I were having a discussion on another thread about opinion vs. fact. It seems to me this is the same issue. Every statement made by a person is a subjective opinion. Alternatively, in my subjective opinion, every statement made by a person is a subjective opinion. In my opinion, those statements are equivalent. — T Clark

But that would appear to assume that the target of the person's opinion has been identified correctly.

Suppose for example that you meet a stranger who insists that the world will end tomorrow. If his ramblings are literally interpreted as his words suggest, we might be inclined to refer to his beliefs as subjective. Yet on some biological level his utterance is merely a stimulus-response to his current environment relative to his current mental state. Once the underlying set of circumstances that provoked his verbal response is identified, then couldn't it be said that his opinion when reinterpreted as referencing this underlying set of circumstances is in fact objective?

If we had a perfect understanding of each other's utterances, wouldn't we be only talking about stimulus-responses?

It is a problem if you are trying to have a discussion with someone and they keep throwing the word or the idea of "subjectivity" as a way to keep the discussion indiscussible — Perdidi Corpus

Isn't "indiscussibility" the very definition of subjectivity?

On the other hand, what isn't ultimately discussible?

For one to claim that another person's uttered judgement is subjective seems to me to express one's incomprehension of their utterance, and is this lack of comprehension of their utterance that is the reason why their utterance cannot be further discussed.

If an utterance is understood, either it is comprehended to be a valid judgement even if it is considered to be a wrong judgement, else it is comprehended to be a context-triggered verbal expression that cannot be interpreted to be a truth-apt judgement, in spite of appearances.

As another example, roll two dice and look for a sum of thirteen. We know beforehand that result isn't possible, but can we demonstrate through a series of trials how the unlikeliness of the outcome increases over the series of tests? — AngleWyrm

Yes, we can *demonstrate* provided we carefully understand that our "demonstration through a series of trials of the unlikeliness of an outcome" refers to our behavioural disposition in response to the trial outcomes we are getting, as opposed to understanding this demonstration in the usual way as being solely reducible to the dice roll outcomes in themselves.

For we cannot *represent* solely in terms of a collection of repeated trials the unlikeliness of rolling 13.

In my opinion the cause of Hume's problem of induction is the result of failing to recognise that induction and inference refer to the behavioural adaptation of an organism in response to the environment. When recognised as such, it makes no more sense to seek logical justification for our empirical inferences than it does for our digestion.

I don't see any reason to suppose that a person's self-reported beliefs when narrowly considered as a form of verbal-behaviour are qualitatively different from, or prior to, any other form of behaviour that is correlated to their holding of those beliefs. The cognitive therapist's working principle that the verbal behaviours of a patient represent the causal origin or explanans of the subject's broader behaviours seems sorely misguided to me.

Self-reported beliefs more often than not, chase the environmentally reinforced behaviours associated with them along with the psychological needs of the individual, while the self-reported spiritual salvation of the manic-depressive can instantaneously change to existential despair with only the passing of a cloud over the sun.

I think the confusion is caused by conflating universal statements over an open domain with propositions. Consider the statement

A. "All Creatures discovered in the Atlantic Ocean between 2018-2020 are not mermaids"

This should be regarded as a proposition, precisely because it is falsifiable.

But the open-ended infinite statement

B. "All Creatures are not mermaids" isn't falsifiable, and hence describes nothing , at least, nothing detached from the culture of scientific practice.

Rather, B is an instruction to scientists to exclude mermaids from consideration in their foreseeable scientific endeavours. Moreover, since B cannot be inferred on the basis of finite evidence, B ISN'T an inference, rather, B represents our pragmatically determined science-policy concerning the course of our future investigations on the basis of our finite experience of the past.

It is precisely for this reason that I don't believe in any universal laws of nature in the sense of them describing nature "in itself". Rather, any purported "universal laws of nature" are merely social imperatives that describe how scientists out to frame falsifiable hypotheses that in being falsifiable are necessarily finite and non-universal.

For example, statement B above is a permission-note that allows scientists to create propositions similar to A in the course of their investigations.

One potential point of difference between Wittgenstein and Hume concerns the notion of "habit". For Hume, are his remarks concerning the psychological association of mental impressions a thesis about his own experience or merely a description of own his experience?

Speaking of my own case, it isn't obvious to me that i call a banana a "banana" due to mental habit, but i might offer it as psychological explanation. Likewise it isn't immediately evident to me that my understanding of colliding snooker balls is based on repetitive familiarity, for me that would again be a psychological thesis.

Wittgenstein made this point in the blue book, that we often interpret our personal actions through the lens of rules or mechanisms as a post-hoc justification or explanation of what we did when defending our actions to others, even if we we did not consciously follow a rule or experience obeying a rule when performing our actions.

Also recall that the Later Wittgenstein even went further to say that one's conscious experience could not be generically described in terms of "following a rule" or "obeying a law", for rules can be variously interpreted and hence cannot be grounded in other rules, while words such as "following", "being guided by" and "obeying" imply no particular experience.

It is therefore only meaningful to say whether or not our experiences are obeying a particular rule if we can be shown in the individual case what constitutes obeying and disobeying the rule by something external to our immediate imagination and supposed "use" of the rule.

Hence putting aside all thesis about what causality is and referring only to lived experience, how do we even arrive at Hume's problem?

I don't normally behave in a matter that is epistemically coherent with the sun coming-up tomorrow because I have a reason to believe it, and neither am i aware of following a habit. I simply act in a certain fashion and then the sun comes up, without me having a reason for my behaviour. And the scientist after giving all of his verbal justifications acts similarly, without reasons.

Your notion of fairness seems to assume that individuals make independent and voluntary choices that are independent of their environment, peers and upbringing. If that thesis is false, such that anyone given the same resources and opportunities would make similar incomes then how would you define what is a "fair" distribution?

And even if such a distribution is "fair" according to some moral definition of fairness pertaining to the individual, does that necessarily imply that wealth shouldn't be re-distributed? After all, what is "fair" for individuals might not be "fair" or beneficial for the collective, or vice versa.

I believe that the Later Wittgenstein would have understood causality more through the lens of epistemological behaviourism in the sense of it being demonstrable through our "use" of epistemic judgements, as opposed to viewing causality as a metaphysical 'thesis' about cognition, nature or reason, or as a concept empirically reducible to mental pictures or propositions.

For example, suppose that while out bird-watching Bob suddenly declares

A. "All swans are white".

As Hume might agree, in spite of appearances A is NOT an empirical proposition about swans. And if we were to have a clear understanding of what Bob meant by this sentence we would either have to continue to observe Bob, or we would have to ask Bob for further information. He might for example reply "Having seen twenty swans, I have given up searching for a black swan and have decided to go home"

Likewise if group of physicists declares that "particle A always follows particle B", we can tell what they mean by watching their behaviour when they perform future experiments.


Like with any rule or principle of necessity, what we mean by causality cannot be verbally represented but only behaviourally demonstrated, similar to how a mathematician cannot linguistically represent what he means by "infinity", for it is a rule pertaining to the behaviour of the mathematician and it is not an object that the mathematician is pointing at.

The only definition of 'real object' I can think of that isn't a circular definition and that doesn't beg-the-question of the existence of a mind-independent word, and that cannot be doubted by the skeptic, is that a 'real object' is purely a synonym for an object associated with feelings of compulsion.

Suppose Bob loses his beloved gold watch and that he imagines it in great detail as he ransacks his office for it. A skeptical colleague interrupts him and asks " what makes think that your imagined gold-watch has a bearer? After all, you cannot physically see a watch, so you are only imagining an 'idea' of a gold watch in the same way you might imagine a unicorn or a fairy" Perhaps bob in exasperation replies "my imagined watch obviously isn't my ACTUAL watch!". The skeptic of course responds "But now you are only thinking of an 'actual' watch. And what makes you think THAT has a bearer?"

The answer of course, is that "realness" has no logical justification in terms of truth-by-correspondence . For bob to say "my imagined gold-watch has an actual bearer" is only to express his motivation to search.

A realist kicks a rock and howls in pain to refute the idealist. The idealist says "there you see, i told you the rock is nothing more than your idea of it" (The idealist charges the realist with 'truth-by-correspondence'. The realist charges the idealist with denying facts).

Suppose Bob then experiences waking up and has no real memories of possessing a gold watch. If he concludes that the above scenario was all a dream, he is likely to stop searching for a watch and to conclude it wasn't real after all. But not necessarily. Perhaps he grew up in a superstitious family where dreams were interpreted literally. He might even keep searching in the spirit of wishful thinking and insist that the gold-watch might be real. But this changes nothing about our understanding of realness, for "realness" still reduces to bob's behavioural tendencies.

To say "i conclude that my gold watch isn't real" expresses a change of heart and nothing more. Logical argument and rhetoric of course *can* lead to changes of heart, hence the reason we might hope to use logic to convince the delusional. But here logic is purely a rhetorical device of persuasion that appeals to a persons sense of coherence and familiarity. Using logic here isn't qualitatively different to cajoling somebody through charm or threatening them violence.

So there is nothing essentially wrong on thinking of 'archetypes' as real, if in saying that one is expressing one's motivation.

To me, reason is a tool and morality is the material we use reason on. Isn't that the working analogy for philosophy?

If I understand you correctly, your view is somewhat similar to my OP - that reason is good. This is what I'm questioning here. — TheMadFool

Yes, i think it is a deeply flawed analogy, for we don't possess a single form of reasoning but have evolved many different games of reasoning-behaviour that constitute a family of coping strategies for surviving in different sets of circumstances.

Using reason to solve a problem is equivalent to comparing actions taken in similar situations of adversity and to estimate their utility in a new situation. And our logical acts of comparison, deduction and prediction are not themselves unique forms of behaviour, and they possess no justification beyond the utility of their behavioural consequences.

Like our principles of morality, we learn what rational thinking is through reward and punishment.
— sime

A fine point. But the normative nature of reason is quite different from that of morality. We ought to be logical because being so reveals truths that are necessary for our survival. However, logic, as yet, hasn't revealed any reason why we ought to be good. — TheMadFool

I mean it deeper than that. Even what we call 'pure logic' and its mechanical application is a matter of us following normative principles that are not represented in the rules of the logic itself. We draw attention to the normative essence of logic when we teach logic to somebody by practically demonstrating how they *ought* to apply a formula.

Logic doesn't merely involve oughts, it is only oughts.

Recall that no matter what linguistic instruction we give somebody in our explanation of a rule and its application, they might always apply the rule "wrongly" in a way we never intended. Rules by themselves cannot justify how one interprets other rules. We ultimately ground our intended interpretation of rules in behavioural habits established through rewards and punishments.


The equations of physics say nothing to the scientist about the world independently of how he ought to apply them. And he does his best to avoid miscalculation on *pain* of failure. But the miscalculation isn't distinct and separable from the pain of failure - there aren't "two' separate things - rather the definition of miscalculation involves pain of failure.

Now why should it be assumed that reason involves different criteria of normativity to morality?

Why should logic and logical thinking be considered to be a distinct type of behaviour to morality and moral thinking?

Yes, and the definition of the standard metre is no longer the length of a particular platinum bar contained in a Paris vault, but the distance light travels in a vacuum in a precise time interval ideally measured by etc etc

In short our metric units are essentially imprecise and are in practice unrelated to a particular standard.

The deeper problem relates to Wittgenstein's observations concerning our notion of sameness. For our notion of when two things are "identical" *isn't* in the sense of them being equivalent in a precisely empirical sense, but in the practical sense that they can be substituted for one another in a language game.

Like our principles of morality, we learn what rational thinking is through reward and punishment.

Therefore doesn't the justification of all applications of reason, even purely mathematical reason such as 2+2=4 and scientific reason such as E=MC^2, boil down to ought-justifications of the type "I ought to lock the backdoor when leaving the house"?

In other words, isn't the confusion of the paradox a result of overlooking the normative basis that is ultimately needed to justify the use of *any* law or rule - even those laws which are supposedly purely empirical or of pure reason?

If neoliberalism is merely synonymous with the monetization of all human activity, the automation and outsourcing of human labour, and the coercion of human culture for profit, then I don't see why that is necessarily a problem provided society and the welfare state provides strengthened consumer rights, adequate health services, appropriate welfare provision and democratic representation for affected individuals.

If what we refer to as neoliberalism is an inevitable part of cultural and technological progress, then all that is needed is a strengthened social democracy, or even a democratic socialism to compensate the adversely affected, presumably something that requires a global universal income that in turn necessitates global social democracy.

The isolationist inclinations of Trump supporters don't seem to remedy the problem of neo-liberalism but to make its inevitable effects much worse.

Why is neoliberalism undesirable?

No, it's not about that, but the thing is that you're not the first person in your age group 50+ who I've met who thinks exactly the same way. You all miss the golden days of the fall of the Berlin wall, how we are all becoming one humanity, New Ageism, etc. etc. There is a reason why you cannot stand Donald Trump, and that is precisely because in some regards he is dynamite in the neoliberal system. He is part of what both Democrats and Republicans agree that is inadmissible. All the other disagreements between the two parties are superficial compared to this fundamental agreement. — Agustino

lol. what on earth was bad about the fall of the Berlin Wall? Wasn't that even the bi-product of america winning the cold war and putting itself first? IF the Berlin Wall had collapsed under Trump's watch, are you telling me he wouldn't be taking all the credit for it?

And in terms of policies that Trump supports or is prepared to sign, and the politicians and media organisations he works with, how exactly is it that he is dynamite in the neoliberal system?

Or do you just mean that he's hastening america's demise and expanding the sphere of influence of China and Russia?

You also said, "All meaning requires...and agent to draw the correlations/associations between them," but again this is something Wittgenstein would have said in his early philosophy (Tractatus), but it's not something that he would have said in his later philosophy (PI). You seem to be saying what many have believed throughout history, that the meaning of a word is associated with some thing, or some object out there in reality. — Sam26

While i'm not myself within this camp of opinion, there are many self-proclaimed Wittgensteinians who interpret Witty's supposed "private language argument" as a 'transcendental argument' for the existence of the external world that attempts to turn the language of idealism against itself. And this interpretation sounds along the lines of what I understand creative soul to be saying.

Recall Wittgenstein's comparison of the meaning of a word with something you walk up to.

Aren't such examples of "meaning as use" the essence of transcendental arguments for realism?

If the nouns of one's language are spoken in order to convey information, either to oneself when one talks to oneself in introspection, or to other people when one speaks to others, then the nouns of one's language must be referring to something outside of one's immediate experience when one speaks - for otherwise one is merely re-signalling one's immediate experience in a private language that is defined purely in terms of his immediate experience - a pointless task surely?

Ergo, to be motivated to say a noun with the objective of discussing the existence of a fact is part of what it means to assert that something exists externally to one's immediate experience. Hence, the realist hopes, scepticism of the external world in the sense of doubting that nothing lies outside of one's immediate experience, is meaningless and nonsensical. For to doubt the external world is to already objectify it.

The reason I don't fall for this argument and doubt that Wittgenstein would have supported it, is because I understand Wittgenstein to be a verificationist in spirit who sought to treat illnesses of the mind as opposed to legitimising pseudo-philosophical problems.

For it is nonsensical for a verificationist, who rejects both the meaning of non-empirical premises and the meaning of non-empirical arguments based on pure reason, to speak of non-empirical truths that cannot eventually be grounded in first-person experience, since all so-called 'truth's must be verifiable either a priori in the imagination or a posteriori in the sense of walking up to and confirming something. The above transcendental argument I presented above isn't an empirical argument based on philosophers actual use of language, and neither is the absolute notion of an external world empirically meaningful.

Perhaps we could say, transcendental arguments are potentially useful therapies for treating anxieties over idealism, while skeptical arguments against realism are potentially useful therapies for treating nihilistic despair over realism.

But since the arguments used in both philosophical therapies not empirically verifiable arguments, they purely consist in propaganda with an intended remedial effect.

Yes, video-gaming, artificial intelligence and the information age are likely to be causing a metaphysical shift in our default cultural assumptions, mostly i believe for the better.

The problem with the past-century's default assumption of a finite single life or "permadeath" in gaming terminology, is that there is no logical incentive for an individual to act morally towards the world.

If everyone is going to permanently cease to exist, then why should it matter whether one looks after the planet and their fellow citizens and treats the rest of society with the undue care and respect that society has not reciprocated towards them? unless, that is, one believes there is no escaping the world, even in death...

One can argue that unless existence is perpetual and that individuals are in some sense metaphysically equivalent and bound to their world, there is no logical justification for morality.

one directly sees indirect realism
— sime
This sounds like a contradiction. This sounds like you have direct access to reality to describe it with such detail and with such confidence, not indirect access. — Harry Hindu

yes, *I* have direct access, in the sense that I cannot imagine what it means to have indirect access in my own case. Yet it is natural for me to describe everyone else as having indirect access, since I observe other people as being objects that are distinct from their objects of perception.

So I am afraid, it is direct realism for me and indirect realism for everyone else.

And surely you would agree. For isn't it obvious to you that my words can only refer to my representations of your world that I cannot possibly know or even meaningfully talk about?

Of course, your version of "my" corresponds to "you" - an object over there- in my field of perception.

And of course, MY version of "my" corresponds to nothing.

And of course, if anybody is rational they will agree with my statements as written, but draw exactly the opposite conclusion.

And the only reason this is appears inconsistent to the realist is because he insists on the semantic symmetry of propositions whose subject is the first-person; he assumes that enlightened individuals would all be in verbal agreement with each other when discussing the truths of philosophy; that their propositions of epistemology would all be phrased in terms of "we know this" as opposed to "I know this" whereas "you know that"

But the realist overlooks what is directly in front of his nose. For when describing one's use of words in relation to one's own experiences, one directly sees indirect realism when one watches other people perceiving their surroundings, whereas one can only think like a direct realist when it comes to one's own experiences. For one's own experience is the very basis in which indirect realism is interpreted.

Even if this doesn't count as a critique of Kantianism, it does count against skepticism. And it shows how rudimentary perception can work on a direct realist account. — Marchesk

I'm not quite sure how that follows, for neuroscience and machine learning are both representationalist and neo-Kantian in the sense of being functionalist, at least in terms of their surface grammar. The upshot is that representations are internal and their designated truth labels are external and they aren't typically considered to be part of a unified single entity.

It might be enlightening to read about Kant's theory of cognitive judgement on the SEP to understand the precise differences of modern neuroscientific thinking to Kant's transcendental idealism.

If I recall correctly, Kant's views of perception are somewhat similar to direct realism in the sense of being roughly deflationary about consciousness in terms of its contents, but with some minor and irrelevant differences that relates to the normativity of judgements. In truth his views were probably somewhat vague and ambiguous but i believe they are deflationary in the critical sense of rejecting truth by correspondence in the empirical sense.

In other words, empirical doubt about the 'external' world 'as a whole' might be impossible for Kant, but not necessarily rational doubt concerning the transcendental reality or significance of the empirical world, since after all, Kant speaks of transcendental Noumenal entities that are rationally deducible, even if they are unimaginable and empty logical entities without empirical meaning and significance.

Hence it appears that direct realism, at least for Kant, even if eliminating empirical doubt 'as a whole', cannot defeat rational Scepticism.

According to utilitarianism there seem to be two ethical arguments for committing murder:

1) The "Utility Monster" argument: Perhaps it is the case that the pleasure and happiness a murderer experiences by killing somebody outweighs the future pleasure and happiness lost by his victim and the grief caused for the victim's family and friends.

2) The "Benevolent World Exploder" argument : Perhaps the most compassionate action to minimise future human suffering is to commit genocide and wipe out the human race.

The problem of course is how to define and estimate the net-utility of a person's continued existence as a whole - a utility value which should take into account how the individual feels about his own life, and the expected net-utility of that person's potential offspring and their offspring etc.

Is it even meaningful to talk about utility in the absolute way these arguments demand?

For while we can estimate *the relative* utility of an individual's actions by observing the average choices they make when repeatedly presenting to them the same set of choices with their associated consequences, there isn't any means by which to evaluate whether or not being dead is a "good choice", since this state cannot be re-entered and re-evaluated.

My conclusion is that murder and suicide, in being non-repeatable events cannot be assigned a utility value on behalf of individual victims. Utility can only compare states of satisfaction of the living, who on average appear very much opposed to the consequences they experience with respect to murder and suicide.

All forms of pattern recognition involve a priori representational assumptions. Unsupervised learning is no different. In fact machine learning nicely vindicates neo-Kantian ideas of perceptual judgement, even if not in terms of the same fundamental categories, nor from categories derived from introspective transcendental arguments (Kant was after all, targeting philosophical skepticism about the self and the possiblity of knowledge of the external world, and not the scientific problem of how to understand the behavioural aspects of mental functioning that concerns a merely empirical affair)

But yet from this neo-Kantian perspective, consider for example a nearest-neighbour image classifier consisting of nothing more than a disordered collection of images. Without any a priori assumptions it is impossible to even talk about this image collection as containing a pattern by which to classify new images with respect to that pattern.

This was the basic observation of David Hume. Raw observation data by itself cannot justify empirical judgements as claims to knowledge. Kant merely pointed out that raw observations alone cannot even constitute empirical judgements, which as machine learning nicely illustrates, requires innate judgement in the form of synthetic-a priori responses.

Generalisation from experience requires metrics of similarity for perceptual pattern matching, together with categories of perception for filtering the relevant information to be compared. Neural networks don't change this picture, even if perceptual filters are partially empirically influenced. Decisions still need to be made about the neural architecture, its width, depth, the neural activation responses on each layer, the anticipatory patterns of neurons and so on.

All of this constitutes "synthetic a priori" processing.

Thank you fdrake and others!

Just one last thing:
Where does the law of excluded middle fit into all this?
A statement must be either true or false.

So if it is unprovable, within a formal axiomatic system, and you cannot decide it's truth value even by going outside the system, what value do you assign to that statement?
How does this fit within the context of Godel's theorems? — guptanishank

LEM is irrelevant, since Godel's Incompleteness theorems don't use it, that is to say, his proof is entirely constructive and syntactic without invoking ~~P -> P.

Recall that Godels results weren't at all surprising to Intuitionists who rejected LEM twenty years in advance of the publication of his incompleteness theorems precisely because they rejected the the assumption that logic has transcendental significance beyond the step-wise empirical construction of its formulas in accordance with intuition. Why on the basis of this intuition ought it be expected that for any well-formed formula P in the language of an axiomatic system that we must derive P or ~P?

Since it is nonsensical to imagine proving the consistency of an axiomatic system that captures arithmetic, it is equally nonsensical to imagine the existence of true yet un-provable statements.

Godel sentences are not "true but unprovable" for this reason. For to assume that they are true is to beg the question of consistency, an assumption without which it is impossible to assign any meaning to godel sentences, for they are no longer necessarily non-derivable.

When reading popular accounts of Godel's theorem, there is always this whiff of a shady magical trick being pulled before the reader's eyes. And this magical trick is when authors like Douglas Hofstadter attempt to sell mystery to the reader by saying to the effect "forget about this boring and logically impossible-to-verify disclaimer about logical consistency that we cannot meaningfully assert, or the related fact that completed infinity doesn't really exist - *cough* look at this weird "self-referencing" Escher picture!"

I'm not sure I follow your point. You don't see how levels of awareness change between dream states and waking states? Moreover, there is no correspondence between NDEs and lucid dreaming in the sense that they are even close to equivalent. One knows when one is having a lucid dream, at least most of us do, and lucid dreams have a dreamlike quality that's not even close to what we experience on an everyday basis. NDEs, as I'm contending, are as reality like as you can get, in fact people claim that it's more real than real, it's hyper-real. — Sam26

No that is generally false. Lucid Dreams can be appear to be as equally real as reality. I think you are only thinking of spontaneous, low quality lucid dreams that occur when tired in nightly sleep. In contrast, wake-induced lucid dreaming that is deliberately achieved by a fully awake subject in the daytime through deep meditation or falling asleep consciously can indeed seem hyper-real. This explains why occultists have insisted on referring to them as Out-of-Body experiences, or astral projection.

There simply isn't a convincing reason to distinguish dream states from "out of body experiences" on the basis of hallucinatory/sensory phenomena.

If you don't believe me, why not try it???

This is exactly what RT is not. If there has ever been a god-like perspective then it is that of RT. How else could you explain time dilation and space contraction? Observers in their own frame of reference do not experience it. — Hachem

As i said, my understanding of SR is that it inter-translates local frames of reference that are causally connected within the speed of light of each other. But that doesn't make it a consistent theory of ALL conceivable frames of reference that lie outside of one another's light cones. Indeed SR has nothing to say about causal implications for space-like events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_and_prohibition_of_motion_faster_than_light

Yes it is, strictly speaking, nonsensical to speak of "true empirical contradictions", including the empirical consequences of special or general relativity - but that isn't the sense of "contradiction" to which philosophers appear to be referring to with the theory of relativity.

For what philosophers seem to be implicitly referring to here is an observer-independent transcendental interpretation of the theory of relativity that they are imagining in line with what their common-sense intuition about what science ought to tell us about a gods-eye perspective of nature.

Special relativity in being an empirical theory is, like with any scientific theory, only designed to account for empirical observations obtainable in the first-person. The theory shows that if our common-sense notion of causation is to be consistent without contradictory implications, then nothing can travel faster than the speed of light; SR says that for any two events that cannot physically influence one-another without interacting via faster than light signals, then it is impossible to say in an observer-independent sense which event occurs first or second, let alone whether they occur simultaneously. They have as it were, a "space-like" relation without a specific temporal ordering, a opposed to a "time-like" temporal ordering.

Hence if one interpreted SR transcendentally in the sense of trying to imagine its implications from a "gods-eye" perspective of the universe as whole, it does indeed imply contradictory states of affairs relative to our notion of causality.

Of course, this is a nonsensical interpretation of SR and forgets the fact that SR is a theory that is only supposed to be meaningful *relative* to a given frame of reference and to describe a frame of reference's relation to "nearby" frames of reference for which the ordering of causation remains unchanged.

But then what of General Relativity? Does it improve matters by giving us a god's eye perspective? i think not. For it allows different frames of references for which events are either seen as time-like or space-like. For example:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/339235/causality-in-general-relativity

I'd like a more astute philosopher of science to chime in here, but I understand that general relativity only avoids 'transcendental contradiction' in the scientifically unimportant sense when it is interpreted either

1) anti-metaphysically, instrumentally and solipsistically as a computational device for describing only a particular individual observer's experiences and hypothetical observers within his conceivable future.

or

2) as a global metaphysics without any interpretation in terms of first-person experience..

I imagine idealists to accept 1, and realists to accept 2.

The anti-metaphysical stance of verificationism suggests that the most logical position on the "afterlife" is that of a soulless immortality that results by judging both "mortality" and "immortality" to be metaphysically inapplicable concepts that are empirically trivial in pertaining only to empirical matters of behaviour decided by convention:

1) Verificationism is anti-realist about time, since the meaning of "past" and "future" reduces to present empirical conditions pertaining to their assertion. Hence all observed change could be said to occur within a non-moving present that can only be said to exist 'in a manner of speaking'.

2) Verificationism is behaviourist concerning "life" and "death" since these concepts are reduced to their empirical criteria of assertion which pertain only to observed biological behaviour in observed persons and other organisms.

Hence for verificationism it would appear impossible in virtue of 1 and 2 to talk meaningfully about the life or death of a literal "first-person" owner of experience, except in the sense of a fictional person that we know of as the "first-person" or "empirical ego" which pertains only to an idea of the imagination that is derived from the publicly verified meaning of "living person" by way of analogy.

So the analogy I'm speaking of is the analogy between dream states and waking states, and waking states and NDEs. We know, for example, that moving into a dream state is moving from a higher level of awareness to a lower level of awareness. — Sam26

This idea of absolute or relative "levels of awareness" sounds highly implausible given the close correspondence of OBEs, NDEs and lucid dreaming and how each supposedly distinct category of experience lacks any essential identifier, with examples of each 'category' spanning the conceivable spectrum of conscious experience, each example emphasising different sensory modalities and parts of volitional agency, language processing, attention and memory , that aren't always amplified or attenuated in the same direction.

It seems my view of the world is grounded in my mind. But I see no way to support the claim that the whole world is grounded in my mind, or in anyone else's mind. I see no way to support the claim that the world disappears when any one animal goes to sleep; nor the claim that the world disappears when any one animal dies. — Cabbage Farmer

Why should the idea that the existence of the world is not independent of first-person experience conflict with the observation that the world continues when other animals sleep?

Why the single-standard assumption that what is true to say of the third-person must also be true to say of the first-person?

Why the prejudice against solipsism?

We have compassion for another because we are ultimately of the same essence. However, I don't think he really means that in compassion we actually feel another's suffering inside another persons body — jancanc

Yes in a sense and No in a sense.

This type of mind-body-problem is caused by the surface grammar of our language suggesting to us the idea of there being an 'owner' of first-person experience.

This is caused by the fact that as children we learned sensation words in inter-subjective contexts in which our carers point to the behaviour of themselves and to other people while saying a pain word, and then they repeat exactly the same word to ourselves when we behave similarly. From this process we arrive at the idea of a literal first-person who isn't merely equivalent to experience itself, but is rather a distinct yet hidden entity who 'owns' their experience.

One way to interrogate this idea is to replace the word "pain" with two separate words. For example, call pain "i-pain" if it is pain which I experience and call it "b-pain" when I am referring to somebody else's pain behaviour.

Your question is then translated into questions concerning the relationship of how these two words fit-together, such as whether learning the meaning of 'i-pain' is dependent on learning the meaning of 'b-pain'

A question probably best left as a forum exercise :)

If i say "now and here" for no apparent reason while pointing at a tree, what information have i conveyed?

Haven't I at best, merely named the tree "now and here"?

I think

Eternalists are temporal realists who believe that our physical notion of time is fundamental and represents mind-independent and psychologically timeless entities that in some metaphysically independent way gives rise to our psychological notion of time.

Presentists are temporal idealists who see our psychological notion of time as fundamental and consisting of private definitions of temporal signification which relate directly to first-person experience, and believe that physical time is conceptually reducible to talk of psychological time.

All stated rules are given their sense only by our application of them and not by their syntactical definition, since a stated definition is in itself a rule whose meaning must also be shown by application.

Sign signification, in being a rule, likewise only makes sense when considered as a human reaction that connects sign to signified. And that is true for both mathematical rules and physical laws. For in both of these cases if we entirely ignored how humans use equations, we would lose the ability to show that the equations represent or imply anything.

And we cannot eliminate ourselves as the meaning-mediators of rules via simply introducing additional rules to describe our meaning-making, since we immediately arrive at a similar problem as before, namely we would need to demonstrate our rules of 'self' description for them to signify anything. .

A trivial corollary of this is that the "free will vs determinism" debate is utterly nonsensical.

Now i have never read any Peirce except for his SEP entry, and I don't have a good grasp of his notion of an interpretant, particularly in my recollection of his earlier problem of an endless of chain of signification, but my reasoning tells me that his semiotic philosophy can only make sense if it reduces to a pre-theoretic foundation of meaning grounded in human perception or action that cannot be stated but can only be shown.

Similarly, I would strongly argue that Berkeley's notion of an 'idea' wasn't a theoretical concept of the mind, but a gesture towards a pre-theoretical basis of relating to the world that also can only be shown, since it is only by interpreting Berkeley in this way that his subjective-idealism can defeat his intended target of epistemological scepticism that results from representational materialism.

So basically I am led by the force of logic to conclude, at least on the basis of my possibly incorrect understanding of these two philosophers, that Berkeley and Peirce must share the same idealism. Indeed i cannot even see how idealism can be theoretical without being self-refuting, and hence i cannot see room for more than one idealism.

I'm simply saying that how I cannot see how the finite syntax of mathematical statements can represent a super-task so i cannot see why mathematics should recognise zeno's paradox. Surely the mathematical answer isn't to 'solve' the paradox but to reject it, by showing that it cannot be derived or represented unless there is an equivocation of

"A line is infinitely divisible" which is a finitely describable definition of a rule

with

"A line has an infinite number of segments" which cannot be represented in our syntax.

Of course, set theory invented the "axiom of infinity" to express the idea of "countable infinite sets". But there is a big difference between expressing the syntax of an idea vs the representing the semantics of the idea. And I cannot think of a compelling reason to see the axiom of infinity is anything other than a meaningless syntactical rule for manipulating finite syntax that represents nothing and lacks real world application , with the possible exception of representing things that are not infinite.

So to my thinking, we can colloquially talk about the probability of infinite sequences as 'names' for our syntax and we can point to associated syntactical expressions of limits and mutter words like "measure zero". But philosophers shouldn't take those words literally.

es we can say that induction is bad, mathematics is bad, we know nothing about the real world, or that the world doesnt even exist. We can disagree in a lot of things. But I still stick to math and science. And I say that Zeno's paradox is mathematically conceivable. Is the mathematical interpretation the absolute and ultimate interpretation? Probably not. Can concieve the structures of Mathematics? No. Does it matter? No. Because Mathematics seem to work.
The mathematical interpretation of the paradox is the only one logically consistent with Newtonian mechanics. So "logically" I dont know why should I deny the possibility of an infinite chain of events. Of course we will never know what the ultimate truth about matter is. But still Maths provides the best answers. — Meta

I'm not doubting what we can "know", I'm only doubting what we can mean to ourselves mathematically.

I don't see how Zeno's paradox can be represented in mathematics, since neither calculus nor logic can literally represent a super-task.

In calculus we might write part of a geometric series:

{0, 1/2, 3/4, ..., 1}

But what could it mean to say that the dots "..." represent an "infinite" number of steps?

Is it really the case that "..." is an abbreviation for missing numbers here? Or was it just a sign we invented, along with a rule that if we write "..." then we can allow ourselves to write the limit of the geometric series?

Likewise the rule of induction tells us "given any line divided into finite segments, and given a rule which we grant ourselves to break line segments in smaller segments , then we can permit ourselves to say "the line is infinitely divisible ". But how do we jump from here to the conclusion that "the line really has an infinite number of segments"? For the rule of induction has only given us a definition for what "the line is infinitely divisible" means. And it means nothing else than to say "i have a line of finite segments, and a rule for further subdividing them"

Zeno's paradox was needed to show we can't state for sure that an infinite chain of events is impossible. In fact the only solution I know to Zeno's paradox uses infinite sums and that an infinite number of events can happen in finite time. I dont want to talk more about the paradox since the message of my comment is crystal clear. — Meta

again, in line with my previous post, one can question whether zeno's paradox is actually conceivable, for it assumes that it is meaningful to talk about infinite and arbitrarily small divisions of a substance, and yet we have never constructed such a thing either on paper, nor with a machine, nor have we ever made arbitrarily small perceptual discriminations.

One cannot say, "yes but zeno's paradox is mathematically conceivable", because again, our mathematical accounts are finite and cannot necessitate the infallible and infinite interpretation required of it.

All we are doing with Zenos paradox is brainwashing ourselves by using the principle of induction.

"I have shown i can keep slicing a cake" means nothing more "I sliced a piece of cake several times until I contented myself with the idea that i can slice the cake again"

Another way of thinking about the probability of infinite sequences is to reject the assertion that it is meaningful or even possible to linguistically refer to a single infinite sequence. For why should we assume that our finite use of language actually 'picks-out' any single infinite sequence when we appear to talk about it, given that we have not constructed it?

In other words, rather than interpret {H,T,...} to denote a particular yet unspecified infinite sequence of coin tosses beginning with the prefix Head-Tail, lets interpret it to directly represent the entire set of infinite coin toss sequences beginning with H,T.

The advantage of this way of thinking to my mind, is it that it resolves the paradox of our standard theory of probability without us having to change it. We can say that we assign probability one to the entire set of infinite binary sequences simply because our problem is binary and sequential, and yet we can defend our assignment of probability zero to any finite set of infinite sequences simply because we are not interested in these unobservable sets in practice and because they are unthinkable.

This interpretation of classical probability is entirely in line with how it is used in practice, for example when predicting the stock market, where {H,T,...} might represent all of the information a trader might have a time t=2 but where there is no purpose for applying probability to finite sets of infinite sequences that require infinite information.

Even if we extend the rules of probability to assign infinitesimally small probabilities to individual sequences, it turns out, at least on some forms of non-standard analysis, that we will end up describing more than we bargained for. For example we will end up describing sequences of coin tosses that are *even longer* than mere countable infinity, and our original problem resurfaces on an even larger level.

your intuition is correct, or should i say, formalised to be correct by definition in classical probability, as, informally speaking, as you imply, the probability of getting at least one tail for an unbiased coin in N trials converges to 1 as N -> inf, yet there still remains an infinitesimally small probability of flipping all heads, a result which cannot be directly represented in classical probability due to it defining probability values as lying in the space of real numbers which forbids infinitesimals. This is the likely source of confusion.

Formally speaking, Probabilities are *measures*, which is to say they are functions defined upon sets of outcomes which obey our intuitions of what a probability function should look like. If the set of possible outcomes contains an unlimited number of possibilities the calculus allows us to consistently assign a value of "one" for the entire collection and "zero" for subsets of that set which contain only a finite number of possible outcomes. Such subsets of possibility, although not empty, are said to be of "measure zero" and to never occur "almost surely".

***** doesn't re-present the number five. The number five is present (immanent) in *****. It doesn't matter if you don't know that it is there or don't know how to count. It also wouldn't matter if there were no sentient beings in existence. The number five is there as a consequence of the asterixes being there. — Andrew M

Is five immanent in ****** ?