Is this supposed to be defending this obviously wrong statement from the previous thread?

(2) If some observation corresponds to some Bible-specific proposition, then it is evidence that Christianity is true. — Hallucinogen

Edit:
It is.

"a carnivorous mammal that has been long domesticated as a pet" — RussellA

That is also not a sentence. :confused:

the sentence "a carnivorous mammal long domesticated as a pet" — RussellA

That is not a sentence though.

That's not something you should guess about. However, it is true that autism is a spectrum and mild autism may be much more common than we suppose. But whatever your opinion, it should not interfere with proper, serious, consideration of your philosophy. Dismissing your view just because your mental health is less than perfect is simply prejudice.
However, I share your suspicion of normative theories of the conventtional kind. They seem to me to be rather unhelpful - even distracting. — Ludwig V

Ok, let's go about this.

Normative ethics is, basically, if a theory is accepted, the set of rules which our human actions should be based on, not basing our actions on those rules is less than ideal.

Ethics is weakly defined as the philosophy of good behaviour (metaethically this definition might be circular, but not an issue here).

Philosophers talk not only of good behaviour, but of love, art, virtue, politics, technology.

Narcissistic psychopaths, specially when untreated, are not quite able to experience love (please no solipsism argument here for this conversation hinges on behaviour correctly reflecting mental states).

So, a narcissistic psychopath could undoutably make a good logician or philosopher of science, but surely a narcissistic psychopath would not make a good philosopher of love.

Likewise, there may be a set of psychological traits that may make someone anxious about the fluid and uncertain nature of what constitutes good behaviour. Because of that, they may invent a set of rigid rules to make up for that. I think that, unfortunately, that misses the very nature of good behaviour, which is ethics.

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

First, I said 'dog' doesn't have to be computable, not that it isn't.

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

In fact, go ahead and feed ChatGPT a bunch of texts, it will tell you which is philosophy and which is not.

Inb4: "But some texts are ambiguous and ChatGPT will not get them right!"

Give the dog detector the picture of a dog-looking but alien creature and it will have the same ambiguous and possibility of error, or give it a bad drawing of a dog, or give it a blurred picture of a dog, etc...

before I start criticizing them — Ludwig V

And there is the problem. Some things are not up to be criticised because they are evidently correct. It is only by misinterpreting the text, by assuming that the other person is saying something absurd rather than something obvious, fueled by the desire for polemics, that we then enable criticism in something otherwise uncontroversial. Not everything is polemical. In Italy they would just acquiesce and carry on with the conversation, but hereabouts we have "Well, how do you know that you know that you know?".

We are able to give a red pen to another because, whatever our or his experience is, those two experiences are both caused by the same thing in the world:

A regularity between a cause and the perception — Lionino

If thing J causes experience X in person A and experience Y in person B, everytime person A uses the word that to him makes him think of X, we will think of Y instead. We assume our experience X and his experience Y are the same because there is no reason to suppose otherwise. We suppose otherwise when there are known physiological facts about him:

It is at least the case with colour-blind people, who will often still give you the right pen, even though we know they don't see the same as we do, as the shade of brown of red is a bit different than the shade of brown of green. — Lionino

Claude


Perplexity

I guess it is a thing. — TonesInDeepFreeze

It is. I did a gig at tech support years ago, it was part of our training to basically baby the customer and quite literally treat it like a king, saying "No" to the caller was strictly forbidden.

There is no definition for the term philosophy. — Tarskian

:roll:

But Pythagoras was the first person who invented the term
Philosophy, and who called himself a philosopher; when he was conversing
at Sicyon with Leon, who was tyrant of the Sicyonians or of the
Phliasians (as Heraclides Ponticus relates in the book which he wrote
about a dead woman); for he said that no man ought to be called wise,
but only God. For formerly what is now called philosophy (φιλοσοφία) was
called wisdom (σοφία), and they who professed it were called wise men
(σοφοὶ), as being endowed with great acuteness and accuracy of mind; but
now he who embraces wisdom is called a philosopher (φιλόσοφος).

has the tangible advantage that it becomes an eminently computable definition — Tarskian

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

The average person does not know what → or axiom mean, so I think it is doing quite well. I have the feeling however that you gaslit Gemini, given it said "You are right...".

For the record, I have a collection of screw-ups myself:

A short compilation of ChatGPT screwing up pathetically:
https://chat.openai.com/share/a3c86a67-ff27-4ec9-8ffa-ebc8fb95e01c
https://chat.openai.com/share/96378835-0a94-43ce-a25b-f05e5646ec40
https://chat.openai.com/share/b5241b53-e4d8-4cab-9a81-87fa73d740ad
https://chat.openai.com/share/f924090e-a7eb-4b67-9e62-389db1f6c87b
https://chat.openai.com/share/025521ed-ac2b-4156-bd15-e74053f66cba — Lionino

Speaking of medicine, here is the actual Hypoccratic Oath, not some abstract thing that nurses dancing on TikTok vaguely hear about in their studies:

and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion

and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males

You read the following from a website you had never seen before:

Myth: If I agree to donate my organs, the hospital staff won't work as hard to save my life.

Fact: When you go to the hospital for treatment, the health care team tries to save your life, not someone else's. You get the best care you can get.

and thought "Oh, chucks, so surely nobody would be corrupt enough to harvest your organs legally!".

Life isn't Reddit.

Mayo clinic says that's a myth. — RogueAI

Ask ketchup clinic next.

I don't think so, for the problem I stated.

Another episode of folks who can't even code Hello World claiming AI doesn't actually exist because it doesn't conform to their sophomoric restrictive view of what 'intelligence' means even though Gemini is able to debate better than them. Yawn yawn.

If I were to say "'Democrazia' non è una parola italiana.", every awake person in Italy who finished school would know what I am talking about. I don't think it is the case that you are half-asleep right now or that the average Italian is much smarter than you, so I think you know very well what I meant by my statement.

I think this thread for the liar paradox is much better https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14962/this-sentence-is-false-impossible-premise/p1

You can use character.ai and talk to "Socrates", "Plato", "Kant", "Descartes". You can also make the AI break character and start talking to you as a normal person/AI. It/they does/do give some good input, it is worth the try.

Speaking of organs, I believe there is a moral imperative to be an organ donour. The issue is that, in some cases, once someone is known to be an organ donour, less efforts will be made to save the person in critical condition, so you are basically being mainslaughtered for being altruistic. Corruption ruins all, I propose harsh punishments for the wicked.

But I'm not sure I know what the point of ethics is supposed to be. — Ludwig V

Neither am I sure, but I know that some things are not its point, and normative theories are one of them — we are humans, not robots. If I had to guess, both Kant (I am confident about this one) and John S. Mill had autism, much stronger than mine at least.

I don't trust "intuition", except as a starting-point for evaluation. — Ludwig V

Do you not trust yours that we shouldn't kill someone healthy to save 9 who are dying?

He does view purgation as involving humoured but Fuller argues that 'the theory of catharsis involved in the ''Poetics'' is unlikely to be a full instance of physicalism'. — Jack Cummins

I don't quite understand this. Is it saying that because catharsis, which is/gives purgative pleasure, is accidental, it looks (but is unlikely to be) a full instance of physicalism? What sense of 'accidental' is being used here, common or Aristotelian?

I should have found out about this article before making this thread.

The Simple View (SV) is the view that "that there are no informative, non-trivial persistence conditions for people, that is, that personal persistence is an ultimate and unanalyzable fact".

SV has two versions, IM (identity mysticism) and WR-INI (weakly reductive and in independence non-informative).
IM is: "X at t1 is identical to Y at t2 if and only if X at t1 is identical to Y at t2".
WR-INI is: "X at t1 is identical to Y at t2 iff there is some fact F1 about X at t1, and some fact F2 about Y at t2, and F1 and F2 are irreducible to facts about the subjects’ psychology or physiology, and X at t1 is identical with Y at t2 in virtue of the fact that the propositions stating F1 and F2 differ only insofar as that “X” and “t1” occur in the former where “Y” and “t2” occur in the latter".

"In their most prominent variants [in WR-INI], these elements [F] are due to references to souls, Cartesian Egos or other spiritual or immaterial substances and/or properties."
We can promptly think of objections to that:
"Initially the idea underlying this claim may appear prejudicial; ultimately it is based on a number of widespread but not universally accepted beliefs about the naturalness of the world and the nature, validity and theoretical implications of physicalism."

"According to this general stance, either both psychological and physiological continuity relations are fully reducible to a domain in which physical explanations are couched, perhaps in terms of the basic elements of a final and unified theory of physics, or they belong themselves to such a domain". So basically, personal identity is either grounded in a non-physical element, or it is ultimately grounded on physical elements. That was my worry when making this thread that, if physicalism obtains, personal identity is arbitrary and continuation of consciousness illusory.

"Nowadays, the Simple View is disparaged as a theory only maintained by thinkers whose religious or spiritual commitments outweigh the reasons that speak against their views on personal identity."

Reductionism:

"Psychological Criteria of personal identity hold that psychological continuity relations, that is, overlapping chains of direct psychological connections, as those causal and cognitive connections between beliefs, desires, intentions, experiential memories, character traits and so forth, constitute personal identity"

"Two apparently physiological theories of personal identity are at bottom psychological, namely (i) the Brain Criterion, which holds that the spatiotemporal continuity of a single functioning brain constitutes personal identity; and (ii) the Physical Criterion, which holds that, necessarily, the spatiotemporal continuity of that which sustains the continuous psychological life of a human being over time, which is, contingently, a sufficient part of the brain that must remain in order to be the brain of a living person, constitutes personal identity"

"Consider a test case. Imagine there to be a tribe of beings who are in all respects like human beings, except for the fact that their brains and livers have swapped bodily functions: their brains regulate, synthesize, store, secrete, transform, and break down many different substances in the body, while their livers are responsible for their cognitive capacities, basic integrated postural and locomotor movement sequences, perception, instincts, emotions, thinking, and other integrative activities. Imagine the brain criterion to be true for human beings. Would we have sufficient reason to believe the brain criterion to be true for members of the tribe in question as well, if we were aware of all facts about their physiologies? No, precisely because the brain criterion is true for human beings, a liver criterion would have to be true for members of this tribe. There is nothing special about the 1.3 kilograms of grey mass that we carry around in our skulls, except for the fact that this mass is the seat of our cognitive capacities."

Yeah, no, the brain and the liver are defined exactly by their functions, as what causes the brain and the liver to have such and such functions is the physical make-up of their cells, the nephrons and the neurons. A brain that stores, secretes and breaks down substance in the body is no longer a brain because it is made of nephrons or something that ultimately works the same as nephrons, making it a liver.

"We can further distinguish between three versions of the psychological criterion: the Narrow version demands psychological continuity to be caused “normally,” the Wide version permits any reliable cause, and the Widest version allows any cause to be sufficient to secure psychological continuity (cf. Parfit 1984). The Narrow version, we may note, is logically equivalent to the Physical Criterion."

"A criterion of personal identity tells us what our persistence necessarily consists in, which means that it must be able to deliver a verdict in possible scenarios that is consistent with its verdicts in ordinary cases."

"First, some attempts to cash out personal identity relations in psychological terms appeal exclusively to direct psychological connections. These accounts face the problem that identity is a transitive relation (see 1.a.) while many psychological connections are not"

"Appeal to overlapping layers or chains of psychological connections avoids the problem by permitting indirect relations: according to this view, the old man is identical with the kid precisely because they are related to each other by those causal and cognitive relations that connect kid and teacher and teacher and old man."

"Opponents of the psychological criterion typically favour a physiological approach. There are at least two of them: (i) the Bodily Criterion holds that the spatiotemporal continuity of a functioning human body constitutes personal identity (cf. Williams 1956-7; 1970; Thompson 1997); and (ii) the Somatic Criterion holds that the spatiotemporal continuity of the metabolic and other life-sustaining organs of a functioning human animal constitutes personal identity (cf. Mackie 1999; Olson 1997a; 1997b; Snowdon 1991; 1995; 1996)."

Utter slop, but the article provides enough counter-arguments.

Quasi-psychology:

"Assume, for reductio, that personal identity consists in direct memory connections. In that case the kid is identical with the primary school teacher and the primary school teacher is identical with the old man; the old man, however, is not identical with the kid. Since this conclusion violates the transitivity of identity (which states that if an X is identical with a Y, and the Y is identical with a Z, then the X must be identical with the Z), personal identity relations cannot consist in direct memory connections."

Theseus' ship but goofy.

"Second, memory alone is not necessary for personal identity, as lack of memory through periods of sleep or coma do not obliterate one’s survival of these states. Appeal to causal and cognitive connections which relate not only memory but other psychological aspects is sufficient to eradicate the problem. Let us say that we are dealing with psychological connectedness if the relations in question are direct causal or cognitive relations, and that we are dealing with psychological continuity if overlapping layers of psychological connections are appealed to (cf. Parfit 1984)."

"consider the case of Teletransportation above: if at t2 Y on Mars remembers having had at t1 X’s experience on earth that the coffee is too hot, then, necessarily, X at t1 is identical with Y at t2. The dialectic of such thought experiments, however, requires that a description of the scenario is possible that does not presuppose the identity of the participants in question. We would wish to say that since X and Y share all psychological features, it is reasonable or intuitive to judge that X and Y are identical, and precisely not that since we describe the case as one in which there is a continuity between X’s and Y’s psychologies, X and Y are necessarily identical. If some psychological predicates presuppose personal identity in this way, an account of personal identity which constitutively appeals to such predicates is viciously circular."

A decent article, but very shallow overview.

But I can't understand why you think it isn't an English word. — Ludwig V

You can.

It would be handy if it could be implemented as source code, but that's definitely a secondary consideration. — Ludwig V

As other users pointed and me initially, the concept he is describing is already perfectly called 'metalanguage'. If his redefinition is adopted, we lose the word 'philosophy' and 'metalanguage' becomes redundant.

Refining definitions is okay if done in an educated fashion, many scientific and philosophical terms out there would benefit from refinement; but changing definitions altogether is sophomoric unless you are Terence Tao or Stephen Hawking.

Not only that problem, but also the word 'philosophy' doesn't exist only in English; in fact, it is not even an English word.

I knew there was a reason Continental philosophy isn't taken seriously... — AmadeusD

Haabermas may be the best of them, because he's had to contend with the accurate retrospectives on his predecessors. — AmadeusD

Out of all the people to choose from in continental philosophy you choose Habermas? That mindset at least agrees with countries dominated by analytic philosophy being so socially degenerate. Analytic philosophy is irrelevant outside of its birthplace. By that metric it has less credence than Confucianism. And by another metric, Confucianism has given us something, analytics have done nothing.

It's pretty rich taking the "everyone is wrong but my club" line. — AmadeusD

That is exactly what you are doing.

Tinkering with language is all Continental's have left to give us. — AmadeusD

Jesus Christ. It is projection over more layers of projection. It is almost like a circus of dishonesty.

Another philosophical statement that doesn't meet the standard:

• Philosophy is a mathematical capability of the language at hand.

What kind of analogy is that? RogueAI was talking about a hydroelectric turbines, not plane turbines.

and the tech agent would say "Amazing!" in a kind of lilting modern way when I executed each step in the walkthrough so that I got to the right element each time. As if each click to the next element was a cause for a moment of minor celebration. I found that charming. — TonesInDeepFreeze

AT&T? Or perhaps Proximus? They are trained to do exactly that with customers in the US.

You could start by Googling Everett’s G1/G2/G3 classification of grammar complexity if you are truly interested. — apokrisis

I did, I didn't find the phrase "fully modern" anywhere. Are you referring to G3 by that?

Or Luuk and Luuk (2014) "The evolution of syntax: signs, concatenation and embedding" which argues like Everett that word chains become recursive. — apokrisis

Or you mean a language that is recursive?

I did find this though:

Those kinds of grammars are found commonly in the world’s languages, but you can express anything from a G3 grammar in a G1 grammar; mathematically they’re all of equal power. So, once you have symbols and a G1 grammar you have language, full-blown human language. We find those today. Was Homo erectus capable of that? Yes, they were. Did they show the kinds of communication, correction, cooperation, planning that would have required human language? Yes, they did. — https://singjupost.com/how-language-began-dan-everett-full-transcript/?singlepage=1

It seems kinda contrary to what you are saying.

First-order arithmetic is its own metalanguage. It is capable of talking about its own statements. — Tarskian

So is English.

A language is philosophical if it is its own metalanguage. — Tarskian

That is not what the word 'philosophical' means, which goes back to my first post.

As soon as I read this, I also wanted to ask: — Jaded Scholar

Going further, the phrase "fully modern syntax" ("syntactic structure" does not make sense, it is like saying wet water or dark black) doesn't seem to refer to anything. Is it asking if primitive hominids were able to turn any given phrase into its negative equivalent in their languages? I can't tell.

but I think ↪Lionino's arguments on the differences/similarities between homo sapiens and neanderthalensis make a lot more sense than ↪apokrisis's (which is to say, they agree most with my own preconceptions). — Jaded Scholar

Thank you. My ego is appeased.

I disagreed with it many pages ago — TonesInDeepFreeze

Amazing!

(2) Get the conversation completely wrong by falsely saying that I had not explained why your translation was incorrect — TonesInDeepFreeze

I don't think the word 'translation' has an exclusive definition in logic, and if it does, it doesn't matter, I wasn't using logical jargon, I meant 'translation' to mean exactly what it does everyday, bringing from one language to another, in that case from logic to English. Translation doesn't always mean translating literally term-by-term, which is what you did in your translations. The only reason I said I used translation wrong every time was to accept your definition and move on as to not waste time on semantics, it was tangential to my goal, which led to my thread, where in the end the only good translation provided was by a user in the 1st page.

Don't matter. I was talking about myself. If I recall correctly, I was thinking of specifically my post with the several examples compared line by line which was what finally established that that translation was not possible.

Ok, I am in agreement. Everything makes sense. Leontiskos was further saying that the RAA is not strictly logical because it does not tell you which side of the conjunct to rule out. I disagreed in the last post of page 21.

So, the point you are making could be stated ('\' stands for set difference): — TonesInDeepFreeze

More like the point Leontiskos is making.

You can use the notation however you wish, but in my formulations, G is a set of formulas not a formula, and on the left side of the turnstile is a set of formulas while on the right side of the turnstile is a formula. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I am aware.

if it is a statement about another statement — Tarskian

That is called metalanguage, not philosophy.

A theory is incomplete if it can express statements about its own statements. — Tarskian

If a statement can talk about other statements, then it can also talk about itself. — Tarskian

Hence, philosophy is a mathematical capability of the language at hand. — Tarskian

Huh

I lightly jibed, aiming at myself as much as anyone — TonesInDeepFreeze

I couldn't tell since you often jump into a conversation that happened several pages before the last post of the respective thread.

But since your revisionist attack on me is ill-premised I respond. — TonesInDeepFreeze

:rofl: alright however you wanna fly it

Speech with a fully modern syntactic structure. — apokrisis

Then I ask you what "fully modern syntactic structure" means.

I will treat this as opinion until you make a better argument. — apokrisis

By 50kya, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Australoid had diverged. If language hadn't developed by then, and given that all these groups have their own indigenous languages, that would mean we have speech surfacing independently a few times in humans around the same time, and yet having quite the similar sound inventory — which is not the case for San, who have click sounds but diverged in evolution much earlier (~200kya by some estimates) —; evidently that is a much more unlikely scenario than them simply coming from an earlier (before 50kya) ancestor.

In a formal sense a reductio in no way determines that we must take one side of the fork rather than the other. Yet the reason a reductio is not usually controversial is because there usually is a set of axioms that both interlocutors are committed to, and a quality reductio will place those axioms in one side of the scale, thus persuading such interlocutors to choose the side of the fork that favors the axioms. I maintain—as I said at the outset—that a reductio involves a <background of plausibility> in order to adjudicate between the two sides of the fork. If there is no background rationale for adjudicating in favor of one side of the fork rather than the other, then the reductio will have no rational force <as a choice between (ρ→~μ) ∨ (μ→~ρ) >. — Leontiskos

Ok. That is much clearer than your other posts. I suppose I agree with what is conveyed. However, the RAA has formally either rho or mu as a premise, so no choice between the conjunct is needed within the RAA, the RAA is logical.

So you know they had grammatical speech? — apokrisis

What do you mean by "grammatical speech"? I take it from what I have read over the years. One article that I can find is this https://theconversation.com/how-neanderthal-language-differed-from-modern-human-they-probably-didnt-use-metaphors-229942
Some believe even that Homo habilis had primitive speech 1M years ago. I don't find the idea absurd. On the other side of the extreme, the theories that suggest speech showed up 50k years ago are absurd as soon as we look into palaeoanthropology.

It seems unfair for Homo sapiens to draw a line with our biological cousins. — apokrisis

I draw the line, genetics does so as well. No issues with that.

As a sidenote, some models suggest that Neanderthals acquired about 5% of human admixture some 200kya, before any movement of great waves of humans out of Africa. Not very relevant to any of the points here, but good to keep in mind.