Music makes an even better analogy, because there's the skill needed to perform, but there's also theoretical knowledge (which my son keeps trying to impart to me). As a musician, you're constantly flipping your perspective between those, aren't you?

But that holds true even in a dictatorship. — Agustino

A fair point. In practice, things don't work out that way, and the difference is institutions. It seems to me, the United States is far from perfect but more free and more just than, say, Russia. Is that because Americans are better than Russians? Or is it because at least some freedoms and some justice have been institutionalized here?

Sure, but not everyone's gonna be in on it, and the people left out will try to fuck you. Democracy in action.

Certainly people try. But there are a lot of people involved, interested parties in and out of government, a lot of moving parts, so it's always hard to get away with too much for too long. It's a question of how much damage you can do before it comes out.

Our system engenders constraints so long as you keep the institutions functional. The press doesn't have to be perfectly free, the judiciary perfectly independent, police power perfectly limited, elections perfectly fair. They just have to not fall below failure level.

Okay. You're obviously right there. Now look at President Trump's control. Doesn't look very absolute, does it? That's the whole idea. Of course he has power. We just need to make sure other people do too. That's how this works.

If I was a leader, I wouldn't expect people under me to behave morally. Quite the contrary. So I would set up the necessary structures around in order to prevent them from behaving immorally. How? By holding leverage over them. — Agustino

What you're missing is that this is the whole point of democratic institutions. You can also look at them as inscribing rights of you like, but they're also practical. Assume people cannot be counted on to behave virtuously, and give all the people leverage over each other. That's the ballot, of course, but also in the structure of government.

I don't need the lecture on how the world really works. You need to recognize that the theory here is designed to address exactly your concern. Even if you start from the belief that life is a war of all against all, maybe we can do a little better. Not by wishing away venality, but by reigning it in. That's what the project of civilization is all about. We're not stuck with the state of nature.

I see Western civilization in decline, which obviously includes the US, so I don't think it's going all that well, but it hasn't collapsed yet. And if you want to know what I think on any more specific issue, just ask, instead of floating vague insinuations to the effect that I'm some kind of nihilistic crank. The world is a snakepit, but that doesn't mean I don't give a shit about it or think that no one else should. — Thorongil

For the record I don't think I was particularly vague. Whether it was an insinuation, well, who's to say?

As for Obama and Trump, I don't actually care that much. I do care about institutions. I believe it is important that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

According to the total number of anecdotes collected by that one website, no. But I wasn't thinking in terms of numbers but in terms of severity of the lie. — Thorongil

That's a reasonable distinction. I'll look closer.

Apologies, but I'm not following how this is a reply to what I said. — Thorongil

Well one interpretation of your posts would be that you don't give a shit, and for some reason don't think anyone else should either. The world's a snakepit and we should all just accept it.

But maybe you're a serious conservative, or whatever you are. Maybe you've got some values. So I took a guess at what those values might be, and asked, in all seriousness, how you think our little experiment is going.

If you care, I would honestly like to know what you think. If you don't, I won't pester you anymore.

Obama was as mendacious as Trump. — Thorongil

Since you've heard of Politifact, here's Barack Obama's scorecard and here's Donald Trump's scorecard.

Do you think "as mendacious" properly characterizes the comparison?

I find it shocking that people find it shocking that politicians lie. — Thorongil

It pisses me of when you pull this "oh you naive little lambs" crap, but I'm going to make an effort to take your point seriously.

So, the founding fathers, they knew people could be right bastards. But freedom is worth having. Justice is a necessity. So you try to craft a system that will provide justice and freedom but won't depend on people being virtuous. They weren't writing the charter for a commune.

Has it worked? How's the republic doing? If it's gone wrong, why? Have we blown it, or could it still be fixed? We still think freedom's worth having, right? We still think justice is a necessity. And we still think everyone has a right to freedom and justice, don't we? So what do we do?

I had forgotten some of these are separable and others I didn't know.

(a) Do we think these losses are better described as losses of ability or losses of knowledge.
(b) Do we have other reasons for thinking, whatever we think of the descriptions, that what we're talking about here must be knowledge, or must be an ability. (I'm thinking of how it might fit with other parts of a model, other theories, that sort of thing.)

(Btw, yes Herbert is quietly astonishing.)

Just a little amplification.

The first analogy I thought of was kids learning how to draw. You don't just learn how-to-draw, as one big thing, and you don't just learn how-to-speak-English as one big thing. When you're just starting, you have to learn how to draw a straight line when you need one, how to draw curves of different kinds. Those feel like distinct skills. You can draw for years before you draw a hand you're happy with! It's a specific skill that will go into the meta-skill of drawing. And just like with language, you have to use those skills together, and so on.

So I thought of how we think of learning the meaning of a word, like learning a definition, and then use that word when we need something that means that. But what if we looked at it the other way round? We could just say you learn to say that word when you need it. If that's what it means to know the meaning of a word, you needn't think of it as a bit propositional knowledge at all. Adding a word to your vocabulary is learning how to use it, so it's learning how to do something, not learning that something.

But what about understanding?

Like with chisels, knowledge how to use a word is a continuous rather than binary datum. — andrewk

That's a beautiful point. Totally wish I'd thought of it. I think we could do something with that.

As far as I can see there is no opposition to science as such, — Sivad

If you think that, you must not live in the United States. Here there is most definitely widespread opposition to science as such.

Then now we have a problem and perhaps, sadly, this is where our conversation ends, because I think my last post says nothing at all, but you think it says something worth agreeing to.

So "we experience what we experience as we experience it" should mean: experience is the constituent of reality for us; subject and object are both parts of our experience; our viewpoints are irreducibly subjective; but also the objects of our experience are irreducibly objective.

Experience cannot be representational; it is the constituent of reality for us. Any representation of ours begins with experience and is only valid inasmuch as it keeps consistency with our experience. — Mariner

The "ours" here refers to a generic individual, right? Because you also say

that our viewpoints are irreducibly subjective, and that objectivity is already an extrapolation (guided by reason) of our experiences. — Mariner

Let's look at an example, however provisionally.

Suppose I am holding a glass of ice water, I am having the experience of holding a glass of ice water. It may be objected that I am surely not only holding a glass of ice water, but doing many other things as well, and that is true. It's not at first clear whether we should say that I am also having the experience of standing by the fridge, say, or if we would prefer to say that everything I am doing at the relevant moment is part of one experience. Maybe either usage is okay. For that matter, there may be nothing either necessary or objectionable about circumscribing the experience temporally; maybe it is better to talk about my experience as a totality, spread across my entire life. Perhaps all that matters is that we keep in mind that, having somehow picked out something as an experience, we could make different choices that would be just as valid, or that we recognize that how we circumscribe an experience will depend on our purpose in doing so, rather than on something intrinsic to the experience.

I understand your remark about our viewpoints being irreducibly subjective to mean something like this: I am, in holding the glass of ice water, not experiencing that object (again, among other things), or not only experiencing that object, but experiencing (myself) holding that object. If I talk about the glass of ice water, I talk about something as I experienced it. Perhaps that is also to talk about the thing, but it is any rate not only to talk about the thing.

But now it seems we have to say that I was experiencing (myself) holding the-glass-of-ice-water-as-I-experienced-it, or even: I experienced (myself) holding the-glass-of-ice-water-as-I-experienced-(myself)-holding-it. Either this ends up as Bateson's infinite regress that forever keeps the territory out of the map, or it ends up trivially as the claim that I experience what I experience as I experience it. If we opt for the former, then we are in a position to say the regress relates not just to representation, but to the having of an object at all. Although we are talking about the experience, and thus conceptualizing it, nowhere was there a question of experience being representational. All we did was allow the possibility that experience was experience of something. So the natural conclusion is that if experience is irreducibly subjective, that either says nothing or it says experience cannot be experience of something.

And perhaps that's where we want to end up. If "experience is the constituent of reality for us," then experience just is, we might say (if we were comfortable saying things like "reality just is"). If experience could be experience of something, then surely those somethings would figure large in reality.

Sorry Srap, I posted that last message accidentally while in draft. — alan1000

Btw, you can't delete posts, but you can edit them after you've posted. You could replace the whole thing with "[deleted]" or something.

This helps a lot, in understanding what you have in mind. I'll do some thinking and reading and get back to you.

Sure. It's not a point, it's a question; a request for an answer (not an argument).

Given that:
1) Peak Experience is an effect of self-actualisation.
2) Flow is automatic attention.
3) Belief is an attitude which accepts a proposition as true without evidence.
4) Imagination is the faculty of forming a mental image apart from perception.

In what way is the experience of these psychological things similar? — Galuchat

Okay. I suppose we could think of these as departures from the ordinary, practical, everyday run of things. Imagination seems to insinuate itself all over the place, but is still a stepping aside from direct experience, I guess.

I'm really not sure what we're talking about.

In what way is the experience of these psychological things similar? — Galuchat

I don't understand your point here. Can you elaborate?

the null set does indeed contain one member - itself - — alan1000

No no no. You have to be clear about the distinction between "being a member of ..." and "being a subset of ..." The null set has no members. It is a set, though.

when the null set should or should not be counted among the cardinality of a set. For example, {x,y,z} has cardinality 3. The null set is not counted. But its power set has a cardinality of 8 and the null set IS counted. — alan1000

Right, because the null set is not a member of the set {x,y,z} but it is a subset. Cardinality is the number of members; the cardinality of the power set is the number of subsets.

I'm going to leave the rest of your questions here for you to work through once you're clearer about sets and membership. Keep in mind that a set might be a member of another set: the power set has sets as members. They are not subsets of the power set (except for the null set--think that through). Subsets of the power set will be sets of sets.

On induction, you're getting there. In practice, it would work like this: you show that some property applies to 0; then you show that if you assume it applies to n, it can be shown to apply to n+1. To make that second deduction, the one that shows you can continue, you want to use an unknown, arbitrary n, because you don't want to inadvertently rely on any peculiarity of the number you chose. (0 and 1 are pretty special, so you'll stay away.)

The Peano axioms (at least as we have them today) tell us that the series of cardinal numbers is generated from 0 and and every number in the series inherits all of the properties of 0 inductively. — alan1000

I think you might be misreading the axiom of induction. It doesn't say that every natural number has all the properties of 0. It says

IF 0 has the property
AND IF n having the property implies that n's successor has the property
THEN every natural number has the property.

Is this what you're talking about? It's how induction works in mathematics. Show that you can start, and then show how you can always continue from one to the next. If you can do both of those, you get to claim you can do it for everything, which amounts to claiming it's done. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I almost went back to change what I said there about cardinality. Then I decided that what I had written was probably already too much.

Does your question reflect honest philosophical consideration, or is it merely determined by your rightist/theist bias?

counterfactual — Terrapin Station

I had to chuckle at this. "Counterfactual" refers here to a world in which there are not miracles. That's meta, dude.

I have often thought that knowledge of the religions of other cultures, other societies, presents a challenge of some sort to religious belief. There's a difference between distinguishing only between yourself and others as accepting or not the beliefs that you do, and recognizing that some of those others don't have no beliefs, but a complete set of beliefs that act as a substitute for yours.

I wonder if a similar challenge doesn't arise from the psychology of peak experience, of flow, and so on. If you have an experience that you interpret religiously, does it really not matter that someone else has a similar experience when surfing?

I had a fellow philosophy major tell me once over beers that he was a believer because of a particular experience he had while tripping on acid. He explained that, at the time, he was already an experienced tripper, and so he was able to recognize that this was not the usual experience of using LSD, but something completely different. I took him at his word, but what are you really to do with something like that?

(There's a generic "you" throughout this post, who isn't you, @Mariner. I trust you to point out where they overlap, if you'd like to.)

I reread the Nagel and looked at the Wikipedia article (I am not going to reread Bateson), but I'm not sure where to go from here.

(E) There is experience we can have, and experience we cannot.
(C) There is experience we can conceptualize, and experience we cannot.
(P) There is experience we can express propositionally, and experience we cannot.

(Not putting those forward as principles or endorsing them, just laying out some terms for my own sake.)

If you have an experience that you believe cannot be expressed propositionally, because you believe it cannot be conceptualized, then you might still talk about it. There is poetry, paradox, apophatic language. (Obviously you can also dance about it, make music about it, express it in how you live your life, and so on, but we're focusing on talk.) But even before getting to to questions of what you could say about such an experience, there are some other issues.

One way of taking the map-territory business would be that you might experience the territory if that experience was not representational. But how is the word "experience" being used here? Do you know that you had the experience? Do you have a memory of the experience? A memory of having the experience? If you had the same or a similar experience at another time, would you know it was the same or a similar experience? Did you, in the first place, know that the experience you were having was a "territory" experience? If so, how? By trying to conceptualize it and failing?

I don't know what to do with any of those questions, really, but maybe you have some thoughts.

Obviously then there's the question of how to characterize the experience, and some people object to some characterizations. That may be a claim that there is a kind of experience you cannot have had, or it may a sort of "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Also, the Christian tradition, for instance, isn't exclusively mystical. On what grounds could you connect an unconceptualizable experience to a thoroughly conceptualized theology? There may be apophatic elements within that theology, but what about the rest? (Mystics have also had to face charges not only of heresy, but worse. How do you know what you experienced was not the Deceiver?)

Nagel I think is a mess. I don't remember what I thought of it years ago, but now, oy. I'm hesitant to start talking about that at all. Maybe it would be suitable for one of those read-alongs, since it's widely available on the interwebs. But if you'd like to pull something particular from that essay and talk about it, I'm game.

We probably should have done this at the beginning.

P = "All actual or possible conscious systems must be allowed to develop."
Q = "Unrestricted procreation must be allowed."
R = "Abortion must not be performed."

We have as premises
(1) P ⟶ Q
(2) P ⟶ R
(3) ¬Q

From (1) and (3), we can conclude, by modus tollens:
(4) ¬P

So far, so good.

But then I think you are trying to infer from (2) and (4)
*(5) ¬R

That's no good.(P ⟶ R) & ¬P does not entail ¬R.

Wikipedia calls this Denying the antecedent.

It is perfectly consistent to affirm (1) through (4) and R, as I keep suggesting many people do.

ALSO: You cannot infer from (1) through (3) that R ⟶ P.

Can you elaborate?

Everyone agrees, I assume, that there is nonverbal experience, and nonverbal communication. It is also common for philosophers to claim that we have knowledge that we are not expected to be able to verbalize. (Knowledge-how is an example. Some theories of language attribute such knowledge too.)

The first question would be whether there is experience or knowledge that cannot in principle be verbalized.

Mariner, would you say all these things you describe, are things you experienced as existing, rather than reasoning that they exist?

they are both merely systems on a trajectory towards consciousness. — sackoftrout

This is your claim, but I don't think it is sustainable. There is a distinction, which people clearly do recognize, between actual entities and possible entities, and it is evident that they encode that distinction in their moral intuitions.

0 isn't the null set {}, it's the cardinality of the null set, the number of elements of that set.

(And given that, you can define 1 as the cardinality of the set that contains only the null set as a member, so {{}}; 2 would be the cardinality of the set {{{}},{}}, and so on.)

The null set has no members, so it is identical to all its subsets.

I think there are people around here with some training, who might have some good advice for you, given your sister's history. I'm just a dad.

I'll just add this, as a sort of commentary on the quote I gave you. I think one of the things people do, not just kids but maybe especially them, is test you. If past relationships--maybe with the parents--have failed somehow, they want to know if you're going to stick, if your love is unconditional. (I don't know if everyone should get to have your unconditional love, but maybe little sister does.) So they test. Can I be bad enough that you'll stop loving me (too)? That doesn't mean you have to just accept everything. Setting boundaries and so on, that's also a way of showing you love her, that you give a damn what she's doing. It does mean that when she crosses a line, the most important message she can get from you is, "Nope. That didn't do it. I still love you," and you can make that "I still love you, you little asshole" if you want.

That's it for me. Hope I have spoken out of turn here.

The only genuinely wise thing I've ever heard anyone say about parenting comes from a humorist from years ago named Erma Bombeck:

Kids need your love most when they deserve it least.

It's come in pretty handy for me. Oh, and keep your sense of humor no matter what. The shit you can get into with kids is ridiculous. You need to be able to take a breath and laugh at it.

He knows more than you do. He has a masters degree -- in PHILOSOPHY! — Bitter Crank

I saw what you did there.

It's my impression that, in the United States at least, scientists feel more unified as a group now than they had for, I don't know, generations, precisely because there is a pattern of attacks on one discipline after another. Biologists got hammered by "cdesign-proponentists". Physicists watched Congress fail to build the SSC, and then watched all their grad students head for Europe and elsewhere, when America basically owned the field of high-energy physics throughout the twentieth century. And now there's climate science. There are a lot of people who most definitely believe the word "science" refers to something in particular, and they're agin it. So now scientists are closing ranks, defending biology as science, climatology as science, physics as science.

@Bitter Crank just got in the philosophy comparison. Mine was going to be "art," which would fall immediately to your criticism.

I wouldn't really care if the terms "art" and "philosophy" went away. But in these times, the word "science" is a fighting word, and you're on the wrong side.

But what if you look at it the other way round?

Suppose we start with the goal of controlling the growth of the human population, and are given two options for achieving this:
1. Reduced procreation through birth control self control.
2. That, plus abortion.
If we assume the goal must be achieved, wouldn't your criteria lead people to choose option 1, because it will achieve the desired effect without terminating an entity that will become conscious and achieve moral standing. Why choose (2) since it has this downside?