Glad it was helpful. :)

Whiteheadian process philosophy — prothero

:up: :clap: :100:

I don’t think there’s necessarily anything nonphysical about that though. See for example Galen Strawson’s “realistic physicalist” panpsychism, and my own essay On Ontology, Being, and the Object of Reality wherein I equate these Whiteheadian occasions of experience to the fundamental particles of quantum physics themselves.

In regards to the subthread about deference to epistemic authority vs kooks and their baseless crazy speculation, may I suggest that there are parallels to the paradox of “anarchy” (lack of governance) giving rise to warlords (the worst kind of governance). I explore that in more detail in my essay On Academics, Education, and the Institutes of Knowledge.

Yeah Zelebg that’s not really a tone befitting the forum.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/clouds-2

Life is self-productive machinery, where productivity is a property of mechanical work whereby it reduces the entropy of the system it is done upon. So life is a system that transforms a flow of energy through it (a machine) in such a way that that system’s own internal entropy is decreased.

As I see it descriptive (factual) and prescriptive (evaluative) opinions are just different attitudes toward the same kinds of states of affairs, where those states of affairs can be phrased in terms of math as we’ve discussed either way, and the different attitudes can likewise be phrased mathematically as a function of the “program” that is the mind. So phenomenal consciousness isn’t something that needs to be especially invoked for evaluative thinking, even though I’m completely on board with the is-ought distinction (other than Hume’s inference from it that value is non-objective; I think there’s an analogous way that prescriptive value is still objective while remaining completely separate from descriptive fact).

I understand the connection you see between the two now though so thanks for explaining that.

A confounding factor to consider is that as people age they generally find time seems to pass more quickly since there are fewer and fewer new experiences (e.g. high school feels like a much longer period of time than ages 40-43 do; there is a huge difference between a freshman and a senior, in each others’ eyes at least, but a 40 year old and a 43 year old see each other as basically the same). So everyone in every era will find that the last ten years seem way more samey and less individually significant than any given successive years from a decade or two prior.

Not anarchists though.

Anarcho-capitalism is not anarchism anyway because capitalism is hierarchical and so antithetical to anarchism.

So it’s just a method to implement a direct democracy?

What about all the problems with direct democracies, or the problems they just don’t solve?

That’s not the Hard Problem of Consciousness at all. That’s just the fact-value distinction. The Hard Problem isn’t about evaluation, and a mathematicist description of the world being independent of any evaluation of the world just means that evaluation is a different topic, one we’re just not talking about yet: it’s not saying there is nothing to say about it, it’s just refraining from saying anything about it, leaving you free to figure that all out separately.

I very roughly agree with all that.

Sticks and stones can be constructed out of atoms that are constructed out of particles that are constructed out of fluctuations of quantum fields that are constructed of mathematical spaces and groups that are constructed in a long process I won’t detail here out of numbers and other things that are constructed out of sets. Or else those particles are effects of some other structure besides quantum fields as we now know them, which in any case is still something that can be described perfectly by mathematics (even if we have to invent/discover some new math to do it) and so identical to some mathematical structure.

Time is an aspect of that structure, so only things that are a part of that structure, or similar structures that also include time, experience change. Only things that are part of the same structure as us are empirically sensible to us. That is the important difference between what is part of this world and separate from it. But that’s just like acknowledging that there’s an important difference between now and other times, or here and other places, or the actual world and other possible worlds: it’s importantly different to us because it’s where we are, but in a more absolute less relative sense they’re all ontologically the same.

All the stuff about ethics and spirituality is besides any of this. This is just descriptive; any prescriptions could be paired with this. Accepting this description of the world doesn’t say anything about what is or isn’t valuable or good or etc.

What method you use to generate answers to these questions is up to you. Part of the reason I asked this spread of questions was to see if there was any methodical or systemic pattern apparent in them, or if people had opinions on different topics that didn’t all fit together well.

Nowhere in your system have you clearly set out an exhaustive universal criterion for what counts as thought and belief... — creativesoul

I haven’t laid out a system of my own here. I’m asking other people about their systems. But I think I have answered your question for my part in our earlier discussion about it, so if you don’t think so then there’s some miscommunication between us happening. In any case, if you think that that’s an important thing to take into account in your answers to the questions I did ask, then by all means feel free to talk about it in your answers to them, if you feel like answering them.

So you’re saying “don’t use that ‘logic’ stuff on me!”? I’ll take that as conceding the argument then.

:up: :victory:

Only the Metaphilosophy section. Did you not read past that? The rest of the questions are about ontology, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, mind, will, education, politics, etc.

The following is a formally invalid argument that hinges on affirming the consequent in a modal context:

P -> Q
[]Q
.: []P

Whether those box operators are alethic necessity or deontic obligation. If we take them as deontic, and P = “You lie” and Q = “Lives are saved”, we get the argument you were making, which is still invalid. It may nevertheless be the case that []P anyway, though; but this argument doesn’t show that.

But an argument of this form is valid:

P -> Q
[]~Q
.: []~P

So consequences are still relevant, they just can’t positively justify any particular means, only rule them out.

In the lower left corner of your post you should see a ‘...’ and if you click that you should see several options including Edit.

I’m not sure I understand your second question.

Yes, but something being fallacious doesn’t mean its conclusion is false, just that you have not offered a valid justification for it yet.

Affirming the consequent is when you invalidly infer from “if P then Q” that “if Q then P”. That’s not valid, but inferring “if not-Q then not-P” is valid.

Confirmationism commits that fallacy when it infers from some theory implying an observation that such an observation would also imply the theory’s truth. That’s invalid. Instead, falsificationism validly infers only that if such an observation is contradicted, the theory is false.

Consequentialism likewise commits the fallacy, or a moral analogue of it at least, when it infers from good consequences following from an action that the action itself is good, the ends justifying the means. That’s not valid, or “deontically valid” i.e. just, but inferring that bad consequences imply a bad action is.

Affirming the consequent is a logical fallacy.

Falsification and the ethical analogue thereof are, instead, the valid move of denying the consequent.

Same thing as what? And also, maybe the “extra steps” are an important difference?

There are a lot of different views on how anarchism could be implemented in practice. Each one requires quite a bit of explanation for someone who’s evidently read very little about the topic at all like you. If you want to see my take on it from the ground up, you can read my essay On Politics, Governance, and the Institutes of Justice. For a more general overview of the whole range of views Wikipedia’s article on Anarchism is a good place to start. If you have more specific questions I’m happy to answer them.

The Importance of Knowledge
Why does is matter what is real or not, true or false, in the first place? — Pfhorrest

All actions are driven by a combination of belief and intention, so no matter what you’re trying to do, half the battle of doing it successfully is having the correct beliefs to drive your actions.

I can’t answer that question myself, but Claude Shannon could, as could anyone who programs any kind of compression software that uses his theorems.

Ends do not justify means in the same way that observations do not verify theories: both are a case of affirming the consequent. But observations can still falsify theories, so...

Lif3r, you are saying that anarchy would be hard to maintain (unstable and collapse into another state), not that it is bad. Nobody disagrees with that. Anarchists, the kind who actually read and write about it, don’t say we need to just get rid of existing governments and then everything will be fine. They say we need to replace those governments with organizations that will do the same good that they do without doing the bad (coercive) things that they do, or to reform existing governments to become like that in time, by increasing liberty, equality, democracy, etc; dismantling hierarchies and authorities and replacing them with egalitarian, libertarian alternatives.

Anarchy doesn’t mean no rules, it means no rulers. And no rulers doesn’t mean no governance, it just means no state: no monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Anarchists want to somehow establish, or at least move closer to, some form of stateless governance, where there are social organizations that help to keep the peace, but they’re not hierarchical or authoritarian.

The aim of anarchism is to figure out a way to enforce moral behavior without in the process of doing so committing immoral behavior by exercising unjust authority over people. It’s generally considered immoral to just make someone obey you on threat of violence, but that’s what all state laws are. So the challenge is to figure out how to stop people from doing things like that, without yourself doing things like that.

You don’t understand what anarchists propose. It’s preventing exactly what you predict in your OP.

Hopefully someone else will fill you in before I get the time.

I would love to be an amateur teacher for amateur students in such a subforum, were it to exist. The opportunity to share my education and help other people discover the wonders of philosophy is one of the main reasons I’m here.

I did say you can think of them as Platonic Forms if you like, so yes “ideas” in that sense is more or less what I mean. (And also in a Berkeleyan radical empiricism sense, too, though differently). And this doesn’t run afoul of physicalism on my account because the concrete physical world just is one of those forms/ideas/mathematical structures, the one we are a part of, and any other structures are just as physical to anything that should happen to be a part of them.

Recognizing a question as incoherent is what I mean by dissolving it.

Even in the serious sciences, do you think "real" scientists discourage personal research? Experiments? The whole impetus of science is to search for answers, to want answers, why would any "real" accredited scientist discount the interest and fascination of those less experienced than him? — Grre

In the parts of the physical sciences that start to verge on philosophy, I do see a lot of that. Every forum has a crank who thinks he can disprove relativity or quantum mechanics, and a lot of more-educated users start to really look down on everyone who thinks they have a novel thought about physics. That makes me sad too, because I've often had interesting thoughts about physics and wanted to discuss them with people better-educated in that subject than me to find out of someone else has already had this idea, if it's been disproven or is already a part of some existing theory, or is at least a live hypothesis in the field, or if not, how well does the genuinely new idea mesh with the existing research... but the response is more often than not just to shut down the discussion right off the bat at the hubris I have to dare to think I could "do physics" outside of academia without my own hadron collider to prove things with.

Also, it sounds like it's too late already, but Don't Be A Lawyer.

Lot of stuff in there, all predicated on the possibility of a 1:1 representation/existence correspondence. Disregarding the logical impossibility of perfect replication — Mww

I'm not talking about it being possible for us here in this universe to actually come up with a perfect mathematical replica of the entire universe, just pointing out that the way we ordinarily talk about mathematical objects, two structures that are indistinguishable other than that we call them by different names are the same structure, so whatever the perfect mathematical description of our concrete world would be (even if we can never pin down what it is), that is identical to the concrete world. Not only in that sense, but in the sense that such a perfect model of this world would contain within it models of you and me having this conversation, so there's no way of telling whether we're in "this real world" or "that model of it", again leaving us with indistinguishable things that we may as well consider identical for all practical purposes.

still leaves us with a hyper-reality, where the mathematical structure and the concrete structure are the same thing, so how would we know we’ve even cognized ourselves as belonging to one or the other?

If we can’t tell the difference, we’re losing nothing by leaving ourselves with the duality we already acknowledge, rather than assume a duality we can’t prove. — Mww

I'm not positing a duality, but rather doing away with them entirely. I'm saying there is at the bottom one kind of thing, abstract mathematical objects, every possible one of them. We are a part of one of them, and that one we call the "concrete world". There is no question of whether we're in the mathematical structure or the concrete structure; the concrete structure is just whichever mathematical structure we're in. "Concrete" only means that we're in it.

Italics added - so, this is a metaphor. And, no computers are spontaneously occurring, they are built by human agents to perform a function. — Wayfarer

It is a metaphor yes, but you'll note right after where you ended that quote of me, I said "but there is no hardware running the program, the software is the primary level of reality.".

So the notion of the universe being a program irresistibly suggests a programmer. — Wayfarer

Not so, if you read through the rest of the worldview I described. A program is a bit of math. All bits of math exist, abstractly; every program that could ever be written already exists "in Plato's heaven", just like every number that could ever be thought up. One such program is indistinguishable from and so identical to our physical universe, and that just is the concrete world: concrete only because it's the one we're a part of. If there are intelligent substructures within other abstract objects, then to them those are concrete too.

...signals being communicated between those functional objects are thus the fundamental ontological stuff of reality... — Pfhorrest

Not really. 'Ontology' is about 'types or modes of being'. And this doesn't say anything about ontology, or how 'those signals' come to be, other than today's universal assumption that it relies on an ability that 'must have evolved'. — Wayfarer

You get that I'm talking about fundamental physics and not living things here, right? I'm talking about things like two electrons repelling each other by exchanging a photon, like in a Feynman diagram. That photon passed between them is the kind of signal I'm talking about. Evolution is inapplicable at that level; I'm definitely not saying that electrons evolved interaction with the electromagnetic field because it was advantageous to their survival or anything like that.

As I said before, progress in philosophy is most often made by dissolving problems, thinking about things in ways that do not give rise to those apparent, intractable problems. Such problems are like paradoxes: the fact that you've run into one shows that you made some error somewhere along the way to there.

The software thing is just an analogy or illustration of the underlying philosophy I'm talking about. I come to that philosophy, to massively simplify things (I literally wrote an 80,000 word book about the whole system), from trying to think about the world and the mind in as unencumbered a way as possible.

What are we trying to talk about when we talk about the world? Most basically, we're talking about the stuff that we can see and hear and otherwise sense. Everything about anything in the world comes down to some impact on my senses, so I'm lead to something like a "bundle theory": objects are bundles of attributes, which are all empirical properties. Phenomenal consciousness on the other hand seems to be talking about the other side of that exact same thing: my "phenomenal consciousness" is the bundle of sense-experiences that I have, something like a bundle theory of self. Combine that with old philosophical adages like "to do is to be" or "to be is to do", thinking in more detail about what it means to have a sensory experience of something, and you start thinking of sense-experiences of things as interactions between yourself and them: the sight of an object just is the photons it sends my way, and its visual appearance more generally is what kind of photons it sends my way under what conditions of what photons are sent its way, what it does in response to what it done to it; specifically what it does to me, and how I interact with those photons, what my eyes are sensitive to, etc. (I'm skipping on elaborating on this for all senses because this is already getting too long). That lends to thinking about objects as being defined in terms of function, of mapping of input to output: a thing is a bundle of empirical properties, and an empirical property is a propensity to do something in response to something else. That dissolves all the philosophical problems about the ontology of physical stuff: materialism, idealism, it's all irrelevant, there doesn't have to be any substrate at all, all that matters is the network of sense-data interactions.

On a separate topic, about access consciousness, we've already got functionalism pretty well-established there: access consciousness is a kind of function, a mapping of inputs to outputs, including internal states as a kind of output, all regardless of the underlying substrate. (The exact specifics of that function are up for empirical investigation). So now that we're already thinking of all objects as functional "bundles" or nodes in a web of interactions of sense-experiences, and of phenomenal consciousness as just being on the receiving end of such sense-experiences, and of the important aspects of human consciousness being the details of our complex functional access consciousness, then it seems like phenomenal consciousness in that sense is naturally attributable to everything, and what differentiates human consciousness is the specific, complex functionality of our brains, access consciousness. All of this is completely independent of whatever any "underlying substrate" might be; we don't need to concern ourselves at all with what that is or whether there is such a thing, it makes no difference in explaining the world in as it appears to us. That dissolves all the philosophical problems about mind-body interaction and what phenomenal consciousness is, because minds and bodies are made of the same stuff and "phenomenal consciousness" (that doesn't even really deserve to be called consciousness) is a trivial aspect of that stuff, what really matters is what kind of functions are going on in human minds.

So we're basically just talking about everything in terms of exchanges of sense-data now, basically already thinking of the universe in terms of the information that describes it. When it comes to descriptions of things, there is the old adage that "the map is not the territory", but a perfect 1:1 map of something just is a perfect copy of that territory (e.g. if you build a map of a city down to the atom, what you've done is replicate the city). So whatever complete theory of everything it is that perfectly describes the physical world in every last detail, that would just be a perfect copy of the physical world. Such a theoretical model would also be an abstract object. Perfect copies of abstract objects are identical to each other, even expressed in different terms: for example the series of sets and set operations that behave identically to the natural numbers and arithmetic are considered by professional mathematicians to be the same objects and functions as the natural numbers and arithmetic, just expressed differently. So the physical world, as a bunch of (sense-)data, being indistinguishable from whatever mathematical model perfectly describes it, just is identical to that mathematical model: if you ran that model on an actual computer somehow, and it gave rise to sub-structures just like us humans in that virtual universe, those structures would find themselves having sense-experiences of an apparent physical universe just like we do. So at least one abstract, mathematical object is definitely real: the concrete, physical world. If that's the case, then like with modal realism, which addresses why the actual world exists instead of some other possible world by assuming all possible worlds exist and "the actual" world is just the one we're in, likewise we can dissolve a lot of philosophical questions about why the concrete world follows the mathematical laws that it does by assuming that all mathematical structures exists, and "the concrete" world is just the mathematical structure of which we're a part. That also then dissolves the problem of whether and how abstract objects exist, neither having to deny their reality nor having to posit some kind of weird other realm for them to exist in: they're just like the world we're familiar with, ontologically, except we're not a part of them. (Again, just like modal realism dissolves the question of the ontology of possible worlds by assuming there's nothing special about them at all, they're just like the actual world, except we're not in them).

TL;DR: the reason to think of things in this way is that it makes a bunch of apparently-intractable problems about ontology and consciousness go away like the illusory problems they are (by responding to questions about "how do you explain this special weird thing?" with "that's not weird or special, that's normal and unremarkable, everything's like that and couldn't not be"), and lets us focus instead on the contingent particulars about exactly what functions human minds and other physical objects in our actual concrete universe execute.

I stumbled into this old thread, and it made me feel sad or ashamed that I never progressed past my BA in philosophy and got a PhD like I once dreamed of. (Meanwhile, on another hand, I simultaneously feel sad and ashamed that I "wasted" my university education on an "impractical" topic like philosophy instead of, I dunno, computer science or something, and that part of me thinks I'd feel even more sad and ashamed if I had ignored the practical reasons I didn't pursue a PhD and "wasted" even more time and money on that instead).

I wonder sometimes what the point is of writing my philosophy book. When I started it, back when I was still getting that BA and planning to go on to a PhD, I expected that it would form the basis of my dissertation. I've since realized that contemporary (at least Analytic) philosophy dissertations are nothing at all like that and I would probably have been unhappy having to eschew doing the philosophical work I was interested in to instead focus excessively on some much narrower problem, probably in the service of someone else's research interests. I have no plans to publish it as a real book in dead-tree format; though it's certainly long enough for that, at about 80,000 words now, I seriously doubt my writing ability, and I don't expect any publisher would be interested in it; and even if they were, I seriously doubt it would get read enough for it to be worth it. My analytics tell me hardly anybody's even reading it for free on the internet (not that I can blame them), so I don't see why anyone more would ever pay for it.

More on the topic of this thread, on academic vs lay philosophy, here's an excerpt from my essay on Metaphilosophy from the aforementioned book:

As regards who is to exercise such faculties, who is it that is to do philosophy, the question is largely whether philosophy is a personal activity, or an institutional one. Given that I have just opined that the faculty needed to conduct philosophy is literally personhood itself, it should come as no surprise that I think that philosophy is for each and every person to do, to the best of their ability to do so. Nevertheless, institutions are made of people, and I do value the cooperation and collaboration that has arisen within philosophy in the contemporary era, so I don't mean at all to besmirch professional philosophy and the specialization that has come with it. I merely don't think that the specialized, professional philosophers warrant a monopoly on the discipline. It is good that there be people whose job it is to know philosophy better than laypeople, and that some of those people specialize even more deeply in particular subfields of philosophy. But it is important that laypeople continue to philosophize as well, and that the discourse of philosophy as a whole be continuous between those laypeople and the professionals, without a sharp divide into mutually exclusive castes of professional philosophers and non-philosophers. And it is also important that some philosophers keep abreast of the progress in all of those specialties and continue to integrate their findings together into more generalized philosophical systems.

I feel like I'm kind of in a weird in-between place with respect to all of that. I have a negligible degree in philosophy, so that's some formal education, but nothing nearly impressive enough to qualify me as a professional philosopher. My interests are extremely broad, as the breadth of philosophy is largely what attracted me to the field, but I really appreciate that other people have done the in-depth specialized work in all of the fields that interest me, so that I can draw from all of that into the big general picture I'm working on. I would love to somehow function as a bridge between those worlds, connecting the many different specialized professional philosophers to a more general and generalist audience, encouraging laypeople to build out their own general philosophical worldviews, for their own sakes, but drawing from the many insights that specialized professional philosophers have already developed. I would love if somehow there was more of such a bridge, socially and institutionally, not just for me to be the entirety of it; some people like Olly Thorne of Philosophy Tube are sort of doing that already, as that whole channel is dedicated to him "giving away his education" after a UK tuition hike. But I don't know what I can really do to help there be more of that, considering I can barely keep my life together enough to do a little bit of mediocre work on my own book a few nights a week.

Sounds to me like you're having a bout of ontophilia, or something in the direction of it at least. So yes, more or less a spiritual experience. I hope you enjoy it while it lasts and maybe make some good use of it too.

Think of it as though the entire universe is a computer program, but there is no hardware running the program, the software is the primary level of reality. Every object in reality is a little "program", a function of some kind. Every interaction between objects is a signal between these "programs", an output from one function feeding into another function, with the objects defined by their function, how they map inputs into them into new outputs to other things. Those signals being communicated between those functional objects are thus the fundamental ontological stuff of reality, in terms of which the objects are defined. Signals are exactly the thing that Shannon information is describing.

Human brains are made out of those functional objects, big complex highly reflexive functional compound objects, and human experiences are the input from the rest of the world feeding into the function of those brains (and, significantly, from the brain feeding back into itself). So you can equally well think of all of this "software" as phenomenal experiences, or think of the universe as being made of "thought" in a rough sense.

This is entirely compatible with the mathematicism I was earlier propounding. The concrete universe is an abstract object, a Platonic form if you like to think of it that way, a mathematical thing, just like a computer program is (software is made of math and logic). The only thing that differentiates that abstract object that we can sense from other ones that we can only think about is that we are a part of the abstract object that is the concrete universe.

This is also entirely compatible with physicalism as I mean it. The signals output by each object, the things those objects do to those observing them, their behavior in a broad sense, constitutes the empirical properties of those objects, which constitute the entire being of those objects. "Physical" just means "empirical", so this universe, or multiverse, made entirely of "mental", abstract, "Formal" information is still entirely physical. Minds are "programs" running on brains made of matter that is itself made of "programs" that are as mental as the stuff going on in the minds.

You seem to think that any view that doesn't maintain a separation of mental, intelligible, otherwise non-physical stuff from physical stuff is trying to do away with the non-physical and reduce everything to non-mental, unintelligible, dumb little billiard balls clicking around. And yeah there have been and still are some people who push that view, but that's not the only alternative to this impenetrable wall between the mental/intelligible/etc and the physical: some of us just think that everything is kinda both at the same time, that there isn't a clear separation between them.

An analogy I thought of a while back, that's not perfect but I think helps: there is no clear distinction between software and data. Every hunk of data is in principle executable, just most of it will immediately crash and not do anything interested if executed. And every bit of software is stored as a bit of data. It's useful to differentiate executable files, that do useful things when executed, from the data upon which they act, but when it really comes down to it they are fundamentally the same stuff. Likewise with mind and matter: two different ways of looking at the same stuff, where minds are executable-like and matter is data-like, but when you get down to it it's all just bits.

I think he could say that if, by his own faculties and labor, he created the property. — NOS4A2

We're talking about land in this case. Nobody creates land.

Who’s to say it is a public space if people are being evicted from it? — NOS4A2

I don't know enough about the specifics in the case in question, but it can still be just to "evict" someone from a public space if they are unjustly monopolizing it. If someone sets up camp in a public park and thereby excludes anyone else from ever using that space, that's little different from someone putting a fence around a part of the park. In either case it would be just to "evict" them from monopolizing that public space, so long as they're still just as free to use it as everybody else is and the action is necessary to allow everybody else their equal use of it.

One cannot just assert "it's my park too" unless the space has been designated as such by some state or authority. — NOS4A2

One could say the same thing about asserting "this is my private land". Unless you think the guy putting up fences around a public park just suddenly owns that park now because he said so? Either claim is contestable, neither is true by default, and one way or another there will have to be social agreement about who owns what or else people are going to be fighting over the consequent disagreements. And one possible thing people could agree on is "this belongs to everyone". That's no different than agreeing that "this belongs to him".