One of the things I "got" there, though, was a predisposition toward "There probably are no gods"...which is a perfectly fine take to have on the REALITY. Fact is, either there is at least one god...or there are none. So the hard atheist and the hard theist have at least a 50% chance of being correct. And the use of "atheist" as a descriptor for someone with that disposition MAKES SENSE. — Frank Apisa

Hm, maybe. It's entirely practical, though. I definitively behave as if there are no gods. Now, I'm a rather cautious person, and I even have a tendency towards anxiety. I'm fairly sure if I were, in the back of my mind, considering the possibility that there are gods, I'd be worrying about that, and it would be a hindrance in making decisions. What if I angered a god? Things like that. I have no such worries, so it'd be probably more a pre-disposition towards "There are no gods," without the probably. Which would be even further down the atheist road, under the three-category-model.

My position, though, is better described that the hard atheist and hard theist have a 0 % chance to be correct, because their respective claims aren't meaningful enough to trigger correctness conditions. Both claims can be disregarded. (This implies that an agnostic who believes that either the hard atheist or the hard theist is correct, would also have 0 % chance to be correct.)

This is further complicated by the fact that I'm a relativist, though. I can only say this some degree of confidence within the confines of my own worldview. I strongly suspect that theists at least do attach some sort of meaning to the proposition, but I since all my perspective-taking exercises in that direction have failed, I can't behave as if. In a sense, this makes my atheism mostly performative, with no content.

There are strange flies in your country. In mine they are not so easily frightened off. Declaring yourself an atheist is the easiest way to get bitten by flies. — David Mo

I'm Austrian. Upper Austria to be precise. It's a very secular life around here. You won't even talk about religion at all until you know each other a bit better (or the context warrants it; e.g. you're talking about news). I'm pretty lucky in that respect. Pretty much the only people trying to convert me are Jehova's Witnesses.

Do these terms mean that you have observed the stimulus prior to its description, or, you heard its description prior to your observation, respectively? — CeleRate

Yes.

If the order is the distinction, I'm still unsure how that would be the critical variable. Wouldn't the extraordinariness of a claim be more pertinent? — CeleRate

It's a framing issue. When you see a thing and part of its aspects surprise you, you'll want to integrate it into your worldview. It changes via direct experience. If you learn about a concept via a word, then you assume the word is meaningful, and you'll try to figure out what it means. You'll first have to try to figure out what the word means, because it's possible that the "thing" is already part of your worldview, but the other person uses an unfamiliar word and sets different accents. If that's the case, you'll have a oh-you-mean-X type of experience. Basically, an unfamiliar word and a description that doesn't trigger recognition doesn't necessarily introduce you to new concept. It might introduce you to an unfamiliar perspective on a known concept. That is: you get knew information about the person you're speaking to via a familar concept (but only if you figure out that they're referring to a familiar concept).

But if you're really introduced to a new concept, you'll not be "naive" about the concept when you encounter the thing in the wild. From the get go, your take on that thing will be influenced by the perspective of the person who introduced you to the concept. Part of the world-view integrational work has already been done. The more abstract the concept, the more pronounced the effect is.

At some level of abstraction the concept itself might actually be an interpretative mold to organise several disparate perceptions and/or feelings into a "comparative matrix". I think words like "love" and "justice" fall into this category. Anything that's culturally specific you usually learn about during childhood, a time when you're still consolidating new concepts into a world view. A lot of these things feel very basic later in life, but you actually absorb them early on by imitation, trial and error. When there's a concept you feel is vital to others, you might be motivated to actively seek out clues. A series of Is-this-it? experiences until you're satisfied. If you fail to acquire too many culturally specific abstracts, you're going to have find other ways to deal with it. I didn't acquire the God concept properly, I think, because I sort of tagged with make-belief, like the Easter Bunny, who supposedly coloured and hid Easter eggs (it was clear to me that bunnies can't hold brushes, and all those pictures were cartoons, that my parents were smart enough to know this, too, yet they'd never admit that they were responsible - I thought God was a similar sort of game; I remember the surprise when I found they were actually serious about that).

One important question about word-first concepts is this: how do we satisfy ourselves that this thing or this constellation of things corresponds to this concept? (Conversion experiences should be interesting.)

Maybe it would help me to understand the epistemology you use to develop an understanding of things contained in the universe, and what is meant by level. — CeleRate

Sadly, that's a mostly intuitive process, and I'm not so sure how to describe this myself. I'm not even quite sure what I mean by level. When I look at the word "God", then I'm trying to figure out what that could mean in a way that would make sense within the confines of my world view. Since I have functional world view that does fine without the concept, this is difficult. So it's mostly an exercise in taking another persons perspective. But the God-concept is opaque.

Unicorns, for example, are comparatively easy. There physical objects, for example. There can be things that look like unicorns, and they then either are Unicorns or not. I don't need complete information. For example, I don't need to know the gestetation period of unicorns, unless if that were the easiest feature with which to distinguish them form mere single-horned horses.

Basically, I'd need some way to check for evidence of God, or some sort of perspective that allows me to interpret stuff that's there as evidence for God. I've developed the unsystematic intuition that if you have faith in God, everything is potential evidence, and if you don't nothing is. And that's a bit of a road block. I don't think there's a specific direction my God concept has to... concretise?... before I can really tackle the question of existance.

That's precisely the area where I confuse myself the most, though, so I doubt I can explain myself very well here.

One's world-view is ultimately what a given individual believes is understood. But people's worldviews can undergo conversions. — CeleRate

I'm not sure I'm reading you right, here, but I think the bulk of one's worldview is unconcious, and it's less a finished product, and more an ongoing progress. Crises will lead to restructurings, and things like epiphanies may not be as sudden as they seem to your conscious self (on account of a sudden trigger). I think I may be using the term a little more broadly than you do in this paragraph (and also a little less precisely as a consequence). There's nothing I disagree with here, though.

The easiness is something I experienced. Trial and error. It would have been different for Huxely. For example, not believing in God, it seems to me, was quite a bit harder in the 19th Century than it was a hundred years later, and that's likely not the only difference. People tend to leave me alone, when I say I'm an atheist. It's just not a big deal. Saying I'm an agnostic is morely to invite discussion, and I'm not always in the mood. Trial and error helped me to find out that I was happier if I generally said that I was an atheist and clarify that I was actually an agnostic when already in conversation on the topic. Nobody took offense, or thought I'd been lying to them. Also, when time was of essence, "atheist" was simply a more reliably known word. In my day-to-day life, I'm very pragmatic about this.

I'm being difficult in this thread, mostly because it's about the term's meaning. I'm stating my preference, but what I'm actually advocating is to know and accept all the definitions out there, at least passively, when hearing or reading.

How about if someone says "unicorns don't exist". Would one be unable to not believe in unicorns if one understood (maybe even imagining renditions seen) what is meant by the question? Or, is there a different point I missed? — CeleRate

In this paragraph, I was using the "atheist" definition that says you need to believe that God doesn't exist. If I don't know what "God" is supposed to be, I can believe neither that he exists, nor that he does not exists. This means that I mean the standard for "does not believe God exists," but I do not meet the standards for "believes that God exists." There are higher standards for believing a negative statement than there are for not believing the corresponding positive statement.

But there are complications here; the short version is I understand the concept of unicorns well enough to believe it very likely that unicorns don't exist. I cannot say the same for God. But what's the difference?

First something obvious: Do I believe sparrows exist? Yes, I do. I've seen sparrows before I even learned to speak. I can point at the bird and ask, "What is this?" It's a thing-first concept.

But if you tell me about the platypus, I might be skeptical. Does such a creature really exist? It's a word-first concept. You describe the creature, and it sounds really unlikely. Maybe you've tried to sell me on drop bears in the past and laughed at me when I was gullible? It's a word-first concept for me, but there's a hierarchy of ever more convincing evidence: pictures, videos, seeing the real thing in a zoo.

A unicorn is word-first concept, too, for me, but the word's cultural status is "mythical creature" rather than "animal", and that complicates things. The unicorn sounds unlikely, but maybe it's not impossible. I might believe it exists, the way a crypto-zoologists would: somewhere out there is an animal that fits the description more or less closely. Maybe it's a hidden species? Maybe it's an occasional mutation of a known species? But if we're sufficiently influenced by myths or fiction to think of it as "magical" in some form (say, it's not really a unicorn, if it's horn doesn't have healing powers), then a real life horned horse simply won't count as a unicorn. But the concept is still understandable. I'd have to say that it's unlikely a unicorn exists to begin with if we expect an animal, but exponentially more unlikely if we actually expect a magical creature.

Things complicate even more if the myth in question is alive and well in the culture you operate in. A word-first concept believed on faith has dubious evidence requirement. Once you reach the level of the Christian God, you have an entity where nearly everything in existence can count as evidence, simply because you have faith. I don't think that people relax their requirements for evidence; it may be just that different sorts of entities require different sorts of evidence. But if I don't understand what sort of entity God is supposed to be, I'm not sure how to look at the world to find evidence. I can dismiss the concept as making no sense (which is what people do when they parody the concept of God with "invisible pink unicorns"), but I can't "believe that God doesn't exist". The concept never reaches a high enough epistemic level within the confines of my world view. Cultural practise is important here, because I know people who believe in God, but who are neither gullible nor idiots.

However, I'm not sure I understand what distinction you were alluding to in the comparison of the two propositions "God exists," and "God doesn't exist". Thanks
Options — CeleRate

That's without a doubt the hardest concept to explain, not the least because I haven't actually worked this out myself. It's more a hunch than anything, and it ties in with the above: what counts as evidence for God, and how do you have to look at the world to see those... things? as evidence. To what extent, am I just using language differently from someone else? Does God have a clearly demarked reference in the real world (as a unicorn would have were it to exist)? At some point in the process I abstract so much that I suspect the difference between existance and non-existence might disappear you it were possible to compare worldviews directly (it isn't; world views other than your own are only available via interpretation through the lense of your own, and how much - if anything - of human worldviews are human universals isn't clear.)

I've never come to clear understanding on this myself, so I'm really struggling to put intution into words.

Is there anyone here who uses “atheist” as a descriptor or part of a descriptor…who falls outside of that parameter? I’d love to discuss the issue with anyone who does. — Frank Apisa

That's me. Or at leat that's my self-perception; I'm not sure you'd agree.

I definitely think that "God exists," and "God doesn't exist," have the same epistemological status. They're both undecidable in my world-view, because I don't know how to order things in a way for the concept to make sense. There are simplistic concepts of God that I do believe don't exist (e.g. old man with a beard in the sky), but neither do most theists, so these simplistic concepts don't count.

Pondering the question of God is a bit like trying to run a piece of software that won't run on my OS on a shoddily written emulator. The functions the programs fulfills are either not very important to me, or I have programs that actually work fine on my OS (not without the occasional bug) that do it for me. The only reason I'm bothering with the program at all, because many people say it's a must have and keep asking me what I think of it. What I think of it is that it's a nuisance, because the emulator sucks, and I'd rather not bother with it at all, when I have workable alternatives.

My daily life experience back when I self-identified as an agnostic was that it was still easier to call myself an atheist, because not everyone the term "agnostic". The question I used to encounter most is "Do you believe in God," to which a yes/no answer was usually a sufficient answer. The line isn't just a question about the existance of God; if you grow up in a Catholic household and go to church on Sunday, you're intimately familiar with the Apostle's Creed ("I believe in God, the Father almighty..."), and at least that sort of contextualises the question. It's a question about faith, not about whether you believe a proposition. In context, I can talk about why I don't really fit in. It's a social question.

Most of the time I used the term "atheist" (while calling myself an agnostic in a more technical context), it was in a really banal context. ("Oh, it's nearly time for church. You coming?" - "Nah, I'm an atheist." - "Gotcha. See you later." -- I wouldn't have been giving them information here. They're fine with a nonbeliever coming along, but by emphasising that I'm an atheist, I'm telling them nothing's changed)

To me the question "Do you believe in God," loses all meaning when I take it out of its social, lived context. And in isolation "Does God exist?" is even worse, because then you'll have to take into account the possibility that people - being fallible - are mistaken about His attributes, and once you go down that rabbit hole nothing remains to make a proposition about. You have to wait until understand the concept enough before you can even start to ponder it. At this point, I'm not holding my breath. But conversion experiences do happen, so who knows?

For me, the word "God" derives its meaning entirely from its lived social context. And as such, I found the grid-based approach makes it easier for me to organise the social environment, for example, because there are theists who share my sense of the unknowability of God, but are somehow able to endow mystery with metaphysical significance, something I fail to do. Basically, I don't know what it's like to believe in God.

Personally, I've never seen an argument for God that's convincing, and I've never seen an argument against God that's convincing. The ontological argument sounds silly, the problem of evil isn't a problem, etc. Now, I'm basically a relativist. We create our worldviews as we live in the world. So if I grew up with my worldview, but at some point my concept of God just stopped growing along with it, it's no surprise that all the God-concepts I can muster are childish. Basically, when the ontological argument looks silly to me, it's just a symptom of the underlying underveloped concept.

This sort of relativism is not without its problems though. Crucially, it's very hard to figure out how much about the differences in worldviews is down to personality differences, how much to personal experience/history, and how much to semantics and usage.

The difference between "atheist/agnostic" in different usages is pretty transparent to me. I can translate between the concepts, but since I've been using the grid-based approach for around 15 years, now, I'm biased towards this one - by habit. The difference between "God exists," and "God doesn't exist," is semantically opaque to me, though the logical structure suggests they're opposites. And at this point I have to remember that all the meaning I can assign comes from the terms social context. I'd expect for a theist the difference between "God exists," and "God doesn't exist," is clear as day, and they may suspect at this point I'm just bullshitting around. I'm not. This sort of stuff really does go on in my head.

If you need to understand how this world would change if a God existed to be an agnostic, then I can't be an agnostic. And if you have to understand what it is that doesn't exist when you say "God doesn't exist," I can't be an atheist. There are a lot of questions like these, and none of them mean much to me. A binary like "believes in God/doesn't believe in God" is about social behaviour, which is observable, and easy to understand. Thus it's more useful as a comparative, social term to me.

So if I have to choose between "God exists," and "God doesn't exist," I'll definitely choose the latter, though I'd rather not choose. This is not an expression of likelihood, though; it's that if I said the former in the context of my day-to-day life people will have expectations about my behaviour that won't pan out. I don't go to church, I don't pray, the "Word of God" carries no weight with me, etc. As a proposition, "God doesn't exist," is simply more compatible behaviour. None of this says anything about what I actually do believe, except what you can glean from what I have to deal with, and how I deal with it.

I worry that this amounts mostly to meaningless babble, but I'm not sure I can do better.

That MISTAKE is the entire reason for the controversy...a reason you seem willing to simply disregard, Dawn. — Frank Apisa

Yes, I'm perfectly willing to disregard this "mistake". First, and foremost, I'm willing to disregard this "mistake" because etymology isn't destiny. I'm willing to use the word atheist this way, because a lot of people use the word this way, and because I like it.

Whether or not this is an actual honest mistake, or whether it's a series of little mistakes, or a politically motivated deliberate re-interpretation, or whatever else might have led to the current usage doesn't matter much to me at this point.

But apart from this, I'm really not sure how you think language works, or what etymology does. When
you're saying this in a follow-up post:

"Anti" has a specific meaning. The letter "a" at the beginning of a word does not. Agreed? — Frank Apisa

I just don't know how you can say this. Anti- is a prefix with a determined meaning, and a- is also a prefix with a determined meaning (although there's more than one "a-"; from the etymology site you're linking to).

Of course, a word-initial "a" isn't always a prefix. It's not in "aardvark", to use your example in my reply to me. The a- in atheist and the a- in agnostic are the same prefix.

"Agreed" very obviously has nothing to do with greed, since the uninflected verb form is "agree". The a- is definitely a prefix, though. Etymologically a variant of "ad" as the etymology site tells me.

The part of grammar that deals with wordformation is morphology. It's important to understand morphology if you're going to do etymology.

(a) theist, resulting in a meaning of "without a belief in any gods" IS A MISTAKE. — Frank Apisa

Yes. When the word was originally coined, we didn't tag "a-" onto "theism". But according to the link you provided it's from Greek "a-theos", and the site even specifies the "a-" as "a (3)", which is referring to their own site and the linke I provided above. So it basically meant "without god" rather than "without theism".

It never happened.

It didn't happen when the word was coint. Something happened later, or nobody would be using it like that now. You can call it a "mistake" if you like, but we'd have to go through the history of the word to see what really happened. Langauge is, has been, and will be messy.

It couldn't happen, because the word "atheism" came into the English language BEFORE theism. It is an etymological construct that makes as much sense as supposing "abate" means without "bate" or "aardvark" meaning without "ardvark" or "abridge" meaning without a"bridge."

Once again, if you're going to argue from etymology you should demonstrate a better sense of morphology. "a-bate" is the same prefix as "a-gree", and not the same prefix as "atheist". "Bate" doesn't exist, I think, as a standalone English verb, but it does survive in phrases like "with bated breath". The "a-" in "abridge" is the same "a-" again, as in "abate", and "agree". But "bridge" (romanic) in "abridge" is unrelated to the noun bridge (germanic). The a in "aardvark" isn't a prefix at all.

The more you talk about etymology, the less persuasive you actually become.

"Rusty"? Why? — David Mo

I haven't used the "theist->agnostic->atheist" partition in years (I'd guess around 15 years, but I don't remember exactly), and I'm a creature of habit. There were some transition hiccups, but I don't remember them that well either.

And if it reaches a deadlock, I would suggest no longer discussing it. No one can force anyone to change. — Coben

That's not the problem, really. I don't much like conflict. I've typed up replies I chose not to post pretty much since the beginning of this thread, because I was dissatisfied with them. A discussion I don't engage in can't reach a deadlock. It's more a matter of feeling like contributing but finding no opening. I'm aware it's really a personal problem of mine. But under such conditions letting it go also feels wrong. Disrespectful? Patronising? I don't know. Something in this direction.

I replied to your post because I found it easier to open up the thread for me, but pretty much immediately after replying I felt it was maybe a bit impolite to talk about Frank Apisa rather than to him. I sometimes think I worry too much.

This argument has just come up because some people in this forum are INSISTING that I...all other agnostics...and all babies and toddlers...

...must accept the descriptor ATHEIST, because some dictionaries describe it that way. — Frank Apisa

See, I find this terribly confusing. If I use the grid-based definition (a)theist/(a)gnostic, then of course you are an atheist under that definition. I'm aware you reject that definition, and that's fine with me. But you seem to be so vehemently against being called an atheist, that it's nearly impossible to even posit that definition. If that's the case, though, why make such a thread?

The grid-based approach is a different discriptor attached to the same label. You're being labeled an atheist, not described as one the way you understand the term, and I'm fairly sure you understand that. So if, beyond rejecting the label, you reject the underlying descriptor - then you invalidate any opposing point of view from the get go, and conversation is impossible.

So:

I do not know if gods exist or not;
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence;
I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction... — Frank Apisa

Yes, this is an agnostic position, because it's about knowledge. I doubt anyone would disagree. However, the grid-based approach doesn't see agnosticism and atheism as mutually exclusive, so at this point people who use the grid-based approach don't have enough information to label you an atheist. You're definitely an agnostic, though.

It's when you add:

...so I don't. — Frank Apisa

that we can start to make a guess. One of the reasons I do remember why I made the switch from the three-category to the four-category (grid-based) approach is that quite a few of the Roman Catholics around me also subscribe to the position that they don't know whether or not God exists. But they react differently to this: it's that lack of knowledge, they tell me, that gives meaning to their faith. Under the three-category model, they'd be theists, because they believe in God. The four-category (grid-based) approach accomodates for these similarities with the categories itself, though: agnostic atheists and agnostic theists have something in common.

Of course, there's a trade-off: "atheist" is no longer a label for a positive belief. To get that back, you add subdivisions like "hard atheist". But there's no reason I couldn't do the equivalent under the three-category model, by subdividing theists. Which you choose will depend partly on what you're used to talking about more.

So:

The question ended up being: Which is the more sensible, more useful definition of the designator “atheist”… — Frank Apisa

I'm not that interested in the "more sensible" part, but the "more useful" part depends on the person and context. I personally made the switch from the three-category definition to the grid-based model, simple because I like variable based grids. You can simply expand them by adding another variable should one become relevant, for example. I like them. They fit the way I think, and so I expand less energy thinking. That's what makes them useful.

Unfortunately, when they realized they were about to be blown out of the water in that argument…the EVERYONE people abandoned ship. — Frank Apisa

Is this a debate? If so, I'll abandon ship, too.

I don't think so. Language is not a machine. — Coben

Language definitely isn't a machine. But if I use the definition of atheism that says "no belief in God," than having no believe in God is sufficient to be an atheist (aside: I don't think it's very useful to extend the term to include babies; "no believe in God" is incomplete - it's "capable of beliefe, but no belief in God"). So when I'm saying I'm an atheist under that definition, then I'm implying he's one, too, under that definition. I'm not insisting he use this definition. But if he's insisting that he's not an atheist period, I just don't know how to respond to that. Basically, I would have to grant him the right to use his definition, while he doesn't pay me the same courtsey. I can't call myself an atheist.

When we're talking every-day pragrmatics, how is this fair?

I don't think anyone should or really can make him take that label. — Coben

I agree, but that's not the problem. If the term's going to be descriptive, it will have to apply to people according to the term's definitive traits. According to Frank Apisa's preferred defition, I'm an agnostic, but not an atheist. I'm fine with that. From around age 15 to age 35, I used that definition myself. I'm a little rusty with the term used like this, but i'm sure I can adapt. The point is, though, that I have to adapt and he doesn't. If we want to use the term as a descriptive lable, we can't both use the terms as we'd naturally be inclined to. Someone has to give.

Now, if we were talking about a particular topic, that wouldn't be problem. Adapting is easy, because I have a context to tailor my non-native usage of the word to. The term is the topic, though. Refusing the label outright is getting in the way of the topic. A descriptive label may be more useful for some people than others, and that's worth exploring. But if it's a win-lose debate about which term is more "rational", I'm not interested. Language isn't a formal system like maths, anyway.

1. It's obligatory that you not murder.
2. (a) If you violate 1., it is obligatory that you choose a manner of execution that is gentle.
2. (b) If you don't violate 1., it is impossible that you choose a manner of exuction that is gentle.
3. If you choose a manner of exuction (of the act of murder) that is gentle, it is necessary that you commit the act of murder. (This follows from 2.(b))

I think it's just a natural-language confusion. Under the above "if you are obligated to murder gently, you are obligated to murder," is invalid. It ought to be: "If you are obligated to murder gently, it is necessary that you murder."

Simply put, If faced with choice A(a1, a2) you choose a2 and only a2 triggers choice B(b1, b2), then choosing either b1 or b2 implies that you have chosen a2. This isn't an obligation; it's a necessity.

Exactly what he asked for when I presented the hypothetical actually — khaled

That's being "entitled to someone else's suffering", then, no? A cure for cancer is good only in the sense that it removes a particular source of suffering; it's value is "reflief". I've furhtermore assumed that other people would be asked to do whatever they can to reduce the suffering of "my child" in this context. It's a morality of mutual relief, if you're not introducing something that makes it all worthwhile. There's a hidden variable here somewhere. It's not really about action/inaction. To an anti-natalist curing cancer must look like pointless busywork when you look at the big picture. In the particular situation - i.e. now that I'm already here - curing cancer can look like worthwhile in comparison to other activities. But the "now that I'm here" is rather important to an anti-natalist, and I don't see what a consequentialist argument from inaction says about this.

I don't actually know how important the now-that-I'm-here aspect is in this context. Thought experiment: You're an anti-natalist. You come across an unconscious man in a wintry street who'll freeze to death if you don't intervene. Obviously you can't ask for consent. Should you save his life? In what ways is this situation different from a non-existent, potential child. What difference does the now-that-he's-here aspect make? I have no answer to that question, but it's intuitive to non-antinatalist me that not giving birth isn't the moral equivalent to letting someone die.

Could you elaborate. I just don't get what you're saying. Where did entitled to someone else's suffering come from? — khaled

Sorry for being unclear. That's what happens when I edit my post too much. Normaly I just close the window, but this time I somehow posted it. I'm not sure I can do a much better job explaining myself, but I'll try.

It's easiest, I think, to start from an example, so let's go with this:

My interlocutor went so far as to say that if I knew my child would cure cancer and didn't have said child then I am a direct cause that cancer is still around and thus, have done something wrong. — khaled

There is, I think, a fundamental difference in world view between what this person said, and what an anti-natalist would say, and this difference remains unaddressed.

Cancer is a form of suffering, but not the only one. Your interlocutor sees suffering as a problem to be solved, but an anti-natalist sees cancer as a symptom of larger problem that cannot be solved. Anyone who would choose to live despite such suffering is making a hypothetical choice; and a choice that someone who would forgo being born under such conditions would not make (maybe; I'm not an anti-natalist, and I'm not an expert on anti-natalism either).

So what your interlocutor and my imagined anti-natalist have in common is that they view cancer as a form of suffering. Cancer as a form of suffering has a different status in their respective world views, though. For your interlocuter, for example, the struggle against cancer might be a goal that gives meaning to their life. But for an anti-natalist it might be part of the package of suffering that comes with cancer: a tedious necessity, something to do. And it's also sisyphean task, not because you can't cure cancer, but because even if you cure cancer, there's plenty of other forms of suffering to take its place.

From this point of view, an anti-natalist could accept that he's partly responsible for the continued existence of cancer ("direct cause" is a stretch, but I don't want to address this here) without missing a beat. It's not an argument against anti-natalism. While you're around, you might as well cure cancer. But all you accomplish is shift the balance of suffering around a little. Most suffering isn't anything as extra-odrinary as cancer - suffering is a banal fact of existance, and your interlocutor might look a little like Don Quijote. On the other hand, my imagined anti-natalist would look like a defeatists to your interlocutor. Someone who gives up way too soon, dignifies his laziness as a sort of philosophical suffering, and so on. There is no common ground on which they can have an argument.

I'm hoping that the concept if we focus on the concept of responsibility, we can create a common ground. Responsibility is always responsibility to someone (someone else or yourself). It's a way of talking about demands, negotiating consensus, and so on. For example, if an anti-natalist might have to commit to the proposition that they're primary responsibility is to their child, and that's something you can talk about. This opens up questions about how to abstract (for whom is "getting rid of cancer" good, both in particular and in general?). It becomes a discussion about who makes what demands from whom.

So for the sake of argument I (roleplaying an anti-natalist) know that my child would cure cancer. What else do I know? Let's say I know that my child's attitude towards life would be such that he wouldn't have chosen to be born if such a choice were possible. What then? Are you asking me to put the cure for cancer over my child? Are you asking my child to suffer through a life he doesn't want just so he can cure cancer?

So someone's suffering from cancer. My non-existent child would have cured cancer. So I share a part of the responsibility to that person for their suffering of cancer. But so do the parents who gave birth to that person. Your interlocutor doesn't address that latter part at all, and in consequence there's no way to talk about the balance of values involved. Conceding responsibility turns an anti-natalist into a villain with little recourse to appeal. It's a judgment, not an argument.

(Note that I'm having as much of an issue with "hypothetical consent before birth" as I do with your interlocutor's "direct cause". I'm not really taking sides, here, even though I have to admit that my sympaties tend more towards the anti-natalist position.)

I hope I'm making a little more sense in this post. It's not an easy topic for me to discuss as I'm not confident that I represent consent-based anti-natalism correctly in the first place, and so I keep second guessing myself, which makes it hard to keep my thoughts straight.

.

Antinatalism, at least most versions I have seen, rely on the assumption that not having children is a net neutral act. As in it cannot harm or benefit anyone. But then someone made the case that there is no such thing as "inaction". By choosing to not have children, I become a causal factor in harming people my child would have helped so one cannot say that by not having children I am actually not doing anything wrong. While this does imply that there are situations where people would be wrong not to have children (which I find ridiculous) it does pose an interesting question in my opinion about what "inaction" exactly is. — khaled

Doesn't anti-natalism focus on the responsibility of a parent to a child? An unborn child is obviously not capable of consensus, so you're responsible for any harm that comes to your child by the act of making said harm possible.

I'm not an anti-natalist myself, but I think the argument doesn't quite work, as it's about your child's responsibility to others, and I'm fairly sure that under anti-natalist tenets this would amount to a "chain of suffering", or a morality of mutual relief: you should suffer so as to reduce someone else's suffering, and in turn you're entitled to someone else's suffering to reduce yours. You could just cut out all the suffering at the root and simply not be born. I don't see the argument working. At best it amounts to a stalement between two unexpressed "life is/isn't worth living" points of view. If life isn't worth living than any pleasure is a temporal stop-gap; if life's worth living than suffering is an opportunity for growth. Two people seeing the same world in very different terms would have a different view on action/inaction, too.

If there's responsibility, it's always responsibility to someone, and if there's no-one, responsibility can't trigger. The argument from inaction doesn't change that, and it sounds like people should suffer so they can ease each other's suffering.

Your comments are basically about practical limitations and these can be safely ignored because, as actual experimentation shows, even a standard-issue die/coin behaves probabilistically. — TheMadFool

On the one hand, you say that practical limitations can be safely ignored, and on the other hand you wish to appeal to actual experimentation. You have to choose one. Practical limitations may not be important to the law of large numbers when it comes to an ideal die, but they're certainly vitally important to actual experimentation. That's a theoretical issue, by the way: the universe we live in is only a very small sample compared to the infite number of throws, and what any sample we throw in the real world converges to is the actual distribution of the variable, and not the ideal distribution (though the sets can and often will overlap).

More importantly, though, since you're talking about determinism, you're actually interested in practical limitations and how they relate to probability. It's me who says practical limitations are unimportant to the law of large number, because it's an entirely mathematical concept (and thus entirely logical). Not even a universe in which nothing but sixes are thrown would have anything of interest to say about the law of large numbers.

I'd say the core problem is that without a clearly defined number of elements in a set (N), you have no sense of scale. How do you answer the question whether all the die throws in the universe is a "large number" when you're talking about a totality of infinite tries? If you plot out tries (real or imagined, doesn't matter) you'll see that the curve doesn't linearily approach the expected value but goes up and down and stabilises around the value. If all the tries in the universe come up 6, this is certainly unlikely (1/6^N; N = number of dice thrown in the universe), but in the context of an ideal die thrown an infinite number of times, this is just be a tiny local devergance.

That ‘law’ states that the average of outcomes will converge towards 3.5, not towards 1/6 times the number of trials (that wouldn’t make sense). — leo

The two of you work with different x's. Your x is the outcome of a die throw {1,2,3,4,5,6}. His x is the number of odd die-throws in a sample of the size of T. He's using the probability of throwing an odd number as the expected value. Explaining the particulars, here, is beyond me, as I'm out of the loop for over a decade, but he's basically using an indicator function for x (where the value = 1 for {1,3,5} and 0 for {2,4,6}).

As far as I can tell, what he's doing here is fine.

My latest post seems to have come out more technical than I meant it to. I went through a lot of drafts, discarded a lot, and ended up with this. But there's a point in there somewhere:

A. The usual way we throw the die - randomly - without knowing the initial state. The outcomes in this case would have a relative frequency that can be calculated in terms of the ratio between desired outcomes and total number of possible outcomes. It doesn't get more probabilistic than this does it?

B. If we have complete information about the die then we can deliberately select the initial states to produce outcomes that look exactly like A above with perfectly matching relative frequencies. — TheMadFool

The scenarios A and B in my previous post was to explain that deterministic systems can behave probabilistically and I think it accomplished its purpose. — TheMadFool

It's clear to me that you think scenarios A and B explain why deterministic systems "behave probabilistically", but as leo pointed out "behaving probabilistically" isn't well defined, and in any case the maths works the same in both A and B.

You use terms like "the initial state", and "complete information about the die", but those terms aren't well defined. "The initial state" is the initial state of a probabilistic system, but that's pure math and not the real world. We use math to make statements about the real world. The philosophy here is: "How does mathmatics relate to the real world?"

The mathematical system of the probability of a fair die has a single variable: the outcome of a die throw. There is no initial state of the system, you just produce random results time and again. The real world always falls short of this perfect system. You understand this, which is why you're comparing ideal dice to real dice. "Initial states" aren't initial states of ideal dice, but of real dice. (I understand you correctly so far, no?)

Now to describe a real die you need to expand the original system to include other variables. That is you expand to original ideal system into a new ideal system, but one with more variables taken into account. This ideal system will have an "initial state", but it's - again - an ideal system, and if you look at the "initial state", you'll see that the variables that make up the initial state can be described, too. This is important, because you're arriving at the phrase "complete information about the die" and you go on to say that "we can deliberately select the initial states." But there are systematic theoretical assumptions included in this in such a way that what initial states we pick is not part of the system we use to describe the die throw. (But, then, is the information really "complete"? What do you mean by "complete"?)

So now to go back to my original post:

A variable has an event space, and that event space has a distribution. — Dawnstorm

Take a look at a die. A die has six sides, and there are numbers printed on every side, and it's those numbers we're interested in. This is what makes the event space:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

The distribution is just an assumption we make. We assume that everyone of those outcomes is equally likely. This isn't an arbitrary assumption: it's a useful baseline to which we can compare any deviation. If a real die, for example, were most likely to throw a 5 due to some physical imbalance, then it's not a fair die. The distribution changes.

In situations such as games of chance we want dice to behave as closely to a fair die as possible. Even without knowing each die's distribution, for example by simple rule: never throw the same die twice. The idea here is that we introduce a new random variable: which die to throw. Different dice are likely to have different biases, so individual biases won't have as much an effect of the outcome. In effect, we'd be using many different real dice, to simulate an ideal one.

And now we can make the assumption that biases cancel each other out, i.e. there are equally man dice that are biased towards 1 than towards 2, etc. This two is an ideal assumption with its own distribution, and maybe there's an even more complicated system which equals out the real/ideal difference for this one, too. For puny human brains this gets harder and harder every step up. But the more deterministic a system is, the easier it gets to create such descriptive systems. And with complete knowledge of the entire universe, you can calculate every proability very precisely: you don't need to realy on assumptions and the distinction between ideal and real dice disappears.

Under prefect knowledge of a deterministic system probability amounts to the frequentist description of a system of limited variables. An incomplete frequentist description of a deterministic system will always include probabilities, because of this. If, however, you follow the chain of causality for a single throw of a die, what you have isn't a frequentist description, and probability doesn't apply. They're just different perspectives: how the throw of a die relates to all the other events thus categorised, and how it came about. There's no contradiction.

There is no confusion at all. A die is deterministic and it behaves probabilistically. This probably needs further clarification.

A die is a deterministic system in that each initial state has one and only one outcome but if the initial states are random then the outcomes will be random. — TheMadFool

A variable has an event space, and that event space has a distribution. How you pick a value for the variable determines whether the variable is independent or dependent. An independent variable can be a random variable, and a dependent variable can depend on one or more random variables.

How we retrieve the values for the variable in an experiment (i.e. if it's a random variable or not) has no influence on the distribution of the event space of the variable, but it can introduce a bias into our results.

That the same variable with the same distribution can have its values computed or chosen at random in different mathematical contexts is no mystery. It's a question of methodology.

I really don't know what you mean by "facing suicide". Usually (in my case), there's a lot of anxiety when those thoughts appear. — Wallows

Not so much facing suicide, as facing the suicidal thoughts and the emotions that come with them - that anxiety, for example. What that means for you in praxis I don't really know. I'm not even saying that medication is a bad idea. Just make sure not to enter into an unhealthy co-dependt relationship with the pharma industry, maybe? I don't know.

I'll probably be addressing what "facing suicidal thoughts" meant for me with some of your other questions.

That's pretty dark, man. — Wallows

Not really darker than the underlying suffering, though. If it works it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't. There's probably no solution that works for everyone. Not even chocolate.

What do you mean by "psychological disincentive"? — Wallows

When you think of doing something, some aspects draw you towards the action (incentives), and some push you away from it (disincentives). I call them psychological, because unlike real-life policy (such as, say, taxes), these (dis)incentives are just part of how you react to the world. Their basically your bundle of values.

Please elaborate. I seem to be encompassed by fear lately. — Wallows

The difference between fear of dying and fear of death is actually a pretty good opportunity to demonstrate psychological incentives and disincentives:

So I have these unpleasant emotions: anxiety, disgust with myself and parts of the world, exhaustion... I don't want to feel them. The way I imagine death is this: no feelings at all. Those are gone, too. That's an incentive.

Now, logically I'd also get rid of good feelings. But back then that didn't function as a psychological disincentive. Rather than something I wanted to keep, that felt like an acceptable price to pay.

However, to get to the desired state of death I have to die, and dying is messy. I can't help but think of it as pain. The least painful method is probably overdosing on barbiturates of some sort, but - apart from being unreliable - I was imagining messing up and feeling really quesy or maybe having convulsions. None of this was based on research. I just had this association of dying with pain (or just undergoing an otherwise unpleasant process as queasiness).

So basically the state of death worked as an incentive, while the process of dying worked as a disincentive. It's not a cost/benefit calculation. Nothing that rational; it's a felt attraction existing alongside a felt repulsion.

To this day I'm not afraid of death. If I look forward a milennium, I realise I'll no longer be around. That doesn't affect me in any way, really. If I knew I had a fatal, incurable illness, I'd adapt pretty quickly to the new deadline. However, the illness itself? The process of dying? It sort of depends on the particulars, but in general this sounds like a rather unpleasant stretch of life. (Note that I don't have a shred of believe in any afterlife. Things might be different, if I thought death was just life v2.0.)

Did time or your age help you see the whole issue as some childish desire or fantasy? — Wallows

Not really, no. You see, I always, even back then, thought I was being childish. It didn't help. If anything it just added a layer to my self-loathing. If anything, I'm less judgemental about my younger self now than I was back then.

Remember how I said near the start of this post that I'd adress the question of what "facing suicidal thoughts" meant for me with another question? Well, it fits here. As I said, I was pretty hard on myself for having suicidal thoughts. Why I can't I deal with life? Other people can live just fine, and I can't? What's with all those petty inner tantrums? Those anxieties of mine are so stupid! And so on.

Facing my suicidal thoughts for me meant suspending that sort of judgement. It wasn't easy, but it was easier than to - for example - just stop being anxious. So instead of berating myself, I just thought I'd dry indulging myself. To varying results. On bad days, that would lead to inner hysterics that were even harder to bear. But on good days?

I have the mind of a story teller. I dramatise everything. That's just how I work. But not all stories are realistic. On good days, allowing myself all those petty, nonsensical, negative feelings turned into a sort of game. If I'm going to be rediculous, I'm going to be really ridiculous. That's a hard-to-explain process. They way I'm writing about this now sounds a lot more deliberate than I was. It was a sort of emotional escalation. The self-judgemental part of me didn't go away, but it sort of transformed from judge to fiction audience. In a sense the process gradually estranged me from my suffering, until it felt like some absurd spectacle. It's a way to non-jeeringly laugh at myself, by ramping up the drama and making it less and less belivable.

It's not something I tried to do. I think the bad days that ended in hysteria would have put me off that methodology, if it wasn't something that... just happened. And I'm saying all of this now, looking back, so a lot of it will look neater in memory than it actually was while living through it. But that's roughly how I remember it playing out. I've been trying to think of an illustrative example, but I can't seem to get it right anymore. Maybe I should be thankful for that.

I think the best way to avoid suicidal thoughts is to first take some antidepressant, and engage in therapy or some constructive endeavor if one has enough motivation to do so. — Wallows

Should you avoid suicidal thoughts in the first place? Wouldn't it be better to face them? What if someone uses suicidal thoughts for some sort of catharsis, like roleplaying, rather than as premeditation for an act? The role suicidal thoughts play in the genisis of a suicide is interesting and not necessarily as straightforward as "I have suicidal thoghts therefor I want to die."

Some suicidal thoughts never lead to an actual suicide. But even suicidal thoughts that are not connected to an intention to kill oneself can lay the groundwork for a future suicide - as you familiarise yourself with the thought patterns. An example would be: "having a favourite hypothetical method" --> "being comfortable with the method, thus removing one psychological disincentive."

I was a suicidal teen. I'm now nearly fifty and don't consider myself suicidal anymore, but I do still have the thought habits. I can tell a difference in the quality; I'm not serious. (They're more over-the-top, exaggerated; a bit like I'm parodying my younger self.) Btw, I don't have a hypothecical favourite method. All methods suck. I think that's one of the major reason's I'm still alive. Too afraid of the system shock that comes with dying (painful methods), and of waking up after an unsucessful attempt and having to deal with the fallout (unreliable methods). As a formerly suicidal person I can tell you that fear of dying and fear of death are not the same thing. I have the former but not the latter.

Talking about my non-serious suicidal thoughts is difficult, because of the taboo that surrounds the topic. I can be pretty casual about it, and people often don't know how to react to that. I usually have to explain that, no, I don't intend to kill myself, and, no, I don't intend to make fun of the topic (even though it sometimes sounds like it). I've just learned to live through my suicidal phase, and now suicidal thoughts are some sort of cathartic tool (and that sometimes includes black humour).

As a result, talk about suicide entirely in terms of prevention feels isolating. It did back when I was suicidal (it felt like people were more interested in preventing a suicide than in trying to understand), and it does now (because of the disconnect). When it comes to fiction I react best to stuff that depicts emotional difficulty without taking sides (e.g. the film 'night, Mother with Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft), or with absurd comedy set-ups (e.g. the suicide arc in the anime Welcome to the NHK). I react worst to shows that idealise a single solution.

In terms of this thread, I don't think it's helpful to seek a single solution to the problem. I mean, suicides range from the guy who walks in on his family to demonstratively shoot himself, to the guy who kills himself and leaves behind a binder explaining himself, a lot of articles about dealing with loss, as well as a list of therapists and help-lines. Suicide is really just a single puzzle piece in a person's life and you won't understand that single suicide without understanding how it fits in. You can abstract, but that would involve multiple non-exclusive categories, I think.

Basically, you can't understand a person's suicide without understanding that person's life. A life can have problems. Suicide doesn't solve those problems, but it does end them (and also prevent solution, though that's moot by then). Focussing on the suicide ("you shouldn't kill yourself, because...") can come across as priviledging the topic over the underlying problems (as in "It's fine if you suffer, as long as you don't inconvenience me with your corpse"). Not all suicides are problem-centred, though. My own phase was more akin to what Pfhorrest describes in his post above. Problems, here, are more nuisances - life's a struggle and there's no reward. Depression is actually welcome, because it's more comfortable than the anxiety of what sort of contradictory demands will come your way next. It's not big deal, really, you can push through that as you always have. But you become increasingly exhausted. People notice this, so they try to be nice to you, and through this process the things you enjoy turn into
obligations, too, and eventually you just forget how to want things, even though you're an expert in how to not want things. Eventually you just feel empty. That's fine during a depression, since you don't feel any sort of vigour anyway. During bouts of depression it's easy to dismiss life. You're not going to kill yourself; it's not worth the bother. But as it recedes? Or if you feel it coming? That's when there's an inner tension that's nearly unbearable; it's a sort of unspecified can't-do-anything-but-have-to anxiety. During that phase you're not likely to make any preparations, though. Half-hearted attempts would be the most likely (though that was never my style). You prepare while your fairly calm and even cheerful. In my case it ended with research, since I never found a method I liked. (I also wondered whether I really was suicidal, or if that was just my inner drama queen. Now that I'm definitely not suicidal, I think I was.)

Basically, I didn't want to kill myself because of a specific problem, but because I was just gradually losing my grip on life.

Suicide can be mitigated by becoming more aware of other people or thoughts. — Wallows

This definitely helped during bouts of what I call the brooding spiral. Re-focusing helped by itself, and as a bonus I tended to find out that I was asking way more of myself than nearly anyone else (though that was a lesson that usually didn't stick).

.

Probability, in my opinion, has to be objective or real. By that I mean it is a property of nature just as mass or volume. So, when I say the probability of an atom of Plutonium to decay is 30% then this isn't because I lack information the acquisition of which will cause me to know exactly which atom will decay or not. Rather, radioactivity is objectively/really probabilistic. — TheMadFool

I don't know whether I agree or disagree. I'm not sure what - in terms of the real world - it would mean for "probability to be real". Probability is maths, and like all maths it's applied to the real world, and so the question is whether it's useful or not rather than whether it's real or not.

A operates with a very "small" probability system, and B with a very large one. A can expand to B, and B can conflate to A. When A expands, the likelihood for throwing a particular number increases until it drops to either zero or hits 1. That's just conditional probability. A's probability table would have to exhaust all probabilities.

What if the universe doesn't have an initial state, just a string of causality that breaks at some point in the past, because stuff like frequency stops working? You could only approximately describe this with a mathematical system, right? Assuming mutliple possible initial states would work, but only if we can describe all those states and their relations such as that they are mutually exclusive.

So, yeah, what does it mean for probability to be real?

Good point. Anything's possible in a game of chance. However, the issue is of predictability. Person B, given he knows the initial state of the system (person A and the dice) is able to predict every outcome; implying that the system is deterministic. However, the system behaves as if that (deterministic character) isn't the case. — TheMadFool

I'm trying to figure out what you think a "probabilistic system" should look like. "The initial state of the system" is different for A and B. For A, it's simply a game of dice. For B, it's the current state of the universe. For A probability only allows six outcomes. B could know that A will die of a heart attack before he ever gets to throw the die (and his hand cramps, so the die doesn't even drop). In my view you're comparing apples and oranges. A asks "What are the odds?" and B asks "What will happen?"

B uses the chain of causality to compute the outcome. A uses probability to compute the odds. Take the following example:

A bag contains only red balls. You draw one of them in the hopes of it being red.

A will use probability theory and know immediately that given that he'll successfully draw a ball it will be red (because there's only one option).

B will have to go through multiple computations to figure out which ball A will draw and then check its colour. B will know, though this process, if A will successfully draw a ball, if so which one, and by implication its colour.

In this limited case, A and B will come to the same conclusion. Why? Because the probability to draw a red ball from a bag that only contains red balls is 100 %. B has a lot more information that pertains to the situation, though, including whether A will draw a ball at all.

I'm not sure I understood you correctly, though. I'm right in assuming that B follows the chain of causality (taking into account all data he has) and doesn't encounter a truly random process (which would contradict determinism)?

Of course, given perfect knowledge in a deterministic system, the question "What are the odds?" is superfluous, because it's always 100 %. But A has very limited knowledge.

A and B have different perspectives: A's tends to be more efficient (but he'll have to contend with risk), and B's tends to be more accurate (but he'd probably die of old age before he finishes the computions).

This result is in agreement with the theoretical probability calculated (4/6 = 2/3 = 66.66%). In other words the system (person A and the dice) behaves like a probabilistic system as if the system is truly non-determinsitic/probabilistic. — TheMadFool

And if A threw a hundred sixes in a row it wouldn't be behaving like a probablilistic system?

Thanks. I never really know how well I make my points, so having feedback helps.

The problem with my post was that it... wasn't sensitive to the flow of the conversation and rewinded the entire thing to a much earlier stage. I didn't notice I was doing that when I was typing. I think the key problem I was having, what caused my confusion, is that I took "crowd subjectivity" instinctively as a synonym for "collective subjectivity", when it's not. In my post, a vending machine could serve as a stand-in for a collective. But a vending machine is obviously not a crowd. Only when I read Galuchat's post did I realise that.

I guess my question would be, then, what's a crowd to begin with (people using the subway vs. people attending a rock concert - I feel there's a difference in output here), and how does it relate to "collective subjectivity"? The prototype? An example?

.

The shop.,.. — Galuchat

A crowd... — Galuchat

Re-reading the thread, I feel I replied to something nobody said. Well, that's embarrassing.

"Some incidental college classes" would have been my first choice, even though it didn't occur to me that "university" and "college" could be synonyms. Thanks for the clarification. I voted now.

I will say that the results so far surprise me some. I was expecting mostly autodidacts, then students, then decreasing numbers of the increasingly higher degrees, and while there are mostly autodidacts and degrees in descending order as expected, I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees. — Pfhorrest

Hm, I don't post much, but I might have voted, as voting as a low-effort activity. But I couldn't because what formal education I have doesn't easily fit into the poll.

First, the subdivision of school/university isn't easily translatable. I'm Austrian, have an elementary school, some sort of middle school, and then some sort of commercial college. After that I went to University where I earned a "Magister" (which is probably somewhat comparable to a Master but in reality might be somewhere between a Bachelor and Master, not at all sure).

Next problem I have is how to map "philosophy" onto my education. Philosophy wasn't part of the elementary school education. "Philosophy" was part of the syllabus in Middle school only in the sense that it was integrated in "German" as part of German/Austrian literary history. It could have been part of my education had I stayed on the school for 4 more years (roughly a highschool equivalent - and I would have had to choose either a humanities or a nat-sci branch) , but I changed to a commercial college, where philosophy wasn't part of the syllabus much (you don't get through a commercial college without hearing about "the invisible Hand" and stuff like that).

However, philosophy was a huge part of may sociology studies at University. Social philosophy (utopias, anarchy, etc.), philosophy of science (even if you didn't take the specifically targeted courses, which I did, you'd hear about Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, etc.), and depending on the theories you end up interested in you'll need to familiarise yourself with certain philosophers, though secondary literature usually suffices. (Marx, Husserl, Derrida...)

I'd say "some incidental university classes" would maybe fit what I went through? I definitely don't have a degree in philisophy, though my univerity degree has included the most philosophy, formally. But it's not easily comparable to either a Bachelor or a Master (though it's definitely not a doctorate). And some of my philosophical knowledge is audtodidact (e.g. whatever little I know about Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Sartre...).

As it is, I finished my degree over 20 years ago and have never done anything with it - I'm both out of the loop and unpractised, and I'm not confident at all. I can read logical notation but sometimes need a table to remind myself what some of the less frequent signs mean, and it's slooooowwwwww going in any case. An autodidact with the adequate passion will know more than I do.

So what should I vote? Autodidact? Some incidental college classes? I chose not to vote at all.

But what I'm having trouble discerning is precisely the implications of subjectivity when brought to bear on the phenomenon of crowds. That crowds have different capacities for action than individuals is, I think, a truism. What the snailshell ought to do, I'd imagine, is provide a novel & useful way of understanding crowds. We turn on the 'subjectivity' filter from our snailshell-cockpit and look out over the crowd and see patterns we wouldn't have, had we not turned that filter on. Or, if we're in the crowd, our understanding of subjectivity ought to give us some openness to possibilities of the crowd that others, without that understanding, might otherwise miss. — csalisbury

I've got a university degree in sociology (but am not doing anything with it and am out of touch with the mode of thinking, too), so I have litte trouble with "collective subjectivity". I don't remember anyone actually using the terms in just this way, but the topic is rather central to doing sociology. Early sociology was taking off from positivism, with Durkheim trying to explain suicide in terms of suicide rates, choosing the topic because it's been seen as a very personal topic and thus a topic for psychologists. Basically: sociology is positivist, and it's not about subjective experience, but it can still provide valuable insight into personal topics.

The need to distinguish sociology (as the younger discipline) from psychology remains. But at the same time getting rid of subjectivity altogether didn't appeal to everyone. So after Durkheim's positivist sociology, you get Weber's interpretative sociology. But Weber worked with ideal types: you don't need to reference each person as an individual: you just posit ideal types and see how close you get to what actually happens.

Take a transaction: You can't buy anything if nobody sells anything. Buying and selling are two actions that are intimately tied together. The meaning of the transaction translates, subjectively, into buying for one participant, and selling to the other participant. But it's really a single transaction, in which a "good" changes "owners". Once you're describing transactions like that, though, you're practically forced to separate the actions tied to such subjective positions from the actions tied to the people who fill the roles. Why? Because the more a society's structure differentiates, the more likely it becomes that at least one of the participants is a collective (even if represented by an individual).

Compare:

Private person buys from private person
Private person buys from family shop
Private person buys from corporate shop via shop assistant
Private person buys from vending machine

And so on (I didn't talk about the internet, about brokers, etc.)

You can play the same game for the other position (or "subjectivity" in terms of this thread) in the transaction; just think in terms of "sells to" rather than "buys from".

So, imagine you walk into a shop. You're taking a sandwich to the counter, but find you're one cent short. What happens?

You may be torn between asking to be granted a 1-cent reduction, pay the difference later (if you're "known to the shop"), or apologise and not buy the sandwich. Meanwhile, the shop assistent as a representative of the shop may not be able to grant you a reduction, but may do so as a person - entering into a responsibility relationship to the shop.

There's something here that needs a name, and I have no problem with "subjectivity", because it's actually about "taking the perspective of X", even if X is a set of abstract rules (either codified or understood).

Note that a vending machine will not be able to respond to your being one cent short. It'll simply wait for the final cent until you abort the transaction (or an internal clock says time's up and the machine aborts). In a way, you can think of a vending machine as an inherently stubborn shop assistent (because it has no consciousness and isn't capable of flexibility).

The biggest problem with using the term "subjectivity" for this sort of thing is that, if at any time you find you want to refer to a consciousness' outlook, too, the term "subjectivity" is no longer easily available: you'll either have to find a way to integrate a typology (e.g. personal vs. generalised subjectivity - which could be hard, or might not work as seamlessly as you'd hope), or you'll have to find another term (which could become an entry barrier for other people, when it comes to adopting the terminology).

What utility does the concept have? Are you trying to highlight body feelings in a discourse where performativity and social construction reigns? — fdrake

This is intricately tied in with "being able to pass". The less you look like the gender you feel like, the more often you will have to justify your feelings. Even well meaning people might treat you like a rare specimen. So you might have an operation, or you might only go for hormone treatment, but you can do little about bone structure. Now, that might not be a thing that bothers you, but the incongruity between how your looks are intuitively parsed and how you feel inside leads to an increased need to justify yourself, especially when there's thing you could do but don't want to (I've heard about peer pressure to take voice lessons, for example). That is, during the transition phase there might be a conflict between being at peace with yourself, and being at peace with the community you live in (and that can include the trans community, who are trying to help).

So, the regular pressures to behave according to your genders can be exacerabated when you're trans, because - other than cis-gendered people - there's a need to legitimise your gender. So a transwoman may need to show an effort to be more "feminine" to prove that she's not faking it. You can't prove feelings easily, so all that's left is behaviour.

If we were to accept that (a) trans people exist, and that (b) it's not all and not primarily about outward behaviour, we would adapt our expectation and lessen the burden of proof on daily life.

And now switch perspectives. You're a woman, you're not that interested in conventionally feminine things, but you live in an environment where people keep expecting this. The constant need to explain yourself would be tedious, too. Then you see a transwoman take voice lessons. Maybe she doesn't quite pull it off, yet? This behaviour has as a side-effect the re-inforcement of the annoying gender expectation you have to correct again and again and again.

So at that point, if we would accept that it's primarily about internal body-image (to be at peace with yourself), and we'd just get used to a trans status, then some of the behaviour might fall by the wayside, and behaviour would be more... instinctive?

A trans woman isn't a cis woman, and they know that or there'd be no point to use the word. But that's sort of the big default concept. If we were to accept that a trans woman is not a cis woman, it wouldn't be a surprise for a transwoman to retain some pre-transition elements, if we just took the category for what it is. Otherwise there's a constant need to prove yourself, and the only real option in daily life re-inforces gendered stereotypes. And in turn people think that's what it's about. There's a social push and pull here, that maybe could be lessened by simply accepting the category with all its variations.

(I'm talking mostly about trans women here because they're far more visible online than trans men.)

If to know is to hold a justified true belief, then what is the justification here? I know it is a picture of him because I recognise it as such? But that is to say just that I know it is a picture of him because I know it is a picture of him... — Banno

I don't think recognising the person in a picture is necessary for me to know that this is a picture of N (for example, N is the author of a book, I don't know what he looks like, but I see what I recognise as an "author photo"), nor do I think that me recognising N in a picture necessarily means that I know it's a picture of N (for example, if I know that the picture is a picture of an event X and I know that N was no longer alive at the time of event X, I have sufficient reason to doubt my recognition, and yet the recognition could be compelling enough to spook me). So, no, I don't think recognising N makes that justification circular.

It does point out the source of a possible error, though, and if you specify "How do you know this is a picture of N?" as "How do you know you're not mistaking the person in the picture?" then that would indeed be circular. Basically, every justification for a knolwedge claim involves itself knowledge that you can question, and I don't think "I know this is a picture of N" and "I recognise N in this picture," are on the same level of abstraction. The latter is more concrete.

The wording in the quote, though, is interesting: "suddenly I had to think of him", "suddenly, a picture of him floated before me..." The language leaves open (and even suggests to me) the possibility of an illusion. In that case, since there's no objective picture, isn't the act of recognition consitutitive? Is it even recognition?

I've always thought there's a great deal of overlap between thought experiments in philisophy and short stories. Every take on the trolley problem, for example, is a character waiting to happen. The biggest difference is that short stories are allowed, maybe even encouraged to spin out of control.

I find one of the most important skills in both thought experiements and story writing is not to automatically dismiss that which seems silly. If something seems silly, seize it, double down on it, until it's normalised. It's only one approach, or maybe even only one part of many potential approaches, but it can work. I mean nearly everything seems silly. Imagine woodpeckers don't exist, and someone approaches you with the concept:

I have this idea for a bird. It eats things that live in trees, but it's not patient enough to wait for them to come out, see, so it bangs its beak against the bark again and again and again, and very fast, too, and... What? No, it's not prone to concussions. So, anyway, that's how it makes holes in trees, and... Wait, where are you going?

The "it" in "it is raining" cannot syntactically refer to the weather in the trivial way the "it" does in "it is sunny" because the syntax differs. — Baden

In the exchange Herg provided (What's the weather doing?/It's raining.) it can. People may consider it awkward, but "it is raining," as an analogue to "the weather is raining," as a reply to "what is the weather doing?" is plausible (but not necessary; it's ultimately an empirical question - I do agree with Terrapin Station that it's all in the head).

The conversation says nothing about dummy it, though, other than in the case of a plausible antecedant for "it" a sentence might be ambiguous between dummy it and anaphoric it.

There are two possible readings of your "B: It's raining.", as follows:
1. 'It' refers to the bumble bee. In this case, since a bumble bee can't rain, the speaker is uttering nonsense.
2. (much more likely in real life) 'It' refers to the weather, and B is not answering A at all.

So semantics matters. You can't simply assume that in 'it's raining', 'it' refers to the subject of the most recent sentence uttered. As Terrapin Station has said, 'it' is indexical, and in any sentence about the weather, suich as 'it is raining' or 'it is sunny', 'it' refers to the weather. — Herg

I could say the same thing about your example. Maybe B didn't hear what A was saying, and is just commenting about the weather, the connection being a co-incidence.

Your example proves nothing, because you're basing the proof on the same imputed connection that I did in this example. But if the connection is there, you have anaphoric it and not dummy it. It's not the same situation.

A: What's the weather doing?
B: It's raining.

Assumption 1: B responds to A. Anaphoric it.
Assumption 2: B ignores A, and is randomly commenting on the weather. Dummy it.

Two different situations. It's just more obvious with the bumble bee example.

You can err on any utterance; but that's a question for pragmatics or conversation analysis rather than either syntax or semantics.

Yeah, context matters. But it matters on more than one level, and you have to be careful not to mix them up.

A: What's the weather doing?
B: It's raining. — Herg

A: What's the bumble bee doing?
B: It's raining.

So "it" refers to the bumble bee.

The conversation makes no sense, but the syntactic connection is sound. In your conversation "it" refers to the weather; in mine to the bumble bee. But it's a question of syntax, not semantics.

Does it matter that your conversation makes sense and mine doesn't, for determining reference?

Again, I'm guessing the context. It's context-dependent. — Terrapin Station

We're talking past each other.

As I said, ""What I'd normally take the subject to be in lieu of other information" — Terrapin Station

If you have enough information to parse an expression without actual context, it's not indexical, though.

What way? As an indexical. That's what we're talking about. — Terrapin Station

But if "It" in "It's raining," were indexical, then you couldn't be arguing that "it" refers to the weather or anything, because you couldn't tell what it was referring to until you had a context.

If I say, "He's a carpenter," then you know that someone's a carpenter, but you don't know who, if you lack context. How does "It's raining," remotely behave like that? That's what I don't understand.

It does if you think about it that way. — Terrapin Station

What way? I don't understand.

"It" is indexical because the meaning depends on the context. "It" doesn't have a "fixed" meaning like "cat," say. Like all indexicals, the reference of the term can be completely different in different contexts, they function more like variables. — Terrapin Station

I know that. But you don't need any context to parse "It is raining," correctly: "it" doesn't behave like the usual indexical "it" in this sentence.

"It" from above, 3. used in the normal subject position in statements about time, distance, or weather.
"it's half past five" or 5. used to emphasize a following part of a sentence. — Bitter Crank

Yes, in those cases I say it's referentially empty and only fills a syntactic function. (Also in 2., 4., and 6., for what it's worth).

Again, on my view, re semantics, terms mean, terms refer to whatever individuals consider them to mean/refer to. In other words, meaning is subjective. Contra Putnam, it is "just in the head." — Terrapin Station

I agree with this. But meaning in praxis, i.e. when you use "it" in "it is raining," is not quite the same as the meaning you assign in analysis. The latter can be adequate to the former or not. In other words, agreeing on what "It is raining," means is a lot easier than agreeing on the proper analysis of the component "it".

So maybe you refer to something when you say "it" in "It is raining," and I don't; but this difference (should it exist) causes precious little problems for successful communication should either of us say that sentence.

Beyond that, I'm not sure why you say that pronouns are indexical, if you think it's all in the head. I'll come out and say it: when I say "it" in "It is raining," I have no referent in mind. None whatsoever. When I say to you, "It's black with pink spots," you probably have no idea what I'm referring to. "It" is indexical, and you're not privy to the context (disclosure: there is no context - I made up a random sentence). When I say to you "It is raining," you probably have a good idea what I'm talking about, because all the information you need is in "is raining". Here "it" is not indexical; it's referentially empty and only fills a function. Please explain the difference in opaqueness of the sentences, if "it" is indexical in both sentences.

If "it" were indexical in "It is raining," it would have a different meaning whenever you use the sentence, and I'd have to parse "it" first before I can understand the sentence, like in "It is black with pink spots." In fact, the general indexicality of pronouns is fairly good argument against the fact "it" in "it is raining," or "it is five o'clock", or similar sentences is referential. If it were, we couldn't fully understand the sentences until we figure out what "it" means (because the meaning of "it" would depend on the context of speaking).

Anyway, if we were avoiding semantics and ONLY talking about grammar per se, then obviously the subject of "It is raining" is "It." — Terrapin Station

Yes.

As soon as you ask "What does 'it' refer to" you're doing semantics. — Terrapin Station

Yes.

Semantically, "It" is "the meteorological conditions outside." — Terrapin Station

That's the tricky part. It is not a given that "it" is referential in the first place. One possible answer to "What does "it" refer to," is nothing, and for most (but not all) linguists that's the answer.

One question we can ask about subjects (as arguments of verbs) is what the participant role of the subject is in relation to the verb. Is it an agent as in "I go to school," where going is an action the speaker undertakes? Is it an experiencer, as in "I'm dying," where the speaker is experiencing death?

What is the relation between the verb and it's primary argument?

My take on this topic is that any attempt at answering these questions is post hoc; the meaning is emergent rather than referential. "It" is referentially empty and has no semantic function until you enter the meta level and ask what sort of function it might have.

I also don't see any reason to ask these questions. Syntactic relations are enough. I do realise that it's not a clear cut issue. Take a potential exchange:

A: "It's raining."
B: "No, it's not; it's snowing."

There are three "its" in this exchange, and if I speak carelessly, I'd say that all three its refer to the same thing. Except it's a dummy it and refers to nothing, so how can it have the same reference? This is a problem, so at the very least your position is valid, if not even right.

Consider this sentence:

"It's true that it's raining."

Two its, both dummy its, but clearly not "referring" to the same thing in the way the three its in the previous examples do.

This is a situation where I see problems on either side, but my personal priorities find the problems with a generalised referent to be more severe.

To summarise, I think the meaning of "it" arises out of the interection of grammar with the semantics of the verb and is thus vague and general. It's not referential; but it has some sort of substance, such that you can differentiate between different sorts of dummy-its. What that semantic substance is like is a problem I'm not sure how to address, but it's not a problem severe enough for me to abandon the dummy-it interpretation.

Does this make sense?

(To make matters worse, we shouldn't be confusing subject-predicate of philosophical propositions with subject-predicate of a sentence structure. It's harder than it should be.)