After quantum mechanics many scientists now do not know what to make of mind. — khaled

This is not accurate. There are interpretations of quantum mechanics that involve the mind (e.g. Neumann–Wigner), but as Kenosha Kid says, the Copenhagen interpretation is not it, nor are its main competitors. Mentalist interpretations of QM are pretty far from the mainstream.

Thanks for your candid explanation. As I suspected, what is at issue here is not the original question, which is easy enough to answer, but how you frame the question in the first place. The key contention here is empirical, not logical. The therapist thinks that the illness is the main reason for the persisting symptoms, with the implication that treating the illness would alleviate the symptoms. Your position is that the symptoms would likely persist with or without the illness, with the implication that the proposed treatment probably would not address the problem. (On a personal note, this situation is familiar to me, and probably to many others as well; even now I am in a similar situation of having to decide on a course of treatment, having consulted with a specialist.)

Unfortunately, this contention is not something that a formal logical analysis could resolve. Everything hinges on the two contrary judgements regarding "the facts about the world," as you put it.

:up: Welcome to the forum!

The 2020 IgNobels are in.

MEDICAL EDUCATION PRIZE [BRAZIL, UK, INDIA, MEXICO, BELARUS, USA, TURKEY, RUSSIA, TURKMENISTAN]
Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.

REFERENCE: Numerous news reports. — Improbable Research

You seem to be using the forum as a personal blog or scratchpad. There are better platforms for this. The point of posting on a forum is conversation. I don't know what your purpose here is, but seeing that you apparently aren't interested in engagement, I am no longer reading your posts. No offense, but if I just wanted to read something, there are thousands of things I would rather read than your musings (indeed, I am reading some interesting papers right now.)

Causality in general is an informal concept. We have intuitions and practices related to causality; theories (plural) of causality attempt to capture some or most of those informal causal notions. You won't find the definition of contributing cause, because, depending on the theory of causality and what it seeks to highlight, it can be defined differently, if at all. Some philosophers are even skeptical that causality is a real thing, like Hume or early Russell ("The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.")

I feel that in putting formalism first you are approaching the problem from the wrong end. One needs to understand the problem before deciding which, if any, formalism is the most appropriate. With most situations with which we deal in our everyday life formalism is unhelpful: at best, it is just a long-winded way of stating what we already understand, and at worst, it can provide a false sense of certainty by cutting out genuine doubt through oversimplification and distortion.

You mentioned that you wanted to answer some real-life question. If you can paraphrase it without revealing personal details that you wish to keep private, it would be helpful to the discussion. But state it in your own words; formalism should come last in the analysis.

Sweden?


On a different, more hopeful note, it has long been a puzzle why Covid morbidity/mortality seems to differ significantly in different parts of the world, even after accounting for known factors, such as timing and demographics. Some places just seem more immune to the virus. This could still be down to the known but not fully accounted factors, but one of the more plausible, though speculative alternative explanations has been prior vaccinations, particularly the old anti-tuberculosis vaccine BCG, which is or was widely administered in some countries, but not others. Some of the correlations have been pretty suggestive.

Related to this, here is an interesting article on BBC about vaccines' "non-specific effects:"

For more than a century, certain vaccines have been providing us with a kind of clandestine bonus protection – one that goes far beyond what was ever intended. Not only can these mysterious effects protect us in childhood, they can also reduce our risk of dying at every stage of our lives. Research in Guinea-Bissau found that people with scars from the smallpox vaccine were up to 80% more likely to still be alive around three years after the study began, while in Denmark, scientists discovered that those who had the tuberculosis vaccine in childhood were 42% less likely to die of natural causes until they were 45 years old. It’s also true in dogs: an experiment in South Africa found that dogs that had been vaccinated against rabies had much higher survival rates, beyond what would be expected from their immunity to rabies alone.

Other happy accidents include protecting us from pathogens which are entirely unrelated to their target, reducing the severity of allergies, fighting certain cancers, and helping to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. The tuberculosis vaccine is currently being trialled for its ability to guard against Covid-19, though the microorganisms behind the two diseases are entirely different – one is caused by a bacterium, the other by a virus. And the two are separated by 3.4 billion years of evolution. — The mystery of why some vaccines are doubly beneficial

No, probability won't help you. You are confused.

If you have no idea whether or not you exist, then I would say you are confused.

But other than that, absent certainty, probability is the obvious next best thing. We use plausible reasoning all the time, in our daily lives, as well as in more exalted pursuits such as science and philosophy.

Pew: U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly

Not quite. We can understand, scientifically, the purposes of many things, aka teleology. We know that if you have a defective heart, your blood will not circulation will be in adequate. It is on this basis, that we decide on norms for heart function. There is no circularity here, just openness to reality — Dfpolis

One can make an argument by way of analogy for a kind of teleology inherent in homeostasis and biological adaptation, but this "teleology" does not possess any normativity on its own, without us attributing it to these features of the natural world.

That's a lot of words for a basic appeal to popularity.

This forum would be much improved (and much smaller) if Moderators filtered out ad hominem attacks, and the sort of "name-calling" one doesn't expect among parties sincerely engaged in trying to find the truth...From the Site Guidelines "A respectful and moderate tone is desirable". — MMusings

Was that in reaction to anything specific? If you want to complain about the running of the forum and moderation, there is a Feedback forum, or you can flag specific posts for moderators' attention.

This all just comes down to whatever we believe ought to be the case ought to be the case - a truism. The halfhearted proper-functionalism with which you attempt to justify this position doesn't actually do any work, because as you yourself admit, what constitutes proper function is itself a normative stance, so this is just like trying to pull yourself out of the swamp by pulling on your own hair.

1. If the apostles were willing to be martyred for the sake of Christ, then they must have had intense belief.
2. Intense belief must be backed by equally sufficient evidence. — Josh Vasquez

Not this old chestnut again :roll: Why anyone would say something so obviously untrue is puzzling, but how this inanity gets to be repeated over and over again is beyond me.

Charge is to do with the way a particle spins — apokrisis

No.

That is exactly how I am reading it. Perhaps you could to put a little more effort into understanding me, and a little less into telling me where I have gone wrong. — unenlightened

No need to get angry. I am trying to engage with your ideas, but you aren't being very forthcoming. I realize that I may be pushing in a direction that you weren't keen to pursue, but I think that it is important to this question.

I had an essay on the philosophy of game theory on the old site, but I haven't got it now and I've forgotten the references, so you'll have to guess. But the pop culture side is fairly obviously the 'greed is good', 'why should I pay for your children/illness/whatever', selfish gene literalists, Randians, Jordan Peterson acolytes, etc. — unenlightened

Yeah, this is very off-key. Again, economic and game-theoretic modeling doesn't concern itself with rationally justifying goals, much less personal identity. They take agents that pursue their interests as givens and explore the dynamics that arises from these givens. The interests that agents pursue can be anything; I have incautiously mentioned "personal gain," but interests can just as well be altruistic. Game theory has been applied to non-profits and charitable donations, for example. It has also been applied to social sciences and biology. Here is one random example:

Using evolutionary game theory, I consider how guilt can provide individual fitness benefits to actors both before and after bad behavior. This supplements recent work by philosophers on the evolution of guilt with a more complete picture of the relevant selection pressures. — Cailin O’Connor, The evolution of guilt: a model-based approach (2016)

It also bears mentioning that classic adversarial games of the type explored by Neumann and Nash are just one corner of the field. The more interesting game-theoretic scenarios often involve coordination and cooperation.


So I am still waiting for some unambiguous examples of the position that you are criticizing. (Perhaps that position will then become clearer than what I could gather from the hints that you've dropped.)

1. According to the FTA, if some property x was not present at the conception of the universe, then the universe would not have existed. — Jjnan1

As a minor note, the argument is not that the universe could not have existed if it lacked some feature, but that it would have been lifeless if its fundamental parameters were not confined within a narrow range. I suppose this correction doesn't affect the logic of the argument, which, I confess, escapes me.

God is usually said to be both all-powerful and free. Freedom is only meaningful if there are alternative possibilities. If the world could not have been otherwise than it is, as a matter of metaphysical law, that would have robbed God of freedom and of power to choose and bring about one state of the world over another. Indeed, God would have been superfluous in such a world. For God to be free and omnipotent, it ought to be metaphysically possible for the world to have been different.

The view that I am contradicting is the one that claims that self-interest is rational, whereas altruism is irrational. You know, the founding principle of game theory. — unenlightened

"rational self- interest" — unenlightened

You are misreading this expression. In game theory, economic theory and such, the self and the interest in "rational self-interest" are taken for granted. Being rational here simply means being smart about maximizing personal gain, whatever it may be (e.g. getting out of prison as soon as possible in the famous Prisoners' Dilemma).

So I would like to know who is the actual target of your criticism? Can you give some real examples?

The view that I am contradicting is the one that claims that self-interest is rational, whereas altruism is irrational. You know, the founding principle of game theory. — unenlightened

You have labeled this view as a fallacy, but in contradicting it, you are following the same reasoning pattern. You are taking a different turn at some point, but that turning point is on the same path of reasoning from an is to an ought, so your view is not any less fallacious than the one you are attacking.

It seems to me that in light of this, it makes perfect practical sense for me to be concerned with feeding myself, and allow you to worry about feeding yourself - we each know our own needs. But it makes no sense at all for me to think that feeding myself is more important than feeding yourself. — unenlightened

I am still not sure what you are trying to say here, but this struck me as bizarre. I get a feeling that you are working within a rationalist framework where you believe that you can't take even such an elementary action as feeding without first rationally justifying it from first principles.

1.0 :cool: (whatever that means)

Just wanted to link this critical review of recent experimental meta-ethics research: Empirical research on folk moral objectivism (2019). Some interesting observations and a large reference section.

Or maybe deep in the bowels of Google's servers, my comments here are linked to other aspects of my online identity, and they factor that into my Youtube suggestions. — fishfry

This site uses Google Analytics, which places a tracking code on every page, so that every time you visit a page, Google knows about it. Google also indexes page content, and of course Google owns Youtube. I don't know much about this technology, but theoretically, putting all this together, it is possible that the pages that you browse affect the choice of suggested videos. (I block google-analytics.com, and I keep Google login confined to those instances where I actually need it - although Google also keeps track of IP addresses.)

Harris is superficially clever but lacking in depth; and ultimately intellectually unsatisfying. — fishfry

This.

The statistics for COVID coming from various countries are not directly comparable because collection and reporting of data depend on the cooperation of the population, the facilities, and the politicians. — magritte

True, official statistics underestimates COVID mortality almost everywhere, for various reasons (not necessarily nefarious), but the extent of undercounting varies widely. However, in retrospect we can always look at excess mortality (difference between this year's deaths from all causes and the average number over the same period in the last several years) and get a measure of what's going on. It's a crude measure, but when the excess is pronounced, it's hard to argue with. (Though some try: Russian authorities threw a screaming fit when several prominent news organizations published their analyses based on official mortality data that showed that Russian COVID statistics were way off.)

Excess mortality in 24 European countries by week

We can conduct experiments to determine a specific finite age of the Earth. But how would we test whether something was infinite in age, size or number as opposed to just really, really large? — Andrew M

Obviously, not by counting or measuring directly. We don't hold a stopwatch to measure the age of the earth either - we use other measurements to establish theories in which the age of the earth is a bound variable. Same with the size of the universe: it makes a difference to the theories that we use to explain astrophysical observations - their accuracy, simplicity and compatibility with other well-established theories. You can't just arbitrarily choose a size without breaking a bunch of stuff.

Bears noticing: ∞ ∉ R — jorndoe

I don't know why they think that. But if it's to be a thought experiment about the physical world, then we have no experimental evidence that there is, or can be, anything infinite. And what would such an experiment look like? How would it be measured? — Andrew M

Same way as how we establish anything in science: that Earth is ~4.5 Gyr old ("How could you possibly know? Were you there?!"), that pulsars are neutron stars, etc. We develop models and evaluate their closeness of fit, simplicity, and other epistemic and scientific virtues.

In the Edge essay Tegmark faults infinities for some specific outstanding problems in cosmology, such as the measure problem, and suggests that alternative finitistic models would do better. (Needless to say, this is not as simple and uncontroversial as it sounds.) Notice how this argument fits with the general theory selection process that I outlined above, as opposed to "Gosh! Infinities are so paradoxical!" or "Gosh! How could we ever measure infinity?!"

The language is always tricky around ontology and I want to say that horizons, like mirages, like like individuality, like desire, are not social constructs, not fantasies, and not material objects, but objective features of perception. — unenlightened

You can't even get a 'you' from an 'is' — unenlightened

But whether these things are deemed to be material or not (I don't much care), the boundaries of perception are still ises, they are facts about the physical world. It's just that when discussing the physical world we are more used to the perspectiveless view from nowhere, whereas perceptions are centered on an individual, they are indexical. This distinction doesn't counter the naturalistic fallacy though: you are still attempting to derive normative from non-normative.

I am obliged to use the language we have. Clearly we can and we do get a self and a sense of self from our sensual experiences and in describing how it happens, my intention was to convey that the distinction and identification we get is a feature of perception, not of reality as such. — unenlightened

There is a kind of materialistic presupposition here (for lack of a better word) that draws a hard boundary between impersonal physical facts like skin and light and neurons on the one side, and on the other - psychological and social facts that are sort of pretend, unreal. But are they, really?

Perhaps ontology is the wrong tool here, because the argument in question is epistemological. It says that reason cannot straightforwardly derive one set of facts from the other.

The normal version is 'you can't get an ought from an is', and it is usually used to deny the 'reality' of moral claims. My radical extension is to deny also the 'reality of identity claims:- — unenlightened

You make it sound like there is a dichotomy between the naturalistic fallacy on the one hand and moral skepticism (denying the reality of moral facts) on the other. But the naturalistic fallacy thesis is more narrow: whatever the status of moral claims, they cannot be justified by or reduced to non-moral facts alone. This leads to two possibilities: either moral facts do not exist, or they are epistemically autonomous.

You can't even get a 'you' from an 'is' - the self is a naturalistic fallacy constructed from the limitations of the senses, which do not make any real boundary or change in the world. This means that there is no difference in substance between what one ought to do and what one wants to do, because the 'one' is fictional in both cases. — unenlightened

Same thing here. The natural extension of the naturalistic fallacy thesis would be to claim that personal identity is essentially normative: it cannot be derived from or reduced to non-normative (material) facts about the world without recourse to some normative postulates. But that doesn't make the self a fallacy. Accepting the above thesis, one can still say that the self is a psycho-social construct. It is as real as such constructs are - which I think are plenty real.

I considered doing that and then deleted it. I knew if I wrote a summary then people would read that and jump to conclusions without reading the whole paper. — Malcolm Lett

Well, that's the point of summaries, in a way: to enable readers to jump to the conclusion of whether to commit to reading a largish text or to pass. But I know what you mean.

Different categories of science have different procedures and protocols and requirements to say that something is proved to be so. Technically they have not proven that smoking causes cancer because you can't ethically take nonsmokers with no tendency towards cancer and have them start smoking. — TiredThinker

Technically, they have, according to the very criterion of proof that you give in the first sentence - that is to say, the epistemic standards of proof have been met to the satisfaction of most practitioners in the field (of epidemiology).

Are you just concerned about (not) making metaphysical commitments when we write formulas? — SophistiCat

Yes. — Pfhorrest

I don't think that's an issue above and beyond the old realist/non-realist divide. Non-realists simply mean something different than realists when they say "there exists x such that..." - or so they say. I am not even convinced that there is a substantive difference between these positions.

That use is not contrary to what I’m saying at all. In fact it’s a great illustration of the alternative reading of the “existential” operator I’m suggesting: instead of “there exists some x such that [formula involving x] is true”, I suggest “for some value of x, [formula involving x] is true”. — Pfhorrest

I fail to see the difference. We are expressing a commitment to the existence of something from the variable's domain. So in what sense are we not making an existential commitment?

Reading your other comments, it seems like in my example ∃x∈R ( f(x) = 0 ) you would want to say that if there were such things as reals (and all the other things that are tacitly assumed by the usual interpretation of that formula), then some real would satisfy the formula f(x) = 0. Is that all? Are you just concerned about (not) making metaphysical commitments when we write formulas?

This reading is inconsistent with how ∃ is actually used in mathematical texts, at least the ones I am familiar with (which would be math textbooks mostly). — SophistiCat

Can you elaborate? — Pfhorrest

The way ∃ would typically be used would be to say things like "∃x (x∈R, f(x) = 0)", that is to say, "equation f(x) = 0 has a real solution." The way you would have it, that formula would say "equation f(x) = 0 may or may not have a real solution," which is trivially true. What would be the point of such an operator?

All existential operator does is assert existence. If you remove that, you have nothing left.

Both quantification functions, ∃ and ∀, only specify how many values of the variable they quantify make the statement that follows true, and the statement doesn't necessarily have to be asserting the existence of anything, so saying that there exists some thing goes beyond what this function really does. — Pfhorrest

This reading is inconsistent with how ∃ is actually used in mathematical texts, at least the ones I am familiar with (which would be math textbooks mostly).

Hexagrams are arrangements of six Yin/Yang lines, making for 2⁶ = 64 possible hexagrams .

DNA codons are arrangements of three bases, and there are four different bases, making for 4³ = 64 possible codons.

No deep mystery here, just a very simple structural property.

I know fuck-all about I Ching, but I suspect that the similarities don't go much deeper than that (without some very creative interpretation). Do some of the I Ching hexagrams mean the same thing? Because DNA "language" is highly redundant, with 61 codons specifying only 20 different amino acids. And the other three codons denote start and stop sequences - the equivalent of punctuation. Do I Ching hexagrams include punctuation?

Anyway, I think such numerology is very silly. As is this perpetual canard about "ancient wisdom" somehow prefiguring modern science. Despite numerous alleged connections, I can't think of a single instance in the entire history of human civilization where some "ancient wisdom" led to a scientific insight. The connection is invariably discovered in retrospect by some amateur numerologist with a book to sell.

Towards the end, Peterson did propose a very interesting view on an evolutionary mechanism behind the belief in God, and that proposition itself has some very interesting outtakes that the pair unfortunately failed to stumble upon themselves.

In my own summary of Peterson's explanation, the belief in god is an evolutionary stable strategy that codifies a heuristic for living life in a way that is beneficial to the community in general. — Malcolm Lett

Meh, that idea is at least a hundred years old, and has been the subject of a body of evolutionary, anthropological and cognitive research (some in support and some in opposition). Abstract ponderings from dilettantes like Harris and Peterson are of little value at this point.

Interesting, thanks!

You may be interested to know that at the time of declaring the end of the communist system at the end of 1991, what was known in liberal countries as "poverty" (i.e. having a lifestyle that would cost about $180 a month in a developed country, or less) was not even 5% of the Soviet population, and that because it had grown in the last five years. In the best moment of the Union it was less than 2%. The "misery" (people without housing, in street situation, without basic access to food and minimum means, etc.) practically did not exist. — David Mo

I don't know how these numbers were calculated. It would be impossible to do a comparison with other countries based on money income, because Soviet currency was nonconvertible and incomes and living expenses were not distributed as they would be in a market economy. No direct comparison with US or Western Europe would be accurate because of how different life was in the Soviet Union.

That disparity went both ways. Some basic foodstuffs like bread were heavily subsidized and distributed, so that as long as you were not institutionalized and had even a tiny income, you were unlikely to literally starve to death. But for all that, most people spent most of their income on food, clothing and other necessities. A Russian-made TV set could cost more than a month's wages.

Cars were not affordable for most people, but then people were not very mobile (in part due to artificial restrictions), and public infrastructure was built with the lack of personal transportation in mind. And if you were determined to buy a car, you would have to wait for years to get one, giving you time to save.

Average savings were just a few percent, but most people in the later period were guaranteed a pension at retirement. Medicine was nominally free, but gratuities in the form of presents or cash payments were common.

State-provided housing - for those who had it - was cheap. But if you were in a situation where you had to rent privately (and illegally), housing would be very expensive. Homelessness "did not exist" officially - indeed, it was criminalized. That doesn't mean it didn't exist in reality though, it just wasn't obvious to outsiders (not in the closing decades of the regime, when it was more image-conscious). And those who were not technically homeless sometimes lived all their lives in cramped, barely livable barracks and hostels.

What interested me about this was not the paper, nor the fact that a retired comp. sci. prof would start writing such papers, but the journal that published it. Journal of Mind and Behavior looks like a small, obscure journal, but it doesn't look like a predatory open-access publication that will publish any drek for a fee: it is indexed, it is associated with the University of Main and it is edited by respectable academics. Its content, however, is an odd mix of some psychology papers and some pretty random, nominally philosophical stuff (some of which may be OK - I haven't looked that deep).

I don't have that much experience with academic publishing, and none in this area. If anyone knows more about this - what's the deal here? How common are such journals?