But you didn't answer my question: have you ever had a song stuck in your head? — RogueAI

You genuinely couldn't get the answer from the above? Seriously?

Fine. Define 'song'.

I think that any form of egoistic hedonism firmly falls into the self-help category. — TheHedoMinimalist

I disagree. I don't think you'd find a book encouraging you to eat and drink with gay abandon in any self-help section. Self-help is an ethic of looking after and improving oneself. Making oneself happy is part of it, but not immediate gratification afaik.

Thus, I don’t think morality necessarily has to be about us interacting with others. — TheHedoMinimalist

True, one could also have a religion that says you cannot walk south, or eat green things, or hold anything in your left hand, or wear shoelaces. Even having some understanding of why we have a moral bent, people can always build a moral around anything.

I'm not sure this is an apt counterexample though. Presumably, being a Jainist, should they encounter someone needing help despite their aims to encounter no one at all, they would help them and, likewise, should he be found by another needing help he would accept that help. By absenting themselves from morality altogether, I had in mind more someone who simply would not help others or accept help, whether they harm animals or no.

I don’t think that the supposed moral progress that you speak of had been brought about by something like a global village of people having a united voice. For example, you mentioned how only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage but it should also be mentioned that it seems that almost nobody gets harmed by gay marriage either. So, I think we hardly had any incentive to be against gay marriage to begin with. — TheHedoMinimalist

And yet we were. And many still are, but the number of people in favour grow nonetheless.

I’m also confused regarding what issues like abolition, suffrage, and civil rights have to do with reciprocal altruism or morality being in our DNA. I don’t think that the Northern states that fought to abolish slavery in the past ever had the favor returned to them by the freed African slaves and the men who marched with MLK to give African Americans civil rights didn’t seem to get rewarded by African Americans in any way. — TheHedoMinimalist

I think you misunderstand. You can't have a biological capacity for reciprocal altruism. Reciprocity is an outcome, not a drive. You do have biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism and empathy, but also for counter-empathetic responses.

Reciprocal altruism is why altruism was beneficial for survival. In individual selection, it doesn't make much sense to have a trait to help others at one's own cost. However if a group of such people have this trait, it does become beneficial to the individual.

Being able to stand by as vulnerable people are treated cruelly is a sure sign of a counter-empathetic response (such as racism). This is something you have to learn from experience or be taught. Socialisations used to be stricter, singular and localised. It's now much easier for, say, a Texan Christian to realise that a gay black atheist is as worthy as a straight white Christian. This has not always been the case. A lot of this has to do with the fact that people are exposed to difference and diversity a lot more now, and that conflicts with traditional intolerant mores. That exposure comes from more travel, more internationalism in education and employment, and more diversity in media and, more recently, social media, but also from people just being able to make the case more freely.

If anything, it seems to me that we have biologically evolved to be very tribalistic and put our ethnicity above other ethnicities(after all, isn’t that what our pre-historic ancestors did). — TheHedoMinimalist

No, they didn't. Immediate return hunter-gatherer groups were egalitarian, altruistic, and peaceful with other tribes until they met a tribe that was warlike. Animosity towards others is more like a cancer than a trait.

Have you ever had a song stuck in your head? — RogueAI

I can go one better: I have even written an entire song, lyrics, chords, bassline and all, in the space of a cigarette break without making a peep. But there was still no music playing in my head, no sounds, just mental representations of sounds.

I feel you are generalizing the behavior on extreme cases. Where I was trying to point out situation that seem more reasonable and in a mild degree. — SteveMinjares

That was literally the opposite of the meaning in the part you quoted. The OP is generalising from successful psychopaths. I'm just saying there's a lot of unsuccessful psychopaths.

Like a good example is if a CEO has to lay off 20,000 employees so the company can survive due to poor sale revenue. And having to dismiss the fact that your decision could affect 20,000 families and there financial stability. Maybe contributing to the unemployment rate.

And this example show that if you find yourself in a loose-loose situation and you have to choose the lesser of the two evils scenario. Psychopathic thinking in a rational, less extreme and non-dysfunctional sense can make the decision easier to rationalize. Especially if you take in to consideration the emotional distress that comes with these type of decisions. — SteveMinjares

It might be better if the company got a capable CEO. In reality, mass lay-offs like this tend to be attempts to sell the long-term future of the company for short-term increases in stock prices. It's psychopathic, but rarely beneficial.

But your example is already measuring benefit in terms of the unlevel playing field built by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful. We might not be in that situation if we avoided the feedback loop between the cultures that high- functioning psychopaths make and the high-functioning psychopaths these cultures make. Industry, economy, capitalism and politics are already contributing to the problem.

Oration is an action they perform and I like the way they do it. None of that means or implies that they have powerful speech. — NOS4A2

Well it was powerful enough to inspire a lot of people, irrespective of your confusions.

But I think that calling an hypothesis "science", when the hypothesis is not at all consistent with observations, as the need to assume mystical, magical entities like "dark matter" and "dark energy" demonstrates, is worse than insanity, it's intellectual dishonesty. — Metaphysician Undercover

Viz:

more generally your approach in all such conversations of:
1. doing no research into a field
2. demonstrating no understanding of that field
3. concluding from your zero understanding that the field must be at fault
4. concluding from your deduction that you must know more than anyone else
is extremely pathological, and not in any beneficial way. — Kenosha Kid

No, because the idealist says that the cause of your experiences is a mind(s). — RogueAI

The cause is irrelevant. We've simply moved from using the word 'physical' to describe the rules that appear to govern our experiences -- irrespective of their causes -- to using the word 'ideal'. It's just exchanging dummy tokens, nothing of physicalist is really lost except terminology.

No, it's not implausible to actually have a song playing in your head. I have a song playing in my head right now. Do you think it's implausible? Do you think I'm lying or mistaken? — RogueAI

Question not to me but, yes, mistaken. Very mistaken. In the same way there's no red in your head when you think of the colour red. You have representations of a song, but no actual music is playing.

:up:

Oh come on, do you really believe that your average Wisconsin Christian is examining their beliefs and studying the philosophy underpinning them more rigorously? This is not an "atheist" or "scientist" thing: most people don't have a solid philosophical foundation for what they believe, and probably shouldn't tbh.

Right, we know how you use that word "insane": " the 'inflationary period', while brief, was insanely rapid". — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, I'm using the word an insane amount of times. But in this case, I just meant that you're quite mad.

Since you have absolutely no idea as to any of the specifics concerning this "insanely rapid" expansion, it makes no sense for you to call this "science". — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm no cosmologist, more a cosmo-hobbyist, but I know enough to e.g. hold a conversation with one. The hypothesis is that a positive vacuum energy would cause an exponential expansion of the universe, and we can make certain scientific predictions from this hypothesis: the CMB and the distribution of matter should be pretty independent of the precise distribution of quantum fluctuations in the early universe, creating a visible universe that is instead more or less homogeneous and isotropic. This is what we see. Such an inflation field would stop magnetic monopoles from forming, and indeed we see no magnetic monopoles. It would also yield a visible universe that is locally very flat, which is what we have. I know that this must be a positive-energy scalar field, making the Higgs field a potential contender, and the remnants of this field are a contender for dark energy, a reference to the empirical observation that the universe's expansion is accelerating isotropically.

Modelling, hypothesis, observation: so far, so scientific, not to mention that inflationary cosmology comes from scientific research groups, not philosophical ones, and the founders of the theory have won prizes for breakthroughs in science, not metaphysics.

So on that level, calling it metaphysics not science is insane, but more generally your approach in all such conversations of:
1. doing no research into a field
2. demonstrating no understanding of that field
3. concluding from your zero understanding that the field must be at fault
4. concluding from your deduction that you must know more than anyone else
is extremely pathological, and not in any beneficial way. This is, after all, not our first rodeo and you pull the same stunt every time.

Permission btw to ignore all that and just respond with "You said insane again, you clearly know nothing and I know everything". We're not expecting miracles.

Regarding your title, the criminal definition of a psychopath is not the same as the medical definition (here in the UK anyway) referred to in 's excellent post. So it shouldn't be a surprise that not all psychopaths are serial killers: old news, as Tom said.

There are certain professions in which being a psychopath is beneficial. Generals in the military and medical surgeons count a surprisingly high number of psychopaths among their ranks and are roles that appear to benefit others, not just themselves.

Politicians and CEOs are more troubling, because these psychopaths also create the conditions in which psychopathic traits are advantageous. It isn't obviously beneficial to have a CEO or politician lack empathy unless business and politics are modelled around ruthlessness, narcissism and overt hypocrisy, which in turn are not obviously beneficial to consumers, employees and voters. However, a great many consumers, employees and voters do admire psychopaths who succeed in these ruthless, corrupt frameworks they help create and maintain. This is how we end up with polarised electorates for instance, half of which admire psychopaths who don't pay their taxes, break the law, and rim murderous tyrants at every opportunity (your Trumps and Farages).

It's also insufficient to point at successes in the psychopath community. How many fail because they simply can't work with others?

Do you mean in terms of judging people who break it? It's an interesting question. At zeroth order, solidarity seems purely a pragmatism: we mostly agree X must occur, but for X to occur we must act as one. But then at next order, there is a moral dimension to whether you maintained solidarity or let your peers down. At next order you have the moral quality of organisations that defy free will, e.g. totalitarian regimes that demand solidarity. It's a nicely messy area.

If someone is born an altruist then wouldn’t being altruistic make that person feel good? If that’s so, then wouldn’t this give them a purely selfish self-help sort of reason to be altruistic? — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes and no. People driven toward altruism instinctively are more likely to propagate their genes. It doesn't have to make someone feel good necessarily -- hunger, for instance, feels bad -- but in this case, yeah it feels good (the chemical involved, oxytocin, is also known as the "cuddle hormone"). But self-help is not the same as hedonism.

If people can rationally work out their moral philosophy for themselves then it seems that they can presumably create a moral philosophy without duties where actions can only be morally praiseworthy or morally blameworthy in a supererogatory sort of way. — TheHedoMinimalist

But then what would make it a moral philosophy? I mean, in the extreme where the philosophy is 'do nothing for anyone, accept nothing from anyone', what makes this a philosophy of morality as opposed to any other neutral politic? That's all I meant by "not in the morality game": since morality concerns particular ways we interact with each other, not interacting with each other isn't categorically a moral philosophy (in much the same way zero isn't categorically a positive integer).

In addition, it seems to me that moral existentialism would suggest that anyone who claims to be part of the morality game is part of the morality game simply by virtue of asserting that they are part of the morality game. — TheHedoMinimalist

I'm not sure what you mean. Sure, making the claim is a behaviour but it's not obviously a moral behaviour. I'm wondering if "morality game" has accidentally picked up connotations of "language game". Perhaps "morality business" is a better name. Someone who is struggling with the sorts of question you ask is in the morality business: they are actively concerned with how much good they have to do, under what circumstances they should do it, etc. As opposed to, say, a psychopath who... well they might be concerned with the same questions, but for different reasons having to do with appearance rather than any drive toward altruism.

I’m not sure why anyone would think that the obligation is dependent on the number of children that need to be saved rather than the amount of effort that would be required of you. — TheHedoMinimalist

Because saving a drowning child is a good act. Saving two drowning children is also a good act. How would the opportunity for the second negate the first? If it does, saving a child is not a good act. If it doesn't, not saving a child is also fine.

I think there’s good evidence that a belief in the supernatural was somewhat beneficial to the survival and reproduction of our ancestors. It can bring people a great deal of hope and it might ward off pessimistic life attitudes that are probably bad for survival and procreation. Nonetheless, if I made a comment that religions are just arbitrary things that we get to decide through philosophy and they don’t have any ontic value then you probably would think that this invalidates religion. It probably wouldn’t matter to you that there is an evolved characteristic for religious behavior that is objectively real. Though, maybe you do think the same way about religion as you do morality. — TheHedoMinimalist

I think the same about religion. It is weirdly easy to get people to convert, so we have that propensity. And I do think it was beneficial, and you don't need to believe in an overseeing deity to reap the benefits of the idea of one. I'm recalling a neat demonstration Derren Brown did many years ago (I'm sure it'll be a reproduction of a published experiment) in which two groups of four people played a game by themselves and were given every opportunity to cheat. 3/4 in one group cheated. 0/4 in the other group cheated. The only difference in the setup was that the second group were told that a chair in the room was part of a different show about haunted objects. None of the players believed in ghosts, but they still acted more ethically once the idea had been planted in their minds.

I'm not sure the hope aspects are particularly beneficial, but the notion of an overseeing, judgemental but forgiving father figure seems to yield more altruism even if you don't believe in it, and historically higher levels of altruism meant higher chance of survival.

At the end of the day, it kinda feels like your non-ontological understanding of morality kinda already dismisses the idea of genuine moral duties(at least the kind of moral duties that I think most people care about). — TheHedoMinimalist

It's curious isn't it! Morality has been physicalised, it's now biological, it's in your DNA. Yet somehow it feels less ontic than the idea of an out-there objective moral truth (e.g. commandment from God) which probably isn't real. I think this is true of a lot of things, like mind. The further something is from the original, traditional idea we have of it, often born of ignorance, the less like itself it seems when we can actually see it and do stuff with it.

What's morally obligatory has the character of a convention, often needing backing up with threats of violence or ostracizing. The conventions seem objective when you're in them because we share them, but seem relative when you're not. Real magic isn't real. Only fake magic is real. (Dennett)

I think a surer sign of objective morality is manifest in the way that, over the last few hundred years, against powerful concepts like religion, empire, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, neoliberalism, the very real, very ontic morality I speak of has gradually biased us towards something better, more human. Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, equal opportunities, LGBT rights, animal (!) rights, stewardship of the planet, equity. These have arisen against powerful vested interests simply by virtue of a global village of people having a united voice. Only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage rights, but the majority of us think it's important to fight for. Why? Because deep down, despite everything done to us, despite the great efforts to destroy every last vestige of community spirit -- the remainder of our traditional ways of living -- those drives that make us distinctly human, social, moral, reassert themselves ever more strongly. That's far more obviously objective than merely insisting that one convention is objective imo.

You are insane.

I agree. Idealism is counter-intuitive, but it doesn't suffer from a similar problem as the mind-body problem because it supposes that something we already know exists (hallucinations that people can't tell from reality) exists on a massive scale. There needs to be evidence for that, of course, but the claim itself is not susceptible to a category error. I think the mind-body problem is evidence that there's a category error going on, and you can't get the mental from the physical. — RogueAI

True. But there's also a kind of category error with idealism. Let's go with the idea that there is no physical world, and take the example of subjective idealism, although there's a variant of the below for other kinds.

How I will explain my experience of the sun coming up every morning, how the clouds gather and move, how I experience having the same body every day (more or less), how the floor holds that body up, how I experience the taste of kimchi, etc., is unknown, but I can describe it to myself or other humans (be they minds or p-zombie hallucinations). Noting my experiences, mentally acting to reproduce those experiences, discussing those experiences with said phantoms, certain rules as about my experiences must become clear. For instance, I can never see the sun rise in the direction my compass calls north (irrespective of whether the sun rises in the same direction every morning or whether my compass consistently points north), nor do I experience others saying they have seen such a thing. My subjective experience is consistent with regularity and consensus.

I might conclude that these mysterious rules about what my mind experiences are the most interesting thing about my existence, perhaps dedicate my existence to their study. The rules seem to be mathematical, but there's relationships between kinds of experience that are not: how fast a bowling hits the ground in my experience 'bowling ball hits ground' depends on its initial height and its mass, and there's no obvious reason to say the initial height is 2 and not 1 or 1000, or that the mass is 1 and not 2 or 200. To use the maths to describe the regularity of the content of my experience, I must have an additional set of rules about how I measure distance between things in my experience, masses of things, velocities of things, etc.

Let's call that Xism: the idea that my ideal experiences play out according to rules (irrespective of how those experiences are generated, e.g. I might be unwittingly imposing those rules) and those rules rely on measures of contents of experience. Note, I've not said anything that contradicts the notion of idealism: I am only talking about the contents of experience that must be true, not the causes of them.

Thing is, this science of idealism we've just described --Xism -- is physicalism. Experience has forced us to ensure that everything we can say about this ideal world is constrained to match what physicalists say about the physical world, since physics is an empirical method, i.e. it's concerned with explaining experience, and the experience of an ideal world must be the same experience, otherwise it's counter-factual.

So idealism commits a worse category error: it holds that coming up with a different name for something is the same as coming up with a new thing. But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

MLK and Winston Churchill were great orators, and so on. I'm just trying to be clear where these feelings are coming from. One doesn't need to believe speech has power to note the genius of Shakespeare's writing, simply because the feelings and ideas one gets when reading it isn't generated in the ink and pages. — NOS4A2

You do have to believe in the power of speech to believe there can be great orators. It's rather confused to think you can have powerful speeches but no powerful speech. The medium isn't irrelevant, but it's not the most relevant attribute of speech, which is the power of words on human minds.

Ah, I see. Useful for explaining something previously unexplained. Then again, as a sheer numbers game, Kant might inspire more people to learn more about where we're at now and where we want to be and, who knows, maybe they'll end up changing the way we think. In terms of that idea of usefulness, whatever gets you there is perfect.

More like a terrible hypothesis though. Anyway, this stuff is not even science at all, so it shouldn't be presented as an example of science, or, counterpunch.an example of scientific failure. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's the standard cosmological model, you can read all about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_%28cosmology%29?wprov=sfla1

Even if I did believe in the computational theory of mind (I don't), we've avoided entirely how a subsection of sounds from the mouth or scribbles on paper possess more power than others. Now they have "influence", which according to the dictionary is "the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something". It's magical thinking all the way down. — NOS4A2

It makes sense to me that you don't think your brain in an information processing system.

It sounds like you don't believe in things like rhetoric which is precisely about making speech more effective. I'm guessing you think that preachers don't get crowds, that no one would pay to see a poet, that no one ever turned up to Dickens' readings. Braveheart was just making a series of sounds no more potent than random squawks.

Or, at least, it seems perfectly reasonable to pretend for the sake of argument. Personally I'm an empiricist and will look to Martin Luther King Jr, Winston Churchill, even Adolf Hitler for empirical evidence of the power of speech. But these are only facts, not blind ideology, so take it with a pinch of whatever it is you're on.

"It's what's encoded and how it's processed that is important". If I try to translate this back to biological terms, I find only one type of object that encodes and processes speech: the human body. — NOS4A2

Really? That's incredibly ignorant. Have you never seen any nature documentaries at all?

Ya know what? I’d like to take a survey, of people in general, after a quick perusal of this:

https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~vadim/Classes/2012f/vertex.pdf

.....followed by a quick perusal of this:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4280

.....with the survey question being, which one of these is the least useless, with respect to a theoretical description of goings-on between the ears of the human rational animal.
2hReplyOptions — Mww

I won't denigrate vertex corrections in QED as it's not my field but in condensed matter theory, last time I checked, they were pretty damn useless. After the first few orders of approximation, adding more is as liable to make your answer worse than better.

As for QED generally, it wouldn't surprise me if it proved crucial: the brain is an electrochemical system, and QED is a complete and insanely successful theory on electromagnetism and chemistry. But it's a computationally exhaustive method just for small inert systems like ground state atoms: for large dynamic systems such as brains, it's also extremely useless. Maybe when we got dem quantumising puters.

I think Kant's metaphysical exposition of space and time is probably more useful even while being less correct. It leads to questions about the brain that are more targeted. How does the brain order things temporally (which I think we understand quite well, and the answer is "quite badly")? How does it order things spatially (not a clue... I have no idea how imaging happens, it seems like magic to me)? Back to for that stuff.

But anyway, if vertex corrections in QED are really standing in for all of science, and Kant's metaphysical exposition is standing in for all of philosophy, I've got to risk angering members with my scientific bias and say: science, without a doubt, is more *useful*. It's not that philosophy isn't vital or contributive, it's just a lot less nimble, nippy and collaborative than its cocky offspring. Empiricism and falsification make science quick to evolve, while philosophers still debate between Platonic formalism, Cartesian dualism, and more up-to-date holistic approaches. But I don't think Platonists, Cartesians and Kantians would see it that way, since science isn't providing the kinds of understanding that philosophy is about. It might be closer to the truth, might be more useful, but it's not very satisfying to be told to shut up and calculate.

It might even be that, because the kinds of calculation required to describe systems scientifically must rely on number-crunching over insight, and advances in computing make this easier, we're already at the point of science becoming, ironically, competent without comprehension. We've been using machine learning and neural nets to make predictive calculations for decades now. So far, thinking hasn't become completely black-boxed... Even adding a vertex correction diagram, while not physical in itself, has a certain kind of insightfulness (relating to how light doesn't really travel at speed c in a straight line). This might not have a big impact on neuroscience directly, but could be important in e.g. condensed matter theory.

It's an interesting question, probably deserving of its own thread.

There's a word missing up there after 'someone's'. — Olivier5

I think it was soup? I love an idea soup.

I'm not an idealist. — Olivier5

I didn't think you were, I was just annotating the edges of our conversation for clarity :)

I wonder if some of what's happening with modern hunter-gatherers (it's quite common that they move to quite a different culture from most Western ones on encountering 'development') is that they are essentially skipping the stage where the future (of improved technology/control) seemed rosy and uncomplicated, and going straight from not having that option to having that option but with the knowledge that it comes with complications (and opportunities). So with the Cree, they were able to transition straight from a state where their culture worked in a limited environment, to one where it was again useful in the new environment - equally limited, but this time by law and government grants etc. — Isaac

Yes, that seems an apt way of putting it. Obviously their practices have changed and that will impact their culture, but probably more in the way mobile phones impacted us: we use them all the time but we're still fundamentally unchanged by them, there's just more disagreements now about who should get out of who's way.

The Cree response to the Westerners is technical (relying on technique) without being technological: the white man is something they accept, use, work with, benefit from, but has not seemed to them to be something to envy, admire, aspire to or emulate. Obviously they have been fortunate as to when and where this relationship occurred: fifty years earlier or 500 miles south, we probably wouldn't be citing them as an interesting case.

Thanks for introducing the concept of cultural lag. The white trapper problem itself was a blip that I expect helped cement the idea of the unwanted difference of the white man (since the Cree went from showing egalitarian tendancies to having borderline exploitative tendancies). This wouldn't necessarily be a cultural development. Most HG groups I've read about appear to, by default, extend egalitarianism and altruism to outsiders until they have good reason not to (for instance encountering a warrior tribe and as a consequence becoming a warrior tribe). I guess as an introduction to Western capitalism, it would have made the white man look pretty stupid and destructive and yes the group least likely to notice how stupid and destructive it is seems to the white capitalists. Good shout!

You of course define 'physical' in a different manner, which appears to include ideas. If ideas are considered physical, or material, then I have no problem with such a 'weak materialism'. It solves the obvious logical contradiction of 'strong materialism' (=the idea that ideas don't exist). — Olivier5

We're talking ideas in someone's, right? It doesn't permit redness to exist objectively as a perfect form outside of brains as an idealist might have it. But yes clearly my ideas exist in some way: I can convey that without any understanding of what they fundamentally are.

In physicalism, there really is no problem to solve as I see it, never has been, never will be. The criteria for what is physical are specific, not wishy-washy enough for the sorts of ambiguity needed to keep dualism alive. But they're also all-encompassing. For us to know about anything, it has to be physical. We can postulate non-physical realms, but by virtue of them being non-physical, we cannot say anything about them.

I think these ideas, like thought having no weight, did make some sense before we understood what we understand about the brain and had built artificial ones (computers) but I don't think they're really mysteries anymore, more akin to dogmas.

Wouldn’t reciprocal altruism be in the realm of self-help philosophy though? After all, I could imagine a self-help philosopher telling people that you do nice things for others and not harm them because that will effect how they treat you. — TheHedoMinimalist

Not quite, since nature can select for altruistic impulses because of reciprocal altruism, but it can't select for reciprocal altruism itself. Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting reciprocal altruism as a moral philosophy; I'm saying you're born an altruist: it's biological, not philosophical. (Though there's lots of ways of getting around that.) My suggestion is rather moral existentialism: acknowledge that the existence of moral impulses precedes our moral philosophies, and work out our own moral philosophies for ourselves.

Saving the drowning child essentially becomes morally obligatory only insofar as, if you do not, you are not in the morality game at all (psychopath, sociopath, individualist, isolationist). But saving the 2nd is not obligatory, merely weird.

That's actually an interesting variant. A man sees two children drowning in a pond. He saves one and has plenty of time to save the second. Must he?

After all, if moral duties are nothing more than evolved mechanisms to ensure that others treat you well, then why should we assume that they have some sort of real ontological existence. — TheHedoMinimalist

I'd say the opposite: if moral duties are just arbitrary things we get to decide through philosophy, then they don't have any ontic value at all. An evolved characteristic for moral behaviour is objectively real.

building more advanced societies would help — ssu

Better than building rabbit-proof fences, yeah. This mentality is what I was thinking of btw:

I mean yeah there's all this science, but what are we supposed to do about it? Just cut out fossil fuels without a real replacement? To me that's scary. Epstein's point is that fossil fuels protect and enhance people's lives. Fossil fuels protect people from heat waves. And yet the environmentalists want to limit them. I find it to be worrisome. — Kasperanza

This is very typical in my experience. It'd be like trying to ban guns in the US, people would just lose their minds.

Physical reality is what we (minds) make of what we perceive. — Olivier5

That's not physical reality, that's solipsism. Physical reality is the causes of our perceptions. Or do you mean physical theory is what we make of what we perceive? In which case, yes

Configuration of neurons are brain states, but changes in neuron configurations are mental states? — Mww

Mental process, not mental state. (I was in a mental state last night.) I'm not differentiating between mental state and brain state: both refer to the same thing (a snapshot of the configuration of the brain at a given time).

Yeah, pretty much. Up/down, right/left, right/wrong, ad infinitum. Physical/non-physical. In the human cognitive system, for any possible conception, the negation of it is given immediately. — Mww

Ah okay. Well then the same as real/non-real I guess.

Isn’t a single Feynman diagram depicting the interaction of one electron with one positron, or the interaction of two electrons, exact? In what way is it not? — Mww

It's convenient to think of them as physical processes, but in fact they're just terms in an infinite sum that describes a physical process. Some match pretty well, especially the lower order ones, but there's no real physical process corresponding to, say, a vertex correction.

This precision being made, when you scan my brain you may be searching for neural correlates for my experience, but my experience is accessible to you only by my telling you about it. — Olivier5

Ah well, let's be yet more precise. Imaging neural activity is one indirect way of knowing what's going on in the mind (in principle anyway). The person having the experience describing it is a different indirect way of knowing what's going on in the mind: the view of the information we get about it is different, hence the experience of hearing someone describe a mental state is very different to the experience of viewing the scan.

A third way is to have the brain that the firing neuron is in, i.e. to be the person having that experience. The unjustifiable claim is not that this view of the same information is very different to the other two, but that the difference is more qualitative and profound than the difference between the first two examples.

All three examples are experiences of different subsets of the total information about a thing being processed by different systems that produce different outcomes. It is precisely because of the limitations of conscious experience, not despite them, that we conceive of those experiences as being immediate, fully-formed and irreducible, when in fact they are the outputs of transient processes transforming and enriching data over time, subject to continuous revision.

One cannot point to the difference between first-hand and third-person viewpoints as evidence for a fundamental difference between subjective and objective realities knowing that, in all cases, the information we have about something is different, with different limitations, and processed by different information-processing systems.

Yeah, sorry, my answer was rather incomplete. The bystander effect has no standing in either evaluation by design, but I'm not sure what you see is important in this: the bystander effect is not everything, it's just one of many considerations about how humans behave.

I'm not sure we can gain any insight from what the NY doctor would have done had he moved to Africa. The insight we get from him ends with his not moving there, which is fine: as I said, moving to Africa is morally praiseworthy not morally obligatory, assuming the intent is to help more vulnerable children.

Is it still morally praiseworthy if the Africa doctor could easily do more but does not? Is it morally obligatory for him to do more?

This is actually touching on my own views of morality. Why it would seem morally obligatory to save one child if you could and only you could, but not to save one more having saved 20 already, has to do with what morality is, how it has developed, and how ill-fitting it is for the world we find ourselves in.

Brief version is that we evolved the social biology that underlies our morality in small social groups in which most individuals would know most of the people they ever met very well, making reciprocal altruism an advantage and helping others feasible. We are the inheritors of this genetic predisposition to help others, but we now live in very large groups wherein we mostly encounter strangers and there are more opportunities for altruism than we could ever possibly satisfy. We must choose, and there's no obvious cutoff point. There's no compelling argument to help anyone, so long as you do not permit yourself to be helped under any circumstance (otherwise you're a hypocrite and a freeloader). Moral existentialism: determine your own moral magnitude.

In this schema, it would still be morally praiseworthy to choose to move to Africa (assuming the intent is altruistic) and save some but not all children (a la the ending of Schindler's List). To not save the drowning child would be antisocial and, in a small social group, the person would not be fed, protected, or the object of altruism which, projected onto a moralistic framework, is equivalent to saying that there's a moral obligation to save the child (insofar as moral obligations are really about reciprocal altruism, and the correct response would be ostracisation).

The upshot is that in the modern age, polarising available narratives might be just too easy and so not really apply the pressure they used to. It's just too easy to find a group to join these days so little pressure to join one slightly outside of your comfort zone. so we need more real-life social groups rather than virtual ones as they are less flexible, and so more able to pull in the direction of social change — Isaac

They change behaviour as well. Online everyone's an individualist at the centre of their own virtual world. Real groups have real group dynamics.

We're either going to make it happen or we're dead. — Xtrix

I don't think that's true. There's not one thing to make happen. There are lots of apocalyptic scenarios, but also lots of survivalist scenarios. Even some of the apocalyptic ones are quite optimistic: we might wipe ourselves out, maybe take a lot of species with is, but leave a living planet that obtains some kind of harmony. That's not necessarily a bad outcome. The survival outcomes could be anything from ideal (complete reversal of manmade climate change in the nick of time) to abject (a minority survive but resort to cannibalism) via horrifying (we survive as cyborgs). It's not a coin toss. Options on the table today may not be on the table tomorrow, but there'll be other, less good ones.

Thus "physical" means by and large: "perceivable by the senses, not just imagined by the mind." And "non-physical" must mean something like: "not perceivable by the senses, but imagined or created by the mind."

Makes sense? — Olivier5

This could be quite misleading. Physicalism concerns the senses insofar as it concerns the observable universe. It doesn't have to be a direct observation, but ultimately you have to sense the results of an experiment and agree with others who sensed the same thing, whether it's the direction the sun came up or the image produced by an electron microscope.

The above gives the impression that if you didn't sense it classically, it's non-physical. However if I can scan your brain and see a neurological correlate of your experience, I am sensing something about it in an indirect way (e.g. I could make predictions about it). This would keep it in the realm of the physical.

Physics defines physical things as things having physical properties, and physical properties are the capacities to couple those things to other things. Spacetime is physical because it has a property (stress-energy tensor field) that is coupled to a property of things in spacetime (energy). The two supervene on each other: the stress-energy tensor tells things with energy where to go, and things with energy curve spacetime, changing its stress-energy tensor field. You can do this with all such properties (electric charge, colour charge, spin, rest mass, etc.), defining a set of interrelated things each with a set of properties that interrelate them.

This is what 'physical' means to me. Non-physical would mean what? It doesn't have properties? It has properties but they don't couple to anything? They couple only to other non-physical things? They couple in a one-way fashion (i.e. break Newton's third law)? It would seem to be defining something that either cannot exist or cannot be demonstrated to exist.

But precisely because the mind is physical......
— Kenosha Kid

Errr.....what????? — Mww

I'm not of the 'mind is an illusion'/'consciousness is an illusion'/'qualia are illusions' camp of physicalists. Mind seems real enough, as the processes or subset of processes of the brain. Physics isn't just material things: it's configuration (information) and changes in configuration (dynamics). Mind comes under that: configuration of the neurons in the brain (brain states) and changes in those configurations (mental processes).

Am I going to be embarrassed in the morning?
— “Kenosha Kid

I should hope so. — Mww

I am haha! :P

You should have no issues with the fact all theories are only logically proved when empirical validation is impossible. — Mww

? They're never logically proven. They remain on the table so long as they are falsifiable but not falsified.

The Principle of Complementarity? — Mww

I'm guessing this is an example rather than a definition. The principal of complementarity follows purely from the wave nature of things. If a wave has a precise wavenumber, it must have an infinitely imprecise position (this is a plane wave) for instance. In quantum mechanics, wavenumber has a physical meaning: momentum. There's nothing non-physical happening here: the wave is just behaving like a wave.

But you have made me think... I misled when I said there's no concept of non-physical in physics. I was thinking of real, non-physical things. But we do use the word itself, however quite differently.

An artefact of a calculation or simulation that does not describe something supposed to be real is called a non-physical artefact. For instance, if you allowed a charge to act on itself, or for errors to build up at the edge of the simulation and propagate through, or artefacts of approximation giving unrealistic predictions, such as the effects due to a single Feynman diagram rather than the sum of all Feynman diagrams (which is exact)... Non-physical means non-real, basically.

Yes, exactly, that's it! The time has come, scientist, to correct your stand on nonphysicalism. — TheMadFool

It's weird that you take the discussion -- on your thread, no less -- less seriously than the drunk guy on the train :rofl: Amusing as it may be, word association doesn't quite have the same heft as an actual argument.

How would one define or identify the non-physical? — Tom Storm

I've been trying to get an answer to this for years.

How can it be said something doesn’t interact with the physical, if that something hasn’t made sense as a concept? — Mww

Because being completely unknown makes it illogical to assertm

That the mind is a valid concept is given merely from the thought of it, — Mww

The mind is not contended. For the record, I am pro-mind. Non-physicalism is contended.

Supervenience is a post-modern analytic construct, which is irrelevant in epistemic methodologies in which “mind” doesn’t hold any power. — Mww

Intrigued, but pretty sure this is entirely untrue. But still intrigued.

I submit to you, Good Sir, that you have already imbued your comments with a conception that has made itself known to your thinking, if not to your words. You have attributed “quality” to the concept of mind, as the only possible means for you to state what it is or is not, and what it can or cannot do. How would you suppose, guess, want, need or just think any of that, without some ground by which to make those judgements, when experience offers no help? — Mww

Easy peasy! This itself assumes that experience is some separable thing that, being of the mind, can be of no use in physical considerations. But precisely because the mind is physical, I can be more sure that experience does illuminate.

Which is impossible, because it is the case that he must necessarily employ the very things he is attempting to revoke. — Mww

This assumes what it seeks to prove.

Btw I shouldn't be writing any of this, I'm hammered. Out of interest, how am I holding up? Am I going to be embarrassed in the morning (more like lunchtime) and will you forgive me?

*Adopts Elvis voice*: Always liked you Mww. Always have. Always will. One day we shall arm wrestle.

What's ill-defined? — TheMadFool

Non-physicalism.

Are you a priest? :rofl: — TheMadFool

Jesus, dude, it's just chat, don't be so offensive ;)

There's got to be a correspondence (a 1-to-1 correspondence) in terms of logical implications between epistemology and ontology. — TheMadFool

Well that's easily dismissed. There are too many theories for the same thing.

You speak as is they're completely independent of each other. — TheMadFool

I don't think that can be inferred. I am a scientist after all. But reality is completely unaffected by our theories about it. And rightly so.

At least you had to intellectual honesty to consider option 3. something nonphysical is happening. :up: — TheMadFool

:( Apropos of nothing, I'm on a train and the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen is going by. Anyhoo, option 3 is there for completion. It is the "I don't want to find out, I just want an answer" option.

That's exactly the issue here. If "laws" can change science is reduced to nonsense! — TheMadFool

Quite the contrary. It is the self-correcting nature of science that makes it superior. The "laws" in this case are our knowledge which may be ever refined to be more complete, more accurate, more integrated, precisely *because* they can be disproven, unlike any claim to non-physicality.

Change in one must be reflected in the other - that's how it works, no? — TheMadFool

No. Absolutely not.

WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!? I've been worried SICK!

Been at a work conference, drunk as a skunk, catch you tomo bro-mo!

This means that he cannot rely on the bystander effect as he would literally be the only doctor that could have helped the dying children with the rare condition. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes, that's not an example of the bystander effect. However it's worth noting that the difference between them is not that one person is saving children and the other standing by, but rather that one person made the decision to get on a plane to Africa to help hypothetical persons and the other did not (i.e. we can't infer that the doctor in NY wouldn't help a child in need). At this point, I think we're well out of moral duty territory and into moral praiseworthiness.

How could one refute sans a definition? — TheMadFool

Something being ill-defined is a good reason to refute it. As I've already said, non-physical doesn't make sense as a concept: either it interacts with the physical, in which case it's physical, or it does not, in which case it cannot make itself known. This is the refutation of non-physical mind you refer to. It doesn't need further elaboration: it is simply that which does not supervene on or is not supervened on by physical reality.

Your befuddlement is understandable. I too am equally if not more confused. — TheMadFool

And you wrote it! :rofl:

See: Violation of energy conservation in the early universe may explain dark energy

Ergo, following your lead,

2. If x is physical then either x violates physical laws or x doesn't violate physical laws — TheMadFool

Let's be explicit. Denotatively a physical law is epistemological: it is a statement about our knowledge of the universe. Colloquially, it also refers to the referent of the former: the ontological truth about the universe. So the law of conservation of energy is precisely a statement about human knowledge, and imprecisely a property of the actual universe that we think is true.

When we say that a physical law is violated, we mean one of three things:
1. our well-tested knowledge about physical reality (physical law) is nonetheless wrong or at least inaccurate;
2. our physical laws are fine (or good enough) but our description of nature or an observation is incomplete;
3. something non-physical is happening.

Your reference to conservation laws maybe changing with time is an example of the first, as is the orbit of Mercury which led to Newtonian gravity to be usurped by Einstein's general relativity. But be clear, this is epistemological. We're not saying that the actual ontological rules governing the universe have been violated, rather that our knowledge has been upended.

The expansion of the universe may be (1) or (2). The laws we have to describe what should happen may be perfectly accurate, but not enough (2). But again, discovering the explanation today doesn't mean that it didn't hold yesterday. Nothing ontological has been violated, we have simply revised our opinions in the face of more facts.

Now it may be that the cause of apparent violation of physical law is never found within the physical. Is this good reason to assume a non-physical explanation, putting aside how little sense that makes in and of itself?

You misunderstand me. The achievements of physicists are irrelevan to my argument. That's all. Do you mean to argue that just because physicists have made so many contributions that they're right about their take on nonphysicalism? Shouldn't it be the exact opposite? :chin: — TheMadFool

No, I was treating the point:

scientists and physicalists always maintain something physical is going on whether physical laws are being violated or not — TheMadFool

nothing else. This meme of physical hypotheses for physical behaviour is based solely on its merits, its fitness: if it didn't work, we'd be doing something else instead of science. I wasn't patting science on the back, just illustrating that science is principally a _practical_ method.

One could break it down and say it's induction, but that doesn't really say anything as to why, just postpones the question. The why is: it works, so that meme propagates! :)

What is a physicist's stand on the nonphysical? — TheMadFool

No, they don't define non-physical at all. It's not on their radar; if it is, they're not doing so as physicists but as metaphysicists. — Kenosha Kid

Many physicists and consciousness researchers have argued that any action of a nonphysical mind on the brain would entail the violation of physical laws, such as the conservation of energy. — Wikipedia

This is refuting, not defining. I'd also argue dualists also fail to define non-physical. Anyway, physicists are in the business of physics, not non-physics. I'd say the overwhelming consensus is that everything is physical, therefore there's nothing non-physical to talk about.

Dark energy you say is physical. Ergo the physical violates physical laws ( :chin: ). It's the "scientific" way. — TheMadFool

This doesn't make sense. An uncaused expansion of the universe would violate physical law. Dark energy is a physical hypothesis in which no physical law would be violated.