Are you familiar with quantum bayesianism? — Wayfarer

Only very recently exposed to it. A colleague of mine knows I follow the work of Karl Friston and he forwarded me this preprint

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.15242

It sounds like a really interesting approach, but my knowledge of Physics is too poor to judge how well it stacks up against the evidence from that quarter.

the philosopher believes that the ordinary person is either unfamiliar with the distinction or fails to apply it properly, and that if they did they too would be in the pickle philosophers are, unable to bridge the gap. Most people just don't notice, or don't understand what a big deal this is, that's the mantra of philosophy. (The other example that leaps to mind also comes from Hume: how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow?) — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting approach. I think perhaps a lot of the time the philosopher is in the job of classifying the habits of thinking which accompany our particular forms of life and mistakes happen when he mistakes his classification for a discovery. The librarian noting that "How to make Curries" is a book about cookery is not discovering something about the book, they are classifying it, it's not a necessary part of the process, the book didn't need classifying to be understood, and used.

Likewise one could say (of Hume's problem of induction, for example) that his contribution was to classify the assumption that the sun will rise tomorrow as that kind of thinking habit and not this kind. It is not of the kind where we can write it down in logical notation, or convert it to maths. It's of the other kind, the kind where we simply find ourselves thinking that way and it works.

The mistake is to then go on to think that Hume has discovered something wrong, something which needs fixing (@Banno's 'plumbing'). That a habit of thinking is of this kind and not that kind is not a problem that needs fixing, it's a classification exercise.

I think this kind of error is what's behind a lot of the "if p then q - p therefore q" kinds of arguments where q is some surprising conclusion. The OP of @Bartricks from which you derived this thread is just such a case. The problem appears to be that q derives from p plus a habit of thinking we want to hold as being flawless (logic), therefore we must accept q no matter how odd. But we don't accept q (perhaps as a result of that other kind of thinking habit). It's a mistake to assume something's gone wrong there. Obviously, there's two solutions to the surprising q. Just as it's valid that "if p then q - p therefore q" it's also valid that "if p then q - ~q therefore ~p"....and choosing which is not something done with that kind of thinking habit, but with another. The philosopher's error is in think that, by rendering one (or other) side of the choice in a clear rational manner he's somehow influenced that choice itself, where what he's done is merely classify it as being that kind of choice.

All of which is just a rehash of Quine - nothing new under the sun and all that... But I think it applies to philosophical propositions no less than it does to empiricism.

The fact a person deserves something can, sometimes, generate an obligation to provide it. And sometimes it won't. — Bartricks

I don't know why you think this is relevant since my opening comment on this was...

For someone to deserve something means (in the context it's used here) there is a duty of moral agents to provide them it. — Isaac

... if I could bold and underline, I would. It may just drive the information into your recalcitrant skull. "In the context it's used here". In other words, not, universally the case.

All that matters for the argument is that having a desert creates an obligation in the context it's used here. I don't really know how I could make that any more simple for you.

Hence my counterargument still stands

For someone to deserve something means (in the context it's used here) there is a duty of moral agents to provide them it. For someone to not deserve something does not impose a similar duty on moral agents to prevent them from having it. It may be that they obtain it by chance, and no moral approbation comes along with that.

So the argument that we have a duty to avoid harm befalling innocents cannot be derived from the intuition that innocents do not deserve harm. They don't deserve harm, but they don't deserve non-harm either. — Isaac

Then it's not clear what you mean by saying that if there is a model of a cup then there must be a cup. — Michael

You can't model a figment of your imagination because there's no hidden states to infer the cause of. With your own (untrammelled) imagination there's only known states, the entire processes is within your Markov Blanket. To have a modelling process we need a hidden state, some element outside of our Markov Blanket to infer the cause of. The process of modelling entails a Markov Blanket which entails an internal/external divide in model network nodes.

This itself doesn't then entail an external material world, it only need be data-external to the modelling network, it needn't be physically external to that which houses the modelling network. That some things are indeed physically external is part of the model of the causes of our sensations of those things. The best explanation for the consistency of my expectations and your expectations about the cup is that there's an external cup. Such consistency is not present in Unicorns so a better explanation for my internal (but seemingly data-external) image of a Unicorn is that there's no such external object, but there is a shared cultural artefact from which the data originates (via spoken descriptions, paintings etc).

No, I'm not saying we model the model. The point is that the perception itself is understood as a model, or more accurately a process of modelling, and the end result is seeing what has been modeled. — Janus

Yes, we seem to be on the same page. What I'm arguing (just to, hopefully, clarify further) is that we cannot 'see' the model if the process of seeing involves making a model (but is not exhausted by making a model). It's like saying we digest chyme. We don't We digest food. Making chyme is part of the process of digestion, but it is not that which we digest. Making a model of the external world is part of the process of perception, it is not that which we perceive.

If one wants to argue (as some do) that there's no external world, then one would have to take issue with the meta-model (the Bayesian policy) that the causes of our sensations originate from an external world at all. Accepting that policy, however, 'seeing' is the process of inferring the external-world causes of the retinal sensations - ie the cup.



(Also in answer to @Joshs and @Wayfarer).The point about indirect realism (a point which seems to keep getting lost), is not to question this meta-policy (the assumption of an external world source of sensory stimuli), but to accept the influence of the stages in the process of perceiving these external world causes. The direct realist would have it that the process involves the data from the external-world cup entering our dat-processing system and our responding to it accordingly. Errors are non-systemic. The indirect realist holds that (among other components) there are two (or three) important steps in the process which have a material effect on how we can talk about the reality they model...

1) a Bayesian predictive modelling stage where the cause is inferred based on prior expectations (and, importantly) data is filtered according to those prior expectation as means of noise-reduction)

2) an active interaction with the inferred source of the data aimed at either gathering salient information to confirm/disconfirm the current hypothesis or at changing the external sources to better match the current hypothesis. (as @Joshs is wont to point out, this is a collaborative interaction, not a one way process). @Banno's 'Direction of fit' goes here.

3) a social activity aimed at ensuring your model of the external world is similar enough to my model of the external that your response to it is going to be more predictable for me (ie I reduce my surprise at your responses by unifying our models)

It seems as if I'm permanently caught between those ultra-realists who dispute the significance of (1) and those idealists who (off the back of my trying to defend (1)) think I'm opposed to the significance of (2) and (3). All three are part of the process of perception. The object of perception is the external world hidden state, the process involves sufficient interactive, predictive, and social stages to accommodate the various features of perception that idealists like to point out as evidence against realism.

the courts should have responded to his challenge with a note that said "lol". — Streetlight

This should definitely become a thing!

But other people do the same kind of thing. Epistemologically, it's not even clear it's possible to do something else. — baker

It's fairly straightforward...

"It seems to me that X implies Y"

"Yes, it seems that way to me to"

"It seems to me that Z implies X"

"Yes, it seems that way to me to"

(shared intuition)

"Well, then given that, is it not the case that Z implies Y?"

(argument based on shared intuition - and shared rules of thought).

Interestingly, what we have in @Bartricks threads is in the form

"It seems to me that X implies Y"

"It doesn't seem that way to me"

"Well, you're wrong because... God"

They don't mean the same thing. If two statements have the same meaning - that is, have the same propositional content - then you can use them interchangeably. — Bartricks

I suggest you buy yourself a good dictionary, it might help in conversations with other English speakers.

mean 1 (mēn)
v. meant (mĕnt), mean·ing, means
v.tr.
1.
a. To be used to convey; denote: "'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things'" (Lewis Carroll).
b. To act as a symbol of; signify or represent: In this poem, the budding flower means youth.
2. To intend to convey or indicate: "No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous" (Henry Adams).
3. To have as a purpose or an intention; intend: I meant to go running this morning, but I overslept.
4. To design, intend, or destine for a certain purpose or end: a building that was meant for storage; a student who was meant to be a scientist.
5. To have as a consequence; bring about: Friction means heat.
6. To have the importance or value of: The opinions of the critics meant nothing to him. She meant so much to me.

Or you could just refer to this excellent philosopher I fond some quotes from online where he uses 'means' in situations other than implying the two components are directly interchangeable...

Of course, this means that under those circumstances most of us have lives of no purpose whatsoever, or lives whose purpose is, to say the least, utterly mundane. — Bartricks

we should not posit them. Which then means that we have a self-refuting case. — Bartricks

I think it is plausible that the moral obligation to be a good friend means that the evidence in this case does not provide me - me - with any normative reason to believe in my friend's guilt. — Bartricks

Also...

It looks stormy outside and so a lot of people are carrying umbrellas. That does not mean that 'it looks stormy' means ' a lot of people are carrying umbrellas', even though the fact it looks stormy is often what's responsible for people carrying umbrellas. — Bartricks

"It looks stormy outside, that means a lot of people will be carrying umbrellas" is a perfectly normal sentence in English. See meaning (5) above "Friction means heat".

Your adolescent God-complex doesn't wash here. You'll have a lot more productive conversations if you give it up.

My claim was that it is immoral - other things being equal - to create injustices. And if one has created someone who deserves something they're not going to receive, then one has created an injustice. Which of those claims do you dispute? — Bartricks

The second.

Do that by trying to come up with a counter-example to the premise in question. — Bartricks

We unproblematically have children. Most people consider it perfectly moral, yet most people consider creating an injustice immoral, and most people think children deserve happiness, therefore most people do not consider it creating an injustice to create someone who deserves something they're not going to receive. It clearly is not a shared moral intuition.

TO challenge that claim you would need to come up with a case where a person clearly does not deserve to come to harm yet comes to harm and it is no injustice — Bartricks

Procreation. I have about 10 billion examples.

As I said earlier. If your moral system concludes that almost every human being ever is morally wrong and that the entire human race cannot morally continue to exist, it is far more likely that your moral system is wrong than it is the entire human race for the last 400,000 years is wrong. It takes a monumental, messianic ego to assume you're right in the face of every other human being ever. Hence why your case is so fascinating.

I think there is a sense in which we can say we see the cup and another sense in which we can say that we see a model of the cup. — Janus

But for that second sense, I can't see what process you'd be using. Modelling the cup is part of the process of seeing, so to see the model, do you model the model?

Is that what I'm doing if I look at a fMRI of someone looking at a cup? Modelling the model?

These are basically assumptions - but that is the very point at issue! Do constructed artifacts have an intrinstic or inherent nature - or is that imposed on them by their makers, in line with a specific purpose? — Wayfarer

Then you come across @Tom Storm's problem of explaining the consistency between us. If there's no intrinsic property which causes us to treat an object a certain way, then why do we so consistently do so?

As @Janus puts it...

Commonality of experience shows that the gestalts or meaningful wholes do not arise arbitrarily, not merely on account of the individual perceiver, taken in isolation. So the possibilities are that either real existents, including the objects perceived, the environmental conditions and the constitutions of the perceives all work together to determine the forms of perceptions. or else there is a universal or collective mind which determines the perceptions and their commonality. — Janus

I accept that all of this is possible, I'm not trying to deny it, but for the second option we're having to invoke a whole load of speculated realms and mechanisms, just to avoid there being intrinsic properties and I can't see why.

Nice work. — Banno

Cheers, I wasn't sure if it even got us anywhere so, good to know it at least made sense.

the end point is where the account the antirealists present begins to look so much like realism that it is difficult to see the distinction. Let's see that happens here. — Banno

Yep. Here we go...

scientific measurement only takes into account the measurable attributes. — Wayfarer

So there are attributes...

What am I referring to when I say "pass me the cup" when dreaming? — Michael

I don't think you're referring to anything. Referring is a social activity, when dreaming you're just rehearsing words. This is why I brought up Wittgenstein's ideas on private rules and rule following earlier. I think there's no sense in the whole idea of 'referring' without another person around, and in that case it's the cup, not the model of it, we're trying to collectively act upon. That's why we put so much effort into keeping your model of it so closely similar to my model of it, so that we can collaborate in acting on it.

Does a painting of a unicorn necessarily imply that there's a unicorn? — Michael

Yes, in a sense. It comes down to what 'real' is. To paint a Unicorn (if we're to take a painting as a kind of model) there has to be a Unicorn for you to paint (model). The question is then what kind of thing that Unicorn is. In this case, it's a figment of our collective imaginations. If you painted it with three horns, you'd have modelled it wrong.

Or simply...

A painting of a unicorn is not a model of a unicorn. The "models" here are weightings in neural networks. — Banno

...works too. We could limit the discussion to models of reality, not models of models.

You seriously still expect me to answer after the bullshit you just pulled ?

If everyone disagreeing with you is 'trolling' then this is not the place for you.

This is that there is the possibility of faulty cognition, which is able to be corrected through various rational means, so as to arrive a correct perception. — Wayfarer

I can see why you'd get this impression, but I wouldn't say necessarily 'rational' means. Rational thinking is a mode of thinking we use on concepts, plans, counterfactuals etc, I don't think it applies to perception so much. Most of the modelling work in perception is done by cortices in the brain which are sub-conscious, or at least without the capacity to engage in rational thinking. It's more just Bayesian inference at this level. Having said that, I certainly think that the conclusions we arrive at using rational thinking strategies effect the expectations we have and so thereby affect the models. Maybe "corrected partly by various rational means"?

underlying assumption is realist, specifically that there is a real [X] which exists even if we might have mistaken views about. — Wayfarer

As I think @Banno may have already alluded to, I think this is intrinsic to us talking about it. To have a model of a cup necessarily implies there's a cup. Otherwise it's a model of what? It can't be a model of noumena - I've no idea what noumena even are, so I couldn't attempt a model of them.

There's a comment on teacups on the book I keep referring to — Wayfarer

They seem an inordinately popular recourse as examples. Do you think that says something about philosophers and their lay congregation? Always within reach of tea?

he atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 3).

I think in some discourses this makes sense. For a physicist (being a physicist at the time) she'd talk of atoms and within that discourse find nothing to determine them to be 'a cup'. But in our shared world, we do have reason to believe those atoms are constituted that way intrinsically. That reason being that that arrangement (and no other) seems to serve the function of a cup. It's true that we've determined that function to be important and in doing so filtered out all the other possible patterns those atoms (and those around them) could have made, but the existence of other possible congregations does not mean that the congregation we find important is not intrinsic to that part of the external world. It just means that other congregations we do not find important are also intrinsic to that part of the world.

I see it like constellations. The stars of Orion seem organised so as to form the shape of a hunter with his bow. That shape is obviously significant to us, so we pick it out. the same stars also form a myriad other shapes of no relevance to us so we filter them out. But... they still do genuinely form the shape of a hunter with his bow. We haven't made up that they form that shape, we've just ignored that they form all the other shapes too.

I'm using stars as an analogy for hidden states of various sorts. If we infer hidden states are in some configuration (a teacup) and our inference is good (something we can't know, but that's an epistemological question, not an ontological one), then it is reasonable to assume the hidden states are actually in that configuration. It's just that they are also in a myriad other possible configurations that we're ignoring because they're not relevant to our form of life.

So it's reasonable to assume that, if we model a teacup well, there is actually a teacup outside of our Markov Blanket. It's just that the same data could be a dozen other things too.

The fact a person deserves something will, standardly, give rise to an obligation to provide it. — Bartricks

Right. So when I said...

For someone to deserve something means (in the context it's used here) there is a duty of moral agents to provide them it. — Isaac

...the correct response was just "yes".

you'd asserted that to deserve something is equivalent to someone being obliged to give you it; — Bartricks

Nope. I said...

For someone to deserve something means (in the context it's used here) there is a duty of moral agents to provide them it. — Isaac

'Means', not 'equivalent to'. If you're going to try and quibble over semantics then you at least need to use the bloody words I used. Quibbling semantics by using words I didn't even use seems a little one-sided.

my argument was that it is immoral - other things being equal - to create a desert of something that cannot be provided — Bartricks

Well then you're lacking any evidence at all that this is indeed a moral intuition since the examples you've given all relate to obligation (such as to avoid harm to others). You've not provided any other example where we consider the creation of deserts, in this way, without the ability to provide them to be immoral.

I see that now what you're doing is questioning the probative value of intuitions. — Bartricks

I'm questioning your equating your personal intuitions with universal ones. Not the use of intuitions tout court. To claim something is immoral, you need to show that others too have the intuition you have (or that they ought to have it). You've done neither.

There is a very significant difference between recognising that all we have to go on are things 'seeming to us to be the case' and assuming, as you do here, that simply by virtue of something's seeming to you to be the case it is, in fact, the case.

Not that I know of. — Michael

Interesting. Turtles all the way down, perhaps?

So a scientific realist will say that the Standard Model corresponds to the way the world is, a scientific instrumentalist will just say that the Standard Models works. — Michael

OK. So does an instrumentalist have a model of the world which explains why their model of part of it works?

Yes, which despite the term "realism" is instrumentalist — Michael

I see, thanks. So how does 'instrumentalist' (not a term I'm familiar with) relate to realism?

Or perhaps Kant would be, like Hawkings was, a scientific instrumentalist. — Michael

Hawking, if I recall correctly, also expressed quite a firm belief in model-dependent realism... If the views of our great scientists are anything to go by...

No, that is not analogous. — schopenhauer1

Of course it is. I'm knowingly risking harm to others. Accelerating a ton of metal at 70mph is inherently a risk to those around me. The analogy required only putting people in a position where they might come to harm, but not deliberately intending that they do.

it is not guaranteed that someone will be harmed. — schopenhauer1

So how likely does it have to be, and why? Is 100% a different moral imperative to 99.99999%?

We could pick others. If I play football (or any other full contact team sport), it's an absolute guarantee that someone else will be harmed at some point in my hobby. If I were a tribesman and I enlist help building the houses for the whole community, it's pretty much guaranteed that someone will come to harm as a result of this activity (it's dangerous work). If I even so much as sharpen a weapon, it's almost guaranteed that someone will one day cut themselves as a result of that sharpening. Examples abound. We live in social groups and see the welfare of the group as greater than that of any individual - or at least the non-sociopathic among us do anyway.

not appropriate for this particular thread.. As Bartricks would say.. stay focused — schopenhauer1

We cannot avoid it. You're invoking your personal moral intuition as a universal moral intuition without any support. Why is your personal feeling on the matter even likely to be shared by everyone else? Your claim (Harrison's) is that there's a misapplied moral intuition - in other words, other people - those who have children - have this same moral intuition you have about harms, but misapply it when it comes to procreation. Your claim absolutely relies on others sharing your moral intuition. But you've failed to provide any argument supporting this.

Without it all you have is "I feel x and so I don't have children" - well bully for you.

When we point to the behaviour of others as a source, you say their behaviour can't be trusted as a guide to their moral intuitions.

When we point to culture as a source, you say cultures change and moral intuitions evolve.

So the question remains - on what grounds do you claim that others share the moral intuition you have, such as to claim it's 'misapplied'?

I'm going to attempt a mass reply... @Janus,@Banno,@Wayfarer,@NOS4A2

Hopefully this clears up the position I'm arguing. If not... sorry.

We have an idea that there is a cup in front of me. Something emits the data which I use to decide to reach for the word "cup", to decide where to direct my hand to pick it up, what to do with it once picked up, how heavy it might be, what fits in it, that it's still there even when hidden from view, what to do when I hear someone say "pass me the cup"...and so on. There is a cause of this data, and we assume that cause is external to us (no solipsism).

We know we make errors about, and there are differences of opinion about, the objects which make up the world, such as the cup. So we need a model of how we perceive objects which accounts for those errors and differences.

We could argue, in direct sense, that those errors are merely equipment failures. That something goes wrong in some of the neural pathways (or whatever model we're going to use of how we perceive) such that they do not deliver the 'right' data from the cup.

But this entails two major problems.

Firstly, our errors are not random. We make mistakes almost exclusively in the direction of our expectations. I saw a great example of this on a Christmas Lecture once. Two jugglers performed in front of an audience. The audience are asked to count the number of passes. Unbeknownst to them, a man in a Gorilla costume crosses the stage right behind the jugglers. Only a fraction of the audience even noticed the 'Gorilla'. Everyone saw it when played back. Obviously, proper experiments have also been done on this - but this one was a great demonstration.

Now we know it's not a failure at the sensory organs (it's impossible for the retina to block out or fail to capture such specific information). We can also rule out early sensory processing areas - occipital cortex, auditory cortex etc, as we can see the activity relating to specific stimuli on fMRI and EEG.

Secondly, we don't seem to be able to resolve some differences by going back and checking. Some people simply see things slightly differently to us (more complex objects usually) and no amount of checking and double-checking seems to resolve this difference. What's more, these differences too are not random. Things that are of higher valence will be perceived differently and the valence we give to sensory data is related in some way to our experiences of life thus far.

So we have to conclude that the error/difference is a) not random, and b) related directly to an prior expectation or experience.

Back to the cup. If I make an error in - where to direct my hand to pick it up, what to do with it once picked up, how heavy it might be, what fits in it, that it's still there even when hidden from view, what to do when I hear someone say "pass me the cup"...and so on - I need a model of how I perceive cups which explains, not only the error, but why the nature of the error is so consistently related to what I expect to see or have a high valence for seeing. Something has to be happening at some stage in the perception process, past the sensory organs, past the initial sensory processing, which changes all those responses (listed above) from being related directly to the data coming from the cup, to being related instead to some kind of fusion of {data from cup} and {expectation of cup}. It's pretty much an absolute necessity that such a stage exists, without it we simply cannot explain what we know about perception errors.

As such we've invoked, out of necessity, the idea of {model of cup} as an entity. It's a stage in the event 'experiencing a cup'.

Bu it's a model of a cup, so there must be a cup for it to be a model of, it is not this actual cup which directs our behaviour, it's the model (it must be, otherwise we couldn't account for those errors). So when I say "pass me the cup" I'm referring to the actual cup, but I'm using my model of the cup to do so.

Some other conclusions fall out of this.

The actual cup cannot be some ineffable noumena. I'm referring directly to the actual cup when I say "pass me the cup". I don't want you to pass me my model of the cup. We cannot (yet) know for sure if our model of the cup is correct (we've no way of bypassing the modelling system), but we know definitionally that it is of the cup, not of some ineffable noumena.



Again, if all that seems totally unrelated to what all/any of you are arguing, then my apologies. It seemed like it needed clearing up.

You've not addressed the point. Is you experiencing a cup the same thing as the cup?

The point doesn't really require a thread. It's much as above. Either your intuitions are always right (God-complex), or everyone's intuitions are always right (relativism), or some generalised sense of human intuitions as a whole are what's right. Dismissing the former two as ridiculous, we're left with the latter.

The latter requires an ad populum argument to arrive at the 'general sense'

I would never unnecessarily harm someone to any significant degree. — schopenhauer1

Neither would I. We're talking about putting people in conditions in which they may come to harm. Not deliberately harming them. I do the former every time I take to the road in my car.

This is the arguments vegetarians/vegans make though. — schopenhauer1

They are no less mistaken for exactly the same reasons.

Some cultures think that gods are in the rocks and the trees. Ancient Romans thought that it was cool to subject people to gladiator events and torture for entertainment. It was pretty consistent in their culture. Others thought burning at the stake was good for suspicion or actual having the "wrong beliefs". So? — schopenhauer1

You keep jumping to the beliefs of cultures. What we're talking about are the moral intuitions which guide those beliefs. I don't think any moral intuition guides the belief that there are Gods in rocks.

You're not presenting any alternative. If we cannot look to people's behaviours to determine their intuitions, then what? Where do we look instead? Unless you answer this question you're just building castles in the air.

a lot of practices are no longer seen as good. Moral intuitions can change over time.. — schopenhauer1

Moral practices change over time. I don't see evidence that moral intuitions do.

Also, none of this addresses

1. Other people have a slightly different intuition to you.

2. Almost every single human of the 10 billion or so that have ever lived have all made some mistake which you (and a couple of others) have finally spotted 400,000 years later.

You're attempting to argue that 2 is the more plausible. — Isaac

All you presented is a way in which 2 might be possible. I fully concede 2 might be possible, but so might 1. You've presented no argument as to why 2 is the more plausible.

Likewise I agree with you entirely about the flaws and pitfalls of deriving moral intuitions from behaviours - we have cultural influences, weakness of will, mistaken methodology... but you've not provided an alternative method which solves these problems.

It's not sufficient to say that because looking to cultural practices for moral intuitions is flawed you can just make up your own and claim them to be universal.

Creating a mess, without intent to harm, but with knowledge that it will harm, and for no good reason for the person it is affecting because no one exists yet to need it, is not fine by most standards. — schopenhauer1

It is. We consider it fine in many contexts. Having children being one. Seeing as having children is just about the most consistent human activity ever, it's ridiculous to dismiss it as a relevant context.

As we've discussed before. Intuition don't go around neatly packaged with little labels on them. We can only gather what they might be from our behaviour and feelings. If most people feel morally fine about having a baby that's very good evidence that they have s moral intuition such that it is st least fine, if not actually advised.

If you don't have such an intuition, that's fine, but to argue that others are misapplying the same intuition you have is ludicrous.

There are two possible explanations....

1. Other people have a slightly different intuition to you.

2. Almost every single human of the 10 billion or so that have ever lived have all made some mistake which you (and a couple of others) have finally spotted 400,000 years later.

You're attempting to argue that 2 is the more plausible.

I have a vague notion harm is wrong — schopenhauer1

Well then intuitions are not misapplied. Your intuition is that we shouldn't risk unnecessary harm on others without their consent, and you are not having children as a result.

What possible grounds could you have for assuming other people share your intuitions on the matter?

Intuition is usually a vague sense that’s all. This feels wrong or right. — schopenhauer1

But that's just in you. You're claiming this about other people. How do we learn of the vague intuitions of other people? Or are you saying that the intuitions of other people are irrelevant. That simply whatever you think is right is right?

Are you trying to get at the idea that what people report is simply what is morality? — schopenhauer1

I'm asking you how we come to learn of these patterns which we are to rationally assess.

There are patterns in moral intuitions — schopenhauer1

How do we learn about these patterns?

vague intuitions. — schopenhauer1

And how do we gather these vague intuitions from other people?

This was not a proposition of mine, it was a corollary of what @Bartricks said about deserts not creating obligations in this context.

If what children deserve doesn't create an obligation to provide it, then procreation is not made immoral by that fact since no one is morally obliged to see to it that those deserts are brought about.

I suspect @Bartricks did in fact mean that an obligation is created by saying that children deserve a good life, but he's just too bilious to admit it.

As to the actual truth of the claim...

If you create a mess for someone else and say that no one is obligated to get you out of that mess…Don’t create that situation for someone in the first place. — schopenhauer1

Still depends entirely on the reason for creating the mess and the extent of the mess. Creating a minor mess, without intent to harm, and for good reason is basically morally fine by most people's standards.

Again, if it's not fine for you, that's up to you, but we shouldn't be surprised that unusual conclusions arise from unusual premises.

It is then distilling out the patterns for consistency — schopenhauer1

The patterns of what?

Yes, that's certainly how I see it. The matter of importance, however, is not the status of this realm in reality, but the origin of its constituent parts.

The important question is over whether a proposition such as "x is y" within that realm has a truth value such that it might be true but no one knows it to be true.

Is ¬(p ∧ ¬p) true by virtue of all humans thinking that way (thus creating a sort of intersubjective realm of facts within which we can determine what is the case and what is not the case), or is ¬(p ∧ ¬p) true even if nobody thought it?

The latter seems to be what idealists want to claim but the evidence brought forward to support that claim seems only to support the former, much weaker version.

I agree, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. — Banno

Ha! I feel that way about many theories.

It has a more general applicability. — Banno

Your use against idealism seemed apt, certainly. Idealism having it's very own peculiar relationship with the verb 'to know'.

is it really a problem to say that all meaningful propositions, except propositions like "this statement is false", have a truth value? Or is that special pleading? — Michael

Personally, I think statements like this are fine, and I think so on the following ground...

We can only make two kinds of propositions - those about the way the world is, and those about the way the world ought to be. Ignoring the normative for now, and assuming realism, then the world is some way and we determine it to be so by testing the assumption that the world is that way and assessing the result. As such, any idea that 'special pleading' is a fallacy has in it the assumption that the way the world is is simple and contains no special cases. I can see a reason for testing that assumption first, but I can't see a reason why if, on testing that assumption, we find it inadequate, that we shouldn't assume, as our next best assumption, that this is some 'special case'. After all, we've no fundamental reason to assume the world is simple and contains no special cases of otherwise general rules.

I think the same assumption holds even for an idealist. There's no default reason to assume our notions of how we're going to see the world ought contain no special cases of otherwise general rules.

It's not as if the issue hasn't been pretty exhaustively examined. If a special case seems a good solution then, at this late stage, it seems more than a little self-defeatingly stubborn to refuse one.

Perhaps we can say (as me and Banno discussed in the other thread) that empirical truths are subject to the knowability principle, but that the truth of self-referential knowledge claims, counterfactuals, predictions, mathematics, etc. work differently? — Michael

Yes, I think one could almost say that's definitionally true since the dividing out of empirical claims is by finding those to which sense data might apply and to make that delineation one needs to imagine, at least, a way in which one might obtain that sense data (and so 'know' the the proposition).

Claims of the second sort seem to rely more on rule-following and as such encounter the problems Wittgenstein shows about assessing whether a rule is followed, private rules, etc.

So is our conclusion to be that those who thinks that only things that have been proved true are true is muddled, or that Fitch's paradox is faulty? — Banno

Well. In my opinion, the whole field of 'truth', and 'knowledge' is made into a quagmire by the use of a JTB definition of knowledge. To my mind, the 'truth' of a proposition is the extent to which it is actually the case, something we ourselves assess by testing the hypothesis that it is actually the case (note, I'm only saying that this is how we test it's truth, not what it's truth actually means). So our knowledge can only ever be a state of the results from those tests. The truth of "p" doesn't enter into it, the results from our latest tests of assuming p is all we ever have. I can't see a place for a mental state (knowledge) which relies on an external state (the truth of something) to be defined. The mental state (knowing that p) doesn't change dependant on p since p might be completely disconnected from our mental state (teapot orbiting Jupiter).

What is often arrived at by way of compromise is a sense that a claim "I know p" and a claim "John knows p " are two different types of claim, with only the latter assessable by JTB. I don't like that solution (though I grant it's coherent), but then we cannot make the claim made in the knowability proposition that 'We' know anything (by JTB) since 'We' necessarily includes 'I'.

Well, a few tried to address that issue. Perhaps that's the positive. — Banno

Am I wrong in thinking that this was only something taken seriously by those defending physicalism? Is it possible an idealist position actually depends on a failure to define criteria fro 'real' such that there can be equivocation on what does and does not belong in that category?

There's the general term 'real' which is clearly used in a number of different contexts. "Santa isn't real" means something different to the claim "mathematics isn't real", or "morality isn't real". The former meaning simply that no physical person fitting that description can be found, whereas to treat the latter claims that way would be to trivialise them (as you said earlier, no one expects to bump into a number 5).

But this second sense seems nebulous at best. The closest I've got from this discussion is something like 'universally applies' (but then @Wayfarer denied that of logical rules, which he still maintains are 'real'), something like 'exists outside of individual minds', but then idealism is in hot water requiring God already (usually reserved for the end of a conversation!). The latest is the oddest meaning of them all, something like 'is important'....? Well, what can we possibly do with that?

I think we just rehashed old material for a new audience. — Banno

And yet no one seems bothered by a discussion about reality which fails to even address the question of what criteria we're using to declare something 'real'. The play being staged seems more a farce than a drama...

Thanks. That is clearer.

Then that's a denial of the knowability principle. — Michael

and

I think it's trivially true that the knowabilty principle cannot apply to propositions about our own knowledge where knowledge is treated as JTB, since the truth of the proposition is contained within the definition of knowing the proposition. To say that "I know I know" is to say (ignoring the justifications for now) "It is true that it is true" which is nonsense. We cannot know things about our knowledge under JTB (one of the reasons I don't like it) because it is senseless to make a truth claim about another truth claim. Whatever uncertainty we had about the first truth claim is automatically propagated to the second.

So, in the terms of the argument, to say that for all p it is possible to know p is to say that for all p it is possible to have p true and be justified believing p.

If q (our substitution) is "p is true" plus some proposition about my knowledge of p, then "p is true" is already a claim (contained within the knowledge claim). "p is true and I don't know p" can be rendered as "p is true and I lack justification", or "p is true and p is not true", or "p is true yet I do not believe p". Or some combination of the three. All of which are clearly contradictory.

Thanks.

Here's where I'm having trouble (gone to the SEP)

If this existential claim is true, then so is an instance of it:
(1)p∧¬Kp.

Now consider the instance of KP substituting line 1 for the variable p

in KP:
(2)(p∧¬Kp)→◊K(p∧¬Kp)

Since p is a proposition (a factual claim about the way the world is) the problem seems trivially solved by saying that some proposition exists for which it is not possible to know the truth. Namely p∧¬Kp.

One can deserve something and no one be under any obligation to give you it. — Bartricks

Good. That's the argument settled then.

Children deserve a good life, free from harms but no-one is under any obligation to give it them so procreation is fine.

A fallacious ad populum. — baker

Ad populum arguments are not fallacious here unless you're arguing for moral absolutism. The argument presented in the OP assumes moral intuition, hence ad populum arguments are all there is. Otherwise we just have the ridiculously messianic claim that whatever@Bartricks feels is moral, is, in fact, moral.

(which is, incidentally, where this thread will end up as @Bartricks's threads always do - with the delusional claim that whatever he happens to feel is the case is, in fact, the case)

But that would indeed be breaking the very normative claim that people should not be used. — schopenhauer1

What normative claim? We use people all the time. It's quite normal, we're a social species and we act as a group and expect members of that group to do their bit. Without a group there's no morality at all since the entire field is about how we get along with each other for mutual benefit.

So here is where I think the largest difference in our values lie. I would not presume for another person what is the "right" or "normal" amount of harm that another person should be able to endure. — schopenhauer1

Absolutely. I think we've identified this before. But this position is a very unusual one, so we should not be surprised that it leads to unusual conclusions. Most people do have a fuzzy, but reasoned view of what harms it is justifiable to impose on others for the greater good.

but to do it with no mitigating reasons, is "undeserved" in a sense that there was no reason for that to befall someone, if you could prevent it. — schopenhauer1

There is a duty on others to supply what is deserved, yes? If I deserve a reward it means someone ought to give me a reward.

But there is no concomitant duty on others to prevent that which is not deserved. If I don't deserve an award, it just means no-one has a duty to give me one. It doesn't mean everyone has a duty to prevent me from getting one.

So if I don't deserve harm, it just means there's no duty on anyone to harm me, it doesn't mean everyone has a duty to prevent me from harm.

3. p∧¬Kp→◊K(p∧¬Kp)

The logic is straightforward and results in a contradiction. — Michael

It doesn't make any difference expressed in notation. 3 does not follow from 1 and 2.

1 says that p is possible to know (ie there exists a circumstance in which p is known)
2 says that it is the case that p is not known
3. then claims that it is possible to know p and not know p, but it doesn't follow since it could still be possible to know p, just not in the particular circumstance where one knows that one does not know p.

Saying that it is possible to know p doesn't rule out circumstances where it becomes impossible to know p. It says nothing of the contingency of knowing p, only that there exists a set of circumstances where it could be the case.

Does a walk exist? Does a cartwheel exist? Does a backflip exist? — NOS4A2

There's you doing a cartwheel, right?

There's you experiencing a tea cup, yes?

The latter is clearly not the same thing as a teacup.

You experiencing a teacup is not itself a teacup. We're talking about aspects of you experiencing a teacup. The particular aspect we're talking about is the model of a teacup your brain creates. It's an aspect of you experiencing a teacup, and as such is very obviously not a teacup.

Heidegger spent a whole career introducing a new way to think about the word ‘is’, such as S is P. — Joshs

OK, so then we're back to "why?". I don't see a way out of this. Before diving into Heidegger, I'd rather just make sure we've got the frame of investigation right. If a claim is about the way the world is, it is a factual claim. If a claim is about some way we could look at the way the world is, then it's a normative or aesthetic claim and it needs a 'why' - why ought I look at thing that way, as opposed to any other.

That 'why' must itself be a factual claim "it will make you happier", "it will work better", "it's more useful"...etc. A claim which takes a position on the way the world is.

If all we have is a series of 'ways of looking at things' which never terminate in a claim about the way the world is (such as to advise I look at things that way) then I'm not sure I see the point.

So your experience doesn't exist? Or are you saying it does have a position?


I’m saying if it exists it has a position. You told me it exists but where it is doesn’t matter. — NOS4A2

I didn't think I'd have to tell you your experience exists. Do you think it doesn't?

The epidermis, then. The epidermis is in direct contact with the tea cup. — NOS4A2

Yes. But your experienced tea cup (the one you act on, talk about, point to, describe, remember, locate, plan about, name, reach for... The one you just referred to with the words "tea cup") does not cause the responses in your epidermis. Something else does. If this weren't the case it would be impossible to be wrong. It's not impossible to be wrong, therefore your construction (no matter how generally accurate) cannot actually be one and the same as the causes of the data from which it is constructed.

Therefore there are, by necessity, at least two nodes to consider. The tea cup of your experience (and mine, and the rest of the world - we construct these things together), and the hidden states which such a construction is an attempt to model, predict and modify.