You're trying to finish the race before starting it. Most people on this forum, once they realize the direction of inquiry, start to dance around the issue. Does a newborn baby have a direction of inquiry when trying to understand and make sense of what its senses are telling it? Don't worry about the direction of inquiry right now and just answer the questions as posed. If there is a problem with the question or you need some definitions for the words in the question, just say so. — Harry Hindu

If this is going somewhere, please dispense with Socratic questions and get to the point. On the other hand, if you have no clue, as you seem to imply, then go and have a good think, and get back to us when you have something to even start a conversation. I am not interested in watching you stumble in the dark.

Can you perform logic without causation or without determinism being the case? — Harry Hindu

There are many things without which you cannot perform logic - breathable atmosphere, for example. What's the point of this and the rest of your questions?

Again, there doesn't seem to be a clear direction of inquiry here - just random things being thrown out.

Your precis on causality is well taken, but I don't think it is very relevant to the present discussion. Causation was not thought to be a law of logic, even in Hume's time. Aristotle, whose doctrines on both these subjects were predominant in Western philosophy, certainly didn't present it in that way. While Hume's analysis sharpened and clarified the distinction, he wasn't breaking any new ground with this observation. It was rather his austere empiricist take on causality that distinguished his view, but that is about more than simply noting that there is no logical contradiction in denying any particular instance of causation.

Logic is about language, not about the world itself. — ChatteringMonkey


Since you disagreed with the person who disagreed with this thesis, I am assuming that you affirm the thesis. Please correct me if you do not affirm the thesis. — Leontiskos

I was only disputing the idea that logic is about the world, which is to say, that there is some kind of inherent correspondence between logical statements and "things out there."

That's not to say that there isn't a connection between logic and the world at some level. But what sort of connection? That question gets back to the issue that I have with this whole discussion thread: it's not clear what "aboutness" anyone is talking about. Are we talking about metaphysics? Language? Evolutionary origins of cognitive faculties? Developmental psychology? It all kind of gets mixed together.

I use "about" in its intended sense - the semantics of logical sentences.

P.S. Meh, I should read all responses before adding mine.

But I'll add one thing: What question the OP is asking? It is never entirely clear. Is it about anthropology? Developmental psychology? Metaphysics (whatever that might mean for them)? Before we jump to formulating answers, we should get clarity about the question.

Human logic is clearly not physical causality. However, logic isn't "about" anything but language? So:

[1] Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore Socrates is a mortal.

Is about the words "man" and "Socrates" and not ever about men and Socrates? Wouldn't this lead to a thoroughgoing anti-realism and an inability of language to signify anything but language, such that books on botany are about words and interpretations and never about plants (only "plants") — Count Timothy von Icarus

[2] Socrates is a fork.
All forks vacillate.
Therefore, Socrates vacillates.

[3] X ⊂ Y
∀Y P(Y)
∴ P(X)

[2] and [3] have the same logical structure as [1]. They are the same logical statements. But, clearly, they are not about the same thing, are they?

Logic is only about something insofar as we make it to be. It can be something perfectly sensible, like [1], or frivolous, like [2], or even nothing in particular, like [3].

Actually, I'm not sure that it is even possible to a materialist to abandon the idea of intelligibility. — boundless

Well, what would any of us be talking about absent intelligibility? If there is an object of discussion, it is perforce intelligible. As for what accounts for the intelligibility of the world, I am not convinced that there are substantive disagreements between, say, realists and nominalists - disagreements that are more than just different ways of speaking / ways of seeing.

We were talking about intuitive appeal. The physics changed from becoming something a child could essentially grasp to something nobody, 100 years after QM, can understand or even agree on. — RogueAI

Yes, I get your point. Although the intuitiveness of Newtonian physics shouldn't be overestimated either. It only seems commonsense because the basics have been drilled into us from an early age. But it is well known among educators and psychologists that our naive intuitions about motion (aka "folk physics") are not in line with Galileo and Newton. No wonder it took so long for these modern concepts to become widely accepted.

I am making the grossly imprecise observation that if materialism was correct, if someone followed this intuition, “my brother” could not refer to anything other than atoms, and similarly, any references to “history” and “personality” would be references to my own mental abuses of words, unspeakable and incommunicable, until translated back into atoms perhaps. — Fire Ologist

So, do you think that this implication has never occurred to any materialists, or that there have never been any materialists to begin with? Because I refuse to believe that anyone could actually hold such a view.

"Physicalism" is a very common contemporary view that is usually recognized to be a form of materialism. — Leontiskos

Right, and even that term is fraught and uncertain, as the article that you referenced shows. I have a hunch, though I cannot back it up with a literature review, that among philosophers, discussions of such general topics as "materialism" or "physicalism" are less common today than they were, say, in Russell's time (other than an occasional windy essay with a title like "Why I am not a Materialist.") Part of this is, no doubt, an increased specialization and fragmentation of philosophical discourse. But perhaps another explanation is precisely in the difficulty of identifying, not an ideological camp, but a genuine "type of thinking." There may well be a type here, but it may be more a type of temperament and a way of seeing than a position that can be clearly articulated.

All right, thank you for the clarification.

So apparently you find his characterization unattractive. Do you have some reason why you think it is unattractive? — Leontiskos

Does anyone? Would any materialists nowadays own up to such a characterization?

So, it's just about physics being different? I don't think it makes sense to identify philosophical materialism with physics at a particular place and time - otherwise, it would just be physics, and we already know what it is and have a word for it.

"Ionian materialists"? I thought you were addressing present-day materialism? For my part, I wouldn't venture to speculate about the psychological motivations of the few ancient materialists, of whom we know so little.

Russell's hyperbolic rhetoric doesn't help much. "How science says the world is" is a little better, but still leaves much to be desired.

I am not asking for a concise definition, but at least some sense of what you are talking about. Otherwise, the whole project seems unserious, more of a vague rant than analysis.

I brought this up too. Old school materialism has intuitive appeal, I guess. Post QM materialism is utterly bizarre and counterintuitive. — RogueAI

What do you think is olds-school materialism, and what is post-QM materialism? Again, examples of exponents of these views would help.

It is based on the assumption that there is an intelligible structure in material reality which is to be discovered. — boundless

Are you saying that materialists deny this? Can you point to anyone, at any time in history, who held this position?

Can you expand on what you mean by materialism, beyond these caricatures:

the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of' — Count Timothy von Icarus

If materialism is, as you assert, a popular and intuitively attractive view, then I don't find your characterizations of it plausible.

You missed the point of the whole text. — Jack2848

To be fair, it is often difficult to understand what you are saying. Perhaps a language issue. For example, I am not sure that I understand what you are trying to say in the following paragraph:

I meant to show how people use the same words with different meanings. If you'd say that knowledge is justified true belief. Then that's objectively not a descriptive correct statement in that case you're equally choosing a definition per your preference. As others would. — Jack2848

Do you mean to say that JTB does not correctly describe all common usages of the word "knowledge"? That would be a fair criticism, but then I don't see how your own proposal would address it.

To be descriptive and claim to be more accurate. You'd have to look at instances of when people say they have knowledge. Now and across time. And you'll see that it's belief assumed to be justified and assumed to be true. — Jack2848

But here you seem to be saying the opposite: that JTB is how people generally use the word "knowledge."

So, which is it? Does JTB capture the meaning(s) of "knowledge" or does it not?

And if JTB does reflect the current use, then what is that point of your definition? Do you wish to reform language? Clarify an ambiguity? But defining "knowledge" as, essentially, fact, true proposition, is not only redundant, but confusing as well. According to the usual meaning, knowledge requires a knower, naturally enough. But with your proposal, most of what qualifies as "knowledge" is not known to anyone!

Knowledge (beliefs assumed to be justified and assumed to be true) have often be wrong. — Jack2848

Knowledge claims are sometimes disputed, disclaimed, or proven wrong, as the case may be. The JTB proponent would deal with this issue by emphasizing the distinction between knowledge claims and knowledge as such. Justified Belief is sufficient for a knowledge claim. The Truth requirement is what is supposed to certify that the claim is merited.

it's only as much a performative contradiction as someone who is anti violence using violence to protect themselves from other violence, it seems to me. — flannel jesus

That would indeed be a performative contradiction, without additional qualifications of what "anti-violence" entails in this context.

If a democracy votes to disband itself, then the last act of that democracy is the act of disbanding. The act of disbanding is a democratic act. There is no performative contradiction here; there is just a majority of people who decide to order their political arrangement differently. — Leontiskos

The performative contradiction is in performing a democratic act by someone who perforce rejects democracy.

F=ma is a definition, not a description. There were no forces sitting around, waiting for Newton to describe them. Rather he defined force as the product of mass and acceleration, as the change in an objects motion. — Banno

Not so fast...

Let us ask, “What is the meaning of the physical laws of Newton, which we write as F=ma? What is the meaning of force, mass, and acceleration?” Well, we can intuitively sense the meaning of mass, and we can define acceleration if we know the meaning of position and time. We shall not discuss those meanings, but shall concentrate on the new concept of force. The answer is equally simple: “If a body is accelerating, then there is a force on it.” That is what Newton’s laws say, so the most precise and beautiful definition of force imaginable might simply be to say that force is the mass of an object times the acceleration. — R. Feynman, Characteristics of Force (from The Feynman Lectures on Physics)

Read on...

There is a sense in which the motion of a body depends on other bodies in both senses: If there was only one body in the world, then the very idea of motion would be senseless, since there would be nothing against which motion could be detected. So, for there to be any motion, there has to be more than one thing. But as long as that basic condition is satisfied, you don't necessarily need anything else, any other, to bring about and sustain motion. A planetary system, for example, can spin all on its own, without anyone pushing planets around. And the same is true for just about any dynamical system, be it mechanical motion, temperature changes, chemical reactions, or anything else.

Going to have to disagree with you here as it appears to me that all motion, including inertial motion (by which I understand you to mean constant velocity) depends to some degree on another. In fact, all motion is relative motion and insofar as it is relative to another, all motion, including inertial motion, depends on another. But then all that means is that the metaphysical foundation of everything, God, cannot be in motion. — NotAristotle

You seem to be equivocating between "dependence" as being a function of something else and being grounded in something else. And your conclusion doesn't seem to follow from anything.

The point I was trying to make is that in citing the example of a billiard ball, you seemed to be satisfied that it can move of its own accord, as long as it doesn't alter its motion. That's the Galilean insight, which diverges from the Aristotelian doctrine that prevailed earlier.

For example, when a billiard ball moves and changes position, it does not do so of its own accord, but because another billiard ball has imparted motion to it. Similarly, and in accordance with Newton's (1st?) Law, the billiard ball will remain moving unless it strikes another ball or hits the boundary of the table, or encounters friction. And so, all change (of some thing) really depends on another to change it. — NotAristotle

The orthodox thinking in Western philosophy used to maintain that what we now call inertial motion (such as that of a billiard ball rolling on a flat surface) required a motive force, like everything else. You seem to have internalized Galilean relativity, but otherwise retained the same intuitions regarding motion (change).

But the Galilean revolution (I am using the term loosely) was more thoroughgoing than just admitting the autonomy of inertial motion. People have come to realize that we don't need to appeal to external agent causation in every instance. The world can go about its business absent any will to push it around.

Because I think change or alteration implies a kind of dependence on another. — NotAristotle

Conceptually, change only depends on time. And time depends on change - it's a mutual dependence. What neither concept requires is a magic man pulling the strings from behind a curtain.

A (pure state) quantum system evolves without an external cause. It's in the intrinsic nature of the quantum system. — Relativist

You don't have to go as far as quantum mechanics to illustrate the idea. Galilean physics will do just as well.

That's a really good question. The only answer I can offer to support a claim that such demonstration has not only been impossible in the past, just as it is now, but that it inevitably will be so in the future, would be that when it comes to introspected intuitions we always will be working with the same data, that is the human mind, that we have always been working with.

In science we may be working with previously unknown data, newly discovered phenomena, and I think this has clearly happened in the history of science. But when it comes to the purely speculative metaphysical ideas, unless we admit science into the equation and don't rely solely on intuitions (which has certainly happened in some metaphysical quarters) there would seem to be no new data to work with. — Janus

Our intuitions are not universal and unchanging. They are influenced by experience, exposure to ideas (from science, but also from history, philosophy, religion), socioeconomic conditions, moral attitudes... That's not to say that there is some fixed asymptote towards which our collective metaphysical intuitions are inevitably converging. They may well diverge, swing and meander this way and that forevermore.

How high must the described order be in order to be an explanation rather than just a description? — Quk

Well, that's a far broader question than the original topic. You won't make much headway on the question of magic if, in order to answer it, you first have to settle the question of what constitutes an explanation.

I think we can all agree that as a general requirement, an explanation should improve our understanding. A description does not satisfy that requirement, since a description is needed before we can even ask for an explanation (else, what are we even trying to explain?)

Your idea of an explanation as nothing more than giving a name for what you want to explain is not even deflationary - it is patently silly. To wit:

Why does the apple fall to the ground? Because of gravity. That explains it. — Quk

This is just the sort of pretension that Moliere lampooned in one of his plays (The Imaginary Invalid): When a supposedly learned doctor is asked to explain the action of opium, he attributed it (speaking, suitably, in dog-Latin) to opium's "dormitive property whose nature is to lull the senses to sleep." Virtus dormitiva has since become a byword for just that sort of pseudo-explanation that merely names or rephrases the issue without providing any insight.

I think that most physical theories are phenomenological and very few fundamental.
Galileo and Newton only give descriptions of what actually happens without a fundamental explanation. It was also Leibniz's criticism that Newton could not explain how the interaction of gravity actually comes about.
I think there are but a few fundamental theories, for example:
- the general theory of relativity which indicates that the emergent phenomenon of gravity arises from the curvature of 4-dimensional space
- quantum mechanics which considers physical quantities at the atomic level as merely random results of measurements — Ypan1944

From what you have written, I cannot tell what distinction you make between a phenomenological and a fundamental theory.

The contraposition of "descriptions of what actually happens" vs. "a fundamental explanation" offers no clarification. All theories seek to describe what actually happens, and all theories seek to explain - that's just what the word "theory" means. But what is it that makes a theory fundamental, as opposed to merely phenomenological?

And the people in power are the ones who decide — T Clark

You could leave the rest of the sentence as a wildcard, since what you wrote up to that point is a truism (or at least that is what it is meant to be). This "universal acid" style of rhetoric can be applied to anything, but that is what makes it unconvincing.

Others characterize libertarianism by what it means more generally, — SophistiCat

What does it mean more generally? — flannel jesus

Libertarian free will requires agency, causal control, and most importantly, "genuine" alternative possibilities. The devil, as always, is in exactly how these requirements are cached out. My own view is that a lot of seemingly oppositional views on free will aren't as far from each other as they might present themselves.

Why do you think libertarianism isn't a subcategory of incompatibilism? — flannel jesus

I am going to take back what I said. While not everyone frames libertarianism as a species of incompatibilism, some do, and that includes some prominent proponents of libertarianism, such as Robert Kane:

Those who are convinced that there is a conflict between free will and determinism, for these and other reasons, are called incompatibilists about free will. They believe free will and determinism are incompatible. If incompatibilists also believe that an incompatibilist free will exists, so that determinism is false, they are called libertarians about free will. — Robert Kane

Others characterize libertarianism by what it means more generally, rather than by what it implies for determinism specifically. On that account, libertarianism and incompatibilism simply answer different questions.

He does? I missed this. I don't think he said incompatibilism at all in his article. Libertarianism is a subcategory of incompatibilism, and that's what he's talking about. — flannel jesus

Well, it's not. Libertarianism and incompatibilism often go together, but they are neither identical nor subcategories of one another.

https://www.georgewrisley.com/blog/?p=47

This has been my issue with libertarian free will for maybe decades. I've worded it in various ways myself, but I think this guy puts it pretty well.

In short, if you maintain that if you were to set the entire world state back to what it was before a decision (including every aspect of your mental being, your will, your agency), and then something different might happen... well, maybe something different might happen, but you can't attribute that difference to your will. — flannel jesus

This is a well-known objection to libertarian free will. It even has a name in the literature - the Luck Objection. Naturally, libertarians are well aware of it and try to address it in various ways.

The author of the blog post articulates the argument pretty clearly, but he is misrepresenting some key terms. For example, he conflates libertarianism with incompatibilism, and he presents compatibilism as a variety of determinism.

I would suggest reading an introductory article on the subject, such as Randolph Clarke's SEP article Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will

Oh, I am not being pessimistic, just saying that the situation there is a lot more complicated and uncertain than the domino metaphor would suggest. Even Georgia insiders don't offer any confident predictions on how the events will unfold.

This is going in circles, and I am not keen on repeating myself.

How is it empty if it justifies the second premise of the argument that you ignored? — Leontiskos

Your argument is not a truism, but its crucial premise stands without support.

I don't know why it is so controversial to insist that in order to make a substantive argument, you need to say something substantive about its subject (and not just things like "AI cannot transcend its limitations"), and for that you have to have some knowledge of it.

It's all too tempting to reach for a recent precedent, but Georgia is nothing like Syria. Without an understanding of its specifics, it is useless to speculate about whether "Ivanishvili might be the next domino tile falling," and even then prediction is a risky game.

Authoritarian regimes are often said to be brittle. But brittle doesn't mean short-lived: there have been (and still are) authoritarian regimes that went on for many years and decades even (and some, like Russia, emerged briefly from authoritarianism, only to slip right back into it). They mostly appear to be brittle because when they finally fall, few can see it coming. But that's partly because they are also opaque.

I thought there was some major development in Georgia in the past few days that I hadn't heard about. But no, the ruling party is still in control and Ivanishvili is still its de facto leader. What's this all about then? Just a speculation about what might happen? (And shouldn't this be in Current Affairs?)

I think you just haven't understood the argument, and thus are engaged in a "lazy dismissal." You could disagree with the claim that humans are able to "set their own norms," but you wouldn't be on very solid ground. — Leontiskos

I was addressing the argument - not the thesis about what is sine qua non for intelligence, but that it is out of reach for AI by its "very nature." No argument has been given for that, other than truisms, such as that AI cannot do what is outside its limits (no kidding!) But what are those limits? That seems like the crucial question to answer, but personal prejudices are all we get.

dismissive truisms — SophistiCat

What exactly is your complaint, here? That it is true? — Leontiskos

That it is empty.

This doesn't help with the logical fallacy of equivocation, for "the essential and enduring structure" of humans and computers are very far apart, both actually and epistemologically. — Leontiskos

No one said they were, so I am not sure whose fallacy you are attacking. I was just pointing out the emptiness of critique that, when stripped of its irrelevant elements, consists of nothing but truisms. I am skeptical of a so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) arising in our time and along the existing lines of development, but my doubts arise from considerations of specific facts about AI (even if my knowledge is very limited in this area), not on dismissive truisms like this:

Computer programs don't transcend their code. — Leontiskos

Well, of course they don't. That's what they are - code. And humans don't transcend whatever they are (which, if you happen to be of a naturalist persuasion, as Josh likely is, could be dismissively caricatured as "meat" or "dumb matter" or some such). So what?

That which is designed has a determinate end. It acts the way it was designed to act. — Leontiskos

Another truism (as far as it is true). So, a hypothetical AGI would be designed to replicate and even surpass human intelligence. But that's not the desired conclusion, so now what? What is needed is not lazy dismissals, but getting down and dirty with what the actual limitations of actual AI might be.