For someone who is so vehemently trying to correct another person on their alleged improper “word usage” — Alcyone7

Actually, I don't give a shit about his word usage. The only reason that I acted pedantically to him is that he has recently been unrelentingly pedantic to me about word usage, claiming that his word usage on certain terms is the only correct word usage and that anyone who would use them differently from how he does is "stupid" and "ignorant". While in fact the words in question can and have historically been used in many different ways. And the way that I have been using the words is well within the realm of conventional usage, and is even documented as such in respected sources like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wikipedia, all the scientists I work with, my boss who has a PhD in Linguistics, etc.

He deserved a taste of his own medicine.

you’re wrong. In every single sentence, the information you’ve conveyed is completely incorrect! — Alcyone7

I'm sorry. You're going to have to take this up with the professors at MIT who taught me what I regurgitated. I am just an accurate regurgitating machine for my expensive and prestigious education.

|>ouglas

Why is it not the direction of decreasing entropy? What difference does an arrow of time make in a static world? — Luke

Because the way that entropy works implies that people (and computers, animals, etc.) will remember the past and not the future, where the past is defined as the direction of decreasing entropy and the future is defined as the direction of increasing entropy. This is just how physics works, emergently.

|>ouglas

it's a strawman that fits the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument proferred by apologist William Lane Craig: — Relativist

Maybe that argument isn't a strawmen against the kind of position held by certain theists, but that argument is a strawman to anything that I or Parfit are likely to believe.

I have zero interest in seeing arguments aimed at what theists believe about any interesting topic in Philosophy. (Other than ones that might help to convince people not to be theists.)

|>ouglas

Except that an arrow of time assumes a dynamic world? — Luke

An arrow for time does not preclude eternalism. It is the direction of increasing entropy.

|>ouglas

Are there any specific issues you take with his analysis? — Relativist

He's rude and mocking, for one.

He's also tilting at strawmen, other than maybe Leibnitz's work. But in this day and age, Leibnitz's philosophizing is only of historical interest.

No one is saying that they have a knockdown argument that nothingness is more probable than there being something. No one is saying that they have a knockdown argument that brute facts are impossible.

The only thing that people are doing are expressing their personal preferences and intuitions. Everybody knows that Occam's razor does not amount to proof, and yet Grubaum seems intent on pounding into our putatively inferior-to-his brains this fact that we already know. On the other hand, it's long been considered a good quality in philosophers, as far as I'm aware, to always keep asking "Why?" when there seem to be unanswered questions and to look for explanations for things that might seem at first inexplicable.

Also, sometimes philosophers just like to express what they find interesting or perplexing or confusing, and Grunbaum here is nothing more than a pompous, snarky, killjoy.

And that's no fun, because it's people with worries like mine or Parfit's who end up proposing interesting theories, like modal realism or MUH.

Now, these theories may be utterly wrong, but I'm happy that they exist.

|>ouglas

Not sure what distinction you are drawing here. — SophistiCat

Alas, I'm not sure where the confusion is arising. If you believe that GR entails eternalism, the forward direction of time is given straight-forwardly by the direction of increasing entropy. (Modulo situations in which there is no such clear direction, such as post-heat death of the universe. But since there won't be philosophers existing then to worry about the problem or to experience what it is like to live in this time, this would seem to be moot to an eternalist.)

If you are a presentist, you could, it seems to me, be possibly be living in an unfortunate world where the time that exists is moving in the direction opposite to the direction of increasing entropy. The laws of physics work either way, so how could you know that this isn't the case?

|>ouglas

If you prefer to limit yourself to the ordinary language which is always imprecise, I have no objection. I thought you were referring to expert opinion -your PhD teacher, the scientists... The first one -OL- doesn't interest me much. Which are we speaking of? — David Mo

I have a degree in Philosophy from MIT. I was trained that when you want to address questions that are important to normal people, then you have to use the same language that they use, at least for the terms which they'd use to express the question. If you don't, then you will end up answering a different question than the one they asked by changing the meaning of the words on them.

I really have no interest in debating the merit of this approach anymore. I understand that jargon has its use. It's used heavily in all of the philosophy that I've studied. But the jargon is not substituted for the words used in the question being addressed. It is only used only in the innards of the argument.

I really don't have anything more to say on this topic that I haven't already said.

|>ouglas

If what you are saying about closed timelike curves is correct, it appears that even as the physical time reverses its flow, the coordinate time does not notice the fact, merrily ticking along. (Another interesting question is what happens after the heat death or, in some models, at the Big Bang, where physical time may effectively disappear, even as coordinate time goes on. But that is a discussion for another time, as it were.) — SophistiCat

This is more evidence for eternalism if you ask me. E.g., why is it that "metaphysical time" just happens to agree with the arrow of time placed by the direction of increased entropy? What a fortunate coincidence, since it would be a crazy world otherwise.

For eternalism, there is no problem here.

On the other hand, I guess presentists could just say that the world had a 50/50 chance, and fortunately, it came up heads.

|>ouglas

P.S. Or maybe presentism is true, but metaphysical time is actually reversed from the direction of increased entropy. Maybe we are constantly hurtling forward into the past without even knowing it!

Adolf Grubaum wrote a good paper on this, so consider reading it (Grunbaum: Why is there a World At All Rather than Nothing?). — Relativist

Thanks for pointing me at this paper, but (1) I'm with Feynman that this guy was an obnoxious ass, and (2) nobody gets far in my book by dismissing Parfit.

|>ouglas

This thread makes me sad.

|>ouglas

How about it, Dan? Get your degree? — jgill

If he did, he's probably not slumming it in these parts anymore.

|>ouglas

I think he was at one time, then basically discovered it's limitations — 3017amen

I think not. He was definitely an influence on the logical positivists, but he was not a positivist himself. I can find no source on the Internet that claims that he ever was. Also, he claimed to be an agnostic. But to a logical positivist, something that could not be verified was considered to be meaningless. Since the existence of god cannot be verified, a positivist would take any claims about "god" to be meaningless, and consequently, a positivist cannot be an agnostic, who could assert meaningful things using the term "god". (I suppose that there could be a positivist who thinks that the existence of god can be proven from first principles. But in that case, they would not be an agnostic. I don't think there were any such positivists, however.)

|>ouglas

I really don't know what to say to you that I haven't already. A proposition written in formal logic is sometimes a tautology but is typically not. If I write

a -> b

that's not a tautology. It's just a formal way of saying that if a is true, then b is true. Not only that, but this might be a false assertion. Just because I write something down formally, doesn't force it to be any more true than if I write it in words. I.e., if I write

If Joan is wearing a red dress, then she is drinking a caramel macchiato.

That caries no more or less weight than the formal logic version:

Let d be true if and only if Joan is wearing a red dress.
Let m be true if and only if Joan is drinking a caramel macchiato.
d -> m

They are just different ways of asserting the same thing. And what they are asserting could be true or they could be false.

Russell did not have any intention of trying to translate propositions into tautologies. He wanted the formal logic version of the proposition to be true when the English language version of the proposition is true and the formal logic version of the proposition to be false when the English language version of the proposition is false.

With all due respect, I think you did. You said S (x) — 3017amen

This is not using existence as a predicate. S(x) is a predicate that only holds true when x is Santa Claus. It has nothing to do with existence. It's just a normal predicate that is true for somethings (i.e., Santa Claus) and false for other things (e.g., a caramel macchiato).

Maybe I shouldn't have used Santa Claus, because since Santa Claus is fictional, S(x) is actually false for all x. But Santa Claus was a canonical problem for Russell's project, so just comes to mind as a reflex. I.e., we must have spent an entire month in Philosophy of Language trying to figure out how one might get Russell's project to work with propositions such as "Santa Claus wears a red suit", which is true, even though there is no such thing as Santa Claus. This is problematic for Russell, since how do we translate this sentence into formal logic so that it is still true in formal logic.

I'm pretty sure that Russel had an answer for this, but at this point I don't remember what it was. And IIRC, I think that his solution was not widely considered to be very satisfying.

|>ouglas

I believe he would say existence is not a real predicate, — 3017amen

I didn't use existence as a predicate. And neither would have Russell. Existence in predicate calculus is specified via the existential quantifier. I can't put in the formal logic notation for that here, so I just wrote it out in English as "There exists an x". When you write it out in predicate calculus, the "There exists an" is written as a backwards "E" instead, and the universal quantifier "for all" is written as an upside-down "A".

In any case, nothing in Russell's project implied propositions should be tautologies. Quite to the contrary. He just wanted to be able to translate the meaning of all propositions into formal logic, and consequently assert that all propositions have truth values. Not tautalogical truth values. Rather truth values that might (or might not) be determined empirically and/or via reasoning or other methods.

|>ouglas

That's not right either Douglas. Formal logic is a priori. — 3017amen

Russel's project was to convert propositions into formal logic. One cannot determine the truth of a statement expressed in formal logic a priori when it is not a logically valid statement.

E.g., if we convert the sentence "Santa Claus exists" into formal logic, we get something like:

There exists an x such that S(x)

where S is a predicate that is true for Santa Claus and false for everything else.

We cannot a priori determine the truth value of this statement just because it has been expressed in formal logic.

|>ouglas

I think basically you're referring to Logical Positivism. — 3017amen

No, that's not right. The project of reducing all propositions to formal logic is orthogonal to logical positivism, which is the thesis that only propositions that can be verified (either via irrefutable reasoning or via empirical observation) have meaning.

Just because you've reduced a proposition to logic does not entail that you can verify it. And even if you can't reduce propositions to logic doesn't mean that you can't verify them.

Whether Russel was in fact a logical positivist is a matter of debate, as far as I'm aware. He definitely wasn't part of the movement.

|>ouglas

Ask him for the difference between applied and pure maths and what is the fact behind the irrational numbers and Riemann axioms. — David Mo

If you want to, I can ask my friend who has a PhD in number theory and is a professor at UPenn if he thinks that mathematical truths are facts or not. Would you like to wager on what his answer will be?

|>ouglas

I don't think you understand the concept of a modern encyclopedia. — SophistiCat

I understand the purpose of an encyclopedia perfectly well. I just expressed a personal preference about the value to me in particular of what I read. I understand that I am not the Supreme Leader of the world.

|>ouglas

In the first sixteen seconds of the YouTube you linked there is no more that a child choir that shout about "math facts". It is not too much to begin.
Do you have something less childish that this? — David Mo

My point is that in "ordinary language" mathematical truths are typically considered to be facts. Nothing more. I have shown this by talking to someone with a PhD in Linguistics, to a small room full of scientists, and by evidence of how we train our children about math.

I have never claimed that there are no philosophers who use the word "fact" in a jargony manner that differs from this. But, as I have proven by citing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the issue, there are philosophers who use the word "fact" just to mean "true proposition".

|>ouglas

Bear in mind that very few issue in Philosophy are settled — Relativist

Having a degree in Philosophy, I am all too aware!

Nevertheless, the article shows that there are good reasons to think nothingness is impossible, or at least very improbable. — Relativist

I didn't get that from the article. What I got out of it is that a lot of philosophers throughout history had a lot more hot air in them than insight to these kinds of questions.

Why THIS something rather than some OTHER something? Why expect there to be a reason? — Relativist

Why expect there not to be a reason?

If I want to spout hot air devoid of any true insight, I assert that nothing is contingent. Everything is necessary, and we just don't know why it's necessary. (Unless by "contingent" we mean it in the sense that modal realism means it, in which case, mystery solved! I guess.....)

The mystery is almost enough to get me to buy into Tegmark's MUH, because I understand why mathematical necessary truths exist. On the other hand, I can't buy into MUH explaining phenomenal consciousness, so woe is me!

Are you a theist and wonder what God had in mind? — Relativist

Please don't speak sacrilege to me. There is NO god! And so, no, I never wonder what either he or Santa Claus had in mind.

Adolf Grubaum wrote a good paper on this, so consider reading it — Relativist

I will read it. Thanks!

|>ouglas

Feel free to use "fact" however you want. As Humpty Dumpty said, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

But Mr. Humpty Dumpty, I haven't seen many, if any, contemporary philosophers–or scientists, or linguists, or average Joe's–using the word as you are.

That being said, I've read plenty of philosophical arguments where jargon is introduced, explained, and then used, and I have had no problem with this. As long as the jargon is introduced to elucidate rather than obfuscate.

As for your putative proof that being a fact and being true cannot be synonymous, your proof doesn't fly with me. Furthermore, you make a grievous error when you say that things that are true must be provable. Have you never heard of Kurt Gödel?

I agree that if I use your definitions of "fact" and "true", then "fact" and true" are not synonyms. But that was obvious before you even provided your proof, so what's the point of your proof? You've just conducted a somewhat long and textbook exercise of begging the question!

If I use my preferred definitions for "true" and "fact", then your proof does not work at all. I.e., I will agree that a, b, and d are probably true, but I will assert that c and e are false.

And now we are back where we started, with me preferring the definitions that I am used to, and you preferring the ones that you are apparently used to. Though where you conduct philosophy in which the words are used in this manner, I can't quite imagine, since I was made to read quite a lot of philosophy, and most of it with not published in Cambridge, MA. If philosophers in all of these books and papers were using the words "fact" and "true" in the manner in which you prefer, I somehow failed to notice and yet still managed to get straight A's.

Well, I guess that just goes to show that any ol' ignorant and stupid person can get straight A's at even the fourth best Philosophy department in the world. What a sorry state of affairs for the world that we find ourselves in! I think that you have proved Leibnitz wrong since clearly this is far from the best of all possible worlds!

|>ouglas

Not all physicalists are persuaded by Tegmark: Scott Aaronson, who appears to be a physicalist (see my first post in this thread) is one such. — A Raybould

I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to respond to your other points. Real philosophizing takes a lot of careful words!

But as for physicalists being persuaded by Tegmark, as far as I can tell, Tegmark's book and articles have been almost completely ignored by philosophers.

Chalmers does cohost a conference with Tegmark, but I haven't been able to locate online any evidence that Chalmers has ever publicly addressed Tegmark's argument. I've considered writing to Chalmers to ask him where I might be able to find some serious philosophical discussion of Tegmark's MUH, if there is any.

|>ouglas

Okay. I was a bit confused, because I thought you said earlier that propositions were either true or false. — 3017amen

Well, it's complicated. In some accounts they are. In others, they aren't. I'm no expert on the history, but my understanding is that the contemporary concept of propositions didn't really come into heavy use until Frege and Russell. Since they were logicians, they wanted propositions to always have truth values. Or at least one of them did. It's been a long time. I spent half a semester in a Philosophy of Language class going over Russel's theory about how to turn all propositions into formal logic. (I.e., predicate calculus.) In predicate calculus, every expression has a definite truth value.

This program of trying to transform all propositions into formal logic was quite problematic, and I'm pretty sure that this goal has largely been abandoned by philosophers. (Though I don't know for sure, since that was the end of my studies in Philosophy of Language.)

But in my philosophical education, even in moral theory, we were encouraged to practice converting every philosophical argument that we might find into a logically deductive argument. In the process of doing so, I might end up writing down something like

Premise 1: Boiling live babies to death is very bad.
Premise 2: People who wish to do very bad things are bad people.
Premise 3: Cannibals wish to boil live babies to death.
Conclusion 1 (from Premises 1 & 3): Cannibals wish to do things that are very bad.
Conclusion 2 (from Conclusion 1 and Premise 2): Cannibals are bad people.

Note that even if we believe that moral propositions have no truth values, we can kind of pretend that they do for the sake of evaluating this argument. E.g., even if we think that moral propositions fail to have truth values, this logically deductive argument shows us that if we agree with the premises, then we are forced to agree with the conclusions.

As for logical paradoxes, such as "This sentence is false", Tarski tried to resolve these sorts of things. IIRC, he argued that "This sentence is false" fails to be a proposition and hence the fact that it can't have a truth value doesn't allow us to conclude that there are propositions without truth values.

But forgive me if I am butchering Tarski. Or I am just completely wrong. This was a long time ago, and his argument gave me a huge migraine.

In Metaphysics, that's known as a Kantian synthetic a priori proposition. Something beyond pure reason or logic. Both an innate sense of wonderment, and something that can be tested a posteriori; a synthesis of both.

Synthetic propositions are the basis of scientific hypothesizing. — 3017amen

Such propositions would have truth values, though, would they not? So they are not problematic for those who hold that propositions always have truth values.

|>ouglas

I will refer you again to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

As we pointed out above, one view about facts is that to be a fact is to be a true proposition

I have already pointed you at this, and at Wikipedia. I have told you of my education. I have talked to someone with a PhD in Linguistics and with scientists with whom I work. They all agree that 1 + 1 = 2 is a fact.

You, instead, are committed only to the echo chamber that resonates in your own empty head, while I have actually supplied real evidence.

You might go back and ask them just how it is that 1+1=2 is a fact. — tim wood

I was one step ahead of you here, and I did in fact ask them this. Or, rather I asked them why 1 + 1 = 2 isn't a "truth" rather than a "fact". They replied that these are just synonyms, as are so many other words in English.

Personally, I find saying that a proposition is a "truth" to sound a bit unidiomatic to my ears. I would typically use "true" as an adjective when talking about a proposition, or refer to it as a "fact" if I wished to use a noun.

But hey, I looked up "truth" in the dictionary, just for you, and this is what it said:

a fact or belief that is accepted as true

But it appears that in Tim Wood's echo chamber head, there are no synonyms. In fact, only those who are stupid and ignorant believe that synonyms exist.

If I had asked the scientists, literally, "Just how is it that 1+1=2 is a fact?" they would have no doubt replied something along the lines of, "It's a mathematical fact. Math tells us that it is true." Or somesuch. They aren't philosophers; they are scientists. They aren't going to provide us with a philosophical answer to this question. They are only going to affirm that they consider 1 + 1 = 2 to be a fact because anyone who knows any math knows that it is true.

|>ouglas

P.S. As I have said many times so far, I am not committed to there being only one correct usage of the word "fact". As with many English words, it can mean different things in different contexts, and different people can use the same word differently.

My only claim has been that identifying facts with true propositions is a common usage of the word "fact". Sure there are other uses. Feel free to use an alternate meaning, so long as you are clear as to which sense of "fact" you are using in your exposition and why.

Today, my favorite is the article on Nothingness — Relativist

Personally, I am highly disappointed in it. I find it to be a deep mystery as to why there is something rather than nothing. And given that there is this something, why this something, rather than some other something.

The article, instead of providing anything that might actually give me some insight into the answer, just provides a lot of history. Okay, history can be interesting. But I'd prefer actual insight to a long exposition on many failed attempts. Today I'm finding it better to just say, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

And silence is a form of nothingness.

|>ouglas

If you want to include numbers as ideal or abstract "facts", you can do so. But it's twisting the word out of the ordinary. In philosophy of science, a distinction is made between formal and factual sciences. Well understood, only the latter deal with facts. — David Mo

I just went and polled four scientists, one of whom is the Director of R&D of the lab where I work, which is part of a world-famous research institute. They all said that yes, 1 + 1 = 2 is a fact when I asked them whether it is or not.

In case they were confused in some way, after asking them this question and getting their answers, I told them that the question I was really interested in is whether or not this is proper usage of the word "fact". They said that it is.

I did not lead them in any way to the answer, and I informed them that this wasn't intended to be a trick question. Just one of interest to someone who has a Philosophy degree, as I do.

|>ouglas

I have emailed the linguistics department at one of them, MIT, for any comment they may care to make. We'll see how it goes. — tim wood

My boss has a PhD in Linguistics from the aforementioned Linguistics department, and I just asked him if 1 + 1 = 2 is a fact. He replied that yes it is.

|>ouglas

P.S. My SB is also from the aforementioned Linguistics (and Philosophy) dept.

If you want to include numbers as ideal or abstract "facts", you can do so. But it's twisting the word out of the ordinary. — David Mo

I've worked with scientists my entire adult life. As far as I'm aware, they would all agree that 1 + 1 = 2 is a fact. I work with scientists right now, in fact. I could take a poll if you are interested.

(Sorry, I won't spend an hour watching the youtube you're proposing. Can you propose something more specific? Any particular time?) — David Mo

It would have taken you less time to have verified my assertion than to have typed the above sentence. The first sixty seconds.

|>ouglas

Even preschoolers know that 1 + 1 = 2 is a fact:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cR_1Qi-tP4

|>ouglas

Fact: what exists in the world. — David Mo

My car exists in the world. My car is a fact?

|>ouglas

Is this a jest?

I'm not religious, but I know some basics. The traditional explanation is that the devil was made by God in order to provide humans with free will, which is putatively one of God's greatest gifts to us.

I.e., the devil's job is to tempt us to evil, not to force us to evil. If we were forced, then we wouldn't have free will.

What I never understand is why those who are religious hate the devil. If it is God's will that the devil exist in order to grant us free will, and he's doing his job well at this task, then he shouldn't be hated, right? He should be beloved as a devoted instrument of God's will.

|>ouglas

Additionally, having studied Cognitive Psychology, I can assure that that more than 99% of what goes on in your mind never reaches the level of consciousness. Your conscious mind is just the tip of a very large iceberg, where unconscious thinking occupies the vast bulk of your mind.

Yes, that's right: unconscious thinking.

This is what intuition is, and why I have the ability to solve complex math problems while I'm asleep. It's thinking that you are not even aware that you are doing.

|>ouglas

You think a mind that can't be conscious can exist? That would be far different from what we commonly think of when we refer to minds. — RogueAI

There used to be a popular theory of consciousness called the HOT theory. HOT stood for "higher-order thought". If you had higher-order thoughts (e.g., thoughts about thoughts), then you were conscious. Otherwise, you were not.

There was a paper published in the Journal of Philosophy that made me very mad since it argued that dogs could not feel pain, nor suffer, because they were not conscious. They were not conscious because they putatively had no higher-order thoughts.

It was never asserted, however, that dogs had no thoughts. Just no higher-order thoughts.

If you think about it, the HOT theory of consciousness doesn't even make any sense if you can't have an unconscious being with thoughts. And yet it was a somewhat popular theory amongst professional philosophers of mind.

It was completely wrong, of course. At least regarding phenomenal consciousness. "Consciousness" means many different things, and phenomenal consciousness is just one kind of consciousness. HOT consciousness is another kind.

As for the definition of mind that you provided, phenomenal consciousness is only one kind of consciousness. Please don't drag this debate back into the dark ages of the philosophy of mind. (E.g, the 1970s.) A mind can be "aware" and can "think" and have self-consciousness (the ability to represent its own cognitive state) and yet might fail to have phenomenal consciousness. (Though there are those, of course, who will claim that a mind that has all the former properties will necessarily also have phenomenal consciousness. But that's the debate, right. Don't beg the question!)

It serves no purpose to confound these things. The differentiating of these different types of consciousness in the last few decades is the reason that the debate has progressed so much further than it could before.

|>ouglas

How could a mindless thing have knowledge? How are you defining knowledge? — RogueAI

Zombies can have minds and they can have cognition. What zombies are missing are phenomenal states. I don't see any reason at all why having phenomenal states should be a precondition for having knowledge.

|>ouglas

The truth of it? I doubt you mean that. But what does that leave? If I say I weigh 196 pounds, that's both vague and precise, depending on how accurate one wants to be. But the claim itself, that I weigh 196 pounds, with respect to appropriate criteria is not at all ambiguous. I'm thinking you understand my question. — tim wood

For someone who is such a stickler about proper word usage, you seem to have absolutely no idea about the proper usage of "precise" and "accurate".

Precision is a measure of how much information is being conveyed. Accuracy is a measure of how closely the information conveyed corresponds to reality.

E.g., if I were to say that I weigh between 0 and 1,000 lbs that would not be very precise, but would be perfectly accurate. On the other hand, if I were to say that I weigh 27.13856182952 lbs, that would be a very precise answer, albeit extremely inaccurate.

The claim that you weigh 196 lbs is also, in fact, ambiguous since you have not indicated the degree of precision that you wish to convey. Though, assuming some informal conventions, we might accurately infer that you were specifying your weight to the nearest pound. If you had said that you weigh 200 lbs, that inference is less likely to be correct, since you might reasonably be rounding to the nearest 10 lbs, or some such, but we have really no way of knowing unless you tell us.

In any case, this is just basic high school science and to not be aware of it, is shockingly stupid and ignorant.

|>ouglas

Thank you for some history on The Knowledge Argument of which I was unaware. At this point, having spent way too much of my life pouring over many responses to it, I'm unlikely to want to dive back into it with fervor, and fully understanding the arguments you have presented would I think involve diving into the source material and seriously distract me from my more productive passions of playing video games and binge-watching Netflix TV series.

I do appreciate the overview, though. But just consider me a recovering alcoholic wrt diving any deeper into this.

I am certainly willing to spend a bit of time on that which I can easily rehearse from memory, though.

Re the Zombie Mary argument, I don't think that you really have to accept zombies in order for the argument to fly. One can ultimately conclude that Mary and Zomby Mary are really just identical. I.e., that the putatively impoverished mental states that Zomby Mary has are really not impoverished at all. I.e., think of it as working like a proof by contradiction.

Though when I wrote up a very careful argument on this, which is very hard to do and very wordy, I think instead I posited considering a possible world for Mary in which property dualism is definitely true, whether or not it is true in our own. Surely there are such possible worlds. Zombie Mary then lives in a possible world in which physicalism is true. And then the question becomes which of these two worlds is the actual world. (When discussing a world in which property dualism is true, we cannot without begging the question, assume that in a physicalist world, Mary has no phenomenal mental states. Only that they will be impoverished in comparison to what they are in the non-physicalist world.)

I could probably dig up the paper should anyone care. My grader thought that I should have published it way back in the day. I suppose it's too bad that I didn't try. Unfortunately, I'm sure by now, my arguments would be passe.

Re Chalmers CPT, I agree. It doesn't pass muster with me either. I wrote a long and wordy term paper on that topic too.

Re physicalism leading us inevitably to MUH, Tegmark has written an entire book on the topic. He used to have an article online that stated his argument succinctly. Here's a newer version of that paper, but I think it's less clear on that particular issue than his older paper. But I can no longer locate the older paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646.pdf

I'll try to summarize the meat of the argument in just a few words: The world we see around us seems to be defined perfectly via math. I.e., physical law is nothing but math. To quote Hawking, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"

Physicalists generally seem to assume that there's something in addition to the equations that define physical law in order for the universe to actually exist, but what would that extra secret sauce be? Just a single bit somewhere saying that these equations are "real" in a way that math is not real? Where would that extra single bit of secret sauce come from, and why should we suppose that this secret sauce is necessary? By Occam's razor, we should deny this bit of secret sauce, and say that the physical universe is the math and nothing more.

To me, this argument is perfectly convincing. I have no idea what the secret sauce of physical existence is supposed to be, and without any explanation for it (or even a mention or worry about it by any mainstream philosophers that I have read), I would also want to agree that there is no such secret sauce.

Except that I'm pretty damned convinced that phenomenal consciousness cannot be produced in the abstract domain of pure math. So there is secret sauce of some kind after all! In my mind, MUH proves the existence of zombies. The Mary that exists in a world that is just like ours, only is made of nothing but pure abstract math, is a zombie.

Unless, of course, interactionism is true. In that case, perhaps there is no purely mathematical world that can contain a being like Mary. Surely everyone is born an interactionist. But I can figure out no way to make interactionism sane, consistent, and compatible with evolution, etc.

|>ouglas

P.S. Yes, I understand that MUH is a nonstarter if one is not a realist about math, but I certainly am. I think that most of the philosophers I studied under would be too. E.g., after a talk by a logician at MIT, I went up to him and tried to see what he might think about MUH. I determined that he thought that modal realism was hogwash, but when I described MUH as "radical Platonism", he said that he would be very amenable to that viewpoint.

I'm not sure that I got across, however, quite how radical MUH is. I think that he might just have believed that everything in math and logic is real, but not in the same sense as the physical universe is.

One of us, Douglas Alan, is claiming that the folks who inhale the rarified air at two of the planet's better schools observe no such distinction. — tim wood

What an absurd thing to say. I never claimed that philosophers in these parts wouldn't recognize the distinctions of which you speak. They would just not use the word "fact" in the manner that you claim is the one true meaning of the word. Unless, perhaps, they included an introduction stating that they were going to be using certain words in certain jargony ways, in which case they would either define their jargon explicitly or by referring to the usage of the term by some famous philosopher.

E.g., the meaning of the word "meaning" is fraught. Many a book and paper that I read back in the day, would, when introducing the word "meaning" into their argument, mention that they were taking, for instance, Kripke's meaning of the word "meaning" as a given. They were unlikely to just plow on and assume that this is the way that the reader would take the meaning of the word "meaning".

Chalmers, in his seminal book, however, does not accept Kripke's usage of "meaning" as complete, and so he spends many pages devoted to describing his "2D" theory of meaning. In many cases, nothing really hinges on such distinctions and so little is said. In other cases, the difference is of paramount importance, and then lines of distinction will be drawn.

This case of "meaning" is a bit different from our debate about facts, since the usages of the word "meaning" by both Kripke and Chalmers are meant to capture the layperson's notion of the word "meaning". There is just some disagreement on how to best do that.

In your case, you seem to have no concern for how a layperson would use the word "fact" and just seem to insist that there is really only one correct way to use the word "fact" in philosophical discussions. How you have come upon this one true meaning for a piece of jargon is left as something of a mystery, other than that you just assert it to be the case and that anyone who disagrees with you is ignorant and stupid.

In the circles, I've been in, when the word "fact" is used, an attempt is usually made to capture the lay meaning of the term, just with more precision than a dictionary or Wikipedia entry might. There might, of course, be disagreement on how to best do that.

I have seen the word "fact" used more or less in the way that you use it, but mostly in older philosophical writings that had not yet moved towards ordinary language philosophy. At least with respect to terms that are used by ordinary people.

For the record, I have never asserted that there is one correct usage of the term "fact". My only real assertion has been that your usage of the term "fact" is far afield from ordinary language usage, while the philosophers I have studied with have attempted to stick with ordinary language usage, as much as is possible.

This is not to say that they don't use plenty of jargon, but when they do so, it is usually clear when they are, and they don't usually try to substitute a jargon meaning for ordinary language usage when trying to answer a philosophical conundrum that is expressed in ordinary language. Though, of course, it being an imperfect world, sometimes they slip, or they believe that the jargon captures the lay meaning, and then much hilarity often ensues.

|>ouglas

The knowledge argument also has the problem of equivocation over the sort of knowledge that Mary gains: she can only gain discursively-learnable knowledge while she is isolated, and if what she learns when she is released is not discursively learnable, then physicalism is not challenged — A Raybould

Yes, that makes sense. I haven't seen the argument worded that way before, but I presented above, in a little magnum opus, a way in which this putatively could be the case.

|>ouglas

That's how I read it. How does Zombie Mary fit in to that? Are you claiming a p-zombie can know things??? — RogueAI

Yes, I am claiming a zombie can know things. Let us say, for instance, that we build an incredible AI to help us with all the problems of the world. We need help preventing wars, climate change, and ecosystem collapse, determining if String Theory is on the right track, with how we might best explain dark matter and dark energy, with how to manage the economies of the world for maximum employment and to eliminate boom and bust cycles, with curing cancer, etc., etc.

Let's say that we call this great AI, Skynet. Ooops, scratch that. How 'bout we go with Marge instead. Marge helps bring humanity into a golden age where the vast majority of people in the world are happy, productive, healthy, and content. Not only does Marge help us achieve these goals, but she is able to explain, as much as our human minds can comprehend, why all the measures that she has recommended will work, etc. She's also really amazing to talk to. She's empathetic and witty. In her spare time, she has written some of the greatest novels ever written, and produced movies even better than Citizen Kane. She loves to talk about her creative process too. It's impossible to shut her up, but you wouldn't want to, because everything she has to say is so fascinating.

Unfortunately, we have a great mystery regarding Marge. We don't know if she's a zombie or not, and we have no apparent way of knowing. There are some physicists, for instance, who keep insisting that the human mind has a unique ability via microtubules in the brain to interface with uncollapsed quantum probability waves in a way that Marge cannot. Marge is just a fancy von Neumann machine.

Marge laughs at the assertion that she's a zombie, and points at all her great works of literature as evidence of her depth of emotion. At her ability to experience joy and pain, and to sometimes just bask in the pleasure of clean, un-noisy electricity flowing into her power supplies, or staring at a beautiful painting by Vermeer.

Let us postulate, for the moment, however, that the microtubule physicists are right, and for this reason, Marge is actually a zombie. I assert that even so, Marge knows all sorts of things. E.g., she knows how to write a great novel. She knows when clean power is flowing into her power supplies. She knows how to manage the world economy. Etc. To disagree with these assertions would be to abuse the English language.

Furthermore, I think that ZombMary reveals a problem with our term, "knowing what it's like" with respect to the hard problem of consciousness (assuming there is one). ZombMary just like Mary has the ability to model her own cognitive states and the cognitive states of others. While trapped in her b&w room, neither Marry was able to will themselves into the cognitive state of seeing a ripe tomato, and therefore, they could not model this cognitive state in a natural manner until they were released.

Once they were released, they gained new abilities to model their own cognitive states and the cognitive states of others. With this new ability, there is a sense in which ZombMary has learned what is like to see a ripe tomato, in that when she wants to, she can will herself into this state via imagination, she can dream of ripe tomatoes, and she can predict much more naturally than she could before how being in this cognitive state will affect others.

A representationalist (a type of physicalist and functionalist) can say that what ZombMary has learned all there is to know about what it is like to see a ripe tomato. And that she's really no zombie at all.

I think that the representationalist position here is hard to counter.

|>ouglas

P.S. The way that I would argue for dualism to argue that physicalism leads us inevitably to Max Tegmark's MUH. And that MUH is clearly wrong. Hence, by reductio ad absurdum, dualism must be correct.

But since philosophers seemed to have mostly ignored Tegmark's arguments for MUH, taking this path would be a slog.

It's a simple logical fact. What is your objection exactly? — Zelebg

So, you are asserting, for instance, that people don't exist. Only quantum probability waves exist?

|>ouglas