I don't see what these koans have to do with what is being discussed, unless you insist on interpreting my words super-literally.

I think you can always ask a person what they believe a probability to be — Pneumenon

No, that is not a given. Outside of a limited colloquial usage, insisting that any belief can be associated with a probability is characteristic of a particular philosophical position: an epistemic interpretation of probability, and conversely, characterizing confidence with probabilities. (This I earlier labelled as Bayesianism, although this is not entirely accurate.) This is a popular enough view, but it is not universally shared. Some will say that talking about "degree of belief" or characterizing it with a scalar metric is incorrect some or all of the time, or that probability specifically is ill-suited for the task. Some (e.g. likelihoodists) will say that probability is fine for e.g. evaluating the support that beliefs derive from a particular piece of evidence, but not for expressing one's total confidence in a proposition.

Did I? I think you can always ask a person what they believe a probability to be, but that doesn't make their belief a probability. — Pneumenon

If you did not, then what is this question supposed to mean?

What is the probability of the invisible miniature dolphin's existence? — Pneumenon

You already channeled the discussion towards Bayesianism when you identified beliefs with probabilities. If you want to have a broader, less theory-laden first approach, you might want to step back from that. Do you want to talk about a specific theory or family of theories, or about phenomenology, or word usage? (I realize that these subjects are not entirely separate.)

Bayesianism though has many varieties, including austere ones that eschew prior probabilities. @Isaac is appealing to a thoroughgoing, Dutch book subjective Bayesianism, in which there is no such thing as being uncommitted: you can't decline a bet. His identification of beliefs with dispositions makes this position more plausible, but I suppose such an identification is itself contentious. In any event, if we are considering the way we actually think, then it is fair to caution that we are not perfect Bayesian computers.

yes please and thank you

We evidently have different definitions of "brute fact." For what it might be worth, Wikipedia states, "In contemporary philosophy, a brute fact is a fact that has no explanation. More narrowly, brute facts may instead be defined as those facts which cannot be explained (as opposed to simply having no explanation)." The whole point of formulating scientific and metaphysical hypotheses is to explain the facts. — aletheist

I don't think that we have different definitions of "brute fact." It is just that by its nature, science is pluralistic and dynamic. There isn't a single coherent and unchanging scientific picture of the world; instead, there is a patchwork of theories that are only partly compatible with each other, and those theories keep evolving. What that means for brute facts is that they exist within the context of a particular theory, and that they are not carved in stone. Philosophy is not any different in that regard.

In any case, whether we are talking about science or philosophy, it is a truism that nothing of any substance can be explained away without residue. Any explanation takes some things as given, the explanation essentially consisting in reducing everything else to those things.

In religious explanations the brute facts are the dogmas of theology and sacred history. That God made the universe just so is a brute fact.

On the contrary, a brute fact is something that is deemed to be inexplicable in principle, thus closing off further inquiry as allegedly pointless. — aletheist

No, this is just completely divorced from reality. In every scientific theory there are brute facts: they are the assumptions and postulates of the theory, be they laws, constants or whatever. That doesn't mean that scientists, the scientific community are committed to treating them as eternal, unchanging truths. For one thing, there are many theories, and their postulates are not entirely compatible with each other, or else a postulate in one theory may actually be obtainable as a result in another theory (e.g. the 2nd law of continuum thermodynamics is more-or-less reducible to statistical mechanics).

Besides, it would be absurd to deny that theories have evolved and continue to evolve in response to new findings and new thinking, and that certainly goes for fundamental physics. The so-called fine tuned constants of the standard particle physics and Big Bang cosmology, which are seen as unsatisfactory by some theoretical physicists, have prompted a search for better accounts that would replace these constants with something more 'natural'. Of course, whatever theories come next will have their own unexplained postulates - it is only a question of which postulates are more epistemologically or metaphysically satisfactory.

On the contrary, modern science largely has its roots in cultures that affirmed divine creation and were motivated by this belief to study nature more carefully. — aletheist

That is a questionable interpretation of the history. One could instead make a case that natural philosophy has always had to struggle against religious dogma and conservatism. In any case, this is irrelevant. The fact is that, as I explained above, scientific postulates are not on the whole treated as dogmas. The entire process of scientific research is set up expressly in order to promote change. One can hardly publish a paper or obtain a grant without the promise of finding something new or at variance with what is already known. But a religious dogma is, well, a dogma. If a thing is postulated to be a divine creation as a matter of faith, that isn't going to change in a hurry.

But my first sentence is talking about the idea that if there is a pattern or constant then it is either eternal or does not change in whatever finite time we have. — Coben

Well, I already explained why "changing laws" are an oxymoron. Laws are revised or retied if evidence calls for it, and not otherwise. Anyway, I won't pursue this further, since this has little to do with the OP.

The spirit of scientific inquiry should preclude us from ever simply accepting something as a brute fact. Like anything else that we observe in the universe, the particular values of the constants call for an explanation, and the FTA poses the hypothesis of divine creation. — aletheist

You have it exactly backwards. Leaving something unexplained (which is what "brute fact" means) leaves the matter open for further inquiry. Contriving a pseudo-explanation such as "divine creation" prematurely forecloses the inquiry.

I don't think that's parsimony. It's just an assumption. There is no need to make the assumption that laws are eternal. We can work with what seem like rules now, and black box whether these rules may have changed or may change. You do not have to commit to something you don't know. Further there is evidence that constants and laws have changed. — Coben

Your last sentence contradicts what comes before it. If we can have evidence that constants and laws have changed, then we can have evidence for the contrary. And the balance of evidence for the known laws and constants is so far on the latter, although as I said, every once in a while someone proposes that some constant is actually non-constant (e.g. the cosmological constant). Such proposals are settled by evidence, because as Faulkner famously said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The role of "surprisingness" has been discussed in the context of fine tuning, drawing on more general epistemological considerations (e.g. in the work of Paul Horwich). White, whose discussion of the inverse gamble's fallacy I think you have mentioned, comments on it. I'll see if I can dig up more.

Not only that, but scientists generally assume that the laws of nature as we observe them operating today have always operated that way; or at least, that they have operated that way ever since very soon after the alleged Big Bang. What justifies this assumption? — aletheist

Parsimony, obviously. If an explanation works well enough, why complicate it without reason? More importantly, if a law is changing over time, then as long the change is itself regular, it simply becomes a dynamic component of the same law.

Why not consider the alternative that the laws of nature have evolved over time, and perhaps are still (very slowly) evolving? What would count as evidence either way?

They are being considered. At various times changes in fundamental constants have been hypothesized. For example, Dirac, in an attempt to explain the enormous disparity in coupling strengths in the present-day universe, proposed as part of his Large Number Hypothesis that the gravitational constant has changed dramatically over time. But such changes (and even much subtler changes) leave their marks in the universe, which is why Dirac's hypothesis was quickly falsified with data. But other such hypotheses are considered even today, so it's not true that this is some kind of taboo.

By the way, I brought up Dirac for a reason, because, unlike the theistic argument, scientific discussion of fine-tuning is framed not so much in terms of "gee, how lucky we are to live in such a special universe," but in terms of the so-called naturalness of physical laws - which is what bothered Dirac so much. Already back then the seeds of the problem of fine tuning were planted, well before Carter et al.

Can't stop listening to Arvo Pärt - so good!

Sleeping Beauty, Doomsday, etc. — SophistiCat

Though debates about these frequently seem just as intractable as those around theism. Answers to these problems rely so heavily on your basic epistemological stance that it's hard to make a convincing case to someone who doesn't have the same background. — Echarmion

I don't actually take a strong position on these puzzles. I suspect that there may not be a good answer to them, or what's worse, there may not be a good question...

One of my hobbies (or obsessions) is to debate theists on their Fine Tuning Argument for God — Relativist

I've been "guilty" of this in my younger years, but eventually I lost the appetite for arguing just for the sake of arguing. Apologists are often too quick to accept the desired conclusion, and lacking the motivation they fail to put up a strong argument.

Awhile back, someone on this forum posted a link to this paper: The Fine Tuning Argument. The author (Klaas Landsman) argues that the existence of life is not a good reason to infer either a designer OR a multiverse. — Relativist

Yes, I've come across this paper before. It continues a long series of debates (as can be seen from its references), of which I think the more interesting ones aren't even about God/designer (that one seems to be pretty hopeless). Selection bias, on the other hand, poses challenging epistemological problems in the same line as Sleeping Beauty, Doomsday, etc.

Who says life can't adopt as many different forms as existent universes? Maybe life can exist in many possible universes. The "laws" of physics are based on models of our universe, not every possible universe. — Enrique

Life is "fine-tuned" in the sense that

small changes in the parameters of physics produce catastrophic changes in the evolved universe. In particular the complexity of the evolved universe, and hence its ability to support life, would be undermined by small changes in the universal constants... Thus, parameter sensitivity is the claim that the target in parameter space which is compatible with a complex universe is small in some sense. — RAW Bradford, The inevitability of fine tuning in a complex universe, 2011

But here is the rub: as the paper above argues, this parameter sensitivity of complex structures is a mathematical inevitability. It will be true in any parametric system that is at all capable of producing complex structures (and most systems would not produce complex structures, no matter how you tune them).

Something slow and beautiful to take your mind off coronavirus.

Arvo Pärt: Spiegel im Spiegel

But supposing, contra the above, that we can meaningfully answer the question about the probability of the universe being fit for life, I do get what you are saying.

This seems similar to the "luck" of our improbable existence that is the result of the (presumed) low probability fact that the structure of the universe happens to be life permitting.

Thoughts? — Relativist

There has been a lot of discussion along these lines. John Leslie offered a now well-known firing squad analogy: You face a firing squad of trained marksmen. Shots are fired, but to your immense surprise, you find that they all missed. Are you justified in inferring that the marksmen intended to miss? Leslie argues that a similar scenario in the case of the universe's fundamental constants suggests two alternative explanations: God or multiple universes. Objections have been put forward in terms of gambler's fallacy and observation selection effect, among others. You can find many such debates under the heading of anthropic reasoning (see also SEP entry on fine-tuning). Although I believe that the considerations that I gave above preempt any such debates with respect to the universe as a whole, I still think that they are instructive.

Sure, the denominator of the probability is still finite - but it's so large that it makes it surprising that any actual person is alive. On the other hand, it's imminently reasonable that SOME people exist. This is the tension. It's erroneous to apply this to individuals to "prove" they shouldn't be expected to exist, because we should expect SOME people to exist.

In terms of the FTA, life (or intelligent life) is one sort of existent, but there infinitely many sorts of existent. So IMO the analogy holds.

I'm wondering if this can be described mathematically. — Relativist

Well, I brought up one difficulty with any such mathematical description: in order to be able to talk about probabilities at all, we need to have random variables and their probability distributions. And there had better be good reasons behind the choice of both the variables and the distributions.

Already in the case of the "lottery" of being born we can see many difficulties in this regard. Depending on what we consider to be the chance circumstances and how we treat those chances, we can get wildly different results. For example, we could, like in so many romantic comedies, consider the first time the two future parents met due to some happenstance. What were the chances of them being in the same compartment on the train on that day? We could go on and estimate those chances using some simple probabilistic model of ticket sales, which might give us a small probability, but not inconceivably so. But we could take a completely different route - like, for instance, in your OP, and get a result that differs by many orders of magnitude.

There is an endlessly variety of such probabilistic models at our disposal, each giving a different result, and there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to prefer one over another, if all we want is to estimate the chance of being born in some very general sense. This uncertainty exposes the meaninglessness of such probability talk even in this intuitively suggestive example: there is no "general sense" of the probability of being born. There can only be a sense relative to some chosen model. Generally speaking, the choice of the model is dictated by our interest in the matter: what is under our control, what isn't, what we know, what we don't know, and what we wish to know.

In the case of the universe's fitness for life the situation is that much worse. Nothing is under our control. We know nothing about the reasons for the universe being the way it is, nor whether such reasons even exist. (And if they did exist, that would only push the question further, forcing us to ask about the reasons of the reasons, and so on.) We can't infer distributions from observed frequencies, because we only have this singular instance. If in the previous example we could at least idly pick among many possible probabilistic models, here there aren't even any models to pick. What are the random variables? How are they distributed? It's impossible to answer. So what could the probability of the universe being fit for life even mean?

Not actually true: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/annual-flu-reports — I like sushi

You should look at how these figures are actually arrived at and you will see that there is a good deal of uncertainty. Just read any study of flu morbidity/mortality.

Read a couple of novels by George Sand. And staying with female writers named George, now reading George Eliot's Middlemarch.

The deliberate element was what threw me off as how can one do something deliberate if they are not given a second choice? That is, having patience isn't something you can practice because nature forces you to wait, you have no other options. However, it is the reaction and the emotions you feel in moments where great patience is asked of you. — Lecimetiere

But you can also be patient, practice patience - as opposed to losing your cool and acting rashly out of frustration and anxiety. Or lashing out at those who "try your patience." That is an active, effectual kind of virtue. Is this the sort of patience that you think characterizes you?

We could say that John is lucky in some sense, but not in any analyzable sense. Therefore no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from it. This seems similar to the "luck" of our improbable existence that is the result of the (presumed) low probability fact that the structure of the universe happens to be life permitting. — Relativist

The "probability" of John being born as a result of chance circumstances is a rather iffy concept: you have to make a pretty arbitrary choice of random variables and their distributions in order to estimate it. But at a stretch one can perhaps make some sense of it.

With the fundamental physical laws the situation is much worse: what probabilities could possibly mean in this case is anyone's guess. We only know about this one universe; there is no statistics, no generative model. What probabilities could we be talking about?

You could say Finland is prepared. While its neighbors are scrambling, the country is sitting on an enviable stockpile of medical supplies dating to the 1950s. It includes personal protective equipment like face masks, but also oils, grains and agricultural tools.

Finland is now tapping into this supply for the first time since World War II, positioning the country strongly to confront the coronavirus. — The New York Times

@ssu

Either way, if so, why claim to be retreating to syntax? — bongo fury

I am deliberately "retreating to syntax," because that is the most basic function of things: as (grammatical) subjects. We can talk about "such things as unicorns." What, if anything, we mean by such talk is a secondary question, and the answer to that question will vary from case to case.

Trouble is, a unicorn can be the first but not the second. — bongo fury

I had the same syntactic sense in mind in both cases. We can refer to unicorns in thought and in speech.

What you call "relative velocity" does not apply in Special Relativity. You need to understand how velocity addition works in Minkowski spacetime. These are the very basics of the theory, and until you understand them you cannot talk about any "paradoxes." Don't be lazy, do your homework instead of expecting people to spoon-feed this to you.

In the broadest sense, a "thing" can be any subject of a sentence, anything to which we refer. The more specific senses depend on the context of the discussion. Sometimes we may be talking about all tangible, bounded things; sometimes - objects of some value (she has many nice things), etc. There is no deeper, truer meaning to thingness than this - same as with any word, really. The general context defines the rules of the game, if we do not set them out explicitly.

Furthermore, It is objective because it is rooted in our human nature as intelligent social creatures. Mankind forms and lives in societies - and these societies require morality as spoken of above. — iam1me

I think you should make explicit your definition of Objective Morality. You treat this as something self-evident, but it is not - unless you are simply coining that phrase for your own special use. But it is then all the more important to state ahead of time what you mean by it and disclaim any pretension to generality - otherwise you have to contend with the existing usage and its controversies.

Based upon all this I would argue there is, in fact, Objective Morality — iam1me

Based on what, exactly? It is not clear on what grounds you match the words Objective Morality with the platitudes with which you conclude your post. You begin by outlining a naturalistic theory of the emergence of moral attitudes in the human society. I'll grant, for the sake of an argument, that it is a plausible theory. I'll also grant that the imperative of unselfish cooperation is an attitude that, according to this theory, can be expected to be promoted in the human species in the course of its natural evolution. But what does any of this have to do with Objective Morality?

Can you give us an example of what you are looking for?

It's what comes from a thoughtless application of formalisms. The premise "Whatever should be done can be done" is only plausible in the context in which choices exist (whatever we take choices to mean). The corollary of this statement is "Whatever should not be done can be done." Taken together, these two statements express the idea that a moral should only makes sense when you have a choice between what should and what should not be done. If you have no choice, then moral considerations are irrelevant.

If you plug in the corollary "Whatever should not be done can be done" into the argument alongside the second premise and thoughtlessly crank the handle, then you can end up with this absurdity: determinism supposedly implies that you always do what should be done and what should not be done, all at the same time. Of course, if you remember that choice (supposedly) does not exist under determinism, then you will not get yourself in trouble like that. But this is why it makes no sense to extend the argument past the second premise.

How does it implies the existence of anything? Premise 2 simply says that for any x, if x should be done, then x can be done. It doesn't even imply that there is something that should be done, nor that there is something that can be done. It is simply a universally quantified conditional sentence, without existential implications. — Nicholas Ferreira

If the domain of quantification is empty (there are no choices), that entails determinism and denies MFT, shortcircuiting the argument.

Anyway, this is a crap paper. It looks like a parody of analytic moral philosophy: sterile and trivial logic exercise.

I got it from "Proof of Free Will", by Michael Huemer. — Nicholas Ferreira

It should be mentioned that Huemer's argument is supposed to be a proof by contradiction against "determinism," which he defines as the contradictory of the "minimal free will thesis (MFT)", which "holds that at least some of the time, someone has more than one course of action that he can perform."

Anyway, the argument falls apart much earlier than intended. The premise "Whatever should be done can be done" implies the existence of a choice (as becomes immediately apparent when one begins to unpack its meaning). But this of course already contradicts determinism (as Huemer defines it). Huemer admits a similar objection of question-begging and tries to defuse it, but the fact remains that his argument is trivial and most of it is junk (everything that follows the second premise).

But fewer people would care about the paper if it didn't suggest (with plausible deniability in that typical academic way) that it has something to say about time irreversibility of physical/natural trajectories as opposed to time irreversibility of numerical algorithms representing them. — fdrake

In the conclusion the authors also try to present their work as being relevant to astronomy, but it should be noted that the problem that they actually consider is a very, very special case of the three-body problem, which is notoriously difficult to treat in any general way. They consider three equal masses in free fall with no initial velocities (which also makes this a planar problem, unlike the more general case, which is 3D).

One fact is here taken for granted, and I wonder whether this is a necessary outcome in this setup, or whether this is an additional assumption: after some time the system ejects one body that flies off into the infinite distance, leaving behind a binary system. This is a dramatic transition in the system's dynamics, which helps understand the criterion of "irreversibility" that they use:

The main idea of our experiment is the following. Each triple system has a certain escape time, which is the time it takes for the triple to break up into a permanent and unbound binary-single configuration. Given a numerical accuracy, , there is also a tracking time, which is the time that the numerical solution is still close to the physical trajectory that is connected to the initial condition. If the tracking time is shorter than the escape time, then the numerical solution has diverged from the physical solution, and as a consequence, it has become time irreversible.

Since such an escape happens more-or-less stochastically, if your simulation doesn't track its onset closely, then from that point on it will quickly diverge from reality, and the error will only increase over time.

Explain what you mean by "which is, in a technical sense, reversible". Please provide a reference. — jgill

I won't hunt for a reference, but as I understand it, a reversible system would pass a reversibility test: Allow the system to evolve for some time T, then reverse the time direction of all dynamical properties (flip the direction of all velocities, moments, etc.) and allow the system to evolve further for the same amount of time T. A reversible system would end up in the same state from which it started, but with all of its dynamical properties in reverse.

"In mathematics, a dynamical system is time-reversible if the forward evolution is one-to-one" — jgill

Well, your wiki reference gives rather more succinct definitions, though they may require some unpacking.

Right, I was being sloppy, I must have had in mind computable numbers. Thanks.

There could be a thread on the concept of time-reversibility. There seems to be a slight conflation here between forward and backward dynamics. — jgill

A while ago we had a thread on Norton Dome - a simple Newtonian setup that (arguably) gives rise to indeterministic (and therefore irreversible) behavior. Classical mechanics allows for some edge cases where such things can happen. This is distinct from chaotic behavior (which is, in a technical sense, reversible) and also from the second law of law of thermodynamics, which is decidedly irreversible.

It has to do with your worry about energy conservation due to Heisenberg uncertainty. Not much with "this" if by "this" you mean the OP.

It is indeed true that between two real numbers there is always another real number. The same is true about rational numbers. This property is called dense ordering, and its proof is very simple - much simpler than Cantor's diagonal argument, which proves something else entirely.

However, the hypothesized property of pi to which you were referring - that it contains every finite sequence of digits - does not follow from this elementary property of real numbers. This would actually be a weaker version of absolute normality - the property of containing every finite sequence of digits in every base with "equal frequency" (scare quotes because this is more complicated than it sounds). While it is has been shown that "almost all" numbers are absolutely normal, it is surprisingly difficult to prove this property about a specific number. As far as I know, this has not been proven about any known number, including pi, although experimentally it has been confirmed for its calculated digits.

You know about time-energy uncertainty, right? It is less straightforward than the other Heisenberg uncertainties, but it is a feature of quantum mechanics. However, the uncertainty only manifests on the quantum scale; on the classical scale it averages out.

Infinity is something else. Somewhere, in the number pi, are all the phrases you have uttered during your life and, moreover, in the same order in which they were uttered. A little further on, there are all the books that disappeared because of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. In another place, there are all the speeches that Demosthenes gave and that he never wrote, but with the letters inverted, as in a mirror. Yes, the conception of what is infinite is too vast for me to grasp well in finite examples. — Borraz

This property has been conjectured for pi and certain other constants, but it has not been proven. In any case, knowing that a certain sequence is buried somewhere in that infinite stream is not as helpful as it might seem, because on average, the index that points to the beginning of the sequence that you are looking for would be so large that it would contain more information than the sequence itself. Think Borges's The Library of Babel. Anyway, this is indeed fun to think about, and the above mentioned conjecture has kept number theorists busy.