God is not the kind of super-person you imagine. — Wayfarer

It's fine with me if that's how you want to use the word "God", but in doing so you are conceding that he does not have the omni-properties often attributed to him.

Note that in my first post in this thread that you responded to, I didn't say "evil exists therefore God doesn't exist". I said that, as asked in the OP, whether I as an atheist want God to exist or not depends on what you mean by God, and stated the kind of God that I would like to exist: the kind that would make bad things not happen.

God is always telling humans not to kill, steal, commit evil and so on. That is what ‘conscience’ is. The fact that there are those whose consciences are stunted - like psychopaths - or who choose to disregard it’s urgings, again doesn’t mean there is no such attribute as conscience. Humans are free to disregard it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. — Wayfarer

Sure, and I did already say a post or two ago that if that's the kind of thing that one means by God, I would also like for something like that but even more effective at that to exist. Obviously conscience exists, or is real, however you want to phrase that; if that's the thing you mean by "God", then no atheist will argue that "God" in that sense doesn't exist (or isn't real, whatever); they'll just tell you that that's a needlessly confusing way to refer to conscience.

(NB that I used to consider myself a pantheist, and was adamant while I did so that I didn't believe in anything different about the universe than an atheist does, I just thought that the universe fit the criteria to count as "God". What changed between then and now was only that I decided that that was a needlessly confusing way of referring to the universe... and also that a non-personal universe doesn't actually meet all the usual criteria for "God", because personality is a part of those criteria).

It might work if you actually believed it rather than simply making a rhetorical gesture. Religious people go through a lot to try and realise that state of grace. — Wayfarer

I also go through a lot to try to realize that state that I described, and not without any success. So if by "God" all you mean is conscience, then I'm quite "godly" as I aim to be (with some success) quite conscientious.

And circling back to the OP, if all you mean by "God" is conscience, then as I said a post or two ago I would love for "God" to "exist more" than "he" already does: I'd love for it to be easier to discern what is good and easier to follow through on that judgement.

Regarding ‘deprivation’ - one of the philosophical doctrines of evil is ‘evil as privation of the good’. It is associated with Augustine. The idea is that evil has no actual being, in the same way that shadows are simply the occlusion of light, and cavities the absence of matter. In Augustine’s philosophy, evil is the absence or privation of the good, if we were to see the true good, then we would realise that evil has no inherent reality. — Wayfarer

Right, that's what I was referring to. Yet darkness is still the opposite of light, even while it is also only an absence of light, no?

Likewise, on my account of hedonic experience:
- an appetite is the deprivation of comfort or contentedness
- pain is the archetypal appetite, or conversely, every appetite is sort of "a kind of pain"
- pleasure is the feeling of an appetite being sated, e.g. of pain being relieved, and
- a "mystical", "religious", or "peak" experience is a kind of intense contentedness, which is consequently quite pleasurable in contrast to the usual pains of life.

If you don't believe in God, then the presumed, claimed, or factual actions, qualities etc. of God are none of your business and none of your concern. — baker

The presumed, claimed, or factual actions, qualities etc. of God are a factor in deciding whether to believe such a God exists. If you say "God is omnimax" (I assume that means at least that he has the traditional omni-properties of power, knowledge, and goodness), it consequently follows from the existence of that God that nothing evil occurs (because if it did, he would know about it, would want to stop it because he's good, and would have the power to do so). Therefore anything that does occur, including child sex slavery, must be not-evil, or else such a God thus defined must not exist.

It would be immoral to try to force someone to enjoy things they did not and a waste of time trying to find those things. — Sir2u

It would be immoral to force them (to do something they don't enjoy, not just to stop doing something that makes others suffer), sure, but definitely not a waste of time trying to find ways to make them happy that didn't in turn make other people suffer. That might be very hard, but it's never logically impossible.

At the ridiculous extreme, a scenario where everyone was in their own virtual world experiencing exactly whatever made them feel best, even if that was the appearance of other people suffering (so long as nobody was actually experiencing that suffering in the first person), would be one universally good solution. Actually attaining that would be pretty hard, of course, and finding solutions that don't require those extremes could be really hard too. But that's the direction to aim toward if we're trying to make things more good.

Is the "we" a branch of government? Or any other coercive agent? — jgill

In this context "we" is whoever is trying to figure out what a good state of affairs would be. They might not necessarily be doing anything about it, just trying to figure out what it would be. Alice hurting Bob for her enjoyment would not be good, even if not doing it leaves Alice displeased ceter paribus; but Alice being displeased would also not be good; so if we, whoever we are, are trying to figure out what would be good, we need to figure out at least what would please Alice without hurting Bob.

Talking about coercion and government is getting a little ahead of the game here, as I'll go into those later in my other threads on the methods and institutes of justice (respectively), but spoiler for those threads: I'm generally against coercion.

You’re depicting God as a responsible executive, a commander in chief who 'allows' or 'stands by'. It is an anthropomorphic projection. All of those evils are done by human beings, by people. Presumably if they were conscientious Christians (or Hindus or Buddhists), they would never behave in those ways - which is not to say that Christians don't behave like that, but when they do they're obviously flouting their own laws. All of the terrible evils done in the last century - the holocaust, the atomic bomb, the killing fields, the immense loss of life in war - these were all done by people. — Wayfarer

And God has no power to stop people from doing these things? Or doesn't know he needs to? Or he just doesn't bother? Which is it?

NB that "stopping them" could very well just be influencing them mentally, shining a light of empathy and foresight and so on into their souls or whatever, so that they can clearly see why to do good. (See below).

And people have free will, they're able to behave however they like. If they were programmed to only do good, they'd be mindless automatons for whom good means nothing. — Wayfarer

This has always seemed like a very strange conception of free will to me, a sense of "free will" that basically just means "error-proneness". Nobody purposely sets out to do things that they honestly think they shouldn't. They sometimes purposely set out to do things that they know others think they shouldn't, but they clearly disagree since they intend to do them anyway. They also sometimes do do things they think they shouldn't have, and regret it. But those things are the consequence of either ignorance of good, or weakness of will.

If God existed, I would love for him to make me very smart/wise/insightful/whatever such that I am never in error about what the right thing to do is, and also very steadfast/determined/reliable etc so that I never falter from what I assess to be the right thing to do. I would not consider that to be taking my free will away. Rather, I would consider that to be strengthening my will: making me more clear-headed and able to figure out what to do and to see why to do it, and also making me more resolved to see that through. Eliminating errors in my judgement and weakness in the power of that judgement to guide my action. Keeping the wrong influences from causing me to think something's good when it's not, or to do other than what I think is good.

Even if God isn't some physical object that "exists" but just some kind of mental "being" in the hearts and souls and minds of all mankind or whatever, influencing people's thoughts like that should be exactly the kind of thing he should be best at, and the fact that so many people fuck up so hard so often is just as much evidence that he's either not good at doing that kind of thing, or he doesn't care to. (Or he doesn't know he needs to).

Also, there are ills that are not caused by human choices anyway. I'm sure you're familiar with the term "natural evil". Human choices don't cause all disease and predation and natural disasters etc.

The religions depict a highest good in terms of 'eternal life' or 'Life', capital-L. — Wayfarer

An eternal life of unending suffering doesn't sound like a good thing, so presumably this is an eternal life that feels nice in some way, yeah? Still a kind of pleasure, or at least the absence of the pain of mortal life, or at the very least (if it's no more pleasurable of painful than mortal life) an absence of the suffering that comes from fear of death. Still talking about pleasure and pain, enjoyment and suffering.

a good that has no opposite — Wayfarer

Would not the deprivation of it be its opposite? Just as sickness is the deprivation of health, etc.

So a person that enjoys the suffering of others can never be happy. — Sir2u

They can and should, we just have to find some alternate means to their happiness. There’s never only one route to happiness. Just because X makes you happy doesn’t mean X is good; but if X it to be good it must make you happy.

“P -> Q” does not equal “Q -> P”.

I cannot see that this would work, if my pleasure is to see you in pain and suffering. — Sir2u

This is the point of distinguishing between appetites and desires: an appetite is not aimed for any specific state of affairs like a desire is, it’s just a feeling that calls for something or another—and there’s always multiple options—to sate it.

And it’s also related to the problem of confirmationism and its analogue consequentialism that I’ll go into in the later thread on justice. “If you suffer, I will enjoy it” plus “I should enjoy myself” doesn’t logically entail “you should suffer”; that would be affirming the consequent.

You should enjoy yourself rather than suffer. Also, I should not suffer but rather enjoy myself. Those are necessary conditions of something being good. You enjoying yourself is not, however, a sufficient condition of something being good; if something causes you enjoyment but me suffering, or vice versa, it’s bad, and something else that brings us both enjoyment rather than suffering must be found if we are to bring about good.

If that something else is not something that either of us wanted at the outset, that’s fine; we were both wrong about what was good. It’s up to us to figure out what we should both want, that will satisfy both of our appetites.

The problem of theodicy exists only because people try to explain God on human terms. — baker

So the problem is that we are mistaken when we say that child sex slavery is bad, and from God’s perspective that’ must be perfectly fine, since he clearly allows it to happen?

what the purported goodness of God actually entails — Wayfarer

If it entails knowingly allowing children to be sold in to sex slavery where they will sometimes be raped to death, then that is no goodness at all. (If he doesn’t know, or can’t stop it, then that’s an excuse that saves his goodness, but undermines any claims to godliness in the sense people usually mean).

those who repeat it likely have no practical experience of what ‘goodness’ entails beyond and above ‘the pleasure principle’ — Wayfarer

You’ve yet to explain on what grounds (other than because someone just said so, which IIRC you also reject) something can be called good or bad other than the enjoyment or suffering, broadly construed, that it brings about. You’ve stated a narrower construal of hedonism and then named things outside that, but then people like me respond “no I mean that kind of stuff too, that’s still a kind of pleasure/pain and I’m not excluding that from relevance when I say only pleasure and pain matter”.

I don’t think so. It’s not “a world” for the actualist, because there isn’t more than one; there’s only this actual world. — Luke

Actualists still use the language of “possible worlds”, and did so before modal realism existed; the novel thing about modal realism is taking that kind of talk literally instead of just metaphorically.

What “world” would remain for something to exist in? It’s not that everything in this world would be annihilated, but the world itself. — Luke

A "world" is just some state of affairs, whether you're a modal realist or an actualist. If there is some state of affairs in which nothing exists, that is still some state of affairs.

In any case, you're missing the point about logical possibility. Even if "the world" was annihilated, it would remain logically possible for "a world" to exist, because "a world" actually exists now, which means it's logically possible now, and logical possibility doesn't change over time, so it remains logically possible always.

The Stoics with their Stoa (a word I found in Nietzsche with respect to them) are like Greek Daoists to me. They are good but they don't tell the full story. — Gregory

Agreed. Stoicism, Daoism, and Buddhism all have the "accept the things you cannot change" side of the equation right. In practice their practitioners often do also have the "courage to change the things they can" part down too, but from what I've read of them that's not emphasized so much in the teachings.

What I meant above about "imposing morality on ourselves" is that we seem to contain an infinity of potentiality inside us and are forced by something elsewhere inside us to impose some of these potentials on ourselves in the form of "laws". I realized this fact when I was studying Fitche. A relevant quote to this is from Hegel: " The will that is genuinely free, and contains freedom of choice sublated (canceled-while-preserved in new form) within itself, is conscious of its content as something steadfast in and for itself; and at the same time it knows the content to be utterly its own." — Gregory

I'm not completely sure I understand you, but if I do, then I think I agree. That's actually sort of the thesis of the next topic I'm planning to do after I finish this one (including the second half of the OP that was cut for space): free will, and how it's pretty much equivalent to the capacity for moral judgement; how to will something is the same as to think that it is good, to not only want it, but to judge that it is correct to want and so want to want it; and how freedom of will is for that kind of self-judgement to be causally effective on your behavior, such that your behavior is directed as you reflectively judge that it should be, rather than just blindly in response to outside influences.

If this world were annihilated, then there would be no possibilities. — Luke

It sounds like you're not talking about logical possibility, which could be a source of our problem here.

If something is logically possible then it's logically possible always and forever. That's why I said earlier "What is (logically) possible or impossible is knowable a priori." It's not contingent on any particulars of the world. So, since it is clearly logically possible for something to exist, because something does actually exist, then even in a future state of this world where everything is annihilated, it is still logically possible for something to exist. That doesn't mean it's possible in any other sense, like physically or technologically or anything like that.

Stoics speak of purpose and such in nature, and of us as nature. — Gregory

I think I see the connection you mean now. I only half-agree with the Stoics in their "just go with the flow and do what you're meant to do by nature" attitude. (Half as in "the serenity to accept the things I cannot change", but half not as in "the courage to change the things I can" -- and yeah I know that's Christian not Stoic, but the first part of it is very Stoic in character).

I don't think that there's any one specific purpose that is given by "God or Nature" (to borrow Spinoza) to something/someone that it/they must do to be good. Sort of the opposite of that, kind of. We start out not knowing much of anything about what the purpose of anything is, because we start out completely ignorant of what specifically is a good state of affairs, just some criteria by which to judge what's good (which is the topic of the second part of the OP that I trimmed for length), and then from there we fallibly set out to figure out what good can be done by what means, and so discover what the purpose of anything is.

I’m not saying it’s impossible that something exists — Luke

You said "The possibility (now) of there coming to be no possibilities (at some future time)". If there are no possibilities, then there is no possibility of something existing -- it is impossible for something to exist. If that was just misspeaking on your part, then nevermind.

The realisation of the possible annihilation of this world would make it a non-world — Luke

That is the thing in question. We could annihilate everything in this world, and make it an empty would, but would it then be no world? I say no, and not for any reasons dependent on modal realism. Even if there's only the actual world, if everything in it were annihilated it would remain a world, just an empty one. Just like, if there comes to be some time in the future where nothing exists anymore, that wouldn't be not a time.

I do agree with a lot of Stoicism, though I'm not sure I see the connection of that to this topic. Can you elaborate on the connections you see?

I think it's more a case of you not understanding, or not wanting to accept, the critique. This seems to be the stock response you have for all critiques of your ideas. — Janus

Of course I'm not going to accept a critique of an idea that isn't the one I'm putting forth. And I'm often putting forth intentionally new ideas that are purposefully differentiated from all of the more well-known ones, because I found all of the well-known ones unsatisfactory and set out to try something new. So if someone pigeonholes my into one of those more well-known categories instead of engaging with that I'm actually saying, of course I'm going to point that out instead of defending a position that isn't mine.

It's not the same phenomena: Individual feelings and responses are available publicly only insofar as they can be communicated. The environment is perceptually available publicly tout suite. — Janus

Now you're just denying completely the subjectivity of observation? Or again failing to understand what I'm talking about? "The phenomena" is the stuff that's happening out there in the world: it's the thing we're experiencing, not our response to that experience. All experiences of phenomena are had subjectively, whether those experiences be empirical or hedonic in nature.

Anyway it looks like we are going to have to be satisfied to agree to disagree; which seems to be the usual outcome of our conversations. — Janus

If you're fine with that then I am too.

Yes, but the difference is that in the first case you have commonly precisely identifiable phenomena to study and in the latter you don't. — Janus

This makes me think you must still not understand what I'm saying, because it's the exact same phenomena I'm talking about in either case, just a different thing about them that we're paying attention to. You set someone somewhere during some event and ask them to record the things they see, feel, etc. Or, you set the same person in the same place during the same event and ask them to record their pains, pleasures, etc. The thing being studied -- the phenomenon of that event happening at that place -- is the same in either case.

I don't see how confirming that all people experience some feeling in a certain circumstance is possible, least of all by merely confirming that we experience said feeling in said circumstance. People and circumstances are highly variable. — Janus

Those are problems for physical sciences too, and can be overcome in the exact same way. You have to control for variables of both the thing being observed and the observer themselves, the object and the subject.

Even how things look or sound etc are not the same between every observer. There are different kinds of colorblindness, actual blindness in different degrees, tetrachromaticity, different degrees of hearing sensitivity or deafness to different pitches of sound, people who can or can’t smell or taste various things or to whom they smell or taste different, etc.

Observations always only tell you a relationship between observers and the world; the predictions based on those observations are that certain types of observers will or won’t observe certain things. It is those relationships that can be objective (as in universal), not just the object-end of them. An ethical science would likewise have features of subjects of experience baked into both its input and its output.

On the other hand is we place someone right in front of a tree and ask them what they see right in front of them, we can be highly confident that they will answer that they see a tree. — Janus

Are the leaves of trees green or red? People will give you different answers depending on the tree, even for the same tree depending on the time of year... some people will even give you different answers for the same tree at the same time, because their color vision differs between them. Yet somehow that hasn't destroyed the possibility of dendrology.

I thought his point was that we know morality from the purpose of functions. If this is true, than we would know the morality of sexuality from its function and thus the position advocated by Dr. Feser would seem to infallibly follow. — Gregory

Okay, I think I see the confusion here.

In my ontology, previously discussed, I argue that what a thing is at all boils down entirely to its function, in the mathematical sense of a mapping from inputs to outputs, where in this case the inputs are its experiences, what happens to it, and its outputs are its behaviors, what it does; what it does in response to what happens to it, basically. I don't at all mean "function" as in "the function of a vagina is to receive sperm"; that is a thing that it can do, and so is at least a part of the definition of what it is, but that doesn't at all tell us what it should be used for.

The question of "what X should be used for" is, I'm claiming here, the most useful sense of the word "purpose" -- one divorced from any agent-centric explanation of how X came to be, one that doesn't depend on someone having created X "on purpose", but just something good that X can do -- and thus, the analogous feature to "what X even is". The ontological question, about what X is, boils down to (on my aforementioned account) a question of what it does in response to what is done to it, a question of causes and effects; this teleological question, about what X should be used for, is a question of what X should do and what should be done to it to prompt that response, a question of means and ends. One is the question of what causes X to be, and the other is the question of what purpose there is for X to be, which once again doesn't mean "what did someone make X for?", but only "what good can X do?".

So to use your example, "what is the purpose of sex?" boils down to "what is sex good for?", i.e. "what good ends can come about by means of sex?" One of those things could be reproduction, sure, if reproduction is good; another could just be the momentary pleasure, if pleasure is good; etc. It all hinges on what things are good, and what things sex can bring about.

I have a continuation of the OP in the wings that I saved for a followup post or maybe another thread entirely, about how to go about gauging what states of affairs are good, and thus, what the purpose of anything is. But I cut that short because the OP was getting too long already, so for now the rest of the OP is just exploring that analogy further:

- Substance is stuff that is real (for some cause).
- Wealth is stuff that is good (for some purpose).

- Substance can by analyzed in terms of matter-energy and space-time.
- Wealth can be analyzed in terms of capital (matter+space) and labor (energy+time).

- Work in the physical sense (stuff really happening) happens when substances move around.
- Work in an "ethical" sense (good stuff happening) happens when wealth move around.

- Abstractly real stuff is instrumental in the explanation of concretely real stuff.
- Proficient goodness is instrumental in the attainment of beneficent goodness.

Etc.

The possibility (now) of there coming to be no possibilities (at some future time) is not illogical. — Luke

What is (logically) possible or impossible is knowable a priori. Since something does exist now, it is clearly possible that something exists. If there could come to be a state where nothing exists, it would still remain (logically) possible for something to exist -- that possibility would have once been actual, back in the past that is our present, even if it's not longer actual in some annihilated future.

It may be a possibility for the actual world to become empty, devoid of things. But that possibility is still the possibility of an empty world, not of some kind of non-world.

The difference is that the behavior and responses of physical substances, biological organisms such as trees, bacteria, fungi and even animals is invariant or much closer to invariant than the behavior of humans. The assumption of this invariance is taken for granted when we claim to have knowledge of the natural world. — Janus

It seems like you still don't understand the fundamental idea of what I'm proposing. This sounds like you think I'm talking about observing humans as the object of empirical study, and protesting that humans are more complex than other objects of such study. But what I'm actually talking about is how empirical study is grounded in first-person experience of the world, and that a moral equivalent, a "hedonic study", could in turn be grounded in a different kind of first-person experience of world. The world being studied is the same in both cases, the people doing the experiencing are the same in both cases, it's only the type of experience that differs: an experience of vision, hearing, etc ("senses"), vs an experience of pain, hunger, etc ("appetites").

This accounts only for your own experiences. I thought you wanted to take everyone's experiences into account, so now I'm puzzled as you seem to be contradicting yourself. — Janus

You confirm other people's experiences by undergoing those experiences for yourself, so you don't have to just take their word on it, and then you take into account that people in those circumstances experience that sort of thing (just like you did), including the other people specifically within that general accounting.

If I do an observation, you don't have to take my word for what I saw, much less what to believe because of what I saw: you can go do that same observation yourself. You have to come over here where I was standing while the same stuff is happening and do the things that I did to get the same experience as I did, but you can do that and confirm for yourself what it looks like to undergo such events. And then once we’re in agreement on what things look like from all the different perspectives in all the different circumstances, we can figure out together what beliefs are or aren’t warranted on the grounds of those observations.

I'm just saying we can do likewise with experiences of pain, pleasure, etc. If I claim that such-and-such feels good or bad, you don't have to take my word for how it feels, much less what to intend because of what I felt: you can undergo that same experience yourself. You have to come over here where I was standing while the same stuff is happening and do the things that I did to get the same experience as I did, but you can do that and confirm for yourself what it feels like to undergo such events. And then once we’re in agreement on what things feel like from all the different perspectives in all the different circumstances, we can figure out together what intentions are or aren’t warranted on the grounds of those experiences.

Of course this does depend on you taking feelings other than the ones you are have right now to be relevant to morality—it requires you not be an egotist—but likewise doing empirical science depends on you taking observations other than the ones you are makings right now to be relevant to reality—it requires that you not be a solipsist.

Moral universalism is as basic a supposition as object permanence, the thing toddlers eventually learn about how mommy doesn’t actually cease to exist while she’s hidden and then pop back into existence when she says “peekaboo!” Things continue being real or unreal even when you can see them. Likewise, things are moral or immoral even when you aren’t personally feeling the relevant pains or pleasures.

But we still need to be able to confirm that IF someone IS in such-and-such circumstance they DO experience such-and-such, by undergoing such-and-such circumstances ourselves, even though we don’t them immediate revise our opinions the moment we stop being personally affected. Because if we couldn't confirm it ourselves, we'd have no choice but to take their word on it.

In practice we usually have no choice but to take people's words on a lot of things in both domains, but with the physical sciences we at least have a group of people who aren't just taking anyone else's word on it, whose word we can subsequently take with more confidence.

Saying we apply morality to ourselves refers to my second my point. — Gregory

Still not following.

My first point was that Greek teleology leads directly to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rynlfggqAcU — Gregory

I'm not gonna watch almost 2hrs of video to get your point here, can you summarize for me?

Right. So in your perfect world, ruled by aforesaid perfect deity, there would no birth, death, or illness, right? Because all of those entail suffering, and according to this model, no suffering could exist, so nobody could ever be born, right? — Wayfarer

There'd be no death or illness for sure, but it's not logically necessary that birth be painful, so an omnipotent being could make birth painless or even pleasurable, and an omnibenevolent one would want to.

Do you believe homosexuality bad and straight sex good? — Gregory

Absolutely not, and I don't se what that has to do with the topic.

In a moment of conscience the "law" is objective, but maybe everyone has different situational experiences — Gregory

Nor this.

Do you think it makes sense for a presentist to talk about a time before time, since to her no other times besides the present are real, they're just ways that the present has been or will be? A time before anything existed, sure... but not a time at which it was not any time.

Does this mean you concede that it does make logical sense for an actualist to say "there's a possible world where there is no world"? — Luke

Nope, because that's like saying "before there was time...".

You could talk about a time in which nothing existed though, or a possible world in which nothing exists. But that's still a time, or a possible world, respectively.

It would be awesome if an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being existed, because then nothing bad would ever happen. — Pfhorrest

I'd be interested to know which Biblical or other religious texts validate this claim. — Wayfarer

I'm not appealing to religious texts at all. I'm not saying "some religion claims that their god ensures nothing bad ever happens". That would be a short-lived religions, making such an obviously false claim that anybody who has any less than perfect day (i.e. everybody all the time) could validate.

I'm not even saying that any religious texts explicitly claim that their god is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. Some might, but I don't know for sure, and I'm not depending on that.

But in philosophy of religion, it is commonly claimed that capital-G God is has all of those omni-properties.

And if there was something with all those omni-properties, that would logically entail that nothing bad would ever happen. No religious-textual support required.

If "possible worlds" is just another name for "possibilities", then it seems uncontroversial that modal realists and actualists alike believe in the existence of possibilities.

The difference seems to be that modal realists consider those possibilities to be actualised (as other possible worlds), whereas actualists considers those possibilities to be unactualised (except in this world). — Luke

If you substituted something like "realized" for "actualized" in there, that would be fine. The actualist believes that talk of "possible worlds" is just a figurative way of talking about states of affairs that could (possibly) be real but aren't; only the way things actually are is real, so "actual" and "real" are basically synonymous to them. But the modal realist believes instead that all possible states of affairs are equally real, each a different world, and what makes one state of affairs actual and the others merely possible is that one of them is the way things are in the world we're a part of, and the others aren't.

I keep using this analogy with philosophy of time because it really seems to clarify things. Both a presentist and an eternalist will talk about the past and the future the same. But the presentist considers "the past" to be merely a state of affairs that was once real but is no longer, and the future a state of affairs that has yet to become real but might; while an eternalist considers past, present, and future to be all equally real, and "the present" to just be the time that we happen to be at.

The presentist is like the actualist, while the eternalist is like the modal realist, just regarding time instead of possible worlds. (And I, uniquely so far as I'm aware, collapse those to the same problem, and consider other times to just be a subset of possible worlds, so the world with nothing in it but shrimp is just as real as last year: neither is actual, or present, but both are ways-things-could-be, equally real as the way things actually, presently are, just not the way things are for us, now).

To take every individual into account is impossible, even if possible in principle. — Janus

So is taking into account every observation in the physical sciences. Nobody thinks we're going to actually finish doing that. The point is that that's what you're aiming to get as close as possible to; that's the measure of completeness of success, the scale against which you compare two propositions to each other.

Strange that you should say that, since it seems to be you who is equating the two. — Janus

I'm saying to base the former on the latter, but it's very important to distinguish between them because if you don't, if you've just got the former, the whole process breaks -- just like if you failed to distinguish between beliefs and observations. You'd end up with the equivalent of trying to do physical sciences by polling people about what they believe, rather than going and doing observations, which is (hopefully) obviously not the way to do things.

Add to this limitation the fact that you would be relying on the notoriously unreliable medium of self-reporting, and your project appears completely impractical. — Janus

The point of relying on replicable first-person experiences is precisely so that you don't have to rely on self-reporting. You don't just ask everybody what they want, or even ask them how they feel; you go see for yourself how it feels to be in their circumstances. If you still don't agree about how good or bad things feel, then you have to start looking for differences between each other and taking each other's words for things, but that's no different than color-blind people needing to take normal-sighted people's word about how they see color.

there seems to be no engagement with phenomenological philosophy and those researchers of consciousness who have been strongly influenced by it( Zahavi, Varela and Thompson), or writers coming from the radical constructivist tradition ( Von Glasersfeld, Maturana, Piaget) or embodied enactivist perspectives( Gallagher, Fuchs). — Joshs

That would because I'm completely unfamiliar with them, which surprises me as if they're notable I'd have expected to have at least heard of them briefly in the course of my degree. Can you give me an overview of the general kind of view they represent? I'm always interested to learn more. (I did a quick scan through all their wikipedia articles and didn’t see anything that jumped out as objectionable to me).

Instead I see formulations reminiscent of 1st generation cognitivism and representationalism — Joshs

I am generally a cognitivist, though I'm not sure in what domain you mean that; in meta-ethics specifically (where I'm most familiar with that term) I'm specifically a non-descriptive cognitivist, which is a position that does not seem well known, that I arrived at independently myself after being unsatisfied with the spread of options presented to me, but which I've since discovered was also put forth a few years before me in 2000 by Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons.

However I am strongly anti-representationalist, if you mean that in the epistemological sense. I am a direct realist. I mentioned that in the previous thread:

This is similar to how my views on ontology and epistemology (see links for previous threads) entail a kind of direct realism in which there is no distinction between representations of reality and reality itself, there is only the incomplete but direct comprehension of small parts of reality that we have, distinguished from the completeness of reality itself that is always at least partially beyond our comprehension. We aren't trying to figure out what is really real from possibly-fallible representations of reality, we're undertaking a fallible process of trying to piece together our direct sensation of small bits of reality and extrapolate the rest of it from them. — Pfhorrest

with the accompanying metaphor of mind as computer ( the mind inputs i interpreted sense dat and processes into output) with a bit of ‘subjective 1st person coloration sprinkled over it — Joshs

It's not supposed to be specifically a computer metaphor, but an account of everything, not just minds, in terms of mathematical functions: things are what they do, specifically in response to what is done unto them, as what they do is what we experience of them, and conversely what is done unto them is what they experience and respond to.

To quote from that ontology thread just linked above:

George Berkeley famously said that "to be is to be perceived", and I don't agree with that entirely, in part because I take perception to be a narrower concept than experience in a broader sense, and because I don't think it is the actual act of being experienced per se that constitutes something's existence, but rather the potential to be experienced. I would instead say not that to be is to be perceived, or that to be is to be experienced, but that to be is to be experienceable.

And I find this adage to combine in very interesting ways with two other famous philosophical adages: Socrates said that "to do is to be", meaning that anything that does something necessarily exists; and more poignantly, Jean-Paul Sartre said that "to be is to do", meaning that what something is is defined by what that something does. Being, existence, can be reduced to the potential for or habit of some set of behaviors: things are, or at least are defined by, what they do, or at least what they tend to do. (Coupled with the association of mass to substance and energy to causation, this notion that to be is to do seems to me a vague predecessor to the notion of mass-energy equivalence).

To combine this with my adaptation of Berkeley's adage, we get concepts like "to do is to be experienced", "to be experienced is to do", "to be done unto is to experience", and "to experience is to be done unto".

This paints experience and behavior as two sides of the same coin, opposite perspectives on the same one thing: an interaction. Our experience of a thing is that thing's behavior upon us. An object is red inasmuch as it appears red, and it appears red inasmuch as it emits light toward us in certain frequencies and not others: the emission of the right frequencies of light, a behavior in a very broad sense, constitutes the property of redness. Every other property of an object is likewise defined by what it does, perhaps in response to something that we must do first: an object's color may be relative to what frequencies of light we shine on it (e.g. something that is red under white light may be black under blue light), the shape of the object as felt by touch is defined by where it pushes back on our nerves when we press them into it, and many other more subtle properties of things discovered by experiments are defined by what that thing does when we do something to it.

We can thus define all objects by their function from their experiences to their behaviors: what they do in response to what it done to them. The specifics of that function, a mathematical concept mapping inputs to outputs, defines the abstract object that is held to be responsible for the concrete experiences we have. Every object's behavior upon other objects constitutes an aspect of those other objects' experience, and every object's experience is composed of the behaviors of the rest of the world upon it. — Pfhorrest

For instance , you write “ Sensations are the raw, uninterpreted experiences, like the seeing of a color, or the hearing of a pitch.” That a classic dualistic move. — Joshs

This still seems like some unfamiliar sense of "dualism" to me. Can you elaborate more on what you mean by it? At first I thought you meant the familiar ontological dualism, i.e. material things vs mental things. I am strongly against that. Then I thought you meant the "dualism" of the is/ought or fact/norm distinction, but the above doesn't seem related to that. So I have no idea what you mean now.

Nowadays, given all these aids that effectively dumb us down, we would be well-advised to check our spellchecker. Which just goes to show....the more things change, the more they stay the same. — Mww

Yeah, in this case it was my phone's autocomplete pulling the rug out from under me. So many times, I start typing a word, it gives me an autocomplete option, and then apparently while I'm reaching to press that word, it switches it with a different word.

As I understand it, modal realists consider what is possible (i.e. possible worlds) to be actual — Luke

As for your own version of modal realism where "actual" is indexical — Luke

The usual (Lewis) form of modal realism also takes "actual" to be indexical, and so in those terms would not say that everything possible is actual. I agree with that too, but it's not peculiar to me. (). The modal realist says that other possible worlds exist in the same way that the actual world exists, but not that they are actual, in the same way that an eternalist says that other times besides the present exist as much as the present does, but not that they are present.

For the actualist it is not logically impossible that nothing might exist, whereas for the modal realist it is logically impossible that nothing might exist. — Luke

Both an actualist and a modal realist can use the language of possible worlds the same, they just take it to mean different things ontologically speaking. In that language of possible worlds, under either interpretation, it makes no logical sense to say "there's a possible world where there is no world". So in either case, it's not logically possible that there be no world at all.

However it is logically possible, in either case, for there to be a world in which there is nothing, i.e. an empty world, as Banno pointed out.

If we're asking why that possible world isn't actual, then the modal realist and the actualist diverge on their lines of argument. For the actualist, that's equivalent to asking "why doesn't that empty world exist instead of this one?" For the modal realist, there's no "instead of": both exist the same way, and countless others; the question is just why are we in this one and not that one; and the answer to that is that a world with us in it is by definition not empty.

where "actual" is indexical, presumably this means that the "actual" world is the one in which one (currently) resides/inhabits. This seems to imply that a possible world requires someone to inhabit it in order for it to be "actual". If so, then how can there actually be an empty possible world? Moreover, can there exist an actual possible world without inhabitants? — Luke

See above for clarification about other possible worlds not being "actual" (to us), but also for further clarification: on an eternalist view, "now" is just the time that we exist at. Does that mean that there could never be or have been times without people living in them to call them "now"? No. On an eternalist view, where "now" and "present" are indexical (it's just the time we're at, not ontologically special), that doesn't mean that times without inhabitants don't exist. Just that they aren't anybody's "now", because there's nobody there then to call it "now".

a modal realist way of thinking is like imagining the universe to be infinite where there is many versions of world — FlaccidDoor

So long as it's clear that "world" means something like "universe", and not "planet" like Earth, so we're not talking about somewhere far away in space there being another planet where things fall up, but about an alternate "universe" in a "multiverse" where things are that way.

many flying unicorns — Olivier5

If we come across one flying unicorn (that we can confirm definitely is a flying unicorn and not some hoax or something), the most parsimonious assumption is that there is a whole species of flying unicorns that has somehow evaded detection thus far, rather than that some special circumstances brought about just this one individual. It's always most parsimonious to assume the things we encounter are normal and not unique until proven otherwise.

The simplest curve that fits to a single data point is a straight line of zero slope through that point.

If we didn’t know for sure already that there were exoplanets, would it be less parsimonious to assume that some special circumstances occurred to create planets like Earth here, than to assume there’s probably just tons on planets frickin’ everywhere and ours is probably not an especially notable one?

Also, same question but about the existence of life on those planets instead, since that’s not a settled question yet: more parsimonious to think there is something special about Earth alone that permits life, or that there’s probably tons of life all over the place and we’re nothing special?

The principle of mediocrity is a natural theorem of the principle of parsimony, became assuming our circumstances are not unique is less complex a theory than assume something that would make us unique, even though assuming we’re not unique implies there are a lot of things like us, while if we assume we are unique then it might be just us.

Many worlds, modal realism, the multiverse, are all just the principle of mediocrity on a cosmic scale. Our universe is not special in its actuality. It’s just the one we happen to be in, and there’s lots more just like it.

Seems to me you are confusing there being no world with there being an empty world. — Banno

I was interpreting "there being nothing" as "there being no world" at first, but when you brought up the possibility of there being an empty world, I thereafter distinguished between them. But in the bit you replied to, I was replying to this:

Why couldn’t there be a non-existent world (i.e. why couldn’t there be nothing) — Luke

Which sounds like Luke is asking not about an empty world, but about there being no world ("a non-existent world"). Maybe he is confusing the two?

My stance toward non-existent worlds remains the same (there logically must be some world, there don't exist any non-existent worlds, whatever it means for a "possible world" to "exist"), but I've since clarified that I think yes, empty worlds are totally logically possible (and so on a modal realist account like mine, exist), although it's of course not possible that we could exist in one, because our existing in one would make it non-empty. But at some possible world there "is nothing", sure. It's just not this one, not the least because we're here.

if we can access an empty possible world — Banno

If I understand Kripkean accessibility relationships correctly (and I'm not highly confident that I do), that's basically asking if this world we're in could possibly evolve into an empty state.



I'm not sure about that question, but as I understand the current state of physics, true vacuum is thought to be basically impossible, so completely emptying this world (or a world enough like it) is not physically possible.

However, almost all of the complete universe (if eternal inflation is correct) is pretty much as close to empty as could possibly be: all but (an infinite number of) tiny finite pockets of stuff (like our observable universe) is just space filled only with vacuum energy, expanding as rapidly as it can. Rarely, but in that infinite universe consequently all the time, a tiny bit of it slows down a little, which collapses the adjacent parts as well, and the bits next to them, and so on at the speed of light, all of that former expansion energy converting into enormous amounts of other forms of energy -- a Big Bang -- but the rest of the universe beyond that pocket is expanding so much faster that these bubbles remain isolated from each other. If nothing is done to stop it (like somehow harnessing that energy of expansion to preserve a part of the observable universe), everything will eventually expand at an accelerating rate and rejoin the rest of that inflating empty universe. In that way, this world as we know it could get, more or less, emptied; and began empty as well, until it suddenly wasn't.

Why couldn’t there be a non-existent world (i.e. why couldn’t there be nothing) even if modal realism were false? — Luke

Because there is no possible world at which there is no world, regardless of what it means for there to “be a possible world”.

There could be no non-existent world even if modal realism were false; that why I said in my last post “whatever that means” about possible worlds.

There could also be an empty world in any case, whatever it means for there to “be a possible world” in each different interpretation of modality.

The appeal to modal realism is only involved in the question of why there’s a non-empty one instead of an empty one, for on a modal realist account all possible worlds equally exist in the same way, so if there could be an empty world, there is; it’s just not THIS one. The reason it’s not this one is, for starters, because we’re here, making it non-empty.

So there is something rather than nothing because of the postulated existence of this building with infinite rooms... — Luke

No, the building is just an illustration, a metaphor.

There is a world at all because there not being a world at all is not a possibility. At every possible world (whatever that means) there is some world.

There is something in the particular world that you are in because a world with you in it is a world with something in it: you.

Why is there anything else in that same world as you? :shrug:

What’s the difference between an empty possible world and “no world”? — Luke

Imagine a building with infinite rooms (a Hilbert Hotel if you will) representing the set of all possible worlds. An empty possible world is represented by a room with nothing in it. An absence of any possible world is not represented; there is no room for it.

A “possible world” is therefore a spacetime snapshot of this or some other (possible) world? — Luke

That depends on who you ask. In my version of modal realism, which seems to also be similar to Saul Kripke's (though I'm not super well-versed in Kripke), that's more or less correct; on my account, another time literally is the same thing as another possible world that meets certain criteria in relation to the present/the actual world. But on David Lewis' account, he being the premier promoter of modal realism, possible worlds are complete spacetimes, with pasts and futures of their own, not just snapshots. I guess I'm kinda weird for combining a (probably) Kripke-like conception of possible worlds with a Lewis-like realism about them.

...no? Not sure where you're getting that from.

There are possible worlds without me in them, and possible worlds with some alternate version of me in them but not this me. Those are not the actual world to me, though they are actual to anyone in them. Just like there were times when I didn't exist, and times with some earlier version of me in them but not this me, and those are not the present to me, but they are present to anyone in them.

If the question is why the empty world is not the actual world, then the question IS why we are not in it, at least to a modal realist like me, to whom “the actual world” means “the world we are in” and nothing more.

It depends on what exactly you mean by God. It would be awesome if an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being existed, because then nothing bad would ever happen. Except bad things do happen, so...

It’d be great if there was even a very knowledge, very powerful, very good being, since then much less bad would happen. The latter is at least something that someday could exist: we could make and/or become such a being ourselves, or someone somewhere else could and then we could benefit from it too.

It would also be nice if what we think is reality isn’t actually the whole of reality and there exists some being beyond it who for some reason can’t make everything in here perfect for everyone (to explaining why it’s not) but can eventually rescue everyone from here (even those who’ve already died) and put them somewhere that it can make perfect for all of us. But now we’re into really far-fetched wishful thinking, basically hoping that we are in some aliens’ simulation and that very specific circumstances in our favor pertain in the aliens’ world.