That sentiment might have had some plausibility twenty years and six months ago.

I basically agree. Practicality and efficiency render skepticism unhelpful in terms of getting on with our daily lives; however, this wouldn't by any means render the initial argument null and void. — PessimisticIdealism

The initial argument is null and void because, as others have pointed out, the realist does not have to accept your burden of proof. All you did was formulate a basic skeptical argument, and most people, realists included, already accept that skepticism cannot be rigorously eliminated. But that doesn't make it the default position. Why should it be the default position?

Yes. — TheMadFool

No, you still don't understand. Suppose the die already landed and came to rest, but you can't see it - it rolled under a couch. The outcome is not just deterministic - it's already determined. Does that fact help you with guessing the answer? It doesn't, and you still don't have anything better than probability. So would you say that a die lying on the floor under your couch "exhibits probabilistic properties?" That would be stupid (but what else is new?)

Probability is about what you don't know. Whether what you don't know is inherently indeterministic or whether it is a matter of fact doesn't make a difference to you. You still don't know what you don't know. So what do you do? You could say "I don't know," but if you have to make decisions based on incomplete knowledge, you use probability.

You are attempting to explain why people have consciousness from the evolutionary psychology standpoint. That's not the "hard problem of consciousness" - that's one of the "easy" problems.

And of course this question has already been taken up and developed long before you ever thought of it, so you might want to start by reading up on what's already been done in this area.

What causes an unequivocally deterministic system to exhibit probabilistic behavior? — TheMadFool

Exhibit is the keyword here. What is exhibited is in the eye of the beholder - it is not just an objective property of a system. A system may hypothetically be perfectly deterministic (although how could you know that with certainty?), but if you don't know enough about its behavior, then you can, at best, predict it probabilistically. Typically, when a die is thrown, there is no practical way to predict its exact trajectory (even if there was a fact of the matter about what that trajectory would be), nor even which side it is more likely to land on. Lacking such information, the prudent bet is to distribute probability equally between each of the six sides. (If you systematically fail to do this, then a competing player could exploit your bias to gain an advantage.)

1. Is probability an illusion? — TheMadFool

Calling it an "illusion" implies that you know better. But you don't - hence probability. Probability is a function of our uncertainty.

To me, if a thread is generating discussion it has merit even if the topic or OP is of low quality. — DingoJones

My observation is that the only threads that may not generate discussion are those with a very narrow focus, such as concerning a specific philosophical work - and those can actually be high-quality posts. Low quality threads tend to generate discussion, if only for people to comment on their low quality or to post easy takedowns.

But my point is that what is done there, in my relatively long experience, never rises to the level of philosophy, that is, a discussion of ideas with a reasoned and reasonable back-and-forth. — tim wood

You could say the same thing about discussions elsewhere on the forum, with the same justification.

Not least bcause even any discussion towards an agreement on terms seems impossible, never mind reasonable argument. — tim wood

Oh right, just as I thought. Your own recent thread in that forum didn't go to your liking, so you are lashing out against the forum. (I didn't look at it much, TBH - the premise for the discussion didn't look promising.)

Make up your mind: are you talking about physics or mathematics? Physics, even mathematical physics, is about something - something over which we have no control and of which we can only judge on the basis of past observations - hence the problem of induction. Pure mathematics is not about anything, at least not about anything over which we don't have ultimate control - such as our own definitions and postulates.

Which gives logic and math a kind of atemporal, aspatial quality. Which is odd, given that we inhabit temporal, spatial universe of change. — Marchesk

There's nothing mysterious here. Logic and math are our constructs, and as ideas that we entertain our minds, write down and communicate to each other, they originate in time, change and disappear - same as with our ideas about the world. But there is a fundamental disanalogy here between purely abstract ideas and ideas about the world: abstract ideas are not about anything, so they don't answer to the challenge of observation, which is what the problem of induction is all about.

ETA Or what said.

What are these destructive conclusions of which you speak? — A Seagull

I just said, didn't I? (Assuming you are replying to me.)

Hume's problem of induction is not just about certainty. It's about plausibility as well - any kind of empirical inference. And it's a problem, if Hume's or similar arguments have force, because we clearly don't believe their conclusion. So you can oppose the argument (that we have no warrant for empirical inferences) or you can bite the bullet and accept its destructive conclusion, but you can't deny that there is a problem here.

Assuming we can adequately define reason, did rational thinking make human beings more ethical in the past, perhaps in Plato's era, and is this still the case? — Enrique

That's an interesting question, but I suppose that the answer will depend on one's thinking about ethics. A lot, probably most people, think of ethics as a system with a more-or-less objective existence, not unlike the laws of nature. It is then up to us to discover and work out that system and its implications, similar to the way we conduct scientific research and work out logical and mathematical problems. If so, then it is reasonable to think that rationality is a sine qua non for coming to the right ethical conclusions, at least if you work them out on your own, rather than just following someone's lead or complying with established norms.

Personally, I am skeptical about ethical systems. I don't see how it would even be reasonable to suppose that ethics is anything like science or logic. I lean more towards emotivist and related views. So I would think that while rationality is important for decision-making, ethical motivations themselves do not owe much to reason.

Ignore the troll. Why is it so hard?

So it seems as though ethics are in a degenerate or inadequate state. — Enrique

Why does it seem so to you? And by ethics do you mean people's actual moral/ethical outlooks, or the study of ethics, or what?

You and the other responders are right to pick on the first premise, but I think before or instead of trying to correct it with what we think is a more accurate prediction of the traits that evolution is likely to produce, the ignorance and hubris of presuming such knowledge just from a general idea of biological evolution (whether accurate or not) needs to be pointed out. Evolution is not "survival of the most vicious," nor is it "survival of the most cooperative" - it can't be summed up by a slogan or caricature. Evolution is messy and complicated, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who is paying attention to the world around them. Evolution is messy and complicated because nature is messy and complicated.

You can find just about every conceivable example of adaptation in nature. There are relatively innocuous symbiotic parasites, but there are also really odious ones who still do pretty well for themselves. There are social organisms, but there are antisocial loners as well. Evolution follows no general principles: it is opportunistic. If there is a viable niche, it will probably be filled, for as long as it stays viable.

Let’s look at the premises. It seems to be true that the slightest variation beyond certain physical constants would not result in the universe as we understand it. Thus premise 2 appears to be correct. — ModernPAS

No, from the fact that the universe is in some way* sensitive to variations in certain physical constants doesn't follow that the universe "is an extremely unlikely event." For the universe to be such an event, it has to be embedded in some kind of causal event flow. The argument makes an implicit assumption that on naturalism, something gave rise to the universe with its known laws of constants. Not only that, but it also assumes that on naturalism, the process that led to the creation of the universe as we know it resulted in a random selection of its known fundamental constants. Neither of these assumptions are justified. While one can imagine such a naturalistic scenario, naturalism in general is not beholden to it.

* It is actually not easy to articulate just what that sensitivity means. Most physical constants are real numbers that could hypothetically vary within an infinite range. If so, then there is no distinction between fine-tuning and coarse-tuning: any finite interval you care to choose would represent an infinitely small fraction of the full range. This consideration nullifies the intuitively impressive numerology that presenters of the fine-tuning argument usually bring to bear.

writing this post for credit in a “Philosophy of Religion” class — ModernPAS

Oh, that's where the sudden influx of phil. of religion posts comes from? Are you guys all taking the same class?

The origin and development of language is a subject that has been extensively studied by linguists. Do you have any familiarity with that field, or are you trying to develop your own theory of scratch?

But what are you abstracting from? Scientists abstract from observations or from more fine-grained models. What is the basis for your proposal?

Logic. — Zelebg

Logic, as pure reason or as a mathematical theory, says literally nothing about free will or any empirical matters. But if you mean to say that your proposal "makes sense" to you, then you are confirming my impression that you are just making shit up. And as I said, with all the research into volition and decision-making that we already have, there is no value in such uninformed speculation. If you are interested in this topic, then do yourself a favor and read up on it.

And you still have not said anything about the philosophy of free will. After some fantasy neuroscience, you just bluntly state that this is what free will is, and leave it at that. Oh, and throw in "downward causation" for good measure, without saying anything else.

It is an abstraction. I am talking in terms of logic not in terms of any other particular science. It seems you are not aware of the problem I am proposing to solve, otherwise I would expect far more appreciation for even a bare possibility such causal mechanics could exist in principle. — Zelebg

It seems that you are not aware that causal mechanisms behind decision-making have been an active area of cognitive science research for decades. You are not exactly blazing new paths here with your speculations. And all of it is an abstraction, of course - such is the nature of scientific modeling. But what are you abstracting from? Scientists abstract from observations or from more fine-grained models. What is the basis for your proposal?

The connection with free will is in that it describes possible causal algorithm for choice process and example of true downward causation.

Then this is what you should be focusing on if you want to talk philosophy. Leave causal mechanisms to scientists (or acquire some expertise yourself before diving in). What connection is there between "free will" and causal mechanisms of choice processes? How is this an example of downward causation?

And no, asking choanic rhetorical questions to deflect criticism won't do. Since this is a topic that interests you, you owe it to yourself, fist of all, to ask and to answer such questions.

If this is not free will, then what exactly is it I am not free from, in this case? — Zelebg

What you have here is an attempt to guess the neurochemical mechanism of decision-making, made by someone with no knowledge of neuroscience. We can do a lot better than that, as far as the neurochemical mechanism of decision-making is concerned. What this has to do with free will though is anyone's guess.

We believe that making even a small change in the past, would drastically alter the present. — Mark Dennis

No, we don't.

So is the Optimism butterfly the one we should be collectively stepping on? — Mark Dennis

Um, I think you got lost in your metaphors here. Stomping on an optimism butterfly is supposed to accomplish what? Extinguish optimism?

Yes, I have read the Bradbury story when I was a kid. But it's just a story, an entertaining thought experiment; besides, if you remember, the effect, as described in the story, was rather subtle, was felt tens of millions of years after the event, and was completely unpredictable - so no drastic changes from small disturbances and no apparent connection between cause and its distant effect. There are some chaotic systems in the world, but lucky for us, they are few and far between, otherwise any sort of stable, structured existence would have been impossible. For the most part, nature seems to be quite robust.

Philosophy (as the imfamous badinage goes) really is the history of who said what when, and people who haven't learnt it aren't going to have a clue no matter what their native skill. — Isaac

As an outsider, I get a perhaps distorted impression that much of academic philosophy is indeed more of a philology - a study, interpretation and analysis - sometimes apologetic, rarely critical - of texts, as well as a history of ideas, or as you said, who said what when.

I am open to possibilities, but possibilities are endless, and without a shred of justification there is no reason to take any particular possibility seriously.

By Intelligence I don't imply human-like in any way or form — staticphoton

The only intelligence that we know is human-like (or animal-like, if you want to broaden the notion a bit). This is where the word gets its meaning. If you are talking about an intelligence that is not human-like "in any way or form," then either you are talking about something else entirely and "intelligence" is a misnomer, or you don't even know what you are talking about and are using "intelligence" as a wildcard. But I suspect that the picture in your mind is nothing more than the bog-standard anthropomorphic deity, only slightly updated for modern secular sensibilities from its traditional archetype.

And "a closed system subject to fixed constraints" like you refer to, does not preclude the possibility that the universe was formulated through a conscious, deliberate process. — staticphoton

Well, nothing can preclude that possibility, seeing as it is left completely unspecified, so this isn't saying much. But wouldn't it be more parsimonious to say that the world just happens to be orderly, rather than that our universe just happens to have been made orderly by some Intelligence, which just happened to be there? If I am to take seriously the attempt at distancing from the traditional divine creation narrative, then I just can't see any attraction in this overcomplicated account.

When I come across and organized system/structure, it is easier to accept the system was constructed under and intelligent process than to believe it to be the result of random and disorderly interactions — staticphoton

But why set up such a dichotomy: either chaos or human-like agency (aka "intelligent design")? Aren't you missing the simplest, most obvious alternative: structure? "Structure" not as a house or a bridge, but in a more general sense, as a closed system subject to fixed constraints - what is conventionally called "laws of nature."

Hah, I can't believe I am the only one so far to have owned up to possessing no philosophical education. Of course, if this counts as education...

I have found Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Incerto series of books a really good read: "Black swan", "Antifragile", "Fooled by randomness", "Skin in the game", ... I have also read many of his blog posts. His focus is on epistemology, i.e. the question, "What is knowledge?", always centred around, and starting from the question of how we deal with randomness. — alcontali

You and I seem to have very different histories of our atheism, and given the religious demographics I suspect most peoples' is more like mine than yours. — Pfhorrest

The religious demographics are such that most atheists don't live in the US and don't have backgrounds similar to yours. But more to the point, I believe that even among those who were raised in a religious environment, most people don't become atheists through systematic, bottom-up construction of a comprehensive philosophical system, while setting aside their background beliefs for later reevaluation.

Allow me to go on a little digression. Textbook presentation of science is sometimes faulted for being sanitized and divorced of its historical context. Ideas are presented not in the order and the form in which they were originally introduced; justifications and relationships between ideas have been restructured in light of a more modern understanding. The end result is a "rational-communicative artifice" () that is thought to be - and most likely is - more pedagogically appropriate. But science has the advantage of having a fairly objective external standard of empirical evidence, of which we can avail ourselves at all times. (You can, of course, attack that standard in various ways, but you can't deny that there is a standard.) We are not constrained, once and for all, to reproduce the same historical approach: we can restructure our ideas and proceed to test them against empirical observations without any loss of legitimacy.

Philosophy doesn't have such a standard. You can judge parts of a system (and I am using the word "system" loosely here) against the background of the rest of the system, but the system as a whole is without anything like an objective foundation. (Any standard that you might propose, such as absence of contradictions, empirical soundness, etc. would itself be philosophical, and thus internal to the system.) Thus lacking an objective foundation, philosophy is something that just grows out of the soil of your temperament, life experiences, socialization, intellectual exploration. Having or not having religious experiences and an attitude or a position on the God question, which for most people predates having articulated philosophical ideas, is not an insignificant constituent of that soil. Nor is it something that you can easily shut off or compartmentalize while you cogitate on your philosophy. It will bleed through one way or another into the way you think and the choices you make.

If you want to engage people on this forum with your ideas, don't post a link to a video with a message that amounts to "go watch my video." There's absolutely no way I will go off to watch some Youtube video about god knows what made by god knows who. In fact, it's very unlikely that I'll go watch a video, period - and I am not alone in this. Short written essays are much better suited to philosophy discussions than rambling 'tube clips.

First of all, to get people interested (or not, as the case may be), write a one-two paragraph abstract summarizing the topic: what issues you address, what approach you take, and what your findings are. Then you can follow with a longer essay, or even a video, if you absolutely must.

I'm an atheist and it's an incidental consequence of the rest of my philosophy — Pfhorrest

I was tempted at first to pick this option, that is to say that my atheism is a consequence of my philosophical positions. But this suggests a causal history that never took place in my case - and I suspect in the case of many, perhaps most atheists. As a matter of fact, I was raised secular, and I was an atheist long before I had anything that could be meaningfully identified as a "philosophy."

As I thought more about this, I realized that my qualms went further than just the facts of my biography. Yes, I could reconstruct my philosophy along the lines that you suggest:

in order to answer questions like "Is there a God?" and "Should we do what he says?", we first have to be able to answer questions of forms like "Is there X?" and "Should we X?" more generally. Once you've done that, figured out some way to answer questions about what is or ought to be, then you have already built a philosophical system; all the philosophically important questions are answered. Now you can ask whether there's a God and whether you should do what he says, using that philosophy, and it might make a big practical difference in life, but it can't make any difference to the philosophy used to answer those questions. — Pfhorrest

As I already indicated, in my case at least, this reconstruction is not true historically. But is it true in any sense? You argue, it seems, that it is better to ground your God beliefs on more general epistemic, ontological and ethical positions than the other way around. This may be plausible, at least for an atheist, in the sense that such structuring would appear to be more balanced and parsimonious. But whence the grounding for those supposedly more fundamental philosophical positions? The fact that they are held to be fundamental means that they are not grounded in anything more than my temperament, my intellectual development throughout my life and the accumulation of experiences. But isn't this also what made me an atheist in my pre-philosophical years? And doesn't my atheism constitute part of that psychological and intellectual background out of which my philosophical leanings formed?

And so, answering this checken-and-egg conundrum for myself, it seems very plausible that my preexisting atheism influenced the development of my philosophical ideas (that is what you consider to be philosophical ideas, which seems to be mostly limited to basic epistemology, but let's set this aside for the moment). Did the influence go in the other direction as well? Very much so: the more I examined the God question philosophically, the more confident I grew in my atheism. But this is hardly an argument for the primacy of philosophy [epistemology]. We naturally seek to rationalize our preexisting beliefs. And given that my preexisting beliefs were partly responsible for the way I was reasoning, this could have been little more than a self-reinforcing cycle.

Therefore, my atheism could be said to be a consequence of my philosophy in the sense that, after the fact, my beliefs could be categorized and restructured so as to make atheism a consequence of some general philosophical framework that I endorse, but not in any other sense.

Why are you people in the minority? — 3017amen

...in the US (but it's not like there's anything outside the US, right? - not anything that matters, anyway.)

Why are people of color in the US on average poorer and less educated than white people? Something must be wrong with them, or they must be doing something wrong.

You can expand and strengthen your contact and interaction with the rest of the world by augmenting your natural senses with technology (something that we are already doing, of course) - that's as far as I would go.

As for your original thesis, it contains some problematic assumptions, chief of which is that there is something that "reality actually looks like." What something looks like is not just a property of the thing that is being perceived, but rather a property of perception, which involves both the perceiver and the perceived. So what "reality looks like" to the perceiver will be in part a function of the perceiver - including any technological augmentation that she employs.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We — jamalrob

Hah, that's an interesting choice. Nowadays the book is probably more name-checked than actually read, but I thought it was a well-written novella in the antiutopia genre (not to mention prophetic - it was written hot on the trail of the Bolshevik revolution, almost 30 years before 1984).

Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia — jamalrob

Apropo of nothing, I slightly know his father, a Russian poet, and I met the future author when he was still in school. Haven't read the book though.

I have a vague memory of S as Sapientia on the old forum. I eventually put him on ignore, but if memory serves, that was on account of high-volume inanity, rather than obnoxiousness. He must have changed over the years that I've been ignoring him.

I won't miss him, but I hesitate to say that I am not sorry about what happened. For someone who spent so much time on the site, it can be a hard blow.

Gaussian curvature
Curved Space

Be careful with Wolfram, I think he is a bit of a crank. At best, he is the proverbial man with a hammer who sees nails everywhere.

I would rather recommend John Norton articles, such as What Can We Learn about the Ontology of Space and Time from the Theory of Relativity?

Is the wording [irrational - SC] just used to express condemnation? — Rufoid

Yes, but not just any condemnation. One can, for example, condemn a decision on moral grounds without judging it irrational. Rationality is an epistemic standard. It's not easy to define what that standard amounts to, except by the method used by dictionary-makers, i.e. by observing how the word is being used "in the wild" and extracting a general pattern (or several) that fits most such usages.

If I think I have a good reason for following bird omens, aren't my actions rational? — Rufoid

Yes, acting on good reasons is close in meaning to acting rationally, though I think 'reason' is a somewhat broader category than 'rationality.'

So, do you think there is a meaning of rationality outside the narrow procedural sense? Or would you use a more general term like "reason"? — Echarmion

Yes, of course, I was only engaging 'rationality' in the stripped-down sense in which @Rufoid seemed to be using the word, as nothing more than rule-following. But rationality, as we usually understand the word, is more than just following some arbitrary rules; the rules have to be the right rules. Colloquially, rationality and reason are more-or-less interchangeable. Both have a normative component, in addition to structure and generality.

If we take the scientific method as an example, would you say the method itself is rational, or merely that we can rationally apply the method? And if the method is not itself "rational", then how do we describe it's justification? — Echarmion

The scientific method is a distillation of our "rational" (in the usual sense) epistemology, so of course, as with our less formal epistemic practices, the scientific method has a normative justification. It cannot be bootstrapped out of nothing.

Right, "checking their internal structure on the basis of shared human mental structures" would be one such reductive procedure. "Greatest happiness (or 'thriving') for the greatest number of people" is another - quite different - stand-in for rational morality (if you don't like 'objective'). Or you could, you know, decide on the basis of which kind of bird you see first thing in the morning, or use any number of other "rational," i.e. universal and consistent procedures that reduce the answer to some objective facts or events.

The thing about rationality, in the narrow procedural sense, is that it is completely sealed. It is a game that you play by the rules that you and your fellow participants agree to follow. You cannot get out of it anything other than what you put into it in the first place when you agreed on the rules. The choice of the rules and the decision to stick to them are not rational though (unless they are the outcome of some other rational game, but that only pushes the problem back one step).

This kind of brings to mind arguments over "objective" morality and the is/ought gap. What often stands for said objectivity is some consistent reductive procedure for deciding moral questions - even if, in a deductio ad absurdum, the procedure were as arbitrary as examining bird entrails.