I see this as a variation of argument like "Mary's Room" and "What it is like to be a bat?" — Ludwig V

The difference with Mary's room or the bat is that it applies to everybody who is not you. But it is not as deep or epistemological as that, it is a simple practical fact of life: actual Chinese people share core experiences that you don't.

But I don't think anything follows that is relevant here. — Ludwig V

It is relevant to the fragment from Count's post that I quoted.

But what about governments subsidizing things like solar and wind energy? — RogueAI

Wind turbines are not worth it for a lot of regions — low efficiency and high maintenance. Solar is good if maintened and recycled properly. Hydroelectric and nuclear are the best options currently. Hopefully China figures something out with fusion eventually. But the Greens in Germany and their troglodytic, lower-palaeolithic brain easily surpassed by that of an Australopithecus have decided that it was a good idea to shut the nuclear plants down. I once heard the cope justification that the nuclear plants became a negative investment, but if that is the reason, suddenly for the greens a bit of money is more important than destroying the environment by burning millions of tons of coal like Germany is doing now.

And what about governments subsidizing lab grown meat? — RogueAI

Untenable sci-fi stuff for the next 100 years championed by the "we heckin love science"/"I can't solve middle school math" crowd (Mickei). Those 3D printed steaks are full of carcinogens for all we know.

Edit: So we might say that (1) guarantees (2) but (2) does not guarantee (1). Thus I admit that it doesn't count as a real translation. — Leontiskos

:smile:

Seems a little unwoke and culturally oppressive for you. — apokrisis

Nobody here is woke, even if many purport to be. Go to the "Currently Reading" thread. Most names there by far are English. We can't be talking about diverse writers when folks don't even bother to read writers from neighbouring countries.

Speaking of writers, screw that Argentine Borges and his shameful inferiority complex.

Are those three all the same thing in the context of this thread? — Leontiskos

Yes, 'consciousness' too.

I am willing to be more surgical with my terminology and prescribe some definitions of terms if it is needed. But not today.

Right, but these two statements of yours seem to be in tension. If it is not evident that grandma's previous ability to recognize her family is merely physical, then it cannot be evidently false that her lack of recognition is not a bodily change. — Leontiskos

Going straight to the point, I would not say that loss of some information, be a memory or else, implies that someone's soul has been swapped. Their mind/brain has changed accidentally to a small extent (in losing that information, I am not talking about the demented condition as a whole), but essentially it is the same.

If I recall correctly, many Medieval thinkers equate conservation with creation, such that there is no difference between a substance which is conserved and a substance which is annihilated and created. — Leontiskos

Since Descartes is in dialogue with the medieval tradition, to then break with it, I would guess so. Perhaps that is why he didn't address the matter.

This is part of what I was getting at with the "no adjudicable way to distinguish these two views" comment. — Leontiskos

But then you see how it doesn't make sense for them not to be distinct? If our consciousness is being annihilated and created every time, aren't we then dying and a copy of us with the same memories being created each time in an empty-individualism fashion? I think that is starkly distinct from our conscious experience persisting.

But what is the difference between building an answer to the inquiry into one's premises, and begging the question? This seems to be precisely what a petitio principii is. — Leontiskos

If the question here is whether there is a proof for perdurance, then it is the same as the question of whether the process thinker's premise is provable. — Leontiskos

To answer all questions and statements in your posts: yes. But it does not triviliase the proposal because we have two different options for the soul: process or substance. We must choose one. Is it findable in a snapshot of time and space? Choosing substance leads to the problem aforementioned; choosing process seems not to.

but I don't think remedying that goofiness solves the question of the perdurance of the soul. — Leontiskos

How not?

So do you then see my claim about wood as 'dogmatic'? — Leontiskos

Well, we know from experience that wood burns. We don't know from experience that the soul lasts, as we are very much philosophising about the subject that experiences.

Then we might ask whether the soul from 2020 perdures into 2021, and whether the soul from 2021 perdures into 2022, etc. — Leontiskos

True. I think I address that point in a previous post:

In that view, what I propose is that the self could be characterised as a chain of experienced patterns that emerge subjective experience. In simpler language, the ‘self’ would be fluid, the union of many mental elements which grow (or decrease, in the case of dementia) through time, and often when we try to analyse (literally meaning untie) this process we end up atomising it in a given moment — and as someone brought up previously, some philosophers say this is a mistake based on objectifying the mind.
Consciousness then (or the soul etc) would start at birth or whenever we wanna say we first become conscious (mirror test?) and ends in death. — Lionino

Unfortunate.

Is there something wrong with: (A→¬B)? — Leontiskos

That is A implies not B.

"Even if lizards were purple, they would not be smarter." — Leontiskos

My conclusion thus far is that «A does not imply B» can't be translated to logical language. I attempted several different ways in flannel jesus' thread but none worked.

In natural language when we deny a conditional we at the same time assert an opposed conditional; we do not make non-conditional assertions. In natural language the denial of a conditional is itself a conditional. But in propositional logic the denial of a conditional is a non-conditional. — Leontiskos

The problem is that the associativity of English words does not match the associativity of logical operators.
Like in math X(Y*W)=(X*Y)*W but X(Y+W)≠(X*Y)+W
Saying «A implies B» is A→B, but «A does not imply B» doesn't take the ¬ operator anywhere. An example is ¬(A→B∧¬B) can't be read as "It is not the case that A implies a contradiction", rather it is read as "not-A implies a contradiction", which is why that formula entails A.

"A does not imply a contradiction" is not a true statement about "(A→¬(B and ¬B))". — TonesInDeepFreeze

I know. I don't edit all posts that I regret. But I don't agree now with what I wrote on that post.

"Does positing something like physicalism provide an answer to the OP, for or against?" — Leontiskos

The problem with physicalism is that it does not address the sensation of "forever here". This is recognised by physicalist philosophers too:



As was said in my comment 922875, the whole discussion is somewhat reliant on mind-body dualism.

Familiarity with the soul shows that it perdures, just as familiarity with wood shows that it burns. — Leontiskos

That seems to do the same as Descartes, dogmatically attributing duration to the soul without deeper justification.

This gets at the idea of distinctions without any difference. If one person says that we are conserved in existence at each moment and another says that we are recreated at each moment, and there is no adjudicable way to distinguish these two views, then what are we even talking about at that point? — Leontiskos

Well, that is Descartes saying and I don't immediately agree with it. Especially because I think there is an assumption of discrete time, instead of continuous, there.

We can define 'soul' as "the interconnectedness of those experiences," but in that case the original question seems to simply morph into the question of whether this "soul" exists. — Leontiskos

That is true, because you may argue there is no interconnectedness. That is true if we have different experiences in different points in time.

If we say however that experience is something that flows and cannot exist in a single point time but instead needs to exist in an interval of time, I think doubting the interconnectedness is equal to doubting the self (which Descartes gave the final argument again). For Kant, we must think in terms of space and time, I am willing to accept this idea. If it is true, it may be because there is no snapshot of the mind, it must exist as persisting in time, for as we create a snapshot of it in an instant it is no longer a mind but something else. Like a river, if we create a snapshot of it, it is no longer a river but a lake.
I think the subscriber to substance metaphysics is able to doubt that the interconnected of those experiences exists because it is premised on a snapshot of the soul being possible; while process metaphysics will say that there is no consciousness on an instant of time.

Let me frame it in a different way. Substance metaphysics works under the assumption that there is such a substance that can be located in an instant of time (a snapshot), and for one to say that the substance is not being created and annihilated each instant, one has to say that the soul persists through time. Process metaphysics however will not commit to there being a substance that can be located in time, but that the soul is something that itself exists through time, and thus is also defined by it.

So when I am alive and experiencing, it is not something that happens in an instant but something that happens constinuously, there is no consciousness without time. Therefore process metaphysics doesn't have to prove the persistence of the soul, it is premised in that metaphysics. As soon as we prove our own existence, the existence of the self, and we are premised in that self existing as a constinuous entity (process) rather than a discrete one (substance), we know that the self endures.

I think this post from another thread is relevant https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/895615


Not just memory. If it were memory, the teleportation puzzle would be solved. If all your atoms are dissolved and then over to another place at nearly speed of light, then reassembled, did you die and went to eternal sleep and what is created a perfect copy of you? Or is it you and you simply lost consciousness for an instant? is the question. There is a spatio-temporal, physical continuity between the moments of the tree as it grows, same with our brains; the issue however is whether we are the same consciousness as before.

Now the commonsensical interpretation is that her body is the same but her soul is different. — Leontiskos

I don't find that to be true. In fact for me it is evidently false, which might be based on the same reason why Abrahamic religions would disagree.

I just came across this webpage https://www.siue.edu/~wlarkin/teaching/PHIL111/meditation%20one.html listing the arguments from the first meditation. I must say, it is pretty terrible. Goes to show how reading the book with a proper guide is indispensable, lectures won't always give it justice.

I will also use this post to say that the Fifth Meditation is by far and large the very worst meditation.

That last clause is wrong, obviously. (Maybe you corrected it subsequently.) — TonesInDeepFreeze

Υes, I did. In my thread, I explored the question "On the flip side, can the English meaning of "A does not imply B" be converted to first order logic formulas?". My conclusion thus far is no.

Or, if you want to be weird like me, use a word to mention a thing, use a word in single marks to mention the word itself (type), use a word in double marks to mention the word as used in a text (token), which is a quote.

Actually, there've been other first insulters in this thread. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I think my insult was in fact in my thread, not on this one.

About the earthly body and God, section 2.1 of this article by Doctor of Systematic Theology from PUG Roma: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/culturateo/article/view/63415/44228

Nothing special about truth tables. For all we know some monk in China in 1030AD or Iranian in the Muslim Golden Age used some but we don't know because nobody here speaks Mandarin or Farsi.

Calculus was invented by two people simultaneously. The Zermelo-Russell paradox was found by three different people independently. I think that putting 0s and 1s on a grid is much less special than those two.

Our usage of them however does come from Wittgenstein.

Many modern historians consider Octavianus to be the first emperor, not Gaius :nerd:

and might as well be wrong for next models. — Lionino

Not even wrong for "next models", it is already wrong today.

By ChatGPT 3.5o:


Claude nails the image, correctly pointing out China, which is where the picture is from:



All of these are the free edition, I don't pay for any of them.

If you are going to go off-topic, at least don't be wrong about that too.

There is no definition for the term philosophy. — Tarskian

We went through this already. There are plenty of definitions for philosophy. Not only are you unable to keep up with what has already discussed, but your replies are half of the time off-topic — as you know they are, because you have no proper reply.

The word philosophy doesn't have to be computable any more than the word 'dog' does. — Lionino

The user replies with:

One example for the computability of the term "dog": — Tarskian

As was explained, the point is that it doesn't have to be computable, not that it is not computable. The user does not understand how to appropriately reply to arguments, so by then we are already off-topic.

He uses computability of 'dog' with deep learning as an example.

Second, the deep learning used to detect dogs can be used to detect philosophical speech, without your distortion of the word. — Lionino

By his own example, his proposal for a strict (and erroneous) definition of philosophy is already obsolete, as machine learning can work with the traditional definition of philosophy, and current AIs will show so.

Then,

If you ask ChatGPT about face detection, it will advise you to try OpenCV. — Tarskian

he replies that ChatGPT cannot do face detection, which is completely unrelated and irrelevant (as we weren't talking about ChatGPT and face recognition, but ChatGPT and philosophical texts) and might as well be wrong for next models.

It is really an embarassing discussion. He doesn't even know what it is that he wants to talk about.

I am several orders better than you at insulting. I just don't do it. I'd rather explore new ideas instead of seeking conflict. — Tarskian

It is not an insult. Everytime you find yourself at a dead-end, you start crying about me poking holes in your nonsensical slop. You just keep crying about it, that is the truth. Speaking of insults, you frequently accuse me of being unemployed with zero evidence, even though by your own admission you are jobless in Southeast Asia (among the cheapest civilised places in the world).

:up: :ok:

I just read this post elsewhere, about Aristotle and number (that's pretty much the context), so I want to share it and see what the inhouse Aristotelians think:

The basic Greek conception of "number," or what we call number, is that it is an abstraction from the countability of "SOME CONCRETE countable things" (as in, a countable/counted set of things like 8 bowls or 9 cows) to the countability of "ABSTRACT countable things," so, some kind of "unit." But whereas we moderns do all sorts of strange things, like seeing the Hindu numerals as hypostatic entities of some sort, and trying to found numbers in non-geometrical non-intuitive notions like set theory, Greek number theory maintains the intuitive basis of number (it "sees" the abstract "units," in a special form of highly abstract seeing theorized chiefly by Plato). It then assumes that there are certain primal relationships or ratios among irreducibly important numbers, which are taken to form the rest of the higher numbers in some way or another. This leads to all sorts of theories now regarded as fanciful, like the idea of "perfect" numbers etc. The Greeks also didn't really see the single unit as the "number" "One," rather, they saw the singular abstract countable unit as the "basis" of the countable sets (which are necessarily higher than one, since counting begins when there is more than one "something"). You can see that the Greeks (a) lacked a fully abstract sense of number like we possess, and (b) were obsessed with ratios and relationships and the derivability of higher from lower numbers in a way we aren't.

Plato's thought included significant Neo-Pythagorean elements, and his successors leaned into these in formalizing his work at the Academy, probably including the editing and publication of the standard edition of Plato's dialogues that comes down to us. Part of the complex heritage of the work done by these guys is the formalization or furthering of certain so-called "esoteric" doctrines of Plato regarding the radical primacy or transcendence of the One, its interaction with duality or the "dyad" to generate multiplicity, and the creation of more complex reality from this interaction. As in the number theory described above, it is often emphasized that the One transcends and precedes all multiplicity so thoroughly that even the names we use to describe it are strictly speaking "wrong." This doctrine probably owes a lot to Parmenides.

Aristotle feuded to some extent or other with this first school of Plato's successors, particularly their "Pythagoreanizing" aspects, and he defended a different conception of number. He maintains number is an abstraction from concrete sets of countable entities, but rather than supposing like a Pythagorean or Pythagoreanizing Platonist that primal numerical relationships underlies and is in a certain sense "hidden in" the concrete multiplicity we see, Aristotle has a more "conceptualist" theory of number in which the mathematician's abstraction of purely abstract numerical units from concrete countable things is a CHOICE, something he must ACTUALLY enact. To make this clearer, compare it with what Aristotle says about the concept of the infinite (better translated, the un-bounded, or even un-finishable). For Aristotle, the infinite is always "potential," and must be MADE actual, for example by a mathematician DECIDING to continuously divide a line more and more finely. For Aristotle, the concretely existing line is complete, finished, finite on its own, but "potentially" infinitely divisible. It's the mathematician or philosopher who comes along and "actualizes" this potential by actually dividing it. Of course, this process can only go on as long as the mathematician decides to continue it, so it's a kind of notional infinity that is quite distinct from our conception of infinity as something that is "always there, waiting to be found." It's really Descartes and Leibniz who start to think of things in this way, and even then, it's only because they think of the Platonic-Christian God as being the mathematician who always infinitely sees and thus "performs" the real (actual) infinity of everything.

Aristotelian and Platonic conceptions of number were variously synthesized, reconciled, subordinated one to the other, etc., and practicing mathematicians often strained against them as the math they were doing simply couldn't be contained in their assumptions. (Although the infinity assumption did "limit" mathematical thinking about infinity for a long time - some say for the better, some say for the worse.) In reality, Hellenistic mathematicians couldn't fit their more expansive, practicing mathematics into the boxes created either by Neoplatonic number theorists or by Aristotle, so they bent and sometimes broke those boxes.

So as things stand, 41% of folk got it wrong. — Banno

It was a misclick from my part. :confused:

It seems like you are asking about perdurance, not permanence. — Leontiskos

Those are sufficiently synonymous, but if you wanna make the distinction, I am talking about the former, not of life after death, yes.

it strikes me as a subset of the induction problem — Leontiskos

In the sense that "From that I am the same person I was before, I can't infer that I will be afterwards."? My question is a bit more extreme, it denies the first premise. Though the focus is indeed on the future, as the past is past, the question also applies to the past: ¿how do I know I am the same person I was minutes ago, but not another person with the same memories due to us sharing the same bodily brain?:

And why is it born with this memory? This would be a consequence of the material world and neurology, in which the brain conditions the mental state to have this memory, because the brains corresponding to the previous mental state and the current mental state have spatio-temporal continuity. — Lionino

This naturally relies on there being a material world. I am not sure how an idealist/panpsychist would reply, or perhaps there is no such problem to them.

If one takes Aristotelian premises then familiarity with the nature of the soul can allow one to understand that it has the property of perduring — Leontiskos

How so? Descartes dogmatically attributes duration as an attribute of the substance, with no justification (Principles Part 1). The alternative is that it is constantly being annihilated and created through time; although it is not an appealing alternative, he does not address or refute that possibility.

The question has mind-body dualism as a premise, as can be seen — especially non-eliminationism about mental states. Though I think the eliminationist physicalist still has to give some account of personal identity.

It seems that we would simply move to asking whether the process perdures over time. — Leontiskos

The process is the perdurance through time, so, if there is such a thing as some experience in time, and each successive point in time there is another experience, the soul is the interconnectedness of those experiences, that gives rise to a sense of self which is the subject.

To give a horrible analogy, the origin and the outflow of a river and everything in between is the consciousness/soul at a moment in time for substance philosophy; for process philosophy, it would be the river flowing itself.

Edit: there were some screw-ups, they have been fixed now.

At room temperature, a black body absorbs all frequencies of incident light, and a white body none, reflecting all of it if it is opaque.
Around 1000 and 9000 Kelvin, that same previously black body emits all frequencies of light, looking white — the Sun is a non-ideal black body. I am not sure what would happen to the previously white body; if it is an ideal white body, it shouldn't emit radiation at higher temperatures, like it doesn't at room temperature, so it should look white like before, but if the higher temperature affects reflectivity sufficiently, it could change colour.
https://e-learning.gunt.de/WL420/html/en_Basic%20knowledge%20on%20heat%20transfer/0000000042.htm

Básicamente es otro anglicismo más que se ha ido asentando en el habla española. — javi2541997

Nunca he visto 'slur' usada en español. Pero, mi texto se aplicará se un dia lo viere.

Esto último no lo mencionó cómo una crítica, sino que resalto que ellos han sido inteligentes en expandir su lengua. — javi2541997

Creo que no. La expansion se dio solamente por la Operation Paperclip y Marshall Plan, así como la amenaza que apresentó la Unión Soviética, dividiendo el mundo en dos. No fue la economía ni la cultura que hizo esa expansión sino Hollywood y el bloque capitalista en la Guerra Fría. Antes, era el francés la lengua internacional y la lengua de cultura; hoy es el inglés la lengua internacional (en el occidente), pero nadie diría que es la lengua de cultura. Tomemos la China, que, de cierta manera, ya es la mayor economía del mundo; no obstante, nadie aprende mandarín.

La palabra slur es reconocida en gran parte del mundo. En cambio, no pasa así con blasfemia. — javi2541997

Todo el mundo cristiano conoce la palabra 'blasfemia', al menos.

Pero blasfemia es más sagrado. — javi2541997

La idea es que raza y sexo son exactamente sagrados para los angloparlantes.

Surely someone has read this book here.

I never got around to, the reviews are mixed. Is it actually good or just pop philosophy? Is it really good pop philosophy if so?

However, we can certainly extrapolate from biology and neuroscience that a Boltzmann brain would need to exist in some range of ambient temperature, atmosphere, etc. in order to produce anything like say "5 seconds of human experience." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I read the last page but maybe I am still getting half-way through the chat. We had a very long conversation about Boltzmann brains here, but the fluctuations could possibly produce 5 seconds of human experience, and it would produce it infinitely many times, as the probability is non-zero in an infinite period of time. Contrary to that, there would be some upper limit to how much mass a quantum fluctuation can produce by how much time, but no such limit is known by our physics.
And it wouldn't necessarily need to create those 5 seconds of experience, but a consciousness with the memories of those past 5 seconds. Though of course that relies on a view of personal identity that puts a substance moving forward through each infinitesimal point of time, but that is not a weakness in my view. It is a scientific version of Last Thursdayism.

Hm, lion...nino...What is that, little lion boy? — Kizzy

You had to reduplicate the -n- there to make the joke work. But not too far anyway.

^

Oh, no. It is the indirect realism X direct realism discussion all over again. Here we go 50 pages.

There definitely was a foundational crisis in mathematics in the 19th century, it wasn't in the philosophy of mathematics.

One could say the crisis is still going on, as we don't know whether ZFC is free of contradictions (and perhaps never will).

It is about metaphilosophy and computational philosophy based on the philosophy of mathematics. — Tarskian

Changing the definition of common words is not metaphilosophy.

And stop crying.

First, how do you get footnotes installed? — isomorph

Those are not footnotes. ¹²³
However I remember one of @Michael's posts actually including footnotes. But I never saw it again.

Why would that be false? — Hallucinogen

So the answer is yes. :yawn:

He won't give in.

Though I disagree — Lionino

To be clear, I don't disagree that he is not aware, as obviously I can't read minds, I disagree with the idea that there aren't philosophical issues implied.

For my part, I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about. — Treatid

So do flat earthers. But alas you are both clueless.

Your claim that formal languages are not axiomatic systems is straightforwardly counterfactual. — Treatid

That is not what I said and that is not what counterfactual means.

But the "twin paradox" is only a paradox within Newtonian/Euclidean space. — Treatid

There is no twin paradox in Newtonian physics. The twin paradox is a paradox in Einstenian physics, paradox is not synonym with "contradiction".

You have no clue what you are talking about. I will not bother with the rest of the uninformed ramble.

Perhaps things are not the same in Italy and when you disagree, you say so more plainly. — Ludwig V

I am not Italian, just have been and talk to locals frequently.

Do you never find that something you thought was evidently correct, isn't? — Ludwig V

However "'democrazia' non è una parola italiana" is correct, unless one wants to misinterpret it to mean "la parola 'democrazia' non esiste in italiano", which nobody would ever say because it is evidently incorrect.

think you must mean that it is a Greek word. — Ludwig V

And that is because it is a Greek word. Same with 'philosophy'.

Well, it is not self-evident to me that a word can only ever belong to the language it originally belonged to. — Ludwig V

So I recommend that you either look deeper or reconsider your choice of words. It undoubtably belongs to Greek, even if it is used by other languages, because among other things it only makes sense in Greek. In case of disagreement, visit the nearby (authentic) Greek restaurant and tell the restaurant owner that the word 'democracy' "belongs" to English. Even without the same education, his reply will be better than mine would have been.

I think it is true of all languages and it is certainly true of English that many words are imported from other languages — Ludwig V

As long as you arbitrarily choose what qualifies as "many", that is surely true.

but I'm not aware that any significant philosophical issues hang on the distinction, so I'm not inclined to worry about it. — Ludwig V

Though I disagree, my original remark was not philosophical, it was general. This thread itself is not even philosophical. At most, it is a very low-quality attempt at prescriptive grammar.

If you ask ChatGPT about face detection, it will advise you to try OpenCV. — Tarskian

Ok, and?