.

Yes, I think that's a good start and we'd need to delve into what property means as well. — Benkei

I'm going to have a go at answering "What is property?"

When I own something -- be it a parcel of land, a book of family photographs, a company, an insurance policy, a ticket for transit, a certification -- I have a claim of some sorts as to how that owned something is to be used. I may do with it as I please, and can even allow others to do with it as I please. So if I own a sizeable portion of land that is fertile and could produce good crops I may use a portion of that land to feed my needs, and allow the rest of it to lay fallow -- say I enjoy walking through the countryside. Now supposing I have a neighbor who also has fertile land, but not quite as much, because they do not own my land they could not plant in it.

Now suppose one season my neighbor decides that this isn't exactly a fair arrangement, since I'm not doing anything with good land anyway, and they could use said land to benefit themselves and even others (by producing good crops, rather than just let the land go to waste). So they decide to plow my land and plant the crops there, come what may.

What am I to do?

I think that in a positive sense we may direct what we own. But the character of property really comes out when our claims to it are violated by others. Supposing there were no state then I would have to find some means of recourse by negotiating with my neighbor. At the end of the day we may not ever see eye-to-eye, but I'll then have some kind of feeling that I have a claim to that land anyways, and will do what I need to do to enforce said claim -- bandy together with fellow neighbors to apply social pressure, burn the crops of my neighbor when they grow, salt the fields, or by the use of militant force.

In some ways property, of this sort, is before the state. But this kind of property preceded capitalism. Feudalism, for instance -- while it did not always rely upon war to solve issues -- certainly did resolve disputes over property by means of war.

What is especially significant about capitalism is that there is a state to back up said claims. There is a law in place and a process backed up by the eventual use of force to enforce claims. Property, state, and the law are all bound together in a capitalist economy.

In some way, then, property actually becomes a limited dictatorship over whatever set of things owned, but delimited by the power of the state (since the state is what enforces said claims in the first place). How said laws and states are arranged -- and even economies, as even this form of property is not what makes capitalism, but is the kind of property which capitalism relies upon -- can differ dramatically, and need not reflect our current societies.

But the point I want to drive home most is that in order for the kind of property which capital requires to exist there must also exist a state which enforces the claims which make property. Mostly because I think it's naive to look at capitalism, corporation, private ownership, and the whole lot of industry under capitalism as somehow opposed to the state (as is often conceived in popular imagination, but I don't think that capitalists are unaware of this -- just something worth noting because of said popular imagination, and also because 'property' often goes undefined and presumed as well understood)

So much more understandable than what I said, not — unenlightened

Heh, naw. I was hoping that last paragraph might be.

The bit that is harder to get my head around, though is the idea that complexity and disorder are somehow the same, and the nearest I can get to this is in terms of information. — unenlightened

Complexity I'm less certain on. But I can speak to the notion of "disorder", at least -- disorder, I think, is a bit of poor wording.

Consider a more simplified system: two jars connected by a small tube. The initial condition of said jars, for purposes of this thought experiment, has 10 molecules in the left-hand jar and 0 in the right-hand jar. Given time what you would expect is for there to be 5 molecules in the left-hand jar and 5 in the right-hand jar. This is because the entropy is increasing -- "disorder". But it's not exactly like disorder is chaotic or unstructured. It's simply the direction, meaning time-direction, in which we observe energy to flow.

In another theoretical world we could reverse the thought experiment, with 5 molecules in each jar and we would expect to find 10 accumulate in one of the jars -- in this world the arrow of time would be observed to flow in the opposite direction from the world we actually live in.

In one sense of the word "ordered" it would be more ordered. But not necessarily in a way that relates to complexity and simplicity.

I'm not sure how you would actually relate the two. Like, what would unpatterend or unstructured information be, exactly? Would it just be unspecified? Or would it be exactly analogous, in that the states we might find any given bit are greater than they were before?


My class on Statistical mechanics is what really helped me wrap my head around the 2nd law of thermo, especially the concept of entropy.


One thing I want to note though:

Somehow this is equivalent to the energy thing, because it is the structure in the distribution of energy that allows for some 'free energy' to be released in it's dissipation. — unenlightened

Free energy actually works on a system -- where a system is just anything that happens to be under consideration, and the universe is everything else (usually a room or a building, but it could also be the actual universe too). Not sure if it's pertinent here, but it's not being released from a system as much as it's either preventing or allowing some process to occur within the system under consideration.

But, yes, the structure in the distribution of energy is what allows (or prevents) some process to occur.


But I'm not read up enough on information theory to be able to say how these two things relate. Just trying to lend a helping hand where I can.

I'm not sure what you mean by this — JJJJS

What came to mind for me was Gibb's Free Energy. -- I linked the section without all the mathematical whatzits because it seems more pertinent, one, and wikipedia is horrible for actually explaining this stuff, IMX. It's written by people wanting to show off their knowledge rather than transmit it :D.

Oftentimes what looks like a decrease in entropy for a given system (say, a body) is an increase in entropy for the universe.

The phenomena of life is like that. At least, so the story goes. I'd be all for reading something more precise than the hand-wavey (though admittedly readable) section on wikipedia.

What are some examples of masculine traits? — Roke

I think that's a tricky question -- not that I couldn't list things that come to mind, but I'd temper any such list by noting that traits are historically fluid. What counts as masculine changes depending on when, where, and who.

But, to use part of my little frame, I'd say that social impression (which, naturally, derives from my own upbringing and the particular sub-culture which that upbringing took place in) makes these sorts of traits masculine: Protective of the people you love, actively listen to your wife, earn enough money to support your family, make the first move in courtship, remain faithful to God, never give up, never complain, work hard

Some of these traits could been seen in the feminine as well. They are not mutually exclusive, per se (and I would say that my particular sub-culture is strongly structured around a binary of gender, where the two are treated very differently). But they are bound up in the identity as a man within this particular sub-group, rather than as bound up in a feminine identity. So it's not the traits, per se, which define the masculine and the feminine. In some sense identifying as a man is just as simple as that -- you are identified/identifiy within this particular gender, often but not exclusively bound up with sexuality, and finding what it means is actually a part of a journey (like a lot of parts of ones identity); there are general characteristics which we can talk about, but even within a particular category one is on a journey of discovery/creation of what it means to be said gender.

For those who agree with Marx and Freud do they believe that Popper's criteria of demarcation for deeming something unscientific wrong? — Purple Pond

Freud I can't speak to as well as Marx. But, yes, I believe that Popper's criteria of demarcation is wrong. There is no hard-line demarcation between metaphysical and scientific propositions, which was sort of what Popper was trying to get at -- not to deem metaphysics as useless or inferior, but simply to draw a line between what is properly scientific and properly philosophical. (after all, Popper held certain metaphysical theses to be true, if not scientifically supportable)

On to Marx -- I don't agree with his theory of history, at least in the robust sense. One can provide a Marxist historical analysis, but there are other theories for writing history too. It is not a science -- it's history, which is methodologically different from science.

Where I agree with Marx is in his analysis of capital as outlined in volume 1 of Kapital. It gets to the heart of some classical economic questions -- such as the origin of wealth -- better than its competitors.

While Marx is often offered as writing down the Newtonian Laws of economy, I would digress on that part. Marx was a modernist, through and through -- he thought that just as the motion of bodies could be explained by scientific analysis so too could the motion of social institutions. I don't rule these things out a priori, but I also don't think that there is a single social theory out there now which can claim to provide the same sort of precise predictions which physical theory provides.

So Marx overstates his case, IMO, largely because he was a product of his own time. But he still provides a meaningful explanation of how capitalism works, and the origin of economic value. By studying Marx we can gain an understanding of how economic institutions operate, what they are motivated by, how they generate wealth, and even economic collapse.

Why do people still hold on the these theories?

For Marx, at least, I'd say that it describes work-place politics better than any competing theory. I don't think it can stand alone, as I noted I don't think any social theory is as precise as physical theory. Other factors can come into play. But the base of institutional motivation in capitalism is well described by Marx.

It could not be global because change would be provoked by the crisis in capitalism, but this would only come about in advanced capitalist societies. — Londoner

Capitalism itself is a global phenomena. I think in that sense, at least, the aims were global. Capital would spread across the world, and the contradictions of capitalism would be its undoing on the global scale.

I think I'd prefer to proceed by way of example rather than definition. There is a frame from the comic book Watchmen that I rather like. It's been more than a minute since I've read that so I had to google the quote. https://coolpeppermint.wordpress.com/tag/watchmen/

“Thermodynamic miracles… events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.

Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold… that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

But…if me, my birth, if that’s a thermodynamic miracle… I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world! Yes. Anybody in the world.

But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget… I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away. Come…dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.”

In this sense of the word then I think it quite plausible to believe in miracles. The miraculous is something similar to the wounderous or that which inspires awe.

But I did vote "no", because there are other senses of the word. Rather than what is awe-inspiring miracles are acts of magic. Magic inspires awe, but so do non-magical events. Magic is a very interesting topic, in my opinion. Understanding magic is a way at understanding our collective sense of the world -- I won't marry a Pisces, because people born under that star sign have such and such qualities. I will fight this fight because I feel that fate is on my side tonight. I will work hard because it will pay off in the long run.

These are magical beliefs -- beliefs which have no reason outside of themselves. We can build large scaffolds of justification to hide the tenuous relationship to reality that they have -- look at astrology. But, at bottom, there is no factual reason to the belief. It can be based on any number of things -- feelings, traditions, preternatural knowledge, intuition, and so forth -- but these are all just names for beliefs without a factual basis. They are magic, where the words we repeat become and create the world.

I tried very hard to avoid anything religious in this definition. While the religious and the magical often do have an interconnection of sorts, I don't think that interconnection is necessary. I am an atheist, but I've known believers who were believers not because of magical thinking. I hope to lay all that aside for the purposes of your query.

And I haven't lain out sufficient and necessary conditions, exactly. My hope is that by way of example we can have a better understanding than the usual route wherein counter-examples are easy to come by.

And in this sense of the magical, rather than the wounderous or awe-inspiring, I'd have to say that I do not believe in miracles. I believe that the miraculous, in this particular sense, is the result of psychological phenomena -- mistaken beliefs and desire being the primary culprits of said psychological phenomena.

It depends on the communist. But if we go with what's most influential now, Karl Marx's communism was the end-goal of his revolutionary program. The states established along that revolutionary program only reached the stage of socialism (again, as defined by Marx -- since that word also depends on the socialist who uses it :D). Communism would be achieved after the state withered away. It's a social condition without either economic class or authoritarian state.

In some ways the end-goal of Marxists and Anarchists is very similar. Their main disagreement is with respect to methods.

That there is a text book non sequiter inference, as it stands. "Do unto others as you would have done unto you" does not just automatically lead one to just war theory. I didn't say it leads to extreme pacifism, either. What I said was it is silent on such matters.

I mean you may prefer just war theory... but if you can accept those terms, then I don't see how you would be able to dissent from the example I used earlier. It was a similarly loosy-goosey principle that can be interpreted in any number of ways, without it sounding quite so nice. And even then I don't see how, of all doctrines, just war theory somehow naturally flows from the golden rule. You'd have to, at the very least, argue the case.

Can you elaborate on what gender means to you? Expressions and impressions about what? Is my affinity for pinstripes part of my gender? — Roke

"Gender" means reference to an aspect of identity. Identity is both expressed and impressed upon us -- it is expressed socially and expressed to ourselves. It is impressed socially and also impressed by our self. So when a person expresses masculine traits to the world they are expressing an aspect of their gender which is an aspect of their identity. But they can also express these traits to themselves: reflecting upon how, as a man, they feel that....

And we are also impressed by others as well as ourselves. We are impressed, as men, to... ; we are impressed by our self to act as...

I think identity has this two by two aspect where it is expressed and impressed, and that expression is to others/self, where impressions is from others/self.

As to whether your affinity for pinstripes is part of your gender, I'd ask -- how do you feel about it?

I think of gender as having two sides of identity -- a social identity and a personal identity. They aren't stereotypes as much as they expressions and impressions; expressions to others and expressions to self, impressions from others and impressions from self. Depending on how fine we wish our gender categories to be we could actually generate numerous such groupings depending on how people express and are impressed upon by others and their self.

It's also a much more complex and bigger question than even triadic or quarternary designations really imply. Gender is an aspect of identity, and so is actually a topic worthy of study because of this complexity and our general ignorance of the phenomena. (that is, it's more than just how we use words, it's an actual phenomena that can be studied)

Alright. Well... then maybe let's just stick to the golden rule then. I don't think what you say communicates the golden rule, exactly, but if that's all you mean then cool.

The problem with the golden rule is that it doesn't tell you much -- it's a guide for people who are already predisposed to be decent people to follow. But it doesn't help in harder cases.

How does the golden rule deal with injustice? I think that's where it fails the most. If we are all already predisposed to be generally decent people and we follow the golden rule then a just state of affairs may come about (though it may not too -- since predisposition plus principle isn't enough to warrant action)

But we live in a world where that is not the case.

Further, we live in a world where there are multiple goods which various people follow and which conflict with one another. So the other failing of the golden rule is it does not adjudicate between actually lived conflicting principles. It doesn't tell us how to deal with enemies.

Person A wants to live. Person B wants person A to die. How do either person A or B can act so that the equality in treatment is preserved at all times? — Samuel Lacrampe

Person A treats B exactly as person A wants to do -- since A wants to live, A will defend themselves. Person B treats A exactly as person B wants to do -- since B wants A to die, B will try to kill A.

But they'll both be treating one another exactly as their desires dictate.

To preserve equality in treatment, if you treat others and yourself as you please only, then you would be forced to accept others to treat you, others, and themselves as they please only. — Samuel Lacrampe

Yup. I agree that the notion of equality posited here would lead to something along those lines.

But the two behaviours cannot co-exist mutually because what pleases you does not necessarily coincide with what pleases others. — Samuel Lacrampe

The principle of the matter can co-exist, though. If I and everyone treated everyone and themselves exactly as they pleased there is nothing contradictory in that. It's completely equitable in that everyone is treating people in the same manner. Whether we succeed is another matter altogether.

But I do not think that the principle is exactly a just one. Which is why I was thinking there would need to be more to justice than mere equality.

I think "diving in" is the best way. Find some topic you're particularly interested in, look up names of philosophers working on that topic, and have a go at some of the material.

If it's not interesting then it's not worth your time -- because interest is what's going to motivate you to keep going in the first place. But, if it is interesting to you then Plato is a great place to start, I think.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a favorite online resource, for me, because it makes it easy to find further work after giving a cursory introduction to some topic.

In this case, because you treat the victims as what pleases you; not them. — Samuel Lacrampe

If I treat everyone as some sort of means to whatever happens to please me, then everyone is treated by the same rule, and would at least count as equal treatment.

If I expected everyone else to follow that same rule, then it would even be a kind of rule which applied to me.

Methinks you need a more robust theory of justice.

Haha. Cool. Thinking is always good :D

Just don't worry about what I say, at least, about whatever somebody IMPORTANT said. I'm just interpreting the words that went through by head. You can say the same as long as you've read the words.

But at the end of the day if you have unique thoughts sometimes that's a lot better than arguing over interpretation. (though I do love arguments over interpretation) We're just some folks discussing some ideas.

So until Harry Hindu or someone else sets forth the alternatives that I haven't thought of, I am left with emergentism, but emergence from "brainy-bodies-in-environments". — unenlightened

Physics has the film 'in the can', but consciousness is watching and acting in that same film. Perhaps physics is missing something. — unenlightened

Maybe this is an issue of preaching to the choir... but I definitely feel that even all of science, from physics on up, is missing something. And I say that as a used-to-be scientific realist materialist type guy.

But I will speak against emergence, too. Maybe because of my history as a used-to-be, but I think I have arguments too. The problem with emergence, from my perspective, is that it suffers from all the same arguments against dualism. Emergence is a kind of answer to the main question of dualism, "How do these two substances relate?" -- but without a real answer other than "Well, this one makes the other one somehow". Maybe I'm being a bit of a pedant, but at this point at least I feel that's not too far off, when you strip away the linguistic maneuvers

To be honest I have flirted with dualism in the past -- both property and substance dualism -- but now-a-days I feel a real ignorance, and a sort of wonder about the problem of consciousness. I don't feel that my thoughts obstruct the facts anymore. But I don't know what to make of it all. I guess that's where I'm at on the problem of consciousness -- just in-between and not quite committed.

Again, the way I am describing things sounds a bit like inputs and outputs, and it is a bit misleading. Seeing the coffee cup is an action and drinking the coffee is a sensation, there are not really inputs and outputs that are different kinds, but everything is both and neither, everything is integral, in the same way that a response integrates the creative initiative with what is already there as provocation. — unenlightened

Good stuff.

I wonder if it sounds like inputs/outputs just because we are accustomed to that way of thinking. I agree that it is both and neither, though. It's not as if I don't react or invent because of the world about me, but it's also not as if I am a puppet to the world about me too. At least as far as consciousness is concerned.

But it may sound as if we are automatons just merely by the way we are trained to think.

***

I sort of wonder which way you're leaning. Nothing is conscious or everything is. Or there is this thing called consciousness and there is also the world.

I member, I present, I re-member, I re-present. All that is now, in the here and now. They are kinds of actions, though maybe a bit different from wielding a hammer.

Is consciousness the sort of thing (I hate to use the word "thing", but alas, English) which acts whether I am moving bodily or no? Just a thought.

I just want more order. — T Clark

Consider this: Most philosophers we study aren't what you'd call all on the same page, making one single project which coheres well together. So even words like "Metaphysics" is going to differ from philosopher to philosopher -- consider how Kant and Heidegger use the word. While there is a kind of resonance between what they're talking about, the essay What is Metaphysics? makes clear that they also have very different things in mind.

So as categorizers of a field of knowledge, historians of philosophy, the boundaries aren't going to be exactly crisp. A word is going to gain more or less prominence through different historical periods, and it's not going to be used exactly the same between philosophers even within the same period.

What's important for us is just to be clear what we mean -- we can set the rules within our conversation, and communicate that way.


So when you say...

For me it's not. The existence of procedural, foundational concepts that set the terms of all discussions is central to my idea of what philosophy is. I want to be able to talk about it. It's not fair!! Oops, where did that come from? — T Clark

I would say that you can set the terms of the discussion yourself. Other philosophers may disagree with you, and I can offer you what I tend to think about as a starting point, but in order to proceed all you need do is say "this is what I mean" -- and we can go from there to talk about the underpinnings of reason, or whether there are matters of fact vs. matters of preference, or if there is an objective reality.

Does that make sense?

I very much want there to be a place to go to discuss the underpinnings of reason. Where we can agree on the rules, or at least argue about the rules, before we start the substantive discussion. — T Clark

Sounds to me like epistemology. But it doesn't matter what we call it, I'd say. What's more important is the question you're asking.

Though, this being philosophy, discussing the underpinnings of reason might actually be a substantive discussion :D.

The closest thing we have to that place I can think of is what we call metaphysics. If that's not what metaphysics is, then what is it - seems to me it's just a junk drawer where we throw unrelated stuff we can't figure out how to resolve.

I don't think that's too far off. I tend to think of metaphysics as being about being, or being about ontology -- questions about what exists, if it exists, and if there is some characterization about what exists what that characterization is.

As a historical category It's a bit eclectic, but from there I'd say it's just a category for dividing up philosophy and understanding it as a whole -- not something to invest too deeply into, overall. Almost like it's not-epistemology, and it's not-ethics, so it's all the other philosophy stuff.

The actual question at hand is more important than what category it might fall into.


Like discussing the underpinnings of reason, for instance. That's an interesting discussion, to me.

So, anyway - Metaphysical questions cannot be addressed with yes or no answers. They’re not issues of right or wrong, what matters is usefulness. — T Clark

On the face this seems false, just considered in a historical way. So I guess I'd ask -- Why do you want metaphysics to be one way, and not another way?

It seems to me that "Metaphysics" is a name for a category of philosophy which includes such and such. The division I had introduced to me in class was between Metaphysics-Epistemology-Axiology, and those were the broad categories which philosophy fell within.

But here's a problem; I am not present to you. Everything I present to you in the previous paragraph is not me, but the model of me that forms part of the model of the world I am offering for you to use as you wish or chuck in the bin. So I am inscribing on this model, 'the model is not the world, the word is not the thing, I am not my post'. Lest I be accused of nonsense. — unenlightened

Interesting.

I'm playing a bit here. Not exactly sure where I'm going, but trying to actually relate too.

To go back to the mirror example, words are the light and the model is the image. We can share words and see the image in our own mind, but that's different from seeing you. I'd have to be in Wales for that, for starters.

So you might say that since you are not present to me -- or since I am not present to you -- or perhaps I should say that you can't see my images? -- we have these two aspects of experience which seem to operate on different parameters of time, and even physics, and even in terms of experiential access. Which is where we may draw our dualistic inference from, these two aspects of the brain/mind.



One way of uniting the two, if that indeed be your goal, is to de-emphasize their experiential aspects. While I can look at the marker on my desk and confirm that it's blue, and were you here you could do the same without me, you cannot access my thoughts in the same manner on whatever it is I happen to be imagining at the time. But perhaps these experiential moments or modes are less important than we have the tendency to give them credit for. What if these are actually just two sorts of "worlds" -- structures of experience, or structures of discourse, or even metaphysical realities -- which act in different ways of find some kind of unity (depends on what strategy we might take -- transcendental seems to correspond to structures of experience, phenomenological to discourse, and epistemological for metaphysical).

But then, those would also just be models to be shared between our own mirrors. The real would still be right there. And then you really do wonder if these two aspects actually have a relation to one another, as one seems bounded and the other unbounded.

She comes close to the famous scientific anti-realism of Bas van Fraassen, who is an anti-realist about entities, precisely because he believes that it's all just a case of organising and classifying our knowledge. But Cartwright's point is that if you pay attention to the peculiar status of laws, one can admit this without being an anti-realist about entities. — StreetlightX

Interesting thread!

How would you differentiate entities from theories?

I ask because, as an old hack of a chemist, it seems that positing entities were part and parcel to theory.


Also, how would this analysis fair when considering thermodynamics? I have in mind the 2nd law, in particular. It's extremely abstract, but doesn't really deal with entities as much (as I understand it), but does seem quite universal ((edit: I should use your terminology better. Not universal, but rather a cover-law)) in that it's often linked to the arrow of time.

I'll just give it the ol' "neat"

:D

Not much to contribute just yet, but cool to read.

I think we may just be in strong disagreement then. To get personal: I am a very independent person. I have strong attachments to who I am, and live my life in accordance to what I think. Even so I have had friends who know me better than I know me. Not that this is something you might need or feel. But I know my most trusted friends well, and they know me better than me. I listen to them because of that.

No, nobody knows what's best for us, including ourselves. — Agustino

If that is the case then "I know what's best for me" is false. No?

I don't think that we have to follow friends in all circumstances to make the argument that "I know what's best for me" is false.

Maybe we're just talking past one another, here, and making the same point.

But to make the fallacious "No true Scostman" argument -- a good friend knows you better than you know yourself.

Even if in some cases they don't. I wouldn't disagree with that -- we are all responsible for ourselves, at the end of the day. It's just that sometimes we take that responsibility as a justification for bad decisions, and we all make bad decisions with respect to ourselves. (Even with respect to our own self-defined end goals and desires)

Alright, what do you mean by justified? — PossibleAaran

I think there is a set of principles we can follow that makes justification work. And epistemology is the debate about which principles we choose. I remember that you and I -- we -- agree that seeming is one such principle. So if something seems that it is so, then we are justified in holding a belief. Intersubjective seemings -- as clunky as it sounds -- is another such principle. To go to science, experimental setup and communication of results from said setup is another justification. If it is widely accepted by others then we are justified in holding a belief.

There is a kind of hierarchy, I think, between the principles. Seeming is less than intersubjective seeming is less than experimental setup is less than widely accepted experimental setups. Maybe the hierarchy of justifications is another principle in the set?

I'm not entirely certain. Justification is the beast, IMO, of JTB theory of knowledge. (not that JTB is the end-all be-all. Far from it. It's just a good starting point that's nice to hash out)

:D

It is a deliciously fun comic. (thanks for the tip btw)

If we don't know what's best for ourselves (and we know more about ourselves than others in most regards, since we have been with us the whole time), then who does? — Agustino

Friends. A good friend knows you better than you know yourself.

It's false. :D

Not to be too trite: We all very often make choices which are against our best interests -- even 'best interest' as defined by our own self, and not some external standard. We aren't always self-defeating, but we are at times. We need others to put us back on the right path.

Or is the idea of a probable belief just so much nonsense put forward in a desperate attempt to stave off scepticisim? — PossibleAaran

That is what I believe. But I do not think the strategy of casting beliefs in terms of probability works.

Bayesian analysis of inference is bunk, as far as I'm concerned. It's just dressed up mathematical hoolabaloo -- it makes someone feel good about inference, while at the same time not really looking like inference in practice. One can use Bayesian analysis, but that's very different from inference -- one uses Bayesian analysis because inference has already taken place, and one desires to have some sort of mathematical model after that fact.

Beliefs are true, false, or neither. We are justified in holding a belief, or we are not. There is no percentage roll that makes a belief more or less justified. It simply is, or isn't.

I wish i knew how to import the pictures from this comic onto our threads... alas, I am a failure.


BUT

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9

seems apropos

Do we need a philosophy? — Philosopher

Yes and no.

In some sense the questions of philosophy are inescapable -- people answer them on the daily in their practical lives, even if they never engage with the practice of philosophy. We all act on beliefs about the minds of others, the nature of the world, how we know something, and what is good.

And, no, we don't need to reflect on our beliefs. We can get along alright enough without asking questions of our beliefs or examining them.

What philosophical questions are you interested in and why?

Right now my mind has been redirected to interpretations of Kant, cuz of a thread on here.

I'm also interested in the ontology of social entities, and the nature of love.

Do you think everyone can call himself a philosopher?

Not really. It seems weird to me to say everyone is a philosopher, in the same way that it's weird to say that everyone is a runner -- we can all do it, some better than others, but that doesn't mean we are defined by that particular potential.

I don't feel comfortable calling myself a philosopher, for instance. It just seems kind of weird, even if I've written some philosophical pieces. I'm a student of philosophy, but not sure about philosopher.

Again your argument here is against some perceived fault in another choice. (and I agree with @darthbarracuda as well)

But what motivates the point you've chosen? How is it not arbitrary?

FWIW, I'm comfortable with abortion being legal up to the point of birth. But I don't pretend that my comfort level is somehow superior based upon either biological facts or metaphysical argument. It, too, is a line in the sand arrived at by weighing the various arguments and positions.

Yearp. Sincere use of "Cultural Marxism" makes me pause and wonder about who I'm talking to -- not by necessity, since sometimes people just pick up words and don't realize their historical use, just makes me pay closer attention to see if there are other symbols of Nazi sympathy.

The Frankfurt school doesn't really fit, at least as self-defined. Not sure I know anyone who would call the Frankfurt school "cultural Marxists' who is in any way sympathetic to their writing.

Based on the poll that just went up, it caused me to wonder if post-birth "abortions" would be considered a legitimate view point. Does the difference of a few minutes, the duration of the delivery, really change the argument made by some people here? — Sydasis

Not in the least.

There simply is no point-like time which you'll find in the continuum of development where some life will be significantly different before, and after.

But we desire such a time -- we often desire to be able to say that this is right, and that is wrong.

But the facts don't fit our desires. And as such any point chosen will be a line in the sand based upon vague notions of rightness and wrongness -- in discussions like these, from the abstract, and in the moment of decision, the various factors of concern.

I think that we're trying to get at the same thing, here. The way I read you at least.

The OP argues against various positions, but never argues for theirs.

I mean... if we're going to rely upon scientific fact alone then why not?

There's certainly more being imported into assertions here than mere scientific fact. The similarity isn't completely out there. But if we believe in more than mere facts, like most people, then.... maybe it is. But it is also not quite right to then claim that you're being "purely scientific" or "biological"