I'm asking why there is a motivation to be moral if moral facts have no practical implications. — Michael

Why would there be a motivation to believe empirical facts that are of no practical consequence?

I just take note of typical grifty tactics, like narrative shifting, and as the list grows my trust shrinks. — Tzeentch

So, for you it's all a matter of trust or lack of it, not a matter of exercising your critical intelligence?

Yes, and it's an unjustified generalization to say that models are always wrong in any case.

Which just shows that because something is explicitly agreed to by citizens in a kind of "social contract" sense it doesn't follow that it is morally right.

Also, I saw what @Vera Mont posted as demonstrating the child's plight in "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas" is not inherently different than the plight of those we oppress in order to enjoy our accustomed lifestyles; I did not take her to be claiming, or even suggesting, that any of it is morally right.

I agree; the content of experience is endlessly variable, so it is the general character or forms that experience in general takes which is at issue.

The laws of metaphysics do not follow necessarily from logical possibility. — Lionino

I agree with you, but would just repeat that we don't, can't, know what the laws of metaphysics (if there be such) are. Logical possibility informs us only about what is possible, not about what is necessary.

If naturalism is true, and there are laws of nature, I suggest the true natural laws would be invariant. The way they manifest might be contingent on local conditions. That's why I think its important to refer to laws of nature, as you have done, rather than the laws of physics- which are based on our current understanding, and subject to revision as we learn more. — Relativist

The Laws of nature may evolve (as Peirce thought) but if that were so they would still be invariant over long periods (unless there were some kind of "punctuated evolution" as S J Gould postulated in regard to biological evolution). The laws of nature may be understood simply as the 'observed habits of nature as formulated by us).

There is the case of psycho-somatic medicine and the placebo effect, wherein subjects beliefs and emotional states have physical consequences. — Wayfarer

If the subjective beliefs and emotional states that produce the placebo effect are neural (physical) states, why would they not be expected to have physical consequences? Physicalist presuppositions make such things easier, not more difficult, to understand. Presuming that such beliefs and emotional states are somehow non-physical existents makes it impossible to understand how they would have physical consequences.

:cool: Excellent points!

I agree with you in that the way I interpret Kant the a priori is both dependent on and independent of experience. As you say it initially comes, not sui generis, but from a careful reflection on the nature of experience (and of course also becomes culturally established), so in that sense it is dependent on experience. It is independent of experience in that once established it is clear that all possible experience must conform to the a priori categories. So, I'm with you in thinking that the a priori is evolutionarily established.

It's also about the fact that no objective description of brain-states can convey or capture the first-person nature of experience. The kind of detailed physiological understanding of pain that a pharmacologist or anaestheologist has, is not in itself pain. — Wayfarer

No objective description of trees, mountains or rivers can capture the nature of trees, mountains or rivers. The physical understanding of a tree, a mountain or a river is not itself a tree, mountain or river.

Kant holds that such representations or ideas cannot be abstracted from experience; they must be the product of careful reflection on the nature of experience.
And what would provide the basis for such ‘careful reflection’ in the absence of an innate grasp of the issue at hand? — Wayfarer

It seems to be no mystery to me. We experience ourselves as causal agents and as being acted upon bodily. We can manipulate things, bend things, break things, variously crush them, smash them, cut them up, etc., etc. We also experience ourselves as acted upon; we can feel the heat of the sun, the wetness and temperature of the rain and the force of the wind on our bodies. We also feel the weighing of gravity, the impact of falls, and the caresses or blows of various objects, including animals and other people.

So, Hume was correct that we don't see the actual operations of causation, we don't see the forces at work, but when our bodies are involved, we can certainly feel them, I don't know if that was the point Kant was making in the quoted passage of course, but all it does take is reflection upon our felt experience to naturally form a notion of causation. I have no doubt animals also have an implicit sense of causation, but it seems most likely that language would be needed to formulate that sense.

The empirical meaning of SR is demonstrated by the experiment and results of the Michelson Morley experiment that partly motivated it. This empirical meaning does not refer in any obvious way to the sentiment that "faster-than light travel is impossible". If a physicist is asked to describe the meaning of this impossibility, he will likely refer to empirically observable Lorentzian relations that he argues are expected to hold between observable events. In other words, his use-meaning of the "physically impossible" is in terms of the physically possible!

So physical impossibilities shouldn't be thought of in terms of impossible worlds, but rather as referring to the application of a linguistic-convention that supports the empirical interpretation of language. — sime

Of course, I must agree that physical impossibility is grounded in physical possibility; there is that which is physically possible, and the rest is not; so I'm not sure what you are aiming at with that.

I realize that an hypothesis such as that travel faster than light is impossible can never be verified by any number of observations. I was only concerned with the notion that there should, or even merely might, be physical impossibilities, regardless of whether we can know what they are or even whether there are such impossibilities.

If we adhere to the idea of universal natural law and assume that what we understand about that law is valid and reflects necessary or universal invariances, then within that context, we can talk about physical impossibilities. But the caveat will always be 'given that the laws of nature are themselves invariant".

The idea that there might be worlds (or universes) which enjoy very different laws would then transcend this notion of physical impossibility which is based on our familiar laws. So, I would refer to that as metaphysical possibility. The question then would be as to whether there should or must be any constraints on metaphysical possibility other than those of a merely logical nature.

Being fundamentally a skeptic, of course I will answer that we can raise these kinds of logically derived questions, but we cannot decidedly answer them. They remain exercises of the speculative imagination.

I agree that most people don’t know what they implicitly consent to unless it relevant to their every day-to-day lives; but my thing is that conscription to the military seems fair (to me) if it is for self-defense style wars because adults in the society are benefiting from the protection and help of that society—so why wouldn’t they be obligated to defend it? — Bob Ross

Defending your society if invaded is a very different matter than conscription to fight in wars that are based on political alliances. The point really is that just because some ethos is entrenched in societal law, on what we might want to refer to as " the social contract", it certainly does not seem to follow that it is therefore somehow objectively, or even inter-subjectively, validated.

You don't see the relevance of counterfactuals to questions of possibility and necessity. Ok, then.

I gather this doesn't help... Counterfactuals? — Banno

The problem I have is that we cannot know if the possibilities we can imagine are actual possibilities or merely logical possibilities. It doesn't seem that hard to determine what can be coherently imagined; that is we can coherently imagine whatever is not self-contradictory.

When I have some more time, I'll read the article you linked; then I guess I'll find out if it helps me to see that counterfactuals have relevance beyond just what we are able to coherently imagine, or if it cements the intuition I already hold.

All I want is open and reasonable discussion. I don't see the relevance of such counterfactuals as "Janus might have been wearing red shoes" for considerations of how identity might be established and the role of genetics in determining identity, which is what I thought this thread to be about.

Okay I was not thinking of the consent of the child, but of the consent of the majority who implicitly accept the social contract. I could have been conscripted when I turned 18, voting age, a few days before that it could not have been argued that I was able to consent to the social contract, now on the advent of my eighteenth birthday I suddenly can? How many people even explicitly think about the contract, and by the time they reach the age of consent, what other choice do they have but to live in a society they have become reliant on anyway?

It's not that I've not previously understood this, but that I see little philosophical significance in it. This modal notion of possibility, counterfactuality, is merely in the realm of fiction; tells us nothing significant about anything other than how we are can imagine stuff.

"Janus might have been wearing red shoes"—how many Januses are there in the world, and how do we know which Janus is being referred to, or even whether Janus is a real, or merely fictional, character?

Yes, that's what I'm asking you. — Banno

Okay, well I'll rephrase the question: on what grounds, other than sharing the same genome, would any entity in an imagined universe count as being schopenhauer1?

On what grounds would any entity in some imagined universe count as being schopenhauer1?

If schopenhuaer1 is a biological organism, then he necessarily has the genome he has. This would seem to be an empirical fact about all organisms.

Right, "social contract", but if people living in the society wherein the child is tortured implicitly consent to it via the said contract, then the same principle would apply, no? Additionally, any existing law, no matter how unethical it might seem, could purportedly be justified by this argument.

Would you agree with the following?

“Questions, what things ‘in-themselves’ may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding, must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that things exist? ‘Thingness’ was first created by us” (Nietzsche, WTP 569). — Joshs

I would not agree with that; the questions "what things 'in themselves' may be like" and "how could we know that things exist": are two different questions. We know things exist for us because we sense them, but we cannot know what things in themselves are like even though we know what they are like for us. So, we know how things appear to us and we have good reason to think things exist apart from our perceptions of them, because other animals, judging from their behaviors, sense things in much the same ways we do. We naturally come to the concept of "thingness", but this is a linguistically mediated concept. We can be fairly certain that things stand out for other animals as gestalts, but we cannot know if there is any prelinguistic conception of "thingness" as opposed to merely "a sense of things".

So, I see Nietzsche's statement as being too anthropocentric.

Good­man puts it succinctly: “We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described” (Goodman 1978, 3), or “talk of unstructured content or an un­conceptualized given or a substratum without properties is self-defeating; for the talk imposes structure, ascribes properties.”

I don't agree with this, because we can impute mere existence without claiming, or being required, to know what the nature of that existence is.

Thanks...these are the definitions given there:

p is metaphysically possible iff p is true in at least one possible world.
p is metaphysically necessary iff p is true in all possible worlds.

p is metaphysically possible iff p is consistent with the laws of metaphysics.
p is metaphysically necessary iff p follows from the laws of metaphysics.

I see the first as being circular and uninformative, because we don't know what worlds (if any other than our own) are possible unless we count possibility as being simply what we can coherently imagine.

I see the second as also being uninformative because we don't know what the laws of metaphysics are, unless, again, they are what we can imagine without contradiction.

In both cases if metaphysical possibility is just what we can, without contradiction, imagine, then metaphysical possibility would seem to collapse into logical possibility.

It seems we may have very different notions of what 'metaphysically possible' means. As I see it, if there is only one world then what is metaphysically possible would just be what is physically or actually possible. If there were other worlds, then different sets of physical laws might be metaphysically possible and actual. If there were a non-physical world, then whatever constraints operated in that world would be metaphysical (and of course logical) constraints. But all of this is only, for us, in the realm of the imagination, pure speculation: we have no way of knowing otherwise. If you have an alternative understanding, I'd be happy to hear about it.

As a friendly reminder, we do know that different ontologies are metaphysically possible. — javra

How do we know that?

But I guess considering what is a "significant difference in different gravitational forces" would embark us too far astray — javra

I would say it would be difference great enough to make a significant difference to biological "age".

... and in the realm of metaphysical possibility, which this thread is in part about. — javra

We don't know what is metaphysically possible, and we only know what is physically possible given the assumption that our understanding of natural laws is correct and comprehensive.

Yes, if the theory of relativity is in fact correct it operates everywhere. Since the different gravitational forces would not make for much of a difference, and it may well be impossible for objects to travel at anywhere near the speed of light, such thought experiments as would allow for huge differences in the progress of biological processes, and hence significant differences in aging probably remain in the realm of fiction or fantasy.

I agree that it is very, very hard to deal with all the complexities of any interesting question. The trouble is that the devil is almost always in the detail, so I'm reluctant to ignore complexities, even if it isn't possible to sort them all out. A grand simplification always gets me going, I'm afraid. Perhaps it is better to think in terms of focus rather than simplification and then it is easier to at least acknowledge complexities. — Ludwig V

It doesn't seem that there are the same complexities (although determinacy is another matter) when we think about the identity of everyday objects as there are when we attempt to address human identity. So, it seemed to me a good plan to start with the simple cases and then work towards understanding the complexities of human identity built upon the relative simplicities of object identity.

Just as an example, a deontologist that believes that one does not have the duty to uphold the rights of a person who is engaged in the violation of other peoples' rights, which is usually called a principle of forfeiture, will have no problem going to war with people that have forfeited those rights. — Bob Ross

Why would this not apply to young people who are conscripted (if not to voluntary soldiers)?

Right, but what I was angling at is that the age of the Universe would not vary depending on where you are in it; there would seem to be a sense in which there is a current state of the Universe. And in general, when we talk about the age of anything, existing things which came into being earlier than other existing things are considered to be the older. On this criterion a daughter could never be older than her mother while they are both still alive, although of cause the daughter could live to a greater age.

As concerns objective time, however, the same dichotomy between a relativistic time and cosmically absolute time will present itself. With all indications now pointing to time being relativistic rather than absolute. — javra

And yet the claim is that the Universe began around 14 billion years ago. Time perhaps does not exist apart from change, and when you think about it the general durations of processes of change probably don't vary that significantly because no macro-objects are travelling at anywhere near the speed of light, and they also are not subject to massive time variations due to gravity either.

If we say there are three types of time — historical time, chronological time, and biological time —, the main character is younger than his daughter in all but historical time. — Lionino

I would say there are historical (Earth or chronological) time and phenomenological time. If biological processes would be slowed down, reduced to almost zero at near light speeds, what would a person on a craft travelling at such speeds experience? Such travel may well be physically impossible in any case, but allowing for the sake of argument its possibility, I can only imagine that during such a journey, even if it lasted a thousand years, the passengers would experience almost no time, or even no time at all, if travelling at light speed.

So, yes if that were possible then the main character would be biologically younger than his long dead daughter. On the other hand, since Earth time is really what counts for us, we would say he has been gone for a thousand years, and is thus one thousand plus years old, even though relatively unaged.

I'm not sure what exactly you have in mind by "time paradox". If travel at the speed of light were possible, someone might not age much or even at all on a thousand-year journey, but she would have endured for a thousand years if the temporal context we are considering is Earth time or even (perhaps) experiential or phenomenological time.

My take is that what is actually possible is what is physically possible, with reference to this world. If there were other worlds where what is impossible here were possible there, then that possibility might be categorized as metaphysical possibility (although we could say that the scope of the category of physical possibility has thus been expanded instead).

What is logically possible is anything that does not involve self-contradiction. Perhaps it could be said that there is a valid category of metaphysical possibility distinct form the category of physical possibility only in the context of positing that there might be existences which are not physical; that is not constrained by any physical law. Would they be constrained by metaphysical laws? Whatever the answer to that might be it seems impossible to imagine that they would not be constrained by logic.

(Adaline mysteriously stops aging due to an accident and her daughter grows older than her). — javra

Should we count age as being the time of duration or physical change? Adaline has endured for a longer time than her daughter, regardless of whether her body has continually "aged". So, in durational terms she is always going to be older than her daughter, and since the very meanings of 'mother' and 'daughter' presuppose that the mother exists antecedently to the daughter, then to say that the child could be older than the mother would involve a logical contradiction.

I think as a society we would, hopefully reluctantly, accept the sacrifice of the child, just as societies generally accept young people being sent to war, and suffering torture and death in order to protect mere national sovereignty, or even just to satisfy political affiliations, not to speak of societal annihilation.

Yes, all that...human identity is complex...but to simplify the question: what is it that makes any object or entity an object or entity? Is it an object or entity in its own right or only because we choose to count it as such?

Well, what matters most to me is that, so far as I can see, there's nothing to rule out the possibility and no positive evidence to establish impossibility. There is a common belief, dear to all of us, that each individual person is unique and irreplaceable - and the discovery of DNA seemed to give a physical basis for that belief. But that it seems to me to be an article of faith, though there is the identity of indiscernibles to fall back on. — Ludwig V

I could respond that, so far as I can see, there is nothing to rule out the impossibility and no positive evidence to establish possibility. I would add, as far as I am aware, there are no documented examples of any two objects being indistinguishably identical (even leaving aside the issue of occupation of different spaces).I think it is articles of faith all the way down, so you'll get no disagreement from me on that point. Perhaps we should augment the principle of the identity of indiscernibles with another principle: the indiscernibility of identities.

—

Well, I don't see why we need to rule that out as impossible. It may be very unlikely, but unlikely things do happen. And we'll never check enough leaves to establish an empirical possibility. — Ludwig V

I haven't ruled out its being possible, nor do I rule out its being impossible: we just don't know, which is what I've being trying to get across.

The difference between a kind and an individual is logical, or if you prefer grammatical, and not to do with substance. — Banno

There are individual or particular kinds just as there are individual entities of particular kinds; so, I'm assuming you're referring to the obvious logical difference between type and token or general and particular, and the fact that individual entities may be objects of perception, whereas individual kinds are objects of judgement.

I'm well aware that we cannot speak about the nature of what lies outside the scope of our experience and judgement. So neither of you seem to have carefully read and considered what I've been saying, which was in no way contesting this obvious truism.