I wonder if that's what charleton means, then. Data streams are ontologically primary, and all other things (brains, hands, trees, etc.) are emergent phenomena. — Michael

Possibly. I don't know what it would mean for data streams to be primary. Streams of data according to whom?

I don't think it makes sense to say it's anything all the way down.

But something is ontologically primary. Maybe quantum fields is a good guess or approximation?

Anyway, whatever else exists is made up of the primary stuff, be it quantum fields or what have you. So it would be society then brains/biology, then chemistry, then physics, or however one wishes to do the reduction.

It's data streams all the way down, dreaming of being turtles.

Saying that we were "designed" like a car or an alarm clock sounds strange. Yet, apparently it is a joy for some people to say that about themselves. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

What about designed like a replicant in the Blade Runner movies, or Data on Star Trek?

Why should feet or breath stink? Why does male pattern baldness exist? What about anti-aging and anti-cancer genes?

I'd like to be more naturally athletic. Like a tiger, or at least, Lebron James. Why can't I just turn pain off? Or desire, when it's inconvenient or inappropriate? Or for that matter, emotion. Why must I be subject to them?

And so on.

. Neither participant was a victim. If no others had been present it would be hard to find anything to complain about. But others were present, so there were other potential victims. — andrewk

I understand the point you're making with the rest of your post, but calling someone a victim because they might have heard a disagreeable joke is taking the victim card way, way too far. We run the risk of making victim a meaningless term if we stretch it to include hearing anything possibly offensive.

I've heard tons of offensive things over my life, as has everyone, and I'm not a victim for it. But of course it all depends on context in the workplace. The OP's first example was not a case where hearing a joke would be victimizing anyone.

I find women's tennis enjoyable, but basketball never appealed to me. It's just too different from the men's play (which is super skilled and athletic in comparison). But I can watch women run track, even though their times are slower.

This isn't to say that WNBA or female college basketball players aren't skilled. They are. But the men at that level are something else. Not all of them. Some are there for size or as specialists. But enough of the men are huge outliers compared to the general population.

The question to be asked is whether using certain terms are useful. Is it useful to refer to human manufactured products as artificial? If we call plastics natural, does that help with noting that plastics are source of major pollution in the oceans?

Of course ontologically speaking, everything humans make is natural, as in it's all part of the universe. But we use artificial to distinguish stuff we make from stuff that nature produces for a lot of reasons. And we do the same for hypothetical alien civilizations. SETI is searching for artificial signals. Calling them natural won't help with distinguishing radio signals or heat signatures produced by alien technologies.

Or take archaeology. How do we know some artifact was human produced? Does calling that natural help with making distinctions between clothing and animal hide?

And if we wanted to, we could call spider webs or beaver/bird nests artificial. They don't undergo biological evolution, and are the products of organisms that do, like us. And those sorts of things wouldn't spontaneously emerge without spiders, beavers or birds to build them.

It seems to me that for there to be no change the universe would have to be completely empty - always and everywhere, so no quantum particles popping in and out of existence. If it contains even one photon or particle then there is change, since matter is energy is waves, and waves involve vibration, which is change. — andrewk

I thought it had more to do with entropy? Our universe starts out in an extremely low entropy state for some reason, and is headed toward maximum entropy a long time from now. Once it reaches the maximum, the system can't be said to be changing in any meaningful way. The laws of physics are time-reversal, so anything popping in and out or waving has no direction.

That's my limited understanding of the directionality of time.

. What would Jesus do? — Sapientia

Hopefully we aren't looking to Jesus to provide economic models.

I don't care whether you think it ridiculous. It's called justice. — Sapientia

The concern is that redistributing the wealth of successful businesses is going to screw up the market's valuation. We can say that Lebron James (famous basketball player) shouldn't make more than X amount that a school teacher does. Alright, but then what happens to the market as a result of setting that proportional value which has nothing to do with what value the market would set? You're going to be sending weird pricing signals to consumers and producers.

I don't think justice applies here. It's a balancing act of wanting a fair society where a small number can't dominate politics and marketing, while still wanting the economy to work well enough.

In the world we live in, nobody will arrest you for making a million bucks when you sell your start up brownie making operation. That doesn't make your brownies as worth while as saved lives — Bitter Crank

Agreed, but can you and Sapientia guarantee that your wealth distribution doesn't lower the standard of living for everyone? Because although fairness is a good principle, I would rather live in an unequal world where most people have a higher standard of living, than one where most people struggle to make ends meet.

In other words, I would worry that in attempt to be fair, you would ruin the economy by ignoring sound economic principles.

Now maybe there is a middle ground between excessive wealth imbalance and equal but poor for everyone. One thing you don't want to do is cripple economic output by disentivizing people. You also don't want to the government to play the role of the market. That's been tried, and it doesn't work well.

It's a problem if it's excessive. That would be a problem because it's unfair and creates an imbalance. And an imbalance impacts people like me. That would be money in excess of what you've earned, which you do not deserve, could go to those who need it more than you do, and therefore ought to be redistributed. — Sapientia

But at what point do you set this limit? If someone starts a software business today that becomes very successful and is used by millions of people, then they might become a billionaire at a fairly young age. Some of that will also be the result of investing their money, or funding other startups that turn out to be successful.

Do you penalize them for their company's success and returns on investment because it's excessive?

What if it's an entertainer or athlete who becomes widely popular and makes a similar amount of money, partly by starting another business and investing. Do you redistribute some of their wealth as well?

I understand that extreme wealth imbalance is a problem, but then again, are not the self-made billionaires generating wealth and jobs as well? Aren't they growing the economic pie? Should we penalize them for being more successful than most?

So this has turned into a debate on lying? These metaphysical disputes take the most curious twists and turns during the longer running threads.

Edit: or even better, read Hume. — Πετροκότσυφας

And even better yet, you read Kant. This is a discussion, not a book reading club.

No, but I've heard and read people discussing Hume and Kant, and there are SEP articles on this issue. In the OP, I mentioned the Partially Examined Life podcast. They discussed Hume, then Plato, then Kant, and then James & Pierce for the pragmatic response. The issue of knowledge, causality and particulars were prominent themes.

His argument is more subtle, suggesting that a priori reasoning does not predict the outcomes of causal interactions and that as humans we have since time immemorial simply had to OBSERVE and conclude from observations causality. — charleton

And Kant's argument was that we couldn't have come up with causality by just past observation. It wouldn't be something that could occur to us as a concept.

If Hume had come up with a skeptical argument for space or time, the same Kantian critique would apply. Habit or custom cannot create a fundamental concept.

Now, I am curious: how would you distinguish such a "Humean" universe from one that is "enriched" with your favored metaphysics? — SophistiCat

I think science is implicitly realistic, even though people figure out ways to talk about in non-realist terms. The Newton example wasn't meant to say that Newton was Humean in his account. He was not. It was just an example of going from particulars to general law. The problem with Newton's realist account of causality is that he couldn't explain gravity as a force acting at a distance, but Einstein could.

The reason for thinking science implies or assumes realism is because unobservables and general laws are posited as part of the theories.

This is baloney, of course, as it has been pointed out before. It pretents that Hume can't recognise that these events are in relations of precedency, contiguity and constant conjunction. — Πετροκότσυφας

But Hume also says we have no logical reason to suppose the constant conjunction will continue. He presents a skeptical view of the future, and thus undermines prediction.

Also, as for the problem of induction, where Hume points out that tomorrow could be Thanksgiving for us turkeys, the problem isn't that we have no justification for causality, only that we don't always know when we're observing correlation or causation.

I'm not ignoring it, but you are misunderstanding it. — charleton

Let's set aside the rationalism/empiricism debate, since this thread is about whether Hume/Witty's version of causality is adequate.

Resetting the issue: according to Hume, the only reason we think that B will continue to follow A is that it has so far in the past. Thus, our expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow is based on nothing more than it having risen before.

However, science says we have confidence the sun will rise tomorrow because it still has matter it can fuse due to it's relatively intense gravity. And furthermore, this will continue for a few more billion years until it can't fuse any more elements, and then it starts expanding and turns into a red giant. There is a reason the sun has been shining for billions of years.

As such, science isn't just cataloging Bs following As, it's looking to provide explanations for B following A. That's what Hume's account leaves out.

IOW, science operates under the assumption that there are causal explanations to be had. It's possible this doesn't always turn out to be the case, depending on how one interprets QM, but for a wide variety of phenomena, it has so far.

You are making my case for me, if you would but know it. — charleton

Not really, because you need the rational faculties to make sense of the empirical data. How we obtained or develop our ability to reason is a separate matter.

Not really. All science is based on evidence. We are just getting better at it. Newton gives way to Einstein, who in turn may well be shown to be inadequate. Einstein's work is observable. If not then its not valid. — charleton

You can't ignore the role of theory in science. Positing concepts to explain phenomena is as central to science, as is putting those ideas to the test.

You are just being ridiculous. Nothing can be conceived unless perceived.
Put a new born baby in a sensory deprivation chamber and see what you get.
You have not really used joined up thinking. — charleton

And nothing can be perceived without cognition. Remove a newborn baby's neocortex and see what knowledge they will learn.

Let's take gravity as an example. On a Humean account, gravity is just a shorthand for objects behaving in a similar attractive manner, such that bowling balls and feathers fall at the same rate on Earth, or the planets orbit in the same manner around the sun.

But Einstein notices a connection between acceleration and gravity, and posits the acceleration of objects through curved space as the gravitational force. So now you've moved from a shorthand for particulars to a very general principle. And not only are objects part of the principle, but light itself, which we have measured. Large distortions in space result in gravitational lensing. And furthermore, length and time get tied into this, along with frames of references.

That sort of scientific theory, like natural selection in biology, goes very much farther beyond noticing similar behavior among particulars over time. It explains why the particulars behave in a similar manner. That's fundamental to scientific theories.

OR - you could answer my question "Tell me the non perceptual source of knowledge of which you speak!" — charleton

Cognition is the non-perceptual source of knowledge.

Our brains honed by evolution in conjunction with the causal environment we perceive. Our brains are necessary to make any sense of raw sensory data, but our brains can do this because the environment is causal.

You are talking and saying nothing. — charleton

Eh heh.

Now, to reason means to find some data set U that is a superset of this data set K. Our method of reasoning works by choosing the most similar data set. In other words, it goes through every data set within some category of data sets that are supersets of data set K in order to choose the one that is the most similar to K. That's all there is to reasoning. — Magnus Anderson

Can you translate General Relativity into set theory?

Better yet, can you transform Evolutionary Biology into data sets? I'd love to see how natural selection falls out of that.

That's hilarious. How else do you think you can form a theory? By simply making shit up? That's what dogmatists do. They invent a theory and then they focus on the facts that support it and ignore those that contradict it. — Magnus Anderson

No, I don't think brute particulars are enough to provide the basis for any theory. That's the fundamental problem with empiricism.

The problem you have is that you cannot accept that predictions and theories are fallible. You cannot live with this fact. You think that if something is fallible it is necessarily useless. — Magnus Anderson

No, the problem is that I don't think you can get from brute particulars to any sort of theory, nor do I think brute particulars would behave in any sort of necessary relationship.

Hume's view does not lead to skepticism and it does not make science impossible. — Magnus Anderson

It does, because you have have no justification for coming up with predictive models. Nothing happens for any reason. Just because the sun's always shone doesn't mean we have any reason for coming up with a mechanism for it shining tomorrow. And as such, there's no reason to apply predictive models to the past before human experience. Maybe the universe was entirely different. Maybe the sun popped into existence along with human beings.

It's precisely that there are only "brute particulars that happen to always behave a certain way". Laws are merely human inventions that are based on a selection of these brute particulars. Any other way of thinking is already a form of dogmatism and absolutism. — Magnus Anderson

Then scientists are dogmatists and absolutists, because they certainly go beyond brute particulars just happening to behave a certain way to overarching theories explaining how living things came to exist, or stars formed, or how stellar fusion results in heavier elements, which gravity acts upon to form rocky planets and so on.

If those who accumulate great wealth are motivated mostly just by the desire to create great wealth (and the power that comes with that) for themselves, do you think that such a situation is morally acceptable and should be tolerated, or even encouraged? — Janus

I think it depends on whether this has a net benefit for society or not, and whether the solution to people motivated in such a way produces a better result or not.

Capitalism operates under the assumption that self-interested economic behavior results in net benefits for society. Of course there has to be some rules in place for this to work, and maybe capping the absolute wealth one can accumulate should be one of those. But then again, you might be disincentivizing the would be Steve Jobs or Elon Musk's of the world. So it's not entirely obvious what we should do.

I agree though when it comes to power that we need to limit any individual's influence. But a large part of that is what modern democracies are set up to do. They may need to be tweaked to take into account undo monetary influences.

Whatever work you want this point to do, if you accept it you just argue against your own view. — Πετροκότσυφας

I'm not accepting Kant's version of causality. Rather, I'm critiquing Wittgenstein & Hume's.

— The Emergence and Development of Causal Representations by Xiang Chen in Philosophy and Cognitive Science II — Πετροκότσυφας

The question here is whether human beings could learn a concept like causality just from experience, or whether the brain is wired to develop along those lines in response to experiences. A similar argument has been made for language learning. You could apply it to math as well. Of course we learn basic math, but we also have the capacity for learning math somehow, which most animals don't (some birds and apes demonstrate siimple arithmetic abilities).

Obviously you have to conceptualise, but you can only conceptualise FROM sensory information which is the source of ALL knowledge - quite obviously. — charleton

Not quite obviously, or Plato and Kant wouldn't have objected to that and come up with their own schemes for how knowledge is possible.

Locke suggests we start as a Tabula Rasa, I do not exactly agree with that, yet without the sensations we have nothing to work on. — charleton

Yeah and people like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky have argued otherwise.

I have no idea what your objection or solution to this rather obvious reality is. — charleton

The objection goes back to Plato in which he argued that the flux of the world presented by our senses cannot be a source of knowledge in and of itself.

The solution in modern terms is that our brains have built-in structures or modules for learning how to apply concepts to sensations to form knowledge.

Yes and no. They do not ask why, they DO ask how.
If you want to know why ask a priest, as they have all the answers ready made. — charleton

I'm not going to get into a semantic argument over when to use why and when to use how. I take scientific explanations to be causal reasons for the regularities we observe. Humean causation undermines that, which was Kant's concern.

). At any rate, there's no reason to suppose that cognitive science which examines the infants' abilities at causal representation supports Kant's apriorism and not Hume's habit theory. In fact, I think it tends towards the latter. — Πετροκότσυφας

I've heard otherwise. That young children quickly develop an intuition for object permanence and casual expectation.

I simply act in a certain fashion and then the sun comes up, without me having a reason for my behaviour. And the scientist after giving all of his verbal justifications acts similarly, without reasons. — sime

The reason for your behavior is because you evolved in a causal environment, where it makes sense for you to understand the consequences for actions that can lead to death or reproductive success.

t isn't. You are merely confused. And the reason why it is "valid" for us to think that the past will repeat in the future is because we have evolved in relatively stable environments. — Magnus Anderson

And why have we evolved in relatively stable environments? You realize that in order for biological evolution to happen, the physics have the universe has to be a certain way? It all goes back to the Big Bang. Pretty far reaching stuff. Offering evolution as an answer to why we presuppose causality is just begging the question of why evolution would exist at all in a merely contingent universe.

It is because of observations + habit. Our method of reasoning is a habit. This habit has evolved in relatively stable environments. — Magnus Anderson

No, it's not a habit. It's an evolved faculty for making sense of a causal world, just like eyes are an evolved organ for using light as a means to perceive objects.

You don't understand what the question "why the sun would rise hundreds of billions of times in a row?" means. That's the problem. When you ask a question such as "why X at point in time t?" you are asking "how can we calculate that the event X, and not some other event Y, will occur at point in time t based on events that occured before the event X?" That's all that is being asked by such a question. — Magnus Anderson

That's not at all what I mean by asking the why question. I mean the causal reason for why B always follows A, not how to calculate a prediction that B follows A. That's the difference between interpretations of QM (for example), and the shut up and calculate folks.

And I do understand it just fine, thanks.

The truth is that ONLY sensory impressions give us all the knowledge we will ever have. If that leads you to skepticism you'll just have to lump it. — charleton

Plato, Kant and plenty of others have disagreed with radical empiricism. Sensory impressions alone cannot give you any knowledge. You must be able to conceptualize your impressions.