I think you make a good point here:

It seems arbitrary to me that we should make the realist assumption that (A1 or A2) is true, even though this assumptions can't be empirically verified, but not also assume that the principle of distributivity holds just because we can't empirically verify either (A1 and R) or (A2 and R). — Dusty of Sky

But this is if you look at quantum logic as making an absolute metaphysical statement about quantum mechanics, rather than simply treating the logic instrumentally, or as usefully capturing some aspect of the phenomenon without pretending to the ultimate truth.

My claim is that a logic in which the principle of distributivity is false does violate the laws of thought such that any claim made in such a logic, regardless of its usefulness, amounts to nonsense if we actually try to conceive of its meaning. — Dusty of Sky

Logic without distributivity is not as problematic as you think. You may find this recent article interesting: Non-distributive logics: from semantics to meaning.

Please, put this sorry thread out of its misery.

And of course there's heaps from the philosophy of physics side. Reviews and anthologies alone will probably fill a shelf or three, e.g. Tim Maudlin's entry on Space and Time in Prinston Foundations series, Dieks' The Ontology of Spacetime, etc.

One wonders whether a focus on things is a form of bias which obstructs our view of reality. As example, astronomers seem to spend most of their time focused on things in space, instead of space itself. To the degree this is true, they are focused on tiny details instead of the big picture, a cosmos dominated by space. — Hippyhead

Rather than speculate in the abstract, do yourself a favor and google "philosophy of space." You'd be surprised at what scientists and philosophers have gotten up to in the last 300 years or so.

Right, I am just saying that bringing up the fact that a conscious being is always involved in QM experiments as a last-ditch defense of a mentalist thesis is futile, because the same is true of everything that we do. So one is no more justified in making the inference in case of QM than in any other case (e.g. performing a classical physics experiment, or getting beer from the fridge).

Who has represented himself as a purely mentalist interpreter? — Mww

Well, Wigner (who came up with Wigner's Friend thought experiment) was one famous proponent who has been mentioned here. von Neumann was another before him. Both were big names in mathematics and theoretical physics, especially Neumann, so one doesn't dismiss them lightly.

You are talking about the mind interpreting the world. Mentalist interpretations of QM imply the mind directly affecting the world, e.g. reaching out and collapsing the wavefunction.

Oh, you want boobies? Why didn't you just say so? :)

Anyway, to your point that an experimenter has to be involved, that's true of literally everything, ever, even when we are not talking about scientific experiments. You cannot come to know something without your mind being involved in the process one way or another. But why then make it a special point about quantum mechanics?

Even if we treat it as false in quantum mechanics, I don't think we must interpret this as invalidating the principle's universality. — Dusty of Sky

You don't have to use quantum logic in quantum mechanics either; classical logic works perfectly well there - it's just one way of thinking about QM that some find useful or entertaining. Which goes to show that "laws of thought" - including the principle of distributivity - don't have to be as rigid and universal as people often assume. We can adopt different logics for different uses.

Now I'm interested in how this would hold up. In the example given, even before the mind cognates the "true" state, it had already been decided by the measurement devices placed. If a measurement device measures which slit the electron goes through, and we NEVER get a case of a striped pattern, isn't it safe to assume that the measurement is what collapsed the wave function not us? If it were us we should get a striped pattern. — khaled

Right, that would be the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation: the electron interacts with the detector and the wavefunction collapses from a superposition of two states into a single pure state right at that moment, way before anyone conscious can come to know about what happened.

The Everett (Many Worlds) interpretation does away with the wavefunction collapse, so that the superposition persists, but now the two states are effectively independent and non-interacting - decohered. If you would like to play along with the mind collapse theory, this parallel-world state would allow you to stall for as long as it takes a person to read off the result from the paper - only there are now effectively two persons, one in each of the two decohered branches of the wavefunction. One of the two, the ensouled one, then collapses the other branch of the wavefunction, together with her mirror twin, and the sanity is restored.

I am just making shit up here, as you've probably guessed. I don't know how the actual proponents of mentalist interpretations deal with decoherence, and can't be bothered to look it up, to be honest, because I don't take this very seriously. But if you are interested, the information must be out there. I'd wager that a deft and committed theoretician can come up with a robust enough interpretation - if you can swallow the metaphysics. It is ultimately a matter of taste.

Wigner was roundly refuted by everyone including himself, including for the above reasons: necessitating consciousness for wavefunction collapse cannot reproduce statistical experimental outcomes. — Kenosha Kid

It can, with some footwork, but at the cost of metaphysical extravagance. But then mind/matter dualism is already pretty extravagant, and if you've already payed that price, then Wigner comes at little additional cost.

I think it might have been him that also pointed out that conscious observers are high-temperature bodies and cannot mediate coherent superpositions. — Kenosha Kid

So like I said, you have to go with Everett up to a point, assuming that decohered states continue to exist side by side until the mind cognates the "true" state, at which point the "counterfactual" state (along with the counterfactual observer's body!) vanishes. Or something like that. Heady stuff, but so is dualism.

What @khaled attributes (inexplicably) to the Copenhagen interpretation sounds like the von Neumann-Wigner interpretation, in which only minds have the power to collapse the wavefunction. If my understanding is correct, the interpretation would say that in the double slit experiment the system (along with the portion of the world that interacts with it) remains in a superposition right until the moment when a conscious being observes the result, at which point the "counterfactual" branch of the wavefunction vanishes. Without that vanishing act, this would be the same as the Everett interpretation. Indeed, before conscious minds entered the world, the world was entirely Everettian. (Either that, or God was extremely busy, collapsing wavefunctions right and left!)

The Copenhagen wavefunction is a mathematical encoding of what we know. If what we know about the past changes, that change is encoded in the past, not at the moment of discovering the change. — Kenosha Kid

That is what I mean when I said that it makes the mind necessary for matter to be definite — khaled

That doesn't follow.

As far as I know that is exactly what it suggests. The uncollapsed "result" is measured by a measuring system — khaled

Which is when the collapse allegedly occurs: when the (classical) measuring system interacts with the quantum system to produce a measurement. Measurement here is a technical (and quite contentious) term; it should not be interpreted by appealing to its common meaning outside of QM.

Some of the original proponents of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation also favored mentalist takes on QM, but what most physicists nowadays take to be the Copenhagen interpretation has nothing to do with mentalism.

The Garden of Eden is one of the most misunderstood passages in the history of the Bible. — bcccampello

This is theology, not general philosophy. Wrong forum.

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?!"