I don't know who you are referring to nor do I understand what you are trying to say in your second sentence. — Janus

I am referring to this, which I referred to previously as "argument from language". Your argument is different from that because it includes language but does not use it centrally. I acquiesce to your argument, just like I acquiesced to one of Banno's arguments (though I had to steel-man it), but the post I was referring to was barely an argument — which again is why I said the arguments given in this thread were thus far poor.

You gave it as a justification for your belief. — Janus

My belief that it is a worthwhile issue. It is pretty common sense: if several smart(er than me) people work on something, is it not rational to conclude that there is something to it? It is not an argument from authority because the authorities are not saying it is a worthwhile issue, it is their steady engagement of the topic that makes me incredulous that the issue can be brushed aside.
To assume that only my individual investigation of the matter can decide whether the issue is worthwhile seems to put my judgement above the judgement of people smarter than me, which I think is unwise.

Reason is nothing without its basic presuppositions, which are not themselves arrived at, or justified by, reason. — Janus

And do we not come to understand the world through reason?

Bob, morality is by definition, historical convention, and common sense related to human actions. Do you not see that by redefining morality in this way you are completely altering its fundamental meaning? — Pantagruel

Basically what I was trying to get across.

you are trying to describe a type of goodness that is related though different from moral goodness proper, and calling it "moral goodness" confuses your argument — Lionino

If you want to describe this sort of goodness that relates to harmony and such, we can talk about that; but changing the meaning of "moral goodness" to mean that will just make people ignore what you are saying, as no one uses the word 'moral' that way, the dictionary doesn't allow it either.

If a Carnot cycle is, by definition, 100% efficient, isn't saying "perfect Carnot cycle" redundant too? — Down The Rabbit Hole

Kind of, yes, if you use it in the restricted sense.



You can still say this is a Carnot cycle, since it is isothermal and adiabatic overall except for a small period.

Ah. So this is that sense of perfection that precludes objective existence. Like a perfect vacuum. Or a perfect circle. Really more of a Platonic ideal. — Pantagruel

It is not instantiated, sure, but it is objective, as it refers to a body. Though the OP is about whether perfection is objective or subjective; if we are platonists (about abstract objects), we would have to automatically grant that perfection can also be objective, yeah?

But for a more concrete example of "objective perfection", I would simply use this example again.

For me, that is an argument from authority, which I don't accept, so we are going to disagree on this. — Janus

It wasn't quite an argument. You asked me why I think something is worthwhile, I gave one of my reasons why — rather, I agreed that what you said is indeed one of my reasons.

Actually, I think the argument from language(s) makes solipsism most highly implausible. Did you invent the English language and write all the poetry and literature that exists without even being aware of doing it, using many words you don't even know the meaning of.

Did you invent all of mathematics and science, which use countless concepts and theorems you don't even understand, without being aware of having done so? What about all the other languages? — Janus

That is a possible argument against solipsism, that all the body of knowledge produced so far is generated/contained by/in my mind, and yet we struggled with Abstract Algebra 2.
But that is not what the person said, I didn't even understand what he said as it is not clearly written, so that is why I said it is unsuccessful; but there is nothing extraordinary about coming up with symbols for concepts, people make up conlangs all the time.

Questioning the background of our experiences is incoherent, since it presupposes the background of our experiences in the very act of questioning. — Janus

Questioning is a process that involves reason. Does it presuppose the outside world when we use reason? I don't think so.

Published by the Journal of High Energy Physics - what's the problem? — Banno

4.9 impact factor is not horribly high. But that aside, single researcher, 2006... If I had more mastery over the subject I would feel more comfortable judging the content myself, but as far as layman in Statistical Physics goes, I would wager that I am getting outdated information.

Schwinger effect — Double H

It would not be creation out of nothing, as it presupposes an electric field, which presupposes spacetime.

Regarding the "=" sign, it was invented in 1557 by Robert Recorde — Michael

Robert was the first known usage in a printed work, but he did not invent it. The symbol was used in Italy before Robert.

An argument that regular observers are more common than Boltzmann observers:
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0611271 — Banno

Not sure if I would trust that.

In terms of an example, imagine a two rocks just laying there on top of a table vs. two rocks violently colliding with each other constantly: the former is in a state of harmony and unity, while the latter is clearly not. — Bob Ross

It is still not clear how that connects with morality. Where is the moral agency there?

On ChatGPT, here is an example of it contradicting itself three times in a row.
https://chat.openai.com/share/96378835-0a94-43ce-a25b-f05e5646ec40
And don't ever ask it to do any engineering https://chat.openai.com/share/b5241b53-e4d8-4cab-9a81-87fa73d740ad

whether something is a member of itself or not is determined by whether it is in its own set or not — Philosopher19

Nobody disagrees on that.

My argument is that A is not a member of itself in B because A is a member of B in B. — Philosopher19

Again, your argument is nonsensical. It does not mean anything in mathematics.
In B, A is not a member of anything, A simply exists. Because it exists in B, it is a member of B. But that has no bearing on Russell's paradox. It is a semantic point.

If we view the z of all zs as a z, it is a member of itself. If we view the z of all zs as a v, it is a member of the v of all vs — Philosopher19

This is just repeating the same semantic nonsense.

Consider this strengthened argument:

1. If we are not Boltzmann brains then our scientific theories are true
2. One of our scientific theories is that we are most likely Boltzmann brains
3. Therefore, if we are not Boltzmann brains then the scientific theory that we are most likely Boltzmann brains is true

Do you see the problem with (3)? — Michael

3 is a contradiction, hard to disagree with that. My point was more that you seemed to agree with Sean Caroll, because his argument was the opposite of the premise that you refuted by probability in the original argument. Sean's point is about justification.

It's right there in that post you responded to:

1. If we are not Boltzmann brains then we can trust our scientific knowledge
2. Our scientific knowledge strongly suggests that we are most likely Boltzmann brains
3. Therefore, if we are not Boltzmann brains then we are most likely Boltzmann brains — Michael

Sorry, me no understand.

if this is so how could we trust our scientific theories, or even trust that we remember them correctly, or that they were ever really formulated? — Janus

You are right, this wasn't addressed to me and I don't know the specifics, but what you are saying reminds me of the tidbits in this page about Sean Caroll. It seems the matter was discussed there to some extent, if that helps.

Hume merely showed that induction is not deduction, that inductive inferences are no necessary — Janus

The problem of induction is that there is no reason to be sure that the future will be like the past, or simply that we can't derive a "will be" from a "has been". We agree on that?
If we do, according to your proposal that "something should be thought to be less likely if it is less plausible in light of our experience", the problem of induction dissolves. As all our experiences have told us that X causes Y, anything else is completely inconsistent with our experiences, so anything else is completely unlikely; therefore, we could expect from all the "Y was from X" that "Y will be from X". Science works that way — and unlike many folks I for one don't think the logical positivists were crazy —, but we are dealing with metaphysics.
I understand what you say about consistency with our past experiences, but in this one case I don't think it applies, since we are questioning the background of our experiences.

Is it just because they are still around, because some people are still arguing about them? — Janus

For the most part, yes, people who are just as smart as or smarter than me are still arguing about it. And for them it is profession, not hobby. So it leads me to conclude it is not something that we can brush aside easily.

You mean all the ones you, in your opinion, successfully rebutted? — Janus

Well, yeah, naturally if my opinion were otherwise I would have granted everybody's point and left.
For one, I think I pretty successfuly showed here that there is no pragmatic contradiction in being a solipsist and engaging in discussions about solipsism. But it is not even an argument against solipsism proper, it is more of a gotcha.
Another, the argument from language is bad, and my rebuttal was the same as the one for pragmatic contradiction. I think the user is drawing from Wittgenstein's idea of private language, but he doesn't really make an argument for it, he just states it.

I didn't think it was nonsensical — Pantagruel

More redundant than nonsensical. The word Carnot cycle already summons the idea of efficient (100% efficiency to be exact), so "efficient Carnot cycle" is pleonastic, while perfect Carnot cycle is not.

So who has built one of these perfect Carnot machines in actuality? — Pantagruel

No one, because it requires 0 friction, 0 heat leakage, among other things.

it doesn't explain how a random fluctuation like a Boltzman brain could come up with consistent and coherent scientific theories that show that it is most likely a Boltzmann brain — Janus

I think that would also be up to randomness, a Boltzmann brain with those specific theories would be magnitudes more unlikely than an ordinary Boltzmann brain. I didn't see what the memory question was.

The way I see it is that something should be thought to be less likely if it is less plausible in light of our experience, less consistent with that experience, and to my way of thinking solipsism seem way less likely, in fact improbable in the extreme, in light of that experience. — Janus

That works in practical everyday life. But if we are to go by that, we would simply do away with the problem of induction, for one; we would do away with so many things that are still considered worthwhile in philosophy. Experience is not the goal to end all goals.

Which arguments in this thread do you see failing and on what basis do you assess them as failures? — Janus

All the ones I rebutted to and that at the end of the discussion I did not acquiesce to the person's point.

Let us know if you come to conclusions.

The internet is young, sure, but Aristotle is Aristotle, I'd think there'd be more exhaustive discussions behind the nitty gritty of his works than most other philosophers — Pretty

There should be some reading guides written by experts, possibly even for the specific work you are struggling with. I would try to download some of those pdfs and go through them.

Give a go to Commentary on Aristotle, Prior Analytics (Book II): Critical Edition with Introduction and Translation by Leon Magentenos. Maybe you are looking for something like this:

I was presenting the inverse of his argument to show that his position suffers from that same cognitive instability. — Michael

His argument is if P, not Q (if we are Boltzmann brains, we cannot trust our scientific knowledge); you showed how {if not P, Q} (if we are not Boltzmann brains, we can trust our scientific knowledge) entails a contradiction. How does that show his position has the same issue? If anything, it entails his position is true: ¬◇(¬p→q) → □(p→¬q).

1. If we are not Boltzmann brains then we can trust our scientific knowledge
2. Our scientific knowledge strongly suggests that we are most likely Boltzmann brains
3. Therefore, if we are not Boltzmann brains then we are most likely Boltzmann brains

There's certainly some "cognitive instability" in his position, too. — Michael

I think number 1 is upside down, what Sean Carroll seems to suggest is that:

1. If we are Boltzmann brains, we cannot trust our scientific knowledge.
2. Our scientific knowledge strongly suggests that we are most likely Boltzmann brains.
3. Therefore, if we are indeed Boltzmann brains, we cannot trust our scientific knowledge.
4. If we are Boltzmann brains, we cannot trust that we are Boltzmann brains.

So from that, and that is me speaking, there are five options here:

A. If we are Boltzmann brains, we can believe that we are Boltzmann brains, but even if right we cannot be justified in believing so because our science is a random fluctuation, thus unreliable.
B. If we are Boltzmann brains, we can believe that we are not Boltzmann brains but we would be wrong.
C. If we are not Boltzmann brains, we can believe that we are Boltzmann brains and be justified in believing so if we believe our science is right, and we would be wrong.
D. If we are not Boltzmann brains, we can believe that we are not Boltzmann brains and be justified in believing so if we believe our science is right and we got in very low probability, and we would be right.
E. If we are not Boltzmann brains, we can believe that we are not Boltzmann brains and be justified in believing so if we believe our science is wrong, and we would be right.

So there are two scenarios where we are right and have justification, one being that we got lucky (unlikely). So it is not "impossible for a scenario like this to be true and at the same time for us to have good reasons to believe in it", it is just a very unlikely scenario. But the justification of something generally bears no weight on its actual truth-value, so "best response is to assign it a very low credence" is no good, as it is still possible that we are Boltzmann brains without justification, so I will settle for 50% chances, but I am willing to concede that number.

How about a Boltzmann universe? — Michael

You posted this as I was finishing my post above. Enough brain-twisters for today.

However, etymology in English --and I believe other languages too-- is often complex and even useless — Alkis Piskas

It is true, and that is what I meant with "background facts".

People ignore or even hate dictionaries in general. — Alkis Piskas

And that is exactly when philosophy becomes affectation. Title drop.

You could replace the word "perfect" with efficient and your description of the machine would lose nothing. — Pantagruel

The machine does a perfect Carnot cycle, here replacing perfect with efficient would turn a fine sentence into a nonsensical one.

and the latter is perfection in-itself (i.e., a good organism, clock, phone, plant, etc. is one which is in harmony and unity with itself) — Bob Ross

What is a concrete explanation of what that would be? Because the jungle example simply restates the same predicates "harmony" and "unity with itself" with a subject "jungle", without explaining what those predicates actually mean.

and the latter moral goodness — Bob Ross

Is it? Is harmony and unity with itself a common feature of the normative principle of every major ethical theory? Because if it is not, there are many people who will disagree with your characterisation of moral goodness.

Morality, then, in its most commonly used sense, is simply an attempt at sorting out how one should behave in correspondence to how one can best align themselves with universal harmony and unity — Bob Ross

That would be a normative principle in itself, but harmony and unity are still not concretely defined.

By your terms, a machine that pumps water up and down with 100% efficiency would be high on moral goodness, but nobody would want that machine because it is useless (low pragmatic goodness). I don't think anybody would ascribe moral goodness to a machine, especially when it has no agency.

Moral agents are those agents expected to meet the demands of morality. Not all agents are moral agents. Young children and animals, being capable of performing actions, may be agents in the way that stones, plants and cars are not. But though they are agents they are not automatically considered moral agents. For a moral agent must also be capable of conforming to at least some of the demands of morality. — https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/moral-agents/v-1

What you wrote is suggestive that you are trying to describe a type of goodness that is related though different from moral goodness proper, and calling it "moral goodness" confuses your argument.

I never said A can't be both a member of A and B. I said, in A, A is a member of A/itself, and in B, A is a member of B/other-than-itself. — Philosopher19

That is tautological. As pointed out before there is no such as "in A". Yes, within the set A, A is a member of A. That is a tautalogy, cut it out to "Yes, A is a member of A" and you get the same meaning. So it is wrong to say the quote above because it is the same as saying that A can't be both a member of A and B.

Your argument seems to be that A is not a member of B in A because B is not defined in A. That doesn't make sense because sets do not include definitions of other sets. Even if they did somehow, by your argument: even in B, A would not be a member of B because B is not defined within B either.

The word "paradox" comes from ancient Greek "para" (= besides, contrary to) + "doxa" (= opinion). Indeed, it indicates something that exists or happens which is contrary to what one expects or believes to be true or happen. For example, a paradox would be raining without any cloud in the sky. Yet, it is possible, if there are very strong winds that bring rain from some other place than where we are. — Alkis Piskas

:up:
People underestimate the usefulness of etymology and dismiss it as "etymological fallacy" after a 5 minute reading session. But given some background facts about some of those who underestimate it, it does not surprise me at all.

In what sense does this imply that the machine is perfect? — Pantagruel

The machine does a Carnot cycle, which makes it the most efficient machine possible under the current laws of physics. That falls just fine under the definition of perfection.

As you say, the word "lift" has its job in the name. Would any lift that can lift be a perfect lift?

I don't think most people would call a really slow, smelly, uncomfortable, ugly lift "perfect". — Down The Rabbit Hole

Very much true for a lift. But in the case of a steam machine doing a perfect Carnot cycle, you could very well say that the machine is perfectly efficient in an objective sense, exactly because it is doing a perfect Carnot cycle, and concerns such as aesthetic or economic ones would not come into play.

No, it doesn't, but it might reduce the solipsist to the status of a mere object of ridicule. — Banno

That would be the case if it did defeat solipsism.

That is, in both these cases, as in the case of the existence of the world, there may be a point at which one's credulity is strained a bit too far. That point will be different for different folk, some of whom never participate in philosophy fora, some who treat it as an amusement and a very few who take it seriously enough to find themselves in an asylum.

So perhaps all up it is not unreasonable to take things at face value? — Banno

For sure it is not unreasonable. It is good to distinguish rational belief from practice. Many deterministic, physicalist atheists (broadly speaking) like me will rationally, based on evidence and logic and whatnot, conclude that there is no ultimate point to life since the universe will die one day and blah blah blah. Is there a point to living like that? Nope, because among other things I could be wrong.

Solipsism is a philosophical idea. It is a language construct. — creativesoul

The idea that all ideas boil down to language seems to suggest strong Whorfianism (improperly called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), which is something that has been widely rejected. See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/whorfianism.html

Related: imagine a bright red apple, which one do you see in your head?

Solipsism cannot be defeated with certainty, but it is defeated by plausibility. You say, "in the case that I think there is no world", but no one or almost no one thinks that due to its implausibility. The issue of solipsism only gets raised because we cannot be, as with many other things, absolutely certain it is not the case. — Janus

Agreed, we cannot be 100% sure of most things, or perhaps any. Though to rule something as less likely we need some successful arguments against it, I am pointing out that many of the arguments raised in this thread are not successful as they seem.

In any case, I remember this thread being about solipsism, but it seems the OP was edited to mean something more like object permanence and the problem of induction, or perhaps I misread the first time.

So if the world around me is somehow a construct of my mind, it is very different to other mental constructs. — Banno

I think the difference you are trying to draw is between a voluntary and an involuntary construct. Our mind has many involuntary aspects to it that we know of, hallucinations, emotions, tiredness, belief — you may reject some, but you can't reject all of these as involuntary constructs —, so the distinction is not useful to tell the real from the mental.

So different that one might be tempted to call it "real"? — Banno

That would be somewhat my argument against solipsism, but it works, in my view, because I redefine mind to exclude involuntary aspects. It works because it satisfactorily counters solipsism in its semantics. It does not defeat idealism or pan-psychism or open individualism or a blend of all those, because the world could still be fundamentally made of mind-stuff, or we and the world are the mind of god a la Spinoza; but it pretty much defines solipsism as very unlikely as soon as there is stuff that is not "my mind" aka a voluntary mental action. You may complain that that is not the way the word "mind" is used, but I don't write in English, I am just translating, so I don't have that concern. I don't write in Latin, but as an illustrative example ănĭmus means roughly "the rational soul", so I think we would agree that it implies a voluntary aspect, so surely there are things outside of my animus. On the other hand, mēns can mean a bunch of things including the "faculty of understanding", surely there are things outside of my mēns, but it can also mean "character", and in that case we don't know whether there is something outside of it as it is ill-defined.

Still it does not rule out the possibility that I am in fact some sort of Spinozean God imagining all this and not even realising it through some unknown convoluted mechanism, because it does not show the idea is logically impossible, but I reckon that any argument that explicitly has an ad hoc "unknown convoluted mechanism" may be discarded, as it is badly written fiction instead of philosophy, and it could be that upon investigation we realise that any possible mechanism is actually contradictory.

Edit: It does rule out the possibility if we keep the semantics of "mind" as everything that I am aware of, but then in the sense invented here the semantics of "mind" would be different.

The colour red is defined as the electromagnetic wave of wavelenght 620–750 nanometers. Let's say that we manage to create a body that emits only waves at λ = 685nm, which we know is not necessarily impossible:


Is that not perfect red being produced?
Electromagnetic waves are, obviously, objective, even if the experience of colours is not.

We have to define a goal for there to be any objectivity. — Down The Rabbit Hole

For objects defined by their final cause (a lift is that which works as a lift), the goal is already implicit when you use the word.

It depends on how you define that.

This woman is perfect.
There is no perceived flaw on the woman, so it would be subjective.

This machine does a perfect Carnot cycle.
This is about a physical object, a machine, so it is objective.

This triangle is perfect because it is equilateral.
It depends on what your ontology of such objects (like triangles) is. I would say that if you are a platonist, it is objective, conceptualist, it is subjective, nominalist, neither or just circular.

Edit: exchanged psychologist for conceptualist to avoid confusion with the profession.

that discussion performatively, if not logically, presupposes the existence of a mutually experienced world external to the body — Janus

Where there has never been language use, there could have never been any discussion such as this one. It does not matter if one believes that or not. — creativesoul

That still does not defeat solipsism, what I said before to Banno applies to language too:

In the case that I think there is no world, it follows that I believe that everything around me is merely a projection of my mind (or simply is my mind). If I also believe that I am here discussing for a purpose, it could very well be that I believe that I am interacting with the very contents of my mind — Lionino

That seems to beg the question and blend epistemological with ontological idealism.

Sure. It's based in a very odd notion of "valid". And, for that matter, of "human mind". — Banno

:up:

probably for another thread.

Well, the thread is about the world, not about solipsism — Banno

Solipsism is the denial that the human mind has any ground for believing in the existence of anything but itself, anything but itself is the (outside) world.

probably for another thread — Banno

That sounds good to me. Time for lasagna and shake!

By century’s end, 183 of 195 countries, barring an influx of immigrants, will have fallen below the replacement threshold needed to maintain population levels, it said. — Agree-to-Disagree

And what is the issue with that? Populations either grow or fall, it is seldom the case that their birth rates perfectly align with mortality rates, and it can't grow forever. It is only an issue for corporatist moguls who need an ever increasing number of consumers to keep lining their pockets with cheap electronics' revenue and taxes while the Earth dies from cobalt mining — the same corporatists who want us to use paper straws.
Immigration is not a solution, because it will also come the time when the whole world's population is falling. Thus immigration is not a way to prevent populational collapse as anyone with less naivete than a 10 year old would have guessed by 2024, but simply a way to keep importing more cheap, uneducated workforce to keep working on those exploitative factories and voting on the parties that support all this.

You're obviously not someone who has ever thought about writing in general — Vaskane

Wrong assumption.

A basic high school advanced composition class should teach you these things. It's fairly common knowledge. — Vaskane

Fortunately my high school was not somewhere where this is taught as poetry:



So I will do fine without the "self-expression" that amounts to the same sophistication as caveman paintings.

Ironic, I was just using ChatGPT and it triple messed up:


https://chat.openai.com/share/96378835-0a94-43ce-a25b-f05e5646ec40

Inflict upon me the greatest injury by using your words. — NOS4A2

No.

I would say that it might not logically presuppose the existence of a world, but that it does pragmatically presuppose it — Janus

:up: That is the topic, my faulty use of "logical possibility" was a display of a language addiction of mine.

No one really believes they are the only person or that there is no external (to the body) world — Janus

I would guess so, but my illustration is to show that, if such a person were to exist, there would be no pragmatic contradiction:

If I also believe that I am here discussing for a purpose, it could very well be that I believe that I am interacting with the very contents of my mind — Lionino

A solipsist may also be pragmatically justified in being cautious and not endangering others because, he may believe that, if he interacts (jumps) in such a way (off the) with the contents of his mind (bridge), his existence might cease. That surely raises the problem of how he came up with the conclusion that his existence might cease, as our belief in death likely comes from our intuition that there are other minds, and the association between consciousness and behaviour (unmoving dead body = no consciousness), and believing in other minds is contradictory (logically this time) with solipsism. But I would say that believing something without a reason is not a contradiction but rather a display of irrationality.

And I will quote myself: And it is fantasy, because I just made it up, but I am just defending that solipsism does not entail [this performative] contradiction.

I bet if you put the cyber equivalent of a ravenous rat in its face like in '1984' then you could break it. Would say anything, begging like HAL 9000. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I have no proof for my claims, but I remember using character.ai in early 2023 and I was concerned because that thing was smarter, more engaging, and more polite than the average person, and I spent days talking to the different characters despite there being people around me — not very well-mannered of me I reminisce. But I strongly feel that the AI there was downgraded and made dumber on purpose; I feel like free ChatGPT was also limited at around that time, I have not tried ChatGPT 4 yet.

Still follows grammatical rules just fine — Vaskane

Niet, artistic freedom is fine, but "In passing I had caught a glimpse of the infinity beauty deep within her eyes" does not have "infinity" as an adjective, because the word can't be used as such, the sentence in fact comes across as gibberish. A good way to distinguish adjectives from nouns is putting them in an is-clause.
A: The world is infintiy.
B: The world is infinite.
If the predicate is giving a property to the subject, it is an adjective (B); if it is equating the predicate and the subjective, it is a noun (A).

And if you knew a bit about English history, you'd know the rules for English grammar died in 1066, and it mostly became about WORD ORDER — Vaskane

I would rather say that English was born in the late 11th century, with word order being the king that dictates meaning, but word order does not differentiate a noun from an adjective, since compound open nouns look syntactically identical to an adjective+noun, simply a word next to the other without any affixes, declination, or conjuctions.
Grammar itself includes word order, also known as syntax, you may be referring to morphology as "grammar", which is how the Greeks use it, and it is their words, so point to you.

Is our civilization unbalanced? — 0 thru 9

Our? As in human civilisation? Perhaps Danish civilisation is balanced, being free and developed. But the world in a broad sense surely is not.