My takeaway from the exchange in this thread is that the left really cannot help but fracture itself with ideological arguments.

How much longer, until a "Constantine" takes possession of the American civilization? And after him, how long before a "Theodosius" forbids pagans - today's Christians - from worshiping their God? — Gus Lamarch

What reason would this Constantine have? The conversion of the Roman Empire did not happen in vacuum.

Unless Biden is clearly ahead after election night or its clear the Republicans loose the Senate, expect the result to be disputed. The electors of the electoral college elect the president, and there are plenty of ways to throw a wrench into that process.

wherever possible we tend to choose the decisions that have pleasurable consequences rather then the most responsible / altruistic ones. — Pop

No, we don't. This description of human behaviour is so overly simplistic as to be useless.

"Right-wing" has become a pejorative term. Oh! What great times do we live in... — Gus Lamarch

It has always been pejorative if you're on the left. But there does seem to be a crisis of progressivism, which ironically has lead to conservatism having nowhere to go but into the abyss of the reactionary and authoritarian.

As the progressives have lost their vision for the future, and turned into managers of the status quo, the conservatives have been forced to either loose all distinctiveness or turn ever more sharply towards the past. And hence, being right wing is becoming more and more a pejorative.

Scalia's method was to ask what the text would have meant to an ordinary person at the time it was passed.

He believed that only the text of the law became operative, not the intent behind it, but that the text needed to be viewed in it's historical context. He was an originalist in outlook, but originalism is not a specific technique.

Originalism is about putting aside the temptation to go beyond the democratic mandate. — frank

Consideration needs to be given to the democratic mandate, but the interpretation and application of legal texts is practiced with that in mind in many different settings in many different countries. The standard canon of interpretative techniques is usually considered adequate for the task.

It's also important to recognise that the judiciary always goes slightly beyond the democratic mandate, because the legislative body does not (and in fact often isn't allowed to) consider individual cases. It's a complex process of cross-pollination.

I have been asking myself if the right thing to do - from the perspective of Barret, who claims to value the SC as an institution, and everyone else who does, is to refuse to cooperate in this or any other confirmation, until the problem of partisan court-packing is resolved.

I feel like that is the major issue from the perspective of the judiciary. It must re-establish it's independence from day-to-day politics.

Isn't it a miracle? But, perhaps it is not, and someone here knows one ruling system in the least (in the past or now) that asks its subjects to love their enemies and not applying its justice on the evil and on the unjust. — KerimF

It's very odd to me to characterise Jesus' teachings as a ruling system. But is your argument that teaching harmony and kindness was not only unprecedented at the beginning of the common era, but also not repeated? While Jesus' commitment to unconditional love might have been revolutionary, there were certainly thinkers before and after him that were similarly interested in peaceful coexistence.

1. If man is the beneficiary of all of his actions and rational self-interest, then Objectivist ethics are right.
2. His right to be the beneficiary is grounded in the fact that he is a rational human being with rational morality.
3. Therefore, the Objectivist ethics are right, when man is acting rational and objective (1, 2 MP) — Mackensie

I don't even see how this follows in the first place. 1 talks about states of affairs, 2 talks about rights.

Premise one does not sit well with me. Unlike what Rand says, there must be a scenario when self-interest is not served. — Mackensie

Essentially, according to the quote of Rand you linked, rational self-interest is not actually self-interest the way we usually understand it. It's defined by an "objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles". From the context, this supposed objective morality is derived from the "nature of man" and leads to personal fulfillment.

This sounds pretty close to a form of virtue ethics. But the details depend on how the objective moral code can be known.

The argument presented in the article is hardly convincing, and doesn't address polling at all.

Whether or not Biden "has it in the bag" is a fairly irrelevant question anyways, since the course of the post-election phase depends more on immediate results and choices than on the final tally.

Slightly off topic, but isn't libertarianism just a form of utilitarianism that places some concept of "freedom" as the goal of the utility function?

Apparently Trump wants the State Department to release full unredacted versions of all the emails from Hillary Clinton's private mail servers to the public. — Pfhorrest

Releasing private emails sounds kinda illegal to me.

Trump apparently wishing it's 2016 again.

Whatever violence there will be will be carried out by agents of the state - police, national guard, and so on. And they'll be carrying out the dictates of law. — StreetlightX

I highly doubt that. Today, it's much easier to leverage a mob via Facebook then it is to bend standing institutions to your will. Of course agents of the state will also be in play, but the justification will probably be existing unrest.

All I'm saying is - don't expect violence to play anything more than some minor role. Everything will be codified and done by the book, because the book itself will be corrupt. — StreetlightX

The problem with that argument is that there isn't a book. I am sure legalistic arguments will be made, but the actual outcome will depend on who is able to impose their will - in the courtroom and outside of it.

I think the plan is fairly obvious in it's broad strokes by now. There are obvious avenues to pursue via violence in that plan. I think it's unlikely that violence will not be used where it seems tactically expedient. That's not the same as saying there'll be an "explosion" of violence.

The approach of another civil war in the disunited state of America? — Janus

Well, there are certainly ominous signs.

A republican governor saying that democracy might be suspended in favor of "stability and prosperity".

A party official of the democrats has concluded that the threat of secession might be employed to stop an all out attempt by the GOP to have Trump elected by the electoral college.

I think the only situation where the US might avoid violence in the streets is if Trump is behind after election night and the republicans loose the senate. They might then drop Trump and bide their time.

In all other situations, I fully expect violent clashes. The level and degree of organisation of the violence is hard to predict.

Thoughts? — Tzeentch

I think Kant more or less nailed this when he concluded that a) since we are not omnipotent, all that can really be expected from someone is to will good, but b) "willing" is different from hoping or wishing, and includes considering not just the end in question, but the means to that end as well, as an integral part.

Since all human action flows from a maxim, to an end, to the means to that end, the good will is not fully realized unless it encompasses both the end and the means.

Yes, that's the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. — Kenosha Kid

So it's at least not absurd to assume some amount of ontological "randomness".

Certainly conceivable, I think, but our inability to determine future states based on states at T0 is of uncertain ancestry, we don't know why we don't know. That's why I think the link between our uncertainty (probabilistic relations) and determinism (the nature of those relations, of which our theories are just models) is a poorly supported one. — Isaac

As I alluded to a few pages ago, it seems to me that the question of whether the universe is "actually" deterministic is ill conceived. It makes no practical difference to our ability to make predictions.

Any useful injection of an indeterministic interpretation of uncertainty at a macro scale has to compete with (and posit alternatives to) physical causation. — Isaac

Physical causation is an interesting term. Is causation physical? Because causation doesn't actually seem to describe a physical process. It seems more like a value judgement by which we identify some part of the web of physical processes as the "cause" and another as the "effect".

The neurological basis of decision-making, for example, which started this discussion, needs, under indeterministic interpretations, some mechanism whereby physical action is brought about without physical causation. QM is often invoked as the mechanism, but so far resolves to classical mechanics at a cellular scale, so cannot account for it. — Isaac

It's unclear to me what it means for "indeterminism to resolve to determinism at a cellular scale", except as a statement on our ability to predict outcomes. Physically, what actually happens always happens at the micro scale. The macro scale is a human construct. Not some arbitrary fantasy, of course, but still an abstraction based on our particular sensory and mental apparatus.

I'd agree with you in that the indeterminism we observe in physics doesn't really lend itself to a useful notion of free will. But it's still inherent in what happens in the brain, even if we can ignore it for the purpose of explaining human behaviour so far.

The alternative explaination for uncertainty (there are literally millions of neurons firing at once and each takes a slightly different route and has done since birth, hence chaos). Requires the invention of no mechanism not already posited and explains the phenomena without flaw.

So, insofar as we don't know what the source of our uncertainty is, it seems odd to invoke new mysterious mechanisms when the ones we already have explain it perfectly well. — Isaac

Could you explain what you refer to as "our uncertainty" here? I don't really follow.

Yes and no.

I am assuming that instead of speculating about ontology, your approach would be to simply focus on the epistemological universe, that is what can be known.

The problem is how you are going to arrive at an epistemology with no notion whatsoever of ontology. While I agree that speculating on ontology in detail isn't useful, we need to at least consider the question of what information is. If we don't want to conclude that information isn't real (which would lead to Solipism) then there must be something ontological to this information.

So the one ontological "fact" we must establish is that there is something that interacts with us in a specific way to generate experience, which includes information.

No wonder that the mightiest nations of the last two millennia worshipped a single, all-powerful God. — philosophience wordpress com

That's true only if you ignore all of Asia.

Wild — Michael

Is it a coincidence that Michigan is one state where the republican legislature might appoint it's own electors?


Why are you talking to the propaganda machine?

Let's see how well the polls predict the election results. We'll see then. — ssu

Shots will be fired (figuratively and possibly literally) before that will be known with any certainty.

Polls are flawed because pollsters have to make judgment calls about who they think are likely to vote. And considering historic low voter turnout in the US, that's probably a very vague science. — Benkei

According to fivethirtyeight, polling errors have been fairly stable, there is no indication of some huge systemic flaw.

Perhaps it's a matter of different definitions of the terms.

The strictest form of determinism would be a mechanical determinism, where the state of the system at any given time can be exactly known if the state at one specific time is known. That would mean events are "mechanically" connected, so that each event has fixed connection to each other event.

The strictest form of non-determinism would be a world where events have absolutely no connection whatsoever.

Is it conceivable that there is a world where events have connections, but the connections are not mechanical? That is, for a given state at T0, more than one future state of the system is possible?

Edit: that's all still presuming time, events and states are ontological categories, which they might not be.

There might be a shred of truth to the silent supporters that will rise up on election day. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

I think it will be close because I do think that it is an reality that many might say that they vote Biden in a poll and then vote Trump. — ssu

No evidence of a significant group of "shy Trump supporters" was ever produced.

But who knows, Trump can get re-hospitalized and Joe Biden can get a stroke next week or something. — ssu

The operative question now isn't whether Trump will win the popular vote (his chances are in the single digits). It's how state electors will be appointed and how they will vote.

Yes, that is the measurement problem. At a given time, we know how much of the wavefunction should be |decayed> and how much |undecayed> but we don't know which we'll see when we measure. — Kenosha Kid

And that's a fundamental problem. I.e. we cannot just improve our measuring apparatus in some way. Either we come up with new physics, or this stays, whether it's an actual ontological reality or not?

That would still be selected for. Sickle cell disease is an example. It confers a survival disadvantage in and of itself, but ends up making the odds of survival greater. If sickle cell disease conferred no survival benefit due to immunity from malaria, it would have been eliminated from the genome due to its survival disadvantage. — Kenosha Kid

That's not necessarily a definition of "selected for" that I'd be comfortable with, but we can probably differentiate in at least three categories: Traits directly selected for based on a fitness advantage, Traits indirectly selected for based on a fitness advantage of a linked Trait, and random traits.

Your second sentence is problematic though. There is no evolutionary mechanism by which traits that confer a fitness disadvantage are removed. The populations were those are present either die out or they don't. If they don't die out, because the selection pressure isn't strong enough, the trait will endure as well.

Which is back to the non-determinism of the gaps: anywhere where it might show its face it is obliged to hide in tiny error bars. — Kenosha Kid

I think that's a matter of perspective. A bayesian might well argue that far from the world appearing to be deterministic, it actually appears probabilistic. That from an epistemological perspective, nothing like the surety that determinism theoretically provides actually exists for practical applications.

Medication impairing his judgement? — Michael

That's certainly one explanation. It doesn't seem to be a move to boost his chances at re-election, quite the opposite.

So it's either unrelated to the election (impaired judgement falls under that heading) or preparation for some future move pre or post election.

So, yes, radioactive decay is an example of a quantum field theory, the electroweak theory. But it isn't characterised by atoms or hadrons either spitting out or not spitting out components at random. The system evolves deterministically through both paths simultaneously, both decaying and not decaying, until the wavefunction collapses/universe branches/superposition decoheres/whatever else happens to yield singular observables. — Kenosha Kid

And the result of all this is that we cannot predict the exact time an individual atom will decay. We can only give probabilities for timeframes, correct?

That doesn't follow. It just needs to have conferred a survival advantage to our ancestors. — Kenosha Kid

Right. Of course when talking about evolution, only the ancestors matter, since individuals don't evolve. But I think that my point still holds if we clarify "survival advantage to some ancestor". For example, it might be caused by a random (in an evolutionary sense) mutation that just happened to occur this generation. Traits might also genetically linked, so that a trait that actually does nothing to improve inclusive genetic fitness becomes dominant because it's linked to other traits that do.

What do you mean, difficult to predict? For instance, would it make the vertical component of motion of a ball on an inclined plane difficult to predict? — Kenosha Kid

We could imagine that the motion is probabilistic, but with such a narrow Amplitude (is that the right word) that the inaccuracies wouldn't matter for everyday purposes.

I think we're speaking at cross purposes; — Kenosha Kid

Probably. We seem to be misunderstanding each other pretty much across the board.

I am really just talking about the probabilistic quality of QM, the fact that e.g. at what exact time an atom of a radioactive element decays appears random.

Bear in mind the starting point for this tangent was the claim that life has evolved characteristics that could not have been selected for. That still remains unshown. — Kenosha Kid

I never made that claim though. All I said is that not all properties of an organism are necessarily selected for.

???? My argument is that characteristics that benefited our ancestors can be passed down to us whether they benefit us or not. Evolution would not be a deterministic process if organs disappeared the moment they became useless. — Kenosha Kid

I was referring to your argument before that argument, but since you're talking to multiple people I should have reiterated.

What you wrote was that since we evolved to see deterministic patterns, it stands to reason this conferred a survival advantage, and is hence evidence that the universe is really deterministic.

This is presupposing that every attribute we have right now confers a survival advantage. But that's not the case.

Fine, don't seek explanations then. — Kenosha Kid

I just think it's important to recognise that some things cannot be explained in a meaningful way. Seeking explanations for everything sends you down metaphysical rabbit holes that people tend to eventually fill up with gods.

QM is a good example, because I don't see a reason to suspect that whatever the fundamental forces of the observed universe are can then be further explained or interpreted. If such forces exist, and it's not turtles all the way down.

However we should, in this non-deterministic universe, expect some behaviour that cannot be generalised well. There should be mysteries as to why we cannot predict outcomes. — Kenosha Kid

I think this is a misunderstanding of how we construct our reality. There'd be nothing mysterious about the unpredictable outcomes. They'd just be things that the natural laws make difficult to predict. Like weather patterns. We'd still get quite good at it if it was probabilistic instead of deterministic.

What I mean is that as we measure, say, the spin of a neutron to ever greater precision, the degree of freedom of non-determinism to show its face gets ever smaller. — Kenosha Kid

That's not where the uncertainty comes from, the way I understand it. The uncertainty is fundamental. Not all values of the system can be known at a time, and the values that are not known can only be expressed as probabilities.

Where a photon strikes the screen in a double slit experiment is not, in principle, predictable with certainty. It can only be measured, but this merely moves the uncertainty to it's speed.

Ah, but that doesn't mean they weren't selected for. We have an appendix that is useless to us, but we are descended from grass eaters. — Kenosha Kid

Sure, we can create plausible theories to explain how certain vestigial or otherwise weird anatomies came about. But that doesn't establish that the end result was selected for. Only that there wasn't sufficient pressure to select for a different result. Meanwhile, your argument, if applied to e.g. the appendix, would lead one to look for the benefits the appendix provides to modern humans to explain its existence.

It can't be proven. My point was just that you have an extremely simple explanation for consensus -- determinism -- or a really complicated and dubious one. — Kenosha Kid

Why do we need an explanation in the first place? Explanations are tools for specific ends, not an inherent necessity.

There are no random fluctuations in the wavefunction. In even the probabilistic interpretations of QM the wavefunction evolves deterministically under a wave equation until measurement. — Kenosha Kid

Right, I tend to mix this up. What I was getting at is that classical mechanics arise from events that are not mechanical, and not determined in the way that interactions are in classical mechanics.

This isn't proof that the universe is non-deterministic. I have already pointed out that I am not trying to prove the nature of the universe to you. What I am saying is that the experience with classical mechanics should be a cautionary tale for everyone who assumes the universe must be deterministic based on everyday phenomena.

But what you're talking about here is Popper's indeterminacy of the gaps. This presumably fundamental randomness of the universe is weirdly constrained to whatever our peak technological capability ends up being. — Kenosha Kid

Isn't that essentially Einstein's argument of the hidden mechanics? There is no evidence, right now, that the uncertainty can be resolved.

Such as? — Kenosha Kid

Lots of organs are weird and inefficient. The human eyeball is a common example, as are various vestigial limbs found in species.

But we do have consensus. A non-deterministic theory of nature not only had to explain why you experience the same phenomena under identical circumstances, but why everyone else does so too. So far, no one has reported that a ball on an inclined plane had a 50/50 chance of rolling up. — Kenosha Kid

We already have a theory that explains how lots of individually non determined events combine into sufficiently deterministic phenomena. Interference patterns. Again this isn't "proof". I obviously have no idea how the universe " really" works.

Can you explain this in more detail? Why would a non-deterministic world appear like ours? Why would a non-deterministic world "appear" at all? — Kenosha Kid

Why would random fluctuations in the wave function collapse into precisely the effects we experience as classical mechanics? Prima facie, the way the universe actually appears to work is absurd, at least to our everyday notions. Until the second half of the 20th century, the assumption behind determinism was that the universe was an actual, mechanical mechanism. But we haven't found the cogs and wheels, indeed what we did find is completely strange. And we still haven't figured out how it all fits together. Doesn't that show that what appears to be a determined, "mechanical" apparatus can turn out to be anything but?

We just know that it's sufficiently predictable to get cars, planes and microscopic electronics. That proves that the universe isn't so random as to prevent these kinds of predictions. And yet everyone one of us can easily set up an experiment where the outcome is dependant on a random quantum fluctuation, and according to our current understanding, there is no way to predict that exact outcome.

We are inclined towards determinism because the universe seems deterministic, not the other way around. — Kenosha Kid

How would we know the difference though? This kind of evolutionary argument always presupposes that the end result is in fact selected for. But we know that not every attribute of every organism is actually selected for. Some are random in an evolutionary sense, i.e. they aren't actually the result of any selection pressure.

It's the same with determinism more generally. We assume "the" universe is deterministic because we can make all these predictions. But what this fails to recognise is that the predictions are our universe. There aren't two universes, the "real" and the "model" in our mind. Whatever "the" objective universe may be, the universe in our mind is a collection of predictions. We don't check these against an objective reference point somewhere. It's only when new information does not fit the pattern at all that we re-evaluate and then only to find a new solution that is "good enough". Maybe the result is something that looks like the "real" universe. But maybe it's a weird jury rig, like so many of the results of evolution are.

The GOP as a decent chance of holding on to the senate, despite trailing the democrats by more than 5 points nationally. There don't seem to be any signs that their support is collapsing. If anything, it's more highly mobilised than ever. In terms of pure power politics, the last 4 years have been phenomenally successful to the GOP. They've been fighting a rearguard action for decades now, and yet they're arguably more powerful than they've been in a long time.

They know a crash is coming eventually. The question is, how far do they go to avoid it?

I'm sure his strong supporters will cheer this, but that alone won't get him votes. Trump's #1 political weakness has been his perceived response to Covid. It seems to me the net result of this incident is to cement that negative perspective. — Relativist

Putting on my tinfoil hat, it's another stunt to distract us all from the GOP working to make sure 2020 will be the last free election in America.

Agreed, but it's important to be aware of why, and not lump unknowns, intractability, and genuine non-determinism into one catch-all. Otherwise you get Olivier5's claim that randomly chucking balls about demonstrates non-determinism. — Kenosha Kid

I am not trying to demonstrate non-determinism. In fact my argument is that it's essentially impossible to do so. All absudities we can come up with rely for their absurdity on the contrast with the real world as we experience it. But if that world is not actually deterministic then of course a non-deterministic world looks exactly like our world.

Anyways, I think your first sentence illustrates that. Why, or rather how, do we know what the things we observe on the micro scale actually signify?

One must measure this against claims that the Universe is fundamentally random and ask: which seems to explain my experience? — Kenosha Kid

But who are we asking? Ourselves. Are we an unbiased observer? There doesn't seem to be a reason to think that our brains are somehow designed to answer the question.

A lot of debate is about lockdown for social interaction, but the question is what impact will it all have for the arts, culture and the philosophical underpinning underlying Western culture and other cultures? Are we at the brink of a collapse or a new, transitional point in culture and human thought? — Jack Cummins

What would it even mean for a culture to collapse? Disappearance of it's ideas, it's rituals, it's language? None of that seems to be happening. To be sure a bunch of rituals are under strain, but a lot is also still going fine.

Will it be a transitional point? Probably. It'll certainly have an impact. How big I think noone can say. My guess is people will mostly treat it like just another economic crisis. The significant uptick in the death rate is not concentrated enough to really affect communities as a whole.

I get what you're saying, a single, fixed deviation isn't the same as constantly changing results.

But effects on the micro scale do exhibit constantly changing results. And it is important to remember, when doing these kinds of thought experiments, that we're not talking about the world suddenly changing from one set of rules to the other. We would of course notice if tennis balls suddenly started exhibiting erratic flight patterns. But this is because we have already extensively catalogued the behaviour of classical objects. The question is whether what we are and have been seeing is determinism or merely sufficiently deterministic behaviour.

It only takes one observation where the initial state is fully known, and where the assumption of determinism leads to a single expected outcome, and to not achieve that regularity of outcome, for that assumption of determinism to be ruled out. — Kenosha Kid

This actually happens all the time. An outcome is predicted, the experiment is done, and the outcome is not what has been predicted. It's the basic scientific process.

However, the conclusion is never "determinism is false". It's always a specific "law" that is amended to account for the observation. And hence we get a more encompassing model of the universe.

So if we ever experienced a thrown ball exhibiting random movements, we'd come up with a system of physics that predicts those movements given the circumstances. In a way, that is exactly what happened with Quantum physics. The experimental results of setups like the "quantum eraser" are utterly bizzarre from the viewpoint of classical mechanics.

For me, it can easily be disposed of as an non-necessary hypothesis. We don't know for a fact, and will never know, if everything in the universe is predetermined or not. It shouldn't bother people, therefore. — Olivier5

This seems to indicate that "determinism/indeterminism" isn't actually a property of the universe at all, but something else. When we think about "the universe", we presuppose determinism, because the "universe" we think of is actually a model of the universe, and a model relies on determinism to function.

However, OP, yes. It is possible to define justice as an atheist. Now, is there any reason to abide by it when nobody is looking and/or you're sure you could get away with it? Not so much. — Outlander

The reason would obviously be that it's justice.

The only way in hell I’d vote for 4 more years of MAGAt-land, is as a potential strategy to possibly clear the way for a Progressive surge. — 0 thru 9

It seems increasingly likely that, after 4 more years of Trump, there will not be another election that deserves the name.

Not, mind you, because I think Trump will single-handedly remake the system and turn himself into the God Emperor. Rather because the powers that be in the GOP seem to have decided that now is as good a time as any to do away with having to deal with the opinions of poor people.