Yes, i.e. they specify how many (actual, existent) things in the domain of discourse the predicate or open sentence is true of. So no call for the "only". — bongo fury

The “only” is because not every proposition is in the business of saying what does or doesn’t exist. “There ought to be some apples in this box” doesn’t say that there exist some apples with the property of oughting-to-be-in-this-box; perhaps the reason why no apples are in the box is because no apples exist. We can nevertheless make sense of saying some ought to exist, in this box.

Do you mean in something like the way talking about numbers (or fictional characters) leaves it open whether they actually exist? — bongo fury

Yes, that is another case. Consider geometry. We can in one sense say that, given the geometric definition of a rectangle, there exist no rectangles: all the “rectangular” things that actually exist are imperfect approximations of rectangles, not actual rectangles. But nevertheless there are true statements about some rectangles meeting certain criteria, like having all equal lengths of their sides, even though no such rectangles actually exist in the sense of “existence“ we were just using before.

(Unless in some platonic sense, but that’s exactly the kind of assumption I think we need to avoid making just by doing math at all, even though I’m not here arguing against platonism, just that it’s not necessarily entailed by doing any math).

When elements of retribution or revenge are added, I think it turns clearly into an act of violent coercion in its own right. — Tzeentch

I agree completely. Retributive "justice" is injustice.

It is exactly the element of reprisal that makes governments coercive. Do not pay taxes and one gets fined, or worse, thrown in jail. — Tzeentch

Agreed.

Do you agree that evicting someone from their home for failure to pay someone else is likewise coercive: "Give me money, or get out, or else"? Or someone "evicting" someone from their workplace for similar reasons: if workers in a business decide not to hand the money that customers paid them over to the owner, so that the owner can give them a small fraction of it back, but instead keep it all for themselves, and the owner says "then get out, or else", is that not coercive? Usually, it's a government enforcing the "or else" there in those situations, but even if there nominally is no government, if the owners themselves can get away with enforcing that "or else" themselves, then they effectively are a government themselves.

That's the kind of coercion that socialists are opposed to. The original socialists, libertarian socialists aka anarchists, think we just need to stop there being governments that do that kind of stuff, or any other kind of coercive stuff, in the first place. State socialists in contrast think we need a powerful monopolistic government (a "state" in the usual terminology) in order to keep private owners from effectively becoming little warlord states of their own, or else using their influence to corrupt a nominally democratic state.

(I see the motive behind the state socialists there, but I think, as I expect you'll agree, that authority inevitably breeds inequality, so having a state inevitably foils the socialist objective. But I also think, and I wonder if you would agree, that inequality just as inevitably breeds authority, so allowing inequality to fester inevitably foils the libertarian objective. We can only move toward either objective by embracing the other as well, stopping the reinforcement of capital and state, and then withering both away together).

Who should determine this, if it can be determined at all? Who or what can be trusted with arbitration of such things? These are great obstacles for me, since humans are fallible, governments prone to corruption over time.

Certainly this produces a lot of food for thought. — Tzeentch

I have to say, I'm pleasantly surprised with how open-minded you've been about all of this in this discussion. I hadn't been paying close attention to you before, but I had the impression that you were the usual right-libertarian capitalism apologist. So far, you seem much better than that, and I'm enjoying our conversations.

The fact that something may be able to be changed does not entail that it should be changed — Janus

Precisely. I've always found the "it's not a choice" line of argument in defense of homosexuality to be kind of ceding the more important point to the enemy: "I can't help it" is only relevant to excuse something wrong, and if it's not wrong (which it's not) then there is no "helping it" to be done in the first place, so whether or not anyone can "help it" is irrelevant.

I wrote a short analogous essay on this a long time ago that I'll just reproduce here:

Bleufromagivoria

Gay sex is like blue cheese.

Some people like to have it. Other people, not so much. In fact, other people very much not so much. Most people who aren't into it themselves seem to find it rather disgusting, would never want to have it themselves or even be around other people who are having it, and don't understand how anyone could possibly enjoy it. Nevertheless, some people do enjoy it; and perhaps that is a good question: why?

When it comes to homosexuality, that's a question people ask a lot, and hold very strong opinions on. But I wonder, what if we ask the same question about another behavior people are split over, as illustrated above: bleufromagivoria, or blue cheese eating.

What makes someone like blue cheese? Is it nature or nurture? Are blue cheese lovers — like myself — born with a taste for it, is it in our genes? Or is our taste for it a product of our environment, our upbringing, something about the way our parents raised us, maybe? As a bleufromagivore myself, I honestly don't know. All I know is that I like it, and I have ever since I was first introduced to it.

In fact I remember my first blue cheese vividly. I was at a party and a friend asked me if I would like to try it. I was a little hesitant at first; I had never really thought about the idea before, and it seemed like it might be gross; but I was feeling adventurous that night so I gave it a shot, and to my surprise, I liked it quite a bit! I had a lot of blue cheese that night, as much as was offered to me, and I've had a taste for it ever since. Now I'll rarely pass up an opportunity for blue cheese, any time of day, and will even go out on the town to look for it if I feel a particularly strong craving.

Obviously, that initial exposure had an impact on my behavior; you could say that that friend got me hooked on blue cheese, turned me into a bleufromagivore, and argue that this was nurture and environment shaping my behavior. On the other hand, I was inclined not only to give it a try, but to like it once I had; I'm certain that there are plenty of other people who turn quickly away from any such offer, and more still who might try it but quickly decide that it's not for them and never look back. So perhaps something in my nature was always bleufromagivorous, lying dormant or latent, and that initial exposure simply awakened that tendancy in me. It's a difficult question, certainly not one that I can answer by introspection alone. It would probably take extensive empirical scientific research to give anything close to a conclusive answer to such an elusive topic.

But why does it matter? I mean, sure, it's perhaps an interesting academic question, but then so is the evolutionary origin of ruminate digestion in ungulates, and you don't see people getting politically charged over that. Why not? Because it is morally irrelevant. It is not politically important why ungulates ruminate, because the rumination of ungulates is not something particularly good or bad in any politically relevant sense. It's not a phenomenon anyone has any good reason to want to promote or prohibit. Likewise with eating blue cheese.

And likewise with gay sex. The only politically relevant reason to care about what causes people to like gay sex is if for some reason we wanted to induce or suppress such behavior. And why would we? Does it, or its absence, harm anyone? If so, how? That is where the argument should be with regards to regulation of anything. And if it was determined that there was harm involved, the cause of the harmful behavior would be relevant only in determining the most effective means of suppressing it; it would not be relevant in determining whether or not it should be suppressed to begin with.

We wouldn't let a sociopathic serial killer go free because he was 'just born that way'; nor if he was 'just a product of his environment' for that matter. Murder is wrong and should be prohibited regardless of what makes people inclined to murder; and conversely, nothing is wrong with eating blue cheese, and it should be permitted regardless of why we bleufromagivores are inclined to it.

Likewise, if nothing is wrong with gay sex, then that is the case regardless of what makes people inclined toward it. If someone thinks something is wrong with gay sex, then that is the argument which needs to be had. Unless it can be determined that there is something wrong with it, and that something needs to be done to prevent it, the political division over the cause of it is misplaced and entirely irrelevant; and contrapositively, conceding the political relevance of this causal question is conceding that there is something wrong with it. I'm sure that gay rights supporters don't intend to present an argument of "sure it's wrong, but they can't help it, they were just born that way", but in accepting the political importance of homosexuality being nature, not nurture, they are implicitly presenting such a stance, and would be wise to avoid doing so in the future.

I put my socks on the same way everyone else does, two hips at a time.

Err, what? So you agree with the concept of "conversion therapy"? Because that would be the logical conclusion from your claim. — Derukugi

Thinking that there is an element of choice to sexual orientation doesn’t entail acceptance of conversion therapy. There are lots of things that are choices that it would be wrong to try to psychologically condition people into choosing differently.

I'm not so sure there is something as legitimate violence. I consider all types of violence to be undesirable and inherently problematic. But it seems sometimes some amount of violence is better than the alternative. I wouldn't go so far as to say that legitimizes it. — Tzeentch

Maybe you take "legitimizes" more deeply than I do. I agree that non-violence is always preferable where possible. But you seem to agree that it is sometimes, lets say, warranted, or called for. Like, if someone tries to take something that belongs to you, you don't just have to let them, right? (Is that itself violence/coercion, them taking something from you?) It's okay for you to stop them, right? Is it okay for someone else to help you stop them? Or for there to be an organized force of people who help people stop people from doing things like that, taking things that belong to others?

I wrote the preceding post on the impression that you answer "yes" to all of this. The remaining question is then "what rightly belongs to whom?" Which then gives an answer to when it's okay to stop people from taking things from others, and consequently what even constitutes "taking something from someone" rather than "hanging on to what's mine".

Violence is about forcing one's will upon others (or hurting others; this is why I prefer the term 'coercion'), and there is no just basis for that. — Tzeentch

Not even to stop them from forcing their will upon you? I get the impression you think defense is okay, but that's still violent coercion: you're not letting the attacker do what he wants to you, you're forcing him to stop. Which is okay, because you belong to yourself, and he doesn't get to decide what's okay to do to you, you do. But it gets fuzzier when people disagree about who gets to do what to property rather than person; that depends entirely on who that property rightly belongs to.

My will is no better than yours. The will of the group is no better than the will of the individual. A government's will no better than that of their subjects. — Tzeentch

I agree.

A political system that cannot recognize this, and instead sees violence as instrumental; a tool to be used to achieve it's goals based on it's own conceptions of right and wrong, I can only consider as tyrannical and deeply flawed. — Tzeentch

The only political system that completely rejects any such thing as legitimate violence is anarcho-pacifism, which is completely vulnerable to the first person who doesn't agree with its principles and decides to use violence against the people who think it's not okay to use violence in return.

I get the impression that's not what you're arguing for.

I would call that more fallibilism than relativism, the difference being that a fallibilist concedes that there is something to be wrong about, and says we all might always be wrong about anything, whereas the relativist denies that there is any sense of being actually right or wrong, just different opinions.

In what way is Absurdism relativistic?

Some of what you said about was a little hard for me to follow, but in general I think you’re on the right track.

Matter being equivalent energy is a more modern form of “to be is to do”: things are what they do, energy is the potential to do, so what anything is is some form of energy or another.

And all matter naturally moves at c, only slowing down (and gaining rest mass) when it interacts with something else, and at c time and space distort such that from the frame of reference of every particle, it existed only at a point and for an instant: the point and instant at which whatever emitted it interacted with whatever absorbed it, the particle itself just being that interaction event: what it does constituting the entirety of its being.

If we consider capitalism a form of violence, surely governments that take the belongings of their subjects as a means of achieving their goals can be considered violent, no? — Tzeentch

Taking things from people is violent, sure, but it's that "belongings" that does all the important work here.


Alice comes along and takes something from Bob (by force, because Bob doesn't want to give it up) to give it to Charlie. That is unquestionably an act of violence. But is it good, legitimate violence (if we accept, which you and I both seem to, that there is such a thing), or is it bad, illegitimate violence?

Well, if the thing belonged to Charlie, then Alice was righting a wrong: Bob was withholding Charlie's property from him, and Alice made him give it back. That is good, legitimate violence.

On the other hand, if the thing belonged to Bob, then Alice was committing a wrong: Bob was using his own property when Alice wrongly took it and gave it to Charlie. That's bad, illegitimate violence.


Saying what belongs to who is basically another way of saying who has what rights to what, and so what violence is justified (if any is) in the defense of those rights.


The dispute between capitalists and socialists isn't overall about whether using violence is ever legitimate, but about what rightfully belongs to whom, and so which violence is legitimate and which is illegitimate.

Socialists generally say that capital rightly belongs to those who use it, so houses belong to people who live in them, businesses belong to the people who operate them, etc; and anyone else, who doesn't live or work or otherwise use that capital, claiming the right to exclude the people who do live and work and otherwise use it, and thus the right to use force to do so, are committing bad, illegitimate violence, against which other violence is therefore good and legitimate, as an act of defense.

Capitalists, of course, disagree, and think that one can legitimately own someone else's home or place or work etc, and that attempts to prevent that owner from excluding people from it as he pleases are bad, illegitimate acts of violence, while the enforcement of that exclusion is good, legitimate violence.

By such definitions, against what does socialism support violence? :chin: — Tzeentch

Anarchism is a form of socialism (the original form, actually), so I already answered that for the most part. The difference between anarchism and statist forms of socialism is just the state, which thinks it’s the only one who gets to use violence and that it is justified in using violence to prevent anyone else from doing so, or from otherwise disobeying it.

what I think happened is you mistook my position as anarchist or 'all coercion is unjustifiable'. — Tzeentch

Nobody could mistake you for an anarchist, and that’s the problem. Anarchists support violence (if at all) only in defense against the imposition of power over others. In supporting capitalism, you must support violence in defense of existing power structures (e.g. in keeping property concentrated in the hands of those who own more than they need to use, against those who need to use more than they own).

The forums were actually email based. But you could browse the logs. I’m not sure. It all seems so far away and hazy now. And usage was metered so you had to get on and off with messages downloaded before you racked up a bill. — apokrisis

wasn't usenet a thing back then? purely text-based discussion threads? — Wayfarer

Usenet was accessible via email (or via dedicated clients, which made browsing it a little easier), and I remember that UK/Australian/etc internet usage was metered for longer than American dialup (besides AOL) was, so it probably was usenet that apo is remembering. Were the forums named like talk.origins or comp.sys.mac.games or alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork, things in that format? If so, that was usenet.

Eternal September was apparently 1993, so I must have gotten on around 1992, which is younger than I remember (I was only 10 then), but I definitely remember when AOL gained access to usenet happening in real time, so it must have been that far back.

Are you reminiscing about the days of usenet, pre-Eternal September, pre-web? Those were the days.

I was a young early adopter of the internet just slightly before Eternal September, and was acculturated into the old ways before they went away. I attribute a lot of my success at critical thinking (and therefore philosophy) to spending my high school days debating with college professors on usenet. Before web-based centralized forums that could be controlled by a central authority were a thing, when "moderation" just meant using your own killfile, etc.

I naively thought that, through the net, reaching out to "the rest of the world", I had discovered that the rest of the world besides my tiny hometown was not as ignorant and cruel a place as my IRL interactions had led me to believe. Turns out, that was just a filter from the net of that time being available almost exclusively to the highly educated. Watching the actual rest of the world, full of the same ignorance and cruelty, spill into the space I thought I had escaped all of that into, as the internet got more widely adopted, has been quite a disheartening experience.

Nowadays, I feel like what I had thought was an escape from the hole I was born into into a brighter broader world, was actually just retreating from the dark world into a brightly-illuminated hole. And sitting in a hole avoiding the darkness of the world feels much less illuminating than the perception of having escaped a dark hole into the bright real world felt.

its easier to whine about "your" money — Pro Hominem

These scare quotes prompted me to think: perhaps a fruitful approach would be to ask him what exactly is it that makes his money HIS (or anybody’s anything THEIRS). I think he would be surprised to learn that socialists are very much in favor of people keeping what is rightfully theirs and not having it taken from them by force. They just have a deeper understanding of what rightfully belong to whom, and a broader understanding of what constitutes force, such that it is the capitalists who are taking things that rightfully belong to people by force, and state redistribution of wealth is rough restitution of those many widespread crimes, in lieu of actually being able to prevent them from happening.

In classical logic, the latter two options are not possible, and also are equivalent: not(P or not-P) = (P and not-P) = FALSE

In paraconsistent logics, something like (P and not-P) is permitted, in a sense, but not anything not(P or not-P).

In intuitionistic logics, something like not(P or not-P) is permitted, in a sense, but not anything like (P and not-P).

I’m not aware of any true paraconsistent intuitionistic logics that would permit both, but I recently had a thread about a way that something like both could be accommodated at the same time, all while never actually giving up the principle of bivalence that governs classical logics:

The use of these mood functions also facilitates something superficially resembling the motivations for non-classical types of logic such as paraconsistent logics and intuitionist logics, without actually abandoning the principle that differentiates classical logic from them: the principle of bivalence. The principle of bivalence is the principle that every statement must be assigned exactly one of two truth values, "true" or "false", no more and no less. Intuitionist logics allow for statements to be assigned neither of those truth values, while paraconsistent logics allow for statements to be assigned both of them at the same time.

With these mood functions, similar things can be constructed without actually violating the principle of bivalance, because there is nothing strictly logically prohibiting it being the case that neither is(P) nor is(not-P), if for example P were some kind of descriptively meaningless statement; it is merely necessary, to preserve bivalance, that either is(P) or not(is(P)), but not(is(P)) doesn't have to entail that is(not-P). Similarly, there is nothing strictly prohibiting it being the case that be(P) and be(not-P), if for example there were some morally intractable situation where both P and not-P were required, and so any outcome was unacceptable; it is merely necessary, to preserve bivalence, that either be(P) or not(be(P)), but not(be(P)) doesn't have to entail be(not-P).

Fleshing out the philosophical implications of things like descriptively meaningless claims and morally intractable situations is a topic for further discussion. But in any case a logic of this form is in principle capable of discussing things that are, in a loose sense, "both true and false" or "neither true nor false", without technically violating the principle of bivalence. — Pfhorrest

That would be a kind of panpsychism and also a kind of epiphenomenalism, yes.

(In Hohfeldian terms, a liberty is something that you are not prohibited from doing. It is the negation of the obligation of a negation, and so it is equivalent to a permission. A claim, conversely, is a limit on others' liberty: it is something that it is forbidden to deny you, which is just to say that it is obligatory. A power is the second-order liberty to change who has what rights. And an immunity, conversely, is a limit on others' power, just as a claim is a limit on others' liberty.)

At first glance, one would think a maximally libertarian society would be one in which there were no claims at all (because every claim is a limit on someone else's liberty), and no powers at all (because powers at that point could only serve to increase claims, and so to limit liberties). But that would leave nobody with any claims against others using violence to establish authority in practice even if not in the abstract rules of justice, and no claims to hold anybody to their promises either making reliable cooperation nigh impossible. So it is necessary that liberties be limited at least by claims against such violence, and that people not be immune from the power to establish mutually agreed-upon obligations between each other in contracts.

But those claims and powers could themselves be abused, with those who violate the claim against such violence using that claim to protect themselves from those who would stop them, and those who would like for contracts not to require mutual agreement to leverage practical power over others to establish broader deontic power over them. So too those claims to property and powers to contract, which limit the unrestricted liberty and immunity that one would at first think would prevail in a maximally libertarian society, must themselves be limited as described above in order to better preserve that liberty.

Just want to comment that I am also looking for that non-antagonistic, collegial, cooperative, enjoyable, friendly environment of mutual learners. And as far from that as this place is some times (often), it’s still the least bad I’ve found on the internet.

I see no logical incompatibility between them. I was about to say that epiphenomenslism kinda renders it pointless to suppose that everything has a mind, but that’s really just an argument against epiphenomenalism generally, regardless of panpsychism.

Sure, though a lot of that is just other people's much older thoughts polished up and fitted together.

:up:

s Objective Morality Even Possible from a Secular Framework? — Ram

Yes.

I was raised in a upper middle class home and I used be a socialist and for much of my life I was on the left. Financially speaking everything was always taken care of for me and in seeing the wealth around me I didn't understand at a young age why poverty or homeless people had to exist. On top of that, I worked some crappy, low wage jobs with bad bosses which further solidified my allegiance to the left. My thinking was in a country as advanced and wealthy as the US, why do we still have poverty and homelessness? I was thinking about the big picture and principles first, and myself last. I also had no experience with poor people. They were just problems to be solved by giving them, as a collective, a certain amount of money or resources.

Somewhere along the line my thinking become more bottom-up. Instead of thinking about vast systemic changes to eliminate poverty, I started studying personal finance and decisions which could be made on an individual level. — BitconnectCarlos

I had the exact opposite experience. I was raised in a dirt poor home (but didn't realize it at the time), picked up libertarian ideals from friends on the internet and my own teenage anti-authoritarianism, thought that I was the smart capable straight-A student who was going to knock life out of the park... and then fell flat on my face upon reaching adulthood, blamed myself, blamed personal (non-systematic) bad luck like the crappy 20 year old beater cars (which were "normal" cars as far as my upbringing had taught me) constantly breaking down and needing to be replaced (because a replacement cost less than the repair), I thought I was just an unlucky "kid" who wasn't awesome enough to overcome that misfortune.

It wasn't until I was about in my 30s that I started researching why my life was such a failure compared to "everyone else" and discovered... that I had never in my life been below the median income, much less the poverty line. That the majority of people in the country had even more shitty lives than me. That didn't mean that my life had in fact been charmed and easy, it was still shit, I was still renting bedrooms in other people's houses and driving ancient hunks of junk and so on, but the statistics said that most people were even worse off than that; that my meager slow savings toward escaping that life were amazing richest compared to the zero savings that almost everybody else had. Eventually I graduated to owning my own... tiny 400sqft trailer in a run-down trailer park, thanks to finally making "fantastic" money better than 75% of the country... yet still, only the average (mean) personal income for America.

That's when I started to realize that the problem wasn't me, that I wasn't a fuck-up or just running on bad personal luck, I was beating the hell out of the odds, considering my background, and how the entire system is stacked against everybody. I was making more money and managing it better than the vast majority of the country, but still trailer trash with barely a sliver of hope of someday not being that. That's a sign that there are major systemic problems, not just a bunch of personal failures.

No this is not all "very idealistic" but very materialistic — JerseyFlight

I think he’s not saying “idealistic” in a sense opposed to “materialistic”, but a sense meaning “naively optimistic”, or “not skeptical enough”. He’s saying you seem to value intelligent, reason, etc, as virtues or ideals in themselves, and he’s trying to call attention to the practical reasons to value them instrumentally instead.

I forgot to include something else in the OP:

Traditionally, both alethic and deontic modal logics write their core functions, either necessity and possibility or obligation and permission, with the same □ and ◇ operators, their meaning distinguished only by the surrounding context. But with the mood operators described above, there is no need for that context, because once we have abstracted the descriptiveness or prescriptiveness of statements away into those mood operators, we are dealing only with the raw idea of whatever state of affairs being or not-being in some variety of contexts.

The usual semantics given to the alethic modal operators is that of "possible worlds": for something to be necessary is for it to be true in all possible worlds, for it to be possible is for it to be true in some possible worlds, for it to be impossible is for it to be true in no possible worlds, and for it to be contingent is for it to be true in not all possible worlds. If we take those □ and ◇ operators to mean not specifically anything about alethic necessity or possibility, nor deontic obligation or permission, but instead as just representing the idea of whatever they are applied to being the case in either all or merely some possible worlds, then when we wrap our descriptive or prescriptive mood functions around them, we automatically get an alethic or deontic logic, both with all the same internal structure.

The descriptive mood function asserts that whatever idea being the case in whatever set of possible worlds is true, yielding necessity, possibility, etc; while the prescriptive mood function asserts that it is good, yielding obligation, permission, etc. For something to be obligatory is for the idea of it being the case in all possible worlds to be good; and for something to be permissible is for the idea of it being the case in some possible worlds to be good. For something to be obligatory is for it to be good for that thing to be necessary; and for something to be permissible is for it to be good for that thing to be possible.

How do I include the actual text when replying? Using Ipad — Ansiktsburk

Select the text, and a little "quote" button will pop up next to it. Press that and it will copy the text into quote tags wherever the insertion point currently is in the reply box.

Do you think they have made a mistake such that they could be reasoned with? — bert1

I think they've made a mistake, but I don't know that they can be reasoned with. It seems to me completely analogous to someone like a solipsist, or anyone else who doesn't believe that there is a reality apart from themselves that can be known from sense experience (whether that be because they think reality is something completely apart from sense experience, or because they think there is nothing to it besides their own). I don't know if I could reason a solipsist out of their position (I have ideas for how to try, but it really depends on them listening), but I think they're wrong; and likewise someone who denies that morality is something apart from their own interests that has to do with hedonic experiences like pain and pleasure (whether that be because they think morality is something completely apart from such experiences, or because they think there is nothing to it but their own).

EDIT: My reasons for rejecting solipsism, transcendent reality, egotism, and transcendent morality, are all the same pragmatic ones: if any of those are true, we could not know them to be true, nor know them to be untrue, but also we could not help but act in assumption that either they are or aren't. If we assume any of them are true, then we just run into an immediate impasse from which there is no reasoning out of; while if we assume they're all false, and that both reality and morality are beyond merely our individual selves but accessible to all of our experiences, then we can actually start making practical progress sorting out which things are more or less likely to be real or moral. It might always be the case that actually nothing is either, but we can never be sure of that, only either assume it prematurely and so give up, or assume to the contrary and keep on trying to figure out what is each.

Liberalism from the Age of Enlightenment was against absolute monarchy, divine rights of kings, hereditary privilege, state religion, the mercantilist policies, royal monopolies and other barriers to trade, and promoted representative democracy and the rule of law and free trade. — ssu

Yes, and liberalism was considered a leftist endeavor, until the redefinition of left and right post Marx. The original socialists and the original libertarians were the libertarian socialists, the true heirs to classical liberalism. Both those who said inequality was an acceptable cost for “liberty” and those who said authoritarianism was an acceptable cost for “equality” are deviations from the original left/liberal cause.

You seem to want to argue that authoritarianism is always right-wing — jamalrob

This really depends on how we construct the left-right spectrum. In its earliest form, the left was for the liberty and equality of the commoners, against the authority and hierarchy of the aristocrats. By that construction, authoritarianism is inherently right-wing.

Since then, largely due to Marx and the backlash to him and the propaganda wars waged by both sides, it’s become common to construct the left as being for equality at the expense of liberty and the right as being for liberty at the expense of equality.

Splitting the difference between the original and Cold War era notions of left and right, we’ve now often got a notion of the left being for equality and the right being for hierarchy, with authoritarian and libertarian strands within each.

As as libertarian socialist, I stand by the original notion of left and right, with the left being for both liberty and equality and the right being opposite both, because I think you can’t sacrifice one for the other, as both laissez faire capitalism and soviet state socialism have shown. A lack of equality breeds a kind of authority (as in laissez faire capitalism, where the rich have all the political power), and a lack of liberty breeds a kind of hierarchy (as in soviet state socialism, where the politically powerful live richer lives than the rest). So either authority or hierarchy are inherently right-wing, even if the purveyors of it also claim to support the complement left-wing value too.

As I understand it, the Standard Model uses U, SU(2) and SU(3) to model all the fundamental fields besides gravity, so you could build a gravity-free model of any physical thing with those, in principle. Wikipedia can probable tell you more details than I could.

Suppose you have some nonphysical things, and these nonphysical things bear an ordered relation to each other: each one has a unique "previous" and "next" thing, and something that is the next thing after the next thing after the next thing is further down the order in that direction, while something that is previous to the previous thing before the previous thing is further up the order in the other direction. Like numbers: you can just put them in order and make a line out of them.

Suppose this set of things has two kinds of ordering to it: some things may be "previous" or "next" in one way, while others are not related by that ordering, but are related by a different ordering, being "previous" or "next" in some different way. Complex numbers are like this: 1 is next after 0 in one way, but i is next after 0 in a different way, and 1+i is next after i in the first way again. Because of this, the complex numbers form a plane.

You can also do this in three dimensions, or more, and forum a volume, or some other higher kind of space.

Boom, there you go with a space made out of non-physical stuff. If you use the right kinds of non-physical stuff, you can make a space that behaves like the physical space we're used to, basically one that's locally flat-ish, and smooth-ish enough to do calculus on: a differentiable manifold.

And if that space is made of, say, unitary matrices instead of ordinary numbers, you can make something like a special unitary group, in which you can build structures identical to the physical stuff that makes up our universe.

If you build a structure identical to a human in there, they'd find themselves experiencing the rest of that math as physical stuff in physical space and time.

So to say that our physical space and time is real is just to say that whatever the thing is of which we're a part, whatever all this stuff we're interacting with that we call "the universe" is, it has a kind of ordered structure similar as described here. That's all space is: an orderly feature of the structure of the universe, whatever "the universe" is.

Language is not, generally speaking, as rigorous as logic. — EnPassant

Logic is a subset of language, but yes, natural language is not usually as rigorous. The reason for inventing systems of logic is to have a more rigorous way of clarifying what we say and the relationships between different things we say.

This proposal is aimed primarily at clarifying the relationship between sentences that are saying different things about the same state of affairs. But it also, incidentally and interestingly, has implications on the things that non-classical logics are aiming to do, without abandoning the principle of bivalence like they do.

I just want to chime in here that my view on creativity and the invention/discovery of ideas in no way hinges on the kind of platonism that Tristan is on about. I think that even on a nominalist account, whatever it means to say that an abstract thing like an idea (say for example, a number) "exists" now, that "existed" in the same way before anyone first thought about it, even if in a strict philosophical sense it's wrong to say that numbers "exist" at all.

I don't think even a nominalist would say that anyone invented the square root of 2, or irrational numbers generally, in a way that is distinguishable from discovery; even a nominalist would say that we discovered that whatever number it is that measures the diagonal of a 1x1 square, that number is not expressible as a ratio of any two natural numbers. Nobody made that up; it was figured out, and it was always the case long before anybody figured it out. Even if there aren't reified abstract objects beyond space and time that are "the irrational numbers" to make that the case.

Similarly, there is some natural number that is so large that nobody has counted up to it yet, but that doesn't mean that that number "doesn't exist" yet, in whatever sense numbers can be said to "exist" at all.

Likewise with all ideas, on my account. Just because nobody has thought them up yet, doesn't mean they don't "exist", in whatever sense at all it could be said that any ideas "exist" in the first place. My account is neutral toward what that kind of "existence" is; my only claim (on this matter) is that someone thinking of an idea doesn't change the status of its existence.

Find something you like or want - anything, even a daily ice-cream cone - that is reasonably doable that you would enjoy doing, and do it. — tim wood

I can vouch for this. When I was going through an existential crisis last year, one day in July I took a walk down the street, and stopped in a little bodega I‘d never paid any attention to before, because I was thirsty, but once there I saw popsicles and got one of them instead, and just walking down the street on a bright summer day licking a popsicle was so enjoyable and lifted my mood so much that I began to do that every day and look forward to it, and just having that little something to look forward to every day made living so much easier.

march in LGBT parades, support capitalism, and welfare — batsushi7

One of these things is not like the others.

This does not deal with the topic of whether creativty is discovery or not. This is a different topic, namely,how the creative process works.

I am not sure if you've realized that the true reason your second part is not answered by anyone, is because it is not an integral part of your firstly presented lemma. In this second part you try to point out how the creative process is a determined course of action. I have no argument against that, I agree with that, as I am a firm advocate of determinism and of the deterministic nature of the universe we liive in. — god must be atheist

The overarching question I start with in the OP is whether creativity requires nondeterminism. My answer is that it does not, but instead requires a certain kind of pattern of exploration or mapping of the abstract space of possibilities in relation to already known possibilities; a process that could be deterministically carried out, but by a different algorithm than just iterating through every possibility in order. (Or randomly picking them out in no order).

Giving that answer requires first establishing that abstract space of possibilities, which comes about from the dissolution of the distinction between invention and discovery. So I first mention that dissolution and the consequent concept of that abstract space of possibilities, so that I can then give my answer to what creativity actually is, if not mere indeterminism, in terms of that abstract space.

you claim that if the world is deterministic, then there are no original, creative, created ideas — god must be atheist

Nope, I just claim that creativity doesn't lie in non-determinism, for reasons that hinge on there not being a clear division between invention and discovery.

That lack of division means that the same problems that make the most obvious deterministic approach seem uncreative also make a random (non-deterministic) approach seem uncreative.

Because creativity is not in the (non)determinism of the process, but in specific features of the process. Which must be adequately determined to have identifiable features at all, but it doesn't have to be wholly determined, and being wholly undetermined doesn't help anything.

I kinda feel like nobody read past the first paragraph of the OP. That's all groundwork. The important part is the end:

it is a specific feature of the process, which requires that the process be at least partly deterministic, that grants the appearance of creativity.

That feature is that the invented or discovered idea must be recognizably similar to previously known ideas, and yet also noticeably different from them. That alone is only the bare minimum of creativity, however: something that is just like something else with a slight twist will be rightly called only a variation on a previous theme and not especially creative. However, something that is completely unlike any prior work will seem so random, out of context, and therefore unapproachable, that audiences will be unable to appreciate it. The kind of new ideas that seem really creative are the ones that make apparent the structure of the space of possibilities, connecting and re-contextualizing previously known ideas.

If two genres of some medium are well-known, for example, with many variations on the same theme, and then a new work of art is made in that medium that blends elements of both genres in a way that shows them both to be the ends of a longer spectrum of genres, then that will be seen as very creative. It will also open up the potential of still further creativity later, as other works located along that same line in the space of possibilities can then have the context of that spectrum to anchor them, to give them purpose in filling in the unexplored regions in the middle of that spectrum and beyond its known ends. If one such spectrum of possibilities is already known, and a new work can bridge between it and ideas that lie off of it in such a way as to expand the spectrum into a new dimension, suddenly even more structure in the space of possibilities is made apparent, and even more opportunity for further creativity is opened up.

In relating already known ideas to each other across a space of previously unexplored ideas, new works can give further context and significance to existing ones and draw context and significance from them, and it is that process of connection and contextualization, not mere nondeterministic randomness, that constitutes creativity. — Pfhorrest

Functionalism is also distinguished from B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism because it accepts the reality of internal mental states, rather than simply attributing psychological states to the whole organism. According to behaviorism, which mental states a creature has depends just on how it behaves (or is disposed to behave) in response to stimuli. In contrast functionalists typically believe that internal and psychological states can be distinguished with a “finer grain” than behavior — IEP

This is more or less what I was trying to get at with my post in the intro thread that spawned this one, which I assumed would be moved over here in the split:

I still haven't figured out the difference between a materialist and a physicalist, or if there is a difference. And I'm not sure about identity theorists, functionalists, and behaviourists — Malcolm Lett

Sometimes materialist and physicalist mean the same thing. When they differ, it’s either just to explicitly expand the set of things believed in to physical stuff besides matter (like other forms of energy, spacetime, quantum fields, strings and branes, etc), or to affirm that general kind of stuff while denying the existence of “material substances” as in something above and beyond the empirically observable properties of things, some kind of transcendental stuff that those properties inhere in.

Behaviorists think that there is nothing more to mind than behavior; to be in a mental state just is to behave some way. Functionalists are very similar, except that they take mind to be a function, a map from input to output, where the output is behavior, and input is sense experience; to be in a mental state is more like to be disposed to behave a certain way in response to certain experiences. Both of these differ from any kind of identity theory because they imply multiple realizability: anything that does the same behavior or function is in the same mental state, no matter what kind of underlying stuff is instantiating that behavior or functionality (brains, circuits, vacuum tubes, etc), whereas identity theories say that a mental state is (either a type or a token of) a brain state specifically. — Pfhorrest

I'd argue a behaviorist admits there is a mind separate from behavior, but its inner workings are unknowable. The mind is not just behavior, but the behavior is the only thing that you can measure. In order to advance psychology into a scientific discipline, as opposed to the speculative theories of Freud, Skinner limited the relevant data to that which could objectively be observed and measured. So, I don't think you can say that behaviorism states that the mind is behavior, but it's more that the mind is a black box with inner workings that cannot be known, therefore making only the behavior relevant for analysis. — Hanover

What then is the difference between behaviorism and functionalism? Since functionalism also looks only at behavior for data. — Pfhorrest

Well ok, but there was more to what I said than just that. — DingoJones

Sure, but the bit that I responded to was the crux of it; the rest hangs on that misunderstanding.

There's what something is useful for. This is purpose most generally.

There's what something was made to be used for. This is just a narrower case of the above.

There's what something is being used for. This must be at least marginally a case of the first thing above, since you can't at all use something that's not at all useful, but if it's not clearly a case of it -- if you can kinda use something, but not very well -- then we would normally say that it's "not useful" (even though we're using it anyway), and therefore that's "not its purpose" in the first sense above, regardless of the second sense above.