I don't understand why John Locke was writing threads because he didn't write any replies to anyone's comments. This meant that he was not really involved in any dialogue or interaction on the forum. — Jack Cummins

He was not alone in this. There is this type of poster who are only interested in their own topics (if even that).

In the general, I take realist to mean the domain in question exists independent of humanity. Man is not the measure for things that are real, because they don't depend on us to exist. I think you would agree that the universe qualifies for being real, and that only solipsists seriously doubt that, although other positions would argue over what the world is, whether science provides us a somewhat accurate account, and to what extent we can know. — Marchesk

This sounds reasonable, but close scrutiny erodes the sense of understanding. What sort of independence are we talking about? A world without humanity wouldn't be the would in which we live, so the actual world depends on humanity at least in this sense. Is it mind-independence that we are after? That too is a slippery idea.

Concretizing the question may help: instead of asking about realism and anti-realism in general, consider some specific issue where controversy is more apparent.

This goes for your question as well, I think. Your point of departure were some writings on religious mysticism, which give the notion of "constructivism" a particular shape (I'll take your word for this). From there you decided to generalize that notion, but in the process of generalizing it lost most of its particulars and morphed into some vague notion of "anti-realism." That is to be expected.

Earlier I pointed you to another, somewhat more concrete example where several varieties of anti-realism are purported to be distinguished, and one of these varieties is also referred to as "constructivism" - which makes it at least notionally distinct from the broader concept. But generalizing from that example would probably run into the same issue, since not all subspecies would survive the process. What would be the generalized version of the error theory, for example?

I think that agnosticism is a better and more prudent position when it comes to the existence of God or a Diety then Atheism as per the above definition. The agnostic does not rule out the existence of God whereas the Atheist does. What are your thoughts ? — Deus

This doesn't tell us why you think agnosticism is better than atheism. If the underlined sentence is your reason, then I disagree. Depending on your epistemic situation (and I am not necessarily talking about gods here), it can be more reasonable to take a position, however tentatively, than to abstain from taking a position, or even renounce the possibility of any knowledge, as your suggested definition of agnosticism states.

If, while sitting in a chair, you announce that you have no idea whether there is a chair under you, and that moreover you cannot possibly know such a thing, anyone would think that you are out of your mind.

Thanks for this. What's the reference for Dummett?

My own takeaway so far is in alignment with that Crispin Wright quip: "realism about any topic" is kind of an oxymoron, since it means different things to different people in different contexts, and I am skeptical as to whether it means anything at all as a general concept. But more specific positions might be more robust.

You should probably tell us a bit more of where you are coming from with this query: where have you heard about "constructivism" and "anti-realism" respectively, what specifically have you read? "Vague" is right in the sense that there isn't a single accepted meaning for either term, and at least with respect to anti-realism, it is debatable whether it can even be nailed down to any coherent philosophical position. In the introduction to the SEP article on Moral Anti-Realism Richard Joyce includes this quip from Crispin Wright (which I like to cite, because it applies to so many topics): "[A] philosopher who asserts that she is a realist about theoretical science, for example, or ethics, has probably, for most philosophical audiences, accomplished little more than to clear her throat."

If you do a search for "constructivism," the most prominent results are from the fields of education and sociology (e.g. Review of constructivism and social constructivism), which is probably not quite what you had in mind.

A different kind of constructivism is Constructivism in Metaethics. If that is what you are asking about, then one obvious distinction between constructivism and anti-realism is that the latter refers to a much broader family of views than just metaethics (although seeing as you eventually settled on this forum, rather than Ethics, I am not so sure).

If you did have metaethics in mind, then from the SEP articles (Moral Anti-Realism and Constructivism in Metaethics) we can conclude that it is not even clear whether constructivism belongs to realism or anti-realism (but that may be seen as further evidence that the latter terms are not well-defined). At the very least, following the broad classification of the varieties of moral anti-realism from the first article, we can say that constructivism does not fall under either moral noncognivitism or the error theory.

So here's my (uneducated) crack at answering your question.

What I meant to say was that claiming that someone's arguments are vacuous because the person is an idiot, not sufficiently educated, right wing, an anti-semite, racist or whatever reason other than explaining what is wrong with their actual arguments, is no different than saying that someone is simply not worth listening to. Either way, that just is the ad hominem fallacy. — Janus

On the contrary, It's only a fallacy if your intention is to explain what is wrong with the argument. The way you phrased it here would be an ad hominem, because you are judging an argument on the basis of the character of the person who put it forward. If you decline to engage with the argument, then you cannot be committing a fallacy. You cannot break any rules if you aren't playing to begin with.

A line is 1D, a surface is 2D. Think of dimensionality as the number of independent coordinates that you need to locate a point in the domain. For example, if I wanted to locate a gap in the fence, I could say that the 6th plank from the left is missing. I would require two measurements to specify where a pants hole is located.

That's the main question I'm trying to get at - when is it reasonable to raise questions about something personal about someone as an argument. If someone were to say "Einstein was wrong about the speed of light," I think it would be reasonable for me to ask how the person is qualified to make that statement. — T Clark

If you bite, then you must put aside questions about qualifications and assess the argument on its own merit. But you don't have to bite - you could decide that giving a serious consideration to the argument isn't worth your time. Refusing to play doesn't break the rules of the game, since there is no rule that you must play.

What's the difference between saying that someone is not worth listening to, and saying that their arguments are vacuous, and thus refuted? — Janus

Saying that an argument is vacuous characterizes an argument, not a person, so this wouldn't be ad hominem.

Is it fair to call a gap in a number line a hole?

I think it has some similar problems to holes we see in the ground, except that it has the disadvantage of being yet even more abstract. At the very least with holes I can plant trees into them, fall into them, and so forth -- there's a causal interactive network. I'm not as confident when it comes to describing two-dimensional holes because it seems that for any series or function, if there is a hole in it, then that section is simply not defined or is said to not exist.

But perhaps we don't mean all the rest when we say "hole" and simply just mean this gap -- so that the natural number line is filled with holes (and if we can say the space between numbers exists, there would even be more hole than there are numbers) — Moliere

Yes, I think the primary concept of a hole is that of a gap, an absence in the middle of something. As such, we can very well think of holes in 2D or 1D. When we think of real, three-dimensional things, like a pair of pants or a fence for example, we can conceptualize them geometrically as surfaces or lines, wherein a hole will also assume an idealized 2D or 1D form in our mind.

A hole in the ground can be thought of as a gap in the surface (2D) or a missing volume of matter (3D), but when you are thinking about planting trees in it or falling to its bottom, you are shifting attention from the hole to the ground.

How would you answer creativesoul's charge of things not existing prior to conceptual schemes, then? — Moliere

To exist is to be the value of a variable
things exist before we give accounts of them — creativesoul

A specious charge. It comes for free with any definition:

"X is Y."

"Well, Y is a human concept. Are you saying that there were no X before anyone thought of Y?"

Quine's deflationary analysis of existence is a conceptual analysis, not a causal account of it, which would be an oxymoron anyway.

There are a number of common rhetorical moves, some of which are generally held to be fallacious - hence named fallacies. Nothing is wrong with the general concept.

As for ad hominem specifically, I agree that it very rarely turns up as a genuine fallacy in a discussion, and most charges of ad hominem come from people who think it's a fancy Latin for an insult.

If you said that bartricks was not worth listening to on account of him being an obnoxious dimwit, you would not committing an ad hominem fallacy - on the contrary, you would be very reasonable. You would be committing the fallacy if you said that batricks' argument was refuted on account of him being an obnoxious dimwit, but who ever does that?

EDIT: Also this leads to the deliciousiously abstract and totally silly but still interesting question: Are there such things as 2-dimensional holes? lol — Moliere

I won't dwell on donuts any more (never liked them anyway, or bagels for that matter), but I am a bit puzzled by this. Why not 2-dimensional holes? A hole in a plane, for example, would be 2D (or even 1D if it's just one point). Or did I misunderstand you?

At first I was uncertain about whether I'd posit that holes exist, but now I'm leaning towards the belief that holes exist. So, mostly, I think my thesis is just that holes exist, and I'm asking how you countenance that -- also, it's a question that gets at some of the popular topics 'round here without invoking the usual suspects ;)

I don't know if I'd say that it cannot be conceptualized that way... that's a bit more a priori than my approach has been so far. If the pacman example is wrong, consider the argument from predicates that I put towards Benkie here.

So my thesis is this: There exists a hole such that the hole is 0.17 km2, and it is in Kimberley.

And the question is: How's that work, on your view?

I pulled up some notional thoughts on Quine to jump from. What would you say about the existence of the hole? — Moliere

Well, one way out of the predication argument, for someone who doesn't want to admit holes into their ontology, would be to claim that any talk about a hole can be translated into talk about stuff (similarly to how, according to Russell, names can be eliminated by replacing them with definite descriptions). For instance, a hole in the ground can be described solely in terms of topography. (This is where you came in with your flat torus counterexample, but I don't think it works.)

This isn't wrong, but as I alluded to above, I take a looser, more pluralistic stance on ontology and am willing to go along with your/Quinean reasoning. Things exist by virtue of playing a role in our conceptual schemes. Or to put it a slightly different way, each thing exists within the context of those schemes in which it has a role to play - and that's good enough, as far as being and non-being are concerned.

(Interestingly, in solid state physics holes can be very active players indeed: they can pop in and out, move around, attract, repel, scatter and be scattered...)

I am skeptical of holes being a typographic feature, however, given the ability to represent a donut on a plane without a hole in a topologically identical manner. — Moliere

A torus in 3D is not topologically equivalent to a rectangle: you cannot continuously transform one into the other. In your demonstration you had to make cuts. You might as well "prove" that a solid rectangle has a hole in the middle... by taking scissors to it :)

In any case, finding one way to fail to detect a hole as a topological feature does not establish your general thesis, which I take to be that a hole cannot be conceptualized solely as a property of the entity that encompasses it. I think you are straining too hard to deny the obvious. Of course you can conceptualize holes in solid objects by focusing on the objects themselves, rather than the holes, and mathematics has the tools to do that precisely (if mathematical precision is what you are after), although it's a bit trickier than one might imagine, as simple topological criteria can detect some types of holes but miss others. A donut is an eminently holey object though: it's not even simply connected (unlike a shell, for example).

The question is not whether you can conceptualize holes that way, but whether you must, as a matter of principle. I don't think so, but then I have a loosey-goosey attitude towards metaphysics. Our language and our conceptual faculties are flexible and diverse; why should we dogmatically limit them? Must there be a fact of the matter about what holes Really Are (or Really Aren't)? In this case, the insistence that holes do not exist probably comes from seeing the world as a collection of self-sufficient individuals. Which is, admittedly, a handy concept that we employ in our everyday lives, mostly unconsciously. But it's not the only possibly concept, and sometimes not the best suited one.

Here is a historical case where a lab leak was passed off as a natural disaster. It took a regime change for the truth to come out: Soviets Once Denied a Deadly Anthrax Lab Leak. U.S. Scientists Backed the Story. (Open the link in incognito/private window if you run into a paywall.)

And that's the problem. Indeed there has been a conspiracy. The one where China wasn't open and truthful about the epidemic at the first place. — ssu

All that you describe here is a typical reaction to anything out of the ordinary in China. Assuming the prevailing natural origin hypothesis, this is exactly how you would expect authorities there to act. This is no evidence or even a cause for suspicion, one way or another. And all this has been known and documented, there haven't been any significant new revelations emerging lately.

As so many Republicans talk about the lab theory, the unfortunate will happen and this topic will irredeemably be made a US political partisanship issue. — ssu

Yes, unfortunately, everything about the pandemic has been highly politicized right from the start. And outside politics, you can see how the depressingly predictable dynamics unfolds: people get into arguments on- and offline, stake out positions, which then polarize and harden to the point where no evidence or reason has any chance of changing minds.

Apropos of the title and nothing else, just read this in an interview with a classics scholar Mary Beard:

I don’t know if this is novel to you, but in the last few years there has been a real resurgence of popular interest in Stoic philosophy — why’d you just roll your eyes? All to the good when people are interested in the ancient world, but this is one of the more mystifying bits of interest: clichéd self-help from a philosophy that, if you looked at it really hard, was nasty, fatalistic, bordering on fascist.

But what’s your hunch about why people are being drawn to Stoicism? What comes out in Marcus Aurelius particularly is rather clichéd thoughts: Never take a major decision when your mind is troubled. We can all agree with clichés like that. And they come with the rubber stamp of great antiquity because they were written by an emperor — an emperor who was about as brutal in massacring the enemy as Julius Caesar. But we tend to forget that side of him because he’s a bearded “philosopher.” It’s not very salutary to look at your Amazon ratings, but I always feel terribly pleased — though it doesn’t happen often — when I’m higher up than Marcus Aurelius. — Ancient Rome Will Never Get Old. Take It From Mary Beard. - NYT

:snicker:

(If you want to read the full interview and run into a paywall, open link in a private/incognito window. But this is the only bit that is relevant to Stoicism.)

Yes, the theorem itself, as you quoted it, does not mention truth. But from the theorem, we do go on to remark that the undecided sentence is true.

And the statement is neither true or false in the system on an even more fundamental basis than that it is undecided by the system: — TonesInDeepFreeze

There is an even more fundamental reason that the object-theory does not yield a determination of truth. That is that the object-language does not have a truth predicate. — TonesInDeepFreeze

But if we adhere to strict "truth=provability" principle, then the sentence is not true even in the metatheory, if it assigns truth to sentences subject to their provability in the object theory.

When we're talking about plain arithmetical truths, I don't know why we would have to go down the road of wondering about realism. I mean, non-realists still recognize the truth of arithmetical statements. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Anti-realists recognize arithmetical statements as true relative to particular mathematical theories, which are as fictitious as any other such theories. Realists view some mathematical systems, such as arithmetic, as representing an objective, mind-independent reality; for them the mathematical study of such systems can be likened to scientific research.

Again, I want to disclaim that this is a simplistic caricature, but here are some statements in the same spirit by mathematician G.H. Hardy:

Mathematical theorems are true or false; their truth or falsity is absolute and independent of our knowledge of them.

Pure mathematics... seems to me a rock on which all idealism founders: 317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way. — G.H. Hardy

(Quoted from another work of Torkel Franzen: "Provability and Truth" (1987))

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Gödel was a mathematical Platonist. Are you suggesting that Gödel's incompleteness theorem would be trivially true on a formalist understanding of mathematics because to be true in a language just is to be proven in that language? — Janus

I wasn't specifically referring to Gödel's theorem, but using that example, a strictly formal reading of the first incompleteness result would be like this quote in the Wiki article:

Any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete; i.e., there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F. — Raatikainen 2015

Here the statement is not said to be either true or false; if pressed, an anti-realist* might say that (a) the question of truth is meaningless outside the context of a particular formal system, and (b) in the context of system F the Gödel statement is neither true nor false, since it can be neither proved nor disproved in that system.

On the other hand, you have, no doubt, heard paraphrases to the effect that the Gödel statement is "true but unprovable." Such readings lean on a realist/Platonist understanding of mathematical truth. They would appeal to the structure of the Gödel statement, which states an arithmetical truth.

This is a very crude and clipped summary. Like I said, the question of truth in mathematics and its relation to provability has been investigated and debated at great length. Just searching for works with the words "truth" and "provability" or "proof" in the title will net you several pages of results on Google Scholar.

* I will withdraw the label "formalism" and use instead the more vague "anti-realism" or "anti-Platonism."

There are different versions of formalism, and it is not the case that in general formalism regards truth to be just provability. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I agree that those two premises are not refuted, at least not directly, by the conclusion that we have no knowledge of causality. But as you seem to admit, the conclusion does refute Hume's (apparent?) notion that we can reasonably identify constant conjunction as the source of our belief in causality and our expectations regarding future events. — Noisy Calf

I don't think he claims this to be the logical conclusion of his argument. It is more like, having cleared the ground, he is venturing a plausible hypothesis. As any narrative that describes events and processes, it must rely on causal notions in order to make any sense. But he already admitted that causality is ingrained in our thought process and is indispensable for sense-making.

What do you make of the rest of what Russell says then?: — Amalac

Russell seems to assume an externalist, causal conception of empirical knowledge, and then projects that assumption onto Locke and then Hume, for whom this would be a stolen concept, given his stance on causation. But whether or not Russell is right about knowledge, the question here is whether Hume espoused the same view: only then would he be open to the charge in the OP. Hume actually seems to hold an internalist view, at least some of the time, i.e. his account of knowledge refers only to mental states. But Russell may well be right in that looking carefully through his writing, one can catch him out on a contradiction.

It is true that, like Locke, he admitted no simple idea without an antecedent impression, and no doubt he imagined an "impression" as a state of mind directly caused by something external to the mind. But he could not admit this as a definition of "impression," since he questioned the notion of "cause." — Russell

Hume believed that all knowledge can be categorized into "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact." On the latter he took an austere empiricist stance: matters of fact can only be known from direct sense impressions. And he argued that causation is not impressed onto us by our senses, and therefore is not a matter of fact. Neither can it be inferred by pure reason. However, he did not venture a causal theory empirical knowledge; he took the above principles as more-or-less self-evident. It is fair to dissect and question Hume's empiricist principles. It is also fair to ask whether those principles are more foundational than our causal intuitions. However, I don't think it is fair in this case to accuse him of illicitly helping himself to the very ideas that he questioned. That Hume imagined impressions being caused by their objects is a speculation.

And in neither case is Hume making an attack on the world, that there is no such thing as causation, or that there is no such thing as morality. Rather, he is making an attack on overblown rationalism that thinks it can make the world conform to thought, instead of conforming thought to the world. — unenlightened

That's one way to read him, but my impression is that he is somewhat less clear and more conflicted on this point. I'll leave this to Hume scholars though.

There's never a statement in any given language that is both definitely true according to the rules of that language and also not provable in that language, because to be definitely true according to the rules of a language just is to be provable in that language. — Pfhorrest

What you say just seems wrong for the simple reason that the truth of statements that are not provable cannot be ruled out; we don't know if they are true or not. In other words there can be truths which we cannot determine to be such, or at least it cannot be ruled out that there are. — Janus

What is mathematical truth is an open question in the philosophy of mathematics that has been much debated over the last 100 years, since Tarsky resurfaced it. This exchange illustrates the traditional axis of controversy between Platonists and formalists, realists and anti-realists.

I am not a "veteran logician," and my criticism was not directed at your logic - quite the contrary. The logical structure of a typical philosophical argument is fairly trivial, and that goes for your argument as well. Logical consistency is by far the lowest bar you need to clear; focusing as much attention on it as you do just distracts you from more important things, and for the reader makes it that much more tiring to engage with you. Your reply to me was so pointlessly pedantic, I almost thought you were trolling.

On a side note, if you were to formalize your critique of the second antecedent in the conditional conjuntive statement of P1 of the main argument, which is asserted again in P2, then you would realize flaws in your own reasoning. One, it is in the form of modus ponens which is tautological in nature, so it is actually just a specialized construct of logical syllogism rather than pedanticism on my part. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Whoosh!

Oh well, maybe it's just a phase you have to go through. On the other hand, I saw an earlier thread of yours - it was much better.

I have no interest in formal debates, either as a participant or as an observer, so perhaps I'll be barking up the wrong tree. But anyway, here are my two cents on your proposal:

Your exposition of the thesis and the argument is overlong and unnecessarily formal. Basic logic is like basic arithmetic: once you acquire competence in it, you rarely have a need to explicitly apply textbook rules and procedures; you just do it. And you should expect similar competence of your peers. Those who would find it difficult to follow your argument when it is stated informally (but clearly and fluently) will likely experience even more difficulty if instead you frog-march them through a page of definitions and syllogisms.

In my experience, when I see such overuse of formalism, it is either a novice, fresh off a logic class and eager to show off their newly acquired prowess, or someone trying, perhaps unconsciously, to puff up a weak or banal argument. (And I have seen this even in academic papers written by prominent philosophers.)

I would suggest that you state your thesis and its supportive arguments in a couple of paragraphs - that should be enough to encompass the substance of what you have written in the OP. And you can omit pedantic qualifications, such as "the subset of humans who value intellectual honesty." You can assume that your peers value intellectual honesty, because if they don't, then they are hardly your peers in this conversation, and why would you even want to discuss philosophy with them?

I was really only concerned with the basic idea. And my thesis was how one could save materialism. Since materialism represents a monism, i.e. assumes that there is only one kind of stuff, namely matter, which makes up the whole world, I must necessarily, in order to prevent dualism, regard physical fields, provided they are ontologically real, as a form of matter. — spirit-salamander

Yeah, but I feel that saying "there is only one kind of stuff, namely matter" doesn't really say much. All we have to do to "save materialism" in this sense is to extend the definition of "matter" as far as we need.

Okay, so matter would be quantum fields in your view. — spirit-salamander

Also solids and liquids and chairs and cats, etc. That is, if by "matter" you just mean what there is. There are many different ways to look at what there is, fields being just one such way.

Marc Lange's book is very readable and he tries to make it clear that physical fields must be real things or entities rather than merely a calculational device. — spirit-salamander

Sure. Whether fields are real in some sense is a debatable question, but it's not obviously wrong. What I took issue with is comparing fields with states of bulk matter, which I think is a category error. Bulk matter can be alternatively in a solid, liquid, gaseous or plasma state; it cannot be alternatively, and in the same sense, in a "field" state. Fields are used as mathematical models of continuously distributed physical quantities, but that probably isn't what Lange has in mind (although it can still be asked whether any or all such fields are real things). Perhaps he is talking about something like light, which we are told is an electromagnetic field: shouldn't we be committed to its existence? Isn't it a physical entity? Perhaps, but an electromagnetic field is not a bulk state. In fact, your next quote from Wallace indirectly makes that point where he says that "ordinary matter is held together by electric fields." (Indeed, at an even deeper level, ordinary matter - solids, liquids, etc. - is all quantum fields.)

Well, fields can move particles, again provided that fields are real things, which I assume. — spirit-salamander

If I were making an argument that fields are real things, I would put it the other way around: fields are real things because they have real effects.

This is the context. I think you can leave the passage I quoted in isolation without the context. — spirit-salamander

I see, he is talking about relativistic length contraction. That's not an example of fields moving matter; for that you could just refer to e.g. an electric field interacting with charged particles.

Materialism is the world view most fiercely opposed by philosophers since Plato (Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer to name just a few great names). They all had good reasons to reject materialism.

However, materialism is still popular. I have found for myself that I need to modify it somewhat to consider it plausible. — spirit-salamander

I don't think there's much point in debating this question, since there has never been a unified concept of "materialism." The word has been thrown around for a long time, but its meaning has remained vague. These days, more often than not, materialism is used as a strawman, a word to label ideological opponents to whom you can then attribute untenable and unattractive views that, in all probability, they don't actually hold.

Defining materialism precisely is problematic, and even if you succeed, you will only identify your version of materialism. Defending or knocking it down would not accomplish much, as far as the general concept is concerned, because as I said, such general concept does not exist.

I think it would be more productive to advance or attack specific positions and not bother about isms. If you want to talk about ontology, talk about ontology; if you want to talk about the mind, talk about the mind. Who cares what it's called?


But to comment on a couple of quotes in your post:

"As we will see later, fields have energy. They therefore are a form of matter; they can be regarded as the fifth state of matter (solid, liquid, gas, and plasma are the other four states of matter)." (Marc Lange - An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics) — spirit-salamander

This sounds very confused. A field is not a state of matter like solid or liquid. Fields in physics are mathematical models used to describe... physical stuff (let's not get hung up on what "matter" is), in whatever state it may be. Saying that a field is a state of matter is like saying that engineering is a type of car.

"Ordinary matter is held together by electric fields, so if those fields are altered by motion, then it is only to be expected that the shape of the matter will be altered." (Wallace, David. Philosophy of Physics: A Very Short Introduction) — spirit-salamander

Looks like you pulled this quote out of context and misunderstood its meaning, which is precisely the opposite of the point you were trying to make. I am guessing that Wallace here is discussing the rationale behind Einstein's theory of relativity. What he says about electric fields being affected by motion is a counterfactual: as everyone knows, the shape of matter is not affected by (inertial) motion. You didn't need to hunt for a quote to make your point about fields affecting matter though, because that's just what physical fields are: they quantify forces, potentials and other things that affect matter.


ETA: Oh, I see it's now a Bartricks thread. Abandon all hope.

Yeah, but it couldn't be just the regular space(time) metric, because that already accounts for distance and gravity - not something you would want to screw with in order to account for something else. Perhaps something on top of that? I don't know.

The idea is similar to ER=EPR where the two entangled particles are connected via a wormhole. — Andrew M

Sean Carroll discusses his team's work on this at his blog: — Andrew M

ER=EPR is way above my paygrade, but I think I get the gist of what Carroll et al. are trying to do:

Divide Hilbert space up into pieces — technically, factors that we multiply together to make the whole space. Use quantum information — in particular, the amount of entanglement between different parts of the state, as measured by the mutual information — to define a “distance” between them. Parts that are highly entangled are considered to be nearby, while unentangled parts are far away. — Space emerging from quantum mechanics - Sean Carroll

From this the usual spacial geometry is supposed to emerge at larger scales. But he notes that

It might seem like entangled particles can be as far apart as you like, but the contribution of particles to the overall entanglement is almost completely negligible — it’s the quantum vacuum itself that carries almost all of the entanglement, and that’s how we derive our geometry.

My naive idea of how to reconcile Einstein's physical intuitions about distant objects with quantum entanglement was to propose that entangled systems can be interpreted as presenting different aspects of the same "object" that just happens to be spread out in space. Perhaps a more promising approach towards reconciling physical intuitions (aka metaphysics) with quantum mechanics is to acknowledge that these intuitions are only valid at some scales, but might be emergent at others.

No, in practice I could look at an insane post like this, look at their bio, and if they were, say, 17 years old I could happily move on and ignore them entirely. — Maw

What I mind is wasting time with a moronic interlocutor who turns out to be in college or a Roger Scruton fan. — Maw

So for you it's perfectly fine to waste your time on crazy or stupid people, as long as they are above 23. That's just bizarre. I judge people by their posts, not their age. If I see someone making consistently inane or insane posts, I start ignoring them, no matter how old they are.

Yes, so? I think it should be obvious from the style that I was speaking informally.

How do you glue two points in a set together? You make them equivalent.

However, this is a non-admissible simplification, and Bell in his article explains why. — Andrew M

I have thought of a different simplification, which I think hits closer to the mark. But first let me quote from Bell's lecture, where he quotes Einstein stating his (meta)physical beliefs:

If one asks what, irrespective of quantum mechanics, is characteristic of the world of ideas of physics, one is first of all struck by the following: the concepts of physics relate to a real outside world... It is further characteristic of these physical objects that they are thought of as arranged in a space time continuum. An essential aspect of this arrangement of things in physics is that they lay claim, at a certain time, to an existence independent of one another, provided these objects "are situated in different parts of space".

The following idea characterizes the relative independence of objects far apart in space (A and B): external influence on A has no direct influence on B. — Einstein in a letter to Born

Imagine an ideal 2D plane in 3D space (you can picture it as a thin glass pane). When we write a word on one side of the plane, a mirror image of the same word can be seen from the other side. This is no mystery, of course, since the two sides are nothing more than different perspectives on one and the same plane.

Now imagine that the front and back surfaces are separated by a distance, but as before, when we write a word on one surface, the same word is instantaneously reflected on the distant surface. That would seem like magic, "spooky action at a distance." Our physical intuitions tell us that objects situated in different parts of space must have an independent existence, so that whatever happens to one cannot have a direct influence on the other. Any influence would have to be mediated by a retarded causal mechanism.

But what if we persist in thinking of the two separated surfaces as being, in a sense, a single object that just happens to be located in different parts of space? Their correlation would then have a natural explanation that does not involve an instantaneous action at a distance, any more than the appearance of a mirror image on the reverse side of a plane requires an action in addition to that which produces the image on the front side.

Interestingly, in topology, where you can imagine all sorts of exotic spaces, you can do just that. You can take two separated points on a plane and "glue" them together, making them one and the same point. You can do that with lines and surfaces as well. That's not to say that puzzling quantum mechanical correlations should be explained by weird space topology. (Although if someone were to produce a topological account, I would be open to it. I just doubt that it would be the topology of the physical space - configuration space perhaps?) Rather, I was thinking of Einstein's concluding remarks:

There seems to me no doubt that those physicists who regard the descriptive methods of quantum mechanics as definitive in principle would react to this line of thought in the following way: they would drop the requirement... for the independent existence of the physical reality present in different parts of space; they would be justified in pointing out that the quantum theory nowhere makes explicit use of this requirement.

I admit this, but would point out: when I consider the physical phenomena known to me, and especially those which are being so successfully encompassed by quantum mechanics, I still cannot find any fact anywhere which would make it appear likely that (that) requirement will have to be abandoned.

I am therefore inclined to believe that the description of quantum mechanics... has to be regarded as an incomplete and indirect description of reality, to be replaced at some later date by a more complete and direct one. — Einstein

I don't have an unshakable commitment to quantum physics in its standard form, but neither do I have an unshakable commitment to the conventional metaphysical ideas articulated by Einstein. Like those physicists whom he opposes, I would consider relaxing some of those ideas if it helps us better accommodate lessons from physics.

What if we are now in the position of the inhabitants of Flatland who reluctantly conclude that they may in fact live in a Klein bottle?

I have great respect for Hume, but I think what we perceive is not a ‘metaphysic of value’, but simply a fact of collective teleonomy—that we collectively do behave this way. To preserve this behavior is therefore consistent in a higher order manner. — Adam Hilstad

As indicated in my last post, I believe this has primarily to do with teleonomy and how we react to it. There is no cosmic reason to do the right thing, there’s just the fact that we are most of us concerned with it, and therefore to fully participate in humanity requires that the rest of us are concerned with it as well. — Adam Hilstad

I am not really grasping your point here, nor how it relates to your thesis. Hume argued that normative statements cannot be logically deduced from non-normative statements, and that is hard to dispute. By the same token, the fact that people behave and think in a goal-oriented manner does not entail any specific goals for us to pursue, nor even a general prescription to pursue goals. (Only if you want to "fully participate in humanity," but that's an instrumental ought, not a normative ought.)

There are other is/ought gaps besides the logical gap: semantic (as in Moore's open question), ontological (as in Mackie's argument from queerness). You appear to go after epistemology in the following:

By ‘ought’ entailing ‘is’, I mean something Kantian—our understanding of what is true is shaped by how evidence ought to be interpreted in order to best understand the world and others. — Adam Hilstad

It's arguable whether epistemic habits and commitments can be treated as normative, or normative in the same sense as other normative beliefs. I would say yes to the first and no to the second: epistemology seems to me to be an identifiable species, sufficiently distinct from, say, ethics.

Anyway, you haven't said much to go on, so we are left to extrapolate.

Why are we so sure that the answers of science are valid — Anna893

We are not. Fallibilism is built into the very idea and method of science. So if your thesis is that science is just like religion because both are dogmatic, then you are missing the mark. And I don't think it's fair to characterize religion as essentially dogmatic either. At least in some religious practices there is a place for searching, doubt, dispute and progress.

And even if we find pretty words to describe science, is it not a believe of how the world is made out of, but more - similar to religion - what we want the world to be made out of? Is this idea of »it is how it is«, not actually how we want it to be — Anna893

That may be so, but I would go even further and ask: is there a uniquely and objectively true statement about how the world is?

Perhaps you can expand on why you think this way? Then there will be something to discuss.

Witti couldn't have said it better:

How would you philosophically explain and describe the probability 1/6 in the dice rolls. What is the 1 here, what is the 6 and what / and how do they relate to the real world?
I have come to the conclusion that it is all very baffling and perplexing because you get to questions of chance and determination. — spirit-salamander

As has been pointed out, your ideas of what probability should mean are very far from what is usually understood by that term. If you are interested in this subject, you may want to read something introductory first.

Now as for philosophical interpretations of probability, there are several, and all of them are contentious. The standard mathematics of probability (known today as Measure Theory) is well understood, but how it should be interpreted in real life is not that clear. Statements like

6 is the cardinality of the set of possible outcomes; that set is the event space. 1 is the particular outcome, which is one of the members of the event space. Division expresses the ratio of the particular outcome to the possible outcomes. — TonesInDeepFreeze

don't actually explain why TonesInDeepFreeze would bet a particular way in a game of dice.

My own preference is for the epistemic interpretation (often loosely referred to as Bayesian, although Bayesianism does not exhaust all epistemic interpretations). I already tipped my hand earlier when I declared that probability is a measure of your uncertainty: that is, in a few words, the essence of the epistemic interpretation. There are others: frequentism, propensity. In my opinion, frequentism is philosophically untenable: it is basically a naive interpretation of mathematics, which invariably ends in hand-waving when the rubber hits the road. However, frequentist heuristics underlie much of the practical statistics that was developed in the last century. Propensity better suits certain metaphysical ideas, and it can be complementary to the epistemic interpretation.

SEP, as always, provides a nice overview of the interpretations of probability.

You can try it yourself at home. Roll the dice 600 times and write down the results. There will be an approximately even distribution. Now my argument was about a dice as a thought thing, the perfect dice rolled perfectly. The distribution should be perfectly even. If this were not the case, one would have to conclude that there was manipulation involved. — spirit-salamander

Here is a little script that implements this scenario using a pseudo-random number generator: https://groovyconsole.appspot.com/edit/5205481161228288 (click "Execute script" to roll a die 600 times and see the distribution).

But you can try a much simpler experiment at home. Take a coin and flip it twice. Repeat as many times as you please. According to your theory of perfect coin flips, you should be getting one head and one tail every time. In reality, you will get that result about half the time. So real coin flips are nowhere close to what you think perfect coin flips ought to be. In fact, perfect coin flips would have to be manipulated to produce an alternating sequence: heads, tails, heads, tails, etc. Anything else would violate your criteria of perfection.

Your misconception of probability is perfectly summarized here:

But what is the point of using probability if it is not reliable? — spirit-salamander

Probability is a measure of uncertainty. Where you can make a perfectly reliable prediction, you have no need of probability.

Is this way off? — spirit-salamander

Yes. Like I said, history-independence is an assumption in common games of chance, such as dice. But if you start off assuming that the probability of each possible outcome in a single trial is 1/6 and then end up concluding that the probability of a particular outcome in the next trial is more than 1/6, then you have contradicted yourself.

The question that arises is what this 1/6 means philosophically or, if you like, mathematically. — spirit-salamander

This is quite a profound question, but for better or for worse, it is irrelevant to the gambler's fallacy. (Your understanding of probability is way off though.)

The key to understanding the gambler's fallacy is in the last sentence of your quote:

How many times the gambler has rolled that night has no bearing on whether the next roll will be a double six." (Philip Goff - Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse) — spirit-salamander

This is not a result of a probabilistic calculation - this is a key assumption, a real-world knowledge on which probabilities are based. The assumption is that every roll of the dice is effectively independent. If you agree with this, then the fallacy in the Gambler's Fallacy should be readily apparent. If you don't agree, then all bets are off, as it were, and that 1/6 probability model can no longer be maintained.