Take some pride in your work if you want to wound. — apokrisis

I don't want to wound at all, and I'm not applying for a grant. I'm not even remotely saying anything original to take pride in. I'm interested in the attempt to defeat Hume, who I see as one of the great defenders of the nascent science, in the name of a false and contrived rationalism. I think it is a great pity and a disservice to science and to humanity. Science is not a religion; it makes no eternal pronouncements but remains humble, provisional, seeking understanding not overseeing. So maybe cut out the bullying posture a bit; it's unscientific.

You have to sound reasonable when you make your grant application. — apokrisis

Is that a law of nature? I think it's the advice of a propagandist. Scream softly or the children might hear.

Abduction doesn’t define a relation of consequence between premises and conclusions; logic requires a structured notation, absent from abduction. Abduction might be a good name for a psychological process, but it ain't a logic.
— Banno

Strawman. It is a necessary part of a logic of science. The bit that gets the game of deduction and inductive confirmation started. — apokrisis

It's interesting how emotively the rationalists defend. I agree with both here. It is the necessary bit of the game that gets induction started. But it ain't logical, and it ain't evidential. It's a leap of faith. Nothing wrong with that - it serves us well so far and perhaps for the foreseeable. It's just that it is not "rational". It's necessary to the project and it seems to work so far. If it stops working we'll have to think again.

What Peirce called the growth of cosmic habit. — apokrisis

That's what Hume called it too - "habit". But he located it firmly in human memory. I would have thought that the cosmos would display something more like inertia, but regardless of what one calls it, there is no evidence of it from the future, and the move from past to future, or from explanation to prediction, remains unsupported by any logic or evidence.

I want to just take a look at the other side, for a moment. And I'm gonna start with an iconoclasm:

There is no such thing as sanity; it's not even a desirable goal.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. — Aldous Huxley

https://kfoundation.org/it-is-no-measure-of-health-to-be-well-adjusted-to-a-profoundly-sick-society/

I see on this site every day, a sometimes frantic defence of rationalism, as if logic and science can tell us how to live. This is a profound madness that denies trauma in an escape to imagined invulnerability.

Every one of us was born, and birth is traumatic. As a child, I used to have a couple of recurring nightmares. One was of being in a field, and suddenly starting to feel crushed; there was no escape from this killing pressure. The other was of my first home. I was in the kitchen, and there was a dark passage from there past the stairs to the hall and thence to the living room, and I had to go to the living room and light the fire. I was terrified, for some reason of I knew not what monster waiting for me. Both dreams ended in the middle without resolution.
I think it was learning the facts of life, about age 11, that I realised that these were dreams of experiencing contractions, and the passing of the birth canal, respectively. I think it is rather rare to maintain any conscious contact with one's birth at all, and I was fortunate in being my mother's 5th child and having a very easy and quick birth. But I do not think I am free of trauma.

The essence of trauma is overwhelming unbearable feelings, that have to be locked away from consciousness, and this results in a splitting of oneself into the one who copes, and the unacceptable one who cannot cope. The irony of this is that the one who is coping every day is the one that cannot cope with the trauma that the locked away unacceptable self is living with in secret.

People who think they can cope are the most dangerous; because their feelings are locked away, they are capable of anything. So I want to say to you all, that if you are feeling traumatised, if you are feeling fragmented, if you are hurt and cannot cope, then you are the fortunate ones, who have not lost all contact with their feelings. Treasure the pain of the human condition, and do not lose your humanity. You are the rightful leaders of society, who lead spiritually and in practical service.

To suggest that laws (so defined) come and go over time is ad hoc, because there's no evidence for this. — Relativist

There is no evidence one way or the other of the future. There is no evidence at all of the future. Not of laws coming or going or remaining the same. One is not more ad hoc than another.

While the long term result of trauma tends to be chronic stress, the long term result of abuse is more typically shame, guilt, self-disgust.

Trauma and abuse are by no means mutually exclusive of course.

She notes this concept, inherited trauma, is contentious, but it sure resonates intuitively. — Jeremy Murray

On the one hand damaged parents are more likely to damage their children all unwilling, and on the other, epigenetics have been shown to be affected by trauma and passed down at least one generation.
https://www.theembodylab.com/blog/cross-generational-trauma-and-personality-the-interplay-of-genetics-epigenetics-and-healing

It seems you are conflating an explanation of facts past and present and a prediction of facts future. So you have arrived at your best explanation, and then you make a prediction based on the idea that there have been these laws in the past, and ...the future will be like the past, because the future will be like the past.

it seems much more likely that we have some non-deductive justification. — Relativist

I'd really like to see that justification. The problem of course is that any evidence that might be brought forward for the future being like the past must come from the past and must assume - in order to constitute any kind of justification at all - that the future will be like the past.

There really is nothing at all to gainsay that in 5 minutes you or I will awaken to an entirely new reality and laugh at the naive dreaming self that imagined they were a human on a planet doing philosophy online. The dreams of Flying Spaghetti Monsters are notoriously long and complex, just like the tangle of their limbs.

Separation between 'us' and 'them', between superior and inferior, between human and the rest of nature.

We are the universe contemplating itself — Copernicus

If this is true, then you are trying to say we are superior to ourself - superior to the universe. You thereby recreate the division you deny.

Well, our sapience is a tangible proof of our excellence above the rest of the earthly creatures. — Copernicus

Your claim of superiority entails a separation. This separation contradicts the other claim of a unified vision.

The parts of the body were having a meeting, trying to decide who was the one in charge...

"I should be in charge," said the brain , "Because I run all the body's systems, so without me nothing would happen."

"I should be in charge," said the blood , "Because I circulate oxygen all over so without me you'd waste away."

"I should be in charge," said the stomach," Because I process food and give all of you energy."

"I should be in charge," said the legs, "because I carry the body wherever it needs to go."

"I should be in charge," said the eyes, "Because I allow the body to see where it goes."

"I should be in charge," said the rectum, "Because Im responsible for waste removal."

All the other body parts laughed at the rectum And insulted him, so in a huff, he shut down tight. Within a few days, the brain had a terrible headache, the stomach was bloated, the legs got wobbly, the eyes got watery, and the blood Was toxic. They all decided that the rectum should be the boss

The Moral of the story? Even though the others do all the work.... The ass hole is usually in charge

We're still at the top of the animal kingdom, — Copernicus

we restore a unified vision of existence — Copernicus

If you do not see the contradiction, I probably cannot convince you, but the 'we' at the top do not seem to be unified with the animal kingdom as long as we are obsessed with 'our' dominance of 'them'.

This paper argues ... — Copernicus

This is a fine summary of physicalism. It doesn't really argue though, it is a statement of belief, what used to be called a 'creed' from the latin, 'credo' - I believe. Nothing wrong with that, but probably best not to consider that the statement proves itself.

By dissolving the false dichotomy between matter and mind, we restore a unified vision of existence: consciousness as the apex of complexity, not its contradiction. — Copernicus

One thing I can give you any amount of evidence for, is that we do not have 'a unified vision of existence'. If we did, we would be able to tackle our problems - poverty, climate change, overpopulation, pollution, and ongoing intractable global human conflict.

In view of our failures in this regard, it seems somewhat pessimistic to call us 'the apex of consciousness'; I think we have a long way to go yet.

So, what you're about to see is part one of my interview with Branoslav Slanchev. Uh, and he he's a political scientist and honestly, this was like the most aha uh interview that I've ever done with anyone. It's just like he lays things out. I'm going to do it in two parts. So, this is part one. So, here we go. — Transcript of the vid intro

"Physics is fun." my teacher used to say. But the German Science Guy is super excited about some new chemistry.

It's mainly Europeans who leave their countries and settle in America Australia, India, Africa, and the Far East, etc. And the way we generally do it is we don't ask permission of the locals, we just take what we want, and impose our culture on those of the natives that we don't get around to slaughtering. That seems the best way to resolve such problems.

As in the rock intended to start the avalanche that happened by intending to pursue gravitational paths of less resistance down the mountain just so?

That would make a rather extreme animist of you. Not even the spiritualists I've encountered hold such views. — javra

"Snow likes to be very quiet, and when someone disturbs it, it does its best to quieten them down."

The point I am making is more so grammatical. Of a living being, one can ask why they did something, and how they did something and get very different answers.

"Reasons why" ask for motives: The tiger killed the goat because it was hungry.

"How" asks for effective method: The tiger killed the goat by creeping through the pampas grass stealthily from downwind and springing suddenly upon it.

So I would rather suggest that my reasoning is that avalanches and snow do not reason, and therefore the question of why they happen is inappropriate. 'How an avalanche happens' one can ask, but 'why' is indeed the question of an extreme animist, or else a 'how' question in inappropriate and misleading disguise.

Thus 'why', asks about reasoning, about the mind in question, and 'how' asks about practicalities and events. I think this simple distinction can resolve much of the controversy. If there seems to be no mind, do not look for reasons why. Because it will only confuse and annoy. Because I said so! Because this is how the language works.

Answers to 'Why' questions all end up the same way, sooner or later— "Because I said so!" or the less responsible version, "It's Godswill!". Either are best said in a somewhat irritated and aggressive tone to convey the end of the discussion.

'How' questions seem to me to be more 'scientific' because they can end on the other side of the discussion when the questioner says "Show me!", after which the discussion hopefully turns to demonstration. Thus no science is done in discussions, but only in the laboratory, or the field.
And the distinction between good theory and conspiracy theory is also made there, and not in discussion.

Then explain by what you meant by "I believe in science." — Relativist

What I believe is that science is a sceptical endeavour, that progresses by means of demonstration. which is to say, that I expect scientists not to put their trust too lightly in the work of others, but require experiments to be repeated, and findings to be demonstrated, and theories to be treated as provisional whenever their scope is extended.

Science is not equivalent to what individual scientists say. I'm referring to commonly accepted theory. — Relativist

And individual scientists do not talk about commonly accepted theory? Really, what do you imagine needs your stalwart defence here? Are you having a battle to see who understands science better? Enough already!

Accepting science means you treat the body of scientific information as true, despite the fact that it is possibly false — Relativist

No it doesn't. Scientists are not all equally scrupulous, and are subject to peer pressure, the persuasion of big pharma et cetera, and the need to get funding. Some science is biased and some is slapdash, and some is bullshit. It's not supposed to be religion where you just believe what the high priests say.

Do you reject everything science teaches? Scientific theory is developed through abduction, and it has proved successful. — Relativist

That seems a rather strange, if not perverse, response from someone who thinks we should be guided by the science as to what to do about human-induced global warming. — Janus

Hume's attack is not on science here, and it is not on morality when he points out that you can't derive an ought from an is. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the two arguments are very similar, and what he is attacking in each case is a form of argument. Let me put it this way, he is not attacking rationality, he is attacking rationalism. He is attacking dogmatism. And when you are unable to defeat his logic, and also unable to accept his arguments, it is dogmatism that you are showing.

Yes, I believe in science, and I hope it will continue to provide a guide to the future and tools for the present for whatever future we may have. But I do not pretend that belief and hope are "rational" while unable to provide any coherent rationale. I also believe in trying to be truthful in communication, and kind to other people, and I wish you would too, but I do not pretend that it is rational, because it isn't.

Rationality cannot tell us how to live, or even what to think; to answer these sorts of question requires something else. it requires caring about something.

Suppose you have a retirement account and you're trying to invest the money to grow large enough to enable you to one day retire. Would you consider taking guidance from astrology, fortune cookies, and California Psychics? If not, why not - if all "rational" choices are simply acts of desperation? — Relativist

What is objectionable about this, is not just that it fails as any kind of defence of the rationality of induction, but that it takes astrology - the attempt to relate celestial regularities to human affairs as the opposite of pragmatism rather than the exact same principle and the father of science. Pragmatically, the origins of agriculture were founded on the connection of celestial events to the seasons and thereby to human affairs.

This is the desperation, to attempt to defend one's rationality by projecting one's irrationality. That and taking money and property owning to be an immutable reality rather than a fragile social construct. Who knows, next week Trump might pass a law that anyone he doesn't like forfeits all their assets and gets deported to Greenland. My advice for a secure retirement is to head for the hills and stock up on canned food and iodine tablets.

We use the past to predict the future because ...

... there is no other guide. — Janus

The difference between us is that you call that rational, and I call it desperation. We are desperate to predict because we want security, and there is no security. Such is the fall into knowledge.

He is not going to recommend that you abandon your science or your common sense. But he is going to ask you to abandon your arrogance and righteousness.
— unenlightened

This seems like kind of an arrogant and righteous comment. — T Clark

Yes, darling, but that's my comment, not Hume's.I am arrogant and righteous, so you can dismiss me with a casual projection like that.

The thing is, it used to be a necessary truth, "All swans are white." Philosophers dined out on it for years. And then there wasn't 'a black swan event'; that could have been dismissed as a sport, an aberration, the exception that proves the rule or some such. No, there was a whole fucking continent of overtly black swans, unapologetically swanning about like they owned the place and had always been there. Cue much coughing and mumbling into beards.

Look chaps, I can claim very little credit for any of this; it is seriously ill advised in my estimation to try and contradict Hume. he is The Man. He is not going to recommend that you abandon your science or your common sense. But he is going to ask you to abandon your arrogance and righteousness. Rationality is limited. It cannot manage on its own but stands in need of passion.

... some explanation is needed for the constant conjunction of past regularities. I judge that the "inference to best explanation" for this is that there exist laws of nature that necessitate this behavior. — Relativist

That is indeed a fine and attractive explanation for past regularities, and "as a rule" I myself have found that heads and tails come up about equally, and so on. But what leads you to apply this rule of the past to the future?

So what's the alternative? — Relativist

Indeed. And you call this 'rationality'? Not 'desperation'?

Abandon (the pretence of) rationality, all ye who enter here.

Suppose you and I reach different conclusions. We could then both profit from having a discussion to identify differences in background beliefs and the reasoning we each employed. We may then adjust our beliefs and/or revise the sort of reasoning we employ. — Relativist

That is what we are doing - having a discussion. You have taken the bet, and I have rejected the bet and we have laid out our reasons. Now I hope you will agree that the actual outcome is not decisive in this case. neither of us is entirely certain in our estimation of the odds, and even if we were, we might still be unlucky. We could do a much more detailed survey of the number plates that pass @T Clark's house, to see if there are patterns in the data and what the relative frequencies are over time. And perhaps a psychological assessment would be helpful in determining whether he is an inveterate gambler with very poor judgement, or a kindly chap that wants to give away some money without causing the beneficiaries any embarrassment, or a trickster, or something else.

But as things stand, we have made different decisions based on different rationales and the information we have.
Therefore, rationality is not decisive in this case. And if it turns out that we are all turkeys, and tomorrow is thanksgiving, then our reasoning about the kindly farmer that feeds us every day will be completely and catastrophically wrong; and perhaps the sun will not rise tomorrow because we are living in a simulation that is about to be turned off.

But what I have not seen in all this pragmatism is any answer to Hume. His claim is that one of our "background beliefs" seems to be that the future will be broadly the same as the past, and this is something we cannot have any evidence of whatsoever because the future is always beyond our experience. It is therefore plucked out of the total vacuum of unknowability and it is on this literally unreasonable assumption that all this "pragmatic rationality" is founded.

This principle applies just as much to probabilities and statistics like car number plates as to the orderly procession of the heavens and the rising of the sun. 'These are the plates we have seen -therefore these are the likely plates we will see next. But the 'therefore' has ZERO justification in logic or evidence. It's called "The problem of Induction". This is what you are calling 'rationality'.

But rationality is more likely to lead to truth than irrationality. — Relativist

My rationality or yours?

You provided rational reasons not take the bet. But another person might very well take the bet, on the basis of the probability and some good reasons to be confident he wasn't being scammed - that would be rational also. — Relativist

So rationality doesn't work as a decision guide.

Would your decision to take the bet be rational? — T Clark

I have already explained why it would not have been rational, viz. that your offering the bet in circumstances where you had expertise that I lacked, especially when you had been plying me with alcohol made me suspect a scam. Thus I had legitimate Wittgensteinian reasons for doubt in the particular circumstances.

Sorry, I really don’t understand this argument — T Clark

I'll just leave it there, and see if it appeals to anyone else. I think you didn't understand Hume's problem in the first place, so an argument that addresses it might likely be rather opaque.

I won't take your bet, because I'm a stranger and you're local and you might know that the ferry just docked and we're due a contingent of Rhode Islanders. Instead, I'll throw you what I hope is a more substantial lifeline/timeline.

So, imagine a world where the future is not always like the past.

You are watching a film, Death in Venice, say, and somewhere in the middle, it cuts to the middle of Bambi, and then it starts jumping every frame to a different movie, so that there is just a meaningless flicker of images changing without connection and too fast to even identify.

But there is still a continuity, which is the person watching.

So now remove that continuity, such that each frame, is seen by a different person. Now there is no continuity, but there is a problem: without any continuity, there is nothing to say one frame comes before or after another; there is no temporal order of past and future, just a heap of random watchers of random frames with no connection at all.

In other words, if the future fails to be connected to the past and related to it, it fails to be the future. The future is necessarily similar to the past, otherwise it is not the future. The timeline has to hold together, or else it is broken, and a broken timeline is not a timeline at all.

So, what’s the problem? — T Clark

The problem is that it is not rational, in the sense that no amount of past evidence can constrain the future in any way, logically. And you just saying it seems rational does not make it so either. It goes something like this:

The future will be similar to the past because in the past, the future was usually similar to the past, and the future will be similar to the past, because it generally was in the past, so it will be in the future.
Repeat without rinsing until convinced.

The doubt is justified on similar grounds. Might we be like the turkey? You might "remember" the sun always rising, but in virtue of what do you know that your memory is reliable? Plus, given Hume's disjoint bundle anthropology, the reliability of memory is perhaps more open to doubt. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is it? Do you doubt it on any of those grounds? Want to put some money on it? :wink:

This is Wittgenstein's suggestion. There might be reasons such as these on particular occasions and in particular circumstances. But because my memory is sometimes unreliable does not mean that I can or should never rely on it, because even the interpretation of immediate sense data relies on memory, and thus there is nothing at all without it. And Hume is similarly complacent in practice about such matters.

I don't see the value in this kind of distinction. How do you see it? — T Clark

You don't see the value of the distinction between rational and irrational? Or memory and imagination?

:gasp:

Huh? Your statistical claim makes no sense, but anyway statistics cannot answer Hume, whose argument comes down to 'you can't logically derive a proposition about the future from propositions about the past, just as his moral scepticism states that 'you cannot get an ought from an is.'

Given every morning of my life (that's more than 1,000) the sun has risen. Habit leads me to expect it to rise tomorrow. Now justify the doubt. Something like "I saw the devourer of suns starting to consume it last evening", perhaps?

The nearest thing to an answer to Hume comes from Wittgenstein, along the lines that doubt too stands in need of justification. Whatever can be known can be doubted and knowing and doubting both need justification. Can one justify the doubt that the sun might not rise in the morning? One can say that it might not, but can one really doubt it?

I think it is our business to distinguish sense from nonsense. I do not think it can be done without touching on nonsense. I suspect the line between laidback and stupid is even more difficult to navigate without getting one's mind dirty.

Here's something to make you glad you live in the fucked up US, God-forsaken Europe, or the La-la land of the UK. This is the real Big Brother.

I have to be charitable and conclude that you only mean to prove my thesis with this little display of uptight contrariety. So thank you. :up: — apokrisis

Well thank you for the reluctant charity. I certainly don't claim to be the incarnation of love, and my use of quotation rather than simple declaration might even suggest that to the charitable. But your suggestion

Still, instantiations such as the latter cases of rape do attest to the fact that some adult humans become utterly immune to it. Love is to them a false promise, hence an utter falsity, hence a wrong reality to uphold, or, more simply, a wrong. Notwithstanding, duly agreed with the proposition: (universal) love is that which makes the world go round. — javra

There is no place in the attraction between electron and proton for consent or dissent. The love of the rapist is the love of power which is the love of the feeble. Since 'love' is somewhat a trigger word, it seems, I will back-track to 'like'. One cannot object to 'like' with any vehemence surely?

'Kangaroos like to hop'. @apokrisis likes to disdain. Systems like to dissipate.

Any minute now I'm going to invent the law of attraction, so I'll stop while I still can.