Comments

  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    I don't deny this, and the use of probabilities in applied science is well known even in schools. They cover scenarios where events happen in uncontrolled conditions, but they still use Laws which I understood to be formulated on a deterministic basis.... which is why the senior scientists that I have heard lecturing default to a deterministic viewpoint, even if they acknowledge the experimental results show multiple outcomes for the factors they are monitoring. — Gary Enfield

    Historically, Law nomenclature has been used to refer to important regularities that can be formulated in a single statement or equation. You will find such laws both in fundamental physics and in applied sciences. And within that context a law can express a fundamental feature of a theory (e.g. Newton's laws of motion) or a phenomenological relationship (e.g. Hooke's law). Laws can be either deterministic (Maxwell's laws) or probabilistic (Boltzmann's distribution law).
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    Constructivism claims that all assertions of supposed facts are in actuality just social constructs, ways of thinking about things put forth merely in an attempt to shape the behavior of other people to some end, in effect reducing all purportedly factual claims to normative ones. — Pfhorrest

    Well, one can be a social constructionist about some specific area of human life, such as morality; it doesn't have to be a slippery slope. Being a constructionist about games, for example, wouldn't even be particularly controversial.
  • Identity politics, moral realism and moral relativism
    ↪Joshs
    Blame is tightly linked to moral judgement, and this is not at all specific to identity politics. For the purposes of making a distinction, we can identity two stages of moral judgement: first, judging some action as praiseworthy or blameworthy (or neutral), and then assigning praise or blame to those responsible, where appropriate. One may argue that the second stage is not moral as such, and that it is detachable from the first. One can pass the judgement but withhold the blame.

    In reality though, the two stages - judging and assigning praise or blame - often bleed into one another (for better or for worth). More importantly, withholding praise and blame implies not holding people responsible for their actions, and that is a dubious position*. By not holding people responsible for their actions we rob them of their agency, dehumanize them.

    * I should emphasize that withholding blame, for example, is not the same as forgiving: only the guilty can be forgiven.
  • Do probabilities avoid both cause and explanation?
    I was beginning to get worried that this subject, which is a fundamental underpinning to most philosophical debates, would not be taken seriously. — Gary Enfield

    To be honest, your post is rife with misconceptions. Right from the start:

    The Laws of Physics and Chemistry are formulated through the use of traditional mathematics that provide only one specific outcome for any precise starting point/cause. — Gary Enfield

    One can perhaps get such an impression from high school science classes, but that is because they cover very basic material, and probability is taught little if at all at that stage. In reality there are plenty of probabilistic relationships and equations in physics, chemistry and other sciences.

    Yet in recent years younger scientists have tried to argue that true randomness does exist in the world due to the findings of Quantum Mechanics. — Gary Enfield

    Uh, younger scientists? You mean like Heisenberg and Bohr? Just how old are you? :lol:

    Seriously though, fundamental physicists do seem to favor determinism. Take so-called black hole information paradox: the reason it is thought of as a paradox is that loss of information implies indeterminism - the kind of indeterminism that doesn't go away in a suitable interpretation of quantum mechanics, because it violates QM's fundamental unitarity.

    But I am not sure that that attitude generalizes across sciences - even across all of physics, of which fundamental physics is a rather small niche.


    For philosophers who have tackled causality and explanation, probability is not necessarily problematic. Indeed, some theories of causation are explicitly probabilistic: the basic idea is that causes raise the probability of their effects. One well-known modern development of that idea with practical applications is causal Bayesian network.
  • Gender rates in this forum
    Yes, I agree, it would not be a result of any scientific value but I find it interesting at least to see if my prejudices and assumptions are correct. This is to say that I'm expecting that more than 90% of people attracted by philosophy are men. — Raul

    A quick Google found me this:

    Gender Distribution of Degrees in Philosophy: "In 2014, 31% of philosophy degree completers at the bachelors and doctorate levels were women, and 28% of master’s degree recipients were women"

    For comparison, Gender Distribution of Degrees in English Language and Literature: "Women have earned a majority of English language and literature degrees at the bachelor’s and master’s degree levels at least since the late 1960s, and reached a majority among doctoral degree recipients in 1981."

    (These stats are for US colleges.)

    As I said, if you want and can delete it go ahead. — Raul

    Don't mind him, he is not a mod.
  • Gender rates in this forum
    This could trigger a good discussion on: are man more attracted to philosophy than woman, the other way around? — Raul

    The population that posts on an internet forum is not representative of the global population in a number of ways, including gender. Besides, a dozen data points do not a statistics make.
  • A Technical Definition of Time
    My assumption is that temporality "is" something, that it exists as somehow instantiated in substance, not an empty, null set concept, and hence not any more "circular" than matter. — Enrique

    I am OK with the idea that time is immanent in the physical world, whether we think of it as fundamental or (as some hypothesize) emergent. But that doesn't avoid the issue of circularity, which refers to attempts to define time in terms of other, non-temporal concepts. It seems that all such concepts through which we try to define or explicate time are already entangled with temporality in our understanding: clock, process, change, rate, periodicity, simultaneity,synchronization (obviously), coordination.
  • A Technical Definition of Time
    All definitions are tautologously circular — Enrique

    You are misusing both words. "Ps are Qs" is a definition, it is not a tautology (it isn't true by definition), and it is not circular (it does not rely on the meaning of the definiendum). A definition reduces a concept to one or more independently known concepts. The problem with defining time (real, physical time, not a mathematical abstraction) is that any other concepts to which you attempt to reduce it already depend on time for their understanding. So the best you can do is contextualize time, connect it to related concepts. It won't be a definition though. But then why do you need to define time anyway?

    my definition's strong point is that it is maximally generalized — Enrique

    Your definition is incomprehensible. I guess you started with an idea of a clock and then tried to compress it into something that sounds like fancy academic-speak.
  • A Technical Definition of Time
    Time: systems primarily sculpted towards the role of coordinating systems that are divergent enough to be deficient in self-coordination. — Enrique

    Given your subsequent elaboration, I guess what this horrible mess is trying to get at is a notion of a clock, in its most general sense. In other words, time is what clocks measure. This isn't wrong, but like all other attempts at bootstrapping the notion of time, it does not escape circularity.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    Name calling isn't helpful. — Book273

    Yeah no, it's totally appropriate.

    Here is cumulative COVID death rate in Sweden and its neighbors:
    Sweden:  1:942
Finland: 1:8734
Norway:  1:9835
Denmark: 1:3050
    Same for USA and Canada:
    USA:    1:804
Canada: 1:2031

    Of course, Book273 has already made it known that he's totally fine with there being more death and suffering, so this appeal to statistics is not only dishonest but hypocritical as well.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    Sweden. Better infection rates, better mortality rates. No response other than wash your hands and take care. Last I looked the US was doing better than Canada, infection and mortality wise, but I admit, it's been a few days since I bothered to look. — Book273

    ↪TheMadFool
    ↪dazed
    The shit-stain is lying through his teeth.

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

    https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    I am pretty certain we're dealing with someone with some kind of mental illness. — Echarmion

    Yeah, I figured his posts were too lame and deranged to even qualify as dangerous misinformation. One would have to work to be misinformed by them.

    Compare to this so-called Great Barrington Declaration. As wrong and mendacious as it is, it at least makes some kind of sense and was competently written, which is what makes it dangerous.

    But more interestingly, why was it called Parler rather than Parlour? — Banno

    I thought it was French (par-LEH)?
  • How is Jordan Peterson viewed among philosophers?
    I see people using incel language and the like (e.g. calling women as "females"). — deusidex

    I don't think "females" is incel language. I don't like the word myself (but I am not a native speaker, so what do I know); however, I think it is more commonly used as a politically correct, age- and social status-neutral way of referring to, well, females - as opposed to "girls" and "women." Same with "males," of course.
  • Joe Biden (+General Biden/Harris Administration)
    So Obama got the Nobel peace price basically for not being Dubya. How are they going to top that with Biden now?

    The bad news is that the bar has been set so low, he doesn't even need to try in order to get approval from those who would support him in the first place, or even more broadly, those who opposed Trump. And those on the other side won't change their mind no matter what, so they don't matter either. So yeah, he could repeat that infamous Trump line about shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn't be wrong.
  • Fictionalism
    ↪unenlightened
    ↪unenlightened
    Good stuff. — ChatteringMonkey

    Agreed.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    Don't healthy immune systems attack and kill invading viruses? — Roger Gregoire

    Only once the virus infects the organism and starts to reproduce and possibly (a) sicken the individual, (b) develop an advantageous mutation, (c) infect other people. The immune system response works to mitigates an already existing problem, a problem that could have been avoided through social distancing, among other measures.

    For the most part, healthy immune systems don't replicate and spread the virus, ...they attack and kill it. — Roger Gregoire

    No, immune systems don't replicate and spread the virus :roll: The virus takes care of that with the help of its host. And yes, even people with light or nonexistent symptoms replicate and spread the virus for many days after they become infected. This has been observed in numerous studies, including studies on young children.

    No offense SophistiCat, but the purpose of the analogies is to put a rational perspective on this whole situation. Right now, the general public is being fed misinformation in the form of "fear mongering" which is only making a bad situation much, much worse. — Roger Gregoire

    Your analogies only lead you astray. You are bone-ignorant about science and public policy, you can't formulate a sound argument to save your life, and yet you presume to advise experts and decision-makers. Normally I just ignore internet cranks, but I make an exception here, because bozos like you spread disinformation that does real harm.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    SophistiCat, it seems that you view healthy people (those with strong immune systems) more as "spreaders" of the virus than as "removers" of the virus — Roger Gregoire

    People aren't "removers" of the virus. Once it is out of its host, a virus dies on its own if it doesn't find a new host, which is nearly always. You don't need people going around "hoovering" virus particles; just leave them alone for a few hours or days and they'll become inactive. If a virus succeeds in infecting a new host, even someone who for whatever reason doesn't show symptoms (it's more complicated than just having a healthy immune system), that by definition means that the virus is reproducing - increasing the probability of its further transmission (asymptomatic carriers are infectious) and of new mutations arising. The more hosts it infects, the more immune systems it encounters, the higher the probability that it mutates to become more infectious and resistant. This is what we are already seeing. It is probably no accident that a recent more infectious strain appeared in a country that had one of the highest infection rates to begin with.

    You need to stop thinking in terms of analogies and think about the real situation, which isn't so complicated that one cannot understand it otherwise. We are all, hopefully, familiar with the basics of the germ theory of disease. And educate yourself a little before pontificating on this topic.
  • Will Continued Social Distancing Ultimately Destroy All Human Life on this Planet?
    I know, I know… your first thought after reading this title is “Wow Roger, now you’ve really lost your mind!”. But humor me a bit and take a look at this analogy first — Roger Gregoire

    You don't understand how to use analogies. An analogy can illustrate an unfamiliar scenario in more familiar terms to provide an intuitive feel for it. But first, you need to make sure that your analogy really does function the same way as the real scenario in all relevant respects. And second, an analogy is not a substitute for an argument, it's just a rhetorical aid for making the argument more accessible.

    What you do is make up an analogy (multiple analogies: blood cells, car tires, fire extinguishers...) without clearly and convincingly showing how it parallels the real situation, and then draw conclusions from the analogy (and then constantly refer readers to the analogy, as if it constituted an argument).

    This seems to be your argument in its entirety (paraphrasing to get rid of an unnecessary analogy):

    We fail to recognize that intentionally holding the healthy population (those with strong immune systems) on this planet from an infection means that the infection will grow and mutate unabated.

    This is ignorant on a very basic level. Population mutation rate is proportional to (virus) population size. That is to say, the more the virus reproduces, the more mutations will appear. Letting the virus run wild through most of the population is guaranteed to produce more mutations than restraining the virus spread as much as possible.

    Add to this the fact that we cannot practically separate the "vulnerable" population from the "healthy" population for many months, while we wait for the "healthy" to acquire herd immunity. "Vulnerable" people live among us (and for most people we don't even know the extent of their vulnerability). They have families and caretakers; they will come in contact with other people. Only by restraining the overall infection rate can we protect them.

    Government experts are quick to reject those that say we should allow the healthy cars to speed up and run free (i.e., implement “strategic herd immunity”) as being misinformed quacks — Roger Gregoire

    Expertise is not acquired quickly. It takes years of training an experience. And yes, they are right to reject random inputs from misinformed quacks.
  • Bannings
    They don't read the same to me, Chester was quippy, counterpunch is an essay writer. — fdrake

    So then you are not denying that @jamalrob is putin? I knew it!
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    ↪SolarWind
    Physicalism is not a theory of everything, so you are severely misguided if you think you can "pound" physicalists with such questions. They'll tell you to go pound sand and they'll be right.
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    ↪SolarWind
    Physicalism isn't married to the third-person perspective. If physicalism is compatible with the existence of first-person perspectives in general (it had better be, otherwise it would be immediately ruled out), then there's no reason why a physicalist cannot assume a first-person perspective when giving a description of the world.
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    Where can I read up on the idea that they are controversial? Do you mean controversial in that it's a bad thought experiment? Or controversial in the sense of they are being discussed? — DoppyTheElv

    I just mean that there is a diversity of opinion when it comes to exotic imaginary scenarios involving personal identity. Our intuitions don't seem to deliver a uniform verdict. Some have strong (and divergent) opinions, others are uncertain.

    The teletransporting / copy-beam thought experiment shows that it is unclear what the objective solution is, not that there is none.
    Both the beaming and my thought experiment show the same thing: physics has an explanatory gap with personal identity => physicalism is incomplete.     — SolarWind

    Well, your thought experiment shows only that if you assume dualism at the outset, then dualism is what you will conclude. Same with identity thought experiments: they need not pose problems for physicalism unless you have already assumed that they do.
  • The Moral Argument
    Well, it’s possible for one to simply fail to see the connection between the premises and how they necessarily lead to the conclusion. Sometimes, seeing that connection may just give them reason to reject one of the premises of the argument but sometimes someone may reasonably just accept the conclusion. — TheHedoMinimalist

    That is certainly true with more complex arguments (or else mathematics would start and end with setting out axioms).

    The problem with the moral argument is that seeing the connection between P1 and P2 implies that P2 can only be defended by reasons that assume C. — TheHedoMinimalist

    Or the other way around, depending on which of the premises moves you most. Those who reject moral realism, especially former theists, sometimes associate it with theism, thereby acknowledging P1. But yes, if you already accept one of the two premises, acceptance of the other premise will go in lockstep with accepting the conclusion. Not saying that this cannot happen, but it's really a two-step process, not three.

    But do all syllogism have this problem to an equal extent? My whole point is that the moral argument is especially vulnerable to these conflicts and thus it should be regarded as inferior to other theistic argument. — TheHedoMinimalist

    I would agree that the argument, as presented in the OP, is weaker than others. It is a structural weakness. I actually mislabeled it as a syllogism above; a classical syllogism includes a general proposition (major premise) together with a specific proposition (minor premise), while this argument has just two minor premises.
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    I think the original argument can be put easier with clones. — DoppyTheElv

    Thought experiments involving cloning or teletransporting differ in an important detail: they start with there being a single person, who then undergoes some transformation. More importantly, these thought experiments are (in)famously controversial; they are the opposite of an argument. If anything, their controversy suggests that there may not be objectively right or wrong answers to the questions that they pose.
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    When you go to the toilet, how can you say you are the same person afterwards as before? — SolarWind

    Wow. That took an unexpected turn.

    OK, I think we are done here.
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    You simply compare the set {A*,B,C,...,X,Y,Z} with the set {A,B,C,...,X,Y,Z*}, where the star indicates which life you would live in the corresponding world. — SolarWind

    That's your dualistic premise-conclusion right there. For someone who doesn't already accept dualism there is no you that is independently assignable and separable from the body that it "inhabits."
  • What podcast are you listening to right now?
    Conflicted — jamalrob

    Thanks for the recommendation. Here is the web page for the podcast (had to google it). The first season was very interesting, listening to the second season now.


    You mentioned BBC 4. My favorite show there is In Our Time. The show covers history, culture, science, religion and philosophy. There is one host and three invited experts for each ~50 min episode - and they are all very good, very professional. What I like about the show is that it doesn't try to entertain or to talk down to the listener. Rather, it is an intelligent conversation between an interested layman (the host) and the experts. There are quite a few philosophy episodes that I have found well worth listening to.

    The Forum is rather similar in its scope and its format, although it is a little on the lighter side - but only a little. Indeed, I found some of the episodes on the same subjects to be similar in quality.
  • Imaginary proof of the soul
    ↪SolarWind
    As has already been pointed out in the very first response, an assertion is all you have going. You postulate a dualistic premise, then illustrate it with your two alternative worlds example. There is no proof here.
  • The Moral Argument
    There is something about this argument that makes it especially vulnerable to this attack. If you try attacking other popular arguments like this, then you will probably have no luck. — TheHedoMinimalist

    Deductive arguments, especially simple ones, are all subject to this seeming challenge: if you had good reasons to accept all the premises, then you should have accepted the conclusion at the same time. Conversely, if you had good reasons to reject the conclusion, you must have had good reasons to reject at least some of the premises (or if you didn't, then you will surely find them when your more certain commitments are threatened).

    Abstracting from the specifics, let's consider a general case:

    P1
    P2
    C

    You say, in the first place, that if you didn't have good reasons to accept P2, but seemed to have good reasons to reject C, then it should be easy for you to dump P2 when ¬C is threatened. On the other hand, if you had good reasons to both accept P2 and reject C, that can only mean that you have good reasons to reject P1. Note that I didn't even say anything about what the premises and the conclusion were, and yet I came to the same conclusions that you did.

    The Kalam Cosmological Argument:

    P1: Everything that isn’t infinite must have a cause

    P2: The Universe isn’t infinite

    C: Therefore, the universe must have a cause

    Let’s say someone accepts P2 because they reject the existence of actual infinities and they point to various thought experiments to illuminate their intuitions. P1 does not conflict with the reasons that they have for accepting P2 and neither premise of the argument implies that the other premise is less likely to be true than the conclusion that the argument is trying to provide evidence for.     — TheHedoMinimalist

    You are right in that the premises in the Moral argument are more tightly linked than in the Cosmological argument. P1 in the Cosmological argument makes a a general statement that happens to include P2, whereas P1 in the Moral argument makes a statement specifically about P2. But this is a difference in degree, not kind. The three propositions in a syllogism are like communicating vessels: if you apply pressure to one, it is immediately transmitted to the other two.

    The fact is that when such arguments succeed, they don't succeed in stages. It is not like you are first persuaded to accept the premises, and then - oh dear, I guess I have no choice but to accept the conclusion, like it or not! No, if the argument succeeds, then by the time you are ready to accept the premises, you are just as ready to accept the conclusion. That is because the logical connection between the premises and the conclusion is so transparent that you cannot help but be aware of it, even as you consider one proposition at a time.
  • The Moral Argument
    ↪TheHedoMinimalist
    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?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    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...
  • If Philosophers shouldn't talk about the big stuff in the world, who should?
    ↪Ansiktsburk
    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 couldn't find any counter arguments against the cosmological argument?
    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?
    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.
  • There is only one mathematical object
    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?
  • Has science strayed too far into philosophy?
    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.
  • Has science strayed too far into philosophy?
    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?
  • What are you listening to right now?
    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):

    Reveal










  • A fun puzzle for the forums: The probability of God
    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.

    a9fecb1706590b687e82a1b9f061631e.jpg

    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.
  • Two Black Balls
    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?
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