we can know that there are no real pink elephants in someone's apartment when they're hallucinating a pink elephant in their apartment, because other people can see that there are no pink elephants, we can tell this via instruments, as well, and we know a lot about how matter behaves and can behave, what's required for there to be an elephant in an apartment, and we also know a lot about how brains work, including how they work on LSD (if that should be the case in this instance), etc — Terrapin Station

(y)

We could differentiate "exist" and "real" (in part) like so:



The bottom "You" would be like those pink elephants.

No elephants were harmed during this event. — Disclaimer

The mentioned mental constructs, re: space, time, points of reference, are not of the same larger world as the experienced; they are the necessary conditions for it. — Mww

An ontological hierarchy of sorts?
The perceived world depends existentially on spacetime, which in turn depends existentially on the perceiving mind?

All optical illusions are hallucinations from empirical misrepresentation, but some hallucinations are purely logical faults given by understanding itself. In the former, judgement usually reconciles the defect and its cognition is modified, [...] — Mww

I'd just say that swimmers in water look different than swimmers out of water.
(At least we do have some understanding of what's going on with refraction, reflection and such.)

(emphasis mine)

A transcendental idealist says that some things are empirical experience and other things are mental constructs. Sense data are by their nature from outside reality. Space and time and frames of reference are mental constructs or inside projected outside. Did I get that right, @Mww? — Noah Te Stroete

Pretty much covers it, yep. — Mww

@Mww, would you say that mentioned mental constructs are part of the same larger world (outside reality) as the experienced?
If so, then @Galuchat's inquiry seems to indicate a need to differentiate among hallucination and perception, yes?

Are hallucinations real? — Galuchat

Yes. They are real experiences potentially informing us of the reality of some neurological disorder. — Dfpolis

I suppose, like synesthesia and phantom limbs perhaps.
That seems to converge on some sort of ordinary realism, surely not mental monism (idealism).

The mere existence of hallucinations and perception is not really in question (or so it seems to me), yet they're different, and the difference would then be the perceived (which includes other people).

I believe we could have no knowledge of them or know anything about them. — Noah Te Stroete

How would you know that I'm self-aware?
You can't experience another's self-awareness (or you'd be them instead).
Doesn't mean you're the only one that's self-aware, though.
Confusing epistemics and ontology leads to the dark side.
We know about other things by interacting, not by becoming them.

Well, individuation (self-identity, self-awareness is essentially indexical) is inherently part of it.
You're apart from the rest/others, yet interact with it all.
You don't have to become something/someone else to know thereof (in which case you wouldn't be the same individual any longer anyway), right?
Furthermore, whatever we all are, we're still parts of the same larger universe/environment, with regularities, similarities and differences alike, sufficiently regular/similar that my neighbor can meaningfully interact with their dog and Armstrong could walk on the Moon.
Interaction at one end is part of my constitution (identity), which, in turn, is rendered as personal experiences (like noumenistic occurrences of qualia), though of course none of this explains their particular format.

It's not a problem if you're down with dualism, or you're an idealist. — Marchesk

Right, they'll just say that qualia etc are fundamental (cf atomic) in the first place.
Given what we already know, I'm not sure how much explanatory force there is in that, though.

On a separate note, synesthesia seems to muddle things up further.

You're back , good to see lifesigns. :)

We could start in the simple with identity.
Without identity, what would these comments mean?
Indeed, meaning presupposes identity.
That's not to say these comments are all meaningful, but, hey... :)

Yahweh getting a fit over an apple and cursing us forever is obviously creative story-telling.
What about the boars beavers goats rabbits squirrels etc that suffer and die from cancer and malocclusion, what did they ever do?
According to creationists it's all different "kinds" anyway.
Nasty fellow that Yahweh character of the stories.

Well, creationists "kind" is (also) ignorant nonsense:

• in a small part of a ring species, x and y can have offspring (⇒ same "kind"), and y and z can have offspring (⇒ same "kind")
• all the same "kind" (transitive relation)
• yet x and z cannot have offspring (⇒ not the same "kind") ⚡
• hence "kind" is incoherent nonsense

My 2 ¢s.

H₂O is a model of water.
And such a successful one that we occasionally use the two interchangeably.
Even though the model is not the modeled.

the element of Gnostic influences upon the Pharisees and the early Christians make it more complicated — Valentinus

Good historical comments, though I don't think Christianity was any particular single movement in the first centuries after Jesus had departed.

Greek philosopher Celsus (~ 175) noted the numerous, zealous Christian cults and factions, fighting more or less everyone (including their rival Christians), and their refusal to cooperate with, even debate, others.

Emperor Theodosius I (347-395) officially decreed them "dementes vesanosque" (demented lunatics) in 380 — everyone but the Roman Catholics of course, now rubber-stamped by Rome.

With Emperor Constantine (272-337), organized efforts to fight others and unite all under Roman Catholicism (i.e. under Rome) got underway, backed by the empire, in an attempt to strengthen the empire — something Tim Whitmarsh called "seismic" as far as history goes (heck, Catholics use the language, Latin, to this day).

The Romans tried to deal with the cesspool of cults, countryside preachers, resentment/dissidents, etc, of Middle Eastern antiquity, in their brutish ways, and Christianity, in the form of Catholicism, eventually came out on top.

And then a few centuries later, Muhammad emerged, and yet another religion hit the market.

And [for] their saying, "Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah." And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill him, for certain. — Quran 4:157

All effects must have causes - the first cause is at a base of a pyramid of causality - all effects do have causes. Only the first cause, being beyond time and thus beyond causality does not have a cause. — Devans99

So you abandon the principle of sufficient reason.

An "atemporal", "eternal" cause of a universe that has a definite age (like 14 billion years) or a definite earliest time, is incompatible with the principle of sufficient reason, since such a cause lead us to expect an infinite age of the universe — there's no sufficient reason the universe is 14 billion years old and not some other age, any other age in fact.

That fine I suppose, but what does it entail? If the "reason" part of the principle is taken to be a generalized notion of "cause", then abandonment runs contrary to your statements above.

An indefinite past history does not run into this problem, like unbounded not infinite ("edge free"), or infinite.

Of course effects have causes, that's typically what we mean by those terms. They're events, which, in turn, are subsets of changes, i.e. temporal. "Atemporals", on the other hand, if there be any, would be inert, lifeless; "abstract objects" are the closest that comes to mind.

An object is abstract (if and) only if it is causally inefficacious. — Abstract Objects (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Strictly speaking, pondering cogito ergo sum implies that thinking exists.
And, deductively, that's about it, according to Gassendi (1592-1655).
Thinking cannot be doubted, since doubts are thoughts.
Not that there's any reasonable person that doubt the existence of "I" (themselves) or others ...
I've heard it called the Cartesian curse, solipsism.

There are all kinds of people out there promoting preaching indoctrinating proselytizing their fancies every day.
When their religious faiths spill over into politics, public life, school curricula, impact others, etc, then it becomes a problem.
I'd say sometimes showing them wrong is called for.

Want to Become an End Times Prophecy Scholar? (Christian Newswire) :roll:
Brunei to punish gay sex and adultery with death by stoning (Ben Westcott; CNN; Mar 2019) :death:

∞+1=∞ — Devans99

... is illogical.
As mentioned, ∞ is not just one of your ordinary numbers, that you can stuff into ordinary arithmetic.
That would be the illogical part, not ∞.

1) Reality is logical
2) Infinity is not logical
2) Conclusion: The size of the universe is part of reality so not infinite — Devans99

Nitpicking, I'd say ...

1. we employ logic to understand reality
has served us well; for that matter, meaning presupposes identity

2. if ∞ derives a contradiction, then ∞ is illogical
and this is not the case in general; we have some examples of veridical paradoxes, which goes to show that ∞ can have counter-intuitive implications, and that's not the same as illogical; that said, there are some cases where we take a derived ∞ to indicate a problem; dealing with ∞ requires special care

3. who knows what exactly is real or not; reality does not have to abide by our thinking

- Infinity is not a number — Devans99

∞ ∉ R (not among the reals, requires different treatment)

∞ requires special care, different treatment than our usual numbers, sort of like a quantity that's not a number.

, as mentioned by , you can't get A ⇒ ¬A

3. ¬A ⇒ A
4. ¬A ⇒ ¬¬A (contraposition of 3)
5. ¬A ⇒ A (double negation elimination)

so your 4 is wrong.

Poor Cantor, depressed, bipolar, suicidal, ... :confused:

, Perez' paper isn't about Cantor's "Absolute Infinite" (which is nonsense), but alleges to disprove Cantor, Church, Gödel, Turing and others, where their writings provided eminent insights.
Don't go all ad hominem when you'd have to address/justify Perez' paper (which is nonsense).
Anyway, @DingoJones asked for bad math, and coming up with some examples isn't all that hard.

Pseudomathematics (RationalWiki)

2. It is expanding — Devans99

Or everything in it is shrinking...?

What would be an example of unsuitable math? — DingoJones

Maybe ...

British computer scientist's new "nullity" idea provokes reaction from mathematicians, Wikinews, Dec 2006
Addressing mathematical inconsistency: Cantor and Godel refuted, J A Perez, Feb 2010
Bible Codes, K Sean Proudler, Jun 2014

Suppose it's true that I posted this.
What's the difference between it being absolutely true and true?
Nutn' really. It's not like it becomes less true without "absolutely".

Suppose I uttered "There was snow at the peak of Mount Everest the other day".
What, then, would it take for my utterance to hold?
Snow up there of course, regardless of what you or I may think.

Too bad . :confused:

Furthermore, there's an inconspicuous sleight of hand move in P1

we cannot possibly conceive of an unexperienced world — Ernst von Glasersfeld

Presumably "we" refers to us, humans at large, like other forums members, including when not conscious. Yet, as per

1. I cannot experience your self-awareness (I'd then be you instead)

others' self-awarenesses are already inherently unexperienceable parts of the world. In fact, we only learn of others' self-awarenesses (indirectly) via experiencing (interacting with) others' "physical" bodies, thus others' self-awarenesses are further removed than "physical" bodies ("an unexperienced world"). There's more to the world than what meets the eye it would seem, t'would perhaps be a bit arrogant/self-elevating to assume otherwise anyway. Ontics ≠ epistemics. Others' self-awarenesses are like a kind of noumena. As far as I can tell, this stuff is related to self-identity, individuation and indexicality.

Anyway, I don't think Glasersfeld's (and Kastrup's) metaphysical constructions are particularly ... ehh constructive, outside of mental gymnastics.

I admittedly did not read the whole document. :meh:

P1:

we cannot possibly conceive of an unexperienced world — Ernst von Glasersfeld

1. I cannot experience your self-awareness (I'd then be you instead)
2. by P1 we cannot possibly conceive of other self-awarenesses
3. P1 degenerates into solipsism and is therefore a performative contradiction

Does that work?


By the way, I came across one of Glasersfeld's partners in crime recently:

Conflating Abstraction with Empirical Observation: The False Mind-Matter Dichotomy
Bernardo Kastrup
Nov 2017

> Context • The alleged dichotomy between mind and matter is pervasive. Therefore, the attempt to explain matter in terms of mind (idealism) is often considered a mirror image of that of explaining mind in terms of matter (mainstream physicalism), in the sense of being structurally equivalent despite being reversely arranged. > Problem • I argue that this is an error arising from language artifacts, for dichotomies must reside in the same level of abstraction. > Method • I show that, because matter outside mind is not an empirical observation but rather an explanatory model, the epistemic symmetry between the two is broken. Consequently, matter and mind cannot reside in the same level of abstraction. > Results • It then becomes clear that attempting to explain mind in terms of matter is epistemically more costly than attempting to explain matter in terms of mind. > Implications • The qualities of experience are suggested to be not only epistemically, but also ontologically primary. > Constructivist content • I highlight the primacy of perceptual constructs over explanatory abstraction on both epistemic and ontic levels. > Key words • Idealism, physicalism, pancomputationalism, anti-realism, hard problem of consciousness, epistemic symmetry, explanatory abstraction, levels of abstraction.

« 41 » The pervasive but unexamined assumption that mind and matter constitute a dichotomy is an error arising from language artifacts. Members of dichotomies must be epistemically symmetrical and, therefore, reside in the same level of abstraction. Physically objective matter – as an explanatory model – is an abstraction of mind. We do not know matter in the same way that we know mind, for matter is an inference and mind a given. This breaks the epistemic symmetry between the two and implies that mainstream physicalism and idealism cannot be mirror images of each other. « 42 » Failure to recognize that different levels of epistemic confidence are intrinsic to different levels of explanatory abstraction lies at the root not only of the false mindmatter dichotomy, but also of attempts to make sense of the world through increasingly ungrounded explanatory abstractions. — Conclusion

Someone claimed that Kastrup thereby proved idealism (mental monism).
Yet, as far as I can tell, all this stuff is susceptible to the usual problems.

While we're at it:

A World Without Clouds

A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century.

Natalie Wolchover
Quanta Magazine
Feb 2019

Being informed isn't helping anything until it informs some action — unenlightened

:up:

Let's get to it! — unenlightened

:up:

Already on it.

Came across this one:

There's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that planting trees can no longer save us
Rob Ludacer, Jessica Orwig
Business Insider
Oct 2018

Alarmist panic isn't helping anything/one.
Being informed is a good first step, though.

The Trolley problem (and whatever variations) is good for some and bad for others.
Apparently it is good and bad. Or undecidable?

I could have all the preferences and opinions in the world, yet still not like getting hurt.

I'm willing to put up with the shorter discomfort of going to the dentist to avoid the possibly longer troubles otherwise.
My preference would be neither, but I ought go to the dentist (which presumably holds for most).

Are there moral truths that do not, in one way or other, depend on (experiencing) minds?
Seems odd if someone were to say "the hurricane ought not murder anyone", "hurricanes are immoral".

Hm maybe something's off with the subjective versus objective thing.

Here's one rendition of the Euthyphro, where G is whatever deity of relevance (like Aditi, Yama, Yahweh, Varuna, Allah, etc):

• G acts according to morality (independent morals) † or
• morality is acting according to G (dependent morals) ‡

† is a partial definition of G (not morality)
‡ is a definition of morality

They say theological moral voluntarism is a response. That would be ‡. Doesn't seem reasonable to me, also dehumanizing us some. So, there'd exist no morals outside those defined by whatever deity of choice, there can't be anything else to know/do in this respect, by definition. Unless whatever deity shows up and informs us we have nothing, except we do. Incidentally, I think it may run into the Torquemada problem.

Yahweh joins you for supper and commands you to kill your child. Some options:

• hold on a minute here (because that’s what any decent human being would do) †
• kill your child ‡

Would "do your own dirty work" be an appropriate response?

The court heard Carly Ann Harris believed with "absolute conviction" she was doing the right thing when she killed Amelia — https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-46592959

Another rendition:

I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that He made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. — Russell (1927)

"Goodness" is a characteristic (or predicate) of some actions (or intentions), a bit on the abstract side, not a person.
The term "God" carries way too much baggage; Yahweh/Jesus, Vishnu, "greatest", infinite, simplest/atomic, triune, ...

Do Christians (still) take the likes of these to be fundamental?

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. — Genesis 1:28

And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein. — Genesis 9:7

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. — Ecclesiastes 1:4

Doesn't seem quite right to me.

Colloquially, isn't possible just self-consistent and either of non/hypothetical?
Self-consistent is at least the usual identity (ontological, propositional) and non-contradiction (propositional).
I guess that implicitly assumes our world is self-consistent, but that seems required for propositions to be meaningful anyway.

Doesn't "meaning" presuppose identity (the 1^st law)?
How would our talk have much meaning without self-identity (of some sort or other), including the posts in this thread?
Seems mostly like the only justification to abandon identity would be if we found that in the world.

, thanks for the article, looks interesting, putting it on the (way too long to-read) queue. :)

: ∞ ∉ ℝ
Cantor et al has shown there are meaningful ways of going about this, which is taught today in high schools and universities.

, it's been addressed more than once by others (including here).

I do not agree with the bijection procedure; it gives the wrong results; see Galileo's paradox. — Devans99

You can disagree all you like, but it does not give "the wrong results".

Galileo concluded that the ideas of less, equal, and greater apply to (what we would now call) finite sets, but not to infinite sets. In the nineteenth century Cantor found a framework in which this restriction is not necessary; it is possible to define comparisons amongst infinite sets in a meaningful way (by which definition the two sets, integers and squares, have "the same size"), and that by this definition some infinite sets are strictly larger than others. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo%27s_paradox

No, it can't be thought of as a quantity; its defined as greater than any quantity therefore its is not a quantity. — Devans99

You switched to a different definition from a (less technical) dictionary that's quite informal. The colloquial definition above is somewhat better, and the two more concise definitions better still. If you just wish to show some sort of inconsistency with informal dictionary definitions, then have at it. Has no bearing on the mathematics. Sorry, there's more to it than what you suggest.

, I happen to know @Metaphysician Undercover (and @aletheist) from the old now-defunct philosophyforums.com.
Metaphysician Undercover tend to wander off in some direction of own makings, yet imposing own ideas on other things. :)
As far as I can tell, @Devans99 just doesn't have much familiarity with the mathematics.

@Devans99, FYI, some details about the real numbers, ℝ, that we use for modeling the world:

Zero is the additive identity:

• 0 ∈ ℝ
• ∀ x ∈ ℝ [ x + 0 = 0 + x = x ]

ℝ is closed under addition and subtraction (for example):

• ∀ x, y ∈ ℝ [ x ± y ∈ ℝ ]
• all "distances" are also reals

ℝ an Archimedean set:

• ∞ ∉ ℝ
• ε ∉ ℝ
• infinites (∞) and infinitesimals (ε) are not reals,
  do not involve them in addition and subtraction (for example)

Colloquially, ∞ could be thought of as a quantity that's not a (real) number.

Two more concise definitions of infinite:

• Dedekind:
  
  • |S| = ∞ ⇔ ∃ ƒ (bijection): S → T ⊂ S
    a set is infinite if and only if there is a bijection between the set and a proper subset of itself
• Tarski:
  
  • S is a set
  • P(S) is the set of all subsets of S including ∅ and S itself
    the power set, Weierstraß, Cantor
  • F ⊆ P(S) is a family of subsets of S
  • m ∈ F is a minimal element of F ⇔ ∀ x ∈ F [ x ⊄ m ]
    no smaller subset
  • M(F) = { m ∈ F | x ∈ F ⇒ x ⊄ m }
    the set of minimal elements
  • S is finite ⇔ ∀ F ⊆ P(S) [ F ≠ ∅ ⇒ M(F) ≠ ∅ ]
    a set is finite if and only if every non-empty family of its subsets has a minimal element, Tarski
  • S is infinite ⇔ S is not finite

They can be shown identical.

We understand plenty about infinites (cf the continuum hypothesis). Yes, ℝ is an infinite set, and any numbers therein are separated by another such (real) number. There's a lot more to say, including that ℝ being an infinite set is not contradictory. In fact, had it been, some rather significant problems would have come about. Archaic (Aristotelian) verbiage like "potential" and "actual" aren't of any use here. The standard mathematical modeling we use today is the best we know of as yet.

Let me just quote Eric Schechter:

Prior to Cantor's time, ∞ was
• mainly a metaphor used by theologians
• not a precisely understood mathematical concept
• a source of paradoxes, disagreement, and confusion — Eric Schechter

And that first bullet there is indeed an outdated tradition. Fortunately we know more these days. Cantor showed that there are infinite different infinites, no less; in a concise context, ∞ is ambiguous.

On the physics side we have general relativity, the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker model, all that, and the evidence, all of which seems consistent per se. Well, we have no established unification with quantum mechanics, that is, we already know that there are shortcomings, limits of applicability, things we don't know.

You'll have to understand at least some of this stuff to comment.

Not sure it's worthwhile mentioning the obvious, but that's what a bijection does, @Metaphysician Undercover. Feel free to derive the contradiction you mention.

The problem being that we cannot pair them up because there is an infinite number of either one of them. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's called a bijection.
(Fairly basic high school mathematics, if memory serves.)
Kind of odd to just deny something without really knowing about it. :brow: