It is less elegant..., — Olivier5

Subjective.

...heavier conceptually.... — Olivier5

Absolute nonsense. Your approach creates an entirely unnecessary category of existence and then populates it with entities we can neither measure nor see which would require an entirely new branch of physics to govern their interaction with the material world. Mine just says if there's seven words on a page, there's seven words on a page. No hidden stuff, no new physics, no magic.

...more complex to teach. — Olivier5

What's easier to show, some other 'As' or the nebulous mental concept of an 'A'?

They are variations on a theme, derivated from the ideal A by adding little bars at the bottom (sheriffs) or thickened strokes (bold) or what not. — Olivier5

They absolutely are not. This is just historically false.

Just teach them the alphabet; it's easier. — Olivier5

Both approaches teach the alphabet.

"Your 'A' is not similar enough to the ideal mental form for 'A', try again."

"Your 'A' is not similar enough to all the other 'As', try again."

What's wrong with the second teaching method? What does it fail to achieve by way of learning how to write?

I express opinions that are justified with reference to research — counterpunch

Well good, but the rest of us aren't going to just take it on faith are we. Let's have links to the research which says that sufficient clean energy can be obtained from magma to supply our current energy requirements.

If you believe wind and solar can support our current levels of material consumption — counterpunch

I don't.

I'm at a loss to understand your fierce opposition to that proposal. — counterpunch

I presume people far more knowledgable than me have looked into it already. It's not the strategy I'm fiercely opposed to, it's the maniacal advocation of it without a shred of supporting evidence.

Can you see a reason it's impossible? — counterpunch

Why would I? I'm not a geothermal engineer. I don't expect to be able to have a 'bit of a think about it' from my armchair and deduce all the problems that might arise. I'm sure it's a very complex field which requires thousands of hours training to understand.

You have not said what similitude means. — Olivier5

The degree to which one entity shares properties with another.

W is similar to M but they are not the same letter. — Olivier5

Yes. W is not similar enough to M.

What is 'N' standing for in this sentence, if not the idea of the one and only letter 'N'? — Olivier5

Depends on the circumstances. Here it might be something I would refer to with the vocalisation something like 'en'. If you put serifs on that printed letter, I would still refer to it with the same vocalisation. If you made it all curly and fancy I may still do so. It would still be similar enough to other printed letters I've heard referred to that way. If, however, you put a fourth line on it to make it look more like M, it would cease to be similar enough. It would look more similar to printed letters I've heard referred to by the vocalisation 'em', so I'd be more likely to use that.

if we care to be understood we need to express ourselves clearly, and this means abiding to certain theoretical or practiced rules. — Olivier5

You've not answered the challenge that similitude gives sufficient clarity to be understood.

There's a full blown typographic theory out there that underpins all modern written communications. — Olivier5

So? Nothing in there mentions anything about reifying ideal forms.

It is not practical, it doesn't tell you how to write New York so that the reader understands New York. We cannot use it to think and express ourselves simply and clearly about typography and writing. — Olivier5

You've given no account of this failure.

Many fonts can be read as 'N' because they're all similar in ways close enough for the purpose.

In what way does that fail to explain fonts?

Nothing in that demonstrates a 'common sense' notion of reifying ideal mental forms, so I'm baffled as to why you went to the trouble. As if anything I wrote suggested I was oblivious to the idea that fonts exist.

if we thought that New York has many different names that all share enough similarity, then our life would be far more complicated. — Olivier5

Why?

We would have to define the boundaries of that similitude. — Olivier5

Why? We don't have to define the boundaries of similitude to understand "stand roughly here", nor do we doubt that high stakes poker is excluded from the definition of 'game' when instructed to "play a 'game' with the children".

We deal quite easily with nouns and names whose definitional boundaries are fuzzy at the edges.

we CAN recognised the same name New York written in seven different fonts on that pic I posted. So we would need another explanation of our recognizing New York than the common sense one — Olivier5

Labelling your own preferred position as 'the common sense one' is a cheap trick. We're talking about ontology here, there's no common sense account at all.

Where would the boundaries of the "New York" similitude lie? What would it take for a scribble on a page to NOT be recognised as meaning "New York"? — Olivier5

Are you suggesting that there exist no ambiguous cases? That there's no scribble I could make where some might read it as saying 'New York' and others might not? We do not need to define the boundaries of similitude. Core cases are used most of the time, edge cases are either ignored or simply remain ambiguous, unresolved. It's not an apocalyptic problem that some scribbles can only be ambiguousmy deciphered.

Alrighty, tell me what you think then. Are you saying that the city of New York has many different names? — Olivier5

I've already given my account. We commonly say that 'New York' has one name, but it is a façon de parler, what we really have is multidudinous instances all of which are similar enough for our purposes. No additional entities required. I'm an Occham's razor kind of guy when it comes to ontology. I don't like to bring things into existence that don't seem necessary. The words (concepts, forms, ideals...whatever) as written, or in each individual mind seem to necessarily exist. There are seven of them on that page you posted. I don't see why a new entity, the unity 'the name's needs to be reified. It's sufficient that the seven necessary objects are similar.

"New York" is a place name composed of two words: the word "New" and the word "York". — Olivier5

That's what a binomial is. I labelled it as such a few posts ago. It's irrelevant to the issue. Had you chosen Boston, we could have simply used 'word'.

there are 7 instances of the name "New York" on the page. Not 7 different names. — Olivier5

You're just asserting again. Do you understand the concept of making a case? I already know what you think, you've made that quite clear already. There's a unity called 'the name'. I want to know why you think that, not just twenty different ways of telling me that you think that.

Asserting it doesn't constitute an argument. You agreed that the word (binomial) 'New York' is a name. There are seven such words on that page so it follows that there are seven names on that page also. Nowhere is it given that there is one of anything on that page, that's the case you want to make, but instead of arguing for it you keep resorting to simply asserting it.

And how many words are there on that page (binomials, in fact - it would have been easier had you chosen Boston)?

What type of word is 'New York'?

It's now so lucrative for pharmaceutical companies to get an anti-cancer drug approved that could make a profit from absolutely any chemical at all and simply run sufficient trials for one to have a positive effect by chance alone. — Isaac


That is how a lot of early-stage drug research is done. Colonies of cancer cells are cultivated in many petri dishes, then exposed to one chemical after another to find one that is harmful to the cancer cells. Same thing with AIDS drugs back in the 1980s and 90s -- lots of lab techs in universities testing one chemical after another. — Bitter Crank

Yes, but the fear being expressed here (it's John Ioannidis's calculation, not mine) is not that the chemical gets randomly tested in vitro, it's that they don't get tested in vitro at all. In other words, they actually have no demonstrable effect on cancer cells whatsoever. Clinical trials have to show an effect to 95% confidence. One in twenty such trials would theoretically show an effect by chance alone - ie the drug did not help the people in the trial in the slightest bit, they just happened to get better for other reasons, but in coincidentally disproportionate numbers in the cohort compared to the control. A new drug trial is extortionately expensive so running twenty in the hope of getting such an effect has been unviable. Only recently, cancer drugs have become sufficiently lucrative that running twenty trials in the hope of hitting a randomly good looking one to market literally any chemical at all is now viable. To be clear, no one is suggesting that this has actually happened, but it's would be hopelessly naive not to take the situation seriously.

Non-drug-company-research is done (not often enough) to determine whether drugs work at all. Fairly often the result is "not that much" or "no better than existing drugs". — Bitter Crank

Famously (though perhaps not famous enough) the Cochrane trials only recently found most common paracetamol to be largely ineffective for the majority of people.

___

What intrigues me most in all this is how the pharmaceutical companies managed to pull of this trick. they are the largest industry in the world, spend four times more than the next biggest spender on lobbying, have an absolutely appalling track record on transparency and social welfare... yet somehow they are the darlings of the political left, immune to criticism, seen as nothing but knights in shining armour whose motives are beyond repute.

If the tobacco industry tells us some additive in it's cigarettes is totally safe because they tested it in house and found it to be fine, we'd throw the report in the bin without a second glance. When the pharmaceutical industry do the same, the report is not only treated with earnest reverence, but to even suggest it might be less than the whole picture is to be lumped in with the Proud Boys and Qanon. It's despicable for sure, but definitely gets my grudging respect - what an astonishing piece of long game PR they've pulled off.

How many cities are called New York? — Olivier5

One, I think. Are cities non-physical now too?

Geothermal energy is an existent facet of energy science and engineering. There are already thousands of experts in the field. It's what they believe that is of relevance. — Isaac


That's what I am saying though. — counterpunch

Well then present what they say.

I could simply believe that CO2 emissions do not cause global climate change and so maintain the hope that we'll be fine without having to do anything at all. Such a belief would be irrelevant if the actual scientists studying the matter disagreed. — Isaac


Could you? I could not simply believe that, because I don't believe it. — counterpunch

It was rhetorical. The point is that, as far as publicly debatable issues are concerned, unless we're going to have good ground for believing what we believe then there's no point in talking about it. It is the grounds we have for believing that are the substance of the discussion. If you just 'believe' that geothermal energy can support our current levels of material consumption then that's of no interest to a discussion community unless you have some ground to believe it which you can present.

Honestly, this seems like such a simple thing and yet absent in some substantial proportion of all the posts (across the forum, not just this thread). It's probably just me being old fashioned, but I'm not interested in what you believe, I'm interested in why you believe it.

The differences you see are not in the name "New York" itself, which is one name — Olivier5

I count seven.

I invite you to conclude that it is possible for humankind to survive - and then there will be two of us! — counterpunch

What you or I believe is possible is of no relevance or consequence. Geothermal energy is an existent facet of energy science and engineering. There are already thousands of experts in the field. It's what they believe that is of relevance.

I could simply believe that CO2 emissions do not cause global climate change and so maintain the hope that we'll be fine without having to do anything at all. Such a belief would be irrelevant if the actual scientists studying the matter disagreed.

the drug companies favor drugs that are taken for long periods of time over short periods of time. Bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites pose the greatest threat to human health and well-being (apart from global warming). There are no new antibiotics in the pipeline of drug development, and the existing ones are gradually losing their effectiveness. — Bitter Crank

Interesting point.

Pricing of drugs isn't "schizophrenic"; from their POV, it makes perfectly good sense to extract the cost of development and profit-potential as rapidly as possible. — Bitter Crank

Indeed. Though what I actually meant by the term was simply that the OP presumes drug companies are making drugs which are sufficiently beneficial that we'd want them to be available at lower cost.

My point was really why would anyone make that assumption. Having established the dug companies are willing to hold their community's health to ransom for a fast buck, why would we simultaneously assume their work in R&D is motivated by any lesser a greed?

Having corrected that assumption, we no longer have good reason to believe these drugs benefit the community and so have no cause for concern about their cost.

Pharmaceutical companies paid for 6,550 trials out of 7,598 in 2014.

Same year that the Cochrane report found Tamiflu had little to no benefit in preventing the flu or shortening the duration of flu symptoms, yet had a chance of life-threatening side effects, including suicide.

It's now so lucrative for pharmaceutical companies to get an anti-cancer drug approved that could make a profit from absolutely any chemical at all and simply run sufficient trials for one to have a positive effect by chance alone.

So basically I'm questioning the assumption that these drugs are useful in the first place, expensive or otherwise, when compared to other potential therapies.

What's messianic about that? — counterpunch

Turns out it is possible - and here's how! — counterpunch

I'm in no position to refute empirically, but nonetheless, I think otherwise. — counterpunch

Sums up your position pretty well. No empirical support whatsoever but repeating the same messianic sermon at every opportunity with a faux shock that anyone could be so crazy as to think otherwise.

This Dunning-Kruger troll is completely incorrigible on this point. S/He won't "feel good" about your reply either. — 180 Proof

No doubt we'll have a sagacious aphorism to that effect any minute.

Not 'similar enough' but identical. — Olivier5

Are you suggesting all seven of those names are the same in every way? I can see some substantial differences.

The same name of the same city. — Olivier5

Yes. 'The same' as in similar enough for our purposes. There's not a unity there requiring a separate ontological existence. The names are clearly dissimilar in many ways too. — Isaac

My feelings say they are not matter. — Protagoras

Why would anyone give a fuck what your feelings say? This is a discussion forum. If you've got nothing more to bring to the table than that your feelings say one position is correct and another incorrect then your contribution is worthless. We're discussing, not conducting a poll.

Coffee tables have a similarity,they are both made from matter.

Feelings are not. — Protagoras

That's just restating your position, not addressing the argument. The issue in question is whether it can be demonstrated that feelings are not matter, that you believe they're not is not in question.

Materialists are saying feelings are Matter. — Protagoras

Yep. As are both our coffee tables, and yet one is different from the other.

Seems a bit contrarian to posit an industry whose R&D departments are so noble that they do nothing but tirelessly produce medicines of the greatest benefit to human welfare, but whose sales department are so evil that would withhold such panaceas from humanity nonetheless. What kind of schizophrenic CEOs do you imagine are in charge of these organisations?

To think there is not a difference between a coffee table and your feelings is nonsense. — Protagoras

To think there's not a difference between my coffee table and your coffee table is also nonsense. thankfully, no one is making such a claim so we need not concern ourselves with it.

Yes. 'The same' as in similar enough for our purposes. There's not a unity there requiring a separate ontological existence. The names are clearly dissimilar in many ways too.

In what way is that a reply to the argument raised? I still see 7 names similar enough for me to pronounce them the same and bring the same city to mind on reading them. Similar enough for our purposes, but not the same entity.

but what is preserved is an idea, information, a story. It can be represented in a variety of media and many different languages or systems, including binary code. But the idea stays the same — Wayfarer

See my comment to Oliver above. The idea does not stay the same, only similar enough for our purposes, so there's no unity requiring a separate existence, only a façon de parler.

It's the same map IFF it represents the same thing the same way, e.g. at the same scale, projection, and was authored by the same person at the same time. — Olivier5

So no two maps are the same then?

that article shows that even for simple stimulus and response, there’s no 1:1 correlation between particular regions of the mouse brain and the response to the stimulus. — Wayfarer

How does this conclusion lead you to...

questioning the idea that neurons ‘represent’ ideas or that ‘ideas’ are ‘written’ on them. — Wayfarer

Ideas may be written on paper too, no? If I copy the idea from one page and then destroy the original, have I not preserved the idea? If such a process were carried out a thousand time by robots, the human reading it after the thousandth iteration would be reading the same idea. If the idea were not represented on paper and preserved through the process described, then how could the human reading it gain the idea?

Beside, a map can be printed on many copies, each of which is a different material thing, but the map itself is one. It's the same map on all copies. — Olivier5

Only if you beg the question already. The map of my local area in my car is not the same map as the map of my local area on my bookcase. There are differences at the microscopic level even to the arrangement of the symbols. It's only 'the same' because we take the expression 'the same' in common language to mean similar enough for our purposes. Here the purpose is to navigate my local area. It's no different to saying two people have the same hairstyle. We're not saying they literally have every single hair in the same place, just similar enough for our purposes.

So all you have in identifying some unifying theme which is constant between two maps of the same area is a linguistic convention, not an ontological distinction. If it were an ontological distinction it would not be possible for me to claim they were not the same, by pointing out microscopic differences. If I do so, you'd have to say "those differences are not enough", which is a subjective judgement about purposes, not an objective one about what kinds of thing exist and of what substance.

It stands to reason that they are written down on neurons. — Olivier5


You should have a glance at this. — Wayfarer

In what way do you think representational drift makes any difference to the robustness of the conclusion that representations are written down on neurons?

Conceptions arise spontaneously from understanding in relation to phenomena, judgement is the unity of conceptions in relation to each other. — Mww

OK, that makes sense, but it still leaves the substance of the question unanswered(or at least I can't see an answer there). Can you hold contradictory judgements? You say "Reason determines the relation of conceptions to each other, that is, a cognition, to experience", but 'reason', in my experience rarely delivers clean categorical judgements. One day one's reason might judge that minds are non-physical only to read an argument to the contrary and judge differently. I'm not sure I see the clear distinction you want to make between thoughts and judgements. Judgements are necessarily recalled post hoc (one doesn't re-judge every second) so a judgement being 'in mind' is a phenomena, an interocepted state one discovers one has.

it isn’t that things don’t fit together, but rather, it is that we ourselves that have misfit them. — Mww

Nice.

reason finds such cognition contradicts experience, re: “That ain’t like no dog I ever seen”. It is in judgement alone, with respect to a posteriori cognitions, that errors in our thinking occurs, and it is reason alone that discovers them, and is solely responsible for the possible correction of them. — Mww

The trouble with this is that, as you say, "we, as conscious agents, usually have no conscious notion of the work the system does, in order to keep us out of trouble, so to speak". Seems innocuous, but one of the activities 'the system' is strongly suspected of doing is filtering and even, in some cases, completely changing, the sensations to match the expected model - prior to delivering this information to the working memory (which is my term for the place where 'reason' is done). So it's not reason alone that discovers them and corrects them. There are three aspects which I cannot see could be maintained without contradiction. The brain is where reasoning takes place - We are conscious of all reasoning - Reason alone corrects perceptions which contradict experience. We know that areas of the brain are responsible for subconsciously correcting perceptions which don't match experience. So one of those three positions has to give.

I’ve been telling you of my system, but you haven’t reciprocated by telling me of yours. And while all this is a proper demonstration of Socratic dialectic, it is necessarily one-sided. Just letting you know it doesn’t have to be; you could always lay some psychological counterpoints on me. — Mww

It's relatively simple to lay out my system, but would take several textbooks to provide you with the evidential reasoning behind it, so you may either just assume a background of empirical evidence supporting, or take what I say as an interesting fairy tale. Either way...

I treat the mind as being the functional system arising from the arrangement and properties of the central nervous system. In other words, it's what the brain does by virtue of it's component parts being so arranged.

It transpires (according, of course, the the interpreted result of the experiments I take to be evidence for this sort of thing), that what the CNS does is almost nothing else but guess the cause of it's own states, all being entirely directed to improving the next guess. Surprise is the enemy here. The method is to have a hierarchy of subsystems, each guessing the cause of its inputs which then becomes the input to the next subsystem, and so on. The details need not bore you now (quite happy to expound on anything though), but the consequences for your comment...

I’m not so sure about that. It reeks of the Homunculus Argument, in that if one senses an inference it begs the question...from whence did the inference arise, if one merely senses that there has been one? On the other hand, if one senses an inference presupposes he is the source of it, begs the other question....why would he call it something he sensed, if it was he who created it? What one senses, is the conclusion the inference obtains, which may or may not be empirical. He does not ‘sense’ the act of logically inferring from which the conclusion is given. — Mww

...are...

The entire system is working post hoc, each input to a system is not the current state of the system below it, it is the state at the time of input - necessarily some point in the past. Inputs are actively blocked and filtered by backward acting neural network connections, partly to ensure this. So what you call 'making an inference' could mean one of two things - we could translate it as some system having a model (it has inferred the cause of it's inputs). This is the sense in which I use the term. But this sense doesn't marry with the way you use it (your requirement for conscious awareness). So for your use, inference would translate better to the model derived by those systems whose inputs are the activity logs for the other systems. Our conscious awareness is a kind of meta-model which unifies the goings on of all the other systems (or many of them, more like) under it's own model. This meta-modelling, we experience as awareness, consciousness...whatever you want to call it.

So, to have your conscious rational judgement, it can only be done by the meta-modelling consciousness systems, whose inputs are the activity logs of the other systems actually doing the inference modelling of sensations. At no point does your conscious, rational, system get access to the sensations from one's environment (nor from one's physiology). The brain simply doesn't trust such a flamboyant storyteller as consciousness with the important stuff.

Hence - what best translates from my system as your 'reason' is only ever something which gathers inferences about sensations, not makes them. The inferences it makes are those which unify the systems below it, to better predict what they are likely to deliver next. 2+2=4 is just such a model.

You implied that other people's criteria for not responding to your post may not be as rational as your criteria to not respond to their post. — Olivier5

I didn't once make an assertion about what was actually the case regarding rationality of people's criteria. I said quite clearly and deliberately that it seemed that way to me. In fact I made a point of saying that I assumed it would all make sense to Wayfarer, and when you directly asked me if mine was an assumption I answered "of course". I really can't fathom how you've gleaned from all that the idea the I've condemned Wayfarer's approach as irrational and that's an end to it. Were that the case I would have nothing to ask would I?

If you don't understand the counter-arguments you're presented with, you can just seek clarity, you don't have to just throw in the towel. — Isaac

Motive questioning again...

So when people do not respond to your post, they are at fault — Olivier5

Never mentioned 'fault', nor did I say anything about failure to respond to posts either. I don't know what this wierd line of enquiry of yours is headed toward, but it's becoming increasingly detached from anything actually being said.

The two cases in question are: whether a camera is a being, and whether the concept of pain is painful. As regards the latter, I said that the assertion was so unreasonable as not to warrant a response. — Wayfarer

I see. So just a failure to understand the argument then. I thought it might be something more interesting. Or are you just deliberately straw-manning the opposing position to avoid the difficulty of addressing it?

No one has said anything like "cameras are beings" (in the sense you mean it), and no one has said that the concept of pain is painful.

If you don't understand the counter-arguments you're presented with, you can just seek clarity, you don't have to just throw in the towel.