Funny you say this. I won't preface a statement about math objects as "usually". They're just are. — Caldwell

Within the context of a given mathematical system, yes. But there is more than one system, and hence more than one way to define/describe a line. For example, in analytical geometry a line is a collection of points, because that's just how analytical geometry is built up. Roughly speaking, you start with numbers, from numbers you build points and spaces, and from that you build all the geometrical objects, including lines. That is not how lines are introduced in Euclidean geometry though. Euclid himself doesn't really define a line - he just gives an intuitive picture of what he is going to talk about. The real "definition" of a line comes in the form of axioms that constrain its properties.

Also, interesting that you mentioned constrained by the axioms of the system. Don't you want to direct that statement towards Banno's question regarding chess? — Caldwell

Funny you should mention chess, because chess pieces are a good example of use-definition. A formal description of a chess game would not have a formal definition of a chess piece - it's just an abstract object to which we give a name. Its meaning is given by the use to which it is put in the game: the rules of how different pieces move, etc.

What was @Banno's question?

Far more people die from old age than from what you call "horrible diseases," such as polio, but that doesn't mean that we needn't do anything about polio, does it? The impact of the disease is only one part of the equation; what we can and cannot do about it, and the impacts of different actions and inactions are the other parts of the equation that must be considered as well. We can't do much about aging, especially for those who are already aged, but we can do much, and relatively easily, about polio.

Have you done that kind of calculation for Covid?

W is missing the point. A line is a distance. Two points apart entails a distance, therefore a line. — Caldwell

A line is not usually defined as a distance, if it is defined at all: in some systems it is a primitive element, which is not defined, but merely constrained by the axioms of that system.

I think what you are getting at is that for us to be able to define or describe a line, the world must already be such as to allow for such an object. And if that is so, then all the elements and constraints that are needed to make up a line (points, distances, etc.) are already in place. So what is there left to be invented?

I think a Wittgensteinian answer would be to say that the world (or rather, the "world" of our thoughts and conversations), its objects, and the way we put them together to construct other objects are all part of a language game.

I fully admit to not understanding it, no jest. — Manuel

No, you are right: entropy is a tricky thing (or things, since there are different kinds). Also, while the simple version of the 2nd law (entropy increases in an isolated system) applies to all isolated systems with a large number of "moving parts," the more general entropy equations that one finds in thermodynamics textbooks apply only to well-behaved, slowly changing non-isolated systems. So I was wrong too.

To be fair, you said "the second law" in the thread. The problem is that the second law applies to closed systems. — Manuel

No, the second law applies to all systems, but that just goes back to what you said at the start of your post. You should have stopped while you were ahead ;)

Read response, he talks sense.

From my Youtube likes:

Rosalyn Tureck plays Bach Capriccio BMV 992 "On the Departure of His Beloved Brother"


Rosalyn Tureck plays Bach English Suite No 3 in G minor BWV 808


I like her delicate, flowing staccato.

Ginastera: Violinkonzert ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Hilary Hahn ∙ Andrés Orozco-Estrada


A recent recording, and a recent discovery for me. (This gorgeous concerto seems to be rarely performed - probably because it's so damned hard, technically and emotionally.)


As for fidelity to composer's intentions, some classical musicians (Richter?) even bristle at being called interpreters, insisting that they merely perform what the composer wrote. Whether they really believe it (I can see how one might) or being coy, it's clearly not true that there isn't a good deal of interpretation involved even in the most scholarly and persnickety performance.

And I think a good piece of music has enough life of its own to survive a variety of good interpretations and even reinterpretations. I draw a line at Stokie's heavy-handed Romantic extravaganzas, but I can very well enjoy modern instrument Bach performances, alongside period ones, and even various adaptations and transformations (like one of my favorite jazz albums, Blues on BACH.)

P.S. Or speaking of Britten, here is one of my favorites: his brilliant take on one of Dowland's lachrymose songs - appropriately titled Lachrymae:



Respectful and personal.

My criticism probably won't be useful or convincing to you, but here goes. I draw the line at premise one - a moral system - in the way both your opponent and you apparently intend it, i.e. as a set of general, simple, exceptionless principles styled after logical, mathematical or simple scientific theories, such as Newtonian mechanics. While I am not a moral nihilist, I don't think that real morality either does or ought to conform to such a system.

That this is how both you and this AskYourself person see a "moral system" in this way can be seen in how hypothetical moral stances are framed, attacked and defended. Your opponent doesn't even consider a simple proposition such as "it is acceptable to eat animals" or "it is wrong to eat humans" - likely because such specific maxims don't seem like they belong in a simple axiomatic system. No, ethical principles ought to refer to something general and abstract, such as "intelligence," from which specific instances can be derived.

Then there is an expectation of clear distinctions and intolerance of moral ambiguity, which is exemplified both in the "trait equalization process" and in your debate with @khaled. The objection to the soundness of my naive maxims would be that one can imagine a series of hypotheticals in which humans become more and more animal-like or animals become more and more human-like, blurring the boundary between the two categories and leading to moral ambiguity. To which I say: So what? Yes, boundaries can be blurry, and moral ambiguity is a fact of life. If that disqualifies my ethics from being systematic, then so be it.

The question is unclear, which is why I think the responses are all over the place. What sort of an answer to do you expect? Is this a scientific question? Normative? Metaphysical? What do you assume at the outset? (E.g. do you assume that moral behavior is an evolved trait and then wonder why other species did not evolve it as well?)

As I’ve explained, I think there’s plainly a difference between hybridisation and genetic engineering. — Wayfarer

Sure. There's also a difference between hybridisation and selection. And a difference between pumpkins and shovels. Point?

I can understand queasiness, but that's not much as a subject of discussion. Caution I can understand as well, but it needs more substantiation than just pointing out that something is new and different. (So was everything else when it first appeared.) I myself do believe that we should proceed carefully and publicly with potentially disruptive innovations - not an original position, of course.

We have been literally creating new species since prehistoric times. There are parasites that only exist because of humans - not to mention practically every cultivar, cattle, pets, etc. etc.

Yes, it's a new technique. So was grafting when it was invented, as well as every technique in our arsenal.

I am not taking a pro or contra position - I am just looking for something more substantive than hand-wringing.

But not by direct manipulation of the genome. None of them were 'created by humans', except for in the sense that the breed was selected. Artificial selection, I believe is the term, and in fact one of the sources for Darwin's idea of 'natural selection'. — Wayfarer

Direct manipulation of genome is just the latest technology used in the process of adapting other species for our needs - and we are already using it (all those GMOs, you know). But I don't get your point. Why are you drawing the line at this technology and not, say, at irradiating seeds to induce more random mutations? Or the good old-fashioned selection and hybridization? Is there some red line that is only crossed with "direct manipulation of the genome"?

I can't think of any "completely novel lifeforms" created by science. You would be referring to new species, not hybrids or modified species, I take it? Wouldn't the mammoth/ African elephant be a hybrid, just as the so-called Tigons or Ligers or mules are? — Janus

Or, you know, pretty much all the animals and plants that we eat or use or live with. All have been created, intentionally or not, by humans.

I should still commend you for writing out the texts - much better than just dropping a youtube link, which I certainly wouldn't watch, even with a picture of a burger :) Text is still the best medium to communicate complex ideas.

Yeah well, this goes both ways. You are entitled to my attention if you know what you are talking about. And I see no evidence of that. But good luck to you guys.

Infinity as a proof for immortality

(Video starts with the picture of a burger) — FalseIdentity

This is excellent. You should've stopped here while you were ahead :rofl:

Yeah, I did read a bit further than that... Not worth my time, sorry.

Being able to do otherwise doesn't seem necessary for moral culpability. — khaled

Well, it may be necessary in some sense - just not in the sense of physical indeterminism. Indeed, if one insists on considering the question in this key (determinism vs. indeterminism), then indeterminism appears to be just as inimical to moral responsibility, if not more so, than determinism. (Hence some philosophers, like Galen Strawson, go so far as to argue that moral responsibility is altogether impossible.)

Say someone implanted a device into Sam that makes it so that the next time Sam gets angry at someone, but then decides to forgive them, the device activates forcing Sam into a fit of rage and killing them. Sam bumps into someone on the street and gets so angry he kills them without the device activating. Is Sam deserving of punishment? I’d say yes. Even though he couldn’t have done otherwise. Because he intended to do harm and did what he intended to do. That seems to be what really matters for ethics. — khaled

Yeah, one of the Frankfurt cases. So not this sense either. But clearly some sort of freedom - ability to do otherwise - is usually thought of as necessary. (At least in our present Western culture; attitudes towards moral responsibility have varied.)

Another thing is that the scientific enterprise does not exist independently of "other phenomen[a] in the history of histories of human civilizations". Obviously, if the human civilization enters a decline (as a result of a global catastrophe, for example), its scientific pursuits will decline as well. Conversely, it is hard to conceive of science undergoing a decline in the midst of a burgeoning civilization.

Can you please address my first point then? — Caldwell

Your point - that science is cyclical - is just postulated out of nowhere. "[J]ust like any other phenomenon in the history of histories of human civilizations" - that's too broad and vague to even discuss.

You should go back and think about this some more.

https://www.google.com/search?q=When+were+clocks+used+for+the+first+time+in+science%3F

In reading a lot of this thread, it strikes me that the many competing theoretical physics models of how the Big Bang might have occured are not particularly useful for answering this question in the sense it is often asked.

Swerve and symmetry breaking as causal explanations don't get at the more essential question: why is there something rather than nothing? From whence all this matter and energy? Or, as important of a question, why does it behave the way it does?

It's unclear to me if physics can give us an answer on this. Physics is the study of relationships between physical forces, but how can it study why those relationships are what they are? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is unclear to me how anything can give us the "ultimate" answer - one that cannot in turn be challenged with the same question: Why that and not something else or nothing at all?

What does it mean to explain something? We substitute an explanans for an explanandum, reduce what we want to explain to something that does not itself cry out for an explanation, at least in the current context. Something that we assume we already understand. But what could we already understand about a putative ultimate truth? Whence such understanding?

For people who find satisfaction in ultimate explanations, those explanations usually take the form of some religious or metaphysical story or method that appeals to them on some level. When they find something like that, they say to themselves: "Yeah, that sounds about right. I'll run with it." This sort of leap of faith is something that we practice all the time when dealing with minor questions and decisions, as well as matters of taste and preference - we call it intuition, confidence and such like. And that works out alright a lot of the time for practical everyday purposes. But such an approach seems to be incongruous with the sort of thoroughgoing skeptical inquiry that moves us to ask ultimate questions in the first place.

The problem with setting up the existence of matter and energy, or their fundemental behaviors as "brute facts," is twofold.

1. Many things we once considered brute facts have turned out to be explained by even more fundemental forces and particles. The onion keeps being peeled back. A lack of ability to progress in explanation does not mean there is no deeper explanation.

2. This answer is highly unsatisfactory, and explanations of theoretical models with varying levels of empirical support and claims of predictive power all amount to so much window dressing on "I don't know, it is what it is."

Of course, the entire question also seems to presuppose some sort of "God's Eye View" through which all truth corresponds to facts of being. I am not so sure this sort of correspondence epistemology actually makes any sense. On the one hand, it seems beset by the skepticism that has hung like a cloud over modern philosophy, "how can I be sure of anything except for my internal states," and on the other it takes a view of knowledge as somehow pure and ahistorical, when it appears that knowledge is more something that evolved and changes forms over time. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would agree with this, for the most part. The conclusion that I would draw is not that we must strive towards something more fundamental and less contingent than some brute facts du jour. If there is a "God's Eye View" it is in any case epistemically inaccessible to us. So brute facts are all we have to work with. We just need to recognize them for what they are: contingent, mutable, subject to taste and temperament, and most of all, contextual. The explanations that we settle on depend on what sort of answer we are looking for in a given situation.

That's trivially easy. Premise "A is (im)moral" entails the conclusion "A is (im)moral". I don't see where that gets us.

what I mean by justified is that there are sufficient reasons to perform that action. For example, some people say that killing is wrong because you shouldn't kill other people. — Hello Human

That doesn't really clarify anything. What are sufficient reasons? Who makes the determination? If someones determines to do something upon deliberation, they judge there to be sufficient reasons for doing it. Or, to take a completely different tack, if something happened in a deterministic world at time T, you could say that any earlier or later state of the world contained within itself sufficient reasons for the that thing to happen at T.

I guess a climatology class for someone training in meteorology is like a cosmology class for someone training in orbital mechanics. Good to have for a well-rounded education, but not particularly useful for your future vocation.

Yeah, if there was a way to throttle a poster, limiting the number of comments and topics per day to, say, 10 and 1, then he would've been ok. No worse than the worst posters on the forum. But he was trashing up the forum like TheMadFool on drugs.

Just want to say thanks for your erudite and educational posts!

Warmed-over denialist garbage cribbed from notorious purveyors of science disinformation. Nothing to see here.

I thought Russell's point was that the notion of cause applies only to objects (“particular things”). If the universe is neither an object nor an abstraction produced by the mind, then what is it? — Amalac

But then we agree that the universe is not a thing or object, so that it doesn't exist in the same sense in which an apple exists (or would you say a quantifier exists?), and therefore there is no sense in applying the notion of cause to it as we would with an apple, no? — Amalac

Whether or not the universe can be thought of as an "object", what's important in this context is whether it is the sort of... thing that can stand in a causal relation to something else. It's not just a question of mereology either: an apple, or a basket of apples, can be put into a causal relation, no problem. But can the universe?

It's easier when the deficit angle is large - e.g. 90 degrees, as in the example given in the link above. If after making three right turns at a right angle you end up on the same spot where you started, there's no escaping the conclusion that you are living on a curved world!

Yes, you can detect intrinsic curvature on a sphere, even if it is not embedded in 3D space. Angles in a triangle won't sum up to 180 degrees.

http://www.thephysicsmill.com/2015/12/27/measuring-the-curvature-of-spacetime-with-the-geodetic-effect/

Well, I just don't see how we can tell whether the universe is a set in the same sense in which we are sets of atoms, or merely a set in the sense in which the set of all the objects in my table is a set. I'm just suggesting that to think the word universe refers to an object and not merely to a set may be a mistake. — Amalac

Are you saying that the universe is nothing more than an unstructured collection of items about which nothing can be said other than that they are distinct from each other? Because that is what insisting that the universe is nothing more than a "set" implies. If not, then where is the mistake? In referring to the universe as an "object"? OK, let's not refer to the universe as an "object". Where does that get us? We aren't any closer towards answering the question of whether we should expect the universe to have a cause.

In order to do that, we need to step back and ask what the notion of cause does apply to. And what sort of a notion is it? Is it an absolute metaphysical law? (Copleston apparently assumed there to be such a law; we know that Russell didn't share that view, but he didn't make that very explicit in this debate.)

If we suppose that the universe, defined as the sum total of all there is, isn't merely a set but also a thing (in the same sense in which an apple is a thing), then we could question Russell's claim, for why would the notion of cause not apply to the total then? — Amalac

You are generalizing Russell's objection into something much stronger (and as you point out, untenable) than what he intended. He merely denied Copleston's claim that the sum total of existents must have a cause. He didn't say that it cannot have a cause by virtue of being a collection. He did at one point say that the word "universe" had no meaning, which I thought was rather confusing. Perhaps where he was going with this was to say that the word "universe" has the function of a quantifier, rather than a proper noun, but he didn't get to develop that thought.

The thrust of Copleston's argument was in denying any brute facts of existence. Everything that exists contingently (whatever that means) must be entirely reducible to some other thing or things, and so on until you get to something that exists necessarily (whatever that means) and thus does not stand in need of a cause or a reason or an explanation (he used these terms interchangeably). And he wanted to apply that principle without restriction - a perilous undertaking. Recall how the unrestricted comprehension of predicates resulted in a set theory paradox that Russell had discovered earlier. Perhaps Russell was pushing in that direction when he offered this objection:

Well, I don't know. I mean, the explanation of one thing is another thing which makes the other thing dependent on yet another, and you have to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire to do what you want, and that we can't do. — Russell

There follows an exchange about whether the word "universe" is meaningful. But in the end, where Russell makes a stand is merely in denying that the principle of sufficient reason applies to the world as a whole.

But isn't it true that a “sum total” must be a class or set? — Amalac

The universe is a class or a set in the sense that these abstractions can be used to talk about the universe as the "sum total" of all there is, but not in the sense that that is all there is to say about the universe. As you rightly point out, classes and sets leave out relations between their members, such as causal relations, so they probably aren't the right sort of abstraction to use here.

I think a more productive approach is to ask what is meant by causes and reasons, to what sorts of things they apply, and where their expectation is warranted by our prior commitments. Copleston uses these notions very loosely throughout the debate. Russell had expressed strong skeptical opinions about things like "the law of causation," so one might have expected him to have pushed back more against the general premise. Nonetheless, the debate did eventually converge on that point, and there it ended.

Anyway, if I understand right through my sleep-addled brain, you're suggesting that it's not so much (as I was speculating) that maybe some law of preservation of free energy (/ some kind of equivalent symmetry) requires that more space and so energy be created to counteract the increase in entropy, but rather that the increase in space and so energy requires (or makes room for the possibility of) thermodynamic action to counteract the decrease in entropy. It's not things winding down that inflates space, but inflating space that keeps things wound up. — Pfhorrest

Just to add to what @Kenosha Kid said, entropy does not decrease when space expands. Rather, the ceiling of maximum entropy is lifted, so it has more room to grow. In the partitioned chamber example, before the partition was removed, each part of the chamber was at its maximum entropy. When the partition is removed, the configuration space is suddenly expanded, and so entropy can grow even further.

This is kind of how it looked 14 billion years ago, when the universe was a very uniform "particle soup." If not for expansion, it would've been at its maximum entropy already and nothing interesting would've happened.

I think the like score is unclear and misreading. Since likes are not offset by dislikes, the metric is cumulative, so it mixes several unrelated factors into one score: duration, frequency, plus whatever else induces likes. That whatever else is itself a mixed bag, in which post quality probably isn't even at the top. And yet "quality" is how the metric would often be interpreted.

The sun provides 37 Petawatts of energy, our global needs only amount to about 4, so there's plenty of energy there to provide all our needs. — Isaac

I wasn't closely following the debate with the crackpot, but these numbers jumped out at me.If our energy needs were on the order of 10% of all solar energy that reaches the surface, that would be a shockingly huge amount! But I think you made a mistake somewhere, perhaps conflating yearly and hourly rates or something like that. This wiki page gives a handy comparison table: Solar energy

Yearly solar fluxes & human consumption
Solar 3,850,000
Wind 2,250
Biomass potential ~200
Primary energy use 539
Electricity ~67

Energy given in Exajoule (EJ) = 10¹⁸ J = 278 TWh

LOL no, that was someone else. Pantagruel is all right.

My comments are about the ones I personally have interacted with including on here, which I qualified elsewhere. I admitted that the one's who don't proselytize are drowned out (in their silence) by what could well be an overly-vocal minority. — Pantagruel

So what you were trying to say was that all and only those atheists who are notorious for furiously proselytizing are notorious for furiously proselytizing. Very insightful, that.

Atheism isn't so much a logical argument as it is a social position. — Pantagruel

And why can't it be both? People with positions on all manner of things like to share them with other people, and even try to convince others to come to their side. So why is it not socially acceptable to be outspoken about atheism, of all things? Is it too shameful, too outrageous? It's especially funny to see someone complain about atheism being discussed on a philosophy board, where people come to discuss and argue about anything and everything, no matter how abstract or irrelevant. Methinks you are clutching your pearls too hard.

atheists are notorious for furiously proselytizing — Pantagruel

That's like saying "Americans are notorious for relentlessly shooting people in the street." The statement exposes your ignorant prejudice. There are billions of atheists in the world; entire countries that are largely atheist. Do you really imagine that all these masses of people are "furiously proselytizing" all the time?

So have any of you guys sobered up yet? I don't mind the like feature (it's almost invisible anyway), but I would much rather have the number of posts displayed under the member name than the number of likes. It's a more obvious and useful metric.

Yeah, but we only occupy a small part of one solar system as one species out of many. Independence means our existence isn't necessary for the rest to exist. That's quite different from cultural artifacts or human language, which clearly depend on us for existence. — Marchesk

So we need to explore what we mean by dependence (and the significance of any such dependence). The Anthropic Principle is one example where the usual direction of dependence is reversed: the world is/must be such as to accommodate the existence of humanity. The most far-reaching interpretation of this principle is explanatory. Why is the world such as it is? In part because our existence, which we take as given, puts various constraints on how the world could be.

A world without humanity would be somewhat like the kind of world we live in because the world was already here when we subsequently arrived to live in it. — Cuthbert

A world that was isn't the world that is though. Or if it be the same world, then it is the world with humanity in it.