Why not read what Mackie had to say and find out?

It all hinges on what is understood by 'property'. The only sense that makes PII true is the most inclusive (and deflationary): a property of a thing is anything that can be predicated of the thing, i.e. any true proposition with the thing as its subject. But that trivializes PII, because if two objects actually present themselves as numerically distinct, then you can always predicate something that would imply a distinction, if only by ostention ("A is this and B is that"). If this seems question-begging, I think that's because the PII doesn't really say anything metaphysically substantive - it is basically an explication of the concept of numerical identity.

This definitely warrants discussion too, but my main point is that many philosophers have been pretty clear that their goal isn't to be "concise and simple", some wrote for themselves, some a select few, others embraced different degrees of obscurantism, mysticism and "make you think" provocation. — boethius

That may be so, but I don't see the relevance of bringing up the fact that some philosophers did not write well as an objection to an admonition for philosophers to write well. Also, the advice is, obviously, not to be simple at the expense of depth or concise at the expense of scope. Rather, it is "as simple as possible, but no simpler," etc.

If we interpret "simple and concise" to mean "not challenging", then we may not only fail to rouse the curiosity of the reader but also fail to convey the argument. If an argument is not completely clear (due to complicated sentences, qualifications and diction), it requires serious thinking to "get it", and that experience is richer and more memorable than a "pre-chewed" version of the same thing. — boethius

Yeah, no, I have zero respect for this snobbery.

"Many famous philosophers were miserable communicators" is not an argument against good writing tips (unless you want to argue that they were great because they were miserable communicators).

Whereas the explanation of the sphere effortlessly and beautifully explained the problem even before it was shown to be true and the flat earth theory was disproven. — TheArchitectOfTheGods

Ancient cosmogonies were not overly constrained by empirical observations, the way (we like to think) our modern cosmology is; ancient people gave a lot of leeway to their metaphysical and religious imaginations. If people back then were really more comfortable with the concept of a spherical earth, what would have stopped them from conceiving it that way? And yet all the ancient cosmogonies that we know about posited a more-or-less flat earth, sometimes surrounded by water (not all ancient cultures thought this out all the way through, and some didn't bother with cosmogony at all). Spherical earth theory, at least as it developed in ancient Greece, was on the contrary prompted by empirical observations that did not sit well with a flat earth, such as the phenomenon of the receding horizon.

But this is not to say that present day cosmology is guided strictly by empirical considerations. Even setting aside the fact that what we think of as modern scientific empiricism is a philosophy in itself, science edges beyond empiricism when it comes to theory selection at its more speculative reaches. The principle of "naturalness" in particle physics and cosmology is a prime example of that.

I am not an expert, but I don't have the impression that the shape of the universe is a particularly common issue on which to make a philosophical stand. Check out Stoeger, Ellis and Kirchner's Multiverses and Cosmology: Philosophical Issues though, where they do just that, arguing (unpersuasively, IMHO) for a finite universe.

By the way, to confound things even more, the universe doesn't even have to be a hypersphere to have a closed topology. It can have zero intrinsic curvature everywhere, just like a flat sheet, and yet have a closed, finite topology of a hypertorus, or something even more exotic.

Thanks. But aside from quotations, what does this mean? — Zophie

I am not sure what you are asking. What do the designations mean? You can read the links and follow the references inside, but I think you already know something about this area.

Existing research understandably focuses on fairly modest cognitive functions that can be tested experimentally, such as color discrimination (thanks for the video, by the way); the more ambitious the hypothesis, the more speculative it is likely to be.

Maybe the relativity is located deeper than language and culture, but is actually a relativity within the individual self, which might explain the conflicting results, with schematic thinking induced in only some investigative situations. — Enrique

I don't know much about this, but my take, for what it's worth, is that cognitive activity, including but not limited to abstract thought, is thoroughly entangled with language, so that one should expect some causal entanglement as well. But I have a feeling that in most cases, causal factors going between language and thought are not clearly separable from other causal factors and contingencies. We'll see. When you read about this psychological research, you can't help but admire the ingenuity with which researchers find ways to tease out causal links.

The terms of art for this topic are Linguistic Relativity and Linguistic Determinism, the latter being a stronger form of the former.

Among the strongest statements of this position are those by Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher, Edward Sapir, in the first half of this century—hence the label, 'The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis', for the theory of linguistic relativity and determinism. Whorf proposed: 'We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language' (Whorf, 1940; in Carroll, 1956, pp. 213-4). And, in the words of Sapir: 'Human beings...are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. ...The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group' (Sapir, 1929; in Manlbaum, 1958, p. 162). — Language and Thought

These theses are understandably controversial. There is plenty of evidence indicating that language and thought are intertwined, but identifying causality is not so straightforward. Does thought drive language or the other way around? Or do other factors like ecology drive both thought and language?

Here is one recent review:

The central question in research on linguistic relativity, or the Whorfian hypothesis, is whether people who speak different languages think differently. The recent resurgence of research on this question can be attributed, in part, to new insights about the ways in which language might impact thought. We identify seven categories of hypotheses about the possible effects of language on thought across a wide range of domains, including motion, color, spatial relations, number, and false belief understanding. While we do not find support for the idea that language determines the basic categories of thought or that it overwrites preexisting conceptual distinctions, we do find support for the proposal that language can make some distinctions difficult to avoid, as well as for the proposal that language can augment certain types of thinking. Further, we highlight recent evidence suggesting that language may induce a relatively schematic mode of thinking. Although the literature on linguistic relativity remains contentious, there is growing support for the view that language has a profound effect on thought. — Phillip Wolff and Kevin J. Holmes, Linguistic relativity

However, you will also find both stronger and more skeptical claims, more-or-less supported by research.

I don't think that our esthetic preferences, habits of thought or limits of imagination should dictate what we believe about the world. On the other hand, evidence for a closed universe may be easier to discover, and if so then we should certainly go for the low-hanging fruit first.

Most of the time, when weighing competing cosmological theories against each other, we have to settle for the one that accounts for the available evidence as well as any other and has the practical advantage of being simpler than the rest - which is why, when pressed to make a choice, cosmologists pick the flat, infinite universe as their default.

No doubt, finding the cosmic equivalent of an image of the back of your head out in the distance would be a smoking-gun evidence that we can usually only dream of. The evidence in favor of a closed universe that has been put forward so far is much more subtle and controversial.

It is generally assumed that it is not meaningful to talk about the center of the universe because all locations could equally claim to be the center, like any location on the surface of a sphere. — TheArchitectOfTheGods

The reason for saying that there is no center of the universe is the observation/assumption of symmetry, or homogeneity of cosmos. If, on a large scale, the universe everywhere has the same properties, then there is no reason to single out any place as the "center." For this to be the case the topology does not need to be spherical. Think of a blank sheet, for instance, extended infinitely in all directions. It is featureless, and therefore does not have an obvious center.

As for a "hall of mirrors" universe, that is indeed a live hypothesis, which astronomers are trying to test, but so far there is no definitive evidence either way. This has nothing to do with the Galilean principle, but rather with the fact that we simply don't know what the topology of space is, other than that it is pretty flat around where we are. So we try to find whatever clues we can.

Does language channel our focus in such a way that it affects what we observe even at the level of basic percepts? — Enrique

Yes, though it doesn't pay to run too far with that idea (as was the fashion at one time). Still, there's a lot of fun, unexpected things that we have learned about this. See for instance Lera Boroditsky's publications, such as How language shapes thought.

He was disillusioned with the forum because we weren't all praising his work and calling him the second coming of Russell or Wittgenstein, which he believed himself to be. — BitconnectCarlos

Nah, you are exaggerating. He was perhaps self-centered, but not uncommonly so. (You should see what a really self-obsessed flake looks like. There's at least one that is active right now.)

Oh...

Odd, I have a pretty keen eye for flakes, and he didn't seem too flaky.

Unless he persisted with flaming after warnings and deletions, banning over one meltdown seems like an overreaction. And it's not like this sort of thing doesn't happen to other members, without any repercussions. I don't have any particular attachment to Pfhorrest, but objectively he had a decent posting record.

Well, I’m not looking for a definition. I agree that there is no generally accepted meaning of these words. The formulations are meant to challenge three commonly held notions of ‘objective truth’. — Possibility

I doubt that we can even talk about commonly held notions here. Most people have rather hazy notions of objectivity and of truth, and 'objective truth' is doubly hazy. But most of all, I just don't see what would motivate such a discussion. So far it seems to be meandering in the haze, just as one would expect.

Also, I don't think Sweden has done as well as Ireland. Ireland has had half the number of deaths over the same period (March 12 - May 2). They have about the same confirmed cases count but that's because Ireland have done more testing than Sweden. — Andrew M

Sweden has more than twice the number of people than Ireland, so per capita they are about even. (It's arguable though whether per capita numbers are more indicative than absolute in this case. Per capita metrics make sense in a uniform, pseudo-static setup, which is not a good match for an infectious disease that is not already endemic in a population.)

Exactly, which precludes objectivity. I’m not after a definition as such - which assumes only one definition is the ‘correct’ one - just a discussion that relates to it from alternative perspectives, with a view to a more accurate understanding. — Possibility

I don't really understand what you are trying to do here. You give us three choices for 'objective truth', but there is no generally accepted meaning of these words, and you don't supply any apart from those three formulations. So are we to take these formulations as candidate definitions? But what would motivate our choice? Why are you looking for a definition? There is no value in defining words per se.

Perhaps this SEP article will be of some help: Reductionism in Biology

Epistemic reduction is the idea that the knowledge about one scientific domain (typically about higher level processes) can be reduced to another body of scientific knowledge (typically concerning a lower or more fundamental level). — Reductionism in Biology

I think @Isaac's examples are clear. The thing is that information is not a thing - it is different things. Different disciplines approach the concept of information differently, but more to the point of the present discussion, in the context of Boltzmann/Shannon approach the question of what constitutes information and how much of it there is depends not just on the thing that is being passed around - the sequence of bits or words or squiggles on a page - but on how this thing is being used.

It is the same with Boltzmann entropy. Like Shannon information, Boltzmann entropy has to do with uncertainty - uncertainty about the physical state. But which state? If we are measuring temperature with a thermometer, then the states that we are interested in are defined by thermal degrees of freedom. But if we are interested in magnetization, for example, then the states of interest are the orientations of magnetic dipoles (and the associated "temperature" in that case can actually become negative!)

Turning back to information, semantics doesn't matter for the mathematical theory of information, but it is what motivates its applications. Without meaning - physical meaning, as in the case of physical entropy, or symbolic meaning, as in the case of written communication - there would not be such a thing (things) as information. What constitutes information in each particular case depends on what it means for us.

So what's the deal with Sweden? By all accounts, the shit should've hit the fan by now, but that doesn't seem to be happening. In terms of overall infection and death rate, they are doing worse than some (their immediate neighbors), much better than others (Italy, Spain, France, NY), and about as well as Ireland, which has been praised for its active measures to suppress the epidemic, while Sweden has done almost nothing. Its elderly have been hit hard, but that is also happening elsewhere. On the other hand its health system hasn't been overwhelmed.

Yeah, because there hasn't been enough Christ myth stuff on the internets, we had to have some of our own. Actually I was wondering why it took so long.

Not to be morbid or anything, but this is gorgeous:

Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) @Noble Dust

If you are into that kind of stuff, Rupert "eyebeams" Sheldrake has done a lot of "research" on this - his "The Sense of Being Stared At" is a classic of the genre.

More, to do with the Getty challenge — Fluke

I somehow missed that one, I just saw an article about the Russian group and didn't realize that it had a predecessor. I love these - if I wasn't fortunate to keep my job while in quarantine, I could browse them for hours.

The painting of the pile of skulls is called "The Apotheosis of War" by Vasily Vereshchagin, sarcastically dedicated "to all great conquerors, past, present and to come". Recreating it with frozen dumplings for skulls is either sick or brilliant, or perhaps both. — jamalrob

Ah, I see you've done your homework while in Russia :) It's an iconic image, but somehow perhaps due to the historic remoteness or to its fastidious realist execution, it doesn't seem to have the same emotional impact as, say, the Guernica.

I'm not sure if I'm just unfamiliar with this area of ontology somehow or if it just seems so transparently confused to me, but either way I don't really see what problem is remaining. If we can study how (ordinary multicellular) living things work, what makes them alive or not, in terms of the operations of their bodies made of tissues made of living cells, and we can study how those cells work in terms of non-living molecules, and we can study how those molecules work in terms of ordinary particle physics... then what questions are really left? Clearly then life is reducible to physics in that way, so what is still unanswered? — Pfhorrest

If you only say that different levels or scales loosely supervene on or ground or compose each other, and aren't too particular about what that means and how that comes about, then you won't get much argument from anyone. The devil, as always, is in the details. There is extensive literature on reduction, emergence and supervenience. The more traditional take on these issues was skewed towards the philosophy of mind, but in parallel with that a more general discussion of inter-theory relations has emerged (), which I personally find more interesting. The SEP article Scientific Reduction gives some idea of the problematics.

lol So, Kurt Godel who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century didn't know propositional calculus existed? — h060tu

Godel proved that first order logic was consistent and complete, you dummy. This discussion has nothing to do with Godel's theorems.

What about chemistry is supposedly not reducible in this way? — Pfhorrest

There is a bewildering variety of notions concerning reduction and emergence in the philosophical literature, but I think that the sort of hand-wavy weak emergence that you outline is not very controversial. However, anything stronger or more rigorous than that - such as ontological reduction that the OP brings up - is rife with problems, starting with just setting out the precise meanings of these terms.

I intentionally slipped in chemistry in the list of examples, because it is often pointed at as a reductionism success story. But this is at best partially true (as with some of the other examples, e.g. reduction of continuum to statistical thermodynamics and molecular dynamics). When you dig below the surface you find that the challenges in the quest of reduction are daunting even in this case - see for instance Reduction and Emergence in Chemistry article in IEP.

More to the point of the OP, @Yuting Liu singles out the problem of ontological reduction: "the biological distinction of life forms from lifeless forms." But ontological reduction is generally problematic in inter-theoretic relations, and even chemistry-to-QM is no exception (as some works referenced in the above linked article argue). So my point remains that there is nothing special about biology in this regard. The inter-theoretic reduction program is difficult and contentious at just about every level.

It seems to me that you are rather arbitrarily drawing your partition at biology. Why not chemistry, for example? Or meteorology? Or just different areas of physics, such as quantum mechanics vs. hydrodynamics? Just like biology, all of those other sciences have distinctive ontological or nomological commitments that are not shared by other sciences. In a few cases a reduction can more-or-less be achieved for some special cases, but by and large these sciences are, for all intents and purposes, autonomous.

Perhaps more precisely it means that all we know of reality comes in the form of measurement, and so if we cannot measure anything as being infinite, then the infinite does not occur in our knowledge of the world. — A Seagull

And what qualifies as 'measurement'? Can we measure our way to having a good idea of what the inside of the Moon consists of, for example (without having to hollow it out to find out)?

If you postulate that time must have a starting point, then you trivially get the conclusion that the past cannot be infinite. — SophistiCat

The idea of time, I believe, presupposes a starting point from which to measure its passing. So I doubt that the past is infinite. — Sir2u

Whether it is trivial or not is only a matter of your personal beliefs, because you have no evidence of it being either the correct or incorrect conclusion. — Sir2u

This is puzzling. Are you now doubting your own conclusion? The way you originally stated it gave me the impression that you yourself thought it to be straightforward.

You could say that beer is just what we postulate 'beer' to be, and you could then postulate it to have an origin. But a more honest and satisfying approach would be to take 'beer' as referring to something beyond mere postulation, something empirically known and do the bloody research to find out where it came from. — Sir2u

Your mocking misses the mark. Indeed, we don't presuppose beer to have an origin - we know this from experience, inference or reliable report. Not so with time. I feel silly even having to explain this to you.

Ok, from there lets define an infinite past. An infinite past is all the events that have occured from the present. Present is defined as simply the event that is. Event is a complete description of reality.An example being the first instant of today and all statements that are true along with it. Time is simply all events ordered from the present. A past event is an the present that longer is. Any problems so far with my defintions? — BB100

Yes. If an event is a "complete description of reality," full stop, then what is left to describe? You probably want to say that an event is a "complete description of reality at a point of time," but that would make your definition of time circular, since you want to define time in terms of events. And even if we allow that, then by defining the whole of time as the sum of all events, you end up defining time as a "complete description of reality" that was, is and will be, and that doesn't seem right.

Anyway, I don't think it's worth yours or my time for you to frog-march me through your proof, because believe me, I am thoroughly familiar with such proofs.

When I were lad... (spoken in best Yorkshire brogue)

We all had a copy of Being and Nothingness on our shelf, and went to see No Exit every second month. — Banno

I saw Nausea, and the book is on my short(ish)list. I doubt I'll ever read any of his philosophical writings though, his is not the sort of philosophy that captures my interest.

Yeah, apparently during his lifetime he was far more influential than Einstein, then he quickly went out of favor and nowadays is mostly remembered by academics who make a career of him, and a few cult followers.

Jimena Canales' s article can be found here: Einstein's Bergson Problem

If I I have one then name the first one you find and we can start from there for me to clarify. — BB100

Don't have to go far. Take this, for instance:

If have an infinite past, then there exists an event in the past that is an infinite events away from the present — BB100

Nope. Doesn't follow and doesn't even make sense. But to understand why you need to have basic mastery of the mathematical concepts at play (a couple of weeks of freshman calculus should do, if you are diligent).

Other problems are not so much technical as philosophical, like when you take it for granted that time is granular, being composed of moments of finite duration, even though this is not something that is immediately evident to the senses or well-established by science.

Don't worry, it's not just you - these are very common mistakes. At a guess, someone somewhere attempts an argument along these lines once every few months or weeks even.

I wasn't replying to you. You have other problems, but they are too many to sort through. You have a non sequitur at just about every step.

No measurement can ever be infinite, ergo there is no infinity in the real world. — A Seagull

There seem to be some steps missing before "ergo..."

If you postulate that time must have a starting point ("The idea of time, I believe, presupposes a starting point from which to measure its passing"), then you trivially get the conclusion that the past cannot be infinite. Of course, no one who does not already believe the conclusion would be satisfied with that postulation, and even those who do ought to be leery about getting their prize without honest toil.

You could say that time is just what we postulate 'time' to be, and you could then postulate it to have a beginning. But a more honest and satisfying approach would be to take 'time' as referring to something beyond mere postulation, something empirically known.

(The original quote was in the context of Russell's work on Principia, where he objected to defining mathematical entities as already possessing all the desired properties, as opposed to constructing them from more primitive elements. But the sentiment behind that quip applies just as well here.)

Well, no. "I believe the probability is 50/50." This statement is not a probability — Pneumenon

I give up. Either you are trolling me or you really are that dense - either way, there is no sense in going on.

The idea of time, I believe, presupposes a starting point from which to measure its passing. So I doubt that the past is infinite. — Sir2u

The method of ‘postulating’ what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. — Bertrand Russell

This isn't a "koan." Insisting that this is somehow cryptic or hard to grasp is disingenuous in the extreme. — Pneumenon

It's not cryptic, it's banal.

You appear to be confusing "I can always ask about probability" with "every belief has a probability," which I never said. — Pneumenon

Of course you did. Reread your OP. The only out that you leave is not knowing the probability, while presumably accepting the question as legitimate (and even that you appear to regard as dubious). Now a thoroughgoing Bayesian in Isaak's vein would insist that you do know, even if you are not conscious of your knowledge at every instance. But like I said, these controversies are still located within the broad epistemological framework (sometimes informally referred to as Bayesianism) that associates probabilities with beliefs more or less tightly.