Same answer: depending on how the situation is really fleshed out (or how I believe it to be fleshed out), I might suffer, but the masked man hasn’t harmed me. And it the victim truly will never be aware of any adverse consequences of the actions upon him, then he hasn’t been harmed either.

The important part is that “never”. Doing something to someone that they’re not presently aware of but will produce negative consequences that they will become aware of in the future is still harm. Doing something to someone that they will never see any difference from cannot be harmful to them.

Nietzsche would be an MRA railing against how feminism has made untermensch of all the men of glorious European blood allowing even the Oriental savages to dominate us economically, probably pointing at gays and transwomen as evidence of that.

No I don't think I'd be harmed. Depending on how the details of the scenario flesh out, I might suffer some empathically, but that's not really the masked man harming me personally.

Has the man that cannot have knowledge of any of this been wronged in any way? — Mark Dennis

If he truly will not ever experience any of the consequences of the actions, then no.

In this example scenario though... well, a lot more details would need to be fleshed out to say for sure, but if the man has a wallet then presumably he somehow uses money in some way that he would eventually notice its absence, and given that his brain relies on his body for him to keep having whatever internal experiences he still has, injury like a punch in the face would eventually impact that brain function, and if he has a wife, presumably something about that relationship matters (maybe she's the one taking care of him, keeping him alive despite his complete sensory dysfunction?), so if the masked man sleeps with her and that jeopardizes that relationship, then he will eventually lose whatever he's getting out of it.

This hearkens back to the Experience Machine, where my only concern with getting into such a machine would be my subsequent ignorance of the outside world's potential impacts on me and the machine, and so the risk that something might eventually happen that would impact the blissful experiences the machine is giving me.

Thank you for your continued responses!

I guess enough people have said enough about their philosophies that I can start offering my own answers to my questions (in shorter form than my entire book of course) here. I didn't want to do that right at the start because I didn't want this thread to be all about me; I'm more interested in seeing everyone share their diverse views and compare and critique each other.

I think I'll just start doing one question per post, and wait for someone else to post before I do the next one.

The Meaning of Philosophy
What defines philosophy and demarcates it from other fields? — Pfhorrest

Philosophy is the love of wisdom, where by "love of" I mean attraction toward, or pursuit of; and by "wisdom" I mean the ability to discern truth from falsehood and good from bad, or at least the ability to discern superior from inferior answers to questions about either reality or morality. It differs from the sciences in that it is not concerned with contingent, a posteriori facets of the experiential world, but more about how to process and react to those, the necessari, a priori, foundational questions about how to do those sciences; those sciences apply wisdom thus defined, and philosophy is the pursuit of that ability to do so. It also differs from more abstract fields like the arts and mathematics in that is is not entirely disconnected from practical applications and concerned just with structure for structure's sake (like math) or presentation for presentation's sake (like the arts), but rather uses those things, like logic and rhetoric, as tools to do its job of facilitating the sciences, both the well-known physical sciences and what I would call the ethical sciences, that I may elaborate on later. It's the glue between the abstract and the practical.

And lastly I'd argue that, properly speaking, it differs from religion in that it is critical, anti-fideistic, taking nothing as unquestionable. But it's also properly speaking anti-nihilistic, allowing free investigation of things with uncertain grounding rather than shutting all such discourse down as groundless and impossible from the outset. I would argue that both fideism and nihilism are rather "phobosophy", the fear of wisdom. But I recognize of course that fideistic and nihilistic elements are often included in what are commonly considered philosophical endeavors; I just argue that, to that extent, those endeavors are failing to really do philosophy per se.

I was saying that I hope that it generates some interesting discussion. The point of this thread is for people to share their philosophies and discuss them. I'm trying not to judge / critique them all too much myself. I might have further comments on your later but it's bedtime now.

The main philosophical angle of this thought is the existentialist interpretation of that part of Genesis. That the story can be taken as a metaphor for knowledge of "good and evil" (foresight of potential danger or safety) bringing with it existential dread. That, coupled with possibility of that kind of knowledge deriving from an increase in brain size and the commensurate problems in childbirth we humans have.

This isn't supposed to be any especially deep or rigorous philosophical thesis, it's just a broadly philosophical thought I had that I thought people might find interesting.

I’m not favoring Genesis over any other myths, I just had a thought about that one.

And as I said, Genesis claims that women are cursed with difficult childbirth as a consequence of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and men are cursed to toil and work the land. I’m just suggesting that both of those elements of the story could have arisen as a mutated account of the prehistoric increase in brain and thus head size, because large brain size increases cognitive capacity and as already elaborated could facilitate worrying about the future and thus driving a harder-working less carefree lifestyle, and large brain size is why humans have comparably more difficult childbirth than other animals. I feel like I’m just repeating myself here.

Congratulations on being the first person to answer all questions! I hope you enjoyed writing that and it generates some interesting discussion.

There is no agreed upon complete explanation for the evolution of DNA because molecules don’t exactly leave fossils so it’s hard to work out the particulars. But it’s generally agreed upon that all it would take is some circular chain of chemical reactions (A + B + energy = C + D, C + D + energy = E + F, E + F + energy = A + B, etc) to start off an evolutionary process, where the chemicals in those chains proliferate more and any chemicals that enable faster/shorter/more efficient chains would then proliferate even more until you end up with some kind of self-replicating molecule dominating the environment, and what we ended up with was DNA in that role. The question is just which steps exactly lead to that particular outcome.

DingoJones already said that it wasn’t his thread.

The list of problems I have here were devised as the questions that are inevitably raised by any other kind of endeavor. As I frame it, every kind of work is using some tool to do some job, with technology and business being about the administration of such tools and jobs, engineering and entrepreneurship being about the creation of new tools and jobs, and the physical and (as I'd call them) ethical sciences being about discovering what tools and jobs there are naturally, from which / toward which engineers / entrepreneurs develop their new tools / jobs.

Knowing how to conduct those physical sciences requires understanding the nature of reality and knowledge, and how to conduct those ethical sciences requires understanding the nature of morality and justice. Investigating those topics ends up dredging up at least all of the topics I've listed under those headings here. And then similar questions can be asked about that act of inquiry into those topics -- philosophy -- itself, which are the topics I've listed under the heading of metaphilosophy.

So, I argue that whatever it is you're concerned with, if you dig deeply enough into it you're going to end up needing to concern yourself with these kinds of questions.

Ideally, people would not have the emotional holes that need filling by other people's caring and esteem, but would be healthy and capable of self-care and self-esteem and that would be sufficient.

The world is not ideal though, people are not ideal, we are most of us traumatized by life to a greater or lesser degree, and need something else to prop us up emotionally.

It's great that other people are able to help us with that. But if a machine can achieve that just as effectively, then I see nothing wrong with it doing so. If a song or a book or a TV show can be legitimate source of such comfort, there's no reason that an interactive form of media like a chat bot couldn't be too.

However, I'm very suspicious of any claims that the tech is there yet, at least for someone like me. If I could tell that a real person (therapist, etc) was giving me obviously superficial shallow platitudes in response to my relation of complex emotional or practical problems, I wouldn't feel very listened-to and understood and wouldn't get much comfort out of that.

But maybe there are some people whose comprehension of their own life and mind is simple enough that those simple platitudes do actually suffice, and if so more power to them for getting such comfort out of such devices. There's nothing ethically wrong with it that I can see; at worst, it's merely ineffectual, and so morally neutral.

Sounds great, I look forward to it. :-)

Here's a good starting point:

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

Six replies in a moderator already said "nah" to this idea, and it's a pretty ridiculous notion that such a traditionally major area of philosophy would be eliminated from a general philosophy forum. And I say that as a strong atheist who think that philosophy of religion doesn't deserve to be its own major area of philosophy: all the topics in it are really just ontological/epistemological or ethical topics associated with a certain category of worldview. Which also highlights how eliminating the subforum wouldn't do anything to eliminate the posts that bother people: arguments about whether God exists or faith is warranted would still be fit for the Metaphysics & Epistemology subforum, arguments about whether morality is connected to the commands of a God would still be fit for the Ethics subforums, etc. The same topics would just be scattered elsewhere.

I have noticed that my general counterargument to regressive or otherwise cynical arguments for nihilism of any sort does resemble Pascal's Wager, if that's what you're thinking of.

The notable difference between my argument and Pascal's is that Pascal concludes that therefore you should believe in some specific thing (the Christian God), when the same argument could be used equally well to argue that you should believe in different contrary things (e.g. other gods), whereas my argument only concludes that you should believe something or another is real, without any specificity as to what that is: just run with the assumption that there is some objective reality and then try to sort out the specifics about it, and maybe fail entirely if there actually is none, but also stand a chance of maybe succeeding at that, if such a thing as success at that is possible. I also apply the same argument to investigations of objective morality. And more generally to all practical endeavors in life: assume success is somehow or another possible and then try to figure out how; you might still fail anyway, but if you assume failure is a foregone conclusion and don't even try, you only guarantee it.

May I suggest on this note a thing I've seen other forums do: when a post is deleted or moderated or something, a clear note is left in its place that such-and-such moderation happened for such-and-such reason, in obvious admin voice (I've seen some places use red text for this). That way people know when and why moderation is happening.

Your argument shows that we cannot know if realism is true or not. But that does not entail that realism is not true. That just leaves us stuck having to either assume one way or the other, because our actions will tacitly entail such an assumption (e.g. if we try to figure out what is real or not, to discern truth from falsehood, we are tacitly assuming that there is something real; if we go about acting like truth and falsehood don't matter and just believe whatever because no reason, we are tacitly assuming nothing is real).

It then becomes a practical question of which assumption is more useful, and I argue that if we cannot know whether or not anything is real, it is more useful to assume that something is real and then try to figure out what it is, than to assume the opposite; because if we assume the opposite then we will inhibit any possibility of ever figuring out what is real, if it should turn out that anything is; and although there might turn out not to be anything real even if we do assume there is, and so we might make no progress at figuring out what it is, we at least have a chance to do so if we try that, and in doing so, tacitly assume that there is something real to be figured out.

I was not hypothesizing that language suddenly evolved, and I'm not making any particular claims about human evolution at all.

I'm just noting that certain elements of Genesis are interpretable as a distorted retelling of certain consequences of uncontroversial things about human evolution. The first part of my thought process was the idea that that bit of Genesis could have been originally meant to be somewhat existentialist, or have been a distortion of an originally existential lesson: that it's a metaphor for how knowledge brings with it awareness of death and with that a loss of innocent naivety. (That's an old thought that I've had for a long while). Then the night I posted this, I thought about how the loss of that naivety brings with it the drive to struggle against that foreseen doom, and how that meshes with the cursed-to-work-the-land aspect of Genesis too.

That then made me think of the bit about how women are cursed to a painful childbirth, and how we humans do have rather difficult childbearing thanks to our unusually large heads, and that made me think that perhaps the origin of the story that eventually morphed into Genesis (me already being aware of influences like Gilgamesh, thanks @frank) is much older than even that, perhaps passed down from a time when some proto-humans with big brains and heads were living alongside others who did not have such big brains, and heads, and so did not have the difficulties of childbirth that we have, and also didn't have the cognitive capacity to worry about the future like we do.

The idea does depend on at least some kind of proto-language existing as far back as then, but I'm not making any specific claims about exactly how or when language (or big enough brains to worry about the future, or cause trouble in childbirth) developed. Just that if some proto-language was around when those big brains and heads did develop, some recounting of those events could have survived, mutated, and made their way into the myths that eventually got recorded once writing was invented.

Thanks for the continuing responses!

2.3 LNC ... — 180 Proof

I don't understand this acronym.

Probably doesn't answer the question because I don't grok what you're asking. Maybe reformulate? — 180 Proof

Basically how should the social endeavor of finding and spreading knowledge be "governed" so to speak. E.g. should everyone pursue knowledge entirely on their own and keep their findings secret, or should some elite subset of the population do all the knowledge-finding and everyone else should just believe what they tell them to, or should some elite subset of the population do all the knowledge-finding and keep it to themselves and only selectively let some people in on it, or should everyone pursue knowledge on entirely their own and share their findings with everyone else, or something else?

The agnostic's facade of humility and caution conceals a smug superiority — Chris Hughes

The important thing is, you've found a way to feel superior to even them. :wink:

(Seriously it's just a joke, and not even an original one, so more like an xkcd reference really...).

May I suggest an alternative (that someone may suggest to the software developers): a user-by-user ability to unsubscribe some subforums from the main page?

Thanks for continuing your responses! I'm seeing an interesting kind of yin and yang between you and @180 Proof so far.

I notice that you skipped a few questions, the latter half of the Metaphilosophy section: Subjects, Institutes, and Importance of Philosophy. Were you planning on revisiting those later, or just don't feel like you have anything to say on them that wasn't covered already?

Also, I don't really see how this post answers what the meaning of descriptive claims is, so maybe you can elaborate on the connection between your answer and that question?

I think it's interesting how the poll results have leveled out over time. Early on the answers were mostly "No" or else "Analytic" with no "Continental" and I think myself the only "Yes", which I take as most people rejecting both sides of the divide, and almost all of the rest being Analytic. As of this writing there are 4 Analytic, 3, Continental, 4 yes, and 6 No, which seems a lot more balanced, though still slightly anti-the whole idea and anti-Continental.

For most of my life I found the question of "what is the meaning of life?" paradoxically meaningless, in that I couldn't for the life of my figure out what exactly it was that people asking that wanted in an answer.

I eventually decided to translate "meaning" to "purpose" and "purpose" to "what something is good for", so asking "what is the meaning of life" is just asking what is good, so just an account of morality answers that already. People didn't seem satisfied with that (although most of those people also rejected that there could possibly be any account of morality, too).

More recently I've decided that the question such people are really asking actually is meaningless. It's a phantom question. People have non-rational feelings of meaningfulness or meaninglessness, and people asking "what is the meaning of life?" are just looking for someone to say something to assuage the uncomfortable feeling of meaninglessness. There isn't any actual philosophical answer to that "question" because it's not a question at all, it's just a feeling, and the correct response to it is to somehow assuage that feeling, and cultivate the opposite feeling instead. I'm not completely set on how to do that, but I've got some ideas.

I don’t derive “is” from “ought”, or vice versa. I was suggesting that maybe you (or Wittgenstein, or someone answering these questions) might want to do vice versa, and saying you’d need to try to justify that, and I personally think you’d fail, but in any case that would still be doing philosophy to try to justify it (and to counter-argue against that, etc).

I saw someone recently characterize the difference between left-wing populism (which is a thing) and right-wing populism something like this: both are ostensibly in favor of the common people against their elite rulers, but left-wing populists see the "common people" as the laboring classes (proletarians) generally and the "elites" as the wealthy ownership classes (bourgeoisie) generally, while right-wing populists see the "common people" as the "middle class" (petite bourgeoisie) of the "normal" national identity (race, language, religion, etc) within the country in question, and the "elites" as some nefarious international cabal of foreigners and their political puppets within the country in question.

FYI I've compiled a couple of the clarifications I've made throughout this thread into the OP.

I forgot to say thank you for your beginning of a set of answers, and I think I generally agree with much of what you have to say so far too, though I expect our agreement will diverge greatly as they go on. I expect to disagree with @180 Proof in due time too though, and it's all good.

Prescriptions of what exactly? — Wallows

Any kind. Whenever someone says "this should be this way", including "you should do this", what exactly are they saying (I would paraphrase that question as "what is the function of that speech-act?" but you don't necessarily have to rely on speech-act theory for your answer), and how are you to decide whether or not to agree with that, whatever agreeing with that ends up meaning? (And who is to do the deciding? And why? Etc.) The answer doesn't necessarily have to be foundationalist in any sense, and there doesn't have to be one single answer -- you can say that there are different kinds of prescriptions that mean different things and are to be judged in different ways -- but the natural sciences generally are not in the business of making or evaluating "should" (or "ought") statements, just "is" statements, so "just do natural sciences" ignores that question entirely. Unless you want to try to equate "ought" statements to some subset of "is" statements and then say we can do natural science to that, but then you need to philosophically justify that position still, so you're still doing philosophy, and you still might be wrong. (I think you would be, but I'm not here to preach my philosophy).

Thank you for that excellent reply! I mostly agree with your answers so far, and I look forward to the rest of them. :-)

I have, and from what I've seen they give generally excellent answers to those questions, doing philosophy well in the process. I don't see your point.

That is a point, but homo sapiens didn't evolve from neanderthals, we were close relatives, that apparently interbred (and so were possibly subspecies of the same species? I'm not clear on the current consensus about that).

And also, my hypothesis was not necessarily about the last step from pre-homo sapiens to homo sapiens specifically, but just some unspecified step along the evolutionary ladder. Neanderthals already had intelligence comparable to homo sapiens (as evidenced by tools, clothes, burial, etc), so on my hypothesis would also be descendants of the big-brained folk in the story.

Rovelli's RQM — Andrew M

Thank you for introducing me to this. It sounds more or less like how I've always interpreted MWI (which, more on topic, strikes me as very similar to Lewis' notion of actuality being indexical), but the RQM formulation of those ideas seems even more clear and elegant.

FWIW, my take on the relationship between MWI and modal realism is that they can be considered equivalent if we take a "possible world" to be something slightly different from what Lewis takes it to be, which also meshes better with Kripke's semantics about accessibility, which always struck me as really bizarre from a Lewisian perspective (e.g. the notion that something might be necessary from one possible world but contingent from another, when "necessary" should rightly mean "true in all possible worlds").

Instead of taking possible worlds to be time-spanning, each with their own pasts and futures, I take them to be identical to points in the configuration space (or phase space) of the universe, which in turn has its obvious connections to quantum mechanics and the universal waveform. I take time itself to be identical to extension across that configuration space, with one point in the configuration space being in the immediate past or future of another adjacent one on the basis of something equivalent to Kripke's notion of accessibility: if you can "get to" one "world" (point in the configuration space) from another, it's a possible future (and thus "possible" in Kripke's relative sense, while still preserving room for the more absolute sense of possibility across all worlds), and conversely worlds from which you can get to the present world are in the past of this world.

The deciding factor in why you can or can't get from one world to another is entropy: if you take a random walk around the configuration space, you're inevitably (because of the statistical nature of entropy) going to end up wandering into higher and higher entropy states (because there are just more of them, by definition), so higher-entropy worlds than the present one are more readily accessible, "more possible", or in other words more probable. Futures thus diverge over time (i.e. over travel distance in the configuration space), while pasts converge, giving us our notion of the past being one fixed thing and the future being open to alternative outcomes (although on extremely short time scales, there are actually multiple pasts, they just quickly converge over any significant amount of time; compare to e.g. Feynman's work).

If we imagine the configuration space two-dimensionally for conceptual simplicity, and then extrude each point in it "downward" proportional to its entropy, we get an image of rolling hills, with the peaks of each hill being points of locally (in the configuration space) minimal entropy, from which points any direction in the configuration space is "downhill", i.e. into the future. Such points are thus seen as the "beginning of time" by those downhill from them, and even though there are things further in the same direction in the configuration space, those aren't "further back in time" but rather into the future in a different direction (down a different side of the hill), just like every direction is south from the north pole and if you keep going in the direction that was "north" past the north pole, you just end up going south down a different line of longitude.

As a modal realist and MWI proponent, I say that all points in the configuration space are equally real, and thinking beings like us existing at any one point in the configuration space can only have memories of the past because memory formation, like all processes, increases entropy; and from those memories we construct a notion of linear time, projected into an uncertain future, "perceiving the flow of time" inasmuch as we have an immediate, instantaneous perception of that series of memories and expectations and a sense of our place in that construction. But we, strictly speaking, only exist instantaneously in this moment. But beings in worlds slightly in the future of us will have memories of this world, memories shared across the multiple future worlds because their pasts all converge through this world, and so will feel, in their instantaneous moment of existence, like they are all continuations of ourselves, each feeling like they are the only continuation of ourselves because they cannot have memories of each other since they are not in each other's pasts; though as I'm demonstrating right now, we can infer each others' existences in the same way we can infer things about the future.

My problem with Wittgenstein's account (at least as you tell it, corroborated by the bits of him I've seen elsewhere) is that even if the thesis of one's philosophy is "just do natural science", there is still philosophy to be done there: why do natural science and not anything else, what makes something natural science and not something else, how do you do natural science, etc. A third of my set of questions in the OP (the ones under the heading Philosophy of Knowledge and Reality) are basically those questions, and my answers to them amount to "just do natural science", but they're still questions someone can ask and that deserve an answer, and giving them that answer is doing philosophy.

Even if we get those final answers concretely settled, we'll still have to teach them to every new person who comes along who doesn't already know them perfectly, give answers to all of those questions and justify those answers. That was the point of my comparison to a hypothetical quietism about the natural sciences. Suppose we eventually come up with a perfect theory of absolutely everything, and there are no more scientific discoveries to be made. All you need to do from that point on is just run with that perfect theory, right? No more need to do natural science anymore. Except... for all of the people who don't know that perfect theory perfectly yet, or who doubt or question it. You've got to answer their questions, show them the evidence, go back over all of the natural science and prove to them that your perfect theory is perfect... or perhaps, if their questions are particularly insightful, discover that it isn't. The same is true of philosophy: even if the perfect philosophical theory of everything is "just do natural science", you still have to answer everyone's questions as to why and how to do that, and possibly adjust for flaws in the theory discovered along the way. And that is doing philosophy.

But also, "just do natural science" doesn't even attempt to answer the last third of my set of questions, because the natural sciences are not in the business of prescribing at all, and so give no answers to questions about what prescriptions mean, how to judge them, etc. At best, saying "just do natural science" to that is merely saying they're meaningless and can't be judged, etc... which is just avoiding the question.

A week at most. Last one I had was three weeks ago, started on a Saturday and gradually wound down by Wednesday or Thursday and was gone completely by Friday morning.

For all of these questions, if I’m asking “what is...” whatever and you think there is no whatever, “nothing” is an acceptable answer. Otherwise I’d have to double the questions by first asking “is there any...” and then “what is...”.

Yes I’m quite familiar with (and generally aligned with) the linguistic turn generally, and I’m not outright rejecting everything about Wittgenstein (as I said I’m only passingly familiar with the specifics of his work), just with the supposed conclusion of quietism. I think philosophy is still something with something to say, something worth doing, even if what you’re doing is mostly clarifying language and concepts and making clear what fundamentally doesn’t make sense to try to do in other endeavors. Just like I hold the sciences to ultimately be about ruling out possibilities and narrowing in on what is still possible, so too philosophy is largely about ruling out the ways of thinking and talking about various things that don’t work, but those are still both worthwhile endeavors. One might as well prescribe quietism about the natural sciences and say to stop investigating things and just accepted the world as it is; that would be absurd of course, but quietism about philosophy is equally absurd.

Because he’s omniscient so he knows all, but he’s a nihilist so there is nothing, ergo he knows nothing. :wink:

Sure thing. In brief, they’re experiences of a kind of emotional high, either caused by or causing a feeling of general OK-ness or acceptance, where I can look right at even the worst of things and still see that they are bad but rather than just feeling bad about them, I feel fine and just think clearly about how to improve them. (It’s possibly the same feeling expressed by people who say “I’m so happy I could die”, i.e. even death is no big deal, I feel so great, confident and certain and not worried about anything).

And thinking clearly and creatively and productively is a lot easier in such a state because so many connections between so many disparate things just seem so obvious, like I can just clearly and easily see this huge web of interconnectedness and how everything fits together, which just makes me feel both in awe of the world and proud of myself for seeing it, and excited to have realized it, all of which just further fuels the emotional high running throughout all of it. That sense of everything being connected also extends to my own being, and so brings with it a kind of feeling of oneness with the universe, or of bring a mirror of the universe or of seeing oneself reflected in the universe, Atman-is-Brahman style.

In that state, not only do I see all these meaningful connections (some of which still hold up under later, more skeptical scrutiny), but there is just a profound feeling of general, non-rational meaningfulness, like the opposite of existential dread, a sort of magical feeling, sometimes inexplicably attached to mundane things, almost like a kind of deja vu, like a mundane road I walk down suddenly feels like it was the site of some important significant event, when there wasn’t really any that I can remember, so it feels like some kind of almost-recalled memory of a past life or of a forgotten dream. I think of the mashed potatoes scene in Close Encounter of the Third Kind: “This is important. This means something.” But it’s really just potatoes.

Glad you like the idea. :smile: I look forward to seeing your answers.

Cool to have another local on here. :cool:

I’m glad reading Wittgenstein was emotionally helpful to you, even if I end up not agreeing with his philosophy much. (I take pretty much the same attitude toward religious texts, for what that’s worth).

I’m not so much asking for people to put together a coherent systematic philosophy, as I am just wondering what people’s present answers (however un-thought-out they may be) to this range of questions are, both just out of curiosity to see how answers to one question relate to answers to others, and as kind of a learning exercise or guided meditation opportunity (so to speak) for those who maybe haven’t considered all of these questions, a chance for them to think about how answers to one question should relate to answers to others.

Thanks for the compliment, and for sharing your history. I’m curious to hear your answers to the full set of questions (if you feel like answering them), since I can only infer answers to a few of them from the history you’ve given.

I don’t mind a small digression into Platonism vs nominalism vs mathematicism, as a Tegmarkian mathematicist myself and yet also an anti-Platonist, who finds it weird that some consider mathematicism an extreme form of Platonism while I consider it more like the opposite. For analogy, if Platonism is like Cartesian dualism, mathematicism seems more like idealism to me, contrasted to both that and to nominalism/materialism. Anyway if this digression gets too long we can always fork it, and right now it’s no worse than the Wittgenstein digression (and more interesting to me).