Or a guess. I guess on things often. I call my guesses...guesses. — Frank Apisa

Are you even absolutely certain that you are guessing?

You have at least two inferences here. — Kornelius

These are equivalences, not inferences. They are just a different way to say the same thing. To say « P » or to say « P is true » is to say the same thing.

To take a trivial example, « I like popcorn » and « truly, I like popcorn » are saying the same thing. There are no inferences between one and the other. Seems to me this Kevin Scharp you are reading is not very sharp.

Li is defined as « Li is not true » which is equivalent to « not Li is true », itself equivalent to « not Li ». Ergo you defined Li as equal to not Li, an obvious contradiction.

I believe you are reading too much into the inference. — Kornelius

No, I am saying: you are starting from an obvious contradiction. Li = not Li. It’s like basing arithmetics on 1=2...

Thanks for Puff the Magic Dragon.

What is the mistake in this inference? — Kornelius

If P is true, then the proposition ‘P is not true’ is NOT true.
If P = NotP (the liar sentence) then you go into a contradiction, because you postulate a contradiction to start with.

It is fundamentally the same as saying: « Let’s see what happens if we postulate that 1 is different from 1... Oh my god, arithmetics as we know them break down! Therefore arithmetics need to be replace by something else. »

If P is true, then the proposition ‘P is not true’ is NOT true.

To die for ideas, the idea is excellent
Me, I almost died for not having it
For all those who had it, overbearing multitude
Screaming for death fell onto me
They convinced me, and my insolent muse
Abjuring her mistakes, rallies to their faith
With a hint of reserve, however

Let's die for ideas, all right, but a slow death
All right, but a slow death

Judging that there is no emergency
Let's go to the other world strolling along the way
For if one speeds up too much, one may well die
For ideas that are no longer in use the next day
Now, if there is one bitter, distressing thing
When you give your soul back to God, it's to reckon
That you went the wrong way, and got the wrong idea

Let's die for ideas, all right, but a slow death
All right, but slow death

The St. John Chrysotome, who preach martyrdom
More often than not, they linger here on earth
Dying for ideas, if you see what I mean
Is their reason for living, and they hold on to it
In almost all camps, we see some supplanting
Soon Methuselah in their longevity
I take it they must be saying, as an aside,

Let's die for ideas, all right, but a slow death...
All right, but a slow death

Ideas calling for the famous sacrifice
Sects of all kinds offer dozens of them
And the question for the novice victims is
It's all well and good to die for ideas, but which ones?
As they’re all similar to one another
When he sees them coming with their big flag
The wise, hesitantly, turns around the tomb

Let's die for ideas, all right, but a slow death
All right, but a slow death

Still, if a few hecatombs were enough
To change and improve everything at last
Since so many "great nights", so many heads rolled off
That in heaven on earth, we'd already be there
But the golden age is constantly postponed
The gods are still thirsty, they never get enough
And it is death, death, a thousand times over

Let's die for ideas, all right, but a slow death
All right, but a slow death

O you fire lighters, O you good apostles
Let you die first, we give way to you
But for God's sake, let the others live!
Life is about their only luxury here on earth
In any case, Death is vigilant enough
She doesn't need our help to raise her scythe
Nor our macabre dance around the gallows

Let's die for ideas, all right, but a slow death
All right, but a slow death

——————————————

Mourir pour des idées, l'idée est excellente
Moi j'ai failli mourir de ne l'avoir pas eue
Car tous ceux qui l'avaient, multitude accablante
En hurlant à la mort me sont tombés dessus
Ils ont su me convaincre et ma muse insolente
Abjurant ses erreurs, se rallie à leur foi
Avec un soupçon de déserve toutefois

Mourons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente
D'accord, mais de mort lente

Jugeant qu'il n'y a pas péril en la demeure
Allons vers l'autre monde en flânant en chemin
Car, à forcer l'allure, Il arrive qu'on meure
Pour des idées n'ayant plus cours le lendemain
Or, s'il est une chose amère, désolante
En rendant l'âme à Dieu, c'est bien de constater
Qu'on a fait fausse route, qu'on s'est trompé d'idée

Mourons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente
D'accord, mais de mort lente

Les Saint Jean bouche d'or, qui prêchent le martyre
Le plus souvent d'ailleurs, s'attardent ici-bas
Mourir pour des idées, c'est le cas de le dire
C'est leur raison de vivre, ils ne s'en privent pas
Dans presque tous les camps, on en voit qui supplantent
Bientôt Mathusalem dans la longévité
J'en conclus qu'ils doivent se dire, en aparté,

Mourons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente
D'accord, mais de mort lente

Des idées réclamant le fameux sacrifice
Les sectes de tout poil en offrent des séquelles
Et la question se pose aux victimes novices
Mourir pour des idées, c'est bien beau mais lesquelles?
Et comme toutes sont entre elles ressemblantes
Quand il les voit venir avec leur gros drapeau
Le sage, en hésitant, tourne autour du tombeau

Mourons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente
D'accord, mais de mort lente

Encore s'il suffisait de quelques hécatombes
Pour qu'enfin tout changeât, qu'enfin tout s'arrangeât
Depuis tant de "grands soirs" que tant de têtes tombent
Au paradis sur terre, on y serait déjà
Mais l'âge d'or sans cesse est remis aux calendes
Les dieux ont toujours soif, n’en ont jamais assez
Et c'est la mort, la mort, toujours recommencée,

Mourons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente
D'accord, mais de mort lente

Ô vous, les boutefeux, Ô vous les bons apôtres
Mourez donc les premiers, nous vous cédons le pas
Mais de grâce, morbleu! Laissez vivre les autres!
La vie est à peu près leur seul luxe ici-bas
Car, enfin, la Camarde est assez vigilante
Elle n'a pas besoin qu'on lui tienne la faux
Plus de danse macabre autour des échafauds

Mourons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente
D'accord, mais de mort lente

Just because we can take stuff into consideration when making a choice, does not imply we’re not making a choice...

1. Assume (Li) is true
2. Then '(Li) is not true' is true (substitution). — Kornelius

Nope.

but every choice either warrents a want or is influenced by what happened before it — Augustusea

Of course we take into consideration what happened to us before, and what our desires are. That’d be why we have memory and desires, I suppose. To take them into account when making choices.

It doesn’t apply, period. Even a god cannot freely will what he wants to will. But we do have, I believe, the capacity to make choices, with a certain degree of freedom.

Consciousness is a process, free will is an illusion. — Augustusea

Free will is a poor concept. It falls apart under examination. Agency is a better one in my view, and I don’t see why it would be an illusion.

I believe life and consciousness are processes and not something out of the physical world — Augustusea

I agree, but illusions are not part of the physical world, by definition. Ergo consciousness is no illusion.

So why do you think your own mind is an illusion?

Charles Mingus - Devil Blues



Charles Mingus: Bass; George Adams: Sax/vocals; Don Pullen: Piano; Jack Walrath: Trumpet; Dannie Richmond: Drums

Unfree reasoning doesn't entail a conclusion being false, this notion that determinism defeats every action is quite false, it doesn't, you still have the illusion of your own will, — Augustusea

There’s no reason for the will to be an illusion, even in determinism. Determinism and underterminism are both compatible with taking the mind seriously, as an agent. It’s called ‘compatibilism’.

The materialist cannot reduce consciousness to some material phenomenon without thereby manifesting the power that consciousness has to think matter: however, there have always been and always will be materialists, who will rely on their own ambiguity to reduce it artificially to the absolute and sterile unity of matter.
— Francis Jeanson

I believe it was written by Holiday, not just sung.

// sorry, my mistake, it’s a poem by Robert Meeropol. Holiday contributed to the music, not the lyrics.

Chip Taylor — Fuck all the perfect people
(about life choices)

To be or not to be
To free or not to free
To crawl or not to crawl
Fuck all those perfect people

To sleep or not to sleep
To creep or not to creep
And some can't remember
What others recall
Fuck all those perfect people

Sleepy eyes, waltzing through
I'm not talking 'bout you

To stand or not to stand
To plan or not to plan
To stall or not to stall
Fuck all those perfect people

To drink or not to drink
To think or not to think
Some choose to dismember
Your rise and your fall
Fuck all those perfect people

Sleepy eyes, waltzing through
I'm not talking 'bout you!

To sing or not to sing
To swing or not to swing
Hell, he fills up the silence
like a chalk on the wall
Fuck all those perfect people

To pray or not to pray
To sway or not to sway
Jesus died for something,
Or nothing at all
Fuck all those perfect people

Sleepy eyes, waltzing through
I'm not talking 'bout you

Interesting text.

Paloma Faith - Do you want the truth, or something beautiful?

It’s a well known fact that values can come in conflict with one another. If you don’t know that, you’ve never met a moral choice. More probably, you are not arguing in good faith. You’re just trying to protect yourself from the complexities of life by way of word salad. Good luck with that.

You haven't shown that there are two objectively important and yet incompatible values. — Pfhorrest

I don’t need to, it’s a well-established fact. You would know if you cared.

A human life is worth the money that it takes to sustain the people they touch, or hurt. — JC Dollar-Bruh

That’s cheap.

That is only necessary if both of those values are objectively important in and of themselves — Pfhorrest

And this happens all the time. Hence your very theoretical system is unworkable.

So, yes: DNA is followed. But there is more to it. And it stays that way for life. DNA governs the brain, but lots of other stuff also affects the brain. — Bitter Crank

Not to be pedant but this is not really the case. DNA is merely a protein cook book, and it does not "govern" much. In particular it doesn't seem to "drive" embryogenesis all by itself. Other things, collectivelly referred to as "epigenetics", come into play that direct embryogenesis, and read and interpret the DNA cook book.

I have also pointed out that moral questions are about ourselves, and that we cannot be objective about ourselves, nor even inter-subjective as easily when talking about ourselves then when talking of trees or stars.

I have pointed out that it is impossible to weight widely different values against one another in an objective manner. Or can you tell me how much money is a human life worth?

And you haven't provided any evidence that neither is — Pfhorrest

I have, actually, but you haven't paid attention.

Littles Boxes !!! Thanks.

Dylan wrote quite a few.

Nick Cave — Into my arms



I don't believe in an interventionist god
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if he felt he had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms

Into my arms, o Lord
Into my arms

And I don't believe in the existence of angels
But looking at you I wonder if that's true
But if I did I would summon them together
And ask them to watch over you
To each burn a candle for you
To make bright and clear your path
And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love
And guide you into my arms

Into my arms, o Lord
Into my arms

And I believe in love
And I know that you do too
And I believe in some kind of path
That we can walk down, me and you
So keep your candle burning
And make her journey bright and pure
That she will keep returning
Always and evermore

Into my arms, o Lord

For one thing, you haven’t provided any evidence that one side is wrong.

For another, the underlying point in both example is that the result depends on one ´s values and their relative strengths, at least when several values come in tension with one another. Eg, how much does one value frankness vs social convenances in the case of the wedding, or how much is one human life worth, a question one needs to answer if one wants to weight the economy vs life protection issue.

Okay so you would think very hard and take some kind of decision, based on some sort of guessing...

The point is that to weight those arguments and arbitrate such trade offs, one essentially needs to put a price tag on human life. More generally, when weighting several contradictory goals or values with heterogenous metrics against one another (eg protecting human lives vs protecting the economy) one needs weights to translate one metric into the other. So, how many dollars for one life? That depends on one’s value system. There is no objective answer to this question.

You gave an example of a disagreement, but that in no way demonstrates that there isn't a right or wrong answer. There are frequent disagreements about facts either, but that doesn't mean there is no objective reality. — Pfhorrest

There is no right or wrong answer in this case either. It all depends on whether you value frankness over social ties, or vice versa.

I’m not sure if you’re asking me about that specific scenario regarding the beauty of a bride? — Pfhorrest

Yes. Not for the sake of your answer, but to help demonstrate that there is often no right or wrong answer. There's the answer given by Hillel, which you side with, and the one defended by Shammai. Different people see things differently, they values different things. Some are more diplomatic, others more frank.

Interestingly the Talmud, which recorded this story as well as many other other disagreements between rabis, doesn’t explicitly take side in those disputes. It just says in essence: here is one interpretation of the Law, and here is another...

Let’s take a less obvious example: the policy response to the COVID pandemic has varied from one country to the next. On one side of the spectrum, some countris have imposed very strict lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus and avoid many deaths. This has created a big economic slow down. On the other end of the spectrum, other countries have not imposed any lock down, our of fear for the economy. In doing so they implicitly accept a certain number of COVID death as the price to pay to keep the economy running. That may sound heartless but it’s not, for them it’s just recognizing that people can die of poverty and hunger, too.

What would be your call, if you were president of your country?

I consider my position the common-sense position, merely shored up against bad philosophy — Pfhorrest

Unfortunately you are doing bad philosophy yourself in my view, by trying to formalised common morality. For one, because we already have the law, which fulfills that function, so you are reinventing the wheel. For two, because common morality is inherently subjective, fluid and flexible, something which you go at great length to ignore, as if you were afraid of this inherent messiness of humankind. But human beings are not robots; they are subjects, and quite ambiguous ones. Some things feel bad until they feel good; some ideals look good until they kill us; sometimes we fell victim of our own successes. It's complicated, or rather it's complex.

Let's take a few examples. First a classic one: two Jewish sages of old, Hillel and Shammai, disagreed about whether one should mechanically apply the Law regarding "thou shall not lie". Hillel as usual was all nuances, allowing for "white lies", while Shammai was rigidely following the Law. The following thought experiment highlighted the contrast:

Imagine you are at a wedding and you find the bride ugly. Someone at the wedding asks you: ain't the bride beautiful? What do you respond?

Shammai: if I find her ugly, i would say so because I shall not lie.
[Ie even if it seems unconsequential, lying about it would still soften my resolve and make me acustomed to lying, so I'd rather stick to the rule]

Hillel: a bride is always beautiful on her wedding day.
[ie she's usually at her personal best that day, so recognise the effort and avoid yourself and your hosts an embarassment].

What do you say?

I suspect you're merely describing common morality here. Or can you cite one or two moral prescriptions about which your model disagrees with the average Joe out there?

Philosophy seems to place more value on introspection; understanding the knowledge that we already possess.
Science seems to place more value on discovery; the hope that newly-acquired knowledge will be more useful than the sum of our previous knowledge. — Bird-Up

I like this demarcation. At the core of philosophy is an exploration of the human condition from within it, as seen from the very human perspective of a subject, a person, a self, a mind or whatever you want to call who we are. Whereas sciences look from the same perspective but explore the outside of us, objects in the world around us.

Of course sciences can also explore the mind, or human beings. This often creates overlaps and tends to blur the distinction (eg think of the similarities between political philosophy and political science).

But even in social sciences, scientists envisage human beings as objects of their attention, that can and must be observed through eg MRI, statistics, voting patterns, etc. to come at a correct or fitting interpretation of such objective patterns. While philosophers envisage human beings as subjective beings, and can thus deal with the stuff of human experience that is still inaccessible to scientific observation (doubts, remorse, intuition, etc) but accessible to all of us through introspection.

You missed the distinction between appetite and desire, and intention. — Pfhorrest

I didn't. This section explicitly speaks of appetites:

"we should appeal to everyone's direct appetites, free from any interpretation into desires or intentions yet, and compare and contrast the hedonic experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for an intention to be good."

The objects of moral questions are not ourselves. They are phenomena in the world. — Pfhorrest

???? Do you have an example of what you would consider a moral question?

Future generations are other people, and other people’s experiences explicitly matter on my account. — Pfhorrest

How does one account for the future experiences of the yet unborn? And you stop the accpunting at which future generation?

That definitionally could not be the greatest amount of good feeling, because the people you’re killing count too. ... Morality has to achieve good ends by just means, neither one nor the other alone is sufficient. — Pfhorrest

It's possible to kill someone without him feeling anything. And how to weight good means vs good ends? What's the mathematical formula?

There’s no way to measure other people’s sensory experiences either. — Pfhorrest

There are ways to record and measure physical phenomena. But feelings?

Empiricism is inherently "subjective" in that sense too (it's about what observations are made by what kinds of observers in what circumstances), and thus all scientific investigation of reality. That doesn't stop reality from being objective. There is a subject and an object to every investigation; it's the relationship between them that is most primary. — Pfhorrest

Of course empiricism is about inter-subjectivity, i.e. agreement between several subjects. But it's easier to come to such agreement with other subjects when the topic is a plant, or a mineral or a star, than when it is yourself.

And my process is hardly "yet to be described". I wrote 80,000+ words on it — Pfhorrest

Apologies, I was not aware of that. Reading through your summary about feelings and apetites, it struck me once again as highly theoretical. A few objections that come to mind:

- What about educating our feelings and apetites? Trying to change them? Acquiring new ones? Is it not an age-old prescription of legions of philosophers and moralists to try and control our own desires?

- Aren't we supposed to care for future generations? How do you factor in their satisfaction? Our present hedonism is their future doom. Can we burn all the carbon we want, après moi le déluge?

- What if in a particular society, the greatest level of good feeling was achieved by, say, killing all people over 70, or killing all red haired people? Would that make such killing "good"?

- There is no practical way to measure people's feelings.