something works there.

If the meaning of a word is best replaced by an examination of use, then of course there is no single publicly agreed upon meaning. — Banno

Agreed. But what then are the different, not-publicly-agreed upon meanings that different people try to use, if not private ones, which you seemed to dismiss?

Well, you might agree that at least you and I are building a thread. Perhaps even a conversation? An argument? — Banno

Sure, because this is an interactive medium where we are each saying things back and forth and they accumulate into a larger discourse like that.

But is a posted sign or a public announcement over loudspeaker meaningless because there is no opportunity to talk back?

And this is not based ... on a transfer of information — Banno

Would you deny that any information has been transferred? (Assuming copying is included within transfer). Do you not hope that I will learn something you already knew through this conversation? Are you just “painting words on this thread” so to speak, alongside me, in a collaborative art project, without any intention to influence my ways of thinking?

nor on a notion of meaning as a subjective, indeed private entity. — Banno

Do you deny that speakers of the nominally same language can mean different things by the same public symbols of the language, or take the same symbols to mean different things? (See “God” on this forum for example). Everyone is trying to use a public meaning, sure, but it’s not the case that there is a single universally publicly agreed upon meaning, and someone’s intended or taken meaning might be idiosyncratic only to themselves.

Sex is a compound attribute.

Chromosomal sex is not the entirety of sex. There’s also hormonal sex and anatomical sex. If anything, anatomical sex is the original referent of the word, from before we knew anything about hormones or chromosomes. And there are some people naturally born with a chromosomal sex that differs from their hormonal or anatomical sex (women AFAB but with XY chromosomes), and everyone has always referred to them by their anatomical sex (as we usually don’t know anything but anatomical sex about anyone).

Hormonal and genital sex can be changed already, and it’s only a matter of time before chromosomal sex can be changed too (hello CRISPR).

Better to take on a perspective of language use as building stuff with other people. — Banno

That is definitely a thing we can do with language.

But how would you construe one person making an assertion to another person as “building something together”?

Unless what they’re building together is something in the mind of the listener (which doesn’t imply any Cartesian dualism: the mind of the listener consists of the function and hence structure of their brain), and it’s only the speaker who is speaking language in his act of building it, whereas the listener’s act of construction consists of interpreting and evaluating the language spoken by the speaker.

Which is another way of phrasing what I just said before.