I'm suggesting that being civilized or sane means that lots of issues are and must be 'dead' for us. They are 'irrationally' foreclosed. We inherit certain norms of decency and intelligibility that make discussing norms possible in the first place. In simpler terms I'm suggesting that open-minded-ness has its limits. To be sane is to be deaf and blind in a good way. — jjAmEs

I disagree. I do think that to make productive headway in conversation, some topics need to be closed off, but those topics that need to be closed off should be closed off for good reasons, not irrationally; the reasons to close off those topics should be readily apparent the more "indecent" or "insane" such topics of conversation are; and the "insanity" or "indecency" of people who insist on trying to force the conversation there anyway lies in their inability to understand the obvious good reasons not to go there as readily as other people do.

Really, much of my whole philosophical project consists of giving the reasons to foreclose certain large swaths of clearly unworkable ways to investigate things, showing how a bunch of different ways of trying to investigate things boil down to those two clearly unworkable ways and so should be foreclosed along with them, showing how a bunch of proposed answers to various philosophical questions are tantamount those those ways of trying to investigate things, showing what's still left after all of that has been foreclosed, and then letting the sciences take it from there, using those not-insane-or-indecent approaches still left to do the actual hard work of figuring things out.

But surely you see how convenient that is. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is all of this...here? What I have in mind is (for instance) presented in Sartre's Nausea. If the big questions are excluded as meaningless, isn't that a little fishy? — jjAmEs

I think some of those kinds of questions have answers, though the answers are usually as trivial as the questions themselves. It reminds me of a joke I modified decades ago. "What is the answer to this question?" someone asked me, and supposedly their 'correct' answer was that "What" is the answer to that question; but I say instead, "This is the answer to that question." The moral of the story is: Ask an empty question, get an empty answer.

That's the big objection. But the little objection would be questions that seem answerable in principle for which we don't have answers. How can humans achieve immortality? What social order maximizes happiness? — jjAmEs

I say that the role of philosophy in those kinds of questions is to show the means to answering them, not to answer them itself. Those are contingent questions that must be answered with a posteriori investigation. Philosophy's only job there is to clarify how to conduct such an investigation.

I guess it would still be nice to have the discipline to type up a system, but it's hard enough to find people who care about the famous books that already do that, let alone my necessarily repetitive contribution — jjAmEs

I know that feeling. I'm still not completely sure why I bothered writing a philosophy book. Mostly, it seems, because there wasn't already such a book out there. I studied philosophy and jumped from one school of thought to another trying to figure out what to call myself, but none of them fit completely; like pants that are either long enough but not wide enough, or wide enough but too short, or where somehow one leg fits right but not the other or vice versa.

So I guess I thought, "I'm going to make some philoso-pants that fit people like me". Sure, it's just pants that are the same length in both legs as this pair are in one leg, and the same width in both legs as that other pair are in the opposite leg, so I'm just stitching together aspects of pairs of pants that already exist, but on the whole I've not found any pair that fits right in every way, so I thought I should make some.

But now that I have, it seems, most people like their skinny jeans or their high-waters or their weird lopsided pants that are too tight on one side and too short on the other or vice-versa, and nobody wants my pants... or I don't know how to let the people who would want them know that they exist now.

I say embed philosophy within a narrative — jjAmEs

I liked that idea so much it was the original plan for my philosophy book. You can still read the old, incomplete work-in-progress version of that if you want. It had five characters, two representing the skinny jeans and high-waters, two representing the lop-sided pants, and each of them a kind of contemporary social archetype (the religious preppy, the gothpunk nihilist, the hippie "social justice warrior", the nerdy "silicon valley libertarian"), except the fifth who was to be my author-avatar. It's a story about us going to see a fictional movie-within-the-story that prompts a philosophical dialogue as we dine and walk around the neighborhood surrounding the theater nearest my old university.

But I realized after a decade of writer's block and then a year of trying to write fiction (that turned into just a 60,000-word outline) that I absolutely suck at writing dialogue, and would make more progress if I just described my views and those I'm against in my own natural voice.

I have vague dreams of maybe meeting someone, or several someones, who agree with the overall aim of my project, who might like to collaboratively work on turning it into a narrative again, someday. But I have no idea how to go about that.

Don't you feel forced to compromise or self-censor?Isn't one constrained to keep it all a little dry and vague in that situation? — jjAmEs

Not at all, really. I was having passionate arguments on the internet in the days before pseudonymity was a widespread norm, so it was all under my real name, and back when I was a teenage no less. UseNet archives and what remains of old mid-90s early web forums are full of records of my views from the time, and it's never hurt me. I think that some of it is because the controversial views are so nuanced and buried so deep among other nuanced views that they're not smacking anybody in the face; I'm an anarcho-socialist for example, and argue for that in my book, but nobody who stumbled across my website is going to come away with that as their first impression, and probably nobody is going to read over 60 thousand words deep into the work to get the the chapter where I talk about that.

FWIW I do discuss these Kantian "categories" (or something much like them at least) in the next essay in this series On Ontology, Being, and the Objects of Reality.

If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing. — schopenhauer1

What I’m saying is that that can be and sometimes is the case — it’s a state of mind, not a state of the world. I’ve had that state of mind before. I’ve also had its opposite, which I’m convinced is behind a lot of authors like Schopenhauer’s worldview.

IOW life is meaningful if and only if someone finds it meaningful. There is no more that there could conceivably be to "meaning" than someone finding meaning in something. There are awful, dread- and angst-ridden states of mind in which everything seems meaningless, and so to a person in such a state of mind everything is meaningless, because the meaning lies in the state of mind. I expect that Schopie et al found themselves all too often in that state of mind. I've been there too. But I've also been in the opposite state of mind, the kind that religious folks and magical thinkers call a "religious" or "mystical" experience, which to me for a lot of my life was a common and thereby sort of "mundane" albeit still awesome experience, unlike the existential angst which only ever really hit me in force last year.

In that positive state, that I call "ontophilia" (love of being), I love just... being. But also, dying doesn't seem so awful. I'd love to live forever, I'll do what I can to keep living, but also it's okay if I don't. Dying is fine, but living is great and so preferable. But while in the negative state, "ontophobia", I'm constantly terrified of the horrific meat-grinder that is all of existence, and yet the very thing that terrifies me is the potential loss of that existence. Living is awful, because dying is awful, but dying seems (when in that state) like it might be the less awful option.

I've since concluded that, reflexively, the meaning-as-in-purpose of life is precisely to cultivate and spread that meaningful feeling, that love of being, ontophilia. To make life feel worth living, and to aid people to continue doing so.

I'd be surprised if you didn't support the censorship or banning of various 'thought criminals' (you know, racists or homophobes or ..) — jjAmEs

I don't support that, at least not in public spaces. I support individuals' rights to not engage with such people, and private venues' rights to exclude them. On pseudo-public but technically private places like internet forums, I prefer technological solutions that empower individuals to not engage with them, rather than outright exclusion of them.

And I don't see how one manages unanswerable questions without some systematic filter that calls most questions nonsense (like some positivist). — jjAmEs

Yeah? I straight up do that in my philosophy, grounding the meaning of questions in what an answer to them would look like (which for descriptive questions basically is positivism, not quite, though descriptive questions are not the only questions). Questions that can't have answers are thereby meaningless.

I'll agree that we are both in the same big tent known as philosophy. But I'll drag in Beckett and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. And politics and theology...Where we draw line is a matter of context and particular purpose. — jjAmEs

All of those authors and fields can say philosophical things, and philosophy can say things relevant to them, but that doesn't make everything they do philosophical, or philosophy so broad as to encompass all that they do. It sounds like you've read something of my Codex since you know the catchphrase, but in case I just posted it somewhere around here, I go into more detail on where and why I would draw the lines at the start of my essay on metaphilosophy, explicitly distinguishing it from (among other things) religion/theology and art/literature.

what's the problem with repetition? — jjAmEs

I think this gets at a key point: “heaven” is as much (if not more so) a matter of our internal states as external ones. If you could have absolutely anything you wanted in all of its possible variety, all of it good, and yet you would still be bored and so displeased eventually, then there is still something you don’t have: interest, an internal quality, the opposite of boredom. It’s like if all the sex you could possibly want were available but you had no libido and that made you unhappy: the solution isn’t some weird new kind of sex, it’s the restoration of your libido.

If you could be of a mental state where everything around you is perceived either as a delightful pleasure (however small some of them may be) or an interesting challenge (however daunting some of them may be), then you could be happy all the time, in any circumstance. And feeling like that, life would seem worth living, and perpetuating. If life doesn’t seem worth living or perpetuating, perhaps the problem is not with the world (though it undoubtedly has plenty of problems too), but with you.

I keep scrolling past this thread and misreading it as "Evidence of Coronavirus Surviving the Body".

FWIW the founder of pragmatism, Peirce, considered others nominally following after him to have deviated drastically from his project, so much so as to prompt him to rename it "pragmaticism" instead, and IIRC Rorty is reckoned among those going off of Peirce's path.

I reckon myself more a Peircian pragmatist, so much so that I keep using the word in its original sense instead of capitulating to the supposed necessity of renaming that sense to distinguish it from its false usurpers.

And yet pragmatism is still a school of philosophy, aiming to do philosophy better than it had been done, not to stop doing it.

Who allegedly invented the coronavirus, was it the Chinese or the Russians? — Metaphysician Undercover

According to now-banned user alcontali, it was probably oppressed Muslim supergenius bioengineers living in China giving the Chinese people what they deserved.

So, are we allowed to call the German measles the German measles, or is that racist? — Nobeernolife

It's actually not measles, so professionals call it by its proper name, rubella. You (hopefully) never got a MMGM (mumps, measles, German measles) vaccination, but an MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) one instead.

For a better comparison, it is generally considered bad form nowadays to call the influenza pandemic of 1918 "the Spanish flu".

for Lewis, "actual" is an indexical, because it is short for "in this space-time continuum". So, from the point of view of this space-time continuum, we're actual; from the point of view of another space-time continuum, they're actual and we're possible. — Nagase

Yes, and for me, "concrete" is an indexical, because it's short for "part of this mathematical structure". So, from the point of view of beings that are part of the mathematical structure that is the world as we know it, other things that are parts of that same structure are concrete, and other structures entirely are abstract. But from the point of view of beings that are part of those other structures instead, our entire world is abstract, and the other parts of their structure are the concrete things.

So, in your proposal, it's not like I'm abstract from one point of view and concrete from another. — Nagase

That is exactly what my proposal is saying.

Of course, you can also go on and say that this simulation is what people have "meant" all along by concreteness, or perhaps simply follow Quine and say that, if this is not what they meant, so much the worse for them ("explication is elimination"). — Nagase

Yes, that's pretty much my approach.

The difficulty communicating this is, like I said before, the difference between my view and its negation is about what constitutes the difference between abstract and concrete, just like the difference between Lewis' view and its negation is about what constitutes the difference between merely possible and actual, so on the one hand each of us would kind of like to say things like (in Lewis' case) "the actual world is just one of many merely possible worlds, and all possible worlds are actual to beings who are part of them" or (in my case) "the concrete world is just one of many abstract objects, and all abstract objects are concrete worlds to beings who are part of them". But in both of those cases we'd be mixing up the senses of both terms, using them once in the sense of our opponents and once in our own sense.

Let's rephrase Lewis's position like this by tabooing his opponent's senses of "actual" and "possible" and replacing them with "AC" and "PO". Lewis' opponents say that there are two different ontological kinds of things, AC worlds (of which there is only one, the actual world) and PO worlds (of which there are many, all the other merely possible worlds). In contrast, Lewis says that there is just one kind of ontological thing, AC and PO are ontologically the same, call it "ACPO"; and the actual world is just this ACPO world, while other merely possible worlds are just other ACPO worlds.

Now rephrase my position by likewise tabooing the platonist/nominalist senses of "concrete" and "abstract", and replacing them with "CO" and "AB". The platonists and nominalists say that there are two different ontological kinds of things in concept, CO objects and AB objects, and they argue among each other about whether or not there exist any AB objects. In contrast, I say that there is just one kind of ontological thing, CO and AB are ontologically the same, call it "COAB"; and concrete objects are just parts of this COAB object, while abstract objects are just other COAB objects.

Another way to say this: It's possible that most of what's going on in this thread is well within[/] the folk tradition. — csalisbury

Yeah, I think that what we're doing here is unambiguously metaphilosophy (I mean, it's in the title! ;)), which on my account at least is the philosophy of philosophy, a subfield of philosophy, and not something outside of it. (I'm aware that there is historical disagreement about whether metaphilosophy is within or outside philosophy, or even if there is such a thing).

I don't think the positions are analogous at all. — Nagase

Being the originator of one of the two positions in question, I've defined it by analogy to Lewis's, so saying they're not really analogous is saying I'm not taking the position I say I am. But I think you're just not understanding the position I am stating at all somehow, so let's abandon that approach since it's obviously not working.

Here is a somewhat poetic way of putting it. If the platonist believes that there's the concrete material world and then "Plato's heaven" in which the abstract objects exist, and the nominalist says there is no such "heaven", just the concrete material world, I am saying that the concrete material world is an object in Plato's heaven. There isn't any space or time inherent in that "heaven", in which the abstract objects of it are arranged, but space and time are features of some abstract objects, like whatever abstract object is a perfect model of the physical world we experience, which just is our physical world, of which we are parts.

(The way this is analogous to Lewis's modal realism is that Lewis says there is no special property of "actualness" that ontologically differentiates the actual world from other merely possible worlds; the actual world is just one instance of the kind of thing that merely possible worlds are, which is only special because of its relationship to us. Likewise, the concrete world, on my account, isn't ontologically different from any abstract objects, it's only special because it's the abstract object of which we are parts).

There are two different senses of "consciousness" we need to distinguish. One is a completely functional ("mechanical" if you like) sense, called "access consciousness", which is uncontroversially replicable by a machine. If you built something that could act and talk like a human being, including reporting on the states of its brain-equivalent the way that we can, that would be access conscious.

The remaining question besides that is about "phenomenal consciousness", which is just the having of any first-person experience at all. The robot described above might just be reproducing human behavior, without actually having any first-person experience of its own, at least so they say. My answer to that question of phenonemal consciousness is just, yes, everything has it, but the character of any individual thing's phenomenal consciousness varies with its function exactly like its behavior does. So anything that behaves exactly like a human, including in internal ways, has the same experience as a human does. Things that have very different, much simpler behaviors, like rocks, still technically have a first-person experience, but there is as little to say about what that's like as there is to say about its behavior.

Tying back to abstract stuff, on my account that having of a first-person experience is just being the recipient of a transfer of information (as all interactions between all things are transfers of information). The interesting things about human conscious experience is the way that transfers of information loop around in complex reflexive ways within us: most of the notable aspects of our experience are experiences of ourselves experiencing ourselves experiencing ourselves experiencing... eventually, the rest of the world. But if we just experienced the world and then didn't do anything with that experience (like remember it, where memory is itself precisely such a loop of self-experience), we wouldn't have the interestingly complex consciousness that we do; we would just be like rocks, passively receiving information and not doing anything with it.

First, there is the question of whether there is a conceptual distinction to be made between abstract and concrete objects

...

Second, there is the question of whether the ultimate constituents of reality fall on one side or the other of the division — Nagase

Yes, but the tricky bit here is, I think that the nature of that conceptual distinction is not what it is usually taken to be, and that is the distinguishing feature of my view, not the answer to either of these questions.

Tell me what you take the answers to these questions to be regarding Lewis' kind of modal realism, because I think the situation there is perfectly analogous. Does Lewis take there to be a conceptual distinction between actual and merely possible worlds? Does he take all worlds to fall on one or the other side of that division?

I think that Lewis would answer "yes" and "no" respectively, but that his opponents would answer likewise, and the disagreement between them is about what that distinction is like, not the answers to those two questions.

Lewis would say there is a distinction between actual and merely possible, that distinction being merely indexical, like the difference between "here" and "there" (there's nothing ontologically different about two different places, but "here vs there" still makes conceptual sense); and he would say that for any person there is one world that is actual to them and the rest are merely possible.

His opponents would agree that there is a distinction between the actual and merely possible, but that that distinction is ontological, that merely possible worlds have a fundamentally different ontological status than the actual world; and they would also agree that there is only one actual world, and the rest are merely possible.

My position regarding concrete vs abstract is perfectly analogous to Lewis' regarding actual vs merely possible.

Thanks for the reference to Paul Portner, I'll have to look him up when I can.

Can you elaborate more on the alternatives to "partaking" supported by contemporary platonists? I didn't mean to imply that platonists support any kind of spatiotemporal interaction between abstract and concrete objects, but certainly on a platonist account the abstract Form of the Triangle is somehow present or involved or [something] in some way in an actual concrete triangular object, no? What phrasing would a contemporary platonist use to describe that relationship(?), instead of "partakes"?

(3) Finally, it is not clear to me how your proposed solution works. You're proposing that mathematical objects are actually concrete? So they inhabit space-time (such that I could kick the number 2, for instance)? Or are you proposing that nothing is concrete? — Nagase

Neither really, but closer to the latter. I was actually about to reply to @Wayfarer asking if he understood this part of my position when I saw your reply, so I'll let this serve as a reply to both. I'm proposing that there is not a hard ontological difference between abstract and concrete objects, that everything is ontologically like how abstract objects are usually reckoned to be, and the concrete world (with its space and time, all of the concrete objects it contains, including ourselves) is an "abstract" object, differing only from other "abstract" objects in that it is the one of which we are a part; so truly "abstract" objects are just objects like our concrete world, of which we are not a part. I see this as still compatible with physicalism in that any sentient beings that exist as part of the structure of any other "abstract object" will find that object to be a physical world that they inhabit, just as we find ours. (And they will find our world as accessible only to the intellect, i.e. only something they can imagine, as we find theirs).

Just as, in modal realism, other possible worlds are ontologically the same as our actual world, and anyone who exists in another world that is to us merely possible but not actual would find that world actual to themselves. So it's not really accurate to say that all possible worlds are actual, or that nothing is actual. And likewise, it's not really accurate of my view to say that mathematical objects are concrete, or that nothing is concrete. "Concrete is indexical", as I said in the essay.

(Obviously, not every abstract object has a structure that could include sentient observers within it; nobody's going to find themselves existing as a part of the abstract form of the triangle. But likewise nobody's going to be existing in a possible world where as much antimatter as matter was produced in the big bang, but that doesn't make such possible worlds ontologically different from others).

Lastly, for Wayfarer, the part I thought he might find most interesting: I hold that a lot of what we think of as "concrete objects" are really abstractions away from the most fundamentally concrete (to us) reality, the occasions of our experience. Rocks and trees and tables and chairs are abstractions from those occasions of experience, but still grounded in that experience and so still "partially concrete". We're projecting the existence of abstract objects "behind" the experience, to structure and make sense of it, in a way similar to the noumenal realm projected to exist "behind" the phenomenal realm on Kant's account: we can't actually have any true experience of those abstract things in their true selves, we can at best guess at that from the concrete experiences that we have. "Fully abstract" objects are those completely divorced from experience, and just found through imagining them.

Incidentally, for what is worth, I would highly object to treating logic as dealing with relations between "ideas" or laws of thought, or whatever. This is completely misses the point of what logicians such as Saharon Shelah are doing (I'm thinking of his classification theory). Of course, some people are happy to bite the bullet and simply classify his work as some kind of more abstract algebra, but I personally think that there is some philosophical payoff to treat his program as being engaged with logic. — Nagase

Can you elaborate more on this, because I don't understand what the objection is.

Give me liberty or give [the old, the sick, and the poor] death! — StreetlightX

I think you got that quote slightly wrong. The usual sentiment that I see has a conjunction, not a dysjunction.

Are you disputing that natural philosophy was historically considered a part of philosophy?

If so, what can we possibly do here to resolve the disagreement over that claim of historical fact, besides talk about it, or point to other people talking about it, pointing to sources we agree are reliable reporters of historical facts?

deductive arguments that don't involve historical facts can't make historical claims — Snakes Alive

How are things like "Philosophy has not changed in any relevant respect since Ancient Greece" and "Natural philosophy was efficacious" not claims of historical fact?

What would be a hypothetical example of "involving historical facts" in an argument here?

This relates to a point I made earlier that you never replied to. Scientists, who are appealing to empirical facts, still write arguments to each other. They report on observations and then derive conclusions from those observations. That's "just conversation", except for the part where the conversation is about something in the real world. But the things you're saying are most characteristic of philosophy, the "litigious" format of it, is still present. Even in an actual courtroom, parties present evidence, and then talk about that evidence, draw conclusions from it... or dispute the relevance or reliability or admissibility of it, and so on. Philosophy in its ancient conceptions, which included natural philosophy, which we now call "science", included all of that. Nowadays, we call the discovery and presentation of evidence and drawing conclusions from it something separate from philosophy ("science"), and only call the discussion of its relevance and reliability and admissibility (what counts as evidence, who has the burden of proof, etc) "philosophy". But it's all part of that same "litigious" "conversation".

Sorry, not intending to stir up shit, but "globalism" is commonly used as an antisemitic dog-whistle, and I just wanted to make sure it's not being used that way, and if not, that people are aware of those connotations of it so they can make sure not to sound like they're using it that way.

But the idea of globalism (sometimes called cosmopolitanism) has a long association with anti-Semitic movements, and the term "globalist" has often served as a dog-whistle to mean Jewish people. — Newsweek

“Alt-right”: “Protection from the globalist elite.”
ADL translation: “For the Alt Right, ‘globalist elite’ is mostly Jews.” — Anti-Defamation League

For the alt-right — aka, American neo-Nazis — the word “globalist” is pretty much a synonym for “Jews.” — The Jewish Chronicle

globalism — Nobeernolife

I just want to check that this isn’t code for “the Jews”, because it often is.

Also, globalism isn’t the problem, capitalism is the problem. We could continue to have a global economy without the capitalist race to the bottom by penalizing trade partners for having substandard worker protections, thereby encouraging them to improve in that regard of else be at a disadvantage in the global economy. Of course then other countries could do the same to us, and we’d have to do better by our workers too, and the race to the bottom would be transformed into a race to the top.

But just turning American working conditions into Chinese working conditions so we can “afford” to bring those jobs back is not the way forward.

I'm very interested in what the hiking is like where you are — Punshhh

I live in a small town in the mountains, so "near home" is close to many hiking trails for basically anyone. Here's a view of pretty much the whole town from one of the closest trails:

Maybe, instead of thinking about things, you could try thinking about stuff for a change?

After all, this thread is really all about mereology: the study of things and stuff.

I'm not an alcoholic... — Punshhh

"...I'm a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings."

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night. Try the veal.

Sure we can talk about regulation, but we're talking about countless of these markets all across the world in both rural and urban areas. I don't think we can just shut down wet markets because that's how millions of people earn their living. — BitconnectCarlos

The optimal solution would be to both enforce sane health and safety regulations on such markets, and make sure that the people impacted by those regulations are able to reasonably continue to make ends meet while complying with those regulations. (E.g. the regulatory body could fund compliance efforts, instead of just threatening punishment for non-compliance).

The hard question is how do we get China to implement both sides of that equation. A less hard but still probably nigh-insurmountable problem is how do the Chinese even get China to implement both sides of that equation. Even though they're nominally a "communist" country, I'm pretty sure China isn't one to throw money at the problems of poor people, any more than America is. If they were, problems like this would have already been solved.

Ok but once you have a frame of reference it becomes relative velocity right? I mean the speed has to be relative to something. — TheMadFool

(The post you're replying to was making a point to differentiate velocity from speed. They're not synonyms. But I'm replying to the unrelated point you're making in response).

All velocity is relative velocity, and all speed is relative speed, but the upshot of relativity is that light has the same speed relative to anything. This is because the speed of light is a consequence of the behavior of electromagnetic fields, and the laws governing those don't change just because you're moving relative to something else.

The only way to make sense of that is to suppose that observers moving relative to each other will observe the same pairs of events (points in spacetime) to be separated by different amounts of space and time, so that light can travel at the same speed from one event to the other relative to each observer, even though each observer is moving differently.

As it turns out, they do. For example, clocks in satellites (which are moving very fast, in order to stay in orbit) run at different rates than clocks on the ground, and we have to take account of that to do things like GPS tracking, which depend on timing signals from satellites.

c = (c - a)/(1 - a/c) = approximately c = c - a where c is the velocity of light. c = c - a is a contradiction! — TheMadFool

Not when a = 0, and 'approximately c' = c - a precisely when a = 'approximately 0', i.e. nonrelativistic speeds. (All nonrelativistic speeds are 'approximately 0' on the scale of relativistic speeds).

Small point. C varies in different media, as through water, and so forth. And, fun fact, when it is slowed through water, then phenomena like Cerenkov radiation actually propagates faster than the light. In a vacuum, though, C is just C. Youtube for lots of videos on these topics. — tim wood

Isn't it more accurate to say that light travels at less than c through various media, not that c itself becomes less in those media? c is always the speed of light in a vacuum, but light not in a vacuum can travel slower than that.

Also, I don't think it's correct to say that Cerenkov radiation itself propagates faster than light. Rather, Cerenkov radiation is the result of something moving through a medium faster than light moves through that medium. The radiation itself, being light, moves at the speed of light in that medium.

Now that the financial worries are straightened out (knock on wood), my life is back to pretty much normal despite all the coronavirus response measures, because I live alone and work from home and never go out except to go shopping or hiking anyway, and those things are both still allowed here. Pretty much the only change in my lifestyle is I can't dine out, but I can even pick up take-out.

It's kinda nice being a shut-in in a tiny mountain town in the middle of nowhere.

(Yes, I know things will eventually get worse here too, but for now, when I'm out in a meadow looking at baby owls and wild bunnies and ducklings in a pond on a beautiful spring day covered with mustard flowers, lupines, and California poppies, it makes me feel quite lucky to be here, in contrast to all the unfortunate people locked in their apartments in NYC).

It's a kind of conversational play plus cognitive loop that was discovered due to the litigious nature of Greek society and the idea that one defended oneself by talking. This got transposed to the world, so that anything could be defended against, or questioned, by talking about it. It comes from the sophistical notion that one can 'talk about anything.' Roughly, the idea is that the techniques of the courtroom get transferred to the world, so that it is 'questioned' or 'put on trial.' This results in the quasi-magical belief that anything can be learned about by interrogating it in a conversation. — Snakes Alive

I still say this both misrepresents what philosophers actually do and misconstrues it as an arbitrary, contingent thing.

First, in the absence of deference to any authoritative font of supposed truth, any people collaboratively investigating anything together will need to converse about the investigation and convince each other with arguments in order to build a consensus on the truth between themselves. (It's either that, force some authoritative decree, or go without any consensus at all). This will have to involve establishing what counts as evidence, who has the burden of proof, and so on. Athenian-style legislation is a specific case of that general process; philosophy isn't an over-generalization of legislative process.

Secondly, once that kind of stuff is established, the conversation turns to the actual presentation of evidence; both in actual legislation, and in ancient philosophy. Nowadays, we consider that stage to be something separate from philosophy, "science", but back in the day that was considered a branch of philosophy, "natural philosophy". And scientists to this day continue writing arguments to each other about what evidence they have to offer and what the implications of that evidence is: that's what a science journal is, a publication of such writings. Philosophy today is limited more to the equivalent of "legislating about the legislative process", though as that self-limitation was not immediate it also is not universally agreed-upon, and some philosophers continue to dispute the process used by scientists, try to apply different processes to their more substantive (vs procedural) investigations, or try to apply the scientific process to philosophy itself. But the trend over time is clear that the actual presentation of evidence is becoming a separate thing, science, and the quibbling over the argumentative process itself (standards of evidence, burdens of proof, etc) is the remaining domain of philosophy.

Whether or not the harm of guns is sufficient grounds to ban them is a contingent question, just as is the question of whether or not the harm from wet markets is sufficient grounds to ban them. It's not completely straightforward in either case that the answer is "yes", and I'm not assuming an answer to either of them in either direction. But if the answer to either of those questions is "yes", then "but my tradition!" is no rebuttal.

Those fixes are all implemented now.

@fdrake I would love your input on this one. I feel like I'm way out on a limb outside my area of expertise talking about all of this mathematics stuff, and your contributions to my Mathematicist Genesis thread (which was inspired by writing this essay) show that you have a much deeper understanding of the topic than I do, so I'd love to know if I got any of the math horribly wrong in this.

@Wayfarer It strikes me that the very end of this might be of interest to you, if you haven't read it already.

The short version is that observers in different states of motion will observer both space and time to be distorted relative to each other such that no matter anyone's state of motion, they will always observe light to traverse the same space in the same time. The consequence of this is that other things besides light appear expanded or contracted in space or time: observers will see each other's rulers squished short or see each other's clocks running slowly, for example. But they will all agree that it takes light the same number of clock ticks to traverse the same number of ruler marks.

Here's the kicker- toleration is almost always seen as a good thing. Yet here is a case where toleration is leading to a bad consequence. And it's not so cut-and-dry like the toleration of a culture that is oppressing another one, or toleration of ritual murder or something. Certainly animals are being harmed, but that might be considered less important than certain cultures not having their traditional values valued. Outsiders who see themselves as multicultural defenders might insist this disallowance is intolerance and small-mindedness to not consider other cultural practices as valid behavior. These multicultural defenders might be saying you are "othering" the foreign culture. — schopenhauer1

"Seen as" maybe, but toleration is definitely not always a good thing, as anyone will admit when pressed. You gave some nice cut-and-dry examples there, like ritual murder; we generally don't think it's good to tolerate violence. Your example of tolerating a culture oppressing another is actually called the "paradox of tolerance", in that we must not tolerate (certain kinds of ) intolerance.

The correct approach to being tolerant and multicultural etc is simply to not disallow things just because they are different. People from different cultures can continue to do things their way all they want... unless something can be shown harmful about them, just like we should be doing within our own cultures. "It's not our tradition" is not a good reason to disallow different customs, but "it's their tradition" is also not a good reason to allow any custom.

Fun thing I discovered recently: the roots of "physics" and "ethics" have senses very, very similar to "nature" and "nurture". Etymologically, the physical or natural is the inborn; the ethical or "nurtural" is the cultivated.

Thank you for the proofreading! I'll put these on my to-do list and will fix them as soon as I get the chance.

I'm considering maybe doing away with the "quaerentis: a pragmatic analysis of philosophy part" and just making the second word after "codex" something clearly identifiable as relating to philosophy. Like "Codex Philosophia", but that mixes Latin and Greek.

Do you have any suggestions in that regard?

Would that seem better to you as well?

Also considering working in "No Unquestionable Answers Or Unanswerable Questions" in there somehow, since that is the succinct summary of my entire philosophy, but that seems like the title would get awkwardly long in that case. Like "The Codex Philosophia: No Unquestionable Answers Or Unanswerable Questions, from the Meaning of Words to the Meaning of Life". Too long, no?

Tradition no more creates permission than it creates obligation. "We've always done it this way" isn't a reason why anybody has to do things that way, but it also isn't a reason why anyone should be allowed to keep doing things that way.

Everything should be allowed unless there is reason to disallow it. If there is reason to disallow it, appeal to tradition is not a sound counterargument.

"That's racist!" is an empty rhetorical device in such a context and people saying that should be ignored or counter-shamed.


(As an aside, in this particular case driving the practice into rural areas would still be a beneficial outcome, because it is the dense concentration of lots of humans with lots of animals that creates the conditions necessary for pandemics. A disease jumping from animal to human is both much less likely and far easier to contain in situations where a few rural people are keeping a few exotic animals).

That’s basically my view as well. Everything is just “mathematical structures” which is to say information. The physical world is the mathematical structure of which we are a part. Empirical observation of physical things is the passing of information from those things (which are defined by their function, what information they transmit in response to what information they receive) to ourselves, the output of their function becoming the input to our own function, our phenomenal “consciousness” or experience. Our actual consciousness in the useful sense, access consciousness, is in turn just a reflexive feature of our own functionality. Math, mind, and matter are all the same things, ontologically speaking at least.

It's not just one specific finite part that had a temporary slowdown. A whole bunch of finite parts randomly have temporary slowdowns all over the place all the time, always have, and always will, but the parts in between are expanding so incredibly fast that communication between them is fundamentally impossible. That's covered in the third of those videos above.

But yeah, if you have a problem with infinities in general, I don't know what to tell you. But as for "when in infinity", you could equally well ask "where in infinite space is x?" There's no absolute coordinates, so any answer you could give to either "where" or "when" would be relative anyway. We can say about how long ago the part of the infinitely old "multiverse" our "universe" is part of stopped expanding (about 14 billion years ago), as well as we can say how far away in the infinitely large space Proxima Centauri is (about 4 lightyears away). What better answer could you want?

NB that we don't actually know for sure that either space or time are infinite. We just know that they extend at least so far that we can't tell any finite measurement of them apart from infinity.

I looked it up. Some Physicists do believe that its possible for when two black holes collide for them to explode. — christian2017

[citation needed]

Stephen Hawkings believes a black hole is like a star that is so dense that the gravitational pull won't let light to escape. — christian2017

That’s the normal idea of a black hole yeah.

Did you read the article? What do you think caused the universe to expand intinitally (initially) or what do you think allowed the big bang? — christian2017

I didn’t read the article because it sounds like just a pop sci retelling of something I already know.

According to the eternal inflation model, which I tentatively accept as the best science we have at the moment, nothing caused the universe to expand initially because there is no initiation, runaway expansion has always been the normal state of the universe going back potentially forever. The big bang was a random temporary slowdown of a small part of it, which became our known universe, which has been slowly accelerating back up ever since and will someday resume that runaway expansion like everything else beyond it.