One of the amazing things about ideas though, especially philosophical systems, is that they are perspectival; every well thought out idea is a perspective on the world and generates a view on other ideas connected to it. — fdrake

I don't believe that a philosophy can ever transcend that variation in connectivity; we'd just end up with the same problem but applied to metaphilosophical theses, and a regress occurs. For that reason, being truthful, honest, precocious, exploratory and recognising limitation and fallibility is much more important than doctrine; care how you generate your perspective and the rest will take care of itself. — fdrake

Yes. The more I learn about different philosophical perspectives, the more I lean towards pluralism. They don't even have to be radically different perspectives; they can be for instance different analytical philosophers' take on causality. That doesn't mean anything goes, of course, and a genuine disagreement is possible. But oftentimes well thought out ideas can illuminate and prioritize different aspects of the same world, even when they appear to conflict.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

One's generative core lies closer to the heart than the mind; more ethics and temperament than a set of analytical principles.

its about rules enforcement — DingoJones

Ive always found “feelings” to be a somewhat lacking metric. — DingoJones

I am gonna go ahead and Godwin the thread.

And yet you'd be the first to complain about low quality if we let him post his OPs. — Baden

I would be complaining if he was posting 25 stupid OPs a month (as some do). One OP in two years? Meh. Not worth hurting his feelings.

Btw: Banned MathematicalPhysicist for low quality. — Baden

Meh, the guy had what, 25 posts in two years? Granted, they weren't any good, but there was no pressing need to get rid of him.

Good call about the other three (if my count is right).

I propose the definition of a property of such physical work, called "productivity", which is the property of reducing the entropy of the system upon which the work is done. — Pfhorrest

Life's particular trick is neither in storing energy nor in reducing its entropy. It's more about the dynamics, which can be expressed in such metrics as entropy production rate, free energy rate, (mechanical) action or (technically defined) information. But this dynamics is not simple, with different, seemingly opposing trends that can be observed at different time scales. An explanation of these issues can be found in this paper: LM Martyushev, Entropy and entropy production: Old misconceptions and new breakthroughs (2013)

Or for a bigger picture check out he works of Chaisson:
Energy rate density as a complexity metric and evolutionary driver (2010)
Energy rate density. II. Probing further a new complexity metric (2011)

But what is evident from the various energy, entropy, action and information analyses is that life exists on a spectrum among a wide range of phenomena, as measured by these metrics, although it tends towards the far end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, if you want to give a sharp definition of life, you probably want a qualitative, not a quantitative distinction.

In any case I don't think there is any bright line dividing theology from philosophy — StreetlightX

I think most of what "Gnostic Christian Bishop" dumps on the forum is a pretty clear case of theology*, and he doesn't even make any effort to disguise it as philosophy.

* Attempted theology, which is not like attempted murder, because it's worse, not better than the real thing.

You already started a thread on this yesterday. Why did you abandon that discussion just to post another OP with the same ignorant tosh?

I find his criticism of universals most persuasive where he attacks the very question. He questions why someone would even suppose that in addition to the meanings of general words - which is how universals appear to the uninitiated - there must be something else besides, something that non-philosophers, as well as a good portion of philosophers, do not see, and that could be discovered (how?)

One might object that there must be a reason for why we have different general words like horse or white in the first place. How do most people acquire facility with the use of such words without much trouble and without any indoctrination from misguided philosophers? But I think he correctly diagnoses the problem with traditional realist/nominalist controversy (at least in the way that he presents it, which I don't know if it is quite fair) and thus understands that providing a positive account for the existence of general words would be missing the point.

Well, you can understand why many people take a dim view of the philosophy of religion if you take a look at the eponymous forum here, which is filled with irredeemable crap. Granted, the same is true of much of the rest of the forum, but not quite to the same extent. Of course, the quality of forum discourse hardly reflects on the academic discipline, but for that you would do better taking a course or reading books and articles.

Morris Lazerowitz was interested in the nature of metaphysics, starting from the hunch that it was not what its practitioners claimed it was (an inquiry into the basic nature of things). — Snakes Alive

Sorry, I haven't read the rest of the discussion. Just wanted to say that your introduction aroused my curiosity, so I read a couple of his papers to get a sense of what he was about. I chose papers on specific questions, because I think they reveal more about a philosopher's outlook than what he says about his own philosophy: The Existence of Universals (1946) and The Paradoxes of Motion (1952).

In these articles he deploys the kind of deflationary, anti-metaphysical, language-oriented analysis that characterized early analytical philosophy, e.g. Russell (with whom he polemicizes), Wittgenstein and Moore (his teachers). I am attracted to that kind of philosophy in general, and find his arguments fairly persuasive.

I have to say though that as far as literary style, he is no Russell. And I don't know about the rest of his output, but these two papers are badly in need of an editor: both could probably be shortened by a factor of four, at least.

In virtue of what are those properties bundled? — GodlessGirl

Well, exactly. If there is nothing to individuation of an entity but the composition of its property bundle, then there isn't any obvious criterion of similarity, let alone continuity between entities. As soon as any property changes even a tiny bit, you've got a different entity, and the one that was no longer exists.

In order to understand why a cup today is the same object as a cup yesterday, in spite of a myriad of tiny differences between them, or why I am the same person that I was yesterday, I would have to supplement a simple enumeration of properties with more structure. But as I add more and more to the initial bundle concept, the project begins to resemble stone soup. Which leads me to think that the very idea of a property is flirting with tautology.

Andras Schiff playing Bach :heart: :pray:

This standard "proof" is of course bullpucky. It's true, but not actually a proof at this level. Why? Well, as you yourself have pointed out, the field axioms for the real numbers say that if x and y are real numbers, then so is x+y. By induction we may show that any finite sum is defined. Infinite sums are not defined at all.

To define infinite sums, we do the following:

* We accept the axiom of infinity in ZF set theory, which says that there is an infinite set that models the Peano axioms. — fishfry

Wouldn't we have to do that to even be able to talk about 0.999...? Or can we somehow deal with "infinite" sequences without the axiom of infinity?

:up:

Why hasn't this shite been consigned to the fairy-story section (or philosophy of religion, as it's optimistically called)? I usually have this stuff turned off so that I can pretend the site is a more serious one than it really is. — Isaac

How do you do that?

Hello and welcome!

While I find the idea of self as a psychosocial construct compelling (as opposed to an indivisible metaphysical essence), the bundle theory specifically has problems. Some problems are definitional, starting with the question of "what are properties?" That is a big can of worms with centuries of controversies attached to it.

Perhaps a more salient problem for the bundle theory is that it is not a good fit for how we actually see personal identity. Every distinct bundle of properties individuates a distinct object - in this case, a distinct self. But we don't think that our personal identity is destroyed every time any of its constituent properties changes, such as when undergoing new experiences and acquiring new memories. Continuity and persistence are essential to our idea of self, so that we think of ourselves as the same person that we were a minute, a day and a decade ago.

Don't purchase Bolton's book — Maw

Why not? — tim wood

Selfless heroes of the press have already suffered through it so that you don't have to.
Read the juicy bits in their reports and be glad that it's them and not you.

I can point to quantum mechanics where the law of the excluded middle does not hold — Kenosha Kid

That is more a case of asking whether the present king if France is bald or not. — Pfhorrest

I think this is more a case of asking whether a beaded curtain is open or closed.

If only anyone had thought of the implications of multiple realizability for reduction...

You must know the paradox called the ship of Theseus. What's your solution for it? — Olivier5

What does this have to do with anything? Are you trying to foist another silly strawman on reductionism, or are you just throwing random shit against the wall and hoping that something sticks?

I think "The whole is MORE than the SUM of its parts" deserves better than a misquote and summary dismissal as a bumper sticker. It explains a lot, including why human beings generally don't fancy being cut in pieces. They kinda know that they would lose something in the process... — Olivier5

Yeah, that kind silly example is a good illustration of how useless this slogan is (or any slogan for that matter). That is, if your interest runs deeper than boo-hooray.

May I ask for your definition of reductionism, or a good approximation thereof? — Olivier5

There are different forms and theories of reduction, but the general pattern is to say that A is nothing over and above B, or A is explained by B, or A is corrected by B, or sometimes that A is constituted by B. But these broad generalizations don't tell you much - you really need to look at the specifics of each kind and instance of reduction. Pat slogans like "the whole is larger than its parts" are useless, and gesturing towards "systems theory" (as if there was just one) doesn't help either. This only serves to signal ideological allegiance.

NYT book review: "exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged"

Imagine that there exists a fortune teller, who is able to see what will happen in the future with an almost perfect accuracy. — Mizumono

Considering this, it would mean that the fortune teller is in fact, not able to undertake any action that would be spontaneous and thus, that the future is inevitable, because he will never be able to change any future event. — Mizumono

Well, you leave a loophole when you qualify the prediction as almost perfectly accurate. With this loophole in place, there is always a possibility that any prediction is wrong, and thus the rest of the reasoning doesn't go through.

Without the loophole, there is a simple answer: whatever the fortune teller predicted, that is going to happen. You didn't say that the fortune teller knows all that will happen in the future. If by spontaneous decisions you mean those decisions that the fortune teller did not foresee, then there may still be room for those. But they will not change whatever he correctly predicted.

Is the fortune teller responsible for his actions (or inaction) that have a causal impact on a foreseen outcome? Our ideas of agency and personal responsibility were formed under conditions that do not accommodate such hypothetical scenarios as a regular occurrence. Therefore, we do not have shared intuitions that can help us converge on an answer. Your take is as good as anyone else's; I don't think there is a meaningful debate to be had here. There isn't a right or wrong answer to the question, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

He's been stuck on this point for years.

I am no astronomer, but to my knowledge, the distribution is a uniform, isotropic black body spectrum. — Kenosha Kid

It's only isotropic in some reference frames. On Earth, if you point your spectroscope in different directions, you will get different temperatures of the black body radiation due to Earth's peculiar velocity relative to the rest frame of the CMB.

Since the point of relativistic physics is that phenomena are invariant even if the way we denote them is wrt coordinate systems, it's difficult to imagine what special universal features might be yielded simply by judicious choice of inertial frame. Moving to non-inertial frames, if, say, the universe was found to have net spin, you could call the frame it which it doesn't 'special'. A very novel physics explaining pseudoforces would be required — Kenosha Kid

No frame is special in the narrow sense of violating the general covariance of relativistic laws, but frames can be special in other ways, such as yielding an approximately isotropic spectrum of the CMB, or zero average velocity of matter at large scales. The hypothetical hypersurface of simultaneity for the universal now defines yet another special family of reference frames. I am just saying that presentism is not unique in requiring 'special' reference frames. But unlike those other examples, there is no practical way to find this special frame - it's pure metaphysical conjecture.

Taking the broader point, I agree that the existence of things that cannot even be indirectly observed is possible. I'm less convinced that it's meaningful to talk about them. Which I guess is what I was saying earlier: what is the explanatory power of the spotlight? If we accept that a) it is a privileged frame, not shared by all of us, and b) makes no difference to observable phenomena, it can't explain, say, the psychological passage of time, which is subjective, i.e. relative. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, the choice of a privileged frame in the sense that is required here cannot be dictated by any physical observations. Although, digressing a bit, there are other considerations that can lead us to single out a "preferred" frame. The division between laws and that which the laws leave out - boundary conditions and such - is conventional to a degree. While relativistic laws are reference frame invariant (up to coordinate transformation), the same cannot be said about those things that the laws do not fix, such as the distribution of matter and radiation in the universe. If we take those other things into account, we can identify reference frames that are special in some way, such as the frame in which the cosmic microwave background radiation has the same energy profile in all directions.

None of which is relevant to the hypothetical frame of absolute simultaneity that would be required for presentism though; there is no particular reason, other than perhaps considerations of symmetry, to identify this frame with the isotropy of the CMB or any other observable feature of the universe. All the same,the need for a privileged frame is not fatal to presentism, although as you point out, no observation can help us identify this frame. Physics doesn't rule out this requirement, but if one is of a positivist disposition, one should find this situation disturbing.

An "absolute now" is not a concept that makes sense to me though. "Now" now is not "now" exactly a year ago: it is not absolute. But a privileged moment (e.g. 13.7 billion years ago) wrt which "now" can be referred and seen to change would be absolute and sensible, even if it has no obvious descriptive power. — Kenosha Kid

Right, there is no fact that you can add to the objective scientific description of the universe that could establish an absolute present. You could say "Now is X seconds from the Big Bang in the comoving frame" or something like that, but that could only be right in the same way in which a stopped clock can be right. So how do you establish a constantly moving now without a reference? You would need a second time axis. And then a third time axis to perform the same function for the second. And then a fourth, fifth, etc.

My point was that there is no concept of absolute simultaneity. There is no "now" that you and I share, unless we're co-moving. — Kenosha Kid

According to the principle of relativity, laws of physics don't privilege any reference frame. But that doesn't mean that a reference frame cannot be privileged in some other sense - like in the sense of indicating the absolute now. The absolute now would not be part of the known laws of physics if it existed; it would come as an extra fact about the world. But that's old news - it was as true for Galileo and Newton as it is for Einstein.

Science and common sense have pretty much always operated under the assumption that the laws of nature are time translation invariant, and that assumption has borne out well in practice. But the laws of nature (assuming that they exist) do not fix everything about the universe, and they certainly do not rule out additional facts that are not time translation invariant - otherwise the universe would have been static in every sense.

If A has causal efficacy, why can’t something from level A affect something from level B? — Olivier5

You tell me.

It is to criticize the traditional materialist conceptual toolbox — Olivier5

Reductionism is not peculiar to materialism, and neither does materialism entail reductionism. Idealism is reductionist with respect to the physical. On the other hand, there are non-reductionists among materialists/physicalists.

↪Luke
I'm done with the thread, I said what I have to say. — ChatteringMonkey

But at this point i'm starting to repeat myself again. — ChatteringMonkey

You could say that again... and again... ;)


What's ironic about the argument that there is no motion in eternalism is that Zeno's famous arrow thought experiment argues exactly the opposite (and just as badly):

"Everything, when it is behaving in a uniform manner, is continually either moving or at rest, but what is moving is always in the now, hence the moving arrow is motionless."

Nothing can change in an instant of time. Zeno, who apparently embraces presentism, says that since only the now exists, change cannot happen.

The fundamental error of reductionism is to believe that that 'small things' (e.g. atoms) always and totally determine big things (e.g. human beings), in a one-way street. But since "to all action a reaction", it stands to reason that, IF the small can have an effect on the big, then the big can have an effect on the small... — Olivier5

Completely wrong. The weakest possible reductive relationship is that of supervenience: "No A changes without B changes." So if A is reducible to B, then anything that happens at the A level must have an effect at the B level.

So the idea that mind is an epiphenomenon contradicts the laws of physics. — Olivier5

Again, epiphenomenalism is not the same as reductionism. You can maintain that A is in some sense reducible to B without denying the reality and causal efficacy of A.

Epiphenomenalism has always puzzled me by its outsize place in the philosophy of mind. Seen in a larger context, one could use the same causal exclusion premise to construct any number of parallel arguments to the effect that special sciences are causally inert. For example, chemistry must be causally inert if it doesn't play any causal roles over and above underlying physics. So it would seem that epiphenomenalism with respect to the mental is a minor special case of a much larger question of intertheory relations.

Observations? It's intended to be more of a synthesizing exercise, bringing some concepts and points of view together, in the context of my own understanding. Several people appear comfortable with the way reductionism is being characterized, it's neither complicated nor a far reach. — Pantagruel

Yes, some people are comfortable with such breathy, substance-free rhetoric that amounts to little more than "Boo reductionism!" ("Boo materialism!" "Boo scientism!) There are any number of critical discussions to be had about reductionism (cf. the SEP article that you just googled), but unfortunately, this is not one of them.

Isn't it a bit more than this? That the special sciences are in principle replaceable by a single fundamental science, usually physics. That means causation is bottom up, and there's no strong emergence of any entirely novel properties. — Marchesk

There isn't a generally accepted meaning of reductionism, but yes, there is a widely shared view that presents the program of scientific unification as a kind of pyramid with the most fundamental science - usually taken to be physics - at the bottom, underlying all other sciences. However, the exact nature of this underlying is a contested matter. It can be cached out as a loose supervenience, or as Nagelian bridge laws, or something in between.

The line between a reductionist approach and a non-reductionist approach is pretty clear, and I don't want to get bogged down in versioning. — Pantagruel

So clear that you still haven't managed to identify it. Reductionism isn't even an ontological thesis, and yet the actual target of your vague vituperations seems to be some cartoonish eliminativism.

You don't really say what you mean by reductionism, nor is it clear who the target of your vague criticism might be. Like materialism and scientism, reductionism is one of those labels that everyone likes to rail against, but the targets of such criticism are rarely clearly defined and identified.

Reductionism in science is the idea of unity of science: that different special sciences present different aspects of the same fundamental order of nature. If you believe that such an order is at least plausible, then you should not find the idea of reductionism objectionable.

What on earth are you talking about? Is this something to do with American football? Why is this in General Philosophy? If you just want to post some random rant, there's the Shoutbox in The Lounge.

Free will is to do so undirected by controlling influences. — Lida Rose

That's a preposterous definition of free will.

This is exactly what I was refuting in the quoted bit. I suspect maybe the word “phase” is leading you to this conclusion, because a phase implies a temporal process, which is why I also named the synonymous term “configuration space” which has no such connotations. — Pfhorrest

I know what a phase space is. A phase space describes relationships between free variables in a particular theory. A different theory will give rise to a different phase space with a different basis, depending on its ontology.

Point being, you already know what time is, since you are a competent user of English. And indeed, the questions you ask are about time, hence presuposing that knowledge. — Banno

It is fine to ask for an explanation of something that you already know and have a word for; we do that all the time, whether in physics or in philosophy. But when asked out of context "What is X?" you should reply back: "Why do you ask?" What sort of an answer are you looking for? A reductive definition? In terms of what? A contextual explanation? In what context?

I offer two similar definitions given by Charles Sanders Peirce.

Time is that diversity of existence whereby that which is existentially a subject is enabled to receive contrary determinations in existence. — Peirce, c. 1896


Time is a certain general respect relative to different determinations of which states of things otherwise impossible may be realized. Namely, if P and Q are two logically possible states of things, (abstraction being made of time) but are logically incompossible, they may be realized in respect to different determinations of time. — Peirce, c. 1905 — aletheist

These definitions will fit any parameter in a parametric description: position in space, population density, Mach number, household income, etc.