• Grammar Introduces Logic
    Not quite. You're correct to link grammar and logic. Logic itself is a language composed of a syntax.
    The nature of spacetime must ultimately be language, since language is the most general algebraic structure. For something to obey rules it's got to conform to the rules of language otherwise it's unintelligible. In spacetime you've got objects, these correspond to nouns, you've got time, which correspond to verbs and functions and you've got space which is prepositional. There isn't anything in spacetime that isn't describable in language. Notice how all attempts to unify the sciences involve trying to boil them all down to one language within a unified grammar. The thoughts we model reality with must also be continuous with that reality and continuity implies shared structure. In the CTMU this is called the metaformal system and it couples that which you describe the universe with that which structures it.

    https://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/Principle_of_Linguistic_Reducibility
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTIv4GiDGOk - language of spacetime
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXvUyrhAaN8 - reality is a language
  • A Just God Cannot Exist
    The analogy just went over your head. I understand letting children suffer would be an injustice - thus I pointed it out.ToothyMaw
    No nothing went over my head. You were pointing out something in agreement with what I originally stated, which was:
    We have free will and it is our responsibility to create just outcomes in society.Hallucinogen
    When you responded asking whether we should "allow children to suffer so we can test them?", I had therefore already answered this question in the comment I made you were responding to. So I don't know which analogy you think I missed, if it isn't the comparison you made between people's responsibility to intervene and God's responsibility to intervene, which I've pointed out isn't a correct comparison.
    If we allow those whose condition we have control over to suffer, then we are guilty for not preventing that suffering, no matter how, as I have had to point out many times in this thread, unfathomable God isToothyMaw
    Yes that's definitely correct, and I didn't assert at any point such a dependency of our responsibility to intervene on God's unfathomability.
    Then God is even more culpable than the parent who lets their child suffer, as he has absolute control over our outcomes and whether or not they are just.ToothyMaw
    This is just you repeating that you think God is responsible for creating justice among humans, when I've already pointed out this is our responsibility which you haven't countered, as well as you assuming that God doesn't create justice in heaven in rectification for that earthly suffering. God has power over the destination of person's spirit, which is the reason why allowing suffering in the material realm does not make God unjust, as he can rectify this in heaven, according to the suffering someone suffered.
    We could just try to arrange society in such a way that people get what they deserve? Do you honestly believe that someone could only be rewarded with a Nobel Prize if someone else falls off a cliff? What connection is there between some people's suffering, or the lack of just outcomes, and the just outcomes others receive, and why couldn't we all at least mostly get what we deserve?ToothyMaw
    Hello left-wing utopianism. Everyone gets a participation trophy, and anything less than that is all God's fault! I'm concluding here that you're just angry at reality for containing suffering and that you're just going to keep insisting that the responsibility lies in God's lap instead of in the laps of people who make those decisions, while ignoring that the justice God appropriates is divine and therefore trumps any assertion of injustice on God's part you can make.
  • A Just God Cannot Exist
    Would you say that adults should allow their children to suffer injustices at each other's hands merely so they can be judged by adults? That we should allow children to suffer so we can test them?ToothyMaw

    I said it was our responsibility to create just outcomes in society; allowing our children to suffer injustices would be the opposite of that. The direct comparison between people and God also isn't justified. People don't have the power to decide the fate and destination of other people's spirits, unlike God.

    From the rest of your comment, I'm getting a strong impression of left-wing idealism and bitterness about inequality, which tells me that your moral intuitions here are just expressions of your personality rather than moral statements I have to acknowledge as being objective or factual.

    And what about good people that get cancer? How are we supposed to enact justness there? If we can't enact justness, then shouldn't God protect good people from injustices we cannot rectify if he is even remotely just?ToothyMaw

    No, this is just your moral intuition/outrage again. I don't have to accept the assertion that God should do anything. Intervening to cure every person of cancer would make creating a world with cancer in it pointless. Cancer gives the sufferer (who is ultimately an alter-ego of God) the opportunity to experience and learn from mortality in a particular way, and it gives a unique experience to their loved ones and anyone trying to help them as well.

    Expecting God to do everything for us so we needn't do anything is lumping the means by which we show God who we are onto God's lap, which would be pointless because God created creation to see how we react to life. — Hallucinogen

    Then God really half-assed creation. We could demonstrate our worth, compassion, bravery, ingenuity etc. in a world with significantly less suffering.
    ToothyMaw

    This is yet again you repeating the insistence there should be significantly less suffering, which I don't have to accept because it is an expression of your personality. I'm curious how you think we could demonstrate our compassion in a world with significantly less suffering, though. Wouldn't that mean significantly less compassion?
  • A Just God Cannot Exist
    We have free will and it is our responsibility to create just outcomes in society.
    We will be judged by God commensurate with the extent to which each of us has done that.
    Expecting God to do everything for us so we needn't do anything is lumping the means by which we show God who we are onto God's lap, which would be pointless because God created creation to see how we react to life.
  • Is causation linguistic rather than in the world?
    It's more than a claim - the page gives an argument. Causation is the telic (wilful) rearrangement of vocabulary according to a grammar or syntax
  • A definition of "evil"
    Intentionality which is anti-existence
  • Is causation linguistic rather than in the world?
    true, if one equates causality to mean determinism
  • Is there an external material world ?
    Material world = thoughts of God all subsidiary minds interact with
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    Isn't it like that?Cuthbert

    No. What you said is "All x are y, except y1". What dclements said was "x is not x". dclements isn't pointing out any exception to the rule like you are.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    ALL of THEMdclements
    Applying a truth-value to every element in a domain, as an invariant and valid operation toward producing a result; there you go using a self-evident axiom again.
    are based on one's own beliefs and desiresdclements
    The examples that I gave and am basing my argument on aren't. They're self-evident in logic. Using examples other people have incorrectly said are self-evident isn't a counter-argument to my position.
    how things really are.dclements
    So there is a true way in which things are?
    "Black Swan Theory"dclements
    So black swan theory is a true axiom?
    Descartes's "I think therefore I am". It assumes that a "thinking thing"dclements
    I don't think it "assumes" a thinking being, rather points out to you the fact that you are thinking. All it assumes is a dependence of thinking on being, and so therefore produces the result that observing you are thinking proves that you are being.
    However, it doesn't address the issue of how such a thing existdclements
    It doesn't need to.
    "The only truth (axiom) is that there is no truth (or 'true axiom")"dclements
    Like all formulations of logical relativism, this is a self-contradiction. It's literally "the x is not x".
  • Pantheism
    If this God has free will, then how do you know he will always do good?Michael McMahon

    God's mind contains everything and is omniscient (also proven by the duality between ontology and epistemology, and God's omnipresence), which means God has no ignorance. Evil is a product of ignorance (as per both Western and Eastern religions), so God never chooses to commit evil.
  • The Everett Solution to Paradoxes
    :up: and if we follow the explanatory burden, we find that it implies the existence of a shared reality, or medium, in which the rules of p or not-p are distributed and selected, just as the superposition in the "original" universe did, at which point we have to acknowledge that that medium is the true reality, making the Many Worlds superfluous.
  • The Everett Solution to Paradoxes
    If I say p & ~p, p goes "this town ain't big enough for both of us" to ~p and vice versa - one has to go! However if p in one town and ~p in another, there's no issue at all.Agent Smith

    Yes, but it adds the explanatory burden of new universes being created with every superposition collapse. An alternative that doesn't necessitate the creation of new domains is that superpositions are potentials, and with observation, a value is selected-in from the medium which does the selecting (which is the medium in which p or not-p are contraposed, e.g. the medium contains the logical syntax).
  • The Everett Solution to Paradoxes
    Paradoxes appear when one rejects the self-justifying nature of logic.

    Regardless of how someone tries to "resolve" the apparent illogical nature of a superposition, the implication is always that all possible worlds are unified in one reality, and that one reality has the property of being able to mentally "select" collapses of state. In line with this, science has demonstrated the validity of quantum contextuality.

    I'd reject the Many Worlds Interpretation on the basis that it adds ontic baggage without solving anything.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    It isn't a given that the statement "there's nothing outside of everything" or your other statement "anything that interacts with what is real must also be real" are true so therefore trying to state that it is a given either one of them to be true is a non sequitur fallacy.dclements

    What you claim my statement is, is not what a non sequitur is, nor is my statement what you describe it to be. I said if you think one is false, then you can explain why. Requesting an explanation is not a non sequitur. I'm not saying either "is a given". Even if I were to say that, that wouldn't be a non sequitur. A non sequitur isn't an unjustified assumption; it is a conclusion that doesn't follow from a presented argument.

    Your responses to me here all fall under the category of denying that there is an invariant guarantor of truth to base any axiom or definition on. What you're failing to notice in each case, is that this is self-refutational, and that is the basis for accepting that there are such self-justifying means for ruling the truth or falsehood of propositions that cover all cases.

    Are you talking everything in this universe or about everything in this universe and ALL other universes? If you are talking about ALL other universes (if there happens to be such things) then it is obvious that you nor anyone else in this universe (who has no experience with interacting this other universe) has any authority to speak about how this other universe operates since we know nothing about it. Even with this universe, human beings have a very limited knowledge on how things actually operate and the rules that most be followed.dclements

    Without noticing it, you've actually instantiated the very truth that "there's nothing outside of everything" in your attempted refutation of my position, since the very format of your argument relies on something being false outside of some domain (having any true knowledge about these other universes)in opposition to what is true inside (having true knowledge about the universe one resides inside) of the domains excluded by the outside. So the fact that I'm right is hiding within your response claiming that I am wrong.

    Despite claiming that there's no objective meaning to the word "everything", and that human beings have no authority to decide on how things foreign to us operate, you've proceeded to use the quantifier "ALL" as if it does mean something intelligible and in way that does apply to and produce knowledge regarding any entity we can imagine. There's another 2 contradictions.

    All you are really doing is saying is that "YOU" define something that is "real" to be something that interacts with something else that is real. But what if the thing that is being interacted with in the first place isn't even "real" but only thought of as real in the first place?dclements

    The presence of an interaction itself is what defines being real - is the feature that a real thing has - proposing interacting with an unreal thing is an oxymoron/self-contradiction. For something to not be real means for it to be incapable of changing anything in reality. This very point is pretty much in the OP.

    like pretty much all axioms that anyone postulates they are only true because one believes them to be true.dclements

    But you also said
    it isn't a given that the way you think what "everything" is and means is actually the way it really isdclements

    wherein you claimed that there is "an actual way it really is". So is there, in fact, an axiom that's stance-independently true? You seem to be claiming there aren't such axioms but then using axioms as your justification.

    All of these objections ultimately stem from you thinking that true might not under all circumstances be the negation of false, which is the general form of what you've said here, including insinuating that what is real could turn out to be, or interact with what is, unreal. It is for systematic reasons that anyone holding the position you are holding about true definitions ends up contradicting themselves in any claim they make about those definitions or about what can be known using them. These errors perpetuate because you are not noticing them.
  • Global warming discussion - All opinions welcome
    Western countries are continuing their trend in decoupling CO2 emissions from economic growth.
    This is in spite of, not because of, the policies that the green movement support and in many places have had governments bring into force.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    you haven't pointed out any non sequitur in anything I wrote.

    If you think either "there's nothing outside of everything" or "anything that interacts with what is real must also be real" is a nonsequitur, then you're free to try and explain why they are.

    appealing to ungrounded skepticism by insisting that we don't know in the way that you're doing is like claiming we don't know whether true is the opposite of false.
  • All That Exists
    Cantor's theorem must give way here, because it is not based on a self-referential model of logic. Logic has to be self-containing (self-justifying on its own) and has a set theory compliment.

    P(E) = E. The universal set contains itself, just as logic contains itself.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    Imagination has to be real, since it has a self-evident connection to whatever you might call reality. What isn't real is nonsense imagined within imagination, which doesn't follow the rules of reality (e.g. logical contradictions).
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    Anything which physically interacts, or interacts in any way, with our world, is real enough to interact with it, and so must be contained within reality to affect the rest of what we know to be reality. Proposing that something unreal is affecting reality is just a contradiction (because it affecting anything would make it real), like claiming something can exist and not exist simultaneously. This places imaginary things in the same reality as anything physical, since what we imagine affects our actions and physical reality from moment to moment.

    This principle is not hasty, rather, it is one which covers any alternative scenario you could come up with and renders the question of what can exist to be quite simple, contrary to the claim that the subject is complex due to having no clear principle of what may be known or unknown and having to rely on rules of thumb taken from experiment.

    The result is that the principle that reality is self-changing is grounded in binary logic, rather than it being an ambiguouis concept. Any changes that we observe are inside reality, and there's nothing outside reality, so the only place those changes could be coming from is inside reality, since there's nothing real outside reality to be changing it.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    All content of imagination influences reality because at the very least it delays the point at which you imagine something that you manage to create some semblence of in the perceptual domain. This places it within reality, since the interaction between the imaginary content and perceptual content is real.

    What is truly not real is imaginary content which does not share the syntax of reality, even if it shares states (e.g. Superman does not share the syntax of reality, but he is describable in terms of real states). This equates to "nothing".
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    "YOU" is the participant in the dialogue who does not say that there is something outside of everything. That is "SOMEONE", the interlocutor who you're claiming has caught "YOU" in a compromising position.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    But imagination can change reality.unenlightened

    Yes, this supports the point. Imagination is within reality.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    First you go on to say reality is everything; then you posit something outside of everything;Agent Smith

    I think you're getting the lines mixed up.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    Huh. Yeah, it is, thanks. I hadn't spotted it even though I often point out equivocation fallacies! Just not of the same format. Usually I've got my eye out for when someone equivocates a term in what they are *criticising* to mean something it doesn't, rather than actually equivocating on what they themselves earlier said.
  • Could we be living in a simulation?
    It depends on how you're defining it.
    A computer simulation? Run by a CPU? No. We aren't a program, you can prove that to yourself by observing that you can define anything however you want, or by observing that you can make up any symbol you like to stand for any meaning you like. There's no program for that; it's protocomputational.

    A self-simulation, (a la Chris Langan) whereby reality as a monic substrate is replicated within all of its constituent parts? Yes, that's how anything is allowed to interact with everything else.
  • Criteria for a stance-independent definition and the definition of involuntary suffering
    I think I worked this problem out. What you can call preferences are actually 3 things together: the perception of the object that is preferred / disliked, the cognitive process of the preference itself, and the functional property of motivation or repulsion that the cognitive process harnesses.

    Obviously the way we perceive is stance-dependent. Some people are colorblind, can't taste asparagus etc.
    Also, our cognitive capacities and dispositions are different, so the way our own individual brain processes a perception into something that is either liked or disliked, is stance-dependent.

    But, the very force of either motivation / approach and repulsion / avoidance, that is stance-independent. If you say that liking / value / approach motive is dependent on the perceiver, then this leads to absurdity. It means you would have no means of deciphering what people mean when they say "I like x", some people could mean things they like, others what they're neutral to, and others what they avoid. There has to be a consistent definition of approach/avoid, value/disvalue, liking/disliking, even if everyone's dispositions and perceptions are different. People obviously can tell what "liking" means, despite the fact they've learned this definition from many observations of different people liking or hating different things.

    Another thing this illustrates is that stance-dependency and definitions are different. I can define perceptions, I can define cognitive dispositions / preferences, and I can define value/disvalue, but only one of those things is stance-independent.

    If I couldn't define something, I suppose this would be neither stance-dependent or stance-independent, because there'd be no definition for that stance to apply to.
  • Generic and Unfounded Opinions on Fascism
    My favorite is when people criticise what they see as censorship or authoritarian as fascism. Typically, it's conservative boomers reacting to deplatforming or some figure they agree with being silenced... that's fallacious because fascism is more than just speech control... it's also counterproductive because liberals are never going to listen to someone calling them fascist.
  • truth=beauty?
    In a biological sense, fitness = beauty.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    Some cities with high rates of violent crime have fewer police killings than those with higher violent crime rates, a situation that can make police killings feel wanton and baseless.StreetlightX

    This is data on cities and states - that's not the same as the relationship between the violence of a group of people and their rate of getting killed by cops.

    Cities and states have laws and procedures which affect the way police behave. A reason why a city with a high violent crime rate but a low police kill rate may be that the high level of violence in that city has caused people to adapt, for example by adopting regulations like banning certain chokeholds, or simply just police becoming more experienced with subduing violent people. The same reasoning applies on a state level. Likewise, a city or state with a low violent crime rate can have a high police kill rate, if those police aren't inducted on how to handle bad situations and they're allowed to do whatever they like to bring people under control. Then, when an uncooperative (or even cooperative one like Floyd or Tony Timpa) suspect comes along, the situation can result in a death. In either of those two scenarios, higher rates of violent behavior from an ethnic group or sex resulting in a higher rate of being killed by police is still perfectly consistent with the trend you are pointing out with cities bucking that same trend.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    They’re saying that the numbers being similar DESPITE the black populations being smaller SHOWS that they are target more; the numbers targeted COMPARED TO the population number is where the “more targeted” claim comes from, and that’s why people are mentioning populations.Pfhorrest

    And the reason for that, as I was trying to say, is for the same reason that men are killed 7 times more than women DESPITE populations of men and women being the same.

    The group with the higher violent crime rate ends up having a higher death by cop rate per capita, because they encounter police more often in a violent context.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    Yes, absolutely, all men too should be absolutely furious at the rate at which they die by the hands of police. Why aren't you?StreetlightX

    This is the first time I've heard this.

    I believed everyone understood why many more men die during police encounters than women, it seems I was wrong.

    Is there something which, unlike population share, explains both why more men than women are killed and why more blacks than whites are killed?

    Well, I said what that might be in my first post - the violent crime rate of each group.

    Is the violent crime rate of men higher than women? Yes it is. ☑
    Is the violent crime rate of blacks higher than whites? Yes it is. ☑

    It seems we've found the variable we should be dividing those per capita rates by

    "Controlling for population (that is, looking at killings per million people) shows that it is black Americans who are most likely to be killed by police officers — that they are nearly twice as likely to be killed as a Latinx person and nearly three times more likely to be killed than a white person. Black Americans are also about 1.4 times more likely to be unarmed in fatal interactions with police than white Americans are (and about 1.2 times more likely to be killed unarmed than Latinx Americans).StreetlightX
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    There's nothing here that contradicts anything I've said.

    I'm pointing out the exact same thing using percentages instead of per capita figures.

    If there were 20x more men than women and 95% of victims were men, then that would be equal numbers per capita by sex.Pfhorrest

    Literally the point of my post, I simply said "50% men/women" instead of "If 20 times...".
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    Try answering the question.

    Your argument is that likelihood to be killed by police should be determined by population size.

    Population share of men: 50%
    population share of women: 50%

    Fill in the blanks,

    Percentage of people killed by police who are male: ___%
    Percentage of people killed by police who are female: ___%.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    Controlling for population (that is, looking at killings per million people) shows that it is black Americans who are most likely to be killed by police officersStreetlightX

    What makes you and Vox writers think that population size is important?

    Do you think that's also why 95% of police victims are male? Because the population is 95% male?
  • Will A.I. have the capacity of introspection to "know" the meaning of folklore and stories?
    This is the Chinese Room problem by Jeffrey Searle.

    Syntax is not semantics. Machines can compute syntax (that's what "computing" is) but they don't have semantics, they don't know the meaning of what they're computing. They don't know anything.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    ... and I'll add to that by stating that the insistence that this is a racial issue is entirely counter-productive to finding a solution.

    Insisting against the evidence that this is racial, so that you can join your political tribe and start beating your chest about it, is what has sucked the entire nation into a never-ending argument where nobody's going to listen to each other and decide on an actual fact-based solution. Even other nations are weighing in on it, based on the false premises that this is all about racism. Then we end up getting side tracked into literally every race-based discussion, about reparations, about slavery, about microaggressions. When actually there's just as many white corpses that were killed by police out of negligence or sheer malice as the black ones.

    People just turn the entire issue into something to score status points out of and engage in tribal cheering over.

    In fact that's what everything is. Status games and tribalism in a million irritating variations. Screw finding solutions, I guess. Any solution needs to benefit my "group" at the expense of another.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    There is no good evidence that there's a trend of systemic racism in terms of police brutality.

    For a nice summary see Tucker Carlson, unlike 99% of media sources, he dives into the numbers.

    About 1,000 people are killed by police every year in the USA. The biggest group being white.

    Any disproportionality of any other group with respect to their population share is simply due to how much violent crime they commit. Otherwise you'd be complaining about "systemic sexism", since it's almost always men getting killed by cops, and nobody is complaining about that.

    The Guardian did a project called "the Counted" where they collected the stories of everyone killed by cops for a few years. Take a look at it.
    Almost all male.
    99.9% of them being stupid, reckless, threatening and uncooperative.

    Even the term "unarmed" doesn't really help decipher who is "innocent" in being slain by a cop - the vast majority of those who are unarmed and die were also being stupid - like Mike Brown, trying to grab the officers gun, fighting or charging the officer, etc.

    But what about George Floyd, Eric Garner etc! Surely they are evidence of racism in the police?

    Nope. There were an equal number of white men, Like Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver, killed in exactly the same kind of infuriating circumstances as Floyd and Garner.

    But you don't know about them because the media chooses not to catapult their deaths onto the front pages for days until it instigates a riot.

    So what's the solution? Well, States have wildly varying death-by-cop rates versus their violent crime rates. Some states have high crime rates and low numbers of police killings. I'd recommend starting there. Find the differences.

    For example, New York banned the police from using dangerous chokeholds, - like the one that killed Floyd - and that may be the reason that state has fewer deaths by cop compared to other places.

    A decent president would have found plausible quick fixes like that based on data from states and signed it into an execute order, maybe that would've quelled the rioting.
  • Why x=x ?
    If x is not x, then all logical reasoning is undermined. It would be impossible to argue any conclusion from any premise.

    "Is" and "is not" are exhaustive and comprehensive operators, there is no third option, which means that x must be x, since it cannot be not x because that undermine all syntactical reasoning.