That may well be the case. But people who do not care about truth don't usually succeed very long. — Olivier5

I take that as a critical statement then and return the favor. No hard feelings.

The important point to realize is that neither determinism nor indeterminist can ever be proven true or false, as they are statements about the ultimate nature of reality. — Olivier5

Oh, the importance of points is again something that is based on value, not on truth. Didn't you point out such a thing as problematic?

I understand why you're evading the question, but even you must see this is horrifically inconsistent. On the one hand, things seem deterministic but, because of small error, the thing itself is non-deterministic. — Kenosha Kid

I dunno. If Olivier5 wants to interpret things as he does this has to be accepted I guess. If there appears to be a 60% probability of something happening declaring that appearance for the truth is surely not unthinkable. God himself does not know where that photon is, then. One could argue about the value of such a theory but there is no logical reason to reject it per se. Of course it cannot be proven and such proofs can be pointed out as fallacious.

But a working hypothesis is quite different from some absolute cosmic ontological a priori statement... — Olivier5

But in the Copenhagen interpretation the probabilistic model really is only just a working hypothesis. Ontologically there is Heisenbergs uncertainty principle which states that certain properties cannot be measured without influencing the system (i.e. shoot photons at other small bodies without playing billiard) or measure a frequency exactly at a given point in time (as frequency is defined as N/dt).
What you seem to do is to take an interpretation which states itself "this is NOT the reality but just a model", say "look! the reality is probabilistic" and then even come back at people who point out, that without getting metaphysical, you cannot even make the statement that "6 of 10 cases" equates to 60% "probability".

QM is not a gap. Randomness is systemic in it, and it applies supposedly to the entire universe. — Olivier5

Isn't this a misconception? Not being able to measure position and speed of a particle does not necessarily mean it ain't at an exact position and speed at a given time. It is trivial that one cannot measure the speed of a car non-intrusively by crashing another car into it.
This is the point where empirical science is bound by it's metaphysical starting point, i.e. that the observable universe is the universe. You will never observe ideal concepts like free will.

But people who do not care about truth don't usually succeed very long. — Olivier5

People... usually know that everything has it's place. This is why there is not too much arguing about maths being a "sure" basis for empirical science. Even if the content can only be described via probabilities it is simply not true that

Everything is that trivial in the end: it's about probabilities, always. There is no full certainty about much. — Olivier5

you'd either have to say there is no certainty about nothing or consider metaphysics.
Schroedinger's cat may well know if it is alive or not.

To simplify it means that in a casino, a player who beats the odds repeatedly by more than 10% should be looked at very closely, cause something is askew in his stats. — Olivier5

Thats trivial. Just as trivial as that there is no proof of anything. The casino can get him out without having to justify it. Just as there is no objective criterion to dismiss a theory. I remember a cite from Popper stating that one could know how things are not. In statistics this is not the case. In this sense Popper was outdated by theories that do not care about truth but about usefulness or buisiness values.

Certainly it would prove it incorrect in this instance. — Olivier5

Okay, so then if you take a radioactive material, where there are a few mol of atoms decaying, you can be sure there is something going wrong if hitting that 2^-100 probability in finding a non-decayed atom?

So what? IF that happened, would it prove the 50-50 chance wrong? Given it is wrong as the coin may land on its edge - is that what you are trying to say?

But you were talking about scientific theories.

Maths say if you throw a coin it is a valid result to get 1bln heads in a row. This does not contradict the 50-50 probability.

How would you disprove a probabilistic theory based on Popper? At no point in time you can know if the 90% chance will be met at the end of all times.

What makes materialism appealing is that it manages to incorporate a basic sense of reality. Most of philosophy failed to do so for a few thousand years up to now. Not because it really was doubted in general but because it's starting point makes it inherently impossible. Yet even philosophers do not doubt the existence of the train coming towards them seriously enough to not step aside. What does this tell? What is the doubt worth objectively if that is the case?

A big point for the "cruel marxist verdict" of the unity of theory and practice.

A fundamental problem I see is that one cannot think an object which cannot be thought coherently. Either the object is constituted by the mind, which means the mind must be able to comprehend it's essence and behaviour in all it's negativity as thinking the object is what defined it in first place; Or the negativity has a source which is not rooted in the mind. A mere statistical probability cannot be a result of thought.

There is no moment in my free-time I would strictly not switch out for sleep. But in practice I would not switch them out all together.
Dunno what the result would be if there weren't necessities like work and stuff that would require me to be awake.

I know, this is clearly not what you were asking for.

The imagination. Clearly just sleeping would result in eventual death if enacted. The point is rather, how much of normal waking days would you not mind replacing with sleep instead of having to do them? If it is neutral or negative, and you switched those out, how much of the day would be that? — schopenhauer1

I would say then it is clearly neutral towards sleeping most of the time. There are very few things I am eagerly looking forward to. I just wanted to point out, that the result of really doing so however would be something I would not be okay with.
I do not see if this really effects your argument yet, though. But asking for every moment separately "Sleep instead?" and asking for the sum seems to lead to different results. This is strange.

From what I understand, most reports are standardized to be written in English, but this only means that most scientists hastily translate their words into the standard language. And translation in general is a mess. Not just the grammatical errors, but some statements become clearly ambiguous. Different languages do not have a direct word-to-word translation to other languages. — Seth72

Do you think the formulations would get better if they translated their thoughts on the fly? Imagine taking notes during a phone-call - might be better that even a single exact version of the note exists I guess (no matter in what language). In that case, if something is unclear, your colleague might be able to figure out what he meant by looking up in his original notes. If the ambiguous version is all that is left, then... good luck.

I know that problem from writing technical descriptions. I translate them on-the-fly and when I re-read them I recognize that I would not be able to exactly figure out what happens. This gets more serious the more exact the description must be. Getting that right often requires reformulating the whole paragraph.
I guess this is not only my bad english. I think in german. You start writing and recognize too late that, in English, you will never be able to put that into a single, precise sentence. So you have to go back and break it up. In the meantime, you forget what you wanted to say. Even professional translators often lag behind the original speaker quite a bit when doing live-translations. My feeling is this gets worse and worse the more complex the matter.

Protection of the rights of minorities is something that marxism is fundamentally opposed. It see's just this "rights" as a vessel for the enemies of proletariat. — ssu

You are talking about a very special minority, are you? In general "rights" indicate conflicts which get settled in the form of rights by the governing body. What would be rights if all were free? Rights are no values-in-themselves.

Yet if the farmer is a land owner, he or she is the root problem of everything to classic Marxism. — ssu

I associated that with Rosseau (On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind)

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

I'd agree with you that the result of individual systems interacting can be something which is not itself reducible to the outputs of those systems, but it's a step too far to suggest that it is not in any way constrained by them. Modelling human social institutions without reference to the human imperatives that constitute them is sloppy at best, regardless of the clear fact that the resultant institutions will be more complex than the constituent objectives. — Isaac

Speaking of responsibility and stuff is all great but have a look at the reality: Often when it comes to wages the business argument is "We could produce much cheaper in china". If then this gets serious maybe even politics step in to "save jobs" and everything gets "fine and dandy". For you, that is, as it is not the "evil chinese" but the "poor chinese" who would work for a much lower wage and whose work now gets forced to an even lower price.
But this is not about prices. Marx is talking about principles. With an economy based on trade-values you would still need to work all day even with the technological means of the StarTrek-universe where everything could be made from thin-air by replicators. Despite nobody wants or needs a trade-value in first place.

If throughout the regular course of the day, you would rather be non-existent/asleep/unconscious than doing that particular task/chore/thing-at-hand, then it was better never having been for those moments. If those moments add up to a majority of the day, it may be the case that it was better never to have been more generally. Similarly, if what you are doing is neutral to the point where you would not mind switching out the task-at-hand for sleeping, that also counts for this argument. — schopenhauer1

Somehow I have to question such "would"-arguments. The simple question is why you wouldn't just do it. A strong thesis might be that such "would rather" statements are more like a kind of self-expression than to take factually.
I sleep little. Yet I would feel tempted to say that I do not value the wake time in itself. I might imagine that sleeping instead would be okay. But sleeping as much as I theoretically could would result in a near "work-sleep-work" cycle. And that kind of existence would seem horrible. So I have to really prefer being wake. My practice speaks against my own "judgement": Why would I feel the need to compensate for the work-time by doing other things (awake) if switching the "superfluous" wake time for sleep would really be ok?
So what do you mean with your question? The real "implicit" judgement or the imagination?

Edit: In reflection only working and sleeping is not that bad at all....

Can we agree, as a general rule, that if X and Y are identical (similar in every detail; exactly alike), then talk of X is the same as talk of Y? — RogueAI

Thinking back to elementary school this does not even hold for mathematics: 3+4 is the question and 7 is the answer.

because “I am deathly afraid of ending up alone”. — MadWorld1

What I may add to this is that "being alone" only matters so long (as it does matter). It might well be you not only do end up alone but that you really will not care about it then. The social needs are an invention of culture or at least lose their weight with time. The thing you may then ask in this forum are if it is a bad thing that you do not care and basically care a sh*t about everything as long as you get your steak on sundays as that really is something existential.

Freud made up for the theories how culture benefits from internalized aggression. So to critique your excerpts of despair: It is really to abstract to be destructive and - thus - satisfying. Too many relativations, too few direct attacks. "Hunter-gatherers"... I'd suggest you google for "Trolling for Beginners" and put things to the test. Think, no, DO Nieztsche:

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity.

What stays on top is right, good and the truth.

Well, yeah. That’s what I meant by “now I find myself in the peculiar situation of having to accept it to thrive in it”, because “I am deathly afraid of ending up alone”. — MadWorld1

What I was trying to tell you is that those thoughts may be symptomatic for the situation of being estranged from the means of your own reproduction. This is not cured by "thinking positive".

Only you are insisting that I keep shifting the subject from "an elephant" to "elephants", even though jkg20 has also gone from "no ant is an elephant" to "ants are not elephants". — Bunji

If I point to a thing and label it an elephant I do not need to know what an elephant is besides the one thing I pointed to. So the proposition system you cite is not the criteria to call things elephants in the first place. So with Descartes. If we call the environment we live in "world" this is the definition of "world". It cannot be something else as this would imply a definition would be different from the thing. But the thing was the definition to start with.
If we take the proposition system of "elephantness" (see the essence) and /ask/ if a given object is an elephant this must either be true or not. If this is true and the object /later/ turns into an ant this just means the elephant turned into an ant. Nothing more nothing less.

Any ideas how to go about denying 2? — TheMadFool

An assumption is made that everything would need a cause.

"A=B & B not = A" is a logical contradiction. It doesn't provide us with knowledge because it's nonsense. — Bunji

Exactly.

But if I say "Elephants are different from antelopes", that is either true or false as a matter of empirical enquiry, not of logical necessity. — Bunji

First of all, you have again shifted the subject of discussion from "an elephant" to elephants. This again is asking for essence. I do not need to /say/ what the difference between two objects is, it is enough for them to be distinguishable. To subsume particular objects under some concept of "type" is not necessarily a valid starting point. And yet this seems to be what you are always trying to do here.

According to Descartes the only certainty I have about THAT THIS is that I am aware of an image which appears to me as THAT THIS. — Bunji

And this already is where he changes subjects. He is not aware of the words anymore but silently makes the proposition those are perceived images. This changes the nature of things. But where did he get that undoubtable insight?
We know for sure there is THIS and there is THAT. And we know they are different.

It seems to me there's a difference between THAT and THIS, but my eyes could be deceiving me, or I could be imagining a difference that isn't really there, or I could be dreaming. — Bunji

Again, that is talking metaphysics. You do not take the things as they are anymore, but subsume them under some essence. But how would an assumed essence make THIS and THAT identical?

Therefor:

To say "I know that THAT is not the same as THIS" seems somehow ridiculous. It's the sort of knowledge that is so taken for granted that it wouldn't usually occur to us to claim it as knowledge. But it is still open to the logical possibility of doubt. — Bunji

No. The ability the differentiate the two is an obvious indicator of their difference. If you have
A = A and say "but in this case the A was a B" this leads to B = B. It is still the same. Even if I (obligingly) wrote A=B with "B not= A" this would only prove that such a thing cannot be - logically.

Well yes, the logical possibility of doubt exists here, because to know that no ant is an elephant it's necessary to know what an ant is and what an elephant is. — Bunji

And how do you justify the proposition that things are not simply what is meant?
I can just say "that" is definitely not "this". Just look at the letters THAT THIS. You see the difference, right? What is different cannot be the same. It requires changing the subject from the concrete thing in question to it's essence to doubt this. But why would I want to change subjects?

It is the matter of the state of things. — Number2018

Don't you think that this is actually part of the problem?

I would not be too ethusiastic though. I guess, the turn from subconscious negation to production means that any "damages" are far more serious.

Philosophy managed to put itself in a condition where the reality of the world needs to be doubted and where it is absolutely unexplainable that one reacts if tipped onto the shoulder from behind. But not only that - this already may be a plain contradiction.
It would be too easy to correlate such deficits to certain modes production and local cults. The human being as a social one directly contradicts the ideal, atomic economical subject of burgeois society. The espistemological starting point of an isolated subject pays the independency and souvereignity over it's environment (including humans) with the alienation of it's own nature and nature in general.

You have to be quite humorous to manage the balancing act of putting emphasis on "first place experience" and then "encounter" reality...
I am sorry.

If you read an article that whose first 2 pages read like yellow press(?) you do not need to continue. It's essence is concluded. Talk about blind spots.

I think that is covered quite well in the essay. — Wayfarer

I don't think so. The article is fighting it's strawman.

There's a fairly recent essay on exactly this at Aeon, The Blind Spot, which I happen to think is a tremendously important essay. — Wayfarer

I will try to make a few points...

>> We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it.

This sounds so obviously true that it simply has to be the problem. I perceive myself as living being with a material form. The abstraction of the epistemological subject already is ideal. So is the concept of "observation". If one derives the "blank mind floating over the world in souvereign supremacy" you are already far away from what defines your being in first place. You will never be able "synthesize" yourself the way you are if persisting on analytic conclusions. This of course means that matter and consciousness can never be interlinked. You started as a human being and took the route to the overmind. Fair enough. But why should the break of the initial synthesis be a problem in general? After all it is salt that tastes salty. The "object" Wittgenstein takes out of the equation is exactly the taste(ing) - not the salt.

The word "encounter" already flies high above world. It implies that for sure there is this ethereal entity that only occasionaliy gets in contact with reality.

I hope you read my last posting.

I will try to put it another way: Where exactly would the difference between the "positive" picture and the defining negatives be when we are talking about conscious processes? You can not think a "citizen" without a "state", but behaving like a citizen where there is no state might be possible. That is for the negation of the negation. But when we are talking about the "state" symbol there is the notion of "souvereignity" and we know the authority, although it is referred as a symbol and (hopefully or not) never realized.

Sure enough. But as I remember it was a central point of Anti-Oedipus to generalize production of the sub-conscious. So I really do not see where your are going with your objection.

What do you mean by "primary"? Most people for example never get into serious conflict with the state because they know the rules.

Is there a thorough historical analysis of the problem of consciousness? One that, for example, links the disappearance of general animism with sedentism and agriculture and continues the plot up to now?