Where he comes in though is his ingenious method of responding to dilemmas, here moral ones, with counterdilemmas. That's the extent of Protagoras' involvement in this thread about moral conundrums. — TheMadFool

You're missing your point. If you read an analysis of the dilemma it points to logical argumentation of the kind that was taught to would-be lawyers by Prodicus, Protagoras and other ancient rhetorician, and by Plato too, and is still taught in law schools. Proficiently arguing either side of a case is essential in today's legal profession. There is no ethical point made there by either side, it's just formal argumentation. Therefore your Protagorean ethical conclusions are just your own inventions.

Prior to addressing the ethical problems of the trolley and the murderer at the door the pretense to pure logical argumentation from both sides of issues should be clarified and removed.

Sorry! If you meant that faith makes placebo an extremely powerful medicine then I wholly agree with you. Faith is one of the cornerstones of religion, the other is accommodation to an acceptable social norm or institution.

"faith" has always been, in effect, a majoritarian mass delusion (placebo). — 180 Proof

What has faith, even as placebo, to do with religion? Isn't religion a socio-cultural self-sustaining support system for those who believe that religion's biases and practices?

Since you like the SEP which attempts to introduce readers to issues and has a wealth of references to dig deeper, I would start with R.A. Blank, Overcoming the 5th-Century BCE Epistemological Tragedy: A Productive Reading of Protagoras of Abdera (2014, U. of So. Florida). a recent Masters dissertation of a neglected controversial but germane topic. After that, I would jump into more standard historical intros recommended in this thread.

Ignoratio elenchi. Protagoras' technique (counterdilemma) is my focus; nothing about his moral views is relevant. — TheMadFool

No. What Protagoras really said, and what he was accused of having said by contemporary and later pundits becomes relevant when you repeat or emphasize certain unimaginable conclusions in his name to support either an argument, or in this case, the format of an argument.

For example, in the Protagoras, Plato's Socrates forces poor dead Protagoras to adopt a dialectical form of argumentation which suits a middle-period semantic Plato (or later Aristotle] but is a method inappropriate and inapplicable to any part of Protagorean ethics. Either-or dialectic questioning or setting up binary dilemmas and paradoxes avoids the crux of real-world problems. (The problems of becoming were considered unmanageable exactly because Parmenidean logic was inapplicable to continua. Plato, as great as he was, was fully aware of what his Socrates was up to and specifically implies so, but unfortunately, thanks to Aristotle and followers, we are not.

The upshot is, or so I imagine, is in the setup of your dilemma. Take the trolley problem. According to Protagoras, in the real world, the identity and closeness of that one person as against who the others are makes all the difference. Are these real people or just numbers? If they are just numbers then ethics is for computers.

No?

Everybody knows the story of a rather interesting dilemma involving Protagoras (the sophist?) and a student of his by then name of Euathlus. Google will take you to the relevant webpages. Here's a good reference :point: Protagoras Paradox — TheMadFool

The story is related by the Latin author Aulus Gellius in Attic Nights. ... The paradox is often cited for humorous purposes — Protagoras Paradox

Protagoras never said that anything goes, or all choices are the same, or even that morality is relative. Protagoras was a moral subjectivist. Expanding spherically starting with myself, first, morality is what is good for me, second, morality is what is good for us, third, morality is what is good for our culture. (i.e. screw all others.)

I think this sums up about 99% of the practical world. Naturally, Socrates had something more ethereal in mind. Socrates, against repeated protestations, twists the argument away from anything sensible to his own unattainable binary ideal Good.

Scientific facts would work because they are grounded in current physics. Is that enough?

For the moment, your truths are my truths. I'm willing to go along with whatever might help me disentangle my confusion.

He is simply setting out how he intends to use the word "fact". — Banno

Is he then replacing the usual real objects with whatever facts about those objects he postulates to be true or must others (everyone?) also agree that his facts are true? How far out on a limb must he climb?

So then by

when I speak of a fact I do not mean a particular existing thing — Shawn

W specifically means himself only by "I" because facts are truths?

We
express a fact, for example, when we say that a certain thing has a certain
property, or that it has a certain relation to another thing — Shawn

Do you agree that facts are what we say about a certain property or a certain relation?

If the universe is endlessly expanding forever and ever isnt that an infinite scenario? Will it stop expanding? If not then the universe is infinite. If it does stop expanding could it have expanded forever if circumstances allowed it to. — Keith W

Language needs to reflect the scope of cosmological questions. It is reasonable that in the very long run, no matter how stable, all particles will decay. Then to make sense of those questions, wouldn't you want to redefine the universe as whatever energetic spacetime left after all ordinary particles have vanished into pure potential energy? Or are you only concerned with material matters and their relative forms?

:up: :100:

Thrasymachus and others like him were a problem to Plato's Socrates character because there can be no valid argument to show that the contrary philosophy is invalid or that its practical consequences were unsound. To proceed with his own story, what else could poor Socrates do than to appeal to authority or to popular opinion to silence such a critic?

major parts of his philosophy is still out of harmony with today's zietgeist — Wayfarer

Plato's is a broad all-encompassing philosophy, How much new has been invented since to be philosophized over? The zeitgeist is the opposite. In the analytic quest for veritability philosophy has become so specialized that most of the subject is missing in action.

The significant divide begins when science begins to question, even repudiate, the more central articles of faith — Janus

Neither philosophy (logic) nor science (the world) can do that. Personal faith is independent of both and also of whichever religious dogma (culture).

the advent of science has had an extraordinarily, overwhelmingly positive impact on how we live. — Banno

Perhaps, but science has been a great deal less influential than technology. The relation of the two to each other is not as simple as is usually assumed.

Technology is often serendipitous discovery based on existing culturally cumulative advances which then motivates science. Which comes first can be a chicken-egg problem.

Nevertheless, both are double-edged swords with many gains in personal comforts, conveniences, and pleasures all with the possibility of being wiped out by human enabled devastating social, international and environmental catastrophes.

It's a good thing for all of us that CERN guessed right prior to producing antiparticles.

the unconscious is doing a lot more, at a much higher level then we often give it credit for — Count Timothy von Icarus

What's been labelled as subconscious is as much part of nature as the outside world is.
We must use whatever sense-perception we are afforded to try to make something of it all. (Plato)

recursively self-referential ... only recursively integrated information reaches consciousness — Count Timothy von Icarus

Suppose the subconscious is a great ball of many inter-twined threads doesn't 'information' come out of the mind after the fact as a particular single thread of yarn?

Often the matter of truth does not seem to be quite clearly distinguishable from the matter of taste. ... ...
A certain relativism cannot be denied here. It seems to be objectively given. Individuals are the standards of their chosen philosophy. Everyone truly needs to realize this. — spirit-salamander

There is no denying that deep psychological preferences do weigh on one's attitudes toward people and life, but if philosophy is to be a logical enterprise then philosophy can just as easily act to correct tendencies to be governed by our guts. This was Plato's hope for the philosopher perhaps because he was more rational and rationally oriented than those others you mention.

Rationally there is no reason to stick to any one philosophy. Just look at the sciences. Is there just one science? When people do stick with one science can they deny all other sciences? Why not? When people do stick with once science can they deny all other sciences? Isn't that answer also applicable to philosophy?

However, if we know the speed of the butterfly, the distance between the two spots it's visible in, and the time taken between them, we can easily determine that this isn't teleportation. — TheMadFool

Cool. When it sits motionless on a tree branch that butterfly is moth-like dirty brown and nearly invisible. Illusions of nonexistence and existence are not uncommon in nature and appearances unlike matter-energy can move faster than light. Astronomical shadows move with the speed of light radially but can be much faster when moving transverse. This could be narrated as teleportation of shadows.

Thanks to Wayback Machine, the Totoni article is still available when searching there for www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_theory and then for the Mar 29 2021 copy

This theory is not a serious scientific proposal. — Daemon

But scientific proposals do seek relevant information as pertaining to some possibly useful measurable aspect of the natural world, or us as individuals, or the environment that we create.
To follow your analogy, electric meters measure not what we did with the used electricity but the total usage over a month.

I'm not sure what IIT proposes. Mathematically, is it the model for an experience/consciousness meter which reads single transient experience or average consciousness PHI, or perhaps both?

Of course, the two are not the same. I can be equally conscious and still experience or miss seeing a passing hawk in the sky. In either case, would PHI tell us anything about my experience or my consciousness?

Perhaps an anesthesiologist could use PHI to gauge consciousness in addition to heart and respiration rates for surgery?

From the point of view of philosophy, let's suppose that the Chinese Room is on the international isolation ward with many adjoining rooms all instrumented with the latest Totoni meters on the door and computer technology for remote communication. Could the Totoni PHI improve on the failure of the classic thought experiment? Could I or my Totoni computer differentiate a conscious person from an AI? Would it matter?

and a bit more clarification from there,

Phi is based on the number and quality of interconnections a given entity has between bits of information. The resulting number — the Phi score — corresponds directly to how conscious it is.
The more connections, the more conscious an entity is, a factor quantifies as PHI
Consciousness, in this model, doesn’t rely on a network of information. It is the network. As such, it doesn’t discriminate based on whether the subject is organic or electronic.
Put simply, high PHI measure means more consciousness — more sentience — no matter who or what you are. — Gina Smith

Not a card trick at all. I don't think you're appreciating the weight of your assumptions in making that argument. To a Trumpist democracy means our power, to you it seems to mean an ideally equal distribution of possibility or actuality of power.

The Constitution was written expressly for a republic ruled by a now denigrated elite analogous to ancient Roman freemen. This discrepancy is slowly evolving to an unspecified resolution, which is decidedly not democracy.

Then you agree with me that democracy is not mine therefore there must be many notions of democracy. The only alternative to that is god-given Democracy. OTH, what the Constitution defines is a lawful republic not popular anarchistic democracy, and that's where the discussion needs to start.

I got a comment published on today's NY Times story on Trump
'Someone ought to raise the point that if Trump's GOP refuses to recognise the result of the 2020 election then they must forfeit the right to participate in the electoral cycle. Democracy is a system of rules, and not recognising the rules ought to warrant exclusion from the system.' — Wayfarer

I doubt that you received any responses given the Times' window for comments, so let's try

Whose democracy do you mean by that?

IIT, based on the scholarpedia page.
In formulating the axioms, Tononi uses these criteria:
1. About experience itself; — frank

Scott Aaronson debunkificated this — fishfry

For assertion 1. the philosophical question is what is x if anything at all. Since experience is private there is no way to answer that except for claiming that experience-in-itself exists as a Platonic concept and as a corresponding linguistic proxy.
In astronomy there are the analogously fuzzy notions of dark matter and dark energy which are postulated to reify their effects on galaxy clusters and on theoretical universal expansion. Neither can be directly seen and identified as objects but physicists can justify supposing that they necessarily exist.

Totoni's phi would be a basis for an objective measure of something-or-another that he labels as experience/consciousness. It is not a measure of my mentality before my first cup of coffee but what it might do is to define totoni-ness, an entirely different thing with hopefully some connection to what is generally thought of by others. Whether that is meaningful or just useful would depend on physical implementation of measuring and classifying phi's for various living and inanimate subjects. If the quantification of a cat's phi lies somewhat between Totoni's and a sunflower's then he will have achieved some success.

Your thoughts ? — Amity

I think that Plato should have been made a saint a very long time ago for what he did for the Church.

The structure of The Symposium and Phaedo, attributed to Plato, is of a story within a story within a story. In the Christian Bible, the gospels are retellings of stories from the life and ministry of Jesus. However, they also include within them the stories (parables) that Jesus told. — Wiki: Story within a story

So I take it that Plato's literary tricks in the Phaedo and elsewhere, as craftily imitated by the authors of the gospels were intended to make all the tales as a cumulative package more life-like, more credible therefore more convincing to naive un-philosophical people who listen to such stories?

The best and safest hypothesis according to Socrates is the hypothesis of kinds (eidos or Forms). Two “shares in the reality” of Twoness, one in the reality of Oneness. — Fooloso4

I think that perhaps two in "a half and another half are two" do not refer to some form of Twoness of the number two but to two as individuals, each being "a half"?

to acquire clear knowledge ...
[1] either he must learn or discover the truth about these matters,
[2] or if that is impossible, he must take whatever human doctrine is best and hardest to disprove and, embarking upon it as upon a raft, sail upon it through life in the midst of dangers,
[3] unless he can sail upon some stronger vessel, some divine revelation — Phaedo 85c-d

This epistemic approach might appear to match the powers and methods of the three parts of the tripartite soul. The tuning might then be finding the right balance among the three parts, however way Plato might think that possible.

To know a Form, Socrates has already proposed that [2] cannot possibly be sufficient, with only [3] having any chance of success as anamnesis gained through prodding one's own inner soul/mind and not as originating based on samples of individuals hypothetically grouped from the outside world.

when knowledge comes in such a way, it is recollection? What I mean is this: If a man, when he has heard or seen or in any other way perceived a thing, knows not only that thing, but also has a perception of some other thing, the knowledge of which is not the same, but different, are we not right in saying that he recollects the thing of which he has the perception? — Phaedo 73c

arguing both sides of a proposition, to try and achieve synthesis — counterpunch

A half-bottle of scotch helps there because the best solution is to forget the distinctions.

The idea of opposites not being mutually exclusive will come up several times. — Fooloso4

Death might be seen as a welcome release from the physical body with all its discomforts.
The pain of life v the joy of the afterlife ?*
There is a separation. Not here a mingling as felt by Phaedo. — Amity

the 'argument from opposites' (70c-72e).
It seems to operate on the presumption that 'the opposites' - those given include larger and smaller, weaker and stronger, faster and slower, the beautiful and the ugly, and of course the living and the dead - are intrinsic to the whole process of generation and decay. Also there's a correlative relationship, in that one gives rise to the other - what was smaller becomes larger, what is weaker becomes stronger, and so on. — Wayfarer

Plato gets much justifiable but undeserved grief for setting up formal and informal pairs as opposites and for being illogical in their resolution. But back in antiquity Parmenidean proto-logic was a huge advance over hand waving and its details fall far short of our modern elementary logic. Much that is obvious to us was a work in progress for Plato.

The question at issue in the contrast between upward and downward [~transcendental] models is this: whether the unity of opposites exists in the opposites or whether it transcends them. Plato in the Sophist tries [~correctly] to have both [~one for intermingling of Forms and one for participation of particulars in Forms]: the forms remain transcendent while now being the abode of opposites. Aristotle sees in this an opening for a revised, dynamic notion of species and genera. Hegel, it could be argued, tries to join sameness and difference in his own [~i.e. illogical] way. — Scott Austin (2010)

Heraclitean pairs of contraries are different than strictly formal Parmenidean contradictions. Parmenidean negation and Socratic elenchus don't work for informal overlapping interacting pairs. Plato was well aware of the logical difficulties, and for the most part presents them to the reader as a challenge for better suggestions of resolution. We haven't advanced quite enough yet to fully do that. Just try a few and see.

Plato's own Greek terms? And how do we decide on their precise meaning when it has already been determined that the dialogues can, and maybe should, be interpreted in many different ways? — Apollodorus

Plato's own Greek terms were often varied and indeterminate. Plato deliberately did not employ precise or just consistent meanings throughout his works or even within the same dialogue.

Why? Perhaps his philosophy was a work in progress with many problems and hypothesized solutions still open in his mind. He suggested many alternatives for discussion or debate but certainly not for fixed single-minded interpretation. Although Plato's philosophy can be partially reconstituted for a single dialogue as implied by the setting, events, and characters portrayed.

two particles are entangled — SupernovaGirl

That's the basis of the paradox. Are there physical particles at all or are particles a mental construct to reify our naive perceptions straight down to the subatomic level?

The video hasn’t shown that “observer” has anything do with minds. Or what exactly is and isn’t an observer. — khaled

A physical observer is an objective instrumental observer not a person. Mathematical or plain language interpretation of the observations translates objective observation into a public hypothesis. Interpretation requires not one mind but the agreement of expert minds, which takes it from private opinion or belief into a public factoid.

thesis-antithesis pairs — TheMadFool

Again, thesis-antithesis pairs are arbitrary and are logically incoherent. For dialectic to have any logical validity some whole pie, or some portion of the pie, has to be cut once into two parts A and B with nothing in-between.
Then if not A then B. But if neither A nor B, as per Hegel, then for the whole pie there is nothing left at all, and for some portion of the pie it is anything and everything else, and never some arbitrary C the 'synthesis' of A+B.

If Hegel were truly a Heraclitean, then his logic would need to be switched from either-or to the Heraclitean both-neither. For example, see Plato's bedeviling Parmenides where things both are and are not. Modern science is the strongest testament, noting that in the physical world everything both moves and does not move, and changes and does not change all times everywhere. This is one big reason why both traditional and modern philosophy are almost totally incompatible with science.

:up:

Dialectics puts the thesis-antithesis duo in a positive light, assuring the two sides that what results - synthesis - all things considered, counts as progress. — TheMadFool

Dialectics is a great method to demonstrate that neither of two incompatible points of view can possibly be correct. Thus it represents small occasionally significant progress in finding out what we don't know.

Any explanations? — Banno

That math, physics, theology, etc. can't be discussed sensibly on philosophy forums?

Wittgenstein again very cleverly discovered the obviousity of the common wheel. — god must be atheist

The common wheel took a genius to discover, some cultures never did. To dig under what ought to be obvious but isn't is one important purpose of philosophy. What more would you expect?
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/perloff/witt_intro.html

the 'relativism' of OC and 'form of life' in general. — j0e

Name calling of 'relativism', being unfamiliar to simple-minded readers (that's everyone) has been the traditional way of spitting on the work of dead philosophers to strengthen one's pretense to divergent views. The Church, fearing dismissal or opposition to its dogma of absolute morality, has done much to cause relative morality and more simply the idea of relativism in general, to be both feared and hated. But with difficulties, logic and science has made small inroads into marshaled academia to the point where relativism is becoming progressive and even cool.

Does 'form of life' imply 'relativism'? Unfortunately, not quite.

... Gadamer views understanding as a matter of negotiation between oneself and one’s partner in the hermeneutical dialogue such that the process of understanding can be seen as a matter of coming to an ‘agreement’ about the matter at issue. ... This process of horizontal engagement is an ongoing one that never achieves any final completion or complete elucidation — Wittgenstein

If both 'partners' are in the same fly bottle then their hermeneutical dialogue can only be because of different understanding of the same language. This can be corrected or negotiated. This is dogmatism.

To get to semantic pluralism we need two fly bottles with flies of two different species speaking in at least some logically distinct terms. This sort of disagreement isn't logically open to correction or rapprochement. This is pluralism.

To get to relativism, one more giant logical (not semantic) step is needed. What does membership in each fly bottle depend on? In my example above, it's their species of flyhood.

Seems to me that Witt is doing a kind of negative metaphysics. Philosophieren ist: falsche Argumente zurückweisen. — j0e

"Philosophy is: to reject false arguments -- Witt Big Typescript"

Insistent negative philosophy is a hallmark of W's analytic (analogous to Kant's 'critical') middle or transitional work. As discovered in David Stern's wonderful Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, (Intro available: academia.edu or google books)

By the time the PI was written, Witt had moved on to seeing that one is to understand a language one needs to be a player to be a participant in that particular language game.

None of us are in position to call other philosophies 'nonsense' until we understand what is sense in that philosophy. (I'm pointing at myself)

The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful.

(b) There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that the man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term "leaf", has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. — Blue Book

The Ideas/Forms are images. — j0e

In some ways, they must be.

W brings in both abstract generalizations like beauty and more concrete generalizations like leaf. Both are expressed by word, yet there is distinction between showing some leaves to a child and then some beautiful objects or scenes. A child can easily generalize from one or two leaves. This is not so easy for beautiful clouds or beautiful ideas.