You seem to think that if someone hears the voice of God, and the other reads the same thing in the Bible, for the latter it is not revelation. It absolutely is, if what is revealed is not known before. — Agustino

Yes, of course it is my position that the former can be revelation and the latter cannot. There's no 'seems' about it. I stated that position already, and furthermore it's the only reasonable one.

In the latter case, all they know is that somebody wrote down a claim about something. They have no reason to believe it is true, so they don't know something that they did not know before. Whereas if they hear the voice of God, and they know that it is God speaking, it is reasonable for them to assume that what the voice says is true, so they can learn something new.

A text is revelatory if its meaning shows or points to things that are otherwise hidden. The Biblical text does this. — Agustino

So you claim. Like I (or rather, Mr Paine) said, hearsay.

If you cannot see the intricacies and wisdom of Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, or the Book of Job to name just three books of the Bible - and perceive that these texts could not under any circumstances be written by stupid and uneducated men and women, then you're just deluding yourself. — Agustino

This sounds similar to the claims in the preface of my Quran, which say that the numerological patterns in the surahs, the language etc, are so intricate that they could not have been constructed by any human - hence they must have been written by Allah.

A circular reasoning is one in which the assumption or premise plays a vital role in the system. — szardosszemagad

I suspect you are the only person in the world to use that definition. For the rest of us, circular reasoning is where the conclusion is used as a premise.

"the Biblical text is revelatory - its aim is to reveal many things that are hidden."

As Thomas Paine (not an atheist) pointed out, if any text is revelatory, it is only revelatory to the person that witnessed God directly speaking those words. To anybody else, it is just hearsay.

This is not consistent with my understanding. But perhaps the apparent conflict lies in words like 'usual interpretation'.

If I have a null hypothesis that a population parameter mu has value q and calculate that, conditional on the null hypothesis being true, the probability of statistic S from a randomly chosen sample of n elements having a value in set A is p, are you saying that making that statement is inconsistent with a Bayesian view?

Or are you saying that to go from there to a statement about the probability that the population parameter mu lies in some set U is inconsistent with a Bayesian view?

I am generally uncomfortable with, and tend to avoid, statements of the second kind, so I expect we probably agree, if that's what you meant.

I'm afraid don't know what you mean by typical method. If I were to use binomial distributions to calculate a level of confidence (a p-value) that the proportion of red balls in the above case is no greater than 0.1, based on an observed sample of thirty balls, would you call that typical? If so, why would a strict Bayesian consider it invalid?

I don't understand your post, but I like it nevertheless. It sounds zen.

A string such as 11001001000011111101101010100010001000010110100011000010001101001100010011000110011000101000101110000000110111000001110011010001... seems random, but it's not. If you put a decimal point after the first two 1's, this is the binary expansion of pi. So the recipe, "Write pi in binary and drop the decimal point" deterministically generates this string. — fishfry

Except that the mathematical concept of 'random' doesn't apply to strings of symbols. The concept normal can be used instead, but the expansion of pi is believed to be normal, although IIRC that has not been proved. As to whether the philosophical concept of random applies to them - we'll have to defer that question until somebody comes up with a non-circular, non-epistemological, non-word-saladish concept.

If you're a strict Bayesian the vast majority of applied research is bogus (since it uses hypothesis tests). — fdrake

Can you elaborate a little please? Are you suggesting that hypothesis tests are always invalid under a strict Bayesian approach, or only that the vast majority of them are?

I ask the question because I am thinking about a hypothesis that the proportion of red balls in a large barrel containing a finite number of identically-sized red or green balls is no greater than 0.1, and then using a sample of say thirty balls to test that hypothesis and make a statement about the confidence that the hypothesis is correct. It's not clear to me that that exercise requires one to choose between Bayesian and Frequentist interpretations in order to be valid.

By the way, you're not alone in struggling with the notion of randomness. Most statements by philosophers that invoke the concept are pure nonsense, and I have yet to see a definition of randomness proposed by a philosopher that is not hopelessly circular. Purely epistemological definitions can be made, but most ontologists claim that they are inadequate - while being unable to suggest any non-philobabblish alternative.

I wouldn't like to say. That way leads a discussion about the meaning of Omnipotence, involving questions such as 'Can God make a stone so heavy that He can't lift it?' (I use 'He' because the last time I debated these things was back when I was about eight, with my older brother, and that was before it was discovered that God was female.).

I'm not sure that God could play dice. Because for me an essential feature of playing dice is not knowing what the outcome will be. Perhaps that's what Einstein meant.

Agreed

I would guess that Jorn means 'if all attainable evidence is consistent with both, then further knowledge is unattainable'. In that case, we have no evidence that allows us to choose between the proposition and its negation. Evidence that there's a cup in the cupboard doesn't help us distinguish the truth of the proposition that Jorn is a man, but neither does it preclude the possibility that we might have other evidence that does support one or the other - such as that Jorn has a name that is nearly always given to male rather than female babies.

Jorn, please correct me if I've misunderstood you.

For some proposition (statement, claim, postulate), p, if attainable evidence is consistent with both p and ¬p, then further knowledge thereof is unattainable. It’s like a difference that makes no difference — not information.
......
What’s up with this stuff anyway? What do you think? — jorndoe

I find it a useful way to think of things. It enables one to work out what controversies there is no point in discussing.

I find ontological debates of that nature. As far as I can see, all ontological claims are differences that make no difference. Yet they generate the greatest controversy and the longest threads on this and on the predecessor forum.

There are two odd ironies here. The first is that I often can't resist getting involved in the ruck of an ontological debate, for the pure intellectual stimulation of it, even though there is absolutely nothing at stake - as far as I can see. It's almost as though the fact that there's nothing at stake is what makes it so delicious to dive into the banter.

And that leads to the other irony. It's what somebody, somewhere, once so perspicaciously said: that the passion invested in philosophical debates is generally in inverse proportion to the importance of what's at stake.

That's only true if we exclude applied ethics though (but not meta-ethics). Ethical debates are important, and do generate great passion. But its arguable that ethics should be classified under politics rather than philosophy. I reckon it's generally in both.

Science doesn't think of time as being anything. Science doesn't do ontology. All science does with time is develop equations that use time to help us predict or explain phenomena.

The question 'what is time' is purely one for philosophy. There is no conflict.

The standard response to that is 'what about Bergson vs Einstein?'. To which the response is that they were both philosophers, arguing AS philosophers. That Einstein was also a scientist no doubt informed his philosophical views. But they were still philosophical views, not scientific ones. Einstein was not arguing as a scientist.

I remember thinking about Bostrom's argument while puzzling over the Sleeping Beauty Problem, which grew into a massive thread on PhysicsForums before the mods got sick of it and locked it up.

I can't remember the details but I think I came to the conclusion that the 'two-thirds' position in that problem uses the same sort of argument as Bostrom, and that the argument makes unjustified assumptions. The problem is in how one determines what are 'equally likely events'. If one just assumes that whatever events one is talking about are equally likely then one can change the probabilities just by subdividing events and declaring the subdivided events equally likely to the un-subdivided alternative events. eg subdivide the event 'I am in a simulation' into events E(1), E(2), E(3) etc where E(k) is the event 'I am in a simulation and the program has between k thousand and (k+1) thousand lines of code'.

If I can recall my thoughts a bit more clearly I'll try to post them here because it was a bit of an epiphany for me. Up till then I had considered Bostrom's argument strong and could not point to a reason to reject it, even though I felt intuitively it was flawed. But I think I managed to convince myself that there was an explicit flaw one could point to, along the lines of my rather vague preceding paragraph.

I'm a 'halfer', by the way. Or at least I recall that I was, the last time that I understood the question.

I agree. In fact, like this one, nearly all sentences that anybody ever utters are as meaningful to idealists as to materialists. It is only when one drills down through a long sequence of definitions from the sentence that one can start to discern any difference. That's why the simple, snappy 'refutations' of idealism like Johnson's kicking a stone or asking about fictional characters are so ineffectual.

How would you say idealists make sense of the distinction between real and imaginary? — Janus

I would say that, for an idealist, an event is imaginary if it was invented and narrated by somebody that had no good reason to suppose that it ever happened.

A materialist can use the same definition.

Of course the map isn't the territory. — Marchesk

The question is though, given Korzybski's concerns about the use of 'is' in the 'identity' sense (concerns that presumably arose later in his life, subsequent to his making the famous statement), how would he have rephrased that statement?

Perhaps something like:

'A map does not have all the same properties as the territory it represents'

If you asked this Indonesian tribe whether imaginary rocks are made up out of the same stuff as ordinary ones you stump your toe on, would they say yes? — Marchesk

The imaginary vs real distinction doesn't relate to the question of Idealism vs Materialism. Both Idealists and Materialists make the imaginary vs real distinction.

It's not some obscure tribe by the way. It's the official language of Indonesia, spoken by more than 200 million people.

I suppose if I wanted to ask an Indonesian, in Indonesian, whether Harry Potter is real, I might ask something like 'Do you think anybody ever did all those things that the book says Harry Potter did?'.

I was talking to an Indonesian the other day, who told me that in the Indonesian language there is no verb 'to be'. That appears to make it a real-life version of David Bourland's invented language E-prime, which is English with that verb and all synonyms removed.

The relevance of that to the thread is that, without that verb, I don't think one can even describe a difference between an Idealist and a materialist. The difference dissolves to just one of language use.

Bourland was a student of Korzybski. Wiki says that Korzybski agreed with his student to the extent that he thought two uses of the verb 'to be' - those of identity and predication - had structural problems. It confuses me no end that Korzybski is best known for his saying 'The map is not the territory', which uses 'to be' in the 'identity' use. So according to Korzybski himself, his most famous utterance may be meaningless.

None of those questions make any difference to the only relevant question, which is whether more human suffering can be alleviated by giving locally than by giving in sub-Saharan Africa. If you have a magic bullet solution to improve distribution, or to make corrupt governments and officials miraculously disappear, go out and implement it. But in the absence of such a magic bullet, we know we can relieve suffering by giving to carefully chosen aid agencies, and that more suffering is relieved in that way than by giving locally. And, as you say, we should do that to the maximum extent before considering our personal pleasures. Yet most people don't. So the evidence is powerful that your GCB principle is not innate to them.

You keep calling special pleading, but never explained why. — Samuel Lacrampe

Yes he did:

If you're going to introduce other criteria (like proximity or quotas of care) which, at times, take precedence over your hierarchy, you have to provide an explanation as to how that's possible - since your axiom, by itself, does not warrant such exceptions. — Πετροκότσυφας

Your only defence was:

It is less efficient to give to the needy that are far away; — Samuel Lacrampe

which is simply incorrect. Saving a life in sub-Saharan Africa costs far, far less than saving a life in an OECD country, even after administrative expenses and travel are taken into account.

I think that most people that think of themselves as irreductionists would answer Yes to that question. I would answer yes. I think maybe @Wayfarer thinks of himself as an Irreductionist, so it would be informative to know what his answer is.

has anybody mentioned Romain Rolland's Oceanic Feeling yet? For me, that's as good an attempt as I've seen to capture what spirituality is about.

It appears that some people sometimes experience this feeling and others never do. FromCivilisation and Its Discontents I got the impression that Freud didn't and was maybe even a little frustrated and annoyed that others felt (or [according to him, just] thought they felt?) something that he had never felt and could not imagine.

Human diversity. Vive la différence!

Mr. Irreductionist claims that it can't, because explaining the actions of any particular particle fully will require an account of its interactions with other particles, so the whole thing telescopes out. — Pneumenon

I don't think that's an accurate characterisation of the Irreductionist view. It implies that the irreductionist believes that everything is explained by the interactions of particles, but that one has to take ALL the particles, and all of the myriad interactions, into account. This person believes that the difficulty is the tractability of the problem (as you say, it 'telescopes out'). I don't think that's Irreductionism, it's just Laplacean Reductionism combined with an acknowledgement that the problem of collecting the data of every particle's position and momentum and solving the gigantic system of simulaneous differential equations is not practically possible.

On my understanding, a true Irreductionist (of whom I'd say I am one, except that I resist accepting labels, especially 'ism' ones) denies that, even in theory, our experiences could be explained solely in terms of interactions of particles.

Politicians should be bought and sold; that's their role. — Benkei

The usual colloquial meaning of 'buying' a politician is not to appoint them by voting them, but to induce them to campaign and vote in parliament for a measure in which they do not believe. The notion of buying a politician with money is about campaign donations that are implicitly conditional on the politician furthering the selfish aims of the donator. Sometimes it is also about bribes, although the boundary between large donations by rent-seekers and bribes seems blurry to me.

Analogously, 'buying' a politician with votes would mean that the politician is induced to support something in which they do not believe, in order to gain more votes. That is the phenomenon of populism, and an example is when politicians demonise refugees because they know that gains votes, even though they know that refugees are not the problem.

Edmund Burke spoke eloquently against this sort of buying with his immortal quote:

'Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.'

in an (unachievable) ideal democracy, parliamentarians would always vote for measures they thought were best, rather than what they thought would gain the most votes at the next election.

I hope you don't mind me pointing out this obscure irregularity of the English language. Your English is amazing. I only wish my French and German were a quarter as good.

D is a well formed definition in the natural language. — Meta

How can we say it is well-formed when natural language is informal, and hence does not have a notion of well-formed statement? Do you just mean it is grammatically correct? If so, that doesn't tell us much as the statement 'The cheese of five is sad' is also grammatically correct.

Same goes for sentences. We can't have a statement A where the definition of A mentions A. — Meta

Depending on what language we are using, this may be possible. For instance, the sentence:

'This sentence contains the first letter of the alphabet'

is meaningful and true, and can be formalised without difficulty.

Using the Godel function we can create a statement that is analogous in some sense to the unary predicate S with the properties you describe. But I don't think we would one formalise 'is false', could we? The Godel function arithmetises syntax, not semantics, and 'false' is concerned with semantics.

IIRC, in some interpretations of Godel, his diagonalised sentence is associated with the purely syntactic notion of 'is provable'.

I am rusty on these issues - It's been a few years since I was involved with them, so I'm happy to have my leaky memory corrected.

Premise 1:All cases of taking someone's money without their consent is theft — Jacob

I doubt that many would accept this premise.

What about fines for breaking the law such as dangerous driving?

What about using the money of somebody in a coma to pay for an experimental treatment to try to heal them, or even just to provide for their children?

What about court awards for damages?

More than just lack of consent is needed to make the premise plausible. But I suspect that 'more' will unravel the whole argument.

Well, let's say 'speculative fiction' instead. Kudos for mentioning Man in the High Castle. Next on my reading list.

I'm making the distinction between Trump supporters and Republicans. My impression is that most Republicans detest Trump. The Evangelical Republicans detest him because they know he's not really a Christian, the Libertarian Republicans detest him because he's an Authoritarian, the Business-oriented Republicans detest him because his economic policies are doomed to fail, the Latino Republicans detest him because he hates Latinos, and many not already covered detest him because he has vilified them at some time or other. Trump's true supporters are what I think used to be called Reagan Democrats.

There's a separate discussion about whether the Republican establishment itself is even pro small government, given their enthusiasm for enormous spending on the military and on prosecuting and incarcerating people involved in victimless crimes like drug use. But, interesting as that subject is, it's not about Trump.

You can't do anything about a fanatic base who view the government as an evil entity that needs to be drained. — Posty McPostface

My impression from afar is that Trump supporters have very little overlap with small-Government Republicans. The biggest economic desire of Trump supporters appears to be erection of a tariff wall to protect US manufacturing, which is about as Big Government as one can get.

I think a possible Pro is that his election may have demonstrated that the electoral influence of people of lower socio-economic status has been greatly underestimated. That may open the door to endorsed candidates with policies that up until now were regarded as political suicide in the US, like meaningful measures to reduce inequality and curbs on plutocratic power. The popularity of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are other signs of this, but those signs are not nearly as persuasive as the fact that people were prepared to elect a recognised narcissistic, bullying, misogynist, racist, neo-fascist ignoramus, simply because they were so desperate for a change from the status quo, and saw no hope of that in the current establishment candidates (once Sanders was gone).

I got this as wrong as anybody else. I really liked Sanders' policies but wanted Clinton to get the nomination because I thought Sanders was unelectable. Now I've come to the opinion that Sanders would probably have beaten Trump (although as a philosopher that statement makes me blush, as I know that counterfactuals like that are meaningless).

If we can get through the rest of the term without him managing to do too much permanent damage then I think there's a serious possibility that we may see the election of a genuine champion of the working class (rather than this current pretend one) in 2020. And then, maybe, the working poor of the US will be able to start to claw their way out of the misery they've been subjected to for the last couple of decades.

The situation is easier to understand in terms of momentum rather than kinetic energy.

The key equation is that the Impulse delivered over a period of time, which is the increase in momentum over that time, is equal to the time multiplied by the average force over that time.

Say the ball is travelling at 20 m/s and the window is 4mm thick. Then the ball takes only .004 / 20 = 0.0002 secs to pass through the space occupied by the glass. The bonds in the ball are much stronger than those in the glass, so the ball barely deviates and the glass is forced to move forward, at almost the same speed as the ball.

The mass of the glass directly in front of the ball would be around 30g. So the Impulse it has received in that 0.0002 secs is (20 - 0) * 0.030 = 0.6 Ns. Dividing by the very short time in which it was delivered - 0.0002 secs - gives an average force of 3000N, which is approximately the weight of a 300kg mass.

That force will be applied to the bonds connecting the circle of grass in front of the ball to the rest of the pane of glass. The force will be much greater than the strength of the electrostatic bonds holding the glass together, so the glass breaks.

In brief, placing a ball gently on the glass exerts a force only equal to the weight of the ball, say 5N. Throwing the ball against the glass at 20 m/s exerts s force of 3000N, which is 600 times as great.

4. if all suffering is warranted, then a large number of human activities are unwarranted — jorndoe

This seems to rest on an unstated premise that, if a phenomenon X is warranted, then activity to prevent X is unwarranted.

How does this explain soccer?

Or, for any rugby fans out there:

The All Blacks' expected demolition of the Wallabies in Dunedin this coming Saturday is considered to be warranted, given their overwhelming superiority. Does that mean it is unwarranted for Wallaby defenders to even try to tackle them?

Camus might suggest that, like Sisyphus, the Wallabies can be happy, and find meaning, in their vain attempts to tackle the Kiwi attackers.

Yes, but personal behaviour is a lot more important than the policies they advocate. It's easy to advocate the good from a distance. It's easy to "love mankind" from far away. Anyone can do that. But when it comes to loving real men and women who are closeby, not many are able to. — Agustino

I agree with the last bit, but not with the 'Anyone can do that'. Both are difficult, and both are important.

Few have the courage to go to jail, be beaten into unconsciousness, or undergo torrents of public hatred and ridicule for their beliefs. I am very thankful for those that have had the courage to do that for causes that I see as important, regardless of whether they also personally helped old people cross the road.

I agree, but Stoicism / CBT has an answer for that, which is to train oneself to worry only about the things one can change.

But if you have negative thoughts and they are valid then what? — Andrew4Handel

It depends what sort of negative thought.

'I feel miserable' is a negative thought and it can be valid, but CBT teaches us how we can change our thinking so that it becomes invalid.

'Life is misery.' is a negative thought but it cannot be valid, because for some people life is mostly misery and for others it is not.

'Donald Trump will plunge us into nuclear war' is a negative thought, which may or may not turn out to be true. But what CBT, and the Stoicism from which it evolved, teach us is to accept that we cannot control that (unless we are one of those rare people that is in a position to influence the POTUS), dismiss it from our mind and focus on making the most of the life we have in the meantime.