For my part, I am not really paying attention to this pompous ass, but there is not reason why we can't discuss analytical philosophy or the value of philosophy.

I take your point that as any pursuit that depends largely on public support, philosophy has a burden of justifying its existence. But as I think you agree, this question should not be considered transactionally, but in the wider context of the value of learning. (After all, philosophy is not much different in this respect from many of our other pursuits, and not only academic.)

But I want to stress that value here does not have to be a measurable material value. We don't support philosophy in the hopes of possibly getting Velcro or strong encryption out of it somewhere down the road. This is value in a broader axiological sense.

I feel bad sometimes for studying philosophy. Other fields are focusing on actual problems like how to stop COVID or how to help countries with serious economic problems while philosophers shut them selves off from the outside world to go play in their own heads or provide extensive commentary on a long dead philosopher that no one cares to read and often requires a second language to fully understand. — BitconnectCarlos

Well, this is true for a lot of academic disciplines, both in humanities and in physical sciences.

One has to wonder about the complicity of this middle-management demand for 'value'. — StreetlightX

Exactly. This demand for (whatever) philosophy to justify itself in terms of its measurable value to society ought to be resisted.

I think (as you correctly point out) it's all about motivation. If your immediate response to a new idea is, that you are obviously right and there's no value to that new idea, then it's very easy to point out irrelevant contradictory technicalities or to even willfully misunderstand the proponent. — Hirnstoff

Likewise, if your response to any push-back is that you are obviously right and there's no value to a different view, then it is very easy to come up with ad hominem excuses for why the opponent can be dismissed outright. For example, psychoanalyze them and conclude that the only reason they are contradicting you is that they are "craving the Gotcha Game experience." After that you don't have to listen to anything they say and you can still feel good and smug.

Should we only believe in what is verifiable? — petrichor

Obviously not. Most of the things that we hold as true are not verifiable in practice or even in theory.

How would we know? — petrichor

If you were consistent in your skepticism, you would eventually arrive at solipsism, thus undermining all your empirical reasoning up to that point. This is a dead end.

Another issue is that the contents of a computer's mind (if it has one) are immune from discovery using scientific methods. The only access to knowledge of computer mental states would be through first-person computer accounts, the reliability of which would be impossible to verify. Whether machines are conscious will forever be a mystery. This suggests that consciousness is unlike all other physical properties. — RogueAI

How is this issue different from not having a first-person experience of another person's consciousness? Unless your real issue is that it's a computer rather than a person - but that is the same issue that Chinese Room-type thought experiments try to capitalize on (confusingly, in my opinion).

In A nice derangement of epitaphs Davidson argues that language is not algorithmic.

Searle is arguing much the same thing with the Chinese room. — Banno

I think Searle's thought experiment was rather a reaction to reductive takes on consciousness, particularly computational, functionalist ones:

I think that consciousness or understanding or perception at a particular point of time is the function of the structural and physiological state of the neuronal network at that point in time. — debd

Now consider the room to be our brain and the person is replaced by a chain of neurons. — debd

There are other variants of the thought experiment that are an even better fit for this, such as Ned Block's Chinese Nation thought experiment, where a large group of people performs a neural network computation simply by calling a list of phone numbers. The counterintuitive result here is that a functionalist would have to say that the entire system thinks, understands language, feels pain, etc. - whatever it is that it is functionally simulating - even though it is very hard to conceive of e.g. the Chinese nation as a single conscious entity.

But I think this people-as-computer-parts gimmick is a red herring. Of course a part of a system is not equivalent to the entire system - that was never in contention. A wheel spoke is not a bicycle either. The real contention here is whether something that is not a person - a computer, for example - can have a functional equivalent of consciousness.

Whenever I hear about those that study psychics, telepathy, remote viewing, and the like it is usually some specialized group that studies nothing else — TiredThinker

Well, that is generally true of specialists. You will find the same with black holes or medieval French literature.

But as for your general question, there has been a fair bit of non-crank research into some areas with paranormal associations, such as near-death experiences. It depends on the character of the claim, how conducive it is to scientific study.

Analytic philosophy, I think, hasn't really been a thing for some time now. — Srap Tasmaner

Was it ever a thing? Is "analytic philosophy" a meaningful and useful designation? I think philosophers tend to answer in the negative. (And the same with "continental philosophy.")

If conjunction and disjunction (∨ and ∧) are interpreted differently than in classical logic, then it does not seem so surprising that the principle of distributivity might fail. But this does not entail that the principle does not hold universally. The principle does hold universally (it seems to me) so long as we interpret the conjunction and and disjunction symbols (and whatever other symbols might also be relevant) to mean what they mean in classical logic. If we change their meanings, then it makes (classically) logical sense that we'd get a different set of theorems. — Dusty of Sky

If you identify logic with classical logic, or something with a close family resemblance, then yes. But formal logic in general is less specific than classical logic, even though it still has to do with reasoning, with inference. Which is to say that the patterns of reasoning that are available to us go beyond those that are covered by classical logic. With this general sense of logic, it is indeed possible to have a logic in which conjunction and disjunction mean something different than what they mean in classical logic, but play broadly similar roles. Perhaps the example on pp. 12-13 will help to illustrate the point, though admittedly, taken in isolation it may not look very convincing.

But I admit that much of what I read in the introduction went over my head. — Dusty of Sky

Yeah, I am out of my depth here as well. Perhaps one of our resident mathematicians will come along and enlighten us :)

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.)