I totally agree, and we are not going to achieve that goal arguing about what a holy book says because all of them are mythology and not scientific thinking. The difference is an important matter of logic. This is about fast and slow thinking. About believing it is God's truth without question, or questioning everything and not being so sure of what we think we know. A moral as a matter of cause and effect is not religious thinking but along the line of scientific logic. That is how to know truth. — Athena

:ok:

I don't know about Christianity but for judgement we need sound moral criteria and that's exactly what's missing or is highly controversial at the moment.

You've begged the question. It being the case that E is either true or false assumes that there are absolute eternal facts (ie E must be either true or false). Without that assumption you cannot have the premise that E must be either true or false, E might be true sometimes but false others. — Isaac

All I can say in response is the finite can't grasp the infinite.

And in the eternal scheme of life these fictive aspects may be just as important as any real objective facts — Jack Cummins

You maybe onto something there...

It seems I have no choice but to agree with you. However...what about the much-talked-about concept of qualia in re consciousness that seems to be last remaining stronghold of dualism? Do you think the redness of a strawberries changes with age? :chin:

Statement E = There are no absolute eternal facts

E is either true or false

If E is false then there are absolute eternal facts

If E is true then it is the absolute eternal fact

Either way, there are absolute eternal facts

:chin:

The question whether time is cyclical doesn't make sense to me but that's probably just me rather than anything informative about time itself.

First, take a phenomenon that we know is cyclical e.g. your life. You get up in the morning, perform your ablutions, after a quick breakfast head off to work, play your part in the office, return home, dinner, go to bed, and you get up in the morning: lather, rinse, repeat as they say. Time, however, continues to progress in linear fashion. I mean you do what I described you do, say on Monday but when you go through the cycle again, it's not Monday anymore, it's Tuesday and when you repeat your life cycle again it's Wednesday, so and so forth. In short, cycles have more to do with matter and the way it behaves than with time itself. The mistake you're making if you are making one is to observe a car going around in circles in a parking lot and thinking space itself is cyclical. :chin:

I'm not sure what you mean here. Deduction is, to my reckoning, the relationship between premises and conclusion such that the latter follows from/is a consequence of the former. It differs from consistency in that two propositions maybe consistent but don't constitute a deductive argument.

It's rooted in either something that happened to you or a chemical imbalance. So figuring yourself on this is first key, and if that doesn't help and you feel stuck Zoloft or ketamine infusions can help. — Gregory

:smile: I'm trying to avoid chemical interventions but I smoke :grin:

I must've misspoke. I don't mean to say that experience, the whole nine yards of it, can be reduced to knowledge. Reminds me of qualia and the like in the alive and kicking issue of consciousness in the philosophy of mind section. Mary of Mary's Room fame, some say, learns something new when she actually sees the color red even though before that she had all the bookish knowledge on redness. Likewise, doing something, which is what experience is, brings with it a different kind of knowing so to speak.

Perhaps we need to look more closely at what knowledge and experience are, at what the difference between them are, and if one can be reduced to the other.

I'll skip the first step in the above line of inquiry and dive right into the difference between knowledge and experience. No matter how comprehensive the knowledge bank on a given subject, it's almost certain that there'll be gaps in it. You spoke of knowledge as a template and this view of knowledge is the right place to start if we're to know what distinguishes knowledge from experience. Knowledge is, as you've pointed out, a template and being so it needs to be as general as possible to ensure maximum relevancy. That means knowledge has to avoid details as much as possible and focus on painting with broad strokes in a manner of speaking. This being the case, there'll always be some aspects of a subject that'll be missing from knowledge - the details as it were. To know the details, we need hands-on experience.

To put it another way, if you were forced to make a bet of three scenarios involving a die rolled three times. Which would you choose? A.) Each roll would be different. B.) Two rolls in a row would be the same. C.) All three rolls would be the same. — Outlander

As I see it, these are equiprobable scenarios each with a probability of 1/216. Sorry, I think I missed your point.

depersonalization disorder — Gregory

Mind if I pick your brain on this subject. It's quite close to my heart in the sense I sometimes feel as if I don't exist or, more accurately, as if I exist only to not exist. A puzzle that's so close to home that I'd probably commit every possible fallacy in the book. Thanks.

As I said in my first comment, this is of no use with knowledge claims because we have no means of distinguishing premises from conclusions. We cannot say that our belief in A is justified by the deductive argument 'If B then A, B therefore A' because our belief that B might be what is at fault, or our belief that 'if B then A'.

The whole approach rests on the flawed assumption that we build up our beliefs one block at a time from some first principle like an inverted pyramid. There's scant evidence that we actually do this and abundant evidence that we don't — Isaac

"Because"??!!

I was always bothered by one thing about Gettier Problems. It seems to be tautologous in the Wittgensteinian sense i.e. it doesn't add to what we already know.

There are two kinds of arguments viz. 1. deductive and 2. inductive. We needn't worry about deductive arguments as they're foolproof justifications in that if the argument is sound it's impossible that the conclusion is false. There is no room for error with deductive arguments is what I mean.

Coming to the other strain of arguments viz. inductive arguments, it is already known, in fact it's contained in the definition of such arguments, that the inference is probabilistic in the sense that there's a gap between inductive justifications and their conclusions which requires, as some would describe it, a leap of faith.

Gettier problems, in my humble opinion, are essentially about this justificatory gap in inductive arguments. In other words, we were already aware of the problem even before Gettier formulated his now famous argument regardind justified true belief. :chin:

Perhaps mental age, as you were initially suggesting, can be roughly measured in terms of the number of ideas our minds have come in contact with. This method would've been more accurate in the past but in the modern age of paperbacks and e-books, a motivated young person could absorb more ideas in a few months or years than faer counterpart back when there were no books or computers.

Any insight as to how those cards are played, and which ones? — tim wood

It's a truism that, roughly speaking, until people are in their early twenties their priorities are "different" - they're not in the least bit concerened about knowledge save, of course, the few who are precocious. Given so, it's not going to be as easy as I thought to impart knowledge to the young unless we manage to make it adequately appealing to young palates. Here I'm talking of formal structured courses in schools and colleges but these institutions don't have a monopoly on knowledge - family and friends can play a big a role in the education of the young.

Methinks it's possible to create the right environment for rapid learning that would, if all goes well, concentrate and condense experiene accumulated over many many years into a lecture or a book. The main worry is this: motivation (you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink).

Gambler's fallacy?

Well that can easily be fixed by making it "Never say never or always except in this sentence". Pretty easy to resolve as far as paradoxes go — khaled

Indeed! That's a solution alright but notice that the words "never" and "always" are gainfully employed in this one sentence. Nowhere else can the duo be used in the sense that they possess. I'd like, at this juncture, to introduce the concepts of selfish words and altruistic words. The former are words that, as part of their utility, are self-serving in the sense the exist for their own sake and the latter are words that have utility beyond their own. Can you think of any other words that fall into these categories. Altruistic words are easy to find - all the words that I've just written except for "never" and "always" synergize with others to build new levels of meaning. I'm not sure but to hazard a guess the only selfish words are "never" and "always". :chin:

:up: Thanks

To both of you:

I've just had an aha moment! Suppose you're rolling a six-sided die. There are six possibilities: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. The probability that you'll roll a number greater than 6 is zero i.e. no matter how many times you cast this die, you'll never get a 7 or higher number. And on every roll of this die, you'll always get a number between 1 and 6 inclusive. It appears that I'm wrong. :chin:

It's been quite some time since I last visited this thread so do forgive me if I'm missing the point in your posts.

Anyway...

I mean, if you are born, you are being used most likely by society, as much as you are using society. — schopenhauer1

Purpose implies meaning, whereas use doesn't require it. — Hanover

My take on the difference between purpose and use is that in case of the former, as Hanover mentioned, there's meaning which, to me, for lack of a better word, is, at some level, self-beneficial in that the thing that has meaning/purpose gains something from it. The latter, use, on the other hand, is a broader concept and it isn't necessary that things that have a use gain something for itself from it.

What say you?

What a great question! Got me thinking and at a certain point in my musings, the memory of me watching a video on language flashed across my mind. The video deals with basic ideas on language and what seems germane to your question is how language carries information (something you already know of course).

At this juncture, two important concepts that need no introduction are relevant viz. 1. Knowledge and 2. Experience. Both, as you know, are essential to success understood in the broadest sense possible. Age, the received opinion is, goes toward accumulating experience and that's what makes an older person an asset rather than a liability. However, language has the ability to transform experience into knowledge with the end result that experience becomes transferable to the young (if they're willing of course).

The video describes how chimpanzees can make tools to hunt termites but due to a lack of a language this experience isn't transformed into knowledge that could then be learned by younger chimps who could possibly improve upon the skill and then pass it down to their offspring and so on. Humans, on the other hand, can teach what they've learned from experience to their young i.e. humans can convert experience into knowledge and that gives us a huge advantage over other animals who seem to be in a, well, Sisyphian cycle of having to continuously rediscover what they've already discovered but left unrecorded because they lack language.

Basically, wisdom, if one plays one's cards just right, is not a function of age.

Yes, that's all it is. The gap between power and wisdom is widening at an ever accelerating rate. Power races ahead while wisdom inches along at best. — Hippyhead

You say it better than me! I'm jealous! :smile:

A key problem that is until we hit the chaos wall the knowledge explosion delivers a wonderful array of amazing goodies. — Hippyhead

I would caution you against speaking too soon. The "amazing goodies" you speak of may come at a heavy price somewhere down the line and it maybe too late by then to, you know, reverse/stall the process that has "catastrophe" written all over it. Isn't this your main worry? :chin:

That is somewhat helpful, but isn't it running the risk of cherry picking the premises and hinting toward pleading a special case (as you probably know chess is one thing, but the totality of what sort of mental gymnastics is likely much much more as in all things... so I'll leave that example out). — Mayor of Simpleton

I don't see how I'm guilty of cherry picking as I haven't cited any evidence to support my claims. All I'm asking for is some kind of mental parameter that tracks the mind's age just as there are physical ones that correlate with bodily age. I must admit that there are observable mental changes that occur from infancy to childhood to teens and then to adulthood but then it stops there until we enter 80's or 90's. There's a gap from roughly 25 years of age to about the late 90's during which there's no perceptible change in mental ability but the same can't be said of the body. It's as if the mind's age-clock stops between these years while the body continues to transform as time passes. In short, the mind doesn't age in the same way as the body does. This might mean a whole lot of other things but what piques my interest is whether this fact can be used to support dualism.

As to mental age... I'm not too sure there is a consensus on a standard of measure for such a all encompassing determination. — Mayor of Simpleton

Is it possible that no such measure exists for the simple reason that the mind actually doesn't age?

On a side note: Personally I only know 4 top level chess players... the oldest is 74 and the youngest is 23. Indeed this isn't a large sample size, but one thing they have in common is that none of them have very mature social skills. — Mayor of Simpleton

I'm not sure where you want to take this but the fact that social skills are lacking across the board makes it ineligible as a marker of mental age. Too, ceteris paribus, it seems social skills are mastered by 25 or so years and then stays at that level well into old age. In short, it isn't a good measure of mental age unless you want to compare infants, toddlers, teenagers and adults but that would be cherry picking, no?

In my humble opinion, if I catch your drift, there are two active agents in this volatile mixture, to wit:

1. Logic and allied abilities that make humans capable of comprehending the natural world in ways that, as you mentioned, enable us to "edit the environment" to suit our needs.

2. Wisdom that, based on our expectations from it, should serve as a guide that makes sure that we make the right moves every time the occasion arises.

It's no secret that our proficiency in logic, individual and collective, exceeds our combined wisdom and thus the state of the world - on the event horizon of global catastrophe.

I started a thread a while back that basically dealt with this, but regarding belief instead of “want.” I would argue that “I don’t want anything” is not equal to “I want nothing.” To me, phrases like “I want X” imply an intent to possess/own something. Therefore, X must be an actual thing, and nothing is not a thing. — Pinprick

Good point! Just what I was trying to get at with Hippyhead. There has to be some limiting condition on what can be desired, something you've just alluded to in your post - nothing isn't possessable like, say, a house/car is.

That out of the way, I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that in everyday conversation it's true that "I don't want anything" is taken to be equivalent to "I want nothing". This, as you've shown, is clearly an error but that it's entered into common usage begs an explanation. Any ideas on that front?

Also, what about the actual paradox itself? What qualities of the act of desiring/not desiring disqualify them from being objects of desire. I mean what's the error in taking the sentences, 1. Not to want and 2. Want to not want as equivalent?

I have loved, greatly so, many things.
from the ocean's fins to the sky's wings.
In passion I desired deep
my love, to in a cage keep
what else in cages sleep?
slaves, bonded, in them weep.
To love and bind as slaves
is to bury the living in graves
Fins, wings, all things between
Freedom is where love's been

:chin:

I think we're talking past each other at this point. I'll try and reframe the issue at stake in a way that, to me, highlights the features that interest me.

Physical age (after 30): Losing teeth, graying hair, wrinkles, aches and pains, and so on

Mental age (after 30): ????

We use virtual reality to become armadillos? Seriously, I don't see a human based solution to excluding the act of wanting. Maybe some theorize they can, but even if so, way too rare to be relevant.

Dunno. Maybe I don't get your point and am not being helpful. — Hippyhead

No problem. Just thought I could pick your brain on something I haven't resolved.

I have a response to the version of the want paradox that goes like so: I don't want anything = I want nothing. Imagine a person, X, who lives in a world with only two objects, Y and Z and there's no such thing as nothing in X's world. If X says "I don't want Y" then it doesn't mean X wants Z. Z is the complement of Y and vice versa. According to the logic of I don't want anything = I want nothing, I can change the "don't want" to "want" if I replace the thing not wanted by its complement (in a set theoretical sense). This doesn't work for X in his world with Y and Z. X says "I don't want Y" but that doesn't mean X is saying "I want Z" :chin:

:up: Thanks.

At the risk of boring you, I'll continue to harp away at the paradox I presented to you. One way out of the vicious circle I mentioned earlier is to specify what are valid objects of desire/want. If we restrict desire to physical objects, ideas and whatnot but exclude the act of desire itself from the class of objects that can be desired then we have, in our hands, an exit point from the loop. Do you see any way of doing this? What criteria could exclude the act of wanting from everything else? :chin:

Another way to look at the issue would be like this:

X = I don't want anything = I want nothing??!! :chin:

You don't know what you want. Neither do I. — Hippyhead

:rofl:

On a serious note, there's an unsettling paradox with desire/want. Sorry Buddhists. I mean there are two options here: 1. Want or 2. Not to want but what's troubling is 2. Not to want can be rephrased, salva veritate, with 3. I want not to want. Surely 1 contradicts 2 via the "Not" and yet we have 3.

Desire 1:
Perhaps if we look at a simpler version of want/desire, we might be able to solve this puzzle. Say X says "I want water" and then, a little later, X announces "I don't want water". There's a clear contradiction in X's statements - earlier X wanted water and then later X didn't want water. Do you smell anything fishy?

Desire 2:
Now, let's tackle the want paradox. X says "I don't want to want" i.e. X wants, like a good Buddhist, to end desire. However, what X said can be rewritten as "I want to not want" and that means fae is in a fix for it becomes impossible to not want to want for it's equivalent to to want not to want.

It's clear that in the case of Desire 1, we can't treat it as X is saying "I want to not want water" but in the case of Desire 2, there seems to nothing amiss when we take X as saying "I want to not want".

Do you mind having a look at this? Thanks

Do we have reasons to satisfy requirements of rationality? In other words, is rationality normative, i.e. to do with reasons? — mrnormal5150

Why be rational? If this query is posed by way of an inquiry into other possibilities, possibilities other than rational, then, in my humble opinion, there are two three: 1. Irrational, 2. Arational, 3. Hyper-rational.

1. Irrational is simply breaking the rules of logic and critical thinking.

2. Arational is best explained with an analogy. In ethics we have the immoral (prohibited), the moral (mandatory) and the amoral (neither prohibited, nor mandatory) and that's all she wrote

3. Hyper-rational is a hypothetical state of mind that has access to new rules of logic that are, as of now, hidden from us. The key difference between rational and hyper-rational would be that the latter would be incomprehensible to the former. I suppose the sentence "there's a thin line between genius and madness" says it all.

What influences our thoughts? That somehow feels wrong to me. It's not that there are influences as much as it's a question of exploration of ideas/concepts/theories. Granted some of what one encounters in the journey through the idea jungle rubs off on us in that they shape certain worldviews but that misses the point doesn't it? In a journey, there's the traveler and then there's the places fae travels to and they're not the same.

It's a bit more than that. Solipsism is the belief that you are the only thing that exists and that everything else is a piece of YOUR mind. It is a form of "all is mind" but moreover it is "all is one mind, mine" — khaled

What do you make of my comment on physicalism and how if one subscribes to it, there's no issue proving the existence of so-called others?

Philosophy as a jigsaw puzzle? Hmmmmm...So, are you expecting a picture to emerge after you've put all the pieces together?

Once the bullet leaves the gun, its trajectory is determined. But the moment the fool waving the gun around pulls the trigger is determined by chance. Not patternless? — Bitter Crank

That's begging the question, no? How do you know "the fool" waving the gun around isn't determined?

I do — Bitter Crank

Good to know.

When people talk about philosophical stuff, each person comes in with a collection of assumptions — darthbarracuda

:up:



Definition:
Solipsism: the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

To my reckoning, solipsism smacks of idealism which I understand to mean that all is mind. For a physicalist who thinks we're brains proving others exist is a piece of cake - a simple CT scan or an MRI of the brain should do the trick. Right? :chin:

but which trajectory the bullet will follow depends on events which are not lawful (determined) — Bitter Crank

Not to contradict you but name one event in a bullet's trajectory that isn't determined.

To be frank, the matter isn't as clear to me as I would've liked. What exactly does chance mean to (you and me and @kudos)?

As far as I'm concerned, since we're talking determinism here, chance is uncertainty in outcomes, a situation brought about by the lack of an observable pattern or if there's a pattern, it's probabilistic with a value between 0% (impossible) and 100% (certain). In other words, if things out of our control were chance, they should be patternless which isn't so. Hence, my reluctance to the claim that things out of our control = chance.

BitterCrank, wear :mask: and stay safe. :smile:

Are you arguing that the motion of small solid bodies in the solar system -- interacting with each other, the planets, and the sun -- are not subject to chance [unpredictable interactions], even while strictly obeying the laws of physics? Or are you proposing that "chance" is the result of inadequately observed causation? — Bitter Crank

It seems I didn't express myself well enough. Let me give it another shot. @kudos thinks, if I understood him, that things out of our control are chance occurrences. This, to my reckoning, isn't correct. Things out of our control could very well be completely determined in every sense of that word.

To drive home the point, imagine particles of gas in a container and consider the "life" of one single particle, call it X. The motion of all particles (including X) in the container are fully determined according to science. For X, the things out of our (X's) control are the motions of other particles but notice that that isn't a matter of chance. Au contraire the motions of the particles are out and out determined. In short we can't equate things out of our control with chance.

"the greatest good" is where the halls of Hell are empty and Heaven is sprawling with infinite souls? :)

By and large, the universe doesn't care about us. Seems we're just dispersing energy entropically, made of stardust, riding on sunlight, like dinosaurs, covid-19, cancer and roses. Deities neither evident nor necessary.

Happy Thanksgiving. (y) — jorndoe

Happy Thanksgiving to you too. Sorry if this reply comes to late. I just saw it now.

I hope this doesn't bore you but I have issue with the part of your post I underlined.

When you say "the universe doesn't care about us" it gives the impression that the universe is indifferent to our interests, hopes and fears as if it were a neutral spectator at a soccer match who doesn't care which team takes the trophy. So far so good, I hope.

Then you mentioned entropy and this concept is precisely what doesn't square with an indifferent universe for the reason that entropy, if I haven't misunderstood it, means that for any given number of ways thing can go right for you there are more ways it can all go south for you. The universe, the way it works (entropy), is guaranteed to thwart your best plans of having a pleasurable experience. Put simply, the universe isn't indifferent, it's assuredly against us.

@180 Proof I wouldn't mind if you chimed in. Thanks

chance — kudos

probability — kudos

This reminds me of a comment I made in another thread about how even in a completely deterministic set up, the way things proceed/occur may be misconstrued as chance/probability.

You mentioned this:

external to an individual — kudos

However, the external is, in a deterministic setting, completely, for lack of a better word, preordained. There are two things to consider here, things out of our control - the external you're talking about - and chance. Methinks, in my humble opinion, you're conflating things out of our control with chance.

To illustrate, take our solar system and put it in the context of chemistry and physics. Chemistry is life, chemistry is deterministic. An asteroid the size of Texas is physics, physics is deterministic. The event consisting of the Texas-sized asteroid hitting our beloved planet is completely determined by the interaction of mass, energy, and force. In other words, an extinction event asteroid impact is not a chance event at all but, here lies the rub, we, chemistry, life, make the mistake of believing it is.

:chin:

This seems off topic to me but you opened this new line of inquiry.