Our primary source of confidence in our senses and our reason is that we don't have a choice. You either take them as given or you are lost.

So I will continue to take my faculties for granted, except when they prove to have been at fault, which, alas, is often enough. — unenlightened

Yes.

Doesn't follow. Nothing follows if you can't take the reliability of your cognitive faculties for granted. The argument is so corrosive that it undermines everything, including itself.

No, I think Nagel is right in this instance. You cannot pull yourself out of the abyss of skepticism by your bootstraps using reasoning and empirical evidence if the very reliability of reasoning and observation are in question. It is good that evolutionary science can give a plausible account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties, but that cannot be your source of confidence in them. You have to "help yourself to a little something" (Plantinga's expression) to even start.

But so does everyone, no matter their beliefs. Theists aren't better grounded just because they help themselves to imaginative origin stories and rationalizations of why the good Lord would not allow a malicious demon to systematically deceive them.

I think it is in the interests of NATO states to oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One could oppose the invasion on moral grounds, but that might be more hypocritical than self-interest. Europe didn't care that much about the USSR invading Afghanistan--who, outside a small circle of friends, did care? But Ukraine is WAY TOO CLOSE for comfort, being right up against NATO's and the EU borders. — BC

Caring about something is not hypocritical unless it is not genuine. And don't see any reason to believe that most Europeans who object to the Russian invasion on moral grounds are insincere. That they allegedly didn't care that much about the Afghan invasion may be unfortunate, perhaps even hypocritical (if they used hypocritical rationalizations for their indifference), but that doesn't make their present reaction hypocritical.

Do you care about anyone in your life? Do you ever help anyone? Or do you worry that not caring about every person in the world to the same extent and not helping everyone who needs help in equal measure would make you a hypocrite?

No, I was thinking of "nothing about me without me", where folk mention a member without linking their name. Once or twice might be forgetfulness, but here are a few repeat offenders. — Banno

I don't see a need to be notified whenever someone mentions me. This doesn't happen offline (and that's probably for the best), so why should this be a rule online? If I get a mention, I take it that they want me to attend to it. If that wasn't their intent, then why bother me?

Scale of alleged torture, detentions by Russian forces in Kherson emerges

This is in regards to why those selfish Ukrainians are giving their lives to defend their country, instead of "accepting the realities" and letting Russia steamroll over the rest of the country, as it originally intended (and apparently still does).

The numbers that are emerging on the scale of alleged detentions and torture, “point to widespread and grave criminality in Russian-occupied territory,” said British lawyer Nigel Povoas, lead prosecutor with a Western-backed team of legal specialists assisting Kyiv’s efforts to prosecute war crimes.

Povoas said there appears to have been a pattern to inflict terror and suffering across Ukraine, which reinforces “the impression of a wider, criminal policy, emanating from the leadership” to target the country’s civilian population. — Reuters

3. You can choose which subjects appear in your All Discussions feed. Go to the Categories page and uncheck the categories you don't want to see. — Jamal

Does this work for anyone? I don't see any way to check or uncheck a category on the Categories page.

Instead, if you open a particular category page, at the bottom of the discussion list there is a faint eye icon. Clicking it will toggle the visibility of the category on the All Discussions feed.

The states and organisations only act when they see it is worthy for their own interests and I don't understand why the Western world is caring that much about Ukraine. I feel I am not seeing something. — javi2541997

You mean to say that your horse is higher because you don't care about anything (besides your income, natch)?

Well, if you believe that "states and organisations only act when they see it is worthy for their own interests" then it should be obvious why the Western world is caring about the biggest war in Europe since WWII. But another reason is that not everyone in the Western world is a selfish rat, and governments and organisations in democratic nations care about public opinion.

The difference between National Socialists and plain socialists appears to be pretty tenuous.

The problem here isn't just that you are ignorant of the facts (you are). The problem is that you think that it's OK for one country to invade and subjugate another if from 2000 km they all look pretty much the same to you, and besides, gas prices are more important, so why are they being so selfish about resisting brutal occupation? In other words, this is an issue of values, not an issue of facts. If you don't get it, you don't get it, and there's nothing for us to talk about.

No one would say that you are "seeing brain states" when you look at something. — SophistiCat

Then I am gratified you are here to disabuse me. I won't ask for a thesis, just the essential idea you have in mind. — Constance

We started this discussion with the thesis "The brain is the generative source of experience," which was presented as an essential physicalist commitment. I won't dispute that, though I personally think that physicalism is not so much about specific scientific commitments. With that in mind, a physicalist should be committed to the idea that what we call "seeing" is generated (in some sense) by the activity of the brain.

In what sense is seeing "generated" by the brain? I would say that the weakest physicalist commitment would be the supervenience relationship between seeing and brain activity (that is to say, no difference in what we see without a corresponding difference in brain activity). Some would go further than that, asserting a stronger reductive relationship between the folk-psychological concept of "seeing" and its physical realization.

The subject is different. While Poland is country with his own history, language, culture and system, Ukraine is basically a little Russia — javi2541997

Ookey... So Ukraine does not have its own history, language and culture and does not have a right to exist as a sovereign nation (no matter what its people think). In that case they totally deserve to be invaded and subjugated. Got it :roll:

we do not see any move by Ukraine to end this war... he is acting selfish and is choking the world economy just for his nationalist business. He is acting like the rest of the world is not in trouble... — javi2541997

Very selfish indeed. Why can't they just quit their resistance to the invasion and let Russia rampage over the rest of the country? No one would care (except for Ukrainians, but they aren't even a people, so they don't count).

Also Poland was as much responsible for WWII as Hitler and Stalin.

but logic* as a field does not present an argument or a justification of itself. — SophistiCat

This would be true if logic were, magically, its own interpretative base — Constance

That's the opposite of what I said.

I first put this out there to show how physicalism as a naive thesis, lacks epistemic essence. — Constance

What do you think the thesis of physicalism is? I don't think there is a single generally recognized physicalist doctrine. It is more of a family resemblance among philosophical treatments of certain subjects.

I see my cat and I am thereby forced to admit I am reductively seeing brain states only. — Constance

That's hardly even a caricature of physicalism. No one would say that you are "seeing brain states" when you look at something.

Phenomenology remedies this matter, I argue. — Constance

Well, I was hoping to find out more about "this matter" (not so much about phenomenology), but I am making no progress in teasing it out.

But you are talking about the very possibility of discoursing (logically) about logic, and I don't see a problem with that. — SophistiCat

And there is none. What you talk about is the very reason why we have the discipline called logic. the point I am making is that this field is question begging in the same way physics is question begging when it talks about, say, force. They talk about and use this term freely and make perfect sense, usually, but ask what a force is, and you will get blank stares; well, at first you will get explanatory attempts that contextualize the meaning, by when you get to "where the ideas run out" as Putnam put it, it has to be acknowledged that physics hasn't a clue as to the "true nature" of force. Go to something like Plato's Timaeus and you find some intriguing inroads, but mostly pretty useless. — Constance

An argument or a justification can beg the question, but logic* as a field does not present an argument or a justification of itself. I already acknowledged that logic cannot be grounded in more logic, but that is in no way controversial, nor does it present a challenge for its study.

* Or rather, rationality, which includes informal logic, as well as other standards of reasoning and decision-making.

(I don't want to derail this conversation further, but if you are interested, Feynman (who rather disparaged philosophy as a discipline) has a good philosophical discussion of the nature of force and its treatment in physics in his Lectures: Characteristics of Force. (I dare say, this is more useful than Timaeus.) He sort of agrees with you.)

Anyway, I still don't see how this addresses the thesis that started this conversation:

If the brain were the generative source of experience, every occasion of witnessing a brain would be itself brain generated. This is the paradox of physicalism. — Constance

What paradox?

I thought the analogy of logic clear. — Constance

I would rather address the original question directly.

No, I don't find the analogy with logic any more clear. Anything can be the subject of a discourse, including logic. At the same time, as you note, logic structures discourse. But I don't see a vicious circularity here, if that is what you are leading to. You cannot ground or justify logic with more logic - that much is clear. But you are talking about the very possibility of discoursing (logically) about logic, and I don't see a problem with that.

I don't see how, at the level of basic questions, anything can be posited that is not phenomena. — Constance

Well, then you do deny the premise, and that's that. You cannot make an argument against a contrary position without first taking it on its own terms. If you deny the position outright, or, as you admit, don't even understand it, then there is no argument to be made.

That encountering is phenomenological. What isn't? — Constance

Indeed, especially if you understand "phenomena" and "encountering" as one and the same, or one being a species of the other. But I don't see where that gets us.

If you accept the brain as the generative source of consciousness and its phenomena, you are also a brain doing the accepting, so the question goes to where the authority of the accepting lies, for one simply can't get beyond the brain-itself-as-phenomenon, for to affirm a brain as not a phenomenon, one would have to stand apart from a phenomena. — Constance

I am not following your argument. I am stuck at "one simply can't get beyond the brain-itself-as-phenomenon, for to affirm a brain as not a phenomenon, one would have to stand apart from a phenomena." Can you expand on this?

Is it that you are committed to the idea that "everything is a phenomenon," and therefore there is no such "thing" as a brain? If so, then you are merely denying the premise. The only contradiction here is between the premise "the brain is the generative source of consciousness" and your commitment to phenomenology.

Or: How can consciousness position itself to "see" consciousness in order to discuss what it is?

I don't see a problem here. Is it self-reference that is giving you difficulty? Self-reference is not necessarily paradoxical.

Indeed, and this is an extraordinary point: If the brain were the generative source of experience, every occasion of witnessing a brain would be itself brain generated. This is the paradox of physicalism. — Constance

I don't see any paradox here. Can you explain?

LESS TALKING MORE SHOUTING1!1

I DISAGREE!!1

Nice. I am listening the whole set.



A while ago I was binging on Purcell and Handel, especially their lesser known keyboard works. These guys rock!

Purcell


Handel

What trips people up is conflating an understanding of consciousness with understanding the NCCs (neural correlates of consciousness). — hypericin

I would include here all scientific and scientifically informed studies of consciousness, including psychology and some philosophy of mind.

You can imagine in the future that we might have a complete accounting of the NCCs, a complete description of all the relevant brain structures and how they interact with one another. But nonetheless, we still can't conceptually make the leap from this description to the first person features of consciousness: qualia, what-is-it-like, etc. — hypericin

Well, this gets me back to what I said about explanations. We have a good idea of what a scientific explanation is (neuroscience, psychology, etc.) But you say: No, that's not it, that's just such-and-such "correlates" of consciousness. OK, but do you have an idea of what it is that you are looking for in an explanation of "the first person features of consciousness"? How would it differ from the other kind? How would you recognize a successful explanation?

And I don't mean to say that scientific explanations are the only explanations that deserve the name. But to even have a discussion about this, we should understand what it is that we are looking for. And that seems to be the one thing that is conspicuously missing in most such discussions.

You have to explain how it is — hypericin

I am suspect that, like @Art48 and some others in this discussion, you are not clear on what the Hard Problem of Consciousness is supposed to be. It is not about describing in detail how consciousness works - that is supposed to be the Easy problem (hah!) The Hard problem is explaining "qualia" - first-person experience, what-it-is-likeness - in an objective, third-person scientific framework. So the framing already assumes a certain kind of dualism in the world: objective vs subjective, first-person vs third-person.

To compound the problem, those engaged in this discussion often aren't clear on just what they are looking for in an explanation. The complaint from the consciousness-can't-be-explained camp often comes down to nothing more specific than "consciousness can't be explained to my satisfaction." But what would satisfy them?

Yeah, fascists and tankies often make cozy bedfellows, even as they try to make bogeymen out of each other. In the post-Soviet Russia the relationships between various flavors of communist/socialist and far-right nationalist/neo-fascist groups have been so incestuous that they are sometimes collectively referred to as the Red-Browns (after brownshirts). Unsurprisingly, in Europe and America both the far-right and the far-left are Putin's closest allies.

Which makes all this "denazification" rhetoric all the more insane on its face. Timothy Snyder characterizes Putin's regime as schizo-fascism.

Another beautiful violin concerto. Not yet "typical" Britten, and not often performed, owing to its great difficulty. (Jascha Heifetz declined to premier it, because he wasn't sure it was even playable.) It doesn't sound like a virtuoso stunt in the hands of Janine Jansen though.

So this is not about fields at all. The actual question being asked could be stated as follows:

Can a researcher postulate an unknown force of nature (to use a somewhat dated expression) in order to explain anomalous results of an experiment?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Not so fast.

Anomalous results are ubiquitous in science. Any student who has performed lab experiments has obtained anomalous results on occasion, be it a couple of outliers or an entire data set. The same goes for most professional experimentalists. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of these occasions do not betoken a scientific discovery, let alone some fantastic new force of nature. That alone should tell you that jumping to conclusions is unwarranted.

There are many potential reasons for anomalous results: equipment malfunction, external interference, faulty experimental design, faulty analysis, even scientific malpractice. Any honest researcher will try to rule these out first. That means critically analyzing your experiment for potential faults, and if none stand out, conducting additional experiments with tighter controls and more data points. Most of the time, this results in either eliminating the anomaly or explaining it in terms of known science.

Only once these most likely causes for the anomaly are ruled out does the search for a new explanation begin. But what could such an explanation look like? There are as many answers as there have been scientific discoveries, but one thing is common to all of them: merely positing "subtle forces that hadn’t yet been discovered" won't cut it, even if you make up a sciency-sounding name for these subtle forces, such as "morphic fields." The reason is that such "explanations" explain precisely nothing. Stripping off superfluous and unwarranted verbiage, all they say is that "there is something that accounts for these results being just so." Well, duh.

"Person" does not have the sort of sharp and unambiguous meaning as, say, the Sun (something that we all understand the same way, at least ostensibly). Not only is it hard to nail down a universal definition, but there are genuinely ambiguous cases, as when someone is said to have become a different person. Can one change so much as to become a different person?

In my opinion, "a person" is not a matter of fact but a manner of speaking.

This seems to be entirely a function of pragmatic convention. — noAxioms

So it's obviously a bad idea to draw conclusions from language conventions. — noAxioms

But language conventions are pragmatic conventions.

Kyiv International Institute of Sociology released the results of the latest telephone poll, which it has been conducting periodically since May: Dynamics of readiness for territorial concessions for the earliest possible end of the war: results of a telephone survey conducted on December 4-27, 2022

I challenge anyone to listen to this song all the way through without e.g. tapping your foot, bobbing your head, etc to the rhythm. Its just infectious. — busycuttingcrap

What did I win? (Just kidding! I like it.)

For me, the most cogent challenges to his view come from writers Jan Smoleńsk and Jan Dutkiewicz. — Paine

Thanks for the article. It nicely exposes the willful ignorance and parochialism of westplaining Ukraine. One phrase strikes a false note though:

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine several times attempted to assert and defend its westward course, including in 2004 and in 2014, both times to great resistance on the part of the Kremlin. There is no point in denying that the West actively intervened in this. But so did Russia. — Jan Smoleńsk and Jan Dutkiewicz

This suggests some sort of parity between Western and Russian intervention in Ukraine over the last 20 years. But that's blatantly false. I am not even sure what they meant by Western intervention, other than the West just being there as a major presence on the world stage going about its business. That can't be ignored, of course, but that in itself doesn't usually merit the characterization of "intervening." As far as anyone knows, Western dealings with Ukraine were open and consensual. It's not like they strong-armed and corrupted Ukrainian officials, penetrated the military and security apparatus, attempted assassinations, played power games with gas supply, issued threats and ultimatums, and finally intervened militarily - Russia provably did all of those things.

On the matter of agency:

Given that the only combatants on the ground are Russian invaders and Ukrainian defenders, the implication that this is a battle between the U.S. and Russia over influence is ridiculous. — Jan Smoleńsk and Jan Dutkiewicz

It is pretty insane to think that Ukrainians defending their country against Russian invasion are merely doing someone else's bidding. Now, if we look at Russian fighters, there is some truth to that characterization. By all accounts, when Russian soldiers were ordered into Ukraine on February 24, it came as a shock to them, as it did for the rest of the country. They had a very vague idea of what they were fighting for, and still do. And that is reflected in the poor troop morale on the Russian side, which just about everyone acknowledges. The difference with Ukrainian defenders is stark.

Besides, Ukraine is a very different country than Russia. Whereas Russia has been living under a progressively more repressive autocratic rule for the last 20 years, Ukraine has had two democratic revolutions over the same period. Even during the most oppressive years of Yanukovich's rule, they still had opposition representation in politics, and a lively and diverse media landscape. And since Yanukovich's fall they have elected and then voted out one president and voted in another. Who wasn't doing so great before the Russian invasion, by the way: Zelensky's ratings were pretty low going into 2022. So to assert that Ukrainians are fighting for Zelensky is just as insane as to assert that they are fighting for NATO.

Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia, now Professor at Stanford, recently gave a lecture: "Explaining the Causes and Consequences of Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine"



His main thesis: "It's democratic expansion, not NATO expansion that has created this tension between Putin and the west and Putin and Ukraine."

Not much new for most of us here, but one of the arguments that he gives in support of this thesis is that relationships between Putin's regime and the West weren't always that hostile. What's more, NATO expansion wasn't much on the agenda until very recently - when there actually was no cause to raise this as a concern, since Ukraine wasn't going to be admitted to NATO any time soon, if ever. He recalls that in all the high-level talks where he was present (he was ambassador during Obama's administration) the expansion of NATO was hardly ever brought up.

I think we are on the same page. It's just that for me energy transfer means that, well, energy is transferred between parts of the system or between the system and the universe, as you say. And that doesn't need to happen during mixing. The Gibbs equation illustrates that: as you said, there is no change in (total) enthalpy with mixing, and enthalpy change stands for heat exchange with environment, assuming total volume and pressure are constant.

Yeah it gets more complicated. What you're talking about, I think, is Gibbs "free" energy. Energy transfer still occurs, it's just not in the simple terms I set out. — Moliere

Does it? What if the gasses are at thermal equilibrium? Where does energy transfer take place in mixing?

Let's take the air in your room, which is mostly a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen at thermal equilibrium with each other (albeit different concentrations). We know that they almost certainly won't spontaneously separate into regions of all nitrogen and all oxygen (thank God - or entropy - for that!) This spontaneous separation won't happen even if thermal equilibrium is maintained throughout. Indeed, bracketing out energy transfer makes it especially easy to see why spontaneous separation does not happen: the number of combinations corresponding to a state of separation is negligibly small in relation to the number of all possible combinations under the same conditions.

(Gibbs free energy is closely related to entropy, and it will decrease as a result of mixing, just as it does as a result of spontaneous energy transfer.)

Or consider mixing in reverse. You need to do work in order to separate mixed substances, transferring energy into the system - but not the other way around. In this sense, mixing does involve an asymmetric energy transfer.

Heh, that's pretty good. But I'd counter the experimental definition. "macro-scale" already says too much, in this notion — Moliere

Well, the experimental definition fails at sufficiently small scales - hence the stipulation. Try to say anything about the entropy of three particles kicking around in an empty can. The concept of entropy is applicable to bulk materials, where you can neglect or average out their internal structure.

Stravinsky allegedly said about his violin concerto that he wanted to write "a music that would have no emotional resonance." What a load of crock! It's pure joy.


Also this:

LOL at "my very accurate denials". Not going to waste my time arguing with another freak, but here are a couple more links for general reference:

Human Rights Watch, "We Had No Choice": "Filtration" and the Crime of Forcibly Transferring Ukrainian Civilians to Russia, September 1, 2022.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian and Russian-affiliated officials have forcibly transferred Ukrainian civilians, including those fleeing hostilities, to areas of Ukraine occupied by Russia or to the Russian Federation, a serious violation of the laws of war amounting to a war crime and a potential crime against humanity.

The laws of armed conflict prohibit the forcible transfer and deportation of civilians from occupied territory, including children, and prohibit a party to the conflict from evacuating children who are not its own nationals to a foreign country without their parents’ or guardians’ written consent, except temporarily as needed for compelling health or safety reasons.

Amnesty International, Ukraine: Russia’s unlawful transfer of civilians a war crime and likely a crime against humanity, November 10, 2022.

Under international law, there are additional protections for children, people with disabilities and older people that are relevant to the situations of those who have been forcibly transferred or deported. International humanitarian law requires, in the process of an occupying power undertaking transfers or evacuations, as Russia has done in Ukraine, “that members of the same family are not separated”. As described in Chapters 3 and 4, Russian and Russian-controlled authorities have, at times, separated children from their parents, in breach of these obligations. Furthermore, the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the occupying power from changing the family or personal status, including nationality, of children.

Regarding adoptions of Ukrainian children in Russia, the CRC calls on states “to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference”. It outlines that any system of adoption “shall ensure that the best interests of the child shall be paramount” and that the adoption is authorized by competent authorities who determine the adoption is permissible and, if required, the persons concerned have given their informed consent. It also states that intercountry adoption may be considered an alternative means of care “if the child cannot be placed in a foster or adoptive family or cannot in any suitable manner be cared for in the child’s country of origin”. For children deprived of their family environment, the CRC calls for “due regard... [to] be paid to the desirability of continuity in a child’s upbringing and the child’s ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic background.”

In violation of these legal obligations and Ukraine’s moratorium on intercountry adoptions, Russian and Russian-controlled authorities in the DNR and LNR have transferred Ukrainian children to Russia and facilitated the permanent adoption of some Ukrainian children by Russian families, depriving them of the opportunity to grow up and receive care in their country of origin. Moreover, in the chaos of war and in the absence of formal relations between Ukraine and Russia, unaccompanied and separated Ukrainian children risk being identified as orphans available for adoption when they are not, possibly preventing reunification with blood relations and guardians.

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Entropy really "clicked" for me when I understood it as nothing but the direction we observe energy to move — Moliere

That's a nice way to put it. Although there is also such a thing as entropy of mixing, as when two dissimilar gases mix with each other, in which no energy transfer needs to occur.

In general, I would describe entropy as the tendency of some macro-scale processes to be strongly time-asymmetric. That is, under the same general conditions we will almost never see their spontaneous reversal. Thus, ice cubes will melt at room temperature and never form out of room-temperature water; cream will mix with coffee and never spontaneously separate from it, and so on.

This is the only place in the body of the post you mention evolution. You don't really explain how it fits into the argument. — T Clark

It doesn't. This is just a brief summary of Plantinga's original Evolutionary argument against naturalism. The OP attempts a parallel argument as applied to God, instead of naturalism.

I had a hard time following your argument. — T Clark

You'll have a hard time following it if you haven't read Plantinga. (I wouldn't blame you if you don't want to bother.)

https://www.google.com/search?q=Natural+selection+and+entropy

/thread

"Resistance is futile!"

They just can't help acting like movie supervillains, can they?

In related news: Putin gives eight golden ‘rings of power’ to CIS leaders, keeping another for himself

Putin, Isolated and Distrustful, Leans on Handful of Hard-Line Advisers
Russia’s president built a power structure designed to deliver him the information he wants to hear, feeding into his miscalculations on the Ukraine war

This article is based on months of interviews with current and former Russian officials and people close to the Kremlin who broadly described an isolated leader who was unable, or unwilling, to believe that Ukraine would successfully resist. The president, these people said, spent 22 years constructing a system to flatter him by withholding or sugarcoating discouraging data points. — The Wall Street Journal