Those times when you get the feeling you're being watched. Or when you enter a property and a cold and unsettling chill goes down your back. Or when you meet a new person and though seemingly normal something just doesnt quite sit right with you about them. Or a disturbing notion that danger is imminent or that a friend is in trouble despite any reason to believe so. — Benj96

I don't think an intuition that danger is imminent despite no sensory data to suggest this -- likely the human brain making correlations between uncorrelated events -- has much to do with 'intuition' that something about someone isn't quite right, which is the brain performing analysis on behaviour that the conscious mind doesn't understand.

I suppose the point of comparison is selection criteria. We have some understanding of why humans are inclined to draw correlations between uncorrelated events, and we have a lot of understanding of why humans need to make quick assessment, unhampered by slow consciousness, of a person's body language. Both are good survival traits, even if both are horrendously error-prone.

As which other cognitive functions, such as empathy, there's a difference between having the capacity to do something (nature) versus the particular learned implementations of that capacity (nurture). For example, you and I both assess the body language of a stranger unconsciously, but whereas my brain has learned to give weight to people whose eyes are too close together, yours has learned to give weight to people whose eyes dart around too much, with neither criteria necessarily consciously known of. (Examples ad rectum, don't read too much into them.)

It is not necessary to know anything about noumena in order to do science. Science is limited to making predictions about observable phenomena. It does this by using theoretical models of reality, of noumena. Good theories have good models that make verified predictions. Bad theories have bad models that make false predictions.

There is always the temptation -- many if not most scientists do this -- to identify models as the noumena themselves. This is not to be confused with people who refer to models as if they were noumena as a shorthand. But some people believe that the theoretical models known as quantum mechanical wavefunctions are as they would be if we had direct knowledge of the noumena themselves.

Sometimes this is fairly justifiable. If we have direct knowledge of the phenomena of the noumena, such as atoms, DNA, etc., then it's reasonable to proceed on the basis that this regular, scientific universe is not so much of a trickster as to make the noumena vastly different from the models. Sometimes the theory itself is so compelling (e.g. the special theory of relativity) that one is inclined to bet that it is a good match for underlying reality.

But, generally, identifying models as noumena is a failure of scientific thinking. Science provides insight about phenomena. It is up to philosophy whether the models are accurate depictions, and it is a matter for science to determine whether the models give accurate predictions.

I have seen alot of people go by like you in my life, some of them ended up in prison, and some of them were shot by their friends. If I had a reason to wish you luck I would — ernestm

Well thanks for at least considering not wishing me dead. That was probably about as fair-minded as I could expect.

I am one of the people who similarly had their property destroyed by a black gang, in my case, because I was white and in their way. They also tried to kill me. — ernestm

I am sorry to hear that, that must have been terrifying, especially if you already had a fear of black people. I don't condone violence at all but, as with Wendy's and Target, one can at least try to understand the reasons for violence. Surely a philosophy Master, even one on the downward trajectory of life, can reason that it is both irrational and immoral to a) hold all black people in judgement for this one misdeed or b) hold no violent white racist in judgement for their misdeeds, to the extent of weighing the recent unemployment of one white man more heavily than the 88 dead black men killed by racist white cops this year, a conservative context for the George Floyd murder?

This has been without doubt the most random and weird conversation I've ever had. I sense you're not done yet, but, my morbid curiosity notwithstanding, I think the right thing for me to do is to not encourage you further down this trajectory. I'm sure I speak for most when I say I don't like where this is going. Remember: Be safe. Don't kill anyone. And for the love of God don't join the Neighbourhood Watch.

you cant answer direct questions either. If you cant answer direct questions, you will have to live with the injustice you create and not understand why you are responsible. It will be a crushing blow when the realization hits you one day, if you live that long. — ernestm

Yes, that happens whenever I don't tell some random weirdo on the internet my age, I'm used to it by now. I appreciate that, according to you, my withholding my age did create injustice, and that might include systemic racism, but I still feel we're going way off piste. Have a safe life, Ernest. Don't kill anyone.

how old are you, and what education do you have? — ernestm

The answer to both questions is: enough to know that a white man out of a job is not more important than a eighty-eight dead black men this year.

Why do you ask? It seems irrelevant. Do I smell an ill-advised ad hominem on the horizon?

I had a recent conversation wherein the responses I was getting were just weird, random-seeming, unassociated to anything I was saying, which made me wonder...

If many humans cannot pass the Turing test, is it really a good test?

There is no law then, except what you approve of. — ernestm

This is your conclusion from the observation that "prioritising the lesser concerns of the white Wendy's owner over the greater concerns of black people dying at the hands of racist white cops is a niche way of thinking"? Care to show your working?

So a guy can have his business burn3ed to the ground and you dont care about him either. He didnt do anything to deserve this. Why should anyone take your views seriously when you are so obviously hupocritical? Its almost ridiculous it even has to be stated. — ernestm

I didn't say I didn't care, nor can you derive that from what I said. I said that prioritising the lesser concerns of the white Wendy's owner over the greater concerns of black people dying at the hands of racist white cops is a niche way of thinking, more suitable for right-wing radio jocks than mainstream media.

I understand it would have been more convenient for you if I'd said I don't care about the Wendy's manager's hardships. I also understand that there are a certain class of people who prefer to pretend they heard what's convenient rather than what's real. I also understand that they don't tend to think as far as "other people can see what the guy actually wrote". I understand you, Ernest. I just don't understand why they named you Ernest. The irony!

What is the difference between a parliamentary politician in representative democracies today and someone in an epistemic democracy? — Christoffer

But that's not the differentiation I made. I'm on board with elected officials being educated, and I'm on board with philosophy forming part of that (indeed everyone's) education. But even in debate, I'd still prefer the woman arguing economic policy to understand economics first and foremost. A two-two in philosophy just doesn't cut it.

It is your belief that there's a simple equation: a philosophy graduate = a better political thinker. I don't even think this is true. Some philosophy graduates will be superior thinkers. But some will be solipsists, a great many are theologians, some deny the material world, some deny causality, some will argue for an ethics of self-advancement. I don't want any of those people running the country.

I'd actually make a stronger argument for physics being a better option: it at least grounds you in some understanding of reality; physicists are overwhelmingly atheists which will guarantee a separation of church and state; they have an average IQ well above politicians; they tend not to be partisan (at least here); they are equipped with the mathematical knowledge to understand economic theory; they are used to modelling complex systems like a society; they're used to thinking big picture (cosmology) so are unlikely to be vulnerable to malicious lobbies; they also understand that the smallest of things are important. Okay, their empathy skills are low, but there's the argument that you actually need your leaders to be a little psychopathic. Overall, physics is clearly the superior choice of universal political education... according to a physicist!

well I woke up today to see a Wendtys on fire in Atlanta. Then I watched CNN, BBC, CBS, ABC, and NBC. All of them had nothing to say at all about the wrongfuness of the arson — ernestm

Probably because they're still thinking about the black guy being chocked by a cop for eight minutes. If you think that the priority here is Wendy's, fair enough, but understand that's a very peculiar way of thinking, so mainstream media is unlikely to reflect your viewpoint. Niche media do exist that reflect niche viewpoints. You'll find ample outlets that agree that the story here should be Wendy's but you shouldn't insist that we all have to have media that prioritises the lesser concerns of white people over the greater concerns of black people in America.

If consciousness is not strictly materialist in origin- being nothing more than a complex product of chemical reactions and electrical impulses of cells, then why can we completely alter the state of consciousness/our experience with chemicals, drugs or neurotransmitters. — Benj96

It's not too mysterious how consciousness could affect matter and how matter could affect it: there would need to be some direct or mediated coupling between the material world and the conscious realm. The latter might be materialistic in nature, electromagnetic in nature, some combination (most likely), or some new thing unobserved in the wild (the route you're going down): as long as there exists some coupling between it and the rest of the physical world, it falls under the purview of physics, and is amenable to physical study in principle.

For instance, let us posit that consciousness is a soul of divine origin. It might be that, by trial and error, chemists have been able to produce items they don't really understand but are in fact miniature prayers translated into chemical language. You pop a prayer, God listens, numbs the pain. Prayer and whatever it is that God does to affect the physical world would be the coupling. We could then examine that, see if prayer always works, works according to rules, works seemingly randomly, or, in the end, doesn't really work at all. (This has been done.)

Or we could posit that all drugs are placebos, and it is only the belief that the drug will work that impacts the patient, in which case the coupling at least in part is via standard sensory input. That would be and has been attractive to solipsists.

Is there a reason, beyond matters of taste ("I just cannot allow for a material consciousness" or "I just cannot allow for an explanation without God" or "Humans HAVE to be special ALWAYS"), why starting from the assumption that consciousness is completely different from anything else we know about, rather than starting from the assumption that it's explicable in terms of ordinary stuff in principle, is attractive?

However, there are parts of the physical universe that fundamentally cannot be explained. — bizso09

Name one example please.

Isn't the neutral approach the philosophical approach? You can't have philosophical praxis without the demand of an undbiased dialectic approach. — Christoffer

In all honesty, I've rarely met a neutral philosophy graduate. But that's not the point. Suggesting that a philosophy degree is the best way to derive great economic policy is like suggesting someone learn Latin if they plan to move to Spain. Yes, you'll learn lots about some of the underpinnings, but you'll not have expertise, and most of what you'll learn will be irrelevant. Would you accept a heart transplant from a biologist?

Philosophy, the broad spectrum of it, actually incorporate areas that are needed for political praxis. You get the knowledge in dialectics and how to form arguments in debates free of biases and fallacies. You learn the complexities of subjects that are key to political decisions. You learn important ideas that are the groundwork for political laws and legislations. — Christoffer

Yes, but these are a philosopher's ideas of what's most important which, unsurprisingly, bend toward philosophy more than pragmatic skills of governance.

The Big Bang took place about 14 billion years ago so assigning temporal coordinates seems possible. — Devans99

That's 14 billion years our time. The theoretical big bang is a black hole with a minus sign. If you fell toward a black hole, an observer outside the event horizon would see you fall faster and faster, then vanish (our time). But your experience would be an eternal freefall, getting ever closer to the singularity but never reaching it. Chuck a minus sign on that, i.e. run the early universe backwards, as an "observer" emerging from the big bang but backwards, and you'd get ever closer to the singularity, but never reach it. In this sense, the universe is both 14 billion years old (far from the singularity) and eternal (proper time of something emerging from the start, not that anything that could have a meaningful proper time did: all energy has a proper lifetime of zero).

Are you elected as soon as you chose to become a politician? — Christoffer

Earlier you said you don't need to be educated to be a politician, only to be elected, so the election appeared to be the crucial point, not the career move. The fact that the degree might be funded by the politician's party also suggests that.

But I guess you mean that if a politician wishes to stand for election, he or she cannot do so without the requisite education level. In other words, they are disqualified.

What your idea (putting aside things like limiting the degree to philosophy and such) really does in addition is provide a framework for politicians to get free degrees if they're ambitious. I'd rather they get them because that field is what they're driven by.

As for philosophy, it's only the right grounding for governance according to... uh... philosophers :) I think education in philosophy, psychology, sociology, physics, and history would all be beneficial to potential leaders and representatives, but I'd still prefer the woman specialising in law to be a specialist in law, the man specialising in economics to be a specialist in economics. Nothing against philosophy graduates, but, to follow your own analogy, I'd rather my surgeon have a medical doctorate than a two-two in philosophy.

Do you think elections ought to implement public opinion? I'm not sure they should. Is there no extent to which we'd prefer to be lead by people who take decisions for us, rather than ask us at every turn? — Isaac

No, ha ha! The argument was merely in terms of best implementing public opinion. Sometimes, like with the current BML protests, the zeitgeist is bang on, and would be best acted on with urgent reformative zeal. Sometimes, like with Brexit, the zeitgeist is just a bunch of xenophobic, generation-gapped stuck-in-the-muds fuelled by right-wing media and opportunistic Trumpalikes who are too old and selfish to care about the damage thirty years down the line.

In essence: You don't educate yourself and then chose to become a politician, you chose to become a politician and then educate yourself. — Christoffer

Are we still talking university-type education here? If so, I don't see how education after election avoids the problem you ascribe to disqualification. You still end up with a politician with a relevant education.

It would circumvent NOS4A2's point about meritocratic elitism keeping out those denied equal education opportunities, since you would be elected without necessarily having been satisfactorily through the education system, whereas a meritocracy would favour the privileged.

What about practicalities? What does an elected official do, government-wise, between being elected and graduating? Do they still govern without competence? Or is it a long game? What if, by the time the elected official graduates, the electorate no longer want her? Isn't that just voting in beneficiaries of presumably state-funded education? And is degree level really the best we can hope for? I'd rather my economy be in the hands of a doctor of economics, in the same way I'd want my surgery in the hands of a doctor of medicine.

@Isaac - I loved your last post, kudos. I'm not sure if this is a step forward or back, but...

Elections seem to me to corrupt public opinion, not just reflect it. Imagine every bill had to have a public mandate via a referendum. "Do you want lowers taxes: Y/N?" I'd actually vote N, but most would vote Y. "Do you want to overhaul the racist police system: Y/N?" Racists choose N, everyone else Y.

This would be a slow and expensive way to action public desire. However, what if you had this choice: "Do you want a) lower taxes or b) an overhaul of the racist police system?" I dare sau many who would have voted Y for lower taxes will now vote (b) against them. But a great many more who would have voted Y for a police overhaul will now vote (a) for lower taxes.

Elections corrupt by creating false dichotomies between independent goods. In fact, I would argue they do so inevitably. The most conscientious voter has to prioritise one good over another. And most voters adopt or inherit a political stance rather than actually engage, i.e. given the following choice:

1. Lower taxes;
2. Overhaul of racist police system;
3. Whatever the Republicans say is American;
4. Whatever the Democrats say is American

(2) would now get a paltry showing.

To that extent, elections do not implement public opinion, for which a more interactive mode of democracy, well within our technical capability, would be neccesary. Unfortunately, as the Alternative Vote in the UK showed, people will vote down a more democratic voting system too if the reds and the blues tell them to.

The biggest problem is not education of the politicians IMO, but corruption and nepotism. Solving that is not a question of better education, but of will, or of giving the right incentives. — ChatteringMonkey

A government can be fair, anti-nepotic, and still incompetent through sheer ignorance. This seems like a separable problem.

No objection; just thinking out loud. What you describe indeed does not fit determinism, and yet a probability distribution still implies some sort of order. It is odd that it is not fully ordered, yet not fully random... For some reason, I would be more willing to accept full absence of order over partial order. — Samuel Lacrampe

Just to jump in here as a quantum theorist myself, quantum theory is not demonstrably non-deterministic. The wavefunction evolves deterministically. The issue is with the interpretation of Born's postulate that the absolute square of the wavefunction projected onto some fixed state is proportional to the probability of finding it in that state. There are determinist interpretations of this (many-worlds interpretation) and probabilistic ones (Copenhagen). How nature evolves a system from a deterministically-evolving wave to a final state (the measurement problem) is unsolved, however early evidence points in one of two directions, both of which are deterministic.

So P1 is valid, but not definitely true. But then what is...

P2 seems to me the faulty one, for reasons Forest has already covered. There is nothing in the definition of free will inconsistent with determinism. Your defense iirc was that you believe free will to be non-deterministic in nature, making the argument circular.

A kind of meritocracy-overseeing-democracy? In principle that's what the UK has, or had. The House of Commons was democratically elected to represent, if you like, the Heart of the nation. The House of Lords provided, in principle, the educated oversight, since the aristocracy were the best educated (really they just represented the interests of the elite), the Mind of the nation if you will. And the Monarch was supposed to be the Soul, giving historical context to all.

It was corrupted from the start and doesn't make much sense anymore, but I've always liked the idea of a self-elected meritocracy providing checks and balances on democratic action. (It would itself need oversight to ensure it remains a representative meritocracy.) It rather relies on people accepting undemocratic judgment though. If something emotive like Brexit failed to pass due to its terrible merit, we'd end up just demonizing then abolishing the meritocratic part entirely.

I think rather than educating the powers that be, would it not be simpler to disqualify uneducated people from executive posts? E.g. the chancellor must hold a doctorate in economics, etc.?

A passionate and eloquent response, not to the question "Why burn down a Target" but "Why don't you give a shit about burning down a Target";

https://twitter.com/Trevornoah/status/1269291643842289666?s=20

I feel the frustration. It's true that, ultimately, those communities will suffer the effects of acting on that frustration, but I come down on the anti-Target-protectionism side, since it's a protectionism of a status quo that keeps that local community in low-paid jobs making profit for rich white people. I think a bare minimum of reparation would be to clear up the mess then invest in businesses owned by local communities. It only costs jobs if nothing is put in its place.

Thank you. I'll pass. — Frank Apisa

Your dime. I'll bear it in mind for next time.

My first instinct was that charitable financial donation is one such example, however I found myself finding it easy to justify this as an obligation, using Peter Singer's example of witnessing a child drowning and not intervening; the event is not caused by the witness (as poverty is not), yet it is still an obligation to rescue the child. I currently cannot think of any other examples of moral virtue and would love to hear some. — JacobPhilosophy

I can define ad hoc an ethical system consisting entirely of moral obligations and sins and wrt that system, yes, there's no merely virtuous act. That doesn't eliminate morally virtuous acts from ethics, merely from that one of a potentially infinite number of ethical systems.

I can also more easily and more acceptably define a system of ethics containing no obligations whatsoever. It would look pretty similar to modern secular Western ethics. Wrt that, finding morally virtuous but not obligatory actions would be a piece of cake.

Since emotion and value are equal (I assume you mean interchangeable in terms of correlation), I gather the importance of sense is merely in providing context to understand the values that drove a behaviour in another?

I think, with the above definitions, and with the above caveats, this is uncontroversial. I think there's probably a dichotomy in the definition of value. It would be interesting to touch on the difference between reactive and proactive behaviours. If I vote down a motion to evict all Big-enders from our hallowed city, that is proactive, from which one can infer that I value diversity above uniformity. Nonetheless, if I jump out of my skin when I turn a corner and encounter a gang of Big-enders, that is reactive, from which one can infer a very different kind of value.

But if I understand you right, (A)-(E) say that observing the behaviours of people in given contexts shines a light on their values, or else that what we value determines our actions.

(F) is then saying that temporary emotions, such as hunger, do not really say anything about us at all. It's how we behave over time that matters. But how we behave over time may include a series of consistent temporary emotions. If I consistently jump out of my skin when encountering Big-enders, and I consistently sate that emotion by crossing the street to avoid them and walking with other Little-enders, am I not a racist? That contrasts me with Little-enders who quite happily hang out and chat with Big-enders, even if our votes on the eviction motion go the same way.

I have a widget. The widget is composed of many devices, and has produces some effect. The existence/nature of the effect, after some observation, appears to depend on its environment: when the ambient conditions of the widget change, so does the output. The output is something I can use, at least some times. Sometimes the output isn't very useful, depending on ambient conditions. But I use the output, when it is useful, to do The Stuff, which is good for me.

You claim to also do The Stuff, but it isn't clear whether you mean the same thing by "The Stuff" as I do. I ask you to describe The Stuff and your description matches mine. I ask you how you do it, and you show me your widget, and I show you mine (ooh-err!). When the ambient conditions of your widget change, you claim the response of the widget changes in the exact same way mine does.

I'm inclined to believe you have the same widget I do, and it does the same thing, but one more check. I take apart my widget and look at the arrangement of its components. You do the same. Your widget appears to have the same components in the same configuration as my widget.

What do you rationally infer? That we're doing the same Stuff with the identical widgets behaving in the same way? Or that The Stuff I do is, despite verbal agreement on the details and observable agreement in the means, still different to The Stuff you do? Are they equally likely to be true, i.e. no amount of evidence of correlation between The Stuff I do and the The Stuff you do can illuminate their similarities?

Further considerations:
1. Does it make any real difference if the response of your widget is slightly different to mine, i.e. that they are only identical in response to within some small margin of error?
2. Does it make any real difference if, instead of comparing components of our widgets (which might end their utility), we happen to know of 100,000 corpses buried with their cherished widgets plus textual descriptions on how their widgets operated and were used, and we compared our widgets to the dead people's widgets but only examined the components of the widgets of the deceased, and found 100% correlation? Would we maintain that our widgets, despite appearing the same and appearing to do the same thing, were special?

@ssu :rofl:

I should clarify, practically speaking, it's an economy. Scientists will also defend Occam's razor philosophically. (Which is necessary for defending the economy.)

It only becomes reductive when you assume that every phenomena at the system level (i.e. the thing being analyzed) must be sufficiently described at the level of the analyzed components. — Pantagruel

For clarity, and your definition does cover this but not explicitly, the phenomena of the structure need to be understandable in terms of more elementary phenomena, not the same phenomena exhibited by more elementary components. What many-body people call "collective behaviour". This rids us of having to explain why the concept of love need not exist in atoms. Or at least it should :joke:

Ah okay. So you've said that emotion is anything that invokes motion, i.e. action, behaviour. You've also said that our values are derived from our emotions (in E). So your formulation is that emotion is a common cause of values and behaviours, so we can derive a value of an actor based on their behaviour? This relies on a one-to-one mapping between emotion and value, and between emotion and behaviour?

It's a shame we can't easily do diagrams :D

Emotional relief on the other hand is very interessting. If we eat is it to be filled or because we are hungry? I think because we don't use future information as a basis. It makes more sence to say that the emotion is the driver. — Cristopher

This is my partner's field of expertise. You're right afaik. Things like heroin addiction are extreme examples. The first hit might have been very pleasurable, but the craving of an addict is painful and the satisfaction of it a relief from that withdrawal. Most anticipated pleasures, like sex, chocolate, and adrenaline, are watered down versions of this: after a few experiences, the brain sets up a reward system driven by some kind of craving. It isn't the pleasure of the thing itself we anticipate, but the pleasure of relief from our current discomfort. Which, as you say, makes more sense that acting now on future experiences of pleasure.

This is qualitatively different though from anticipating new things, like a child's anticipation of going to Disneyland for the first time. That said, and this relates to MU's point, we can anticipate based on indirect experience: a love of Disney films; excitement generated by friends who have been; and imagination which, while not external, is still experienced, i.e. "sensed".

Here is the quote again: "I further assert that one cannot establish that it IS MORE LIKELY that at least one god exists than that no gods exist using logic, reason, math, or science."

Please deal with that. — Frank Apisa

I did. I even explicitly bring it back to the quote within the text. Did you not really read it? Too long? Brevity is not my strong suit.

Either way, the assertions regarding relative likelihood are poorly chosen, patently false in fact. That is my gist. If you want the details, refer to my previous response.

Hi, I enjoyed your post. I don't necessarily agree with the primacy of emotions in the causes of value, although I expect emotional relief or anticipation are important factors.

In terms of what we possess as humans, the most important factors seem to me to be need and means. The more we need it, the higher we value it. The greater our means of getting it, the less we will value it. The most important needs in Maslow's hierarchy are the biological ones for survival of the individual: food, drinking water, warmth, safety. The next are sexual and social required for the survival of the genome: a mate, children, a social network. These all have biological drivers, the manifestations of which are observable in laboratory conditions, the origins of which are understood in evolutionary theory, and the mechanics of which are fairly comprehensively detailed in biochemistry.

On (C), can you not think of examples where you acted dispassionately? Do you not e.g. work most days irrespective of your emotional state? We "act" all the time. The rollercoaster of emotions required to get me through a typical working day if action depended on emotion would make me seek a doctor, I think, and their bizarre Mon-Fri regularity followed by Sat-Sun discontinuity would trouble me even more.

Not if one takes the definition of "arbitrary" into consideration

ar·bi·trar·y
/ˈärbəˌtrerē/

adjective
adjective: arbitrary
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system. — Lida Rose

That was exactly the definition I had in mind. I'll leave you to figure it out.

But for perhaps the rare exception, I don't believe a free willer sees any of his choices as arbitrary. — Lida Rose

And yet this is rather implied by "I could have done otherwise," unless we take that to mean nothing more than "I was capable of doing otherwise." My recollection of the usual free will thought experiment is a thousand replicas of the same person in the same state in the sane situation: a determinist would expect the same outcome 1000 times; a free willer would expect different outcomes.

The illusion you speak of seems to me only an illusion for an extreme definition of free will, free even from causality. But that's a case of setting oneself up to fail. It is I who am in the situation, I who considers the options, I who evaluate the relative efficacies, and I who choses, and I can stand by my choice as being what appeared to be the best at the time, knowing what I knew then. I don't know how much freer I could expect my will to be and still function as a decision-making process.

What isn’t? Reductionism? True enough, although reasoning logically from the general to the particular might be considered a philosophical reduction. — Mww

And thank you again! ^ I meant the scientific community's tendency to assume simplicity where possible. It's not a philosophy, rather an economy.

If I were to take exception to anything, I would think science is at least partially reductionism-driven, insofar as science should always seek the simplest principles....derived from the fewest conceptions.....to justify its methods.

Otherwise......well done. — Mww

Thank you! :) Occam's razor is not really the same as reductionism or is perhaps a very different kind of reductionism. Occam's razor shaves off assumptions in a theory that are unnecessary to the predictions that theory yields, e.g. that gravity is due to the curvature of a spacetime called Barbara. Reductionism replaces study of a system as a whole with study of its structural components working together. What I mean by "not reductionism-driven" is that, when a new thing is discovered (say, the Higgs boson), the next logical question isn't "what is it made of?". It's perfectly reasonable to be open to the idea of a Higgs boson having an internal structure, even though that doesn't fit with Higg's theory. But one proceeds on the assumption of simplicity until experiment suggests otherwise, which is what happened with atoms.

It's not really a philosophical position. We have limited resources for limited time; it is uneconomical to investigate questions there's no experimental reason for asking.

That said, it does happen. After formulating general relativity, Einstein immediately sought a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism. This wasn't completely random: the mathematical similarities between the two theories are intriguing, and Einstein was in a position to do whatever Einstein wanted. A mathematician named Klein later found that both theories are the same in five dimensions, which gave rise to string theory, and what a waste of resources that turned out to be! Quantum gravity theorists are also reductionist, attempting to formulate a quantum theory of gravity to replace general relativity. Again, it's not a total longshot: quantum mechanics absorbed the special theory of relativity easily enough and that gave rise to quantum theories of all other forces, so it was not expected to be as hard as it turned out to be. (Also, string theory, which is a quantum theory, churns out gravity very well, hence it stuck around for so long.)

But these are exceptions to the rule, what we call "fringe science" or sometimes harshly "pseudoscience". Generally, we proceed on the basis that, if there's no evidence for internal structure of a thing, the thing can be assumed to be simple even if it is not. And most of the time we treat complex things as simple. (An anecdote: a fluid mechanics lecturer is asked about the aerodynamics of horse-racing. The lecture thinks, then takes up her chalk: "Assume the horse to be a perfect sphere...")

The drive to determine e.g. how love works on a physical level isn't scientists being spoilsports. We love love as much as the next fella. It's just that we know stuff about the brain now that leads us to examine how complex-seeming phenomena like love in complex systems like bodies can arise from interactions between simpler components for which well-tested theory already exists.

I further assert that one cannot establish that it IS MORE LIKELY that at least one god exists than that no gods exist using logic, reason, math, or science. — Frank Apisa

A person tells you there are blue pigs everywhere in Australia and another tells you that, if you're lucky, you might spot an orange echidna. You spend a year travelling in Australia and see no blue pigs and no orange echidnas. The quote above is equivalent to saying that blue pigs and orange echidnas are still equally likely, i.e. if you did not see a blue pig, there is a 50/50 chance of them being in Australia, and if you did not see an orange echidna there is a 50/50 chance of them being in Australia.

This is neither logical, reasonable, mathematical or scientific. If blue pigs are supposed to be abundant and orange echidnas rare, the probability of encountering a blue pig is much higher than encountering an orange echidna, thus the probability of not encountering a blue pig much lower than the probability of not encountering an orange echidna.

Neither actually exist, to my knowledge and experience (I was lucky enough to spot a few normal echidnas), and neither have been disproven by my experience (it's still possible that Australia is teeming with blue pigs and I was just unlucky), however: the claim that Australia is teeming with blue pigs is now less likely than the claim about the rare orange echidna.

This is, in fact, how science works. We calculate the probability of a null hypothesis being true given the experimental data. Probability theory being a logical, reasonable field of logical, reasonable mathematics.

If God A is omnipresent, eternal, and interacts with matter and electromagnetic radiation, it has a much higher probability of being detected scientifically than God B who was very tiny, billions of light years away, lived only for one second, and had the scattering cross-section of a neutrino. That is, the probability of not detecting God A ever is much lower than the probability of not detecting God B. Given that neither God A nor God B have been detected ever, God A is a less likely proposition than God B.

And the notion that God A is omnipresent, eternal, interacts with matter and electromagnetic radiation, but is not detectable unless He so chooses is non-scientific, and can be dismissed by scientists on those grounds.

If God A can be said to be less likely than God B, then it cannot be said that, unless proven or disproven, God cannot be said to be more likely to exist or not exist on scientific grounds (or indeed mathematical grounds), whatever characteristics God might have.

As an extra: any monotheistic God has a vanishingly small probability of existence if undetected, since there are an infinite number of possible monotheistic Gods and, by definition, at most one can exist, making the monotheistic God's probability of existence infinitesimal on mathematical grounds, again, no matter His characteristics beyond His monotheism.

The impression that when you do (did) something, you could just as well choose to do (to have done) something else instead. — Lida Rose

Perhaps not "just as well". In a particular situation, say, coming across a lost boy crying for his parents, I might decide to take him to the nearest police officer. I could instead kick the kid in the shins, but I wouldn't. It would not be just as well. It's a ridiculous choice, but in principle the equal of any other option in this formulation of the question.

On which, I notice whenever I see this question in the context of philosophy instead of psychology, the actual process of decision-making never enters into it. The act of choosing may as well be instantaneous and arbitrary, and therefore is not realistic.

The "just as well" point is pertinent, for instance. Human decision-making involves a human in a given mental and emotional state, in a given situation, within a given interval of time (short for urgent problems, long for non-urgent ones), weighing up the potential efficacies of each of a tiny subset of available options drawn from personal experience and emotional reactivity from an uncountably large number of actual possibilities to affect a desired outcome. It sounds deterministic... because it probably is.

If the anaesthetic also made you experience time more slowly, at which point would that change your assessment that you'd be fine with it? If the surgery takes an hour and you're in terrible pain for what feels like an hour, you're fine with it. But what if your agony would feel like it lasts two hours, a week, a year? Would you still be fine with it as long as you remember none of it afterwards? If so, why does the duration matter? — zookeeper

I agree, it does not. Or, at least, that's my majority opinion. From a rational standpoint, since I will not suffer any consequences (except for the benefits of surgery) after the event, and I will make the decision before the event, I can safely agree to it and live with it afterwards.

The scenario you're describing is quite horrific, and, if I were aware that this would definitely happen to me, that horror would likely effect my decision. But that would not be a rational objection, just an emotional reaction to the magnitude of the horrific idea. I might have such a reaction to e.g. gory details of the procedure in advance.

That said, rational me comes back with: "If someone told me this would happen, I would call BS on it." Anything of that magnitude should leave some effect on the sufferer, which would violate the final-state condition I gave in my previous reply. So even if I were wrong and it were true, I would discover this after I disbelieved it and made my decision, and would never know or regret or tell of it after. Should I find out by some other means later, I would keep the stance that it was ethical, presuming the surgery is necessary.

If the net effect of the anaesthetic is that the (non-)experience makes no impact on post-op me whatsoever, sure. One would assume that being awake during the surgery would be pretty mentally scarring. A drug that alleviates that would be ethical.

The soul more or less means the totality of all emotions throughout life, as a whole. — Syamsu

I don't take issue with this definition, but is it meant as the working definition of "soul" for the rest of the post? It's difficult to see how one gets from this to judgement, or to union of "the totality of all emotions throughout life" through a ceremony. Other invisible characteristics seem to get bolted on ad hoc, which is not conducive to "understanding the soul".

In terms of the definition, which has a point of contact with my feeling of "me-ness" which I guess you would describe as the soul or its aspect, emotions are potent experiences, but there are others. I would probably agree that who I am owes more to my emotional history than anything else; nonetheless, however I responded to Schubert the first time I heard him, my direct experience of Schubert's music had some bearing. Music and smells are also potent experiences that impact my "me-ness". (Memories associated with emotions, music, and smell have been shown to be more easily retrievable by the brain than others, e.g. https://www.livescience.com/8426-brain-link-sounds-smells-memory-revealed.html .)