Right, but you said its purpose is what you are using it for. I — DingoJones

No, I said what it's useful for.

You can use something in a way that it's not very useful. Obviously it has to be at least a little bit useful otherwise you won't be able to use it at all, but there's no problem saying, while using spoon to cut bread, "this spoon isn't very useful for cutting bread".

The reason I would not say a spoon’s purpose is to cut bread is precisely that a spoon is not very good for / not very useful for cutting bread. It is slightly useful for / good for cutting bread, but we don’t really have the language to say something is “a slight purpose” or such, so we have to say that it either is or isn’t a purpose, and a spoon is so bad for cutting bread that we’d lean toward the “not its purpose” option, even if it can kinda be used for that purpose.

Ok, so can something have a purpose that it isnt useful for? — DingoJones

I think to “have“ a purpose is the same thing as to “be useful for” a purpose, and so if a thing is not useful to some purpose, that is not a purpose of it (a purpose it “has”); that’s not something it’s good for.

Also, could you address the lack of mutual exclusivity I mentioned? It seems to me it can be both, and thus my point about different senses of the word being used stands. — DingoJones

I don’t understand this question.

Do you think that the purpose of something is the same as the usage of something? — DingoJones

I think a purpose (there can be more than one) is what something is useful for, and the use that the creator of something had in mind is but one case of that more general sense, not a different special sense. Uncreated things, or things created accidentally, unintentionally, with no purpose in mind, can nevertheless have purpose, if they are useful, good for something.

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

Maybe this conversation should be split into another thread so we don’t crowd this introduction thread.

I don’t think those are two different senses of the word purpose, those are just two different ideas about what it’s purpose is.

Otherwise he or she might earn actually very little, so little that the job at McDonalds might give equivalent or better income. Yet if the farmer is a land owner, he or she is the root problem of everything to classic Marxism. — ssu

You can’t just look at the income difference, you need to look at the expenses too. Someone who owns no land and works at McDonalds sees the vast majority of their income go to just paying someone else to live on their land. The farm owner has no such expense, and also has a job that they can’t be fired from because they own it.

I never said I was avoiding teleology, just that teleology isn’t all about what good the creator of something had in mind when they created it, just what good anyone can use something toward however it came to be.

I think the problem causing all the fuss about teleology is taking it to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive.

A thing’s purpose is whatever it is good for, regardless of whether or not anyone created it with that use in mind. Our use of the word in the blackbird case demonstrates that we are generally okay with this sense of “purpose” in everyday speech.

I think the field of teleology should be refocused to not look for purpose-centric descriptive explanations of how things came to be, but instead prescriptive accounts of why things should be, what they’re good for, what is a good end, what is good in a consequentialist sense; as a separate but equally important question from what means are good, or right, or just, in a deontological sense. What are we aiming for, and how best to get there.

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.

Nothing is better than heaven.
But a ham sandwich is better than nothing.
Therefore a ham sandwich is better than heaven.

By "different" I mean numerically not the same idea. In the way that Alice and Bob might drive "the same car" as in the same year make model and condition (qualitatively identical), but "different cars" as in there are two cars (numerically non-identical). By Alice and Bob having different ideas, I mean there are two ideas involved in the scenario. By them having identical ideas, I mean that there are no features that differ between the two ideas.

And yeah, having numerically different but qualitatively identical ideas doesn't make much sense. That's why I called it absurd. And I know that you don't think that that's what's actually happening; neither do I. But that's what logically has to happen if coming up with an idea means bringing it into existence. Which is why coming up with an idea can't bring it into existence.

What makes a mental image an idea but a mental sound (else an imagined smell, taste, or tactile feel) not an idea? — javra

I don’t mean just visual images, but the all-sensory sense of “image” used in the very way you just said “IMAGined” smell etc.

Moreover, how can one obtain a correspondence to reality in the absence of some idea which so corresponds? — javra

Here you’re using “idea” in the same sense as I am. Figurative, you’ve got a drawing, which could be put to several uses: it could be used as a representation of reality, or a blueprint for something to make real, etc. The drawing is the idea, and one thing you’ll can do with that drawn is say “this represents reality”. The use of it as a representation, and the accuracy of it as a representation, is not a part of the drawing—the idea—itself.

For instance, the idea that “planet Earth has trees on it” can be either a truth or a falsity given what employment(s) of it? — javra

For clarity I would phrase that as “the idea of planet earth HAVING trees on it”, “having” in the gerund mood, with the indicative mood “has” in “planet earth HAS trees on it” instead showing the employment of that idea as a representation, and the usefulness or correctness of that use as representation determining whether that indicative statement is true or false.

Your implicit assumption here is that two people cannot create the same idea because an idea cannot physically be in two places at once. — Luke

It has nothing to do with that. Ideas aren’t concrete, so they don’t have locations. I say they also don’t have temporal location, or any other temporal features; they don’t come into being or go out of being or change over time, which is the main reason why I think it makes no sense to say a human being at some point created an idea. Abstract things aren't in space and time like that.

But the argument I've been making about that toward you, since you think they can come into being over time (by being created, invented) is about the incoherence of two people separately bringing into existence the idea. So you think the idea didn't exist before, from the dawn of time until some day one person brought it into existence, then later another person separately... brought something that already existed into existence, again? That doesn't make sense. The only way it can make sense that two people both did an act of creation, that each separately brought an idea into existence, is if they are two separate ideas that got brought into existence. But that would mean that those two people didn't separately come up with the same idea, they just came up with two different, but identical, ideas.

Except we already agree that that's not correct, so then you have to follow the chain of inferences backwards, contrapositively: since those two people didn't come up with two different ideas, but if they had each brought an idea into being they would have, they must not have each brought an idea into being. You might want to say that the first one brought the idea into being, but not the second; except then you're still denying what we've both already affirmed, that two people can independently come up with the same idea. So it must be that neither of those two people coming up with that idea brought it into being. Which means whatever the state of existence we can ascribe to the idea after they came up with it, we must also ascribe to it before they came up with it.

That could be that it neither existed before nor after. It could be that it existed before and after. It could be that "existence" is a confused thing to ascribe to an abstract object in the first place. I'm not taking a stance here on the ontology of abstract objects, like you and @Tristan L are arguing about. (I have one, and I'm pretty sure it's not the same as either of yours; going to do a thread about that soonish).

But one way or another its state of existence didn't change when someone came up with it, or else two people couldn't have both separately come up with it.

the proletariat are in the majority (or at least they were in Marx's time and I would say, without checking stats, probably still are) — Janus

It seems hard to imagine the proletariat could possibly ever be a minority, as that would mean that a property-owning majority was somehow getting by on the labor of a minority. Hierarchy always seems to be a pyramid: it’s smaller at the top.

I guess maybe with technological advances it could be possible? E.g. about 5% of people today are engaged in the agricultural work that used to be 100% of the economy, so maybe somehow it could come to be that 95% of the people own 100% of the means of production and live off the labor of that remaining 5%?

Ideas as I speak of them are images of possible, yes; the claim that reality matches one of those images is something beyond a mere idea, it is something one can do with an idea.

So truths and lies are different ways ideas are employed, but not themselves ideas.

You are basically saying that not helping the truck accident victim is a valid, although morally weaker choice. — Seth72

Yes. And giving money to those who need it more than you is good, but it's totally okay if you don't.

It seems that helping others is a consistently more "moral" than helping yourself. I don't understand why that is. — Seth72

I don't think that helping others is always better than helping yourself, but (leaving aside the question of means and whether they are obligatory/permissible/omissible/impermissible) helping someone worse off than yourself usually produces a better end than helping yourself, because of marginal utility: something is worth more to someone the less of it they already have, and worth less to someone the more of it they already have.

A millionaire losing a dollar won't even notice the harm he incurs, while a homeless beggar might be able to get a snack and stave off his hunger for a little while longer with that. Conversely, it does not produce good ends for the beggar to give a dollar to the millionaire: while that might demonstrate some positive character trait of the beggar like selflessness, it hurts him far more than it helps the millionaire (who couldn't care less about a single new dollar), and so in the end produces net worse ends.

Suppose you start with .1111... and end up in a finite number of steps at sqr(2)-1. How do you do this? Just curious. — jgill

I don't know how to figure out the route from a given starting point to a given end point. But if sqrt(2)-1 has a(n infinite) decimal expansion, as I think it does (correct me if I'm wrong), and you start an unending process of adding to a list of infinite decimal expansions new infinite decimal expansions that aren't yet on that list, you would eventually get to the infinite decimal expansion of that. No?

Step by step? An algorithm? If so, then you are generating all the real numbers and counting them as you do so. Perhaps you refer to an uncountable algorithm? Is there such an animal? :chin: — jgill

Like I said, you’re the mathematician here, not me, so you tell me where I’m going wrong. I’m working directly from Cantor’s proof that the reals are uncountable, which hinges entirely on this ability to always generate a new real that’s not on any supposedly complete list of reals. That process of course can’t ever end up generating any complete list of all the reals, else that proof would contradict itself. But surely any given real will eventually be included on the ever-growing list, even though the list will never be complete?

Most people have way more money that they would need to simply survive — Seth72

Do they really though? Most people don’t own a place to live and could scarcely dream of ever having enough money to. Most people are less than a month of unemployment (or one major expensive problem) away from starvation and homelessness.

But yeah, there are nevertheless lots of people around the world with even less than that, and if inaction were morally wrong then we’d all be morally wrong for saving up toward escaping our own poverty instead of giving that money to those who are already starving, not just a month away from starving.

It’s a good thing that inaction isn’t morally wrong then. Instead, taking action to help those in need is an omissible good: good, but not obligatory.

I think in that first Rawls quote, he is not endorsing all of the things he lists, but simply listing common well-known examples of “major institutions” the likes of which are the things being decided upon from the Original Position. So he’s not saying that monogamy is a necessary thing for justice, but that questions of justice include questions about things like whether or not to allow/require/etc monogamy.

Considering four elements A, B, C and D spatially located in a "configuration space" , — RussellA

I think you don’t understand what a configuration space is. It’s also called a state space or phase space. I think this is the most straight article of those three terms:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space

I agree that two people independently coming up with the same idea is an "obvious normal thing", but there is a disconnect - or lack of explanation from you here - in why the idea must pre-exist either of them. You have repeatedly stated that two people cannot come up with (invent) the same idea because it implies that an idea is its instantiation, or that an idea is its thought event. — Luke

You have that implication backwards. If ideas were their instantiations or thought-events, then two people couldn’t independently come up with the same one.

I know you’re not claiming that now, but it doesn’t matter because what it seems you are claiming still has the same implication:

If ideas are created by the act if coming up with them, then two people couldn’t independently come up with the same one.

(Because the same numerically singular thing can’t be independently made by each of two different people. They could make it together, but that’s not what we’re talking about).

Since two people CAN independently come up with the same idea, it follows that coming-up-with is not creating.

And if ideas are not created by coming up with them, then their existence status doesn’t change when people come up with them.

So if they can be said in some sense to exist after coming up with them (and this is the “if” you should really be questioning), then they can be said to exist in that same sense before anyone has come up with them.

Because coming up with them doesn’t change whether they exist or not.

I’ve already demonstrated this to be a straw man argument: the “thought event” (i.e coming up with the idea) is not identical with the idea it produces. I’m sure you agree. Therefore, it does not preclude the possibility of two people having separate thought events but coming up with the same idea independently. I have never implied or stated otherwise. — Luke

The absurdity you imply doesn't stem from the thought-event and the idea being identical; that's just one possibility, and you've made it clear that's not your position.

But when we're talking about concrete objects, if I make a chair, and you make an identical chair, we've still made two chairs, not one chair.

If in coming up with an idea, I make that idea, I create it, invent it, bring it into being... and elsewhere independent of me you come up with an identical idea, in the same way that I already did unbeknownst to you... then you and I have made two different, but identical, ideas, like the two different but identical chairs.

That's absurd. I'm not saying that's what happens. I'm saying that's an implication of your position that coming up with an idea creates the idea.

Since I’ve never laid any claim to your straw man argument, then you must either deny that it is absurd for two people to come up with the same idea independently — Luke

I have, repeatedly. The absurdity is that your view logically implies that this obvious normal thing, two people independently coming up with the same idea, should not be possible, in the same way that two people can't independently build the same single chair, because you say that coming up with an idea is like building a chair: a clear act of creation.

What is a "list of any one real number"? — jgill

Cantor’s diagonalization starts with supposing you have a list of all real numbers (you really can’t), and then goes on to show how to make a new real number that isn’t on that list (thus showing it’s really not a complete list). I take it then that we can thus start with a list of any size, even just one item long, and continually generate new numbers that aren’t on it to add to it.

Who's calling them "two different ideas"? — Luke

By saying that the act of coming up with an idea creates that idea, YOU imply that two separate acts of coming up with something must result in two separate ideas. That’s absurd, so your premise that coming up with the idea creates it must be false.

I've asked you repeatedly why it's absurd or impossible for two people to create/invent the same idea independently. — Luke

And I’ve said repeatedly that THAT is not absurd, but the implications of your view of idea-creation are contrary to that, in an absurd way.

What if they both came up with it at the same time? Anyway, it is your position that neither of them can come up with the idea without it pre-existing, so why is it absurd/impossible for the first person in this scenario to come up with the idea without it pre-existing? — Luke

The point is to refute your claim that coming up with an idea is a clear act of invention. If it were the case that the first person to think something up created that idea, but the next person to independently come up with it did not also create the numerically same idea (because someone else already created it) nor created a numerically different idea (because that would be absurd, numerically two qualitatively identical ideas), then the second person would have to be merely “discovering” the idea despite the fact that they did exactly the same thing as the first person, who instead “invented” it. Thus illustrating why there isn’t a clear distinction between invention and discovery of ideas.

I think you’re still interpreting me in an unnecessarily Platonic fashion. I’m not saying that, unless some idea already exists “out there” somehow, it’s not possible for someone to think of it. I’m saying that it makes no sense to talk of making or creating ideas (not merely instantiating them), so their existence status doesn’t change when someone thinks of them. They don’t come into existence or go out of existence, we can’t do things to make or destroy or change what kinds or ideas there are to be had. We can just have them, start having them, stop having them, but they themes don’t change, only what we do changes.

But what they are is nothing more than the possibilities of us doing (thinking) things, so it’s also not so clear that we’re “discovered” them like we discover concrete things. We’re just also not “creating” them like we create concrete things either.

The original position view on marriage would be the that any kind of marriage between any number of consenting individuals is permissible. Including polygamy.

And what do you know, polygamy actually is ethically permissible, so it all works out.

Wouldn't that be tantamount to counting them? — jgill

You’re the mathematician, so you’d know better than me.

It seems though that since Cantor has the diagonalization method of aways coming up with a new real number that’s not yet on any supposedly-complete list of real numbers, you could start with a list of any one real number, diagonally generate new one to add to that list, diagonally generate another new one, and so on, and mechanically spit out new real numbers without end like that.

In this moment I am euphoric, not because of any phony God's blessing but because I am enlightened my own intelligence. — BitconnectCarlos

I understood that reference.

Didn't you say this was absurd? — Luke

No, I said the implications of your position that thinking up an idea creates that idea would make that situation absurd.

If thinking up an idea creates that idea, and there are two separate events of thinking-up, then two different ideas have been created... even if they are qualitatively identical, what we would normally call “the same idea”. That’s the absurdity, calling two separate instances of the same idea “two different ideas”.

Contrapositively, if those two thinking-up events result in the same single idea, as we usually say, then that idea can’t have been created by the second event if it was already created by the first event, so it must not have been created by either event. If it was not created by anyone thinking it up, then in whatever sense it can be said to “exist” after being thought up, it must have already “existed” in that sense before.

Yet you said the “the greatest socialist country that has ever existed on the face of the earth” — NOS4A2

That was, more or less, sarcastic. If “socialism” meant wealth redistribution, not just from those with the greatest means to those with the greatest needs but any kind of wealth redistribution, then America would be extremely “socialist” because it redistributes trillions of dollars all the time... just not toward the welfare of its people, but to wars and corporate bailouts etc.

That isn’t what “socialism” really means, but it is what anti-socialists seem to think it means, without realizing that therefore America is extremely “socialist”... just not in the way that actual socialists want it to be.

so you are saying that it is possible that all people happen to value the same things — ChatteringMonkey

No, I’m saying that moral objectivism isn’t the claim that everybody does value the same thing. It’s not the opposite of descriptive moral relativism, but of meta-ethical moral relativism.

Why not (for a sufficiently specific definition of x)? — Isaac

I meant “x” to stand in for a single word. If “x” can be some arbitrarily long compound phrase, then sure, that’s fine.

Isn't it strange that I would be arguing this point, as a moral constructivist, against a moral objectivist ;-) — ChatteringMonkey

Only if you think moral objectivism has anything to say about what people do in fact value as part of "human nature", which it doesn't necessarily.

Right, this (above) is what I mean by two people coming up with the same idea independently. Why is this not possible? — Luke

If you mean the "same chair design" scenario, that is totally possible, and I never said otherwise. What I mean is that that doesn't constitute two separate acts of "creating an idea", but two separate acts of instantiating an idea, and that if it were two separate acts of "creating an idea", then that would result in two separate (but identical) ideas (because there were two separate acts of creation, each of which must have its own product), which is absurd.

How is "coming up with the idea" different to "thinking it (up)"? — Luke

It's not, but the idea itself is separate from the event of thinking it up.

Why shouldn't two people be able to have separate "thought events" and come up with the same idea? — Luke

They can. The absurd conclusion that they can't is the consequence of the position you're taking, and I'm bringing it up only to show that that position has to be wrong.

Why does that idea need to pre-exist each of their "thought events"? — Luke

Because if the thought-event was identical to the idea, or at least created the idea, then separate thought-events would be identical to, or create, separate ideas. Say Alice from 1900 came up with an obscure idea, it was lost to history, and then Bob in 2000 came up with the same idea, independently, without knowing about Alice at all. How could Bob's thoughts create an idea that Alice's thoughts had already created a hundred years before? If Alice's thoughts created the idea, then it already existed by the time Bob thought of it; and if thoughts create ideas, then Bob's thoughts must have been a different idea, not identical to the one Alice had. But if Bob and Alice did have the same idea, which is how we'd normally talk about it and I think that's the right way to talk about it, then Alice's thoughts and Bob's thoughts can't be identical to, or have created, the ideas that they're about. So in whatever sense those ideas "exist" after having been thought up, since thinking them up can't have brought them into "existence", they must have already "existed", in whatever way they do now.

I think the problem with arguments that stem from “human nature”, the objection to such arguments, is that the picture of “human nature” being put forth is usually hopelessly simplistic. “Competition is human nature” vs “cooperation is human nature” arguments are dumb because humans are a complicated bag of nature and nurture that includes both competition and cooperation in a very nuanced and ever-changing way. Sure you can do science to human behaviors as a species, but the patterns you come up with aren’t going to be so simple as “humans are naturally x”, for any x.

Yes, I understand, but you’ve simply repeated your stipulation that two people cannot invent the same idea (content) just because they are different people. — Luke

It's not because they're different people, it's because they have made two different instantiations, so if the instantiation is the idea, as you seem to put forth, then that's two different ideas, not the same idea instantiated twice.

So you say, but do you have any argument for this supposed pre-existence of ideas? Why is it not possible for two people to come up with the same idea (content) independently without that idea pre-existing? — Luke

See above. If coming up with an idea creates it, in the same way that building a chair creates that chair, and two people independently come up with something, those are two separate acts of creation, and so two separate creations, not the same thing. If two people build identical chairs, they haven't built the same (singular numerically identical) chair. But if two people think up the same design for a chair, independently, then they've "come up with the same idea", even though their thoughts are separate events and they build separate chairs, which indicates that the "idea" we're talking about in the phrase "came up with the same idea" isn't the event of them thinking it or the fixing of that thought in a material object, but some abstract thing that's separate from the thought event or the chair object, and wasn't created by the thought event, otherwise the second person to independently come up with it couldn't have created it since the first person already had.

Right, so it is your position that ideas (not possibilities) pre-exist their “discovery”. — Luke

In the sense that discovering doesn't make them come into being, sure. Complex numbers "existed", in whatever sense that can be said to "exist", before anybody thought that maybe taking the square root of a negative wasn't simply impossible.

You definitely imply that possibilities “are lying around out there in space somewhere apart from the instances of people doing them” because you keep talking in terms of their “discovery”. If they don’t exist “out there in space somewhere”, then where/how do they exist? — Luke

I'm not taking any stance here on what the sense in which they "exist" (presently or pre-discovery/invention) is. I'm just saying that in whatever sense we can say two people "came up with the same idea", the thing that they're "coming up with" is in some way or another independent of them having come up with it, otherwise what you'd be saying is that one numerically singular concrete thing (the instantiation of some idea) simultaneously exists in two places (in the minds, i.e. brain-states or whatever, of two different people).

And I'm not (at least trying not, maybe I've slipped up somewhere) talking about their "discovery" simpliciter, specifically because that seems to have implications that they were just... out there somewhere, waiting to be found, in the same way that concrete things are. I don't think abstract things, ideas, exist in the same sense as concrete things, and so the sense of "discovery" that we use of concrete things doesn't apply to them. And neither does "invention". "Coming up with" an idea is both invention-like and discovery-like in different ways. (This is kinda like wave-particle duality. Is a photon a particle or a wave? Yes. Yes it is.)

They cannot have the same idea (in terms of content) because they are different people? Sounds like no more than a stipulation. — Luke

No, I mean if the “idea” is not its content but its instantiation, then two people who separately instantiate it, who separately invent it, have invented two, albeit very similar, things, not the same thing.

The only sense in which those two instantiations can be called instantiations of "the same thing" is a sense in which that thing of which they are instances was not created by it being instantiated, but already existed in some sense.

The invention/creation of ideas is impossible? — Luke

In a sense that is distinct from the discovery of them, yes.

With concrete things, it makes sense to ask whether someone made the thing or just found it pre-made. There is a clear way in which those are different.

With abstract things, ideas, that's not so clear. Because abstract things are just possibilities to begin with, and being the first one to do something that was always possible doesn't make it possible; but it's also not like the possibilities are lying around out there in space somewhere apart from the instances of people doing them. So neither invention nor discovery in the sense that we use them of concrete things really makes complete sense applied to abstract things, but something that's kind of like both of them at the same time does.

Each irrational number is an "idea", so this process cannot exist. — jgill

There is no algorithm that will eventually spit out every possible irrational number? I know they can’t be put into a linear order, but is there no way of generating them without any particulars order? I would think something like a space-filling curve would be in the ballpark for something like that.

If they both invented, created, their respective ideas by the act of instantiating them, such that the idea itself and the instantiations of it are not distinguished, then Alice and Bob’s ideas are not the same, because their instantiations are not the same. If instead they merely created instantiations of the same something that in some sense or another “existed” before it was instantiated, then their instantiations can be of the same thing, but then neither of them created it, they both just found it.

I thought it was your position that both/neither "invention" and "discovery" are correct, but your apparent endorsement of Tristan seems to confirm my initial assessment that you are in the "discovery" camp — Luke

Tristan makes great arguments against the invention-only side. I wouldn’t say that that means ideas are discovered-only though, because the act of finding the content of an idea is also an act of creating an instance of it, which is why I don’t think the two can really be distinguished.

Thanks for sharing that, great find! I want to be hopeful that this candid testimony (the sister was unaware her remarks were being recorded) will change some people’s minds... but then the kind of minds that need to be changed are likely too far gone to do anything but latch onto whatever flimsy dismissal is put out in response to this.