I was a math prof for many years, and at large universities senior faculty might simply give an unsolicited paper to a grad student as an assignment to critique — jgill

Agreed. From my own experience contacting faculty, it highly depends on the individual.

OP will have a better shot if what he has written has some connection to the professor's publications.

Of course the solution doesn't work when you change the mechanism to be exactly like Thompson's lamp without the limit.

Likewise, Earman and Norton's solution doesn't work if you remove the limit (falling ball).

The description of the Thomson lamp only actually specifies what the lamp is doing at each finite stage before 2 minutes. It says nothing about what happens at 2 minutes, especially given the lack of a converging limit.

Not a rebbuttal of my statement.

You are pushing back the issue and falling into infinite regress of causes.

See Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume.

This is just a meaningless hand-wavy rationalisation and is inconsistent with the specific timing intervals: — Michael

Sensors. Touching the sensor means the colour is white.

We can come up with other mechanisms that can better represent this exponential acceleration. Which I didn't do:
1 – for simplicity sake
2 – to use the same example as the SEP

After 30 seconds a white square turns red, after a further 15 seconds it turns blue, after a further 7.5 seconds it turns back to white, and so on. — Michael

That seems to be a Thompson's lamp with 3 states rather than 2.

To which the same solution applies (image missing):

I would propose a parametric curve on the ball path, and, for fantasy sake, by whatever mechanism, the plate knows at what part of the parabola the ball is at, defining the counter. As time goes on, the revolution gets smaller and smaller. Eventually the ball will completely rest on the table, which is 0: — Lionino

Just replace 0 and 1 and 2 with white, red, and blue. The square starts as white, so it finishes as white as the ball rests still on the plate.

Perhaps it would become an infinitely long counter showing an infinitely long line of 9s — Lionino

And since the counter is infinitely long, there is no first digit.

And what about rejecting the premise of the counter being apt for the task? You've designed a counter that is metaphysically constrained in such a way that it cannot perform the metaphysical task given in the way you want it to perform. What if you employ a counter that can show ∞?

I think the BiV is a thought experiment that updates Descartes' Evil Demon to a scientific world. — Moliere

More of a fork, if you will:

Granting the success of the argument, my sensations are caused by an external material world. But for all the argument shows – for all the broader argument of the Meditations shows, up to this point – my mind might be joined to a brain in a vat, rather than a full human body. This isn’t an oversight on Descartes’ part. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/

And that assumption entails a contradiction — Michael

What contradiction?

In which case I would say the counter is missing a key feature for the mission. Perhaps it would become an infinitely long counter showing an infinitely long line of 9s or 1s or 3s (does it even make any difference?). The counter has to be only metaphysically possible, not physically possible, and we already have the possibility of infinity as an assumption. But that is for 30s, I have no clue what would follow from 60s. If our mathematical descriptions are representative of quantities in a continuous, infinitely divisible space-time, perhaps we would be dealing with transfinite numbers.

If it does count to infinity, I am not sure if it would show any natural number :sweat:

But then I am interested in a counter that would indeed count to infinity when it gets to 30 seconds. Then I wonder, what would it show at the 60th second?

Ok I hadn't seen that before. Whatever shows at the end (if that even makes sense) it's certainly finite, since you're adding up finitely many finite numbers then resetting to 0. — fishfry

The counter resets to 0 after 9. It will only ever show the digits 0-9 — Michael

I misunderstood the question to mean it kept counting into infinity.

That is, the sequence is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...

That sequence doesn't converge. — fishfry

True. It seems to be Thompson's lamp but with 10 different states instead of 2 (on and off). In which case the solution of the ball skipping on the table does not work immediately. But the issue does seem to be missing limits as well.

I would propose a parametric curve on the ball path, and, for fantasy sake, by whatever mechanism, the plate knows at what part of the parabola the ball is at, defining the counter. As time goes on, the revolution gets smaller and smaller. Eventually the ball will completely rest on the table, which is 0:



Preliminarly this seems like a solution.

I don't see how that follows at all. No mathematical thought experiment can determine the nature of reality. We can use math to model Euclidean geometry and non-Euclidean geometry, but math can never tell is which is true of the physical world. You can use math to model and approximate, but it is never metaphysically conclusive. — fishfry

Agreed:

So concluding something about the nature of time from thought experiments seems to put the horses behind the chariot or maybe to be analogous to ontological arguments, where we conclude something about the world by relying our own, perhaps mistaken, human intuitions. — Lionino

-

By the way the Thompson's lamp sequence is 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, ... and that doesn't converge either. — fishfry

Yes, but check the solution at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-supertasks/#MissLimiThomLamp

Speaking of extended real numbers, is there any useful application of it?

According to that definition, the sum of 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... is 1. — fishfry

Yeah, the series has infinite terms. Michael's example flips it, and the counter counts how many elements there are in the series, not the sum of the terms, which is the passing of time.

So I don't see how you can justify claiming that the sum should be infinity — fishfry

I am not, check his problem: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/898574

You'll never get past ℵ0 by adding more finite numbers. Likewise ℵ0<br/>+ℵ0+ℵ0+...
. — fishfry

See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/898574

The analysis seems to be presupposing rights. — Leontiskos

It seems like it.

I want to say that "to harm something is to make something lose its qualities," is too broad, because not all qualities are self-consciously believed to be valuable — Leontiskos

Which is why I say:

pushes the issue back and leaves the conclusion up to subjectivity, instead of grounding it objectively (on something like freedom or serotonin or reproductive success) — Lionino

Because the word "quality" here is often up to personal preference, as I note: If I am shooting someone, I am making them lose qualities (health) that we hold universally as desirable. However, if I offer someone drugs, there will be wide disagreement about whether I am harming or helping them because what the drug is supposed to counteract may or may not be held positively, or may or may not be held more negatively than the other effects of the drug.

For example, on your definition if I cause someone to lose weight I have harmed them. — Leontiskos

Well, being fat would not be a quality — so would everybody say prior to 2013.

if I take alcohol away from an alcoholic, does it necessarily follow that I have harmed him? — Leontiskos

In most cases no, because being addicted is something that (almost) all would agree is not a quality but the inverse of it.

Are you saying that people do not use "life" in that way, in languages other than English? — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I am saying that in some other languages — that I know —, people use "life" with no issues. You claim however that we don't know what "life" means. Surely, that is an English word, and I don't speak for it. But in other languages, everybody knows very well what the equivalent for "life" means.

Well, being that your native language seems to be English, no, since you'd translating from it in your head, and you don't seem to know. Otherwise, yes, that is how communication goes.

I wonder if there's such a solution to my variation. — Michael

What digit does the counter show after 60 seconds?

If time is infinitely divisible, the counter would go up to infinity. Not a conclusion that many of us may like, but there doesn't seem to be anything logically absurd with it.

I am generally in agreement with fishfry that

the story's made up. In freshman calculus, the sum of that series is 1. But freshman calculus is just another made up story too. Just a highly useful one. There are no summable infinite series in the physical world. No physical computer can calculate the sum. — fishfry

If it is in a made-up universe where such counters are possible, and time is infinitely divisible, the counter should count to infinity after 30s.

Let's say even, the counter counts 1 at 15 seconds, 2 at 22,5, 3 at 26,25 and so on. It seems it would converge to infinity at time 30s. However what would the counter show at 60 seconds? Are we talking about aleph-0 and aleph 1 and so on?

if an infinite task may not be completed in a finite amount of time then we must agree that time is not infinitely divisible — Michael

Of course, but it seems that supertasks have not proven that the issue is truly the nature of time instead of their phrasing or some other thing.

It is indeed strange, if supertasks are impossible, it is because of the nature of time. So concluding something about the nature of time from thought experiments seems to put the horses behind the chariot or maybe to be analogous to ontological arguments, where we conclude something about the world by relying our own, perhaps mistaken, human intuitions.

That some scientists want to include "virus" in what we call "alive" does not bear any issue to how we use the word "life", as for now we use it according to our current scientific theories, which includes bacteria but excludes viruses; when we say "life" we know exactly what each other mean. As a reminder, I am not speaking for/about English.

I would suggest that harm and the withholding of welfare are both contrary to the object's will, if in slightly different ways—harm is certainly more contrary — Leontiskos

I would say both are contrary to the object's desire, but not free will in the sense of freedom of choice. When we impart harm on someone, we are taking something away from them, which by the definition of "harm" is against their will; by withholding welfare, we are not attacking their free will, as we are basically not interacting with them at all — not giving them something appears to me as very different from taking something away.

Second, I would want to inquire into the relevant definition of harm. — Leontiskos

to hurt someone or damage something: — Cambridge

To hurt:

to feel pain in a part of your body, or to injure someone or cause them pain: — Cambridge

The definition of "to damage" circularly says "to harm". So I translated "to harm" to another language and translated the definition to English:
"To make lose qualities".

I am behind these definitions. The interesting thing about "harm" is that indeed it means to make something lose its qualities. So then we see that the word "harm" itself already carries some sort of aesthetic/moral judgement by evoking the word "quality". In many cases it seems uncontroversial. If I am shooting someone, I am making them lose qualities (health) that we hold universally as desirable.
However, if I offer someone alcohol, there will be wide disagreement about whether I am harming or helping them.

So perhaps it is the case that negative utilitarianism simply pushes the issue back and leaves the conclusion up to subjectivity, instead of grounding it objectively (on something like freedom or serotonin or reproductive success).

On classical justice one can still act unjustly against the gunman even though he has forfeited some of his rights (by, say, using excessive force) — Leontiskos

And in many countries that is indeed the case. Shooting someone brandishing a knife is allowable if done so to incapacitate, but going behind him and shooting him in the head may be seen as undue use of force and execution.

More broadly on this example, perhaps a distinction between potential harm and actual (more accurately certain/guaranteed) harm is due.

What other options are there that dividing a pizza by 0 will get you? — bert1

You have 5 kids and 10 candies. Each kid gets 2 candies. You have 10 kids, each gets 1 candy. You have 0 kids, how many candies does each ki...

The paradox does not require the physical possibility of such a counter. It simply asks us to consider the outcome if we assume the metaphysical possibility of the counter. If the outcome is paradoxical then the counter is metaphysically impossible, and so we must ask which of the premises is necessarily false. — Michael

Point taken. This thread is the first time I hear of "supertasks". What I can't agree to immediately is that

I would suggest that the premise that is necessarily false is that time is infinitely divisible.

It is metaphysically necessary that there is a limit to how fast something can change (even for some proposed deity that is capable of counting at superhuman speeds). — Michael

If we agree that time is infinitely divisible, it seems to follow that an infinite task may be completed in a finite amount of time, just like there are infinitely many numbers between 1 and 2, Cantor nonwithstanding. What is being argued is simply the metaphysical possibility of infinity — I don't see anything metaphysically necessary or impossible about a certain speed threshold.
If we admit infinity is metaphysically possible, the counter is metaphysically possible too, and it counts to infinity. We may dislike that conclusion, but aesthetic appeal is not an argument but a motivation to seek one, which is not rejecting a premise outright.

Examples such as Thomson's Lamp show that this entails a contradiction and so that supertasks are not possible — Michael

Except there have been plausible solutions given to Thomson's Lamp. Which is more of a problem than it is a paradox.

For this reason, Earman and Norton conclude with Benacerraf that the Thomson lamp is not a matter of paradox but of an incomplete description.

All this, I take as evidence that we do not know what "life" is. We seem to believe that there is something called "life", (and it's sort of odd that we name it as a thing, harkening back to "the soul"), but we really do not understand what it means to be alive. — Metaphysician Undercover

Maybe in English you don't. In other languages we have no trouble using the word that comes out of Google translate when you write "life".

I quite agree with ↪wonderer1 about it being weak. — Patterner

Which is peripheral to the question. People born blind are still capable of the brain activity which sets up visual perception, because people born blind in most cases have issues in their eye apparatus, not in their brain. It is not a matter of whether they do, but that they can; and the scholarly opinion is it is likely that they do. As the article says:

In the vast majority of cases, blindness results from problems in the eyes and in the optic nerves, and not in the brain. In the few cases where blindness results from problems in the brain, the person usually regains some amount of vision due to brain plasticity (i.e. the ability of the brain to rewire itself). Therefore, people who have been blind since birth still technically have the ability to experience visual sensations in the brain. They just have nothing sending electrical impulses with visual information to the brain. In other words, they are still capable of having visual experiences. It's just that these experiences cannot originate from the outside world.

Rather, the visual sensations must arise from the electrical fluctuations that originate within the brain.

Regarding the current conversation, the question is, would an infant born without any senses develop a self/mind from the visual, and presumably other, hallucinations? — Patterner

Kant says in the preface (I don't recall whether A or B) of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft that all knowledge starts with experience. That seems to be a fact of life, we do have senses before we form knowledge in our heads. But I am not sure whether he also meant that experience is counterfactual to knowledge. I think it is the debate whether the mind is a blank slate or whether it has innate ideas. If it has innate ideas, perhaps it would be able to think and therefore know, but I am skeptical of whether even then it would have an idea of self, as someone like that would essentially live in a solipsistic world.

That's sounding like word salad to me.

The article is an example. The majority opinion seems to be that people born blind can indeed "see".

Because he is not using "idol" in the way you mean.

How could a being that never had a sense of sight have a visual hallucination? — Patterner

Like this:

While people who have been blind since birth do indeed dream in visual images, [...] — https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2020/02/11/do-blind-people-dream-in-visual-images/

If that was possible, would we not be able to describe vision to people who were born blind? — Patterner

Not necessarily because they can't communicate images and we can't communicate it to them, as they have no outside object to reference with a given word. They could make a language to label the things they see but it would be a sort of private language.

"[The self] is the being that exists in the mind prior to any sense perception", but "there is no self without sense perception of the world". That seems contradictory.

It couldn't be visual, auditory, tactile, or dealing with taste or smell. — Patterner

Couldn't it?

Not to float my own boat, but back when I wrote my midterm essay for some 100-level ethics course, my choice of normative principle was along the lines of "avoid the greatest amount of harm, even if it means also avoiding a greater amount of welfare (to another party)". That seems to be the same as some version of negative utilitarianism, particularly threshold NU and weak NU.

One of my justifications for the principle is that harm violates the object's free will, (not giving) welfare does not.

I will check the theses and the objections when I am in an ethics mood and when I have time.

Google has told me that viruses are not alive — Metaphysician Undercover

Who are we to disagree then?

Despite what Google told you, there are many biologists that do defend viruses should be classified as life:

Raoult and Forterre (2008) even argue that we should reclassify all biological entities into two major groups: the ribosome-encoding organisms (archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes), or REOs; and the capsid-encoding organisms (viruses), or CEOs (Figure 2).

I don't agree with them, but that is just a personal preference of mine.

The earliest examples of writing date to 7,000 BCE when Neolithic Period humans in China and elsewhere began producing glyphs and ideographics—symbols representing objects and ideas. — Joshs

I imagine this source is referring to what amounts to cave paintings. Not writing by any stretch, especially the case when 7000 BC the ancestor of the Chinese language wasn't even thinking about existing yet — in fact that was at least 3000 years before there were organised societies by the Huang He Valley. But do tell me otherwise.

In any case, the earliest recognisably Chinese piece of writing is the Oracle bone inscription from the 13th century before Christ. Mycenaean Greek (not Greek but Hellenic) is first attested in the 14th century before Christ.

As a sidenote, Minoans in Crete were writing for over 500 years by that time. They were not Greek, but they were to the Greeks what the Greeks were to the Romans.

Agriculture requires laws, not writing — isomorph

Agriculture requires crops and irrigation. Incas were a unique exception in world history where a society fulfilled all criterions of civilisation except for a widespread writing system. Then again, Chinese civilisation is not 5000 years old.

Infinite geometric progression with first term 30 and ratio 0.5.
The sum is $\frac{30}{1-0.5}$. The counter is the number of members of the GP, to reach 60 seconds the counter must go to infinity. But in reality the counter, no matter how powerful, will just break the closer we approach the 60s mark.

As t→60, probability of the counter breaking goes up.

the naive realist's claim that distal objects and their properties are constituents of phenomenal character — Michael

I am gonna have to quote Amadeus here:

Is anyone truly positing that the screen infront of me is part of my experience? — AmadeusD

It seems that no one is really talking about naïve realism, it has nothing to do with the semantics of "see".

claimed (1) that everyday material objects, such as caterpillars and cadillacs, have mind-independent existence (the “realism” part); (2) that our visual perception of these material objects is not mediated by the perception of some other entities, such as sense-data (the “direct” part); and (3) these objects possess all the features that we perceive them to have (the “naïve” part) — https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0340.xml

The issue is that people will easily reject 3, many will reject 2, few will reject 1.

If we define our minds as being inside the world, yes. If we don't, no. For the former, the debate dissolves again into a semantic issue.

that takes place in the world — fdrake

And this would be wrong.

I think viruses are quire clearly living. — Metaphysician Undercover

So viruses are living?

Enter poliovirus:

A virus that is made of a simple RNA and an icosaedric capsid. If this is living for you, there is no reason why a simple RNA without capsid is not living. Being that RNA is a nucleid acid, a molecule, then other molecules must be living too, like proteins and lipids. And if those are living, other organic molecules must be living too, like ethanol and glycosis. Then it seems your line between alive and inanimate are just as arbitrary as humans and animals.

You could easily look up that the first piece of writing in Greek predates the first in Chinese by some 200 years.
Farming villages are not enough to establish "civilisation".