To disprove supervenience we would need to observe a change in mind state over a time interval in which the brain state did not change. Since brain states are always changing - think of all the subconscious processing necessary to keep our heart pumping and physiology regulated - there is no time interval in which brain states do not change. So it looks like the theory cannot be tested. — andrewk

I think your criterion is too strict - it would apply to any dynamical systems. We don't necessarily need to test supervenience in such direct, literal way. First of all, in order to even talk about supervenience, we need to have two commensurate theories, i.e. we need to have a theory of brain and a theory of mind, and we need to be able to relate these theories to each other, e.g. by relating mental states to neurophysiological states. If we could do that, then it might be possible, through theoretical analysis, to find an instance where the same neurophysiological state can correspond to two different mental states. How do we test that theoretical analysis? Not necessarily directly, as you suggest, but by validating each of the two theories against observations.

Yes. Supervenience assumes (or logically relies) on two assertions, (1) Reductionism and (2) determinism. — Kitty

No, it does not.

Well, the reductionism part may or may not be true, depending on how reductionism is defined. The loosest definition simply equates reductionism with supervenience, although most often something like Nigelian reduction is meant (i.e. deduction of the laws of the reduced system from the laws of the reducing system). If that is the sense of reductionism, then supervenience certainly does not logically depend on it.

And determinism is not relevant either. You can have a deterministic system supervene on a non-deterministic one (e.g. thermodynamics and statistical mechanics), and the other way around (statistical mechanics and molecular dynamics).

This is a dispute over land. That's what this is. If we accept Israel's right to the land it occupies, it stands morally right. If we don't, it doesn't, although I would not allow that the terroristic acts by the Palestinians are acceptable in any circumstance. — Hanover

Interesting asymmetry. Atrocities are conditionally excused on one side and unconditionally condemned on the other.

It's amazing how many crazy Jew-hating comments are on here. — LD Saunders

I stopped reading right here. If this is what you took away from the preceding discussion, then you are not in a position to participate in the discussion (for whatever reason; I am not going to speculate about the possible psychological reasons of such striking incomprehension).

sanctimonious — Sid

Please tell me that this was a drop of self-mocking irony. Because it would be sad if it wasn't.

The universe revolves around me, so should I not exist, it'd stop revolving. Yes, a revolving universe. That's what I said. — Hanover

The word is revolting. The universe is revolted by you.

According to Relativity there is no present moment because there are only different frames of reference in which time can run slower or faster relative to each other. — Ben St Clair

And to add to what @noAxioms said, you seem to be confusing eternalism, which the theory of Relativity does not assert, with relativity of simultaneity, which it does. But for your question, relativity of simultaneity is what you actually need, so no harm done.

Anything that can be described in the abstract, without essentially incorporating references to specific instances, would be substrate-independent. Anything that is usually referred to as a principle, mechanism, etc. would belong to this class. With a rich enough choice of available substrates, there's a chance that such a mechanism would have more than one instantiation.

There is nothing particularly unique about evolution in this regard. If you can describe evolution in such abstract terms, then it is ipso facto substrate-independent. But so is, say, the inverse-square law of attraction.

Nothing physical has changed - only your belief. — Wayfarer

As @Pierre-Normand noted, you need not appeal to such exotic examples as the placebo effect. One moment I was sitting on a chair, the next moment I decided to get up - and lo, I got up! "Nothing physical has changed" when I made my decision - or that is what a dualist would say, right? So it is a problem for the dualist to explain how a purely mental event could have a physical effect. For someone who says that the mental supervenes on the physical there is no such problem. "There is no difference without a difference" is the slogan of supervenience: there is no mental difference without a physical difference. So when I decided to get up, something physical did change.

Here is one nice example: Suppose a pigeon has been trained to peck on red objects and, thereafter, the pigeon is presented with a crimson object and pecks at it. The cause of the pecking behavior, one might say, is the 'event' that consist in the presentation of the specific crimson object. But the pigeon would still have pecked at the object if it had been scarlet, say. So, the antecedent event only can be said to be causative and explanatory of the effect when individuated with reference to the contrastive class 'non-red' rather than 'non-crimson'. And the same can be said of the contrastive character of the effect. — Pierre-Normand

You can also say that the cause of the pigeon's behavior was its prior training (contrasting it with untrained pigeons). Or the fact that it was awake and hungry (as opposed to asleep or sated). Or the fact that it was there and not elsewhere. And we've only considered the pigeon as an agent or an organism; we could go further into the various mechanical or physiological causes, and so on. There seem to be so many different causes of the same event operating at the same time, one ought to wonder how it is that they don't clash with one another! But of course they don't.

This ties in with what I said elsewhere about philosophers of mind: they sometimes seem unaware of the much wider context of their worries, such as that of epiphenomenalism. And just considering that wider context can serve, if not as a reductio, then at least as an important check.

Hence, for instance, the low-level explanation for the putative 'event' that was the occurrence of an upward movement of a hand doesn't constitute any kind of a rival causal explanation of the intentionally described event of someone's raising her hand. — Pierre-Normand

Yes. And to address the causal exclusion/overdetermination argument head-on, causation is contextual; there isn't some objective matter of fact about what causes what. Mental causation is in no way in competition with e.g. neurophysical causation because in each case causation is situated within an independent, self-contained explanatory scheme. Only other factors within the same explanatory context are relevant to it.

The question "what is the (morally) right thing to do?" is not a question which cannot be answered by science, it's a question which absolutely can be answered by science. — Pseudonym

Well, your one attempt so far in this conversation has been to replace the question with a different one (which, I contend, science cannot answer either):

"should we, as a species, kill our own mothers?" — Pseudonym

What you should have written, to be consistent with what you were saying earlier, is

"Do members of our species tend to kill our mothers?"

Which is even further removed from the original question.

Your stated position is that science can answer any question that can and should be answered, and that conversely, a question that cannot be answered by science, such as what is the (morally) right thing to do, consequently isn't meaningful or answerable. Whether the answer to the question seems obvious or not doesn't come into this.

If the question is "should we, as a species, kill our own mothers?" — Pseudonym

No, that's not the question. See, your tactics when in difficulty is to propose some different question that science can answer. This will not do.

Thanks for this discussion. I wasn't really impressed by the title paper, which trades in anecdotes that won't be very informative to non-experts, but in the end doesn't seem to express any clear vision; however, I'll be reading some of the linked materials.

By the way, Batterman has a topical article in the SEP: Intertheory Relations in Physics.

Other relevant overviews: Supervenience and Emergent Properties.

Perhaps some of you here wonder who these terrible reductionists are who hold such absurd and obviously untenable notions (not counting amateurs like Weinberg). Jaegwon Kim would be one such formidable foil (his work is discussed in above articles). His "Supervenience and Mind" is a locus classicus on the topic. But, to add to the general reviews cited above, he also has this short primer:

Emergence: Core ideas and issues

One point to note about Kim and some of the other authors who have written on the topic: Many of them come to it from the perspective of the philosophy of mind, and among their principle concerns are mental causation, epiphenomenalism, eliminativism (about the mental), and so forth. I find it frustrating that in their exclusive focus on the mental they often don't seem to see the larger context of such questions: science (not limited to cognitive science) and other explanatory projects. I am glad that this wider context is the focus of attention here, rather than the parochial questions of the "mental" vs. the "physical."

Neither of these things will help a person who has risen to the level of reflection in which they wonder whether the way they are currently living is the right way to live, or whether there even is such a thing as the right way to live. — PossibleAaran

Exactly. If a rational person is asking both of those two questions, then a rational person can see that the fact that there is sufficient doubt in the latter means that they cannot, with any certainty, answer the former. — Pseudonym

I can answer whether it is right for me to kill my mother; I consider both the question and the answer to be meaningful; and science has nothing to do with how I come up with the answer. Do you disagree with any of this?

President Trump repeated on Thursday his false assertion that the United States runs a trade deficit with Canada, the morning after privately telling Republican donors that he had deliberately insisted on that claim in a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada without knowing whether it was true. — Trump Repeats False Claim About Canada After Admitting Uncertainty Over Figure

Trump in a nutshell.

Russia, on the other hand, and Putin in particular, have a known history of imprisoning and killing opponents at home and abroad, and have suffered little in the way of consequences for it. — Baden

They probably figure that whatever consequences they are going to suffer this time have already been payed forward. Their reputation outside Russia couldn't get any worse than it already is, so nothing to lose on that count. And domestically this sort of thing is a sure win - both the assassination itself and the reaction abroad (it plays on the siege mentality).

Good post. Yes, taking what is commonly understood to be a Humean regularity view of the world*, "laws of nature" do not exist as some independently given ideal to which the world is bound to conform. The world just is regular - or not, as the case may be. Which makes it hard for a Humean to make sense of a miracle.

But even if we take a more hospitable approach by assuming the reality of the laws of nature, we then have to tackle those. What is a law of nature? It can't just be a precise specification of what actually happens, because no matter what happens, it could be specified, and that specification could be said to be a law. Thus, any purported miracle could be accommodated in a law that makes room for that miracle.

But that is an old-fashioned notion, because randomness seems to be built in. And randomness in radioactive decay, for example, seems to be unconditioned by the past. — unenlightened

It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to establish, just from observations and scientific models, whether there is "ontological" randomness in the world - or what that even means. Quantum mechanics, for example, has both indeterministic and deterministic interpretations.

I think, finally, that if there is any criterion for distinguishing the random from the miraculous, it must lie in the meaning/significance of the event. But that is a can of worms for another day, or another poster. — unenlightened

I think I'll follow you a little down this lane. I don't think that what is commonly thought of as miracles can be objectively, impersonally defined. The popular idea of a miracle is bound up with the idea of a miracle-maker. Hume wisely included God in his definition, though it could be any "miracle man." But man it has to be. Miracles are intentional and meaningful - that's the only way to understand them (quite apart from whether or not one believes in them).

* There is actually quite a broad and contradictory spectrum of views on Hume, for all his seeming clarity, but I don't want to get into exegesis.

My word for today is "woebegone." - looking sad, pitiful. — T Clark

That's a word that sounds right, but a naive parsing suggests a meaning that is the opposite of what it actually means. Woe - be gone! But, according to Dictionary.com, the etymology is "Middle English wo begon orig., woe (has or had) surrounded (someone); wo woe + begon, past participle of begon, Old English begān to surround, besiege".

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon...

Tenebrous.

Came up regularly in a book I once edited and I had to look it up. It still sounds to me to be the opposite of what it is. But maybe that's just me. — Baden

To speakers of Slavic languages it should sound just right: the first syllable stands of "shadow" or "darkness."


A word that I often encountered in Falkner, and practically nowhere else, is susurrating. Now that's a word that doesn't even need an explanation.

du
1. Contraction of de + le (of the)
2. Contraction of de + le; forms the partitive article

My entry ;)

I think that's not a bad definition, but what is it that you think people find so odious about that viewpoint? I mean, they're just saying that no other type of claim is valid, not that no-one can hold or talk about any other claims.

Obviously you might not agree with them in that, but I would commonly expect such disagreement to take the form "claims made using method X are valid because...", whereas all I hear in connection with the term Scientism, is the complaint that it denies claims of any other sort. Well, why shouldn't it? Surely, if one has at least a reasonable argument about epistemological claims, one is entitled to make it? — Pseudonym

Perhaps (contradicting what I've just said - I am large) "scientism" is perceived as a certain philosophical obliviousness. It is when someone prejudges science to be the right tool for the any job without giving the question any critical thought - i.e. precisely without having a reason for it.

Curious contradiction I can't quite unpick, in the first half of the paragraph you say I'm over-thinking it, in the second half you advise asking the users of the term to elaborate. Is that not exactly what I'm doing here? Where is the line you think I've crossed between asking for elaboration and over-thinking? — Pseudonym

I mean that the term by itself expresses more of a speaker's attitude than a motivated stance, which is what you've been demanding. If you are after reasons and arguments, then ask your counterpart to give you that, instead of just giving you the attitude.

I think perhaps you are looking for something which doesn't exist. You ask for a neutral, non-polemical definition of Scientism. I don't think there are any philosophers who willingly accept "Scientism" as a description of their views. Usually "Scientism" is used as a name for views which, in the eyes of the critic, elevate science into an unacceptably special position. — PossibleAaran

Yes, exactly. @Pseudonym, you are overthinking this. There is no such philosophical school of thought as Scientism. It is just a pejorative label; it expresses a subjective attitude. If someone throws an accusation of "scientism" in a conversation, don't agree or disagree, but ask to elaborate.

I don't know how old you are, so I don't know what perspective you are judging from. Let me make a list of major events in the course of liberal democracy since the end of WWII:

Reconstruction and rise of Europe. End to centuries of conflict
Reconstruction and rise of Japan and Korea
The United Nations
The breakup of the Soviet Union
Democracy in Eastern Europe
Independence of former European colonies
[*} Democratization of formerly authoritarian regimes
The end of Apartheid
The European Union
The Arab Spring
The rise of second string and third string economic powers - Brazil, China, India — T Clark

Your outlook seems to be stuck sometime 20 years ago. I remember, it felt like a hopeful time then. The fall of the Communist empire, the end of Apartheid, old seemingly intractable conflicts, like the one in Northern Ireland, finally dissolving, peace in Cambodia, the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Israelies negotiating with Palestinians, Pinochet's regime winding down... Of course, I was young then, and fortuitously situated to experience some of those events first-hand. But even accounting for the changes that advancing years bring to one's outlook, it's hard to deny that times have changed, and we are not living in the same period any more.

However, for China, Luce states that two prized historic events for modern China are "China's detonation of the Hydrogen bomb in 1964," and "Britain's transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997." Both examples, "show China's deep-rooted desire to be treated with respect and dignity." — Maw

A curious thing about China is that the historic events they tend to most dwell on are not of great victories and achievements but quite the opposite: defeats and humiliations - at the hands of foreigners, of course. Ressentiment is strong in traditional ideological propaganda, and the people seem to take well to it.

(This is gotten second- and third-hand, so take this with a grain of salt.)

That Einstein quip about the Moon should not be taken too literally (or at all literally). Its context is a scientific debate about quantum physics, which is wide-ranging and in large part philosophical in its own right, but since this is a metaphysics & epitemology section and your line of questioning doesn't seem to engage with that specific debate, we can leave it aside. Suffice it to say that in the context of the historical debate, indirect observation most definitely counts as an observation. If you can observe indirect effects of the Moon, that means that its wavefunction has long since "collapsed" (to use Bohr's preferred interpretation), so the question is moot.

Reading your glosses of Cartwright's attacks on the laws of nature (as well as one of her shorter papers), I have to wonder who is she arguing with? And just what exactly is she attacking?

To the extent that the positions that are being attacked are not vague generalities, here is what I can make out:

1. As a preliminary observation, what is meant by "laws of nature" in this context are specific statements, rules, equations that have traditionally been so called. So Newton's Law of gravitation is one such law.

2. And the criticism seems to come down to this: No one law of nature specifies the behavior of everything, ever, in all domains and all contexts.

Well, duh? How is that a criticism? Yes, a scientific "law" usually describes a particular regularity in a prescribed context and against the background of a specific theoretical framework. Or even just one principal component of what may be a superposition of regularities. How is that controversial?


Also, to better understand where Cartwright is coming from, it would help to note that she belongs to a powers/capacities/dispositions school of thought as regards causation. Things exercise their natural capacities in certain circumstances, and that is how everything happens in nature. You can see how the view of the "dappled world" comes about. While every given thing has a specific nature, a world filled with a bunch of different things with no overriding organizing principle (since all principles are local and attached to particular things), on the whole it's going to look "dappled."

There is a wide variety of views on causation, and no one of them dominates - indeed, different views do not necessarily exclude each other. I lean more towards causal pluralism myself (which Cartwright also advocates), but the powers-capacities view is perhaps my least favorite. It has a homely, intuitive appeal, but as an analytical tool I think it is very limited, and science does not sit well with it.

You mention assumptions and I suppose this could be the key to this, I have a horrible feeling that we must make assumptions about the nature of justification itself before we can apply it to anything, and that makes it seem feasible that we can make assumptions about the nature of reasoning and thereby develop a system of logic. Perhaps assumptions like, that we can know justification as a concept exists automatically without it itself requiring justification. This then makes me wonder if logic also doesn't require justification, though it also makes me wonder how I can, or whether I need to, justify those assumptions. — hymyíŕeyr

Yes, I think that's the right idea. However we structure our beliefs, ultimately the whole thing hangs free, so to speak: inevitably, some beliefs will not be grounded in any other beliefs, or else the structure of justification will have to be cyclical. So, taking the first option, if perforce some beliefs have to be ungrounded, why not logic? (Here I mean not mathematical logic(s) but the logic(s) that we routinely employ in reasoning.) A more natural choice would be hard to find. The second option is exemplified by the already mentioned pragmatic justification, which, as has also been pointed out, is ultimately circular.

Funny how you say that morality does not have to be grounded (any more than anything else), then immediately go on to posit a ground for morality. It doesn't work, of course. You can join anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists in proposing an explantion for morality, but that does nothing to justify moral beliefs.

But there exist theories as well that make the claim there is an objective universal morality. How are the theories that make a claim but then don't claim that claim to be objectively true different? — BlueBanana

Depends on what "objective" morality means - as others have pointed out, that is a fraught term.

Any moral theory that wishes to state what is a morally right thing to do should ground this claim on something. — BlueBanana

You are taking theory to mean more--or-less what it means in science, where theories are indeed descriptive and are (supposedly) grounded in publicly accessible, verifiable observations.

Just as a matter of language use, an ethical theory can be nothing more than a teaching - a cohesive system of beliefs that are accepted by way of persuasion or authority. In this case there is no requirement for the theory to be grounded in anything "objective," in the same sense in which objectivity is claimed for empirical theories.

More often in philosophy an advocate of an ethical theory will not ask you to accept it in toto on faith or authority, but will instead attempt to ground it in some truths and methods that are taken to be self-evident, and develop the theory from there. Which makes it basically no different from any other philosophical theory.

That said, I am also skeptical about normative - and even descriptive - ethical theories. I think they tend to unjustifiably simplify and "mathematize" a subject whose messy and complicated nature does not easily lend itself to such treatment.

The immediate answer is that controls already exist, although differing in different places. — tim wood

For context: How to Buy a Gun in 15 Countries

• I am not America or The West.
• I did not bomb Hiroshima or invade Iraq.
• I can - and should - have my own opinion about world events regardless of what I or anyone else has been doing.

Well, that was a random response to what I wrote, considering that I was talking about former Warsaw pact countries joining NATO.

You do understand that was Russian land right before Ukraine absorbed it, right? You are attributing me a propaganda group of the Russian side, when I made it clear that I was not for either side. — yatagarasu

And yet you are hitting all the usual propaganda bullet-points. Historical claims and grievances are always brought up to justify wars and invasions. Crimea was not Russian land before it was absorbed by the Russian Empire (with help from Ukrainian Cossacks), and it was not majority Russian until Stalin's ethnic cleansings. We could go back and forth like this endlessly - but what's the point? None of this justifies Russian aggression in this particular instance. Taking advantage of the turmoil in a neighboring country to stealthily invade part of its territory with troops, special forces and civilian thugs, overthrow the local government, close down or take over non-compliant media, intimidate or kidnap dissidents, hastily stage a "referendum" with fabricated results - I say that is wrong, whatever else may have been the case historically or contemporaneously.

But of course it's America birthright to invade and occupy nations and steal their oil or make them capitalist. — René Descartes

Talking about carving up the world, USA is leading by example. — CuddlyHedgehog

Ah well, if America is doing something wrong, then Russia can do no wrong. (Or something like that. The "logic" of tu quoque is hard to grasp.)

American neo-Imperialists — René Descartes

LOL. I am not even an American, let alone "neo-Imperialist."

As has been already stated, if you are willing to read, Russia has the 12th largest GDP, so I would not go on to call it impoverished. — René Descartes

Russia ranks 71 for per capita GDP, and half of it comes from selling its natural resources.

I see that putinverstehers are out in force :roll:

From a Russian perspective they see America as an adversary. (as they should) The Warsaw pact fell apart and NATO has reached all the way around Russia. — yatagarasu

Right, because it is Russia's birthright to dominate and subjugate and occasionally dismember its smaller neighbors, which the West should respect (or else!) It needs that security blanket of dependent states to insulate it from the West. Never mind that no one forced the former Communist nations to join NATO; they were clamoring to join as soon as Russia loosened its grip - and boy are they now glad they did! Montenegro couldn't get in fast enough. But who cares about them? Only nuclear superpowers are entitled to carve up the world as they see fit, right?

Putin's and Kim's rhetoric are getting more and more alike. Both autocrats preside over impoverished nations and demand respect by threatening to destroy the world in a nuclear Armageddon.

That said, despite the outward form of his appeal ("You didn't listen before - listen up now!"), Putin's rhetoric was probably intended more for domestic consumption. (The reception of those fabulous super-weapons of his was rather incredulous outside Russia's tightly controlled mass media.) Which is, if anything, even more disturbing. The traditional narrative preferred by Western leaders is to portray a people suffering under the thumb of a hated dictator; they just need a little help and encouragement to topple him - and then a bright liberal-democratic future beckons. But Russians love Putin, even as they suffer and grumble. And they lap up all this militaristic rhetoric.

And it's not just Russia. Eastern Europe is rapidly sliding back towards authoritarianism, much of the rest of Europe and even the US are being engulfed by right-wing populism... It feels like 1930s all over again, only this time on an even more global scale.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Interesting discussion, I haven't read all of it yet, but here's one little comment:

Prosaically, the perspective of a photon or of a (pathologically) distant motion is just as valid a reference frame sub specie aeternitatis as ones which preserve our causal orders. — fdrake

There is no such thing as the perspective of a photon. The perspective of a photon would be in its "own" reference frame, i.e. a reference frame where the photon is at rest. But there is no such reference frame.


A couple of references on the topic:

John Norton's "opinionated assessment of what we can learn about the ontology of space and time from the special and general theories of relativity":

Also, since causality has been brought up repeatedly, it is perhaps worth mentioning that there are nomologically possible violations of causality both in special and in general relativity. John Earman has written about it a number of works, such as Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know.

What does this mean though? What is right is what has to be done? Is it about rules? — Πετροκότσυφας

It is about what ought to be done (or avoided). I doubt that "ought" can be adequately reduced to something that is more basic.

So if you are willing to think of moral behaviour as that which promotes the best solution for the community — unenlightened

But that is not what moral behavior is in reality.

You will have to explain why this "helping ourselves" is some kind of problem. It might be if you believed that deduction is more fundamental than induction or something. But how can it be if it is the other way around? — apokrisis

I am not saying that helping ourselves to induction is a problem - quite the opposite. Or if it is a problem, any "cure" that has been proposed so far - any putative justification for induction - is worse than the "disease."

I don't think that deduction is less fundamental than induction; deductive reasoning seems to be at least as fundamental as inductive. But that doesn't mean that one can subsume the other.

I hit the cat and it runs away! — charleton

GTFO

Determinism can be framed deductively as:

1.There are immutable laws which determine every event down to the minutest detail
2. Every event must occur exactly as it does occur and the immutable laws are its sufficient reason — Janus

I am not sure why you bring up determinism at this point. Are you saying that inductive/deductive split is equivalent to indeterminism/determinism? The laws of nature could be deterministic, but we don't know that (we don't even know that there are laws of nature). And even if we did somehow know that with certainty, that knowledge alone wouldn't have removed the need for inductive inference, since we still wouldn't have had sufficient information to deduce everything we wish to know.

You can also put specific inductive inferences into deductive forms by adding extra premises which insure that you must end up with the result that is observed. — Janus

That wouldn't be the same inference - it would be a different inference with the same conclusion. But I in any case, I am not seeing the significance of this observation.