Seems like there has to be an answer. — Fire Ologist

My argument is everything is arbitrary after you have a living organism with 46 chromosomes. — Fire Ologist

And "46chromosomes" is not arbitrary?

Suppose in fact there doesn't have to be an answer. Suppose we have to make decisions about the rights and wrongs and the life and death of our neighbours in peace and in war; for the saints and the murderers, for the unformed and the agonised. Suppose the difference between murder and justified killing is something we establish and disagree about arbitrarily without end?

I'll tell you where I stand; I don't like abortion. But if a woman in society is in such a situation that her pregnancy is not wonderful news, or at least a bearable interruption, then the whole society is guilty. And I take the same stance about kids shooting their fellows in schools, and Trump, and Hitler, and Jews and Palestinians and Ukrainians and Russians.

Perhaps this is what is unique about 46 chromosomes; our capacity for unlimited cruelty to ourselves; our propensity to condemn each other while taking no responsibility for each other.

I don’t think it helps at all to have this conversation in religious terms. — Fire Ologist

"The spirit of the law" is not a religious term. But I don't think it helps to have the conversation in purely physical terms either, and that is my point. Matter and cells - some we are made of, some we eat, What's the difference?

It's just one damn thing after another.

I’m at least a collection of particles.

That’s all I need to be to have this conversation. — Fire Ologist

The law is said to have its letter, and also its spirit. I don't see why you and I need to manage with less?

Who speaks for the unborn? I don't know, but i know who sings for them.

Another careful picking apart of a bullshitter who ought to know a lot better.



And a new magic German feeling word to rival schadenfreude — "fremdschamen".

When I win the presidency, I'm going to nationalise McDonalds and put Trump in charge of it.

In the meantime, I am calling it for the democrats in a not quite landslide, based on early voting and anecdotal evidence of registered republicans voting democrat.

Super powers.

I used not to think that Trump was evil. — Wayfarer

Judge not, that ye be not judged. Condemn the sin, and not the sinner.

That says more about us than it does about him honestly. — Mr Bee

Yes. This is the hard lesson to learn; that it is plainly arguable where the most evil lies in American politics. Plainly, because people are arguing it here on this page in seeming good faith.

If politics is characterised as an equal battle between good and evil, then necessarily, evil will triumph, because the good have scruples and the evil have none. Or else there is no difference and the analysis fails altogether.

When the opposition has to be called evil, it is the failure of the good to maintain their own standards that has allowed it to happen. If there is a party of the good and a party of the evil, there is no question who to vote for; it is when one cannot tell them apart that evil can triumph.

A quickie, something for the weekend, to make you me, anyway, smile.

Ok, this is slightly off-topic, and the guy does a great imitation of the mad staring eyed mathematician.
But it relates to any number of waffles threads over in the hard-nosed philosophy section. It goes right against my instincts on the abstract, but it does it well.

Now this is a backroad so scenic and unspoilt, you may want to stop for a picnic. Or, if you need to be somewhere urgently, probably avoid the area altogether.

Procrastination is the result of internal conflict, and hence of a divided mind. If I am single minded, there can be no conflict; I am doing what I am doing, wholeheartedly.

I want the dishes clean and the kitchen tidy, but I want to go on sitting in my comfy chair dreaming. Such a conflict is uncomfortable, and there is no resolution, unless perhaps my wife will go and do the job. Procrastinating, I jump from one side to the other, arguing back and forth, and neither doing the job nor relaxing.

It is fairly easy to see the whole conflict as I have just described it, and obviously, the solution is that since i cannot relax properly until the dishes are done, I want to get the dishes done, and then relax.

But typically, the conflict is hard to see; perhaps I want to write a really good essay, but I am afraid I will not be able to, so I do not want to start and find out.

Or I want to stop smoking, but I do not want to suffer the withdrawal symptoms, so I want to smoke.

In such cases, it can be hard to see the whole conflict, and one is always on one side. and avoiding or ignoring the other. And until one can see the whole, there can be no resolution. There is a moment, possibly, though, when one becomes aware of the conflict as a whole, and in that instant, the conflict is ended. One writes the essay as best one can, or else one abandons the essay for good. One remains a contented smoker, or one stops smoking completely.

Yes, but falsely.
— unenlightened

But, also "No, but falsely." — punos

There is an asymmetry, I think. The answer "No." is a performative contradiction, while the answer "Yes." is not.

It is a matter of interpretation, but i suggest that a yes/no question can always be answered by yes, or by no. Usually, one answer is true and the other false. So under this understanding the correct answer is "Yes, it can be answered by "No.", but that answer would necessarily be false.

Pedants of the world unite, you have nothing.

When women can choose not to have children, a pretty high percentage of them don't. — frank

Perhaps child-rearing is an undervalued contribution to the economy; a cost that individuals choose not to bear unaided in support of a society that does not reward it.

In other news ...

Yes, but falsely.

We know that this is one-sided reporting. But the other side? You want to hear from them? There is no other side - the world is round.

Plenty of reading and good advice already.

But here is a handy free online crib sheet to use whenever you come across a name or a term that you are not familiar with. Philosophers love to name drop and use latin jargon so as to sound smart when they talk their nonsense. You don't want a treatise on every name, just a quick outline of who or what and when.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/index.htm

There's other stuff there too - a timeline some stuff on logic, some history, etc but the dictionary is what will be most useful probably. Not to read wholesale, but to lookup this and that while you cruise here or elsewhere..

A 20,000 year old rock carving will carbon date the same whether it's been preserved for 20,000 years or freshly chiseled 20 minutes ago. — Outlander

Yes, but it looks as though you have misunderstood the science being reported. It's not carbon dating.
The sooty carbon layers from fire smoke deposits mark the annual layers of limestone deposit that build up in layers on the roof of the cave. This produces a barcode of thicker and thinner layers that can be matched over many years just the same way that tree rings can be matched so that a library can be built up from these flakes producing a continuous record of the years of habitation, and particular flakes can be associated with identifiable remains or artefacts of neanderthal or h.sapiens occupation and that enables them to say with confidence that they are occupying the cave if not at the same time, then at most one year apart. Carbon dating cannot get anything like that close, of course.

people falling into the conclusion that consciousness is definitely a quantum mechanical process missed that this is not proven yet. — Christoffer

I missed where people were falling into that conclusion. "Is Human Consciousness Quantum After All?" is the subtitle. And at the end of the video, the guy says. This is super exciting because maybe Penrose and Hameroff were right ...", having noted at the beginning that no one had taken their ideas seriously for years.

And of course it is only a very partial explanation at best, of something that every living cell has, that is possibly a precursor of what we might recognise as consciousness.

The most damning thing from the trove of evidence corruptly released just weeks before the election was that Trump sipped Diet Coke. What a Hitler. — NOS4A2

Nero fiddled.

I heard; some people are saying; a lot of people actually think; we'll be holding a press conference about it in a few weeks and I'll be making some really important announcements about that, I think you'll be very interested.

Make America Sane Again. We can do that nowadays, you know - we have these really smart nano-bots we can inject you all with and control what you think through G5. You'll all become so smart you'll think just like me. And you won't have to vote because the government will already know what you think.

I just saw this sign on a video:

"Orange is for pumpkins, not presidents."

Thus saith the Lord.

Do we get a referendum on what topics we have a referendum on?

It is indeed a sensible answer, but doesn't explain what appears to be the modally necessary character of the abstractions, and their role in explanation, if any. Have you read the target paper I cited? It might explain the problem better than I have. — J

Yes. I note that causation is also an abstraction, and that there is not 'necessarily' more than one object, and leave you in peace.

are our abstractions mysteriously agreeing with the world? — J

This becomes a ridiculous question as soon as you understand that "abstract" literally means "taken out".

origin of abstract
Middle English: from Latin abstractus, literally ‘drawn away’, past participle of abstrahere, from ab- ‘from’ + trahere ‘draw off’

https://en.bab.la/dictionary/english/abstract

So where are abstractions taken from? I suggest "the world" is a sensible answer, and one that explains the "mystery" rather well.

I can see that you wouldn't like this approach on the grounds that it shoots your fox and spoils the fun of the chase.

Q1. Why is the number 23 not divisible (evenly) by 3?
Q2. Why are 23 objects not evenly divisible into three collections of whole and unbroken objects? — J

A1. 23 divides by 3 exactly into 7 & 2/3.
A2. You have introduced 'whole' and 'unbroken'.

If you have 23 objects you have already mathematicised them by counting: they are pre-labeled, as it were, and the act of division is a relabelling, labels which we can call in this case ,' a, b, and c,' instead of numbers again (that would be confusing). Then we have objects:

1a, 2b, 3c, 4a, 5b, ... and so on. And because the labels are always applied in the same sequence and we always stop the sequence in the same place, the result is always the same.

First you learn the label names in sequence, and then you apply the labels to themselves and that is the abstraction that is arithmetic. And the meaning of the name is its position in the sequence, and nothing else.

And when philosophers and mathematicians have thoroughly forgotten their childhood, they wonder that the world should mysteriously agree with their abstractions, as though they were abstracted from nowhere at all.

And lo, God said "this should freak them scientists out for a century or Two." And verily, it was so.

https://www.britannica.com/story/why-is-the-platypus-a-mammal

If God does not exist, then it is false that if I pray, then my prayers will be answered. — Banno

I, (or perhaps just this post,) am the answer to all you godless people's prayers.

Therefore the quoted premise is false.

So should we assume that everything that you say is sarcastic? — Agree-to-Disagree

You should, but everyone else, not so much. :grin:

I mean, the other way round.

Oh, let's just agree to disagree about it all.

Are people meant to take you seriously? — Agree-to-Disagree

No. they are supposed to smile at the sarcasm. Like this : :grin:

That OP looks messy and unfocused to me. And this conversation seems now to be about everything and anything. — Baden

Yes, but that is, for me, the value of philosophy; that it can somewhat clean up conceptual messes. There's something messy about how we think and talk about causation, because our talk and thought is inside the causal chain not beyond it. Even just to understand that much is useful. We cannot untie that knot, but we can acknowledge it, and apply a palliative dose of humility and some 'whereof one cannot speak ...'.

Herewith, some more lies and propaganda from the new scientist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG_iHwEn33I

There is something interesting here though.

Triggering cause (push of other domino or finger) vs. enabling condition — Baden

Triggering cause, trigger, enabling condition bullet in chamber? "Guns don't kill people, rappers do."

We set up the dominoes so that we can see how a small cause can have a large effect; the trigger is another example. We love to exploit 'the butterfly effect' - the will to power perhaps?

And there is also, I think, an urge to begin the casual story with a human. The trigger does not pull itself, the gun does not aim itself. And one cannot follow the causal story into the physiology and neurology of the individual without generalising them out of existence. The story becomes personal and no longer objective.
And at this point we have arrived at the starting point of this thread: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15499/when-can-something-legitimately-be-blamed-on-culture/p1

The story changes from causes to reasons and motives. The faulty trigger mechanism fails to fire, the bullet but the faulty person fails to reason or act appropriately; the storyteller has entered the story and transformed it.

One tells only the causal story that one finds interesting
— unenlightened

Yes, that's the key to understanding causality. — SophistiCat

As witness:

Maybe we can take a simple scenario like the one below, and analyze things from there.

*

Two dominos, A and B and an agent, X.

X pushes Domino A, causing Domino A to fall against Domino B, causing Domino B to fall.

Domino B falling:

Proximal cause = Domino A falling against it
Distal (ultimate) cause = X pushing Domino A. — Baden

Wot? Falling not caused by Gravity? :gasp:

Many people are gullible enough to accept what they are told without thinking. — Agree-to-Disagree

But not me. I scrutinise your every word. And I trust, by and large, the published temperature figures of meteorological departments, because I don't have time to personally inspect their facilities, but I see that their work is used by farmers and weather forecasters and so on who find their figures useful, and I see no evidence of or reason to suspect any conspiracy to inflate the figures.
On the contrary, there is strong evidence that powerful interests have for credible reasons of power and profit sought to undermine the evidence for global warming over many years. So when gullibility is in question, well right back at you, kiddo.

And God said, "I'm not going to be ordered about by a bunch of bloody logicians." and promptly ceased to exist.

(Plagiarised from Douglas Adams.)

↪Baden Bingo! Thanks for that. — I like sushi

Well that seems the other way round from the op, and totally in line with the notion that action at a distance would be "spooky".

But in practice, we do a lot of hand-waving, because to spell out the full mechanism each time would be both tedious and unjustifiable. 'The billiard ball went in the pocket because the player had practiced, and judged his shot well.' One leaves out the psychology, the neuroscience, the physiology, the Newtonian physics, the properties of felt and slate and effects of air resistance, and... But we understand that a ball entering a pocket is also caused by Some billionaire offering prize money for a tournament in his backyard. What's the difficulty?

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe — Carl Sagan

Because an apple is made of star dust. Yet most recipes leave out that bit, and assume that you already have a universe at hand, and access to apples therein. One tells only the causal story that one finds interesting- the full history of every atom of pie, tin, and oven from the big bang would take too long, and your pie would get cold.

Being wrong, and realizing it, is like removing a splinter — Moliere

I never am wrong, so I wouldn't know. Always I realise I was wrong when I have just changed my mind. :cool:

Being wrong is the best thing ever. It is the fundamental unit of learning.