* That thread was more appropriate to that forum than to this one. This forum struggles more with skepticism than certainty. — Leontiskos

On the contrary, I'd say the forum is not skeptical enough. ;)

I love this theory of Rock 'n Roll. Just the idea of digging down into the conceptual bits -- it's some good aesthetic reflection, which is rare to come across.

(Should I wait and allow people to catch up? Should we set a schedule from now on?) — Jamal

I plan on catching up tomorrow. So far lack of schedule has worked for me, but if you'd feel better with it I'm not opposed either.

No, not in the least.

I don't believe in essences, so I have to pick up someone else's beliefs in essences just to make sense of the notion. If his essentialism isn't the one being advocated for then by all means the example is off topic.

But then are we talking in terms of Kripke's essentialism? In which case what I've said ought to make sense -- if water is H2O then water is necessarily H2O a posteriori. I can go that far.

But that a posteriori bit is important, after all. It means that we discovered a necessary relationship between terms after the fact -- so before the fact (or perhaps later when we use a new way of talking about matter the necessity de-emphasizes) there was nothing to say there was an essence in the first place.

I'm using Aristotle because he's an essentialist, and his notion of essence seems to be the sort of thing essentialist have in mind -- so rather than setting up a character, The Essentialist, I'm using an essentialist to help clarify just what essentialism is.

If what Aristotle believed doesn't pertain to essentialism, then what's the difference between yourself and Aristotle's "essence"?

1. The essentialist would be likely to say that water is H2O (or that water is always H2O).
2. Water was not H2O before 19th century chemistry.
3. "Water" nor "H2O" "pick out" what water or H2O is. — Leontiskos

Er, but how are you disagreeing?

Again:

(2) does not contest (1); instead it contests (1a). And (3) does not contest (1); instead it contests (1b).
— Leontiskos

So:

P1. (2) does not contradict (1)
P2. (2) contradicts (1a)
P3. (3) does not contradict (1)
P4. (3) contradicts (1b)

If you disagree, then assign truth values to P1-P4. Be clear about what you are saying. If you say you disagree then apparently at least one of the truth values must be false. — Leontiskos

P1 is False. 2 counters the claim that water was always H2O -- in Aristotle's time, water was not H2O. Aristotle in particular stood against Democritus, so we even have reason to believe Aristotle would oppose the belief that water is always H2O. That's an atomistic belief.

De dicto, note. Not De re.

I understand that it was Cavendish, not Lavoisier, who first identified water as a compound (through experiments around 1781), though Lavoisier's chemical revolution helped fix the conceptual framework. — Banno

Yes, I stand corrected.

It occurred to me on looking again that there are two readings of what you wrote - the de re and the de dicto. The sentence ‘Water is H₂O’ was not something people could assert or know before Cavendish; the term "water" did not yet rigidly refer to H₂O. So if you were saying that the word "water" could not be used to refer to H₂O before Cavendish announced his work, I agree. — Banno

Yes! Bingo! de dicto is what I mean --

However, if the assertion is that prior to Cavendish's announcement, the chemical structure of water was not H₂O, it is I think in error. — Banno

There's a sense in which we can entertain the idea that matter itself changed, but I think it's an erroneous inference -- even if it were true there'd be no way for us to make that inference because we don't live in that time. We live in now. And what seems most consistent is that nature hasn't changed all that very much from then to now, in the sense that there are fewer hoops to jump through mentally to make an inference.

Note, though, that none of this is scientific. It'd be impossible to determine, scientifically, if the meaning of "water" in Aristotle's time excluded H2O as a possibility, which is where I think the sympathetic readings of Aristotle get headway: broadly accepting an Aristotelian framework while changing the details to match what we know now in a scientific spirit.

For myself I'd say that Aristotle is not a scientist in the modern sense -- this isn't to speak against his work as a scholar, only to note that first guesses will often be inadequate, even if they hold a certain spell to them. What's atractive in Aristotle is how it all seems to fit together into a harmonious whole -- but this is a siren's song more than a mark of wisdom, if you ask me.

It's entrancing, but doesn't really look like the world I see now. And I'm not sure how the methods of metaphysics in Aristotle are somehow better than latter methods of metaphysics -- it seems to me that this is very much in the realm of philosophy and philosophy alone, where the science is a grab-bag for examples of reflection, but not philosophy itself.

This to go back to my point with @Richard B -- that philosophy is not using science to give itself credibility, and it has no need to do so.

There's all sorts of complexities here. The foremost is that Kripke's "Water=H₂O" is intended only for extensional contexts. While Aristotle presumably believed fish live water, he doubtless did not believe that they live in H₂O.

We should head back to the topic at hand, which is "what is real". The idea seems to be that there is an essence, a "what makes a thing what it is", and that this is of use in deciding what is real and what isn't. Along with this goes the view that there really is a difference between what is real and what is not real, such that for any x, the question "is x real" has a firm "yes" or no"no" answer.

I think that view is mistaken, for reasons I gave earlier. And I think that view is quite common amongst philosophers - at least those who are alive. — Banno

We're in agreement here, for the most part and for what's worthwhile in the thread as points of contention.

there's a grab-bag of entities which don't have as firm an answer as we'd like -- dreams, halucinations, mistaken worldviews, historical counter-factuals, hypothetical examples...

We could certainly stipulate answers, though I tend to think "X is real" sounds like "X exists", and I'm still fairly well persuaded by Kant on that -- that there is no difference between the imagined unicorn and the real unicorn in terms of its predicates. The old "existence is not a predicate" thing, which isn't strictly true but it gets at something important about making inferences about existence -- in a lot of ways we treat reality like it's given. If whatever we conceptually designate as "the given" matches our conceptions of "the given" then we are inclined to say such and such exists.

Or to go along with Quine -- to be is to be the value of a variable. So it's not a predicate, but a quantifier over predicates. (EDIT: Or individuals? "Over" loosely meant)

Both seem to handle inferences about existence better than positing an essence, to my mind. Which part of water are we to call its essential part, after all? As you note, in Aristotle, the essential part was not that it is H2O. So why the switch? What makes this description a better example of essence, or is it at all?

But here are those amongst us who, bathing in the light of Plato and Aristotle, seek to reinvigorate metaphysics by bringing back the "what makes a thing what it is" version of essence. And that's pretty much were the argument here stands. — Banno

Funnily enough I kind of welcome the resurgence, as long as we take the historical approach. They really do have valuable things to offer a thinking mind, and points of comparison between ancient and modern science are deeply illuminating on the practice of producing knowledge.

It's their difference that I value, above all. I don't care of its true! :D

I'll leave this now, although I might come back to it and talk about water again.

Cheers.

Cheers!

That seem quite mistaken. And on either account of essence. — Banno

The only thing that comes to mind is that I'm anti-essence. But I'm glad to see that I've said false things cuz that's what leads to new thoughts.

I'm certain that your perspective is perfect for a counter-balance to mine, though.

On the other side of things, I like to mention proton-pumps -- proton transfer is a big part of biochem, and the reason they work is cuz of quantum properties -- this event may not have transferred the proton, but the next one may not or will, and so on. The probability distribution of position/momentum is what makes the transfer happen.

(This especially with respect to the notion that D2O is H2O -- the extra weight of that neutron is what makes it deadly to us)

Heh, I wasn't, so thanks for highlighting what I ought focus on when I'm in the mood to focus fr fr.

I actually think you've ignored that sort of question over and over throughout this conversation. You are ignoring requests for clarity. — Leontiskos

M'kay.

I'll focus on those, though not today. I've been responding with my first thoughts rather than digging in. Sorry if that's distracting.

I think the essentialist would tend to say the concept of fire (the understanding in the mind actualized by fire being experienced through the senses) stays the same, but our intentions towards it are clarified. Fire hasn't changed, but our intellects have become more adequate to it, and towards its relationship with other things. The identity of water as H2O clarifies a whole host of relations between water and other things (the way water acts in the world), and it is through those interactions that things are epistemically accessible at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fair.

Tho this gets a bit into some of my disagreements -- an essentialist has to have an idea of mind? Intentions, actualized understanding, experience through the senses?

A Jedi craves not these things. ;)

I suppose one challenge to the essentialist lies in pursuing the primacy of interaction into something like a process metaphysics, dissolving the thing-ness (substance) of water into processes. Yet this has its own difficulties. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeh, I'm not so keen on process metaphysics, though I ought to be given my stances.

What can I say? I just live in a world of confusion and questions. :D

Why? Klima's whole point is that what Lavoisier & co. discovered does not falsify what came before. That Lavoisier understood water better than Aristotle does not mean Aristotle had no understanding of water, or that Aristotle's understanding of water was false. — Leontiskos

Because Aristotle believed water to have a teleology which put it above Earth, and air above water, and fire above air. The reason water goes where it goes is because it's supposed to be -- it wants -- to sit atop earth.

At the time I think that's pretty much true -- how else to distinguish why the ocean sits on top of the land and we breath what's above the water and see the fire in the sky?

I agree that Lavoisier did not falsify Aristotle. I just don't think there's a better or worse understanding of water with respect to historical thinkers.

Today we'd say that Lavoisier had a "better" understanding than Aristotle, but tomorrow we may say the opposite if we find out teleology was right after all.

I disagree, but also I don't think it matters that I disagree because I clearly put them forward thinking them convincing :D

When they are not.

1a. The essentialist would say that the term “water” signified H2O before 19th century chemistry. — Leontiskos

I don't think that's what the essentialist would claim -- but I would claim that water was not H2O before Lavoisier. But this is a claim about meanings and how we understand things rather than the world. The essentialist would agree with me there, and the disagreement would be about true reference -- that when Aristotle described water without use of H2O he said true things about water which are no longer true today.

I like the example of a quarter because it takes it out of the realm of abstract science and into the realm of our everyday understanding.

I'd use Yahtzee and Pachinko interchangeably with that example.

All of them can be interpreted as being in a deterministic world -- where this very coin flip must be heads -- but that interpretation, so I think, is beyond our ability to judge things true or false.

Rather, we have some macroscopic events which behave in accord with probability. And also some microscopic ones that surprised us along the way.

Heh, maybe.

I don't think I'd be wise enough to be able to tell if indeterminism comes after determinism, or elsewise.

What I know is that you have to perform the experiment in order to find out the outcome -- much like a quarter.

There's no question it's deterministic — flannel jesus

Well, I for one have a question -- namely that it uses probablity and you have to do the experiment to find out which "world" you happen to be in.

I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation. No infinite worlds, but simply a probability in one world. But probability throws a wrench into the notion that every event is connected by necessity -- which is what I think of when I think of determinism.

If it's not relying upon the science then apparently Kripke would have made the exact same argument in 1700, before the science had occurred. Is that your claim? — Leontiskos

Seems a bit outlandish, so I certainly couldn't claim that.

But I'd put it in historicist terms -- we can imagine Kripke being transplanted to another time with different concepts being taken seriously, but really we couldn't claim what he'd claim at that time at all. He was in his time, and made the claims he did in his time.

Hrmm... if so then I've done so without meaning to.

I'm still committed to essentialism being 1.

1. The essentialist would be likely to say that water is H2O (or that water is always H2O). — Leontiskos

And I'd attribute a misunderstanding on my part of what you're looking for -- I thought I was cogently arguing for my point rather than it having three different meanings.

this conservation isn't about if its true. You expressed confusion about why people think many worlds is deterministic. Regardless of if it's true or not, you can hopefully be able to gain an understanding of why it's a deterministic world view. — flannel jesus

OK, got it.

I thought you were claiming it rather than saying there's a possible interpretation of the equation such that determinism is true.

It says it, but how do we know it's true?

Have you googled if it's deterministic? What does a bit of googling tell you? — flannel jesus

Heh, no. In school I solved the Schrodinger equation in the one and only case that it's analytic as an exercise -- one proton and one electron.

So rather than googling I'm drawing upon my studies from whenever ago. (and it might sound impressive, but really it's just a partial differential equation -- so if you know them maths you can solve it too)

a deterministic function is a function that gives the same output given the same input — flannel jesus

If so then sure it's deterministic, but with a probablistic mathematics which makes it such that you cannot tell what will necessarily happen.

Well, here the "is" is open to interpretation. D2O isn't called water; it's called heavy water, which is meant to remind us of the family connection with what we do call water. We can, and do, also call it deuterium, with no reference to "water" at all. The Kripkean approach is, I think, intended to help us distinguish between which "is" questions are about essences, or properties like "potability," and which are about uses of words. Another way of saying this: — J

Huh, that's interesting.

I'd be inclined to say "potability" is, in large parts, what people mean by "water", though not always. In a way this is just a choice on how to use "water", from my perspective. We can include D2O or exclude D2O insofar that we understand one another.

Which might put a spanner into Kripke. Point 1 about how "if water is H2O" -- it's not, if we include D2O, for instance. Unless we say that D2O is just a name for a variant of water, and it has 2 hydrogen molecules after all, with a little extra.

The Schrodinger equation is not deterministic, by my understanding -- unless probability distributions as events are somehow deterministic, but that seems to go against anything I understand of determinism.

You understand that the Schrödinger equation is deterministic tight? And that many worlds is just the idea that the Schrödinger equation continues to evolve the wave function with no collapse? — flannel jesus

I understand that it's not deterministic, but that's probably contributing to our misunderstandings.

Well, you can't, you see -- that's what I'm getting at. We can say these things, but there's no way of telling which is what -- why am I in the up and not the down universe? -- so the ontology is exploded beyond our ability to judge.

It's a point about how there are a posteriori necessary truths -- it doesn't say that water is H2O; it's not relying upon the science for its point. Only if water is H2O then it is necessarily H2O, and this was a process of discovery from terms we previously would not have associated with H2O.

I think I'd push against the notion that D2O is water, after all, because it's not potable. Basically the "D" is a lot more different from "H" even though the only difference is the addition of a neutron.

I don't think he hopes to apply it to reality as much as he's making a point about logic.

It's a subtle point, but he wasn't talking about reality as much as how we talk about reality -- logic.

The claim that "water is H2O" is not some philosophical conspiracy theory. — Leontiskos

To be fair to -- I didn't think he was claiming a conspiracy theory as much as thinking that philosophers make this claim because scientists have made this claim for a long time and they do it to bolster themselves with science.

I don't think this is a good way to do philosophy, or what most people do in philosophy -- but he wasn't claiming a conspiracy theory as much as speaking a false assumption.

I (mostly) agree.

the last bit I disagree with. Where you say:

This whole idea “Water is H2O” is a sorry attempt by particular philosophers to gain some credibility from science to demonstrate how their theories have some sort of application to reality. — Richard B

I don't think that's true, because philosophers have no need of gaining credibility from the sciences -- except where the sciences are valorized and we must make proposals to say why our work will cure cancer, or whatever.

Where I agree -- "Water is H2O" is false in the strict sense, as you've noted -- it has various other chemicals in it and yet is still water.

If it's a strawman then I must do the reading until I respond for reals.

Given my commitments I'm not doing it anytime soon, but I'll stop responding as if I know something since I haven't done the reading.

Just brushing over the last 3 pages: Modern science can be integrated into the Aristotelian framework, of course.

I'm still sensing the same transcendental error though: interpreting others such that they have to mean "x" (in this case x = essence) because else they'd fall into incoherence, and here are the reasons why they really mean "x".

I can certainly see the Aristotle in our modern science, especially if I'm giving the with-the-grain interpretations of Aristotle.

But...

So water was not H2O before chemistry became popular? — Leontiskos

Yes, that's what I think. "water" nor "H2O" -- to use a phrase from your paper that I've only glanced at -- "pick out" what water or H2O is.

Specifically, if you disagree, then when will water not be H2O? — Leontiskos

When we don't have that level of description -- namely, before chemistry became popular. In Aristotle "water" does not mean H2O, for example -- it's just one of the five elements.

I've started to think that Plato's ironic stance on philosophy is more correct than Aristotle's scientific stance, tho. In scientific terms I'd only be able to say that water will not be H2O if we manage to find another way to cut nature up that's more useful than the periodic table.

Are you sure that's the answer? Doesn't that pre suppose that you have some kind of pre-existent identity with which to flip heads? — flannel jesus

I don't think so -- and obviously the stochastic process is more complex than flipping a quarter -- but I do think that I'm me and not you simply cuz that's how the world evolved, in the same manner that a quarter can be heads or tails before you flip, but after you have a determined token.

The universe in which you're you and I'm me is identical to the universe in which I'm you and you're me - so identical in fact that I posit it's most likely correct to say that the very concept that I could be you and you could be me is probably incoherent. — flannel jesus

Why would we believe this? It seems to me that there's a very salient difference between those universes -- namely that I'd be typing what you've been typing, and vice-versa.

Cool. I'll be honest in saying I don't think I'll be reading these anytime soon, but she looks interesting to me -- I like the notion that the medievals are good or better in various ways, I'm only skeptical because I think the attraction is a Romantic one: for a time that never was.

I think I can characterize what is meant by an essence, which is why I'm anti-essentialist -- I'm against this particular rendition and various other possible renditions that basically fit. I'd say "essence" is what makes an entity what it is: water can be wet or solid, but it will always be H2O, for instance.

Nutty TPFers like to inveigh against essences, but they are all essentialists. They log off and immediately start talking about dogs, trees, cars, water, etc. — Leontiskos

:D

Sounds to me like a transcendental error -- if they speak in this way, with nouns and such and believe it's true, then they must believe in essences even while proclaiming that they do not.

Aristotle was forging something which was in competition with the theories of other ancient philosophers. — Leontiskos

He was, true. His philosophy is a deep and original contribution to the practice, even with our ability to read him only through his lecture notes.

That's an indexical problem. The answer to that is not a problem for many worlds, it's a problem for ANY multi-consciouness existence, even if many worlds is not true. Why are you you and not me? If you can answer that question coherently, you can also answer why you're this version of you in MWI and not some other version of you. — flannel jesus

I'm me and not you cuz there was a percentage chance I was you, and a percentage chance I was me -- and I just happened to flip heads.

we're not talking about if many worlds is true or not, just what the consequences of it would be and why it's considered deterministic. Right? You can understand why many worlds is deterministic separately from questioning if it's true or not. — flannel jesus

You may be able to, but I cannot understand why Many Worlds is deterministic for the reason I said -- why am I in the up-world and not the down-world? What is the deterministic law that makes it such that I experience this world I am in?

We can make up one, but our experience is such that we get a probability distribution -- we might be in the up- or down- world, but we have to perform the experiment to see which we're in.

And if we're in the up-world, what does positing a down-world we're not a part of do? Doesn't that explode our ontology beyond our ability to judge true or false? There may be a left-world, for instance, but we have only observed up- and down- quarks.

Heh. I suppose we just see probability differently then -- your dice example reminded me of my quarter example, but whereas you want many worlds to explain the actual results I'd just say that this is the nature of dice, quarters, or other trivia wanting more explanation than we are warranted in believing.

I'm not sure -- but I am certain that analogies between computer programs and reality are basically misleading, at least in our day and age.

More directly: I don't think any of the executions of a program are deterministic, but are manufactured such that they appear, or are mostly, deterministic.

So my skepticism of determinism, more than the PSR, is my motivation here.

After all, it does the same thing every time. — flannel jesus

"does the same thing every time" isn't what I said with respect to different kinds of events.

I think it's a bit silly, but in the same way my question about universe 1/2 is silly. Not bad or wrong but a bit outlandish, is all I mean there.


I'm struggling to see how many-worlds can be interpreted as deterministic, but again it seems like we're coming back to terminology in the first place.

To wrap back around to your OP:

There seems to be a common intuition, but not a universal one, that the Principle of Sufficient Reason, if it were true, would imply Determinism is also true. — flannel jesus

Where do you fall on the question?