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?

I wasn't making a statement about our universe, you asked me for a scenario in which something would be true. It's a hypothetical to answer your question. — flannel jesus

Mkay.

But qm is only a counter example depending on interpretation - you brought up many worlds, many worlds is deterministic — flannel jesus

Wouldn't we be able to ask "Why am I in universe 1 rather than universe 2?"

?

Is there an answer to that question in the many-worlds interpretation?

Adorno said that whatever concepts Husserl came up with, from start to finish it was all so much idealist and reified paraphernalia (he took him seriously though, so I don't want to suggest a dismissive attitude on Adorno's part). — Jamal

:D

I'll cap it there for tonight. I can't say either way, but the idea makes me smile cuz it makes sense -- tho I suspect I could find a point of disagreement along the way.

Given what we're reading -- I can excuse it because Husserl was before Auschwitz, and even suffered due to a certain H. turning him into the Nazi party.

I poke fun at Husserl cuz I get irritated with him, but I ought not cuz any of us who take modern phenomenology seriously owe a debt to him.

:rofl:

Have there been no advances in philosophy or logic in the last two thousand years? — Banno

Philosophy is footnotes to Aristotle?

:D

I get that feeling at times -- tho I disagree with it of course.

Later phenomenology did drop the former and went with the latter, along with sociality and embodiment. — Jamal

So later phenomenology decided to be right rather than wrong, got it. :naughty:

And jokes.

Ah, okay. That makes sense. I totally thought of this bit from John Mulaney. :grin: — Leontiskos

LMAO at the bit. First time hearing it, and I got a good gut laugh out of it.

So do you criticize your parents' beliefs? Mormonism is very interesting given its wholecloth nature, as you point out. — Leontiskos

Naw.

No point in doing so when they live out their beliefs, I think. They are genuine believers and good people -- I know it's false, but what does that matter?

So do you pretend to believe when you are with your family? I'm trying to understand what you mean by falling into an in-between. — Leontiskos

O no. My fam knows.

"In-between" in the sense that my folks believe, and I see how my beliefs are tied to that tradition -- it's not like I was born out of nothing -- but I can criticize these beliefs even though they give meaning to people I care about.

"In-between" may not be the best expression. I mostly was inspired to respond because it's easy for me to speak to a person who believes in the supposed golden plates :D

If someone has found meaning in John Smith's interpretation of gold plates stumbled upon supposedly in the Adirondack for example, and he has full buy in to all that due to his upbringing, why would I suggest it's bullshit? That i don't get. — Hanover

This is where I fall into an in-between -- I reject it because I was brought up to believe in it, and yet I don't reject my folks belief. I don't care if they find comfort in it, but I do care that they feel discomfort in my lack of belief. (And "lack of belief" in mormanism indicates various rituals and such -- it's not just what you say at times, but a communal religion, for better or worse)

What that has to do with the OP? I'm not sure cuz it was only your mention of my origins that spurred me on to post.

I started looking but forget where I read it -- Adorno said something about how philosophy is all about seeing the obvious in different ways, so that what is obvious has different conclusions based upon how we think about the obvious.

I only kinda get it cuz of my background interests and reading. I liked this bit that I don't remember where it was at cuz it made lots of sense to me -- philosophy often delves into the obvious and sometimes looks pedantic, while there is a point we miss.

Damn your eyes. — Banno

I, for one, am happy to draw you back into Adorno. :D

M'kay.

I agree that there's no particular reason for the physical constants or starting conditions of the universe.

I don't know why you'd claim our particular universe evolves deterministically when we have QM as an obvious counter-example to the various examples we'd be tempted to invoke. There is at least one natural phenomena, according to science, which does not behave according to the relationship of necessity between events.

How do you arrive at a belief that the universe we happen to live in is deterministic? Much more how to make it an obvious belief?

That the world has a meaning can't now be maintained, — Jamal

This is a theme I'm enjoying throughout -- not an assumption so much, but a Background belief that need not be demonstrated at all. I'm enjoying it because it's what I feel and I don't run into many deep thinkers who feel the same.

Yeah, I haven't got to the bottom of it yet. What's cool about it though is that it looks a lot like the linguistic analysis I've seen in ordinary language philosophy, like that of Austin and Ryle. — Jamal

Yeh! It's a very cool passage -- which is why I highlighted it, and gave the best guess interpretation I could give.

I'm glad you gave a structure for the lecture cuz I was thinking of doing the same, with numbers and summaries, and yours looks about right to me

Suits me :smile: — Jamal

Me too :smile: -- imagine a world where what you do for the economy doesn't define your entire existence. I like that imaginary.

Excellent summary. My thoughts are still so scatterbrained I appreciate these synopses.

One question: if emancipation is the realization of philosophy, does that mean there will be no more philosophy? — Jamal

If we take Marx as an Orthodox sage --

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

It seems that even in communist society there's a time for those who wish to critique, but one need not become a philosopher.

Electron can be spin up or spin down. We measure it down. Why was it down? "Because it could be up or down". That's cool, but why was it down? — flannel jesus

Suppose the many-worlds interpretation -- is "It was down because you're in the down-electron universe, whereas another version of you is in the up-electron universe" a sufficient explanation?




Cool. I don't agree for reasons I already stated, but ultimately that's just a battle of terminology. I can go along with the notion that the PSR implies determinism.

How then, using this terminology, does determinism not imply the PSR? What is the deterministic scenario in which the PSR is false?

the singular nature of the end result. I want to know why one thing happened, if your explanation doesn't tell me exactly why this one thing happened, then it doesn't seem sufficient, right? — flannel jesus

I guess it'd depend upon what you want out of your sufficiency.

I'm inclined to say that if the probability distribution of an event is consistent between tokens of said event then there's still a "singular nature of the end result" -- it's just that it's a probability distribution which is neither 1 or 0.

I also think that while we like to know a relationship such that A necessitates B, this is only because we like to control nature and such relationships enable us to do so. But nature need not conform to our desires, and we have to be open to that possibility.

But I can imagine a consistent way to believe the PSR while accepting that possibility -- namely since we are already allowing causes into our ontology we need only say there are at least two kinds of causes, and note the logical relationships which differentiate the kinds (necessity between A->B, or a necessary probability between A->B/C)

Going back over LND5 I'm thinking I'm sympathetic to Adorno's take on theory/practice -- I certainly agree that "practice" can become a kind of fetish, and even anti-intellectual. Concepts -- theory -- are an important part of practice, and thinking is itself a practice.

LND6 was a wild ride. I found myself agreeing with him on Heidegger, and his distinction between two bad poles of philosophy that feed on one another -- the formal and the arbitrary -- is very interesting.

Philosophy always deals in concepts, and it is for this reason that the philosopher is easily tempted to cut out what philosophy is supposedly about -- the ever changing world, the "content", the "referent".


The paragraph which talks about Hegel's move I don't think I'm fully following. Hegel makes an inference , or an equivocation, in moving from "the indeterminate" to "indeterminateness":

However, when Hegel substitutes ‘indeterminateness’ for this, the concept, namely, thethe w absence of
determinateness as such takes the place of what is undetermined – through what Kant would have called a ‘subreption’, that is, a misrepresentation. The purely linguistic slippage from ‘the indeterminate’,
the term that denotes what is underlying, to indeterminateness is itself the turn to the concept.

"The turn to the concept" -- I'm not sure I'm understanding. My first guess is that Hegel is moving from "the indeterminate", a concept about the concept "indeterminateness", and the linguistic move is his phenomenology from the concept of the concept to the concept itself. And Kant would call this move illegitimate, but that's kind of the whole rift between Kantian and Hegelian epistemology -- For Hegel terra incognita can be uncovered, and there is no separation between concepts and objects, not even in a parallel-functional operation of a pure-understanding/pure-intuition, where "intuition" is counted as part of the mind but is still the "object" which comes to justify concepts with respect to scientific knowledge.

What are the reasons that you find satisfactory, and why? What is it about necessity between events -- ball A causes ball B to move in such and such a direction -- that is more satisfactory than the stochastic description -- photon A causes electron B to be in the first or second energy state at such-and-such a probability?

Suppose the case with a quarter -- why did you see heads this time and not tails? Well, because 50% of the time you will see that and 50% of the time you won't, and this is only one time so you had to see one or the other.

I think insofar that such explanations don't amount to "Just because" then they could still count as good enough for the PSR, but not good enough for determinism. So perhaps an explanation for stochastic events is that there are two kinds of events, deterministic and stochastic. So insofar that we are willing to accept that there is such a thing as metaphysical cause at all it seems that the hard commitment is already done with -- it's easy enough to suppose that there could be two kinds of causes, to my mind.

But then this wouldn't be a brute fact if we are following along with the PSR -- perhaps it's a regulative fact, though there's some further reason why our explanation ends with causation -- like we cannot comprehend events outside of the structure of causation, for instance. That doesn't mean there are no such events, only that we wouldn't be able to comprehend them, and this is why explanation must terminate in cause -- see how this satisfies the notion that everything has a reason, even if that reason is not a cause?

It's a Be-cause, but not a metaphysical cause.

Does it pop out of nothing anymore than the belief that A necessitates B pops out of nothing? Is there a cause for the necessary connection between causes, and so forth on back? Or does explanation eventually end, and we can still be rational for all that?

I imagine that the explanation is unsatisfactory, generally speaking, but we'd reach for it in the event that we have reason to believe such-and-such a kind of event is, in fact and not just because of how we calculate things, stochastic.

So if we simply accepted "Self-caused" for all events then that's deeply unsatisfactory, and there I'd say yeah pretty much amounts to denying what the proponent of the PSR is wanting to say.

But given the difficulties there are in claiming quantum events being deterministic that seems to me the most obvious example that we'd reach for. Why did it cause itself? For the same reason that A necessitates B -- that's just how it works.

In a way the explanation in operation in both cases, be it deterministic or stochastic, is an appeal to an events being -- the kind of being it is is what explains how it behaves. Deterministic events necessitate, and stochastic ones do not, and the PSR could be taken as a regulative rather than factual principle whereby the termination of thought into self-caused events is acknowledged as unsatisfactory, and so be on the lookout to see if we missed something after all.

"The conditions were sufficient for this thing to happen, but it didn't happen anyway"... Maybe I'm misunderstanding what sufficient means, but it doesn't seem like that's how sufficient works. — flannel jesus

In the case of a stochastic event I'd imagine we have to say "The conditions were sufficient for 50%A/50%B, and we observed A this time" -- or B. And then, if truly stochastic, you'd predict that with repeated measurements of the same system-event you'd begin to see the distribution emerge, whatever distribution that happened to be for that phenomena.

↪Moliere if everything has an explanation, but determinism is not true, the problem for me is, where's the explanation for the undetermined event? — flannel jesus

Isn't "That's a self-caused event" a sufficient explanation for an uncaused event? Or "These events are the stochastic events"?

Wouldn't that just mean that insofar that determinism is true there is a/(some version of the) PSR must be true, namely, the one wherein reasons are causes and there are no other explanations worth considering with respect to the PSR, or something like that.

I think I'd be more inclined to accept the inference from determinism to the PSR than the inference from the PSR to determinism just because reasons and causes need not be one and the same, so it seems obvious to me that one can hold that everything has an explanation without everything having a cause.