So what is the point of C? It is just stated as to what is happening. — schopenhauer1

Just making sure.

Set aside birth just for a moment. You haven't, so far as I know, claimed that procreating is just wrong; it's wrong because it's an instance of a sort of thing that is wrong. I'm trying to figure out that part.

A is lacking enough information — schopenhauer1

Enough information for what? You could be claiming that being forced to experience anything is unjust. Are you?

C is ignorant of the connection — schopenhauer1

Connection to what? C is only about experiences that are inevitably in part bad; would you describe having such an experience as an injustice? It's a simple question.

Unjust remains but the connection of the birth to the situation of inescapable situation is not recognized. — schopenhauer1

There's no birth at all in my questions. I'm trying to ask about the general case of which procreating is supposed to be an instance.

Yes, our commitment to continue living appears to be instinctive. We might, in considering our own situation, choose to discount it as a bias; but when making a decision about whether to give life to another person, we can rely on it --- that is, you don't need to know anything else about the person (their tastes and preferences) to know that this is exactly the sort of thing they would want. I can't assume that random person who's just been in a car accident would wish to own a copy of Brilliant Corners; I can assume they want me to call 911. That's all.

we need to assess the overall hedonic value of life — TheMadFool

By and large we apparently don't. I think there are really unusual boundary cases, sure, just as real people do face circumstances that can overcome their commitment to self-preservation. But the evidence says people will put up with a lot.

if it is so likely that people will appreciate existing, and natalism is the default, then the most important factor is whether or not there is some sort of condition that will prevent them from appreciating existing after being given life. — ToothyMaw

I really thought I had said almost exactly that. (But then the OP also mentioned instinct and people are still pointing out to me that it's instinct.) My point was that the presumption for life is so strong, that you need a pretty extreme negative on the table before you're anywhere near the threshold of it being a close call, worth thinking about.

There have been people who took "be fruitful and multiply" as a divine commandment; on that view, having children is a moral duty, and you should have basically as many as you can manage. I'm not saying that. I could also hold a view that life is pretty swell, and I could count that as something on the "pro" side when considering whether to save or give life, to be weighed against whatever negatives come up. I'm not saying that either. I'm saying, more or less, that life needs no argument. It is the default. The cases where the question even arises are already at some extreme of experience. The behavior of billions and billions of people shows this clearly. And I'm saying we might want to acknowledge that in the way we think about it.

Did I say that minimizing suffering is so important we should shoot people in the head for having toothaches? — ToothyMaw

Just having a little fun. I wasn't impugning your character or your intellect.

I'll add one more point before calling it a night: if objects are assembled out of our sense impressions by our internal model-making machinery, we might expect this fact to be disguised better. That is, we shouldn't have to learn to associate the scent of just cut grass with the look of just cut grass --- our model should have already taken steps to convince us that this scent and this look go together perfectly naturally. We shouldn't be surprised that they go together, and have to learn that this is normal. The model should be a better liar than that.

I think it's an excellent question, the best question I've seen on here in a very long time. I think it might be a really fruitful way of looking at how we think about our senses, so heading in a very different direction from yours I think.

If we had not seen a horse carrying a cart before, I don't think we would associate the sound the object produces in us with the object. It's only once we become habituated to hearing this specific sound, that we say it was caused by a horse carrying a cart. — Manuel

Okay, I thought that might be it. A little like Hume and the billiard balls.

Let's say something like this: we can take an object, look at it, touch it, smell it, get it to produce a certain sound by the way we manipulate it or bring it into contact with another object; we know all of these sensory impressions are produced by the one object (or, for many sounds, by a pair of objects), so even though we recognize that our senses respond to particular aspects of the object -- I would like to say "separately" but this is known to be false, for instance, when it comes to taste and smell -- we think there ought to be some analogy, or even homology, between the different impressions. That is, the look of cut grass should be to vision as the scent of cut grass is to smell as the texture of cut grass is to feel, something like that.

We may come to associate the scent of a lawn that's just been cut with the look of such a lawn, but I don't think anyone would really claim that how the lawn looks to us is what its scent would be if it were a visual impression rather than olfactory. Nor the other way around. We know the connection can be explained, grass being what it is means it looks a certain way and smells a certain way when it's just been cut, and we can associate those impressions, but that association can't help but seem somewhat arbitrary.

The question really is why it should seem arbitrary, why would we expect our sense impressions to be nearly homologous like this? It's almost as if we aren't supposed to notice that we have these largely independent subsystems -- vision, hearing, and so on. Over here on our side, there's supposed to be a unified person, a self, that experiences objects in its environment; and over there, those objects are also individual entities. The look and feel and taste of that object to this person are supposed to be abstractions, in a sense, aspects of an interaction between that single object and this single subject. But it doesn't feel like that; it feels like a particular look arbitrarily associated with a particular texture and a particular scent, and so on.

The point for me is that such things we take so utterly for granted, are created by us. We take poor stimulus and create rich meanings associated with sounds, etc. — Manuel

Should we infer that everything about the interaction of that object and this subject is assembled somehow, maybe that the object is just a sort of bundle of impressions, a bundle we assemble? Maybe we also conclude that we are such a bundle. That's Hume's word, I guess, but I'm not trying to insist that there is no structure here, only that there is some assembly required to get a subject and an object.

But maybe we don't have to do that. Maybe there's just something odd here in how we think about what our senses are and how we think about having more than one of them. Most people, I'd guess, will think there's something terribly foolish about expecting any kind of similarity between the "reports" of our various senses, but I'd much rather ask this very strange question and get an actual answer for why we shouldn't expect it.

Sounds appear or are represented (if you prefer this word) by us as belonging to certain objects automatically, but they need not produce these specific effects in us. — Manuel

I'm still confused. Is it the association of a given sound with the object we think of as making the sound that is puzzling?

Yes, and I was hoping someone would say something like this.

I'm inclined to say that people feel attached to life whether they want to be or not. People who have suffered tragedy, loss of loved ones, go on, but might be inclined to say they'd rather not.

What are we to make of that? Anything?

The bridge example doesn't seem to originate with Turing, but comes up in an earlier lecture:

Watson: The reason why one thinks that in all such cases of agreement and disagreement there must be a right and a wrong is that in the past there have been mistakes in mathematical tables, with the result that if one used these tables when building a bridge, it would probably fall down.
Wittgenstein: The point is that these tables do not by themselves determine that one builds the bridge in this way; only the tables together with a certain scientific theory determine that.

Turing: The sort of case which I had in mind was the case where you have a logical system, a system of calculations, which you use in order to build bridges. You give this system to your clerks and they build a bridge with it and the bridge falls down. You then find a contradiction in the system.--- Or suppose that one had two systems, one of which has always in the past been used satisfactorily for building bridges. Then the other system is used and the bridge falls down. When the two systems are then compared, it is found that the results which they give do not agree.

I tried excerpting the relevant bits from a pirated pdf found online, but it needs considerable reformatting. The whole book is essential reading if you're interested in Wittgenstein.

It's in lectures 21 and 22 of Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathcrnatics, Cambridge 1939. Turing is present throughout the book on and off.

It seems to me should not is both more pertinent than should and exists independently of should. — ToothyMaw

I'm not following this. Can you take another swing at it?

I think it reduces suffering. — ToothyMaw

So does this: you come to me with a toothache and I shoot you in the head.

this is not exactly an argument for natalism or against anti-natalism. — T Clark

No it's not. Just a stray thought. Procreating is the default. One way to describe that is by chalking it up to reproduction being instinctive (insert selfish gene theory if necessary). Saving lives is the default, with the same explanation (insert something about the evolutionary expansion of kin affinity if necessary).

Maybe it's not all that unusual -- if you see someone beating up someone else, there's little reason to think the victim won't approve of you intervening, and if they could stop the beating themselves they would. Life-giving and -preserving actions are just the most extreme version of this. I was thinking about this point of @Outlander:

Yet we still seem to be deviating or at least dismissing (which if you choose to admit and broadcast will result in utter failure of any alleged important goal) the fact that some people like how it is, the good and the bad, the give and take, the uncertainty. — Outlander

and how @khaled regularly (since his conversion) mentions that most people like life. I was just thinking that we can say a bit more: almost everyone is fanatically committed to having their own life continue and will gratefully be the beneficiary of almost any (within some ethical boundaries) effort to bring that about. People who lose everything to wildfires or hurricanes don't kill themselves en masse. The overwhelming majority of people who suffer all sorts of tragedies don't respond by immediately taking their own lives.

Meanwhile the neighborhood anti-natalist suggests that having to wait in line sucks, having to hold down a job sucks, and you add up these and similar injustices and life just sucks. Humanity at large has considered this question and disagrees. I think almost all of humanity, if they think about it, agrees with @Outlander; I thought I'd throw in something about why they don't bother to think about it, why it's not only a matter of instinct but a perfectly reasonable default view.

the fact that some people like how it is, the good and the bad, the give and take, the uncertainty — Outlander

Absolutely right. Everyone knows that, for us, maybe because we didn't evolve for it, utopia would suck. There's that Star Trek movie where Kirk is dumped in some fake utopia and it dawns on him out horseback riding that he never misses a jump. Whatever that is, it's not real life at all.

life sucks because the pendulum swings from striving for goals because of boredom, and feeling boredom after you've strived for it — Albero

I really don't think I've ever been bored for more than five seconds at a time in my entire life. I have more goals than I know what to do with. I just wish I didn't have to sleep.

This is a curious thing, because LW approaches philosophical problems in a way that suggests practicality -- think of the opening lines of the Blue Book, say. And people often take him to be advancing a theory that emphasizes "the practical", as I've vaguely done here, talking about practices as the ground of this and that.

But then Dennett sees Turing as the practical one here. (And I think that's right. It reminds me of Anscombe's thing about Wittgenstein being a philosopher's philosopher, not an ordinary man's philosopher, or however she put it.)

Does any of this really address @Banno's bumper sticker claim that "maths is made up"?

Well, it is just amusing you picked calculus as the place for no contradictions. Perhaps I misread you. — Ennui Elucidator

A little? Maybe? Most people who use calculus everyday couldn't prove the mean value theorem from scratch. (I could have done it several decades ago on demand, but no longer.) You just don't need to understand the theoretical foundations of calculus to use it consistently. I expect we all agree on that. If you want to claim that calculus has no foundation, that it is contradictory, help yourself. I'm not (any longer) competent to rebut you, but I don't recall any of my professors saying, "By the way, this doesn't make any sense."

Instantaneous velocity means what, precisely? — Ennui Elucidator

Do I have to be able to answer that question to build bridges?

Allowing contradictions in how you do calculus would cause all modern bridges to fall down. Does that matter? Is it different from the point about foundations?

Here's another way of looking at it: we have always intended to do mathematics consistently, since long before the modern study of foundations. That's our practice. A theory of that practice is not supposed to disturb it by introducing inconsistency. But it does happen -- and mathematics is a prime example, but I think also music -- that the theory you come up with is somewhat more powerful than you need, so it supports some existing practices but also others. Now suppose some of the others it supports are not consistent with existing practices. (Not everyone wants to hear 12-tone compositions.) Are you forced to engage in these new practices because the theory authorizes them, or do you carry on doing what you were doing?

You are arguing that (B3) represents an injustice. What about (A2) and (C3)? Are both or either of them unjust?
— Srap Tasmaner

Not sure where you are going, but A would be an injustice if that something was bad (like B). If C is a known fact, then it conflates into B, essentially. — schopenhauer1

Is that a no to both then, neither of the others are in themselves unjust?

It's certainly common these days to treat set theory as fundamental, and for kids to learn naïve set theory, and I agree that's useful. But you didn't learn ZFC in elementary school and weren't taught anything about alternative axiomatizations or independence.

What were you taught then? A lot of the mathematics people learn in classrooms is definitions and techniques. This is what we mean when we say .., this is how it works, this is what you do. Questions about whether those definitions, which support those techniques, are "good" just don't arise. And that continues to be true for much of mathematics.

It's one of the curiosities of set theory that now and then people do worry about whether the axioms are "good", not just in having the usual mathematical virtues of being powerful enough to do the job but not more powerful than needed, but in the sense of "natural". The axioms are supposed to be like Euclid's old axioms, just spelling out our intuitions clearly. Of course there was a massive failure there relatively early on with the axiom of comprehension and Russell's paradox. We teach kids you can make a subset of "all the blue ones", but we don't tell them there are rough waters ahead if they think they can always do that sort of thing.

Maybe this is what I'm trying to say: children are not actually being taught foundations, and not even really being taught set theory as they are taught other mathematics --- definitions and techniques. What they're being taught is an application of something they already know, that things can be grouped together, and they can be grouped together according to rules. In order to apply this basic intuition, it gets tidied up and even formalized a bit (though not much at this stage). But the idea is that sets are not introduced the way, say, tangents are later: here's the definition, it's just a thing, and we promise it'll turn out to be interesting. They're expected to nearly understand sets already, but not to realize just how much they can do with them.

That last part -- what you can do with sets -- might turn out to be all of mathematics, but not in practice, not by a long shot. No one proves theorems starting from ZFC, and certainly no one does calculations that way. There's a sense in which the difference between calculus before the development of set theory and after is just a change in notation.

I guess the question that's left is something like this: does our ability to express all of mathematics in the notation of set theory mean that set theory is the foundation of mathematics? Both answers to that are tempting, but perhaps that's because it's a bad question. There is no single thing that is set theory, in that sense; there are various competing ways of axiomatizing our intuitions, all of which are adequate to doing mathematics (and you actually need less than ZFC I believe to do most math).

One last example: having later learned about cartesian coordinates, you can readily think of a line as a set of points defined by a linear equation, an infinite set. But that's not how you were taught what a line is; you were taught that it's "straight". When you learn that y = mx + b produces a line, that feels like a result, not a definition, because you already know what a line is, just as you already knew what sets are.

On the one hand, I think I agree with Turing about contradictions mattering, but on the other hand it does seem clear to me that practice and intuition is the foundation of theory not the other way around, and you don't really need the theory, even when it comes to mathematics, insofar as foundations counts as the theory, to practice. Which is not to say that it can't be helpful. Maybe it's just that mathematics makes it clear there are at least two approaches to theorizing: one to justify what you're already doing, but one that is expected to feed back into practice. A whole lot of mathematicians do the latter without ever bothering about the former, starting from when, as tots, they learn about sets for the latter reason much more than the former.

The idea that engineering calculations would somehow remain unaffected is like saying: the logical foundations of mathematics are purely decorative, pure aesthetics, they do not actually matter at all when doing actual mathematics. They can be self-contradictory all you like, just like a poem can. — Olivier5

There is middle ground here though. Foundations of mathematics is nearly a separate field of study, and unnecessary for the doing of mathematics. You can teach high school kids (and engineers) calculus without teaching them about Dedekind cuts and making a deep dive into the nature of continuity. (And it works the other way too: you might be thoroughly conversant with the independence proofs but pretty bad at solving systems of linear equations.) As @unenlightened says, theory follows practice, and in some ways this is true of mathematics as well. It's a bit confusing here because mathematics is also a theoretical subject, and when theorizing the practice already in place, mathematicians inevitably see opportunities to fiddle with things: if we need these nine axioms to ground what we've been doing, what happens if we drop number 3 and number 8? that sort of thing. The result of that sort of thing doesn't touch existing practice but does generate new, additional mathematics.

But it's worth remembering that engineers are not waiting to find out if the continuum hypothesis is true, and the vast majority of mathematicians aren't either. A lot of the basics of probability are well understood centuries before we get Kolmogorov's axioms.

So, could the liar paradox cause a bridge to collapse? — Banno

On balance, I think the answer might be yes.

The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which a bridge may fall down or something of that sort [] You cannot be confident about applying your calculus until you know that there are no hidden contradictions in it. — Turing

And it's yes in part because of Turing. Nowadays engineers will to some degree rely on software to design bridges. It is fact that software complexity has created enormous challenges, and that it is not nearly so simple to verify correctness as one might wish. (In some fields like aircraft design there are strict, explicit standards for the provable correctness of programs, and still ... 737.)

I don't know enough about this stuff to point to examples, but Turing's general point that allowing contradictions can be dangerous is almost certainly correct, precisely because of the emergence of computers.

And it seems Sokal needed to pretend that "metatheorems" are not part of the game of mathematics to protect mathematics proper from what he thought of as monsters. Seems overkill. — Banno

I think you misread that. Sokal is only saying, what I thought was widely known, that the overwhelming majority of working mathematicians have nothing to do with foundations at all. It is functionally a sub-field of the discipline, just as much as complex analysis or differential topology.

The type of argument I am talking about here is the type which attempts to prove the truth or falsity of a premise. This is the issue, how do we determine whether premises are true or false. So, for example, in the dialogue The Sophist, there is a premise that the sophist, the philosopher, and the statesman, are three distinct types. But then in the course of the dialogue, it is demonstrated that this premise is not true. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agreed. Earlier today I was thinking a bit about the several "What is philosophy?" threads around, and thinking that the choice of terms, of the categorization of data, the work you do before engaging in inference, is a domain to be governed by reason but not logic, and thus a domain for philosophy distinct from both logic and science. (Certainly science is very much concerned with classification, but in a quite different way.)

I am not saying that a philosopher would not divide things into kinds. I am saying that an argument which proceeds in this way could be deceptive. Because of this we have to be very careful to analyze, and carefully understand the proposed divisions, and boundaries, to ensure that they are appropriately created. — Metaphysician Undercover

And I agree with this too, and precisely because this work is not covered by the rules of inference, it certainly presents an opportunity for deception, but also for simple failure. Philosophers do seem to spend a lot of their time re-classifying things.

Very glad you brought this up.

The visitor's use of "kinds" is the chief indicator that he practices sophistry. We might call this the theme of The Sophist. That mode of argumentation, which is to divide things into kinds, is extremely defective, and is actually just sophistry. This is because the division of a kind into further kinds may be extremely subjective, arbitrary, or done solely for the purpose of bringing about a particular desired conclusion. — Metaphysician Undercover

An argument that employs any -- what shall we call it? "technique"? "method"? "approach"? -- that can be misused is sophistry? And by "misused" there I guess I have to mean something like "making the weaker argument seem the stronger", or perhaps deriving false conclusions from true premises. I don't really know what to put there.

The usual modern view is that the forms of inference we rely on, or should rely on, are merely truth-preserving, so an argument yields truth only by being founded upon truth. If you make a proper inference from what purports to be truth but is not, or if, in an informal argument, you rely on true premises that you have stated and untrue premises that you have not, you are abusing or misusing inference.

Do you have in mind an alternative, a means of reasoning that cannot be abused in such a way?

the injustices of life — schopenhauer1

Here are three arguments:

A1. P is forced to experience L.
Therefore
A2. P is forced to experience something.

B1. P is forced to experience L.
B2. L is inevitably in part bad.
Therefore
B3. P is forced to experience something that is inevitably in part bad.

C1. P experiences L.
C2. L is inevitably in part bad.
Therefore
C3. P experiences something that is inevitably in part bad.

You are arguing that (B3) represents an injustice. What about (A2) and (C3)? Are both or either of them unjust?

It is serious, but you have to know the context a little. It's an expression of PKD's disillusionment with square culture in the late sixties, his perception of its shallowness and hypocrisy. A bit like "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here --- this is the war room." In book after book, he asks the reader to question, what counts as a person? It's not a denunciation of pest control, no, but of a callous attitude toward life. The book it occurs in is his memorial to the friends he lost to drugs and craziness, people whose harmless lives mainstream society was prepared to write off. He includes himself in the list.

If memory serves, a mosquito hawk was the target in this case:

If I'd known it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself.

Thus the only question of import is, given any particular belief, to what extent is is caused by an external reality and to what extent by internal assumptions. That it is, in some proportion, caused by both, is something we can't help but agree to, so it drops out of the conversation (or should). The actual proportions, in each case, are what matter. — Isaac

This sounds so reasonable, but I'm not sure I understand how it's supposed to work. If we took this quite literally, is a judgment with a higher external-to-internal ratio supposed to be better? Then you might be saying something like Hume did, that a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. (Which is helpful, because in my mind I immediately connected this to a Ramsey-ish partial-belief model.) In practical terms, we compare theories sometimes on how much of the evidence they account for, more being better. But we also have to measure the assumption side, and it's true we like theories that require fewer assumptions, but sometimes the key step in theory development is adding an assumption so that you can account for a whole lot more of the evidence, so it is indeed a question of bang for the buck, of the ratio.

That, again, all sounds very reasonable as a practical matter, but there is a problem if we follow Quine and do not expect to be able to separate the internal and external bits of a given proposition. If we can't even do that, we can't sort our propositions into observations and theory. If it's holism all the way down, we can't even sort internal-ish from external-ish based on ratios because we can't ever determine those ratios. I expect your answer here is that we really don't: the ones that we deem most internal-heavy are wired in, and next come those that align with convention, in some sense, with a script or a narrative. Then the measure (what places a proposition near the center of the web rather than on the periphery) is not the internal-to-external ratio but this other thing, conformance to our narratives (and below that, narratives we're born with).

the relation between our sense of realities and our ideas is perhaps more like a dance performed by two dancers — Olivier5

I like this very much right up to the word "precision" in the last sentence. Science might be like a kind of competitive ballroom dancing, where you lose points for having your hand a few centimeters too high on your partner's back (I'm making this up, just by analogy to gymnastics scoring, which I used to have to try to understand), but in everyday life I'm with LW: "stand roughly there" is not by definition inexact given the circumstances.

Herbie Hancock used to tell a story about when he was playing with Miles: they were playing some tune and Herbie, as he puts it, played something that was just wrong, he knew it immediately and was mortified (he was after all pretty young) but, he goes on, Miles played something on top of it that made it work. His point was that Miles was missing some typical preconceptions and could allow almost anything to find its way into his music. That's also a kind of realism, right? Allowing the other to lead. Reality's going to do what it's going to do, so our dance cannot be completely choreographed but must also be at least partly improvised. @isaac points out that such surprise is expensive, so we try to make good predictions that will minimize the expense of revising our model. (And you get institutional momentum there that can lead you to throw out outliers in the data that you should have updated on -- you continue to follow the choreographed dance despite your partner's deviation.)

I have mixed feelings about the "separateness" of the dancers too. On the one hand, we have to distinguish between organism and environment; on the other, they are tightly, physically and chemically connected. When I eat part of my environment, I get raw material to maintain myself with, but also information that goes into the model. The relation between my environment and my model of it looks at least a little causal, it's just that the those causes hook into some pretty complex predicting machinery rather than doing something like knocking me down.

The word "representation" has to be handled really carefully if it's going to be anywhere close to adequate as a description of all of this.

Yet I suspect that many philosophers are skeptical about Dummett's argument: it smacks too much of positivism and Wittgensteinianism

Something is odd here. — Banno

That's more than odd and doesn't inspire confidence.

We all (Berkeley aside), treat some representations as immutable and others as not. — Isaac

Because we are wired to, yes? So it's all Kant by way of Darwin.

The point about LEM is that you give it up as an introduction rule, as a 'syntactic' matter. Semantically it means you are not entitled to assert that p is either true or false, for any p, without having shown that p is true or that p is false. (Dummett for one has no truck with third truth values. Tertium non datur.) And honestly why should we get to deduce much of anything just from p being truth-apt?

I'll leave you all to it --- my Dummett has grown rusty...

So you are abandoning the principle of bi-valance? — Ennui Elucidator

If you read ~ as an intuitionist, as Dummett would, then ~p only says that you haven't demonstrated p, and ~~p only says that you haven't demonstrated that you haven't demonstrated p.

Enjoy.

Sure. I might have been confused by a math problem yesterday and again by the same problem today; but my feelings of confusion are presumed to be two, one each day, not the same feeling experienced twice. Yes?

Things you work for, that you earn, are more valuable to you. Your dad was right about that.

Gifts are things you don't earn, and maybe that's why so many people reach for the word "gift" when talking about life: you could not possibly have earned it.

What makes a gift valuable to you, is the giver's estimation that you deserve it. There's an opening there --- you could have earned that estimation --- for receiving the gift to be "getting what you deserve" in that sense, but in many cases such a view strikes us as too transactional, ungrateful, too ego-centric. It's not your judgment, as the receiver, that is gratifying and imbues the gift with value, but theirs.

One effect a gift can have is to instill in the receiver a wish to deserve it, to be worthy of a gift they would not have thought they deserve. (This is another of @Banno's direction-of-fit cases.) And this is indeed the attitude many take toward life: it is a gift I could not have earned, but that I can make an effort to deserve. To do otherwise is to be ungrateful.

In which case the work incumbent on living is welcome, because it is how you can earn the gift, become deserving of life. (This might be a cousin of Keats's view, expressed in a famous letter, that we are not born with souls but acquire a soul through suffering, the world as a "vale of soul-making".) It is true that, to quote another poet, "some are born to endless night"; we understand if they do not feel life is a gift, but if that's not your life, you have even more reason to feel grateful for having the life you do have, through no action of yours.

There is first the gift of life itself, which you can work to be worthy of; but then there is luck, that the life you were given is not one "endless night". It is, as you have noted many times before, an odd thing that the people giving you the gift of life cannot know what sort of gift they are giving you. They too will count it as luck (or grace, if they lean that way) that the life they gave not turn out to be "endless night".

Can you deserve luck? Can you put in any amount of work to be worthy of being lucky? It does not seem so. But you can, and should, be grateful that you were lucky.

Maybe I can make it simpler.

I'm looking at my car right now. It is the same car, the same unique instance of a type, that I was looking at yesterday.

I'm feeling confusion now, but it is a brand new unique instance of confusion; it is not numerically identical to the confusion I felt yesterday, not the same confusion.

Why is feeling different from looking-at? That's what I'm wondering. I'm not suggesting it isn't; I'm just wondering why we assume that it is.

It's junk. I'll rephrase a bit to show how I understand it:

The Thing = some specific external source of a particular sort of judgment

(1) If you rely on The Thing for a particular sort of judgment, then you don't make such judgments for yourself.

No problem. Seems straightforward.

(2) If you don't rely on The Thing for a particular sort of judgment, then The Thing is not relied on by you for such judgments.

Seriously, (2) isn't saying anything at all.

Therfore,
(3) Either you don't make a certain kind of judgment for yourself, or The Thing is not relied on by you for such judgments.

Well, yeah. This is actually an exclusive or, but it's all so weak, I think we can cheat a little and recast it as a conditional:

Therfore,
(3') If you make a certain kind of judgment for yourself, then The Thing is not relied on by you for such judgments.

Where have we seen that before? Oh yeah, it's just the contrapositive of (1).

It's junk. It takes something true pretty much by definition and tendentiously rephrases it a couple times and then presents it again so it looks like a startling conclusion. It's junk.

My point was only that we seem to assume all of our inner experiences are numerically distinct, unique instances of types, and that the words we use to refer to them must refer to the types. Thus "I have the same feeling I had when we were about to lose the playoff game" is presumed to be literally false; it's not literally the same feeling, but a numerically distinct instance of the same type of feeling. (Or not -- I'm not getting into whether we're right.) I was just wondering where this assumption comes from. I think it's a perfectly good assumption, but it's not just logic. Is it empirical? What is it?

I find it hard not to look at philosophy as whatever inquiry isn't science. Historically, philosophy as an ongoing pursuit keeps spinning off whatever bit of itself is cleaned up enough, made precise enough to do actual research, into a science. Once upon a time, that was nothing. Then physics and biology. The early moderns are still full of not-yet psychology. There's a lot of linguistics along the way.

Philosophy seems always to be whatever's left. That can be hopeful: philosophy as a sort of minor leagues or a training ground for what will eventually become science. Or it can mean that the stubborn bits are just muddles that of course cannot be made into science. To many, too many for my taste, it means philosophy is about the Big Questions, questions science cannot help you with, because they're so, you know, Big.

When people talk about medium sized dry goods, it's usually clear enough whether they're talking about two tokens being of the same type, or a single unique individual, though there's sometimes ambiguity. If a friend tries to lend me "the same book" I had loaned them, my name may or may not be on the flyleaf.

But when people talk about their inner experiences, we tend to assume they are all numerically distinct, that having "the same feeling" at one time that you had at another means only that you have had two quite similar feelings. Why is that? Is it because we are physical beings, subject to time and chance?

There seems to be no logical barrier to having the same experience or the same sensation twice. But it strikes us as wrong. We believe "I have the exact same feeling I had when ..." is always literally false. What would have to be different for us to consider such a statement, like the unintentional return of the loaned book, literally true?

the direct realist wants a stick with which to beat his opponent on some matter of dispute and "it's objectively the case that..." makes a great stick — Isaac

In my example, the challenge is "try it and see", which still strikes me as an epistemically healthy attitude. Does saying that make me a realist? What if I say some magic word like "objective"? Or does the demand for verification make me an anti-realist?

Mathematics is really curious in this way. Mathematicians lean toward Platonism because of experience: it feels like you're discovering patterns and structures in something that is there; you invent tools to explore with, but you have to make them out of things that have already been found. On the other hand, "truth" in mathematics, as a practical matter, means "proven". Until there's a proof, all you have is a conjecture. Fermat's Last Theorem didn't count as true, despite most mathematicians' intuition that it was, until we got the proof.