The only time Husserl shows any hint of distain for science is in his analysis of psychology and how it has clung fastidiously to empirical science at the denial of the whole subjective experience of the human condition - it is a reasonable criticism of psychology and why, even today, there is s confliction between psychology and neuroscience, where psychology is being ‘reborn’ to some degree as the empirical sciences (in the form of neuroscience; or now coined ‘neuropsychology’) has pretty much supplanted the core of psychology and thus given psychology a stronger reason to differentiate itself from empiricism - this is quite obviously being shown in the current climate of ‘social sciences’ (not that it is much of a science and we’re finding rhetorical use of data as a large part of politics today on a scale previously unseen). — I like sushi

Yes, I overall like Husserl's intentions, as far as I'm aware of them anyway. From what I understand of it, I disagree with the use of intersubjectivity as a foundational concept for regularities in nature (this may not be Husserl's own view, it is probably my limited experience with it from a few papers and snippets of his books over the years), but I like the emphasis on intersubjectivity as foundational for perceptual regularity.

From your very brief comments, I don't think you're seeing the point at all. Husserl was very much working from the Kantian tradition. Are you familiar with his criticism of naturalism? He wanted to devise a 'science' in a completely different sense from what I think you probably understand by the word. — Wayfarer

Yes, I'm reasonably familiar with the critique of naturalism, and Husserl's attempt to provide a foundation for science based on the structure of experience.

You always pretend that I don't understand the issue, whereas I just disagree with you very strongly.

There is no nature outside of an interpreted world — Joshs

Dinosaurs called, they want their time back.

That is not what most Philosophical Pessismists are doing. Deprivation is the root of most ideas of structural suffering. Nobility seems to be a shifty adjective in this conception as well. — schopenhauer1

Deprivation structurally in that post is potential loss. You've made a few examples of it. This is precisely what I was talking about; too much thought about dealing with potential harm intellectually, not enough about dealing with real harm practically.

But they are invaluable in telling you what you miss out when you do so. — Wayfarer

And the phenomenological emphasis on the inadequacies of the natural attitude, or harping on about how unsophisticated perceptual naive realism and scientific realism are, will never provide an account for why when they're all harmonising we end up with a successful understanding of nature. Something phenomenology rarely emphasises, or shows deference to, enough.

Edit: I don't mean to poo poo on phenomenology here, what I take issue with is Kantian critique being used to undermine science, then distance oneself from the undermining.

What was concealed from Galileo was the practical activities of the life-world making possible the abstractions of modern science. — Joshs

I mean, you could say that, or you could say that in general Kantian considerations are practically useless in modelling nature. The subject was never in the way of the world. Phenomenology seeking a primordial realm of practical coping, or the application of conceptual schemes, which renders scientific thinking derivative of that understanding will always miss that the subject is of the world and the world is of nature. The transparent veil erected by this wrongheaded thinking isn't really there; our senses are prisms more than prisons.

If perhaps you are pointing out that this is somewhat of a bogus or artificial abstraction, I quite agree. After all nobody knows whether time itself is accurately modeled by the standard model of the mathematical real numbers. That's a philosophical assumption made by science. It bumps into quantum theory. There are good reasons to doubt the mental model of static states as a function of time, and the standard real numbers as the official model of time. That viewpoint has been pragmatically successful for a few hundred years, but as to its ultimate truth, that's unknown. — fishfry

You might like this calculus identity:

$\frac{d f}{d g}=\frac{{d}f}{{d}t}\frac{{d}g^{-1}}{{d}t}=\frac{df}{dt}\frac{dt}{dg}$

One can imagine measuring the time it takes a kettle to boil by the heartbeat of the person watching it, the clock measuring both factors out. In that regard time's an instrumental variable for any bijective continuously differentiable function of it.

Don't know if this is a good place for it, but I don't have much sympathy for pessimism.

Step (1): Characterise life as loss.
Step (2): Characterise loss as nobly as possible.
Step (3): Forget nobility transmitted to life by transitive property.

The best pains, and joys, take us by surprise. We suddenly find ourselves stricken or fulfilled, and we're never the same again. These transformative surprises are what inspire action, not the humdrum banality of suffering or the dull rises of fleeting happiness.

Pessimism is the intellectualisation of loss elevated to a lifestyle choice; it requires self distancing to adopt. In same sense as supporters of Che Guevara might wear a Hot Topic shirt with his face on, pessimism is a contrarian's Hot Topic, aisles full of fashionable acceptance that only help with the concept of loss, not its gritty detail. It is an exercise in vanity, forever wallowing in itself, giving itself the pretences of necessity and inevitability. Everyone has colour in their wardrobe, even black can clash with itself.

When the need is urgent, pessimism falls silent, real loss arrests us, we contemplate in its wake, not apprehending it in advance as intellectual pop art.

Thing with mystical interpretation found in human body, I'll man the walls of reason until the woo parade passes.

Edit: turns out it was found in rats. Not humans. Great.

I agree that there can be plurality of understandings consistent with it. I take this to be one of the main points Wittgenstein is making here. It is consistent with a quote I cited some pages back: — Fooloso4

Ah, sorry, seems we agree on the interpretation of W. then. :)

@Baden summon an admin, like this.

Yes, I think it is easier to see if looked at that way. — Fooloso4

I think I might disagree with you though. There isn't always a unique justification for someone using language in any given way, there can be plurality of understandings consistent with it.

Your way is probably how a child might see the error, my way was probably how W. constructed the series.

Skip the first number, 0, and write down the next number 1 followed by the skipped number 0, then skip the next number 2 and write down the next number 3 followed by the skipped number 2, then skip the next number 4 and write down the next number 5 followed by the skipped number 4. The series continues 7, 6, 9,8 (unless I made a mistake). — Fooloso4

What he was actually doing was pairing the numbers into twos iteratively then inverting the elements.

{0,1,2,3,4,5}
becomes
{ (0,1), (2,3), (4,5) }
becomes
{ (1,0), (3,2), (5,4) }
becomes
{1,0,3,2,5,4}


A different rule that expresses the same series.

Ok, sorry for coming off awry. Thanks for your input! — Wallows

No need for the apology.

Rather than apologising I'd rather you dropped what I suspect is a euphemism. Thank you for your input, really? This is what customer services tell clients they want to fuck off.

Then, you point it out for me if you care to. — Wallows

How in the name of Hell am I supposed to know how you think? It's not my responsibility to think through your habits, it's your responsibility. Well, it is if you actually want to fight it, rather than giving the mere appearance of fighting it and leaving it at that.

In this regard, I lack insight into my own condition, and I really have no idea who would be able to discern the chaff from the wheat. All I have are a diagnosis that is being addressed individually with medication. — Wallows

I don't mean to be a debby downer, but people without insight typically don't know where they lack insight.

All I got out of the concept of "games people play" was the wrong assumption that the depressive likes the game her or she plays. In most cases, the depressive simply hates playing games at all. — Wallows

I'm not saying you like it. I think the deeper point of games people play is that it reveals that patterns and habits which are difficult to break usually have some pay off.

:point: :strong: :cheer:

You can have pretty profound experiences on dissociative drugs, they aren't necessarily negative. You can also have fun ones. There are reasons besides addiction that people want to take them.

Some powerful hallucinogenics aren't addictive either. Salvia and LSD spring to mind, and you can have dissociative experiences on them. Some people make occasional use of DMT or ketamine for similar reasons.

Carl Sagan used to take drugs, study and write. It ain't all bad all the time. :)

Distinguish this fun stuff from involuntary dissociation. Imagine someone has a dissociative trigger while J-walking and loses control of their body, collapsing into the path of an oncoming car. Doesn't matter how fun it was to dissociate, it can still be fucking dangerous.

Which is why if you've dissociated outside of a controlled environment, you need to get your ass to the doctor ASAP.

There's a difference between dissociation in a controlled context which a subject can wilfully elicit and an involuntary response or neurological issue. The former can be recreational or therapeutic, the latter usually will be unpleasant and is strongly associated with neurological or mental health issues.

This seems to imply that freedom cannot be permanent, that eventually, we will hit a wall and not be able to expand our autonomy. — TogetherTurtle

Freedom's always going to be particularised, if we're always in a state of freedom, that sense of freedom becomes politically irrelevant regardless of its ontological richness. Freedom should always be thought of as a political/social/cultural direction of development rather than equated with any existing state of affairs. Freedom which is gained needs to be defended.

We're always on the precipice of greater freedom, or losing it.

Freedom - the conditions under which autonomy may be expanded and maintained.

Tried that. Talked with my therapist, and he has the attitude of being honest with me when I am not with myself as much as I should. — Wallows

Will just leave this here.

No algorithm will tell you what to do, the self help books don't help you when you finish them.

One of the first steps is to be frighteningly honest with yourself. If you can't mitigate your depressive habits, find out why you need them. Then challenge it.

You have to live like life's a battle on all fronts, since your mind has a habit of following you everywhere.

and the random mistake does not — Metaphysician Undercover

Nonsense. You just intervene differently in the case of a clear systematic mistake and a random one.

You can tell someone why, or guess how, they made the mistake if there is a systematic error. You do this by exploiting whatever contextual and behavioural cues you can.

If there isn't a systematic error, you can still correct the mistake by telling them what the answer is, or what they ought to do.

The line about there not being a clear-cut diction between a random and systemic mistake had me puzzled, but this reading from Oskari Kuusela helped: “The distinction between not following a rule (making frequent random mistakes as opposed to merely occasional mistakes) and following a variant rule (making a systematic mistakes) is not sharp. Thus, while we may readily say of a pupil who makes constant random mistakes that she is not following a rule, the verdict is less straightforward in the case of a systemic mistake”. — StreetlightX

The random/systematic distinction here I think more neatly maps onto mistakes being patternless and mistakes having a pattern.

My little foster brother often counts like {75,76,77,78,79,90} or {75,76,77,80}, in the first case he's incrementing by 10 extra, he does this more often when the number preceding the multiple of 10 and the multiple of 10 share a digit name, like 'seventy-nine' 'ninety'. The second mistake is similar, 78 shares a digit-name with 80. He also sometimes just skips to the next multiple of 10 irrelevant of context, and sometimes skips numbers towards the upper end of a multiple of 10 (like, he struggles with 76,77,78,79 themselves sometimes).

So, for any given case, you can't tell whether he's 'just skipped it' or he's skipped it due to one of the systematic patterns. This isn't just an epistemological limitation, there's nothing in his use of words (including gestures, and intonation...) that determines one or the other. Sure, you can always guess, but there's nothing like 'evidence' of which mistake he's made, sometimes at least.

He's also too young to have developed insight, or an 'inner watchman' for his thought processes, so you can't ask him why he's struggling and, even if you could, he cannot notice these patterns himself, so he can provide no answers.

Just in general, there's a mathematical field (well, statistics) devoted to figuring out ways to take difficult qualitative concepts and develop quantitative indicators of their aspects. Operationalisation. Even if you can't boil the whole concept down to a number, sometimes you can boil some parts or simplifications of it down to a number, and it can be really surprising.

One good example is that if you want to measure the intensity of someone's experienced mental effort, you can measure their pupil dilation.

Go to a doctor about it if you haven't already. It can be dangerous. You should be screened for neuropathology. If it's mental health it's not an immediate life risk like a mild stroke could be, but you still probably need to get it treated. So that, you know, you don't dissociate while crossing the street and wake up six days later in France.

I have dissociative disorder. The fog's part of it. One way it's treated is similar to trauma therapy, exposure to the trigger( s ) for dissociation. This doesn't mean drink everything ever, it means learn to disarm the dissociative response through lots of practice.

Different orders of infinity are e.g. the Natural Numbers and the Rational Numbers. There is an infinite amount of Rational Numbers "between" each sequence of Natural Numbers. — Echarmion

These are actually sets of the same cardinality. There's a clever geometric insight which gives you that result. Imagine a coordinate system, 2 axes. Mark every natural number pair (x,y), making a grid. You can 'snake out' from the centre and hit every pair. But this set of pairs maps onto to the set of fractions (x/y). :)

The property you're referring to is closer to the idea of the (topological) density of one set within another, in an underlying axis of real numbers, the rationals are dense (can always find rationals of arbitrary distance apart, and between every pair of real numbers), but the naturals are not. This doesn't tell you much about the cardinality of either set.

First you have to understand the notion of the size of a set. The 'number of elements' definition makes less sense when considering infinite sets. Since, you know, every infinite set has an infinity of elements.

The definition of set size for finite sets is that a set is of cardinality (size) X when there exists a bijection (one to one and onto function) between it and the set of natural numbers {0,1,2,3,4,5,...,X-1}.

More generally, two sets are the same size when there is a bijection between them. One set A is larger than another B if there is a surjection from A to B but no surjection from B to A. One set A is smaller than another set B if there is an injection from A to B but no injection from B to A. One set is the same size as another if there is a bijection between them.

Under these definitions, a set is infinite just when there is a bijection from that set to a proper subset of it. So one way of showing the integers {1,2,3,4...} are infinite is to pair them up with the even numbers {2,4,6,8...}, there's a bijection between the two sets so they're the same size, but the evens are a subset of the integers, so the integers are an infinite set. So your example is wrong, the two sets you consider have the same size.

Nevertheless. The power set of a set is always of higher cardinality than the original set. That is, it is strictly larger.

If you have one infinite set, you suddenly have infinitely many infinite sets of strictly different sizes, and ordered sizes. Just take the power set of any infinite set to obtain another infinite set which is strictly larger! Each of these sets has a cardinality associated with it. So yes. There are different sizes of infinities so long as you admit the existence of an infinite set and allow the power setting operation to work on infinite sets.

Edit: if you want to go really crazy, there are infinities so big you can't actually reach them through the power set operation. :)

Part 2:

Becoming grew bored of its tryst with gravity
Seeking to play in the spaces opened by its neglect
Learning new songs of creation
Their sounds smaller than gravity’s open arms
And all the more numerous for that.
Little corpuscles of tremendous invigoration
Formed a score to pinprick the young melody of space
With the patter of tiny feet.
Legion shapes and sizes
Thrumming lockstep towards substance
to matter and form
Both poles given stability in the new weightless cold;
Then made to perform in their own voices
A chorus forms from each;
Becoming had created its first genres
The New Forces
Mediated by matter carrying forth each song.
These distinct rhythms, laws,
Emerged and blur the lines between
Object and event;
These poles of interaction
In the tepid sea
Make instruments
Of all these precious little things.

The other one had a terrible OP Wallows, this one is better.

Doesn't the Robinson translation draw a line between interpretation and Interpretation anyway? The former's discursive in the sense of being socially-normatively enriched without necessarily consisting of acts of language, the latter consists of (the existential structure of blah blah...) acts of language.

But it has been a while since I've been through B&T.

I'm wondering what kind of sampling mechanism could actually exist to generate individuals from previous time points. All probability is doing here is summarising the areas under curves with reference to the total area of each curve. The concept is doing no work, since there's no probability model - the sampling mechanism is completely artificial.

An Attempt To Write A Secular Human Creation Myth

Part 1:

It has been said that from nothing comes nothing
This provides no problems for a history of somethings
From something came something else, or more of the same
Stable structures arise in media res, they are harmonies
In the old song of becoming that subtends them;
which remains when they cease

Before writing the tablature of these cosmic ages
Which render life an instant in their depths
We must wonder whence the rhythms came
That discretize the music of creation into the rigid time signatures
Of cold natural law
Alone such laws provide the blank page upon which
Every note is written and sung
They delimit the tones by which becoming sings
Itself forward a beat
Which rephrased, by which becoming sings itself along its merry way
As what could be larger than everything?

As if to spite this question
In the beginning was the swear word
“It’s so fucking hot” everything is driven apart
If there were words, none could be uttered
No difference could furnish their meaning
As the only order was white hot noise
The universal absence of stability as a rule unto itself
Chaos pregnant with its own cacophony

If some midwife’s hand had tried to jam matter into
Every rut in that molten larval sea
It would explode back upon it
Scarring the attempt
As for people, for matter; confinement yields revolt

Gravity tried this;
the explosion spread becoming out
Leaving time and space in its wake
In turn these gave rise to the first distinctions
The Old Forces
Gravity, and everything else

Matter’s rebellion against confinement
Dethroned gravity’s funereal wake
density decreased, so did the pressure of gravity
Anxious at its own decay, it inserted itself everywhere
In the tiny nooks and confined crannies of everything
Like a jealous lover’s attempt at total control;
futile before inevitable scission.
Leaving becoming to love
Space, time and gravity as equals;
as its other halves.

As sovereign rights left gravity
So too did the urgent heat of its activity
Becoming cool, like a book unfolding from crumpled origami
A roadmap from uneasy nothings
To the first fumbling attempts
Of determinate matter
A uniform instability
But an unstable instability
Full of contingent potential

Stanford page on the 'capabilities approach', of which there are several. Probably worthwhile at least reading this before wading in, considering the OP's request for those familiar with Nussbaum (and presumably would also be ok with those familiar with other capabilities scholars).

I think it's a myth that PC is destroying good humour. If it's destroying anything, it's terrible jokes with no insight. Compare:

Bad: "Have you seen these trans people they have now? Yeah, these trans people. How do they wear hats? I mean, a fedora isn't a felt boater people! Come on. You can't just be one hat one day and then another hat the next day. That's fucking stupid.'

Good: "When I was having some sperm frozen, pre transition.. Well, I've never felt like more of the feminine ideal of the mother than when furiously masturbating into one of these vials."

The bad joke there has no teeth, it's just a restatement of stupid stereotypes; good humour should indiscriminately skewer those.

I almost always get neutral good in these things. Though knowing the alignment system and the stats makes the tests easy to cheat.

Though it isn't so surprising that we learn how to look for things. :)