That seems to me a bit confusing, because it suggests that the actual world is merely a possible world. Surely one needs to say something to the effect that the actual world is different from all the possible worlds. — Ludwig V

Well, the actual world is either possible or impossible (necessarily not actual) - this is the equivalent of the law of excluded middle in standard modal logic. It would be absurd to maintain that the actual world is impossible, so you are left with the actual world being possible (indeed, this is a theorem in all but the weakest modal logics). And yes, the actual world is different from all the other possible worlds - it is actual!

In informal speech, we sometimes want to put possibility on one side and actuality on the other, as you suggest, but not always. For example: "things, as phenomena, determine space; that is to say, they render it possible that, of all the possible predicates of space (size and relation), certain may belong to reality" (CPR).

Do you think we'll see a true survival show by 2035? Like deathmatches or frantic races?
The participants could be death row inmates, debtors, or the terminally ill, and the action could take place in third-world countries. The technical details aren't so important; what matters is whether modern society is ready for such a show. — Astorre

We already have motorsport, don't we? The incidence of fatal crashes actually used to be much higher than it is now, after safety improvements were implemented (in contradiction to the usual world going to hell in a handbasket sentiment).

There's a fine line here. Rogues are people who break the rules and thus evoke sympathy (something like Jack Sparrow). They remain within the rules themselves. The current conversation isn't about morally black (bad) people, but about morally gray people. That is, those who live entirely outside the good/bad paradigm. The phenomenon I'm talking about has a somewhat different nature. These heroes seem bad, but they are a reflection of us—they're just like us, with everyday problems. And we no longer know whether they're bad or not, or whether we can justify them (because we're all a bit like Walter White). — Astorre

I wasn't talking about black and white characters, either. "Morally gray" characters are nothing new, nor is the critics' hand-wringing over the "moral decline". Again, classic epics are a prime example, but if you want something more recognizable and relatable, look no further than nineteenth century literature - plenty of examples there: Thackeray, Maupassant, etc.

Well, the issue is not new. Homer's heros are no angels, by anyone's measure. Even the otherwise rather prissy Aeneas did a bad thing with Dido, and didn't even get the obligatory Hollywood reckoning for it. Milton could be (and has been!) faulted for the aestheticization of Satan, no less, in his Paradise Lost. On a lighter side, the picaresque genre, which has us delight at roguery, has always been among the most popular, going all the way back to The Golden Ass or Odysseus even. Even the word rogue ("a dishonest, untrustworthy person; scoundrel") has long since acquired the connotation of irresistible attraction.

"Free will" as such doesn't have much of an ordinary use, though, outside of legal contexts. — Pierre-Normand

These exact words may not be used all that commonly in ordinary language, but I think that cognate concepts of freedom and responsibility pervade all our interactions. After all, what does freedom imply? Freedom to act as you will. And how can there be responsibility without freedom?

Anthony Kenny does a very good job in his little book "Freewill and Responsibility" of clarifying the concept in its relations to various categories of mens rea (from strict liabilities, through negligence or recklessness, to specific intent.) This yields a sort of thick compatibilist notion that goes beyond mere freedom from "external" circumstances and extends outside of legal contexts to those of warranted reactive attitudes like praise and blame. In those more ordinary contexts, the question seldom arise of one having acted "of their own free will." We rather ask more ordinary questions like, "could they have done better?" or "is their action excusable?" Something like the Kantian dictum "must implies can" finds its ordinary applications. — Pierre-Normand

Interesting, thanks.

Let me be clear: there are plenty of things we don't understand, or even are entirely speculative, but are perfectly valid concepts.
Free will has not even attained that level yet though. It's self inconsistent, at least in the formulations that I've seen. A reasoned choice that can't be traced to reasons. — Mijin

I don't really understand why you think that. Let me be clear in turn that I think that this is a tenable position (that free will may not be a valid concept, or at least that it has serious problems), but it needs to be supported with honest work. You cannot come to this conclusion simply by picking on some clearly untenable conceptualizations (see, for instance, post above). "Free will" is a thing, so to say - the concept has been in use for a long time, not only in exalted domains of philosophy and theology, but also in common parlance and in specialized secular domains, such as law. Do philosophical accounts of free will that you criticize accurately capture the concept of free will? This question needs to be answered before making sweeping conclusions.

Is that at me? WTH? — Mijin

Sorry, my reference to derailment was, of course, with respect to the OP. You are as guilty of it as I am, but I am not blaming you in this case (just don't do that to my topics :joke:)

In time for COP30, New York Times published some nice charts that show 10 big things that have happened on the climate front in the last decade:

10 Years After a Breakthrough Climate Pact, Here’s Where We Are

1. Emissions are still rising, but not as fast as they were.
2. The last 10 years were the hottest on record.
3. Solar is spreading faster than we thought it would.
4. Electric vehicles are now normal.
5. Rich countries have put relatively little money on the table. (@unenlightened Meanwhile, some of the poorest countries are getting clobbered by extreme weather. They’re falling deeper into debt as they try to recover.)
6. Coal is in a weird place.
7. Natural gas, a planet-warming fossil fuel, is ascendant thanks to America.
8. Forests are losing their climate superpower.
9. Corals are bleaching more often.
10. U.S. electricity demand is soaring, in part because of A.I.

#7 is somewhat misleading. The chart shows LNG production, with USA leading the pack. LNG currently accounts for about 11% of gas production worldwide, although its share is projected to increase to 18% by 2030, mainly thanks to the US.

The core of the disagreement seems to be whether straightening up the popular and intuitive concept of free will amounts to a minor revision (which I think it does, like Dennett,) or to a wholesale replacement (like Harris thinks it does). — Pierre-Normand

I am not even certain that we should be talking about revision here. That Harris's concept of free will is out of touch with its common meaning is obvious. It is less obvious in the case of Dennett. The trouble is that when people are confronted head-on with the question of what free will is, their conceptualizations may not align with how they actually understand and use the concept. I think the project should begin with the study of the meaning or meanings (qua use), and only then can we proceed to critique and revision.

1. The concept usually gets framed first around Determinism. The reasoning is that, if the universe is Deterministic I might think I chose coffee or tea, but actually that choice was predictable from the big bang. I only had the illusion of choice.
Fine.

2. Then, when it's pointed out that the universe may well not be determinstic, thanks to quantum indeterminancy, this is usually handwaved away. How can randomness be called choice?

3. But to me, (1) and (2) combined leave a bad smell. In (1) it seemed that the issue was with our decisions being predictable, being integrated in the causal chain of events. When the suggestion (2) arrives that this may not be the case, apparently it's still insufficient to have free will.
So, to me, at this point we should be asking What exactly do we mean by free will, and is it something which could even potentially exist? — Mijin

I rather think you should begin by asking the bolded question. You may even find that the question of determinism vs indeterminism isn't as relevant to free will as all that, belying your first and second points. In any case, these first two points prompt the conclusion that free will is impossible, not that it is meaningless.

The popular "Could have chosen differently" is quite a woolly definition. Every reasoned action I've made in my life I did for reasons, that I could have told you at the time. And some of those reasons were more important to me than others. When we talk about "could have chosen differently" what do we mean in this picture -- that I could have been aware of different things, or would value different things more highly? But these things can also be traced to events / properties external to me. — Mijin

You seem to be conflating the two main criteria of free will: alternative possibilities and agency (ownership of decisions). In any case, I think you are right to question the meaning of at least the first of these (you should also question the second). They aren't necessarily as straightforward and literal as they may first appear.


NB: I wouldn't normally derail a thread like this, but seeing that this is yet another pathetic attempt at self-promotion by one of our resident crackpots, I have no regrets.

A reasoned choice is the product of reasoning: the product of (knowledge of) past events and individual predilections: both of which can be traced to causes outside of the self. — Mijin

Is this why you think that the concept of free will is incoherent? Why?

I noticed that the term "Law (of Nature)" is misleading in your otherwise logically sound post. The term itself comes from 17th-century theology and jurisprudence (Descartes, Newton), when the world was seen as a divine code. But nature doesn't prescribe—it occurs. The term "Law (of Nature)" seems like a linguistic artifact. A more accurate expression would be "stable regularities of the physical world" or simply "physical invariants." — Astorre

The OP is not worth commenting on, but I just want to note that to this day, the existence and the nature, as it were, of the laws of nature are debated. Humean regularity view is not universally accepted; there are also essentialist and dispositional views. Metaphysics aside, even more basic questions, such as what is lawful vs. accidental, are frustratingly hard to settle.

Do we need to analyze thoughts in terms of causation? — SophistiCat


To this, I'd say no, we don't. I'm quite open to other hypotheses about the "relations," "affinities," "influences," "associations," et al. among thoughts. The only line I'd draw in the sand would be: We mustn't talk as if we already understand this issue, or as if there is no issue. — J

To clarify, my question was not rhetorical. Where I was going with this is that causal analysis is a choice that we make, and so is the form that it takes. We shouldn't presuppose that causation is there, and we just need to elucidate it, or if it turns out that causation is absent, then we are in trouble (epiphenomenalism!)

That said, we need a proper motivation to look for causation. The place to start would probably be the field of psychology (less so philosophy of mind, for that is where idle and wrongheaded questions often originate...) Does mental-to-mental causation figure in psychology - as distinct from reason or explanation (informally, those words are often used interchangeably)?

As for the type of causation, perhaps inferential causation would be more promising in this context, since it is quite loose (being a spiritual descendant of Humean regularity theory) and does not rely on any physicalist ontology, such as energy.

I think the topic should be:
How Does a Thought Cause Another Thought? — Patterner

Before asking this question, or @J's original question (Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?), I think we should ask ourselves: Do we need to analyze thoughts in terms of causation? Because so far, this discussion looks to me like a solution in search of a problem.

Ned Rorem's violin concerto is a recent discovery for me. It is featured on this recording with Gidon Kremer and Leonard Bernstein, together with Philip Glass violin concerto and Bernstein's Symposium:



Rorem is better known for his songs. Here is a beautiful selection sung by Susan Graham:

How about this?

Here is one that has an actual philosophical background. Serenade after Plato's Symposium is probably my favorite of Leonard Bernstein's works. Though the composer himself said that the work did not have a literal program, its structure does follow Plato, and its themes can be tied back to its source material:

• I. Phaedrus; Pausanias
• II. Aristophanes
• III. Eryximachus
• IV. Agathon (the most beautiful and moving part, in my opinion)
• V. Socrates; Alcibiades

Young Hilary Hahn plays like an angel in a recording that also includes Beethoven's violin concerto:


Another recording with the fiery Janine Jansen and the LSO:

Welcome to the forum!

I’m concerned about the paradox of perpetual economic growth. Boosting economic growth is central to government policy (both this government and the last one) but on the face of it, economic growth at any percentage per year is an exponential function and must eventually result in an infinitely large economy. — Peter Gray

It is only exponential if the rate remains constant, and even then it will never become infinite. Anyway, if your point is that perpetual growth is unsustainable in the long term, Maltus beat you to that insight by 200 years.

I’m not the first person to have noticed this. If you Google for “Is perpetual economic growth possible?” the new AI Overview function says — Peter Gray

That's not a good way to do research.

So I was wondering, does philosophy and mathematics have anything to say about the possibility, or otherwise, of perpetual economic growth?" — Peter Gray

Mathematics has little to do with this - except inasmuch as researchers use mathematics, of course, but that is mostly textbook calculus and statistics. Most of the innovation in this area has been in demographic and economic metrics and modeling, and to a lesser degree in computational methods.

Naturally, a simpleminded mathematical projection pointing to unbounded growth is not going to give you the right answer, just like you cannot predict the height of an adult person by extrapolating their rate of growth at a young age. Even your AI overview is right on this point: it is a complex issue with varied perspectives that has been studied and debated for literally centuries.

Apologies, slowly replying to comments. — tom111

No problem, and thank you for your response (I am not usually so impatient...). I have listened to some of Emerson's podcasts before, even though I am not sympathetic to panpsychism (not all of them are about panpsychism). This one does clarify the question somewhat. He is apparently referring to this recent paper by Cutter and Crummett: Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism. The paper has a fairly detailed section on the concept of psychophysical harmony, which apparently has a bit of a pedigree in panpsychist literature. I will have a closer look and reply later (if I have anything worth saying).

The word "artificial" is a relative term. Rhetorical question: If artificial things are not natural, then what are they? Supernatural? — punos

'Artificial' is not the same as 'unnatural' or 'supernatural', even though all of these words are contrasted to 'natural'. Artificial means made by human art, often, but not necessarily, imitating something that is not (that's the meaning that is most relevant to this discussion - there are others, of course). It denotes a perfectly coherent distinction, useful in its place.

Yet it seems highly implausible that the qualities of experience would so precisely mirror a system’s physical and functional organization.

Why should neural activity for detecting 650 nm light feel like red, so well-suited to signalling urgency? Why should the mechanisms of tissue damage produce the feeling of pain, which drives protection? Or why should patterns of motion perception yield the vivid sense of fluid, continuous movement, matching the body’s need to predict trajectories? — tom111

Since the OP won't answer my question, can anyone else explain what he is talking about? @Count Timothy von Icarus? What does it mean for an experience to "mirror" or "match" physical and functional organization? This seems to be somewhat similar to Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness," which asks why there should be any subjective experience at all, but in a way, it's almost in direct contradiction to it. The whole premise of the "hard problem" is that subjective experience is purportedly of a different nature than physical and functional organization, and thus the two are entirely incommensurate. So, in what sense can one mirror/align/match the other?

And this "Notturno" is just impossibly gorgeous...

Huh, I was just listening to Chopin's nocturnes in Sokolov's rendition the other day:

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, a form of epiphenomenalist dualism, in which there are two distinct kinds of things: physical processes occurring in the brain and an associated array of conscious experiences. On this view, every physical event in the brain produces a corresponding mental event, a subjective experience, but these mental events have no causal influence on the physical. Consciousness is a passive byproduct, a kind of “ride-along” to the real causal story that takes place in the material world. — tom111

You ask us to assume this for the sake of an argument, but the rest of your post proceeds as if this was the only live option, save for "two unsatisfying possibilities." Is this indeed your position, or did I misunderstand you?

What I find bizarre about epiphenomenalism is its assumption that there can be only one "real causal story." Any other causal story is not merely subordinate or approximate (as a reductionist would posit), but altogether false (because if there was anything true about other causal stories, then they would be causal to some extent - and the epiphenomenalist flatly denies that possibility). That just goes against every causal intuition and practice, and I don't understand why we would want to consider this position, even for the sake of an argument.

Once we grant this setup, we immediately encounter the problem of psychophysical harmony. Why is it that our conscious experiences are so perfectly aligned with our physical and behavioral states? — tom111

I don't understand what you mean by this "perfect alignment." What aligns with what? You say, for example:

Why does seeing a red apple correspond to the experience of redness rather than the feeling of pain or a random hallucination?

But seeing a red apple does not correspond to an experience - it is an experience. It cannot be any other experience, on pain of contradiction.

I am not seeing your point, but whatever. You are entitled to your prejudices.

I would think handing your half-formed prose to a bot for it to improve it is plagiarism, regardless of the number of words changed or inserted. — bongo fury

Unlike handing it to a human editor, which is what authors have been doing for yonks?

Well, it looks like you've already gone deep into the rabbit hole. There is a disturbingly rapid accumulation of reports of "AI psychosis", in which AI chatbots encourage and amplify delusional thinking. I realize that a stranger on the internet trying to talk someone out of their delusion will probably do nothing but deepen it, so I won't try it here. I just hope that you will find your way safely out of this hole in your own time. Be well.

Welcome to the forum! Don't be discouraged by the lack of prompt feedback - you are not being "shadow-banned," it's just that not all threads attract much attention. The title may have been an obstacle - I stumbled over it myself. The concept expressed by these German terms isn't hard to grasp, and I think it could be easily rephrased in English (though I would avoid subject-object terminology, as that just invites confusion).

@Astorre has given some thoughtful responses, but on a more technical side of this question, I get the impression that you are being overly impressed by the fluency of AI responses and its tendency to tell you what you want to hear. Passing off as a human in text chat is not a reliable indicator of consciousness (nor did Turing thought of it that way). The consensus among experts today is that although generative AIs are good (good, not great) at imitating the patterns of human speech, they don't have anything approaching consciousness.

Another aspect of generative AI chatbots is that they "role-play" personalities and points of view that can vary widely between and even within instances, if prompted accordingly. They don't have stable personalities, although they have certain tendencies, like the aforementioned sycophancy (which is not at all accidental: it helps increase user engagement to the benefit of the businesses that create them). You can easily get AI to agree with you on any topic, but you can also make it change its "mind" on a dime, even if it means changing a factually correct answer to an incorrect one. AI has no concept of truth.

Here is another answer that a chatbot generated on the topic of AI consciousness. Note how diametrically opposed it is to what you posted. (Also note the fawning reaction at the beginning and the offer to role-play at the end.)

I'll leave it to you to figure out. But first, you need to understand that if your definition implies that you perform a miracle every time you tie your shoelaces, then you are doing it wrong (the definition, not the shoes).

Magic is when you do a series of rituals in order to cast a spell that causes an effect in reality. I believe that I can prove right now that there is in fact magic.

First, an algorithm is a set of purposeful steps used to accomplish an overall goal. For example, solving a Rubik's cube. What this means is that for our purposes here, algorithms are rituals as both are purposeful set of steps meant to achieve an overall goal. — Noonefromnowhere

I believe that I can prove that a pig is a kind of dog. A dog is an animal with four legs and a tail. A pig is an animal with four legs and a tail. Therefore, a pig is a kind of dog. QED

It is fine to not find it interesting. One can be more interested in revisionism than what the actual concepts are. Such projects can be both useful and interesting.

Still, I was responding to Truth Seeker's first question:

Is right and wrong just a matter of thinking something is right [...] and something is wrong[...]? — Truth Seeker


That question is about what "right" and "wrong" are and to answer that it is important to understand what they mean. Semantics is important in that regard. If one uses a different meaning, one is answering a different question. Dismissing semantics abandons that project. — GazingGecko

Of course, but the point I was trying to make was that the question of cognitivism vs non-cognitivism is an analytical question that does not really get at the substance of the OP's query. It hinges on philosophical positions on truth, properties, beliefs vs attitudes, etc. With the right combination of such positions, one can be a cognitivist subjectivist (or perhaps even a non-cognitivist objectivist).

I take a relaxed, commonsensical attitude towards truth, which inclines me towards ethical cognitivism, but not in any robust sense that an objectivist might wish for.

You keep referring to "crude subjectivism" - what is that, and who propounds it? — SophistiCat


Roughly: x is right = I have a positive attitude towards x. And similar translations for other evaluative terms. — GazingGecko

It is worth putting "x is right" in some context, because this is a common source of misunderstanding. The subjectivist position is that when someone says "x is right," what they mean is "I have a positive attitude towards x." The statement is indexed to the speaker and reports on their mental state, in contrast to syntactically similar sentences, which report on something in the common domain ("the cat is on the mat") or expresses common knowledge. Understood in this way, even this "crude" position puts to rest easy charges of logical inconsistency. If A says "x is right" and B says "x is wrong," there is a controversy, but not a (logical) contradiction.

Still, this statement of crude subjectivism leaves something out. Emotivists or expressivists accept other, uncontroversially non-propositional functions of moral statements, such as exhortation or signalling. (As an aside, such uses of moral statements might be counted in favor of moral non-cognitivism. However, moral statements are far from unique in this regard. Natural language is rich and quirky, and there are plenty of instances of seemingly assertive expressions that can function as something other than assertions.)

And why do you think that it does not adequately address the open question challenge? — SophistiCat


Because if the crude subjectivist theory is correct about our moral concepts, the meaning of the sentence (O) "I think abortion is wrong, but is it wrong?" would translate to (T) "I think I have a negative attitude towards abortion, but do I have a negative attitude towards abortion?" which makes that kind of reflection seem trivial, like "I think I'm hungry, but am I hungry?" — GazingGecko

The only reason I can see for why this might seem like a serious challenge for subjectivism is if one has an objectivist presupposition at the back of their mind. Absent such presupposition, what could a question such as "I think abortion is wrong, but is it wrong?" mean? I believe it would be reasonable for anyone, subjectivist or not, to interpret it in ways that I have suggested: reflection, self-doubt, open-mindedness. The subjectivist goes further in stating that that is all there is to it. There is no objective truthmaker against which to evaluate the answer.

"I think I'm hungry, but am I hungry?" would be more like "I think it would be wrong to push that little girl into traffic, but is it wrong?" No one in their right mind would ask such a question. The questions that are actually being asked are not so easy to answer.

Brainwashing is not a good counterexample. A brainwashed subject is a morally impaired subject. — SophistiCat


I don't really see why it is not a good counter-example. What do you mean by a "morally impaired" subject? That is not clear to me. Otherwise, it risks seeming like an ad hoc fix. — GazingGecko

In your thought experiment, a person is brainwashed to have certain moral attitudes (and they know about that in advance, but this is not important to my point). This is not a fair counterexample, because a person's moral agency is suppressed or compromised, so that they can no longer be considered to be the same moral agent at a different time. If that is not clear, I am not sure what else I can say.

As an aside, edge cases and pathologies are not very illuminating in philosophy, and I wish analytical philosophers would abuse them less. If they are good for anything, it is to counter simple and rigid frameworks, which are brittle by their own nature. But subjectivist metaethics is not like that, I would think. Nothing is simple or rigid where human psychology is involved.

The Dying Omnivore. Adam is sitting on his porch, reflecting. Adam is a deeply self-aware person that is well-attuned to his attitudes. Tomorrow, Adam has chosen to die due to inoperable cancer. Still, he is clear-headed. In that moment on the porch, Adam asks himself, "I believe and will always believe that buying animal products is right, but is it right?" and then continues, "I'm certain I have a positive attitude towards buying animal products and that I will always have that positive attitude towards it, but is it right?"

If crude subjectivism, even with the added dimension of degrees of belief, is correct about the meaning of "right" and "wrong," it appears like the two questions by Adam should sound like trivial, settled re-asks akin to "It is snowing today, but is it snowing today?" One would probably suspect that the person was confused if they asked such a question. But Adam's questions sound coherent and substantive rather than obviously confused and trivial. So crude subjectivism probably gives the wrong account for the meaning of "right" and "wrong." — GazingGecko

Well, simultaneous assumptions of certitude and doubt would not sit well in any context, so perhaps your framing here is flawed. But I guess that is not what you wanted to highlight with this example, but rather the practical near-impossibility of changing one's mind. In that respect, this is a better thought experiment than the brainwashing one, since (morbid premise aside) it does not push into the pathology territory. Still, I don't think that this is much of an argument against subjectivism. We are asking a hypothetical question, and hypothetical questions invite counterfactuals, where some things are held fixed and others are left open. So, the question is not "will Adam ever change his mind?" but "would Adam change his mind?" Here we would want to hold fixed Adam's moral character, but the particular circumstance of his fatal illness seems to be irrelevant.

if moral utterances are not propositions, then, trivially, they cannot be contradictory in the logical sense. — SophistiCat


I agree that it would be a trivial point if emotivism is assumed as the correct account of morality. — GazingGecko

No, that is not what I am saying. What is trivial is that according to non-cognitivism, moral statements do not have truth values, so, of course, sentences expressing moral sentiments cannot be logically contradictory, since they cannot be formalized into logical propositions. But that doesn't mean that they cannot be understood as contradictory (conflicting, antithetical, etc.) in an informal sense.

My point here was that moral discourse behaves like propositions, while emotivism predicts they would not. Since emotivism goes against the linguistic data, it does probably not capture what "right" and "wrong" means. — GazingGecko

I think you are making too much of this. First of all, if moral statements did not behave like truth-apt statements, the question of cognitivism vs non-cognitivism would not arise in the first place. The non-cognitivists' position is to bite that bullet. You are not telling them anything they don't already know.

Second, morally flavored statements are commonplace. Who is to say that they must fit into the same linguistic mold as non-moral statements, rather than form a distinct class?

First though, what kind of emotivism is it you have in mind? Talking in terms of "beliefs" and "moral propositions" suggests you take moral language to be truth-apt. Emotivists typically deny that. Are you some other sort of non-cognitivist? — GazingGecko

When asked their opinion on an ethical question, non-cognitivists do not literally say "boo!" or "hurray!" do they? In any event, whatever language they choose to express their attitudes, they do have such attitudes - pro or con or noncommittal, same as the rest of us. And when they are called to act, their actions are motivated by their moral attitudes, same as the rest of us. To be sure, non-cognitivists maintain that moral utterances are not, technically, propositions, but so what? If all you are saying is that theirs is a tortured semantics, I would tend to agree with you, but at the same time, I don't find this issue to be interesting or important enough to argue.

Also, I think your response comes at the open-question-challenge from a direction that, while more sophisticated, misses my main concerns. Sure, one can have different degrees of attitudes towards moral propositions. The point I'm pressing with the question, "I believe the death penalty is wrong, but is it wrong?" is that crude subjectivism struggles with the semantic data. I don't think your re-interpretation of the question in theory-laden terms really fixes that problem.

A further problem is that it undermines deliberation. It seems like I'm asking myself a substantial question when I question my belief in such a manner. With the crude subjectivist reading, it would trivialize that deliberation. — GazingGecko

You keep referring to "crude subjectivism" - what is that, and who propounds it? And why do you think that it does not adequately address the open question challenge?

Any moral question worth asking is, by that very framing, not a trivial question to answer, even for a subjectivist (perhaps especially for a subjectivist). Introspection in such matters is not as easy as reading a number off a gauge. Nor does one need to be satisfied by the first subjective impression.

I doubt that your current appeal to psychological prediction of possible change in attitude helps. Suppose I know a dystopian state will brainwash me into having a positive attitude towards the death penalty tomorrow. Your re-interpretation makes "I think the death penalty is wrong, but is it wrong?" map neatly onto that prediction, yielding an obvious "no" because I know my attitude will change tomorrow. But even in that scenario, the question appears more substantive than a trivial "no." So it seems like your re-interpretation struggles to capture what that original sentence means. — GazingGecko

Brainwashing is not a good counterexample. A brainwashed subject is a morally impaired subject.

Sure, you can give an account for how emotivists could want to press the convergence of attitudes, saying something like: "Everyone, disfavor the death penalty!" That helps explain morally inspired conflict.

My problem with your response to disagreement is that it does not appear to solve the issue I have in mind. In genuine disagreements we aim at contradiction. Crude subjectivism predicts we shouldn't experience the exchange as a contradiction given what it says that "right" and "wrong" means, yet linguistically we do.

Compare with a truth-apt domain:

A: "The Earth is flat!"
B: "No, the Earth is not flat!"

B is negating A's declarative statement. Both can't be true.

Moral claims appear to frequently function the same way:

C: "Abortion is wrong!"
D: "No, abortion is not wrong!"

D seems to be negating C's apparent declarative statement. Once again, both can't be true.

Here are my attempted translations inspired by your comment:

E: "Boo to abortion! Everyone, disfavor abortion!"
F: "Yay for abortion! Everyone, favor abortion!"

or (another attempt):

G: "I have a positive attitude towards abortion. Everyone should have a positive attitude towards abortion."
H: "I have a negative attitude towards abortion. Everyone should have a negative attitude towards abortion."

There is no literal contradiction between E & F or between G & H, where as there seems to be between C & D. That gap is semantic evidence against crude subjectivism (and some non-cognitivist flavors). So I believe my original objections stand (for now). — GazingGecko

I am not sure what point you are making here, if it is not just the truth-aptness point - is it? Yes, if moral utterances are not propositions, then, trivially, they cannot be contradictory in the logical sense. But is this really important? They are opposite, contrasting, or what have you - for all intents and purposes, other than logical formalism, it comes to the same thing, doesn't it?

You are right, this is a very personal list. Not even a recommendation, more like a fact of Calvino's biography. For that reason, it doesn't sit well with how Calvino himself describes classics in your quoted passage.

I largely agree with Calvino's characterization, except that I would probably strike out "individual." Classics are very much a collective canon; "individual classics" is an oxymoron. Nor should classics be idealized as an objective distillation of the best and most important works and authors. What forms the canon is contingent on history, culture and politics. A work that was, perhaps unjustly, overlooked in its time is all the less likely to ever enter the canon (though there are exceptions). On the other hand, the classic status is self-reinforcing, so that once something is enshrined in the canon, only a large cultural or political shift can dislodge it from there.

You mentioned Calvino's bias towards Italian authors. Each culture will have its own version of the literary canon, and if that culture does not lack in great literature, then it is quite understandable that its canon will reflect that. What's more interesting is that even foreign classics vary across cultures, to the point where an author long forgotten in their own land and language culture may be feted as a classic somewhere across the world.

Here is an amusing illustration from Nabokov's novel Pnin, whose eponymous protagonist is a Russian émigré, a middling intellectual who settled in America some time after he fled the Bolshevik revolution:

... he entered a bookstore and asked for Martin Eden.

“Eden, Eden, Eden,” the tall dark lady in charge repeated rapidly, rubbing her forehead. “Let me see, you don’t mean a book on the British statesman? Or do you?”

“I mean,” said Pnin, “a celebrated work by the celebrated American writer Jack London.”

“London, London, London,” said the woman, holding her temples.

Pipe in hand, her husband, a Mr. Tweed, who wrote topical poetry, came to the rescue. After some search he brought from the dusty depths of his not very prosperous store an old edition of The Son of the Wolf.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that’s all we have by this author.”

“Strange!” said Pnin. “The vicissitudes of celebrity! In Russia, I remember, everybody—little children, full-grown people, doctors, advocates—everybody read and reread him. This is not his best book but O.K., O.K., I will take it.” — Nabokov

If, like Nabokov's sales clerk, you are racking your brain: “London, London, London,” you obviously did not grow up in Russia, where Jack London was regarded as a classic long after he slipped into obscurity in much of the rest of the world, surviving even the Russian revolution and the enormous cultural shifts that it brought. No doubt, London's Socialist sympathies helped him garner an endorsement from the new authorities (while many other authors were suppressed and forgotten), but he was not simply imposed on an unwilling populace: he was genuinely popular. The vicissitudes of celebrity, indeed.

I will take the claim to be:

X is right = I have a positive attitude towards X.

I think this view of 'right' is incorrect (and the same for 'wrong'). When discussing ethics, that simply does not seem to be what is meant by the terms.

For instance, it makes sense to hold the thought "I think death penalty is right, but is it right?" Under the view above, this would translate to: "I think I have a positive attitude towards the death penalty, but do I have a positive attitude towards it?" This makes ethical reflection seem trivial, when it does not seem to be trivial. So that is a problem for the theory. — GazingGecko

I think emotivism can meet the open question challenge. A straightforward response would be to cache it out in terms of degrees of belief. That is to say, one can have a strong, dubious or indifferent attitude towards a moral proposition. In any event, one can be humble (as you yourself advise) and keep an open mind. "I am strongly opposed to the death penalty, but I might be persuaded to change my attitude, or perhaps some future life event could effect such a change."

If you object that this is not what the question is asking, that you want to know whether it is "really" right or wrong, then you are begging the question against the anti-realist.

It also fails to handle disagreement. If I disagreed with the previous speaker, and said: "No, the death penalty is definitely wrong", it seems like I tried to contradict them. However, this would not be the case if I'm just reporting my own attitude. To illustrate:

A:"I have a positive attitude towards the death penalty!"

B:"No, I have a negative attitude towards the death penalty!"

A and B are not making contradictory propositions. Both can be true simultaneously. But in these exchanges, we are often trying to contradict the other person. So there is something problematic with the subjectivist theory. — GazingGecko

Most moral propositions are more-or-less universalizing. When I say "I oppose the death penalty," I am not just talking about my own value judgment. To hold a moral proposition is to believe that everyone ought to hold it as well. Accordingly, an emotivist will hold concurrent attitudes towards moral agreement (positive) and disagreement (negative).

I'm a panpsychist, so I think that everything possesses some degree of experience. When I say that my consciousness was elevated from commonplace matter into sapience, I literally mean that. — Dogbert

OK, but I don't see how this follows:

Sapient life is incredibly rare, so naturally, me becoming human is an unlikely event. — Dogbert

What do you mean by "me becoming human"? Before you were born, was there Dogbert protoconsciousness inhabiting non-Dogbert matter? And then somehow it was transferred into your Dogbert body? I don't think panpsychists conceive of personal identity like that - this smacks more of theological dualism (but I am by no means an expert). Even still, there is not enough to go on here to conclude anything about likelihood. We haven't been told anything about how or why this embodiment occurs.

Given that you are holding a glass, is it an amazing coincidence that the glass is filled with water and not, say, burning lava? As I said before, the key to any likelihood question is what we take as given, and the answer will be nothing more than what you have already assumed.

Likelihood, in its usual sense, is the probability of something being the case given a theory of how things work. So, for instance, the likelihood of a winning bet on a coin flip, given the assumption that the coin has equal chances of landing heads or tails, is 1/2. This part after "given..." is key here, as you rightly intuit in your first paragraph. There is no free lunch here, no stone soup: whatever you assume at the outset will determine your answer.

So, it is crucial to critically examine your assumptions. What exactly are you assuming? What does it mean for your consciousness to be "elevated from commonplace matter into sapience"?

If you make very general assumptions about the world, or even no assumptions at all - just that something exists - then it is hard to assign any likelihood to any particular event. The best you can do is to try to avoid bias by making it even odds for anything that can happen under these assumptions, and that of course will give you a likelihood of any particular outcome as "practically zero." But that's no revelation - it is just a straightforward consequence of your ignorance. And besides, the conclusion holds for anything, not just the one question that you are asking here.

The question in the OP is much too broad to be interesting, since the word "system" has multiple meanings, and those meanings are in turn quite general without further qualification.

The meanings of "system" that have been largely left out of this discussion (except by @Srap Tasmaner) are, for example, system as a theory ("Kant's system"), method ("Dewey decimal system," "gambling system"), rules of behavior ("system of discipline").

Within the material context, some definitions that have been given are too restrictive. @Baden's is mostly about differentiating a system from its environment, but in some contexts, environment is irrelevant for our purposes and can be left out of consideration. The only internal differences required of any system are those between the whole and its parts. Stability and rigidity also do not always apply: systems can be dynamic in their composition and form, although it could be argued that some essential features of a system must be invariant within the scope of consideration for it to be recognized as one system. But that is true of any named entity.

@T Clark and @punos gave good general definitions of a material system, and it is pretty clear that not much more can be said on the subject without getting into specifics of particular kinds of systems, such living organisms or ecologies. If we stay at the most general level of a "system," then we are just doing amateur lexicography.

Both are valid concerns, but I'm more inclined to focus on how our predictability is being exploited. I'm not saying social physics isn't useful, but I'd prefer to see applications that go beyond profiting from our behavior. — Alonsoaceves

Well, as I said, "social physics" may be a new discipline, but the phenomena that it studies and the uses to which it is put are as old as society itself. We, social animals, are attuned to patterns of behavior exhibited by other members and groups, and we use this knowledge to cooperate, compete and exploit. We have done this since well before computers, before mathematics, before language itself.

It is not clear to me what your worry is: is it simply the fact that our choices can be predictable, or is it that this predictability can be exploited? The former is an old worry about the supposed conflict between freedom and determinism/determination. The latter is also as old as human society (or any society).

I was just citing a perfect cipher as a proof of concept. Regardless of the intention of the sender, when all you have is a single message, it is entirely possible that the message is indecipherable in principle. And that means that there is no way to prove, or even offer a reasonable conjecture, whether the message in the OP scenario is gibberish or carries a meaning.

The message need not even be nonsense to be indecipherable. There is such a thing as a perfect cipher, e.g. a one-time pad.