It seems that your reasoning would apply equally to any argument (including your own!) Did you pick the Moral argument as an illustration, or do you think there is something about that argument that makes it particularly vulnerable to this attack?

It seems like the only two plausible outcomes are that Republicans let their party be completely consumed by insane Trumpers, or else the party splits. — Pfhorrest

Party members at a gathering of the Republican National Committee endorsed President Trump as the man to lead the party forward, ignoring the turmoil in Washington. — NYT

There was the Tea Party (remember the Tea Party?), there was Trump in 2016, who at the outset was opposed by many in the Republican establishment - the party persevered. I don't see that changing now.

The Right are authoritarian by their nature. All their rhetoric notwithstanding, they have no higher principle than Power. They will support anyone who manages to seize and consolidate power - be it Trump or Putin or...

This sounds a lot like the old idea of a "philosopher king" - or "philosopher kings." There is a reason why this naive patriarchal fantasy was never a reality.

I think you'd have to order them the other way. — Garth

I can order them any way I want. Nothing wrong with ω* order type.

I couldn't find any counter arguments against the cosmological argument? — Varese

Well, the only way you could fail to find counterarguments to common versions of the cosmological argument is if you didn't look. But as for your formulation, I confess that I find it too confusing. For example, I can't tell what you mean by "immanent" - a word that you use a lot, but not in a way that I recognize.

I'll say one thing though. A common feature of cosmological arguments is that they rely on some kind of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), which I think you call the "deterministic principle." I think the most direct way to oppose a cosmological argument is to deny the PSR.

The two big objections to Platonism that arise from conversations like this are that Platonic objects lack clear identity conditions and that the ontology is profligate, a crowded slum, what Quine called Plato's Beard. Reducing every object to Math should answer both objections. — Pneumenon

Well, it is an answer, but why is it the answer? Why one object and not two or 42 or all of them? Why do you elect to be a lumper and not a splitter?

I think you need to back up a bit and tell us why the question matters. What difference would an answer make?

Do you know what I mean ? — Avema

Not really, you just restated what you already wrote earlier. Assuming you are speaking from experience, can you give a specific example where scientists fail to give an adequate definition and how that hurts their efforts?

And it is hard for scientists to do that because they're only used to defining notions that are quite directly related to experiments. — Avema

Well, yes, that's the point. Science is an empirical discipline, so it needs operational definitions.

For example, scientists could try to explain very global concepts such as life, intelligence, welfare, and expose the limits of science in understanding (or measuring, defining) these concepts. But that was never part of a discipline. Some scientists do have opinions on these concepts but they’re not knowledge, it stays at a personal level. And when philosophers try to think on scientific knowledge, well, they often lack the scientific background to do it right.

Does anyone think it would be a good idea to create such a discipline ? Or does anyone know such a thing ? — Avema

I am not sure I understand what you have in mind. Can you elaborate a little further, give a more specific example?

Thanks, I need to revisit that Reich era. Certainly not my go-to, but I'll revisit. — Noble Dust

Reich was new for me. I've been listening to his music for the past ten days or so.

My favorites so far (+ Proverb):

I only mention this, as relativity does not negate what I am saying about states. In fact, relativity is essential to my claim about states. Make the unit of time within whatever relative time frame you want. That doesn't negate the point. Regardless, lets not over complicate the issue and make this about relativity. — Philosophim

The relevance of relativity is not towards the relativity of duration, but towards the relativity of simultaneity. Your "snapshot" presumably includes all events that are simultaneous with each other. The problem is that in Relativity this designation is fairly arbitrary. Given a particular event in space-time, there are other events in space-time that are objectively earlier or objectively later than this event (events in its past and future light cones), while the rest are neither here nor there: they can be earlier, later or simultaneous, depending on the choice of reference.



There isn't a unique, objective way in which you can slice space-time into snapshots or slices. So "state" ill-defined.

Great! if we are in agreement on this point, then what do you think about my conclusion using the premises of the OP, that it is logically necessary that the universe's origin must have a first cause? — Philosophim

Some other time perhaps.

Now, can we write a definition of "identity" that allows us to treat either one of them as an individual object? — afterthegame

I am not sure what you are asking. Are the two balls identical? Yes, because that is a given. Are there two balls rather than one? Yes, that is also a given.

Is this a lead-up to questioning the principle of the identity of indiscernibles?

Let us think of slices of time as "states". — Philosophim

You would have to assume an absolute time for that, that is, something like a Newtonian universe. In a relativistic universe there is no fact of the matter about how the space-time is to be sliced along the time dimension (the technical term for this is foliation). Now, we don't have to commit ourselves to any particular physical framework, but in view of Relativity, neither can we take for granted the existence of an objective foliation.

Let us think of slices of time as "states". At its most simple, we would have a snapshot. But we could also have states that are seconds, hours, days, years, etc. We determine the scale. Within a state, we analyze the existence that has occurred. Causality is the actual prior state, not potential prior state, that existed which actually lead to the current state we are evaluating. — Philosophim

This won't do as a definition of causality. Rather, you could restate this to say that given a causal model, it is the case that every state is causally related to an earlier state, if there is an earlier state (but see my note above).

If there is no prior state, then there is no reason for the first state that is, to have existed. For the reason of a current state, is explained by the actual prior state. All we can say as to why a first state existed, is that it did. — Philosophim

You are conflating reasons with causes (you do that in the OP as well). They are not synonymous.

The only thing I can logically conclude from the above premises, is that there is no cause for the existence of any potential universe. Whatever universe exists, exists without prior explanation.

Lets examine this thought process before I move on. Does this clarify my position? — Philosophim

To the extent that this makes any sense, this was a very convoluted path to an uncontroversial conclusion: in a causal model with an initial state, the initial state is the cause of all subsequent states, and there is no cause for the initial state.

Do you understand that by "necessity", I mean actual, and not potential state? — Philosophim

I don't understand why you use modal language if you don't mean it. And if you eschew modality, then what is left of your definition? If we plug 'actual' in place of 'necessary,' we get something like this:

Causality - an actual prior state in time before the current state in time.

???

Before you had a counterfactual definition of causality, which has its problems (one of which I pointed out), but I think that in this basic form it captures a lot of the common-sense, "ordinary language" meaning of causality. With some work it can perhaps be made into something more robust.

But now I just don't have any idea of what you are trying to get at.

Let me clarify for you, as I worried people will interpret it that way. I did not mean to imply potential prior states by "necessary". I mean actual prior states. Sure, A could be caused by B or C potentially. But in this case, A is caused by B. Therefore B is necessarily the prior cause of the A. Perhaps a better set of terms would be B is the actual cause of the actual A?

Thus for a first cause, there is no actual prior causality involved for its actual existence. Does this make sense? — Philosophim

No, I am afraid you've lost the thread. Remember, you were trying to define causality:

Causality - a necessary prior state in time for the existence of the current state in time. — Philosophim

Now fiction aside, can we imagine a place without time? Would any events occur? Can memories form? Or do all possible events occur simultaneously? What is the lay of the land? — TiredThinker

I don't see any conceptual problems with a timeless world. We routinely construct such worlds in our minds. One of the subfields of mechanics is actually called Statics, and there are plenty of other theories and models in which time does not figure. Frankly, I am surprised that anyone with any exposure to science and abstract thought in general would have a difficulty with this concept.

Causality - a necessary prior state in time for the existence of the current state in time. If there is no necessary prior state that entails the current state, then the current state is a "first cause" without any prior causality. Does that make sense? — Philosophim

No, this won't work. Suppose A was caused by B, but it could alternatively have been caused by C. Neither B nor C are necessary for A to occur.

This is a well-known objection, by the way. I don't know why, but philosophers of the previous century loved thought experiments involving murder. So a counterexample might have run like this: Black arranged to kill Smith by dropping a chandelier on him. Instead, it so happened that the chandelier dropped and killed Smith on its own. So Smith was killed by a chandelier, but neither an accident nor a murder were individually necessary for this to occur.

I started reading your "puzzle," but like @Antony Nickles I immediately got bogged down in questions and objections and didn't even get to the "fun" part. I frankly find topics like causality to be more fun puzzles.

Well, this place may be slightly more expert than the general population, on average, but only slightly. There are hardly any professionals here, a few well-read dilettantes, but most aren't very knowledgeable.

Effectiveness is established in the labs in thousands of test tubes by mass laboratory techniques. Before they ever take a vaccine outside the lab effectiveness is already solidly established.
Biological testing with live animals and humans is different. This is where side effects, persistence, and other unknowns are expected to show up before a vaccine goes for approval. — magritte

This sounds like science fiction. Where are you getting your info? Since when is the effectiveness of anything is "solidly established" in vitro?

When the Russians claimed that they had won the vaccine race after supposedly observing an immune response in a small human trial, everyone thought they were nuts. But not even they were crazy enough to stake their claim before running a trial.

Curious, why would you want to solicit opinions from a few random people on the Internet? If you want to know who the best known or most influential modern philosophers are, you will do much better with Google.

A bona fide philosophical piece: Steve Reich gives an appropriately minimalistic treatment to a quote from Wittgenstein: "How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!"



Somewhat less typical in style, but one of his most beautiful pieces IMO.

Having read through the discussion, I still don't really know what you are getting at with all these Capital T's and Absolutes and so forth. Some examples that you gave (1=2, etc.) have to do with so-called analytic statements. On whether those can be doubted see e.g. Quine's Two Dogmas and the ensuing debate. More generally, the meaning and function of truth is a long-standing question in philosophy, one of the less tractable ones, but I am not sure whether your query has anything to do with that.

Perhaps instead of making vague, sweeping statements, considering some specific question would help.

I trust experience because it tells me that it should be trusted — znajd

The reason you trust past experiences is that you believe that the future will be very much like the past. If tomorrow things start falling up instead of falling down, then all your experiences of things falling down will be of no use to you. It is because you believe that things will continue falling down that past experiences can be useful in making predictions and decisions.

Now, why should not the people best suited to THINK make significant contributions to that? And who is more suited to think, than philosophers? — Ansiktsburk

Everyone thinks, and people of intellectual professions - such as engineers and managers - can think their way through certain kinds of problems better than most. Philosophers are specialists too. They are better than most at solving certain kinds of intellectual problems (most of which are, like chess, games of their own invention). They are not all head and shoulders above everyone else in any intellectual task that you throw at them. I wouldn't trust a random Plato scholar with making decisions about lockdown, I would want people with relevant skills and experience.

For me that depends on an odd sort of private language (maybe not 'private', but oddly technical). To claim that one's process is addressing 'moral' decision-making, one must already know what type of decision-making is 'moral' as opposed to any other sort. And to know if one's process works, one must know what a 'good' decision should be, which again one would learn from experience.

So in order to understand the meaning of 'morality' and 'morally right' one must have learnt it by example from other people, and the evidence we have of the process other people are using is varied in the manner I described. Thus one is inevitably talking about the decision-making we actually do. — Isaac

We learn how to use moral language from other people, but we don't necessarily learn how to be moral in the same way (although there is an overlap between these two learning processes). We acquire a common language, but we don't generally acquire a common morality with all language users - which, of course, is what makes moral disagreement possible.

One could, I suppose, having learnt how to use the terms say "scrap all that and decide thus", but what would make anyone do so aside from their moral desires, the satisfaction of which has just been described.

It would seem like setting out an algorithm which we've no intention of following to solve a problem we already have the answer to. — Isaac

The problem that you are pointing at is that of persuasion. How persuasion happens is not simple and straightforward, but we know that it does happen.

However, strictly speaking, it can't be both an empirical and phenomenological account? — jancanc

Can you elaborate on the contrast that you are drawing between an empirical and a phenomenological account? (I am not even going to ask about "metaphysical," because that is such a mushy category.)

Any moral 'system' which tries to claim moral decisions are based on a single metric is just pointless armchair speculation without any reference to the real world in which this simply doesn't happen. — Isaac

Whether this is a relevant objection depends on what one is trying to achieve. If your goal is to describe how moral reasoning functions in general, then of course you want to be "as close to scientifically accurate as you can get." But moral philosophy is primarily concerned with normative questions. Objecting to Peter Singer's utilitarianism, for example, on the grounds that it doesn't fit the moral profile of the general population would be missing the point.

The SEP article on Medieval Philosophy gives a short overview. I would start here. If you like podcasts, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has a section on medieval philosophy, with an intro episode.

Sounds pretty reductionist. — Marchesk

Yeah, OK, that does sound reductionist. But I must confess that there is a lot of muddle and controversy in this bundle of concepts: reductionism, emergence, supervenience, downward causation, autonomy, etc. Better philosophers than Sean Carroll have been trying to make sense of this mess and still there isn't anything like a settled opinion, not even on on their meaning.

I think when he agreed with Tegmark on our universe being mathematical, he meant it could be fully described by math without leaving anything out. Which means it can be simulated in principle by a full understanding of the microphysics. — Marchesk

That's not the same thing. This would be reductionism, which is a much stronger position than just holding that the universe can be described with mathematics. Proponents of strong emergence, downward causation, autonomy of sciences also believe that the universe is "mathematical" - they just think that the mathematical description cannot be built from the bottom up.

In Sara's podcast, Carol mentioned Bedau's paper on emergence, where weark emergence is anything that could in principle be simulated before it emerges. A mathematical universe would be computable, so that would make any phenomena weakly emergent. Sara says she doesn't think life can be simulated. — Marchesk

For there to be any kind of emergence, the universe must be "mathematical" in the weaker sense of having an all-pervading structure. The varieties of emergence are different takes on that structure. It would be safe to say that up to this point Carroll is on board with Tegmark (who does take a stronger position), but so is practically everyone involved in this conversation.

Sean thinks the universe is mathematical (from the Tegmark podcast), so naturally he thinks emergentism is weak, since all macro properties could in principle be computed in advance, given everything is math in his and Tegmark’s view. — Marchesk

Tegmark was on Carroll's podcast, but I don't think Carroll has endorsed his idea. Carroll is a good interviewer, in that he is receptive to all ideas and tries to get his interviewees to make their strongest case. But that doesn't mean that he agrees with everything they say.

Anyway, I don't see much of a connection between mathematical universe and weak emergence.

Sara’s views are a bit more complicated. It helps to take into account her views on information and life’s emergence earlier in the podcast. — Marchesk

I didn't find that it helped, to be honest. But I've looked at her publications; she has a number of papers on top-down causation in biology, some with Paul Davies, who has also been interested in this topic. That would probably speak to "strong emergence."

Emergence is a tricky topic, as evidenced even by the number of articles with titles like "Emergence," "What is Emergence?," "Making Sense of Emergence," etc. that have come out over the decades.

Sara then mentions math and the question of why it's so useful in physics. — Marchesk

She explored this theme here: The Descent of Math.

It’s about the logical contradictions of materialism. Logic is important for some. — Olivier5

Ah, how wonderful it is to be a self-assured fool. Everything is crystal-clear, and no question requires more than two seconds of contemplation.

I listened to that podcast, and I found that part of the talk obscure (and my impression was that so did Sean).

Do we have to have the same damn discussion year round in five different threads? "What does it mean? How can consciousness be an illusion? What is it an illusion of?" I mean, how hard is it to read anything by Dennett, Frankish, Graziano, Pereboom? Or a frigging Wiki article? The main idea is not difficult to understand, whether or not you agree with it.

I should note that of course there are other senses of "action," and one can also come up with their own definition for some purpose. I only insisted on this particular definition from physics because that was the context set by the OP (although he then wanders from it a bit).

Clearly, there are no holonomic constraint equations possible for particles under "intelligent control" — Sir Philo Sophia

Seems obvious to me — Sir Philo Sophia

I am curious, is this your personal theory about animate matter, or did you read it somewhere?

Amen, and a small point. Anything can be defined by anyone anyway they choose to define it - whether any good a different topic. Insofar as the definition is a text intended to convey a definite meaning, wrt to that text the language matters, is in fact the first and arguably only thing that matters.

In literature is the concern for le mot juste, the right word. I imagine in the sciences as well, perhaps as the correct word. And do the sciences have their own phrase for that? — tim wood

My point wasn't that you can define action however you want. It was rather the opposite: action has an established definition in Lagrangian dynamics. But Lagrangian dynamics is just a mathematical framework that is applied differently in different contexts. Once you define your Lagrangian (a mathematical object), then the definition of action follows straightforwardly from that. But how the Lagrangian is cached out in physical terms is going to vary from one theory to another. It is one thing in non-relativistic classical mechanics, another - in relativistic classical mechanics, yet another in quantum mechanics, etc.

Here is a random example from the literature:

This paper proposes a theory for understanding perceptual learning processes within the general framework of laws of nature. Neural networks are regarded as systems whose connections are Lagrangian variables, namely functions depending on time. They are used to minimize the cognitive action, an appropriate functional index that measures the agent interactions with the environment. The cognitive action contains a potential and a kinetic term that nicely resemble the classic formulation of regularization in machine learning. A special choice of the functional index, which leads to forth-order differential equations---Cognitive Action Laws (CAL)---exhibits a structure that mirrors classic formulation of machine learning. In particular, unlike the action of mechanics, the stationarity condition corresponds with the global minimum. Moreover, it is proven that typical asymptotic learning conditions on the weights can coexist with the initialization provided that the system dynamics is driven under a policy referred to as information overloading control. Finally, the theory is experimented for the problem of feature extraction in computer vision. — Cognitive Action Laws: The Case of Visual Features

Here the Lagrangian formulation is given to a mathematical model of a perceptual learning process. The action here doesn't even have the units of energy x time, as it usually does in physics. But given the context of the model, it is unambiguously defined.

I am not going to comment on the OP "theory" with regard to animate vs. inanimate matter, which he somehow wants to cram into the definition of action. I was just giving some context on how action is actually defined in mainstream science for those who may have chanced on this thread.

@fishfry already addressed a number of your misconceptions. You ignored his patient explanations and are now repeating the same mistakes here. And while you quoted my post, you did not address its content and instead repeated the same nonsensical arguments that you made earlier. I don't see a point in continuing this conversation.

Standard set theory includes an axiom that basically says that given a set, any collection of its elements is also a set. Since sets that are not members of themselves are included in the set of all sets, then a collection of all such sets must form a set. But we know from Russell's paradox that such a collection cannot form a set on pain of contradiction.

I am not going to comment on the "definition," but for those who are actually interested in science, action can be defined in any theory that admits a Lagrangian formulation. Lagrangian dynamics applies to a very important class of theories in physics and other sciences. Invariances of the action integral under continuous transformation were the subject of the famous theorems of Emmy Noether, who related them to symmetries and conservation principles, such as conservation of energy.

Because Lagrangian dynamics is a general mathematical model that is applicable in multiple contexts, action cannot be given a single physical definition that will cover all applications. This is a feature, not a bug. A general definition could be something like "the integral with respect to time, along a possible history or trajectory in configuration space of the system, of a quantity with the dimension of energy" (Butterfield).

A classic introduction to the concept in physics is Feynman's lecture on the principle of least action.