PBS Space Time has a nice easy explanatory video:



Another good (but more difficult) place to start would be Wikipedia's article on the Higgs mechanism, and possibly also their article on weak hypercharge (which is what e.g. the proto-electrons give and take from the Higgs field to convert between their two types).

I'm not saying anything about the definition of the word "universe", just that in a lot of contemporary physics, people use "big bang" to refer not to a singularity at the start of time, but to the end of cosmological inflation; there was already a universe before "the big bang". Like Enai De A Lukal just said upthread:

(as Pfhorrest already noted, this is less of a shocking result than it may seem since the "Big Bang" in this context is the post-inflationary period in the inflationary model, not the hypothetical "t=0" spacetime singularity of non-inflationary big bang cosmology often referred to as "the big bang") — Enai De A Lukal

Some inflationary models do still posit a singularity at the beginning of time, in which case the universe had a beginning just as in ordinary non-inflationary big bang models. But there is also a model of eternal inflation, where there wasn't necessarily any start of time, just a local stop of inflation, which is the "big bang" for all intents and purposes as we usually mean it, in such a model. It seems to be in that context of eternal inflation specifically that the term "big bang" is used that way, rather than to mean a singularity.

You can start here for info on eternal inflation:

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

The YouTube channel PBS Space Time also has a great series of five video about it, full playlist here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPUh22kYmNCc3WCKb5yF136QSRf0xErm

But I think these are probably the two that are most relevant:

Hmm, I don't think I've heard of that description before, of the HIggs field absorbing things like quarks and stuff like that (and for that matter, I don't think that quarks are absorbed and produced either like force carriers are). I think you're mixing up two different explanations here, one for why light moves slower than c in a medium, which does involve photons being absorbed and re-emitted, and how some particles acquire mass through the Higgs field. — Mr Bee

Admittedly I am not a physicist, though I think @Kenosha Kid is, so maybe he can back me up. As I understand it, the Higgs mechanism involves massive "fundamental" particles like electrons actually being a kind of "blended" particle created when more fundamental particles rapidly interact with the Higgs field. In the case of the electron, IIRC, there is a particle that is mostly exactly the same as an electron, except it has no mass (and so moves at c), and a fixed spin, let's say left. Such a particle can't travel any notable distance at all though, without immediately smacking into the Higgs field, which converts it into a different particle with the opposite spin. That can't travel without immediately smacking into the Higgs field again, which converts it back to the first kind of particle. And so on, over and over, immeasurable rapidly, back and forth. The net result is what appears to be a single particle that's like both of those two, except it moves slower than light and has mass, and an indeterminate spin: the electron as we know it.

Likewise, all the other "fundamental" particles with mass, except IIRC the neutrinos, which don't couple with the Higgs field and so whose tiny mass is still unexplained (because in the Standard Model, all particles should by default be massless, unless interaction with some field is slowing them down and converting some of their kinetic energy to rest-mass, which was my main point).

Yes, and my principles are intended to do exactly that kind of taking the good from both sides. My principles of criticism and phenomenalism are the “skeptical” side of things contra fideism and transcendentalism. But my principles of objectivism and liberalism are the other side, contra nihilism and cynicism. I feel like people tend to pin the overall picture they paint as belonging to one side or the other depending on which principles I state first. When I’ve argued against fideism first thing, the people who come out arguing are the religious supernaturalist folks. But they’re nowhere to be seen here now in this thread where I opened with objectivism...

correctly distinguished science (which proceeds from not knowing but wanting to find out) from religion (which proceeds from pretending to know and fearing being found out). — Kenosha Kid

Nice turn of phrase!

Not that I mourn the loss of GCB, but I do feel there could be some kind of... chilling effect or something?... with the potential threat of suddenly being banned despite a long post history without any bannings. A mod somewhere recently said something like if you’ve been posting a while and haven’t been banned yet, that’s good evidence that they think you’re generally good enough and worth keeping around. But GCB’s ban seems to contradict that.

I get that given a long low quality history a warning probably isn’t going to affect much change, but I think for the sake of other posters remaining, knowing that they would be warned ahead of time could give them more peace of mind.

This problem can trivially be remedied by insisting that only perfect justification, the kind that guarantees the truth of something, is good enough to turn true belief into knowledge; but that would imply that knowledge of almost any substantial topic, where such certainty cannot be obtained, is thereby impossible.

My response to this problem is similar to that of Robert Nozick: I say that knowledge is believing something because it is true, such that not only does one believe it, and it is true, but if it weren't true one wouldn't believe it.

This last condition can, I think, be considered a different sense of "justification" from the Platonic one, and so salvage the traditional definition of knowledge, albeit only by turning the concept of justification on its head, which I argue needs to be done anyway to have a workably rational method of deciding what to believe (critical rationalism or falsificationism).

unless we have a means of evaluating the objective truth, there's nothing going on inconsistent with the view that there isn't one — Kenosha Kid

In my replies to Isaac in the same post you’re replying to, I gave my reasons for why to proceed on the assumption that there is one, and explained why I advocate hedonism specifically because of the need for a common ground to evaluate it by.

No, it's forwarded by some in relativism too — Kenosha Kid

It sounds like we’re just disagreeing about terminology here. I acknowledge that there is a lot of variation in what people mean by different terms in this area, and all I can do about that is be clear what I mean by my use if them. The reasonable kinds of things you’re saying are not what I mean by the things I say I’m against. The unreasonable stuff I’m identifying these terms with are the things I am against. Being mindful of biases, different contexts, individuals differences, etc, is not relativism in the sense that I am against. That’s rather things like criticism in the sense I am for. Failing to distinguish between these kinds of things are the errors I was on about in the OP.

What people think the correct opinion is doesn’t matter.
— Pfhorrest

RE: emphasised point... not a little bit dogmatic? — Kenosha Kid

Nope, quite the contrary. Dogmatism boils down to “because I say so”, and I am saying it doesn’t matter who says so, they still might be wrong.

I believe that there is some objective reality behind phenomena, and that scientific modelling is a way of gaining insights on the limitations of its behaviour. But I do not believe that science is revelation. We do not access objective reality; we see the results of interactions between its parts. I suspect objective reality is something quite fundamentally different from our state-of-the-art models and, while we will always improve the accuracy of those models, we might never have a faithful representation, or know it if we do have it. — Kenosha Kid

I agree completely; and then I take an analogous approach to morality as well. Objective anything, reality or morality, is just the limit of increasingly improved fallible models. Objectivism in the sense I mean it is basically just acknowledging that there is some notion of “improvement”, some way of assessing one fallible model as better or worse than another, so that there is some notion of a limit being approached.

you're great to talk to — Kenosha Kid

Thanks, I enjoy talking to you too.

Now there's the dogmatism of objectivity I was looking for! — Kenosha Kid

Just saying there is some correct answer or another is not dogmatic, when what that answer might be is completely open to question. Objectivism is not fideism; criticism is not nihilism.

You’re doing exactly the conflation of different things that I describing in the OP, so... thanks for the demonstration I guess.

Abortion may be right for Anna, wrong for Barbara. — Kenosha Kid

Sure. That’s not relativism though. That’s “situationism”. Relativism would say something more like that whether abortion is right for Anna depends on whether we ask California or Alabama, because whether people think it’s morally okay varies between those places.

They depend on systems, and in that sense are relative. Morality also depends on systems (moral codes), — Kenosha Kid

One could equally (wrongly) claim that truth in general (even about contingent things like the shape of the world) depends on belief systems, which was my point about the shape of the world changing when you enter or leave the Flat Earth Society HQ. The prevalent belief systems change between those places, so if one held truth relative to belief systems the way moral relativism holds goodness to be relative to moral systems, then the truth would change as you walked through the door.

Objectivism as I mean it is the opposite of that. About both reality and morality. What people think the correct opinion is doesn’t matter. (But what people experience does). The correct opinion, about reality or morality, is independent of what anyone thinks it is.

It makes no argument that we should take up this contingency. — Isaac

The argument for that part was the main thing I was directing you to, and the first bit I quoted in my last post.

But here, let me walk you through the whole thing backwards as a reductio.

The opposite of hedonism as I mean it is the supposition that some things are bad even though they don’t feel bad to anyone; they just are. The supposition that there is such a thing as a victimless crime, morally speaking.

If that were the case, the only way of telling which things were good or bad would be to take someone’s word for it. You would not be able to confirm that something is bad to someone by standing in their place and seeing if it felt bad to you too. You’d be stuck just agreeing or disagreeing with no manner of adjudication.

One could get around this problem of having to take someone’s word on what is good or bad by denying that anything is actually good or bad, saying all there is is people’s words about it and if those differ between people then what is good or bad differs between them too.

But if you do that, then if there is such a thing as the right opinion after all, you will never find it, because you never even attempt to answer what it might be, and you will remain wrong forever.

So we’re back to having to take someone’s (maybe your own) word for it without any way of questioning it. But then if your opinions should happen to be the wrong ones, you will never find out, because you never question them, and you will remain wrong forever.

There might not be such a thing as a correct opinion, and if there is, we might not be able to find it. But if we're starting from such a place of complete ignorance that we're not even sure about that — where we don't know what there is to know, or how to know it, or if we can know it at all, or if there is even anything at all to be known — and we want to figure out what the correct opinions are in case such a thing should turn out to be possible, then the safest bet, pragmatically speaking, is to proceed under the assumption that there are such things, and that we can find them, and then try. Maybe ultimately in vain, but that's better than failing just because we never tried in the first place.

So we try by proceeding under the assumption that there is such a thing as a correct opinion, in a sense beyond mere subjective agreement, but that there is always a question as to which opinion, and whether or to what extent any opinion, is correct. And if you are going to hold every opinion open to question, you have to consider only opinions that would make some experiential, phenomenal difference, where you could somehow tell if they were correct or incorrect.

So when it comes no normative questions, we’re left appealing to shared normative experiences: we agree (from our firsthand experience) that this feels bad to people like so in situations like such, so subjecting people like so to situations like such is bad.

And since if you are going to hold that such a thing as a correct opinion is possible, you have to give every opinion the benefit of the doubt that that one might possibly be it (otherwise you would be forced to dismiss all opinions as equally incorrect out of hand), we have to proceed on the assumption that anything else might as well be good enough until it can thus be shown bad.


Most of this post is things I already wrote either here or in the essay I sent you to, just rearranged to address this one specific point.

I really didn’t intend this whole thread to be a defense of just one small part of my own principles. I wanted to talk about systemic principles in general and gave mine as an example of the kind of thing I mean.

Asking about it causes it to change? — Luke

No, but what answer you get changes with what questions you ask. “What is the position at time t?” has a different answer than “What is the position at time t+1?”

Elevation might change wrt latitude, but nothing about the (3D) road changes at a time, including the position of any of its 2D cross-sections (per elevation). — Luke

Exactly, now you’re talking sense.

The elevation changes with latitude but not with time.

A similar gradient in 4D changes with time (which we’re picturing as a dimension just like space here) but not with... hypertime or something.

In 4D, a change over time is simply a slope of a 4D object, just like in 3D a change of elevation over latitude is just a literal slope in the usual sense.

In the case of your 3D road, it's the elevation of 2D cross-sections of the road changing wrt latitude/length. In the case of a 4D object, it would be (some attribute of) 3D cross-sections of the 4D object changing wrt time. — Luke

Some attribute like their position in space? So you have a change in position over time. That’s exactly what motion is.

Any Blavatsky Mews — Punshhh

Nope, that’s not a familiar name to me.

The argument isn't directly for hedonism, the argument is for those four principles, of which hedonism is only half of one (phenomenalism). The argument in question is the entire second section of that chapter, starting with "The underlying reason I hold this general philosophical view..." and continuing through the whole comparison with Pascal and so on.

The most important part is:

If you accept fideism rather than criticism, then if your opinions should happen to be the wrong ones, you will never find out, because you never question them, and you will remain wrong forever. And if you accept nihilism rather than objectivism, then if there is such a thing as the right opinion after all, you will never find it, because you never even attempt to answer what it might be, and you will remain wrong forever.

There might not be such a thing as a correct opinion, and if there is, we might not be able to find it. But if we're starting from such a place of complete ignorance that we're not even sure about that — where we don't know what there is to know, or how to know it, or if we can know it at all, or if there is even anything at all to be known — and we want to figure out what the correct opinions are in case such a thing should turn out to be possible, then the safest bet, pragmatically speaking, is to proceed under the assumption that there are such things, and that we can find them, and then try. Maybe ultimately in vain, but that's better than failing just because we never tried in the first place.

Plus just earlier:

Phenomenalism, as anti-transcendentalism, is entailed by criticism: if you are going to hold every opinion open to question, you have to consider only opinions that would make some experiential, phenomenal difference, where you could somehow tell if they were correct or incorrect. (At least, unless you're willing to also reject objectivism for nihilism, and say that there are some questions about things beyond experience that simply can never be answered).

Where hedonism is the normative half of what I mean by phenomenalism, as explained here.

So there's an argument for commensurablism generally, half of which is criticism, which entails phenomenalism, half of which is hedonism.

There are also paraconsistent and intuitionistic logics that can deal with propositions being either (respectively) both true and false, or neither true and false. (Alternate links from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: paraconsistent logic and intuitionistic logic).

Had I lived in the first half of the last century (and, who knows?), I probably would have been a Theosophist. — Wayfarer

Interesting side note: my home town was founded in part by Theosophists, and a bunch of them still live here and lots of things are named after them. I walk daily in Besant Meadow. My junior college was on Leadbeater beach. Krishnamurti taught regularly at the Krotona Foundation overlooking Besant Meadow, whose gardens I used to regularly walk before the COVID-19 lock downs closed them. Etc. (My dad helped lay the mosaic on the "throne" of Beatrice Wood, whose home was on the land of the Besant Hill School, which locals know as "Happy Valley". I got to smash a bunch of her priceless ceramics to make the pieces for the mosaic).

Motion or change along the time axis is required by the definition of motion (v=dx/dt). — Luke

The 4D object spans time. It occupies multiple temporal positions, a whole continuous span of them. At one one its temporal positions, its spatial position is different than the spatial position it has at a different spatial position. Change which temporal position you're asking about, and the corresponding spatial position will be different.

Just like, on my south-facing coast here, the main road has a higher elevation in the north than it does in the south. The road spans many north-south locations. At some of those locations, its elevation is different than at others. So its elevation changes with latitude.

Just like a 4D object's spatial position changes with time.

But the road isn't moving north over time, and the 4D object isn't moving later through... something.

Yeah I was just curious what the big deal was. Thanks.

Let me put this way, if a scenario has the rights of one group of people, say trans women, at odds with the rights of another, say cis women, do you believe there is an objective moral truth that can resolve or override the conflict? — Kenosha Kid

Yes. Rights in principle cannot conflict; if they seem to, at least one claim of rights is incorrect.

Even in moral relativism a thing can be considered objectively true for that person/culture and objectively false for others though — Kenosha Kid

That sounds, again, like a weird use of “objective” to me; maybe you mean it as a synonym for “absolute” again? Different cultures consider different things moral absolutes, of course. Relativism would say that they’re each right, in their own cultures. Objectivism (as in universalism) would say that at most one (of any set of contrary claims) is right.

I expect that you know that isn't true. There is a truth relativism, but it doesn't concern facts like the shape of the Earth, rather how systems of truth can be constructed differently with different truth values for the same questions. It isn't nearly as controversial as absolutists make out. For instance, all mathematical truths are true with respect to a mathematical framework: choice of axioms. Different axioms yield different outcomes of truth values. Most of us are pretty comfortable with this. — Kenosha Kid

Mathematical truths are of a different kind to claims about the world. They are logical truths, which depend only on the assigned meanings of the words used in them, the axioms of the logical system as you say, which are arbitrary; we could easily assign them differently. The moral analogue of that, on my account, is property rights, which depend entirely on who owns what, which is likewise arbitrary and could be assigned differently. But most of morality concerns supererogatory goods, which are the moral analogue of contingent truths. That’s why I gave a contingent descriptive scenario (about the shape of the earth) as an analogous form of relativism.

@DoppyTheElv This is the poll I was taking about. Bumping for your reference and to get more current data.

Looks like it’s almost exactly 3/4 atheists here, 3/4 of whom are only incidentally so; while about 5/8 of the 1/4 of people here who are theists take it as a core part of their philosophy.

I don’t know that most people here are necessarily not-theists, just that there are plenty of people who also argue against theists... although, I did do a poll about this a while back, maybe I’ll dig it up and bump it for more current data.

I think perhaps you are conflating together several different dichotomies with regards to kinds of morality.

I do take most of morality to be entirely contingent, but that doesn't make it non-objective. Most facts about reality are contingent (not necessarily true), but still objectively true. (I think there are some necessary moral truths, obligations, but they're rather vacuous without taking into account some contingencies: just like the only necessary descriptive truths are logical truths that only mean anything non-vacuous in terms of the contingent assignment of meaning to words, so too the only moral obligations regard rights, which I construe as all about property, and so depend entirely upon the contingent assignment of ownership).

Non-contingent moralities are generally called "absolute" rather than just "objective". (And contingent ones are sometimes called "situational" in contrast). Objective in the sense that I mean it is often also called "universal". It's opposite relativism (which also has multiple senses, but it'll be clear which one I mean) in the sense that what is or isn't moral doesn't change depending on who you ask -- people will give you different answers, but some (if not all) of them are wrong -- even though it can change depending on context or circumstance.

For a descriptive analogy, relativism would hold that inside the headquarters of the Flat Earth Society, the entire world is flat, because that's what people there believe. But as soon as you step outside of there, the entire world is round. Objectivism in contrast says that the shape of the world doesn't depend on who you ask: one of those views about it is wrong (and I'm sure you know which). But that doesn't mean that the world couldn't actually be shaped differently at different places: it's conceivable that there could be a flat side to the world and a round side. (Not conceivable in terms of actual science, but we can imagine a hypothetical world where that was so). In such a scenario, everyone should agree that it's flat over on that side and round on this side, and if people disagree about where it's flat and where it's round, at least one (if not all) of them is wrong.

And yeah, my concept of morality is in no way limited to humans. It can be applied to animals, aliens, anything. (Paging Dr. Singer).

Empiricism is about the source of knowledge, not the source of beliefs. Whatever measure you use to distinguish between the two (I prefer a fuzzy gradation, myself) there is a difference. — Isaac

Knowledge is a species of belief, and the kinds of things I’m thinking of (theists and other spiritualists, flat earthers, etc) often claim knowledge despite lack of or contrary empirical evidence.

Again, it's caring about the pain of others which is required for your translation of hedonic values into moral ones. This is not equivalent to empiricism where it is my knowledge which is being sourced from my senses. — Isaac

Developing an intersubjective agreement on what is or isn’t real depends on caring about other people’s observation at least enough to go and see if you have the same observation in the same circumstances, and then on account of that confirmation agreeing that reality actually is such a way that it continues to appear that way to them, even if you’re not making that observation yourself right at this moment.

Likewise, my hedonic account of morality hinges on people confirming first hand as necessary that yes indeed it does hurt when someone does that, and then on account of that confirmation agreeing that it morally is wrong for people to do that, even if it’s not you experiencing the pain right at this moment.

Sure you could just care about your own hedonic experiences to the extent that you say so long as you’re not a actively experiencing the pain then it’s not bad, but that would be akin to taking a solipsistic view of reality that anything that you’re not currently observing isn’t real. That’s the kind of thing my principle of objectivism is to guard against. Phenomenalism by itself isn’t my whole view; it’s phenomenal objectivism, or objective phenomenalism. Objectivity means not being biased toward your own perspective, but accounting for others’ too.

Perhaps it would be quicker and easier if you simply tell me (or direct me to) your method for demonstrating that judging moral rights and wrongs using hedonistic variables is more right than other systems. That seems to be the sticking point and so it might be better to just jump to it. — Isaac

I’ve been asked not to link to my book anymore, but you can find it in my user profile. It’s the chapter called “Commensurablism”.

where possible, and in a spirit of charity, read Platonists as positing universals as a shorthand for shared naming — bongo fury

When I first read Plato himself, I thought that was all he was on about, and agreed with much of what I thought he was saying. It’s only reading second hand accounts of what professional scholars say Platonists believe that I grokked the full scale of woo that I guess I was too-charitably interpreting as poetic language or something I guess.

This is not in the least bit true. Virtually everyone in the world believes their eyes (especially if you take as I presume it was rhetorically meant to imply senses in general), only the insane don't. There's nowhere near this level of agreement that pain is bad. — Isaac

You dismiss all the beliefs people have in things they can’t see, and disbeliefs people have about things they could see if they looked at the evidence, to say that empiricism is ubiquitous, when it’s really not. Some degree of it is, sure, but not a full commitment to it.

Likewise, most people consider people who say they like to be hurt to be as crazy as people who see hallucinations. Who in their right mind wants to be tortured? That kind of partial hedonism (not liking to be hurt) is as ubiquitous as your partial empiricism (trusting your senses). But a full commitment to it is as rare as a full commitment to empiricism.

In any case, how commonly something is accepted is besides the point. I was saying that lots of people reject these principles (both empiricism and hedonism), and those people are nevertheless wrong. I’m not saying “Look how everyone accepts these things! They must be right!” You’re doing that, and I’m denying the validity of that inference.

Empiricism about the external world is indubitable because without it one would be unable to simply navigate 3D space. — Isaac

And one would quickly die if they didn’t care about pain at all.

There's also somewhat urgent Mod attention needed, here. — Banno

Seeing how that’s deleted already, I’m curious what was so urgent there.

It would seem odd to me for some alien anthropologists to take a view that, whatever it is, there was a right answer to a human question that did not exist at any time during the lifetime of humanity. — Kenosha Kid

At first glance I read this as a comment about there being correct answers to “human questions” that predate the existence of humanity, but on second glance I can’t parse this correctly. Maybe you can rephrase?

If it did mean what I initially took it to mean, then I’d say the only answers that existed to human moral questions prior to humanity itself were conditionals. Like today, we can say that supposing we artificially created some kind of life form vastly different from humanity, such-and-such would be the correct answer to a moral question that might come up in such a species’ culture. But that species doesn’t exist yet. Likewise, it can have been true for all time that if humans do such-and-such to other humans it is bad, even if no actual humans exist yet, or anymore. It’s just kind of a useless truth when there aren’t any humans.

It is not that I disbelieve that some phenomonological thing has an underlying objective reality necessarily, more that it's easier to dismiss false beliefs about that reality than it is to justify good ones. — Kenosha Kid

That is exactly the implications of my principles, both about reality, and about morality. Initially anything goes, but options can be weeded out, by showing them in conflict with experience, and the more options we weed out by accounting for more and more experiences, the more we narrow in on the correct answer. I think you already get what that means for investigating reality. For morally, it roughly means that everything is permissible until it can be shown to hurt someone, and the more and more such hedonic experiences we account for, the narrower and narrower the range of still-permissible options remaining, closing in on (but never reaching) the correct answer to the question of what we should do.

I think empiricism about the external world is something which cannot really be doubted, so I don't think it requires a justification. — Isaac

And yet plenty of people doubt it. People believe in supernatural things that can’t be empirically tested, and disbelieve things that have stood up to empirical testing, all the time. Most people, probably. But we who advocate for science say that those people are wrong. I think arguments can be given for why they’re wrong; arguments that don’t beg the question by presupposing empiricism.

I’m just applying the exact same process to normative questions and hedonic experiences. Most people agree on some level that pain is bad, just like most people generally believe their eyes. But then they also go on to think that all kinds of things that hurt nobody are bad, and things that do hurt people are okay. I think that’s wrong just like people who disbelieve empiricism are wrong, and that arguments to that effect can be given, arguments that don’t beg the question by presupposing hedonism.

you're presenting something as the case (and claiming to be able to argue for it) that is absolutely not judicable by reference to common phenomenal experience. — Isaac

You keep making this category mistake, here and other times this has come up. Common phenomenal experience doesn’t JUST mean empiricism. I am absolutely not saying that hedonism can be empirically proven. Hedonic experiences are a KIND of phenomenal experience, the prescriptive analogue to the descriptive kind of experience we call empirical. I am saying that appeal to common (shared) experiences of that kind is how to settle normative questions, just like appeal to our common (shared) empirical experiences is how to settle factual questions. Lots of people disagree with both if those “how to”s, but I think they can be shown wrong; without begging the question by assuming either kind of phenomenal appeal.

I prefer stupidity to rudeness, personally. — unenlightened

I agree with this too. What makes a forum high-quality to me is not so much the intelligence or education of its posters, but things like charity, patience, and other stripper names. People like that new user @DoppyTheElv are a great example: by his own admission he knows very little about the topics he’s interested in, but he’s humble about that and open-minded and eager to learn.

I’m looking for a place where people like that can come to chat and learn and field their thoughts for discussion, to find out when their ideas aren’t new and who has said what in the same topics before, and to build up any genuinely new ideas they might have in a friendly collaborative way (but still critical of course), not to be harshly shot down for being an idiot who makes mistakes.

I came here thinking of myself as such a learner, expecting a place full of people at least as well educated as me who would hopefully treat me in such a way. I have lots of philosophical thoughts that I think might be new, but I’m not at all confident enough in them to go try to publish a paper or something without even talking to someone about them first. I just want to casually chat with some philosophical people about them.

For the most part, people here usually seem less educated than I at first hoped, but that’s fine: I’m happy being on the other side instead, helping them learn and sort out their thoughts. On the other hand, most of the people who seem possibly more educated seem either silent or unfriendly, with some notable exceptions. So I imagine for those many users even lower down the totem pole, the experience is even worse.

:up:

Dark matter is supposed to make up 80% of massive matter in order to explain the rotational velocity of galaxies. As accurate mass estimates for galaxies are on-going (e.g. only recently have we realised the abundance of supermassive black holes), it's worth treating with some scepticism. Dark matter is, sceptically, an error between current cosmological estimates of mass and current astronomical measurements of mass. — Kenosha Kid

Don’t we now have direct confirmation of dark matter as a stuff in the universe (WIMPs specifically) from the Bullet Cluster observation?

A implies B and C. B strongly suggests A and is true. — Kenosha Kid

This line suggests you’re imagining a confirmationist epistemology, which is problematic, especially since the question at hand is about justification of belief.

Others have already explained why life doesn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics, but I do think the relationship of life and entropy is very useful for defining what life is.

What constitutes life is an open question in the philosophy of biology, struggling to include all of the things that we ordinarily think of as being alive, but to exclude things that we don't ordinarily think of as being alive, like crystals or fire, that are too easily included in some attempted definitions. The definition that I find best suits this purpose hinges on the physics concept of a "machine", which is any physical system that transforms energy from one form to another, which is to say it does "work" in the language of physics.

I propose the definition of a property of such physical work, called "productivity", which is the property of reducing the entropy of the system upon which the work is done. With that established, I then define "life" as "self-productive machinery": a physical system that uses a flow of energy to do productive work upon itself, which is to say, to reduce its own internal entropy (necessarily at the expense of increasing the overall entropy of the environment it is a part of).

The universal increase of entropy dictated by the second law of thermodynamics is the essence of death and decay, and life is anything that fights against that.

There are over 11 different forms of pan-psychism. — christian2017

Why do you keep mentioning this?

Looking back on this thread, I just noticed that all the quotes from my Codex in the OP have broken (deleted apparently) opening quote tags. I'm pretty sure it didn't used to be like that. I'm curious if some admin (@Baden?) came through after the fact some time between now and then and removed them?

In contemporary inflationary cosmology, the universe isn't "everything that happened after the big bang". The big bang is just an important early event in the history of the universe as we know it (which may be only a small part of the total universe, which may be infinitely old, if eternal inflation is correct).

I don't have a comment about this directly, but I was recently searching to see if there are other philosophy discussion places on the internet that might interest me, and I found myself rather intimidated by the standards demanded in them.

I'm looking for a place where I can have a casual conversation with people who are interested in philosophy, preferably with plenty of people who are intelligent and well-educated, but it doesn't have to be exclusively thus. The standards I found many other places demanding seemed like they were all places to submit a rigorous formal argument for critique and rebuttal. Or else a place to meekly submit your questions for the supposed experts to answer. Not a place to just have an easygoing chat about the topic.

This place has its weaknesses, but it's certainly a lot more welcoming than others I've seen.

NB that in contemporary inflationary cosmology, "the Big Bang" doesn't refer to a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather to the end of the inflationary period, a phase shift in which the energy of the expansion of space (the "inflaton field") converted to energy of the quantum fields that underlie matter as we know it. The universe stopped being a mostly empty and cold and rapidly expanding space, and converted instead into a slowly expanding extremely hot and energy-dense state, which then evolved to the state we see it in today.

The article is saying that dark matter was possibly around already before that phase shift. Which isn't very surprising, since it's apparently some kind of stuff very different from the stuff made of excitations of quantum fields that we're familiar with.

The first head-scratcher for me is the compatibility of objectivism with phenomonalism. Isn't the acceptance of the phenomological limit rather at odds with the idea that I have direct sensation of reality? And why do I need to even appeal to shared phenomena if my knowledge is objective? — Kenosha Kid

My principle of objectivism isn’t saying that we have direct experience of (the whole of) reality (or morality), or that all our thoughts are objectively correct. Just that there is something that it would be objectively correct to think, as opposed to saying there is no correct or incorrect and every opinion is just as baseless as any other.

Your use of “limit” is apropos here, because on my account objectivity is the limit (in a mathematical sense) of progressively less wrong opinions, what our opinions converge toward as we take more and more experiences into proper account, but which we can never quite reach.

And is a philosophy of what's-right-for-me truly compatible with liberalism? For instance, can:

the initial state of inquiry is one of several opinions competing as equal candidates, none either winning or losing out by default, but each remaining a live possibility until it is shown to be worse than the others
— Pfhorrest

be said to be compatible with objectivism? — Kenosha Kid

I’d say liberalism is actually entailed by objectivism: if you are going to hold that such a thing as a correct opinion is possible, you have to give every opinion the benefit of the doubt that that one might possibly be it, otherwise you would be forced to dismiss all opinions as equally incorrect out of hand, i.e. cynicism. (At least, unless you're willing to also reject criticism for fideism, and say that there are simply some foundational opinions that are beyond question).

Likewise phenomenalism, as anti-transcendentalism, is entailed by criticism: if you are going to hold every opinion open to question, you have to consider only opinions that would make some experiential, phenomenal difference, where you could somehow tell if they were correct or incorrect. (At least, unless you're willing to also reject objectivism for nihilism, and say that there are some questions about things beyond experience that simply can never be answered).

Does being an atheist also mean you're a naturalist? — DoppyTheElv

Strictly speaking no, but there is a strong correlation, as being a naturalist generally means being an atheist (unless you use a strange concept of God).

I heard Alvin Plantinga is a popular one. — Wheatley

Be aware of biases though. Plantinga is very much laying out an apologetics, an attempt to philosophically justify religion. You'll also want to temper that with someone philosophically critical of it. Or maybe look into someone like Russell who went back and forth between both sides of the course of his life, criticizing his own earlier arguments in later ones, back and forth.

I see but do you agree that once philosophy begins to delve into an issue that issue formalized so as to be sufficiently removed from folk intuition even to the extent that it becomes unintelligble to our intuitions? — TheMadFool

No, quite the opposite. For example, the common folk concept of free will predates concerns about whether determinism would inhibit it. We had a notion of freely willing vs not freely willing before it occurred to anyone to ask whether a deterministic universe would mean that nobody was ever freely willing. Then after two millennia of people debating free will vs determinism, you've got a bunch of philosophers who simply cannot conceive of a notion of "free will" that might be compatible with determinism: free will in their minds has just become the antonym of determinism, and determinism the antonym of free will. But if you step back and as whether that analysis of the concept tracks with our common pre-theoretic folk understanding of it, you find it doesn't, and we need to find a different analysis of the concept that does track with that understanding. Otherwise, "free will" in philosophy becomes some technical term that doesn't mean what people ordinarily mean by it, and any philosophical results about "free will" don't actually tell us anything about free will as people ordinarily mean it.

Likewise, if Gettier was right (I don't think he is) that a JTB account of knowledge did not track with our common pre-theoretic folk understanding of knowledge, that would show that JTB is not a correct analysis of what it's supposed to analyze (knowledge). We could then either insist that JTB is definitionally what it means to "know", and let there be a technical term of art in philosophy called "knowledge" that isn't knowledge as we ordinarily mean it; or we could re-analyze knowledge into something other than JTB, to have a useful analysis of knowledge as we ordinarily mean it.