I might be a few hours late. I assume nobody minds, since this is not a contest. I'll definitely be done by midnight my time (UTC -7)

Ah, my real concern was that the essays were going to be hidden from the main forum. I see that is not the case.

I will submit something. I suggest we post them to the main forum, maybe with a prefix like [PF Essay]. They are topical, after all!

No argument. Would you go so far as to say that there is no correspondence at all between the notation and the actuality of the situation? — noAxioms

I think that goes too far. Minds are adept at formulating concepts, and matching instances to these concepts. For something to be notated a member instance of a concept biases toward the fact that the thing does indeed match the concept. And while the relationship between concept and reality is not simple, it similarly goes too far to say there is no relationship at all.

I think there is a subtle conflation here between an attribute and it's notation.

That we notate something as existing depends on a mind to do the notation. With the weak anthropic principle, this means that worlds conducive to minds are liable to be notated, and worlds not conducive will not be notated. This absolutely biases the notation towards only those worlds that can support it.

But this doesn't have a logical connection to mind independent reality, itself. Both types of worlds may exist independently of minds, regardless of the fact that only one may be so notated.

So, in one short week, the Moron has:

* Crashed the stock market
* Crashed the bond market
* Crashed the dollar
* Alienated all of our allies (except Russia)
* United the entire world against us (except Russia)

And these are just the immediate effects of his malignant imbecility. Longer term, we can expect surging inflation, factory closures, exploding debt, recession at minumum.

I hope all the Trumpies are happy!

You see, the interest on the debt is already a higher spending issue on the budget than defense spending. At that, no DOGE or whoever can touch (even if they tried), because not meeting the interest payments is default.

The interest on the debt is on the average now 3,3% which is over 1% higher than five years ago. Just an additional 1% of interest and the whole debt thing is worse. Think if it would be double, 6,6% which is on the long run quite normal. That would basically double the expenses. And let's remember that we have come from literally from the lowest historical interest rates of all time and now the cycle is going up. — ssu

Believe me I am aware of this. You might be under the misapprehension that the Republicans in this country are actual public servants working for the public good. Maybe from outside the country, despite Trump, it is hard to perceive how bad it really is. Not only do they not give a shit about the debt (despite endless bloviation to the contrary), they thrive off it. The goal is to redirect as much of the non-military budget to their wealthy donors as tax cuts. That is all. The debt is a tool to that end. Even before Trump the debt was likely to fall into a death spiral. Studies have shown that, without the Bush and Trump I tax cuts, revenue would have been better than neutral. THEY DO NOT CARE.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-responsible-for-the-increasing-debt-ratio/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

And no they will likely never default. Instead, they will debase the currency to meet the debt. In fact they have been floating this idea for years now.

I can't wait to hear the first Trumpy laud the market rebound as a great victory for Trump.

The Trump administration might not care about the stock market, but the government does care a lot of the interest on the US debt! — ssu

I'm not so sure they care about that either. The debt has worked wonderfully for the republicans, by playing the Two Santas game. Historically they use it as a cudgel during debt ceiling negotiations, and to deny any legislative win to the dems that actually costs anything. Now they have gone into overdrive, gutting all programs they don't like in the name of reducing "waste and fraud", with the crisis of the debt as the pretext for this urgency. Then, they gut taxes to the wealthy, in total disregard to the debt, while throwing a few breadcrumbs to the masses. They will keep playing this until the system collapses, and likely after.

He's handing us an economic revolution. If you're a leftist, you're like: go Trump! Get those tariffs! — frank

Absolute blithering nonsense. There is nothing remotely "leftist" about completely upending the economic order in order to institute a massively regressive tax on everyone. Which in turn will be used as a pretext for massive tax cuts for the rich. You seem to have the ignorant idea that being leftist merely for change of any sort. And that conservative means resisting change.

As long as his followers suffer economically — Christoffer

That is completely guaranteed. A lot of these people are truly living precariously. Trump simultaneously, by imperial decree:
* Threw a wrecking ball at the US and global economy
* Instituted severe austerity onto what little safety net we have
* Guaranteed a dramatic resurgence of inflation.
* Threw hundreds of thousands of workers out on their asses.

A lot of them are on the margins, with a poor paying job, or not job at all. A lot of them are small business owners that struggle even during "good" times. Any one of these three events would push many over the edge. All four, at the same time? They will suffer enormously for this.

It is beyond obvious that Trump found the ultimate grift and power trip. He is the greatest market manipulator of all time. There is a 0% chance that he is not profiting enormously from these massive market moves that he is engineering. 0%.

It is all a grift and power trip. Hilarious that Trumpys are falling over themselves trying to rationalize his absurd "plans".

I'm inclined to think that faith in institutions or people is trusting that they are doing the right or appropriate institutions thing. — Ludwig V

I don't think this is quite right. Our faith in institutions and privileged people is in the belief that their powers are legitimate. "Doing the wrong thing" might call that legitimacy into question. But the faith is in legitimacy, and moreover in how that legitimacy was granted.

If we believe in the legitimate authority of a king or president, the fact that this individual is the legitimate king or president may or may not be a matter of faith. But the fact that royal succession or winning a fair election bestows kingly or presidential powers must be an article of faith.

Believing that putting the ball in the net counts as a goal is not an act of faith but simply to understand how to play football.

Consenting to our social institutions is not an act of faith. — Banno

The act of faith here is not believing in specific rules, but belief in the relevant institution's (IFAB here) authority to will rules in and out of being, and for their intercessors, ritually outfitted with uniform, cards and whistle, to arbitrate them.

Similarly, faith is not in a rule that stomping babies is bad, but in the belief that underpins that rule, be it God/Gods, religions institutions, or the sanctity of human life.

You put a lot of emphasis on change. I'm wondering if you are under emphasizing a more fundamental epistemic problem.

As I see it, the core problem of knowledge is that we don't perceive reality itself, but rather we experience sensations which are something like signals emanating from reality, much like Plato's shadows. Based on these signals, we construct models of the reality that produced them. The problem is, there are always multiple models that fit the signals we receive. Some seem more likely, some less, some seem absurd, yet for any set of observations there is never just one possible model. This is true both of everyday life and of science.

This directly leads to the Gettier problem. The businessman saw the clock , and saw the train arrive at the proper time. Naturally he assumed that the clock was functioning, and had told him the correct time. He probably never considered the alternate model which also equally fit his observations: that the clock was broken, but by chance was stopped at the correct time. With imagination you can construct still less likely, yet consistent, models (i.e. the clock was painted on the wall, or a hallucination sent to him by a benevolent train spirit).

Notably, this problem would obtain even in a static, unchanging universe.

What do you think? How does this jibe with JTC?

Faith is the attitude of consent toward social/institutional realities. Without evidence, these are treated as if they were objective realities, not anthropological realities. Faith sustains these entities, as these social realities can only exist through collective human consent. As faith goes, so goes the reality.

This is true not just of religions, but of nations, currencies, laws, companies, and ethics. There is no objective evidence of any of these, beyond the actual practice itself. Because they consist in the practice, and the faith that engenders and sustains it

Not withstanding some everyday uses, i.e. "I have faith the bus will come in time".

I agree with pretty much every thing you say. The one part we may differ is that I question the validity of the Gettier problem. In the sense that it attacks JTB. If the businessman was not justified in his belief, then it is not a counterexample of JTB. It's just that, to truly know whether something is a JTB, we need to adopt the omniscient perspective implicitly taken in the thought experiment. In the real world, empirical knowledge is always provisional.

Hmmm, remind me why Gettier is even a problem.

The businessman believed himself to be justified that the time was correct. However, in retrospect, after learning that the clock was broken, he would realize that his belief wasn't justified. The clock was right only twice a day, and just by chance he picked one of those. His belief wasn't justified, it was only apparently justified, and it was true merely by luck.

Truth, as @flannel jesus points out, is always uncertain. Perhaps the same holds for justification as well. What counts as justification is always subject to revision in the light of new information. We only ever think something is true, and we only ever think its truth is justified. Therefore, we only ever think we know something, and that belief needs to always be held in proper suspicion. At least for what @DasGegenmittel calls dynamic knowledge.

Could that be all there is to it?

This hoary false paradox certainly says nothing about the actual nature of space or anything.

In this exercise you are imagining the state of the tortoise/hare at a time closer and closer to the time that the hare catches up. But never reaching that time.

You can use this method to approximate this meeting time. No one does, since obviously it can be exactly solved. But if you perform enough iterations of the hare catching up and the tortoise moving on, you will arrive at the effectively exact time and distance that they meet.

The hare never reaches the tortoise, because time, in the thought experiment, never reaches the moment that the hare does pass. As soon as you imagine time proceeding beyond this meeting time, you must imagine the hare passing, for your thought experiment to tension consistent.

Furthermore, he is a professional philosopher in Argentina and has written interesting books. — javi2541997

I'm curious, what books?

When you pour coffee into a cup, is it cup or space in the cup which holds coffee? If there were no space in the cup, coffee won't be contained in the cup. — Corvus

It seems clear it is held in the cup. The shape of the cup is such that it can hold coffee. No need for a separate entity, "space".

Consider this: You are a school principal. Every classroom can hold no more than 25 students, by law. You are given X students this year. As a manager, you develop an accounting trick: instead of thinking in terms of students, you think of slots, that is, empty places in a classroom. After all, that is the limiting resource, you have plenty of students. After juggling the slots around on your spreadsheet, you conclude to the school board "I'm sorry, I can't fit that many students, there aren't enough slots!"

"Slot" is a noun, and your statement is true: you don't have enough slots. If you had more, you truly could fit all the students. Yet, "slots" don't actually refer to anything in the world. They refer to an idea, specifically an absence of a student, turned mentally into a thing.

This is what I mean as placeholder, and this is what I am suggesting space is. An idea you mentally frame, nounify, and pin onto your mental map of the world. But it doesn't actually refer to any entity in the world, it is a (very useful) idea, absence formalized into a mental thing of its own, and thoroughly reified by constant use.

Now do I actually believe all of this? Not necessarily, but I think it is valid idea, worth pushing until it breaks.

On the other hand, you can make the same sort of arguments for time you make for space. When you watch a clock, or any physical process evolve, you are experiencing time. You experience it every time you say to yourself, "this is happening right now", and that present utterance and moment transforms irreversibly into a memory, pointing to the past.

Time functions as a real constraint on what is possible. It is likely possible for you to arrive in Paris from wherever you are, within a day, if you really had to. And it is likely completely impossible for you to arrive in Paris in an hour. The only difference between these two requirements is one of them has an inadequate amount of time. How could time function as a physical constraint on what is possible and what is not, if it didn't exist?

My overall point is, if time falls, so does space. Since they really are the same sorts of things.

What do you mean by "fictitious"? — Corvus

Some words have substantive [referents outside the web of language, some do not. Some do not but pretend they do. Time may be one is them.

When you say "a placeholder", would it be in the form of concept? Or would it be some other form or nature? — Corvus

A kind of concept. An eminently useful mental tool we use to engage with the world. We ideate it as having an essential reality of it's own that we can't clearly articulate. But it does not.

I understand space as physical entity. Do you mean the placeholder could be in space somewhere?
Could it be in the form of property of space or principle of motion? — Corvus

I wouldn't call space an entity, and I don't think you perceive it any more or less than time. When you think you perceive space, you are only perceiving objects and their arrangements. You unify this set of arrangements under the umbrella concept of space. Time may be a similar thing, but with relative motions. We perceive relative motions and imagine an umbrella concept 'time'.

Put another way: What if you abandoned the notions of space and time as metaphysical containers, and thought only of objects and their relative arrangements and motions. What would you thereby lose?

What could that "some separate, ineffable, metaphysical entity" be? We need more elaboration on this. — Corvus

My suggestion it that it is a fictiticious placeholder, an abstraction of derived from physical process.

But if there is such a thing, it is the same sort of thing as space. Space is the medium of arrangement, as time is the medium of sequence.

While the arguments are fallacious, I might agree with the basic premise: maybe time is a placeholder, an abstraction, there is no actual entity corresponding to the word.

What really is, is casual processes. These processes can be mentally separated and made independent. Then, when we compare placeholders that are significant to us in these processes, such as revolutions of the earth, ticks on a clock, beats of a heart, you can compare the two: some amount of X placeholders in one process have transpired as some amount Y of the other has.

This is what we ordinarily call time. But this description doesn't seem to necessitate some separate, ineffable, metaphysical entity, the way the noun 'time' seems to suggest.

Why do you think he wants Greenland and Canada? — frank

The thought has crossed my mind. If so, that is a particularly odious kind of evil: at the one hand, deny climate change as strenuously as possible, dooming most life on the planet to catastrophe. One the other hand, profit from it, by any possible means.

Words fail me.

@Pierre-Normand You have posted many very impressive conversations. In your opinion do you think AI has achieved "AGI", whatever that is supposed to mean? Given any reasonable definition I have to say it has.
Phil
If any of these conversations were posted 10 years ago, people would have agreed without hesitation that any hypothetical AI which has achieved conversation at this level represented AGI. Now that it has been achieved it seems the goal posts have shifted.

Speaking of jazz and metal, here is Napalm Death as performed by NY arty jazz musicians. It blew my young mind when I heard it first.



The "technicality gap" mentioned by @Arcane Sandwich is evident. Ain't no metalheads playing this. They could play it note-for-note live:

We do not directly experience matter. — Art48

But this I agree with. Your original claim was that we don't experience matter at all.

Your argument is with the direct realists, not with me. But, that one was long, exhausting, and done with.

The point of the original post is we can be 100% certain of the sensations we experience but we can not be 100% certain of the cause of the sensations. — Art48

It might be the case, but this is not what you posted in your op. Your original claim was that we experience sensations, not matter.

We can experience things without being 100% certain of them. I experience you via this interaction, but I am not 100% certain of your existence, as you might be a LLM. I can doubt you in a way that I could not if we were speaking face to face. But that does not mean I am not experiencing you and your communication (assuming you are real).

Matter is not what we experience. Rather, matter is our explanation of what we experience. — Art48

Matter is both what we experience, and the explanation of our experiences.

When we see a tree, we experience visual sensations. These visual sensations are experiences of a tree.

The word "experience" can refer to the phenomenology, or to the cause of the phenomenology. When I go to a concert, I experience sounds, and by doing so I experience the instruments, and the players. When I visit Prague I experience a beautiful city, and I experience all the sights sounds and smells this city induces in me.

It's just that one, the phenomenology, is an "experience of" the other, the object.

For example, perhaps you think that someone who says, "I think Putin is a nut," is not thinking self-consciously. That may be, but the I think of Kant or Rodl is not based in that sort of off-the-cuff, half-conscious utterance. — Leontiskos

Clearly not, the "I think" of common speech self-attributes or weakens a claim, it doesn't reference consciousness in any way. What I'm pointing out is that language itself isn't the source of this confusion, since "I'm thinking about thinking p" is available if we ever need to point out we are self-consciously reflecting on our thought.

If someone says "I think p" they are thinking p self-consciously. This seems pretty basic — Leontiskos

Not really, since "I think" as a attributer/weakener dominates English usage, any other use is very unusual and requires clarification. Far from being learned in either philosopher's work, I nonetheless see two possibilities for a "philosophical" "I think".

1: Thinking p.
2: Self consciously thinking p.

Given what was posted in the op, I favor 1, at least for Rodl.

Claiming that stating 1 immediately leads to 2 muddies the water. Even if this were so, this doesn't change the meaning of 1. Especially since we are speaking philosophically, not over the dinner table.

Would you like to say more about how you understand "include"? — J

I mean include in a textual proposition describing my mental state .

If I think p, in response to "what is going on in your head", I must include "I think" in my response, if I am to be strictly accurate: "I think p". "p" alone will not suffice.

In this sense, "I think" is always bound to any proposition that is thought.

I don't think this is vacuous or tautological either. "P" strictly speaking cannot occur in a brain. What can occur is a mental perspective on p. Given any proposition p, each of us considering it will mentality instantiate it in our own way. Rather than p, thinking p, the thought of p, is what is going on. This all happens without necessarily self consciously considering the thought of p itself.

So if the three cases you gave are all inaccurate notations of "I think p," then it looks like they won't function as counterexamples. — Leontiskos

That's fine. I don't want to overfocus on natural language, and I think the sentence of mine you quoted was mistaken. For one, self-consciously thinking p would be rendered as something like "I'm thinking about thinking p", not "I think p". So, I don't think there is necessarily ambiguity there.

The confusion is a philosophical one, not a linguistic one. There are three distinct propositions under consideration:

1. p
2. I think P
3. I think about thinking about P

Rodl says, afaict, only 2 and 3 can occur in thought. Pat's confusion is conflating 2 with 3.

I have in mind speaking in a language you don't understand. Speaking on a subject you don't understand. Lying.

Also, you might include cases such as LLM speech.

The issue I see is that you cannot notate that you are thinking p without self-consciously thinking p. If the words "I think p" are uttered, then the self-reflection on thought is already present. And so it seems that the "notation" cannot be first-personal if it is to properly prescind from this self-reflection. — Leontiskos

Interesting. I would say this is usually, but not necessarily the case, that uttering "I think p" entails thinking about thinking p. In the same way, uttering "p" usually, but not always, entails thinking p. But this does not change the meaning of the utterances. "p" means "p", not "I think p", even if uttering "p" usually entails thinking p. We need to keep the meaning of utterances and their side-effects distinct.

My response to the op, without reading though the whole thread:

Rodl is correct (leaving aside whether Kant supports him). I would answer Pat with something like 3.

To translate the mental event thinking-p into propositional form, you must include "I think". Because, the declaration "p" alone does not do this job. You can claim p without understanding it. You can mouth the words, with no internal representation accompanying your recitation. You can say p without believing it, by lying about it, or merely disagreeing internally.

The claim p alone is not the same as the event thinking-p, and so to convey this event accurately, "I think" must be included. But this is not at all the same as actually thinking, or experiencing, "I think p". This is reflecting on your own thought, which you do sometimes, but certainly not always, as Pat points out.

And so, there is a confusion caused by language: accurately notating that you are indeed thinking-p, and reflecting on your own thought, can both be represented as "I think p" in English.

I'm surprised such an argument would look convincing to modern eyes.

For one, there are just too many steps for them all to have any hope of withstanding scrutiny.

To me the first really objectionable one is:

9. Two beings can only exist separately if they are distinguishable in their parts. — Bob Ross

Two things might be indistinguishable in their parts, and yet be numerically distinct. We don't distinguish two identical marbles by their parts, but by their distinct bodies occupying distinct spatial locations.

When we say we've experienced X, we're saying that the world would have to be in state X in order for our perceptual systems to be functioning properly. This is what language use about experience means. — frank

I've experienced joy and pain.

Oh cool, I didn't notice accepted answers were a thing now.

But what on earth is constituting extension from unextended elements with respect to geneticists in 1940's-ish France? — Moliere

I think the link you found is a good clue. Sartre no doubt inherited the French anti-Mendelian sentiment of the time. One strain of that argument may have been: how can you get from the mere notion of genes, which had no known, and perhaps no conceivable, physical mechanism, to the concrete, physical features the traits supposedly correspond to? There was a gap, perhaps a reversal of today's gap in the hard problem: instead of an impossible leap from physical neurons to non-physical qualia, we have a leap from non-physical genes to physical traits.

Similarly, Sartre seems to say, how can we bridge the gap between present elements, such as artifacts, or memories encoded in neurons, to the past as such? We can no more arrive at the past by accumulating present artifacts than we can arrive at physical traits by accumulating or manipulating non-physical genes.

I believe this is also how we should see some mathematical truths, e.g. 2+2=4 is true. — Sam26

The rules of chess do not describe the truths of reality in the same way that "water freezes at 32 degrees F" does. Instead, they constitute the very framework within which true and false (correct and incorrect) can be assessed. — Sam26

But 2+2=4 is not arbitrary in the way that "bishops move diagonally" is.

Or rather, 2+2=4 follows the rules of adding in the same way that a diagonal bishop move follows the rules of chess. But the rules of adding are not mere convention, they capture some sort of truth that has not been stipulated into being, like the rules of chess were.