I think I said enough on the tautology and contradiction. — Corvus

Mr denying the antecedent, I think I agree.

nah, you don't have the best track record with basic logic and I don't think you're doing a great job of it here. Prove there's the contradiction you said there is

If you read the posts carefully, it is clear why it is a contradiction and why it is a tautology — Corvus

I don't think anything yous aid is clear at this point.

You say "How could we have a single thought, knowing that all that exists is matter and forces?" As if you know of some other way to have a single thought.

I have no idea what you're talking about

how could we have a single thought period?

That sounds like a strawman. You are suddenly talking about Venus, when the point of the replies was about the morning star and evening star. — Corvus

How is it a strawman? You literally said "The morning star and evening star both refer to Venus."

Territory is the shit that exists. Map is a representation of the shit that exists.

There are maps, and there are territories. Our brain is a territory in itself, but it's a territory which contains maps of other territories. Those maps can be wrong. Being wrong is a feature of the map, not the territory. Uncertainty is a feature of the map, not the territory.

They aren't all simultaneously true. "The reason that the Morning star is morning star is because it is only visible in the mornings. But the reason that the evening star is the evening star is because it is only visible in the evenings." This clearly isn't true if both of those words refer to Venus, and Venus is visible in both mornings and evenings. You've only created a paradox by compiling a bunch of false statements.

It's easy to make a paradox out of false statements. Corvus is a human and he's not a human. If I allow myself false statements, then voila, I can produce a paradox at will.

The important question is how could we possibly be uncertain if matter is a deterministic thing. In other words, how the sense of uncertainty is created in the brain considering that the brain is made of matter. This is something that I am currently thinking about and I believe no one has a clear answer to it. — MoK

I don't understand why there's a problem to think about at all. Our brain doesn't have direct access to all the knowledge of the world. Our brains build models of how we think the world is, based on limited information, and sometimes those models aren't actually close to how the world is.

The way you phrased it, "isn't it a tautalogy but also a contradiction", makes it sound like you think it's a contradiction. Do you not?

I don't. I don't see what's contradictory about it.

I have a name, and I also go by a nickname. If someone said "FJ is the same person as Flannel Jesus", there's no contradiction in that. Why would the evening / morning star be different? I don't see the contradiction.

It's also not necessarily a tautology, not to a person that doesn't know it's the same object they're calling both of those things.

what makes it a contradiction?

The answer depends on whether or not the Universe is comprehensively and rigidly deterministic . Current scientific understanding says it is not. — Janus

I think an interesting question is, where does quantum randomness come from? There are a few interesting options, but one option in particular I personally really struggle with.

With many worlds, the randomness is actually only apparent randomness, an inevitable subjective experience but not random at all from a meta perspective.

Pilot Wave theory says there's no randomness, the conditions are there which determine any quantum result (maybe retrocausally).

Random-collapse says neither of the above are the right way to conceptualise the randomness, but in this way there are still two possibilities:

1. Non-local causal reason for why this random result was observed instead of that other random possibility. Imagine a universal random number generator that can affect quantum particles non locally.

2. Genuinely no reason at all. Literally no reason whatsoever why one random thing was observed instead of another. True ontological randomness.

I can't really wrap my head around 2. A lot of people go for #2 but, to me, literally any other possibility seems more comprehensible.

Obviously the universe just does what it does, with no concern for what I find comprehensible, so I could easily be wrong. If #2 is reality then I just don't comprehend reality. But damn, I really don't think it's #2. I'm with Einstein: things don't happen for no reason.

what does it mean to hand him to me?

in either case, counterfactuals work for a causal view of the world.

See, you can view the world as 2 things: the way the world operates, and the facts (or state) on which it does those operations. So you can reasonably say, if the state were counterfactually like X instead of what it was, then Y would have been the causal result. As long as "the way the world operates" is treated as a constant, then you can treat the state as a variable.

just imagine a universe that started last Thursday.

One could also imagine a godlike figure reaching in and changing a couple individual things

Do you think your view needs justification? If so, would you share it? — frank

Probably, but I think it's pretty intuitive. Most people have some kind of model of causality. Counterfactual statements like mine are just the basic idea of applying the same kind of causality but changing some of the preceding conditions.

You can apply - and verify - those kind of counterfactual statements to physics simulations. "This happened this time, but if counterfactually I changed the simulation to have this bit instead, this would have happened." You could make that statement about a physics simultaion, and then you can test it. And sometimes, those statements will be right! And sometimes wrong.

Of course we don't have the straight-forward ability to test our counterfactual statements about this world, but it doesn't seem remarkably controversial to me. In fact it's part of every-day speech for most people. "That wouldn't have happened if such-and-such".

my thoughts are, they could have made a different choice if they counterfactually had wanted to.

is that what your first reply did? It didn't look like it was looking at ANY possible answers

Well, I'm pretty sure if someone asks you a question, they just want to know how YOU look at it, not all the other ways it could be looked at lol.

Lol. I just love the idea of you giving such a useless response every time someone asks you a question.

Did you enjoy that movie last night?

That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.

Can I take you out on a date Frank?

That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.

Would you like a bit of sloppy toppy Frank?

That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.

Are you in pain Frank?

That can be answered with yes or no, depending on how you look at it.

that's how questions work, that's right

Nothing i said would even remotely suggest memory isnt a function of the physical bain. I would hazard a guess that you didnt read much of what i wrote, because even a little bit of effort toward understanding it would lead you to see that my idea would fully predict memory loss, and other cognitive loss, from brain damage.

Again, current evidence would suggest you’re wrong. — Darkneos

Again, what current evidence is that?

I don't think so. I think the mind is more *what the brain does*, the processes it engages in, than just "the physical arrangment that is the brain". Of course, the physical arrangement of the brain gives rise to what it does - what it does can be derived from its physical construction.

Maybe the difference there is pedantic, I don't know. I actually can think of one important difference, though - if you can construct another, physically different object that undergoes isomorphic processes, then in my view, it's the same thing. If you can imagine a machine that was constructed to behave exactly like a brain, following the exact same high-level neuronal processes, but being chemically very different, then if the mind is "the processes the brain does", this machine is as much a mind as the brain, since it's performing the same high-level processes.

A machine that, for example, computes a neural net. (I'm not saying neural nets as they are now are conscious, I'm instead saying that if it were possible to make a neural net that follows all of the same processes as our own brains, they could be).

What current evidence says that's wrong?

I haven't read the rest of this thread, but I like Jo Whelers answer.

I would consider myself a "process philosophy" believer when it comes to the emergence of human minds.

I consider myself a physicalist, which is to say everything is either physical, or the consequence of physical events. When you mix that with Process Philosophy, you get a view of the mind where it makes sense to say "the mind isn't physical, but the mind IS the result of physical events - the mind is the consequence of physical processes".

So the physical stuff is real, the events are real, the processes are real, and that is a way of discussing how things like minds can emerge from non-mind things like chemicals in the brain.

Here's an even better one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC7odtQHoPc

Given that you can produce this type of animation using only consumer-available telescopes and cameras, it's pretty hard to deny that the moon is spherical. That looks like a wobbling sphere to me.

Wonderful. Funnily enough, most flat earthers also believe the moon itself is flat. There's actually another stop-motion you can get of the moon to disprove that.

It's a not-very-well-known fact that the face of the moon kinda wobbles a bit, which allows us to see it from a very slightly different angle at different times. It wobbles enough that if you take frames from various full moons and put them together, you can see the 3d form of it in an animation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/educationalgifs/comments/w7otnc/ive_captured_almost_a_complete_lunar_cycle_to/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCKmZXhVvkQ

It's actually apparently pretty accessible to prove the world is round. All you need is access to a 600-ft-high view of the sea. They're not exactly EVERYWHERE but you can find it. Go and take a photo of the horizon with a normal rectilinear lens, being sure to keep the horizon as near to center-frame as you can (this is because the edges of lenses tend to have more distortion). Then, you can analyze the picture in some editor for any deviation of the horizon towards a flat line. It won't be obvious to the naked eye, but once you draw a straight line from the left of the horizon to the right, it should stand out - the middle will bulge up.

Here's a similar technique illustrated: https://mctoon.net/left-to-right-curve/

If you don't want to trust these variuos someone elses, and see it for yourself, you can do it! Or just buy a telescope and watch ships disappear past the horizon, bottom-up.

I went on a couple flat earth Discord groups and was quite unpleasantly surprised with the state of their community.

What I thought would be the case is, flat earthers were convinced that they have a better model that makes better predictions than the round earth. (I just thought they'd be wrong about those things for a variety of reasons).

What's actually the case is, most flat earthers don't have a model at all. The reason for that is simple: the ones that DO have a model have an easily falsified model. The "clever" ones have learned from that experience, and just denied having a model at all. They claim nobody knows that hte world is like, they don't have a map because nobody really knows what the continents are shaped like and arranged like.

Now normally, an agnostic position is respectable. We don't know everything, we're all ignorant of some things, so saying "I don't know" should be a respectable answer, right?

But we live in a world where you can take an air plane from just about any part of the world to just about any other part of the world. We have GPS google maps coverage of everywhere. You really expect me to believe those things are true, AND nobody knows anything about the shape and arrangement of continents?

They're not even ashamed of their lack of a model.

So instead of working on a model, they build communities where they allow "globies" to come in, but they dog pile them and then ban them on the premise of misused psychological buzzwords. They basically use these communities as funny little bullying rings, because they don't actually want to seriously investigate the shape of the planet, they just want to get revenge on the globies for their shame.

Apparently.

sure, there's no way to be certain of anything if you are very skeptical. But if you're reasonably skeptical, there could still be ways to be justifiably confident.

Recently there was an expedition to the South pole, that cost 35k per head, for flat eathers to go observe the 24 hour sun. It's called The Final Experiment.

I've devised a similar experiment that should be much cheaper than 35k. It should, in my opinion, be convincing to any honest flat earther if carried out. The plan is this:

Visit 4 destinations, 2 in the north and 2 in the south. Each hemisphere of our planet has night time vision of what's called a Celestial Pole, enough is just the part of the night sky corresponding to our axis of rotation. In the north, the celestial pole is very near to the North Star, and in the south it's very near to the Southern Cross.

So, the 4 destinations could be Canada, England, South Brazil and South Africa. Obviously they don't have to be those exact places, but they're a good example.

At each place, you set up a camera on a tripod to observe that celestial pole. You'll use that footage to create time lapses like this:

https://youtu.be/TZOg8EPJ_yk?si=Zryt1GUcldohiFpu

The reason you want 2 places in each hemisphere is to handle all possible objections. A flat earther can easily explain the celestial pole of the north. But to explain not just one, but two celestial poles in the south is actually much harder. The firmament would have to be rotating from east to west in order for the southern celestial pole to go from South Africa to Brazil - but the time lapse would show that in fact the southern celestial pole is not moving east to west, but is quite stationary.

Now of course i know this wouldn't actually convince them, but the theory crafting about it is just fun for me. This experiment would reduce the cost from 35k to something closer to 5k.

Of course, if you haven't been turned on, you wouldn't know, — unenlightened

What does any of this have to do with sexual arousal?

Yeah totally.

I came across this response to that type of experiment the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/globeskepticism/comments/1dej3ox/perspective_not_curvature/

Of course, the difference is, when you zoom in on the reddit scenario, the bottom comes back - when you zoom in on the ship in the horizon, it doesn't.

Like "scientific" skeptics about perception, also "unscientific" flat-earthers fail to distinguish between what an object may look like and its true visible shape. — jkop

Kind of like what you did when you claimed you could just see the curve

this is the image I'm thinking of

https://www.google.com/search?q=telephone+poles+over+sea+horizon+curve&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=16501dcb6f6c1178&udm=2&biw=1280&bih=559&sxsrf=ADLYWIIcaNJt_9jG3BosNMEDH2Fk0C-DlQ%3A1736530546173&ei=clqBZ52lCsaehbIPsf2l0Qc&ved=0ahUKEwidpuKy2OuKAxVGT0EAHbF-KXoQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=telephone+poles+over+sea+horizon+curve&gs_lp=EgNpbWciJnRlbGVwaG9uZSBwb2xlcyBvdmVyIHNlYSBob3Jpem9uIGN1cnZlSJIKUI0DWLoJcAF4AJABAJgBQKAB5QKqAQE2uAEDyAEA-AEBmAIAoAIAmAMAiAYBkgcAoAeOAg&sclient=img#vhid=RmI4MnBl40TscM&vssid=mosaic

Yeah this is a good one. I saw an image with something like telephone poles curving down over the horizon.

How can you be sure? The curvature might be too small to notice, say, if you only see a narrow piece of the horizon, but I'm pretty sure it's curved, also visibly if you'd look closer. — jkop

It's been calculated to be imperceptibly small. If your view of the horizon from a beach front is x "pixels" wide, so to speak, the curvature of the horizon is 0.01% of x - as in, the number of pixels the apex of the curve is above the lowest point of the curve is x times 0.0001. That's 1 pixel of rise for every 10,000 pixels of width of an image. I linked the article calculating it on the previous part of the page.

I do not believe you can actually perceive it. I know I can't - I go to the beach pretty often, I see the horizon a couple times a month, and there's no apparent curve from a vantage point of 6-8ft above sea level.

edit. link here: https://flatearth.ws/standing-on-a-beach

There are places you can look a long way, enough that the boat bottoms disappear behind the water, if not the horizon which is the hills in the distance. Maybe you can write that off as refraction in the other direction — noAxioms

They actually do write it off that way, funnily enough.