To even ask the question is already to give too much credit to the anti-vaxxer wingnuts. — Thorongil

:D Had to try being impartial. Not all that successful.
I suppose there is the political question, like enforcing vaccination?

In my virtual travels, I've come across a few varieties of views/arguments.

Some appear to be motivated by a general distrust, an anti-establishment sentiment.
Those folk seek to subvert any perceived authority, and medical science then gets in the way (usually via the political aspect).
Many assorted assertions can be found here, including that medical schools (like Oxford, Harvard and Karolinska) are lying, "Big Pharma" lies, the government lies, and family physicians withhold truth of the matter (perhaps due to peer pressure or pride).
There are other, parallel movements.

Some hold that "parents know best", and if they associate health problems of their children with vaccination, then medicine is to blame.
Jenny McCarthy comes to mind.

Others generalize from events that suggest a conspiracy may have taken place.
Allegedly the CDC in the US has swept some evidence under the rug, that might suggest vaccination could cause autism.
Collecting examples of malpractice, errors and wrong doing, seems to have become a hobby here, for better or worse.

It's worth noting that it's not terribly hard to find trained scientists that has jumped on the anti-vaxxer bandwagon.


<sub>15 Myths About Anti-Vaxxers, Debunked (Tara Haelle, Forbes, 2015)

No MMR-Autism Link in Large Study of Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Kids (Autism Speaks, referring to The American Medical Association, 2015)
Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses (Clinical Infectious Diseases, Oxford University Press, 2009)
Vaccines and Autism - A Deadly Manufactroversy (Harriet Hall, 2009)
Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On? (Chris Mooney, Discover Magazine, 2009)
The Autism-Vaccine Myth (Emily Willingham and Laura Helft, PBS)
A Wild-Polio Outbreak in Nigeria (Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 2016)

Meet The Children (Barbara Loe Fisher, VaxTruth, 1996)
Immunization Ploys (Neil Z Miller, 1995)
How Big Pharma Dupes Medical Journals (Antony Barnett, Guardian, 2003)
March 2015 Settlements in Vaccine Court: 117 Vaccine Injuries and Deaths (Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News, 2015)
The US Government Has Paid out $3 Billion to Vaccine-Injured Americans Since 1989 (Lily Dane, The Daily Sheeple, 2015)
Vaccination: The Hidden Facts; Chapter 11 (Ian Sinclair, 1992)
Doctors speak out: Vaccines don't work, but do cause brain damage and death
Vaccines: U.S. Centers for Disease Control Manipulated Data, Covered-Up Higher Incidence of Autism in African American Boys (Global Research (referring to Focus for Health), 2014)
Vaccination Statistics (Mercola)</sub>

:D Isn't Cantor's night shelter just one infinitely large, continuous room? With regularly spaced signs giving directions? Never visited, but fortunately, no matter where you are, you're always still a finite distance from the main exit.

But in reality infinity is not infinite, but it has an END. — Apple

No, there's no last room, only a first room.
Rather, what's finite, is the distance from any given room to the lobby, or to any other given room.
What's infinite is the number of rooms - like a quantity that's not a number.
I don't think the thought experiment can derive a contradiction.

"Plenty of room at the Hotel California", but unlike Hotel California, you can actually leave Hilbert's Hotel.

Hi mcdoodle (apologies for my absence).

Yes, you're right, my rendition definitely tend towards realism of some sort (perhaps physicalism).
There may be other renditions.
It was mostly a matter of contextualizing Chalmers' hard problem and solipsism, or that's how it ended up anyway, with the basic explanatory assumption being onto/logical identity.

Typed the musings in over on wordpress, with a bit more detail:

https://aniarasite.wordpress.com/yet-another-mind-body-hypothesis/

Comments welcome of course.

Assume I've gotten myself a headache; I'm sure most can relate, unfortunately.
No aspirin at hand. Instead I go scan myself, fMRI or whatever the latest may be, doesn't really matter.
I now have two different angles, the experience of the ache, and a visual overview of my gray matter (need not be visual alone).
I'd say only the angles differ, in an ontological sense, so what makes them different?
(Does anyone really doubt that feeling hungry means the body needs replenishment?)

Someone elsewhere asked (not my quote):

Does a neurophilosopher who performs an awake surgery on his own brain to investigate the body-mind problem carry out a thought experiment or scientific research?

Understanding the scan, in this context, would converge on understanding the headache; a straight identity may not be readily available (or deducible).
The headache itself is part of my self-experience, or, put simpler, just part of myself — bound by (ontological) self-identity, like self-reference, regardless of any scans or whatever else.
Others cannot have my headaches, but others can check out the scans.

Hey mcdoodle, thanks for the comments.

The mentioned "boundary" (in lack of a better word), is inherited more or less directly from solipsism and Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness. (It's not so much a brick wall everyone carries around.) :)
A focus on one's own mind is self-reference, and thus "bound" by self-identity.
But then (a bit unexpectedly) it seemed that such "bounds" appeared in a few places.
This angle does not "solve" these things as such, but just contextualizes them in a kind of basic way.

In this particular context, a notion of personal identity only goes as far as mind and body.
(Personality is something else, like psychology, traits and behaviors and such.)

Hmm.. Your examples (doctor, wife) may actually exemplify the idea, need more morning coffee to tell.
By the way, I typed the stuff into a wiki page elsewhere; may be formulated/organized better there; sending you the link.

Leap to Hypothesis

Central to these musings is identity, be it as reasoning (logical), or worldly structure (ontological).

The hypothesis can now be expressed, in brief, as: what separates introversal and extroversal is simply onto/logical identity.

• We're subject to a dichotomizing boundary condition, as a result of identity.
• A number of recurring dichotomies are partitioned by similar boundaries, where the halves of each dichotomy does not entail the other.
• Along with solipsism, the mind-body problem expresses an aspect of said boundary.

Anything essentially self-referential, remain introversially stuck. And, like indexical information cannot be derived from non-indexical information, the extroversial does not imply the introversial. Where introversial identity (post 5 above) is phenomenological alone, extroversial non-identity (post 5 above) is also empirical.

As per Freud and Wittgenstein above, I surmise one of the ways these conundrums have come up, in philosophy, originally, is the difficulty in grasping how something like one's own 1st person experiences could come about, from the world of 3rd person perspective things. That is, how on Earth can the more introspective world of experiences, thoughts, qualia, etc, come about from the extrospective spatiotemporal world of objects, processes, etc? Limitations of introspection compound the difficulty.

If the hypothesis holds (that the "disconnect" or boundary is due to basic identity), then we may have to contend with our predicament.
Incidentally, this emphasizes a need for strong epistemic standards, i.e. justification.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

The Chalmers style mind-body problem derives from a dichotomy:

• the format of 1st person phenomenological experiences, qualia (introversal)
• the 2nd/3rd person world of objects, processes, bodies, brains, etc (extroversal)

And the apparent intractability:

• 1st person experiences do not derive others' self-awarenesses and such, and are thus incomplete — solipsism
• physicalism (or whatever) does not derive qualia, and is thus considered incomplete — the hard problem of consciousness

From mind to body:

the leap from the mental process to a somatic innervation — hysterical conversion — which can never be fully comprehensible to us — Sigmund Freud (Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis)

the puzzling leap from the mental to the physical — Sigmund Freud (Introduction to Psychoanalysis)

From body to mind:

412. The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come into the consideration of our ordinary life? This idea of a difference in kind is accompanied by slight giddiness — which occurs when we are performing a piece of logical slight-of-hand. (The same giddiness attacks us when we think of certain theorems in set theory.) When does this feeling occur in the present case? It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain! — as it were clutching my forehead. — Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, Part I)

So we have a context where solipsism and the hard problem of consciousness comprise yet another dichotomy.

More on those pesky dichotomies and dualities and what-not

At a glance, it seems there are a few somewhat related dichotomies, that crop up in various contexts.
In terms of solipsism, or parsimonious skepticism, a similar dichotomy could perhaps be expressed as existential certainty versus uncertainty.



Substance dualism is out, rather identity itself creates a different sort of apparent dualism.
The Cartesian cut — res cogitans (thinking substance, mental) versus res extensa (extended substance, material) — is an expression of a duality like the dichotomy above.
By substance, Descartes meant an ontologically independent, real thing.
In the context here, res cogitans is instead subject to an inwards self-blindness (possibly tending towards "soul" ideation or mysticism), and the identity boundary outwards.
This account is thus is compatible with monism of some sort, and there isn't anything in particular preventing an "artificial" organism from experiencing the world akin to us.

Okiedokie, let me resume a bit with this stuff; first a summary of identity, because the dichotomy already shows up here.


There are two important senses of identity — ontological and logical — encompassed by this 1st of the 3 classic laws of thought.

Ontological identity simply states that anything that exists is self-identical. This is both self-evident and intuitive, allowing us to talk about and differentiate things, and usually taken to be fundamental.

Logical identity is technically a formalized axiom, a rule that pertains to propositions and reasoning (tautology, x=x, p⇔p), and can be a more linguistic expression of ontological identity. The excluded middle (the 3rd law), along with its complement, non-contradiction (the 2nd law), are correlates of identity. Because identity intellectually partitions the world into exactly two parts, like "self" and "other", it creates a dichotomy wherein the two parts are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Non-contradiction is merely an expression of the mutually exclusive aspect of that dichotomy, and the excluded middle is an expression of its jointly exhaustive aspect.

The two senses of identity are intimately related, and somewhat interchangeable depending on context.

Whatever is, is. — Bertrand Russell (The Problems of Philosophy, Chapter VII)

Michael, so this snippet is the wrong part (or translated incorrectly to the logic stuff)?

I, for one, can safely say that I don't know if I'm omniscient or not, as a matter of certainty I mean. — jorndoe

Isn't this taking the metaphysical concept of omniscience and treating it as a logical concept? A category error. — Cavacava

This seems to be a well formed proposition, yes?

ω = I'm omniscient — jorndoe

For some proposition, p, using standard notation
Kp = I know that p (is true)

And let's define the following proposition
ω = I'm omniscient

Then, by definition of omniscience, we must have that
ω ⇒ Kω
and by contraposition
¬Kω ⇒ ¬ω

I can safely say that I don't know if I'm omniscient or not, I don't know either way
¬Kω ∧ ¬K¬ω
so, both of these hold
¬Kω
¬K¬ω

From not knowing, i.e.
¬Kω
I find that I'm not omniscient
¬ω
which I then know, since I deduced it, i.e.
K¬ω
but this is contrary to ¬K¬ω above, thus a contradiction

The standardized test

I think it might be worthwhile extending "emotive" with semi/intuitive as well.

On my part, disbelief in the claims of a God of theism does not really hinge on any one specific argument, though such arguments are cumulative. Some knowledge of history also plays a part, like how insights and claims have advanced over time.

For the most part, theist/scriptural claims are introduced at some young age, be it by peer pressure, parental indoctrination (even instilling desire and hope for eternal bliss and fear of eternal punishment in some cases), implicit social and cultural expectations, or (preferably) information presented in a less biased fashion.

When it comes to scriptures, I find every reason to not take them as authoritative in any significant sense.

If I were to speculate, say, with respect to reincarnation and heaven/hell, then I simply find more mystery without any good reasoning. A more "neutral" scenario would be one where an "afterlife" would present new opportunities (e.g. to learn), as opposed to being beamed up to "everlasting bliss" or tossed down into "the grand barbecue roasting forevermore" (as taught by Christians and Muslims).

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. — Unknown but sometimes attributed to Marcus Aurelius (121-180)

I decline wasting my life preparing for death. :)

Sad news.

To Mars Man:

Get well into 2016 everyone.
And remember to take care of yourselves and others.

(opens an Erdinger Weißbier)

Thanks for the comments.

I'm headed in a different direction. (Descartes was just an example.)

Identity can be the propositional tautology or ontological (whatever exists is self-identical).
The solipsism thing in the opening post exposes a dichotomy originating from identity, or at least that's the working hypothesis for investigation, supported by the opening post.
The overall idea is that identity also leads to other, somewhat similar dichotomies, with whatever boundaries.

Going by the opening post, 1st person experiences do not derive others' self-awarenesses, and are thus incomplete. Going by the hard problem of consciousness, physicalism (or whatever) does not derive qualia, and is thus considered incomplete.
If the hypothesis holds — that these various "disconnects" or boundaries are simply due to identity — then what of our predicament? Maybe the world is "dichotomized by identity" (not lobotomized, mind you :)), with these intrinsical boundaries?

Anyway, I'll try to give it some more thought, and post, when time permits.

(I've been tricked into North American spelling. Neighbour without the 'u'.) :)



Your impressions of your neighbor is, or is derived from, your experiences, yes?
Similar to your memories thereof.
None of which are your neighbor, though.

Note, hallucinations themselves do indeed exist.
What makes them hallucinations is just that they're not what they're taken to be.
So I think the categorization holds for phantom pain.
What makes pain "phantom", is confusing non-identity for identity.

Consider the following dichotomy, a common categorization of experiences:

• Non-identity: Say I have a chat my neighbor. My experiences of my neighbor ≠ my neighbor. (My better half may also experience the neighbor.)
• Identity: Say I have a headache. My experience of the ache = the ache. (My better half don't have my headache (I sure hope not anyway).)

By this categorization,

• hallucination is confusing non-identity for identity, and
• solipsism is confusing identity for non-identity.

Paraphrasing Searle, if anything significant differentiates perception and hallucination, then it must be the perceived.

As in the opening post, non/identity sets the stage for a dichotomizing boundary condition.

I think the issue gets too much attention, and it's because of a misreading of Descartes, or perhaps because of some lack in Descartes' development of the implications of the cogito. — Wayfarer

I agree, to an extent at least. It is, however, a philosophical problem, regardless of Descartes.
That said, I think there are some other conundrums that are somewhat related. I'll try to formulate something, if time permits.

For those who don't know it, here's "the greatest Venn diagram ever": — ssu

I'd like a rabbitduck version of that. :)

... so of my favorites: — Mayor of Simpleton

Cool. The Doctor has it all. (Speaking of.. We're still puzzled about the latest episode hereabouts.)

And religious practice is, in some sense, being trained to think about it the right way. — Wayfarer

It is - being trained to think in some specific way. And, in absence of other training, it can engender narrow-mindedness, which emphasizes the gain from broadening one's horizons. The number of people (e.g. from the US and the Philippines) that outright deny biological evolution, in spite of the overwhelming evidence, is a testament to this sort of thing.

Right, sometimes they can be like a street-sign giving some directions, or maps giving some context. Other times they can be like refreshers, for something you haven't looked at for a while.

For something reasonably simple, like justified true belief (knowledge), I think they're worthwhile. Digging into the gory details (like the Gettier cases), of course remains separate.

The Cosmological Argument does not lead me to accept the existence of a deity, merely the plausibility of a First Cause. — darthbarracuda

This class of arguments (prime/unmoved mover, first cause, kalam, cosmological, ...) seems the most commonly used for justifying such belief out there. Don't have any numbers though. Maybe it's part of a curriculum or something.

1.) The Problem of Evil — darthbarracuda

In my experience, some simply dismiss these with some hand-waving, and leave it at that. :)
The "free will" defense is brought up for the problem of evil, and the "greater good" defense for the problem of suffering. I'll go as far as to call it predictable; perhaps such defenses are listed in a Catechism.

As for the "greater good", you could equally defend omni-malevolence, and life as we know it is just foot work towards the "greater bad". >:) Or you could defend omni-indifference, towards whatever, nothing in particular. Or... In that sense it's arbitrary, though, admittedly, it does show that the problem of suffering is not a purely deductive argument.

Let me just quote Arkady and Marchesky from elsewhere, regarding the "free will" defense:

... there are at least 2 major deficiencies in the free will defense, viz. that it is impotent to explain suffering caused by "natural evils" such as plagues, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc, and also that it presumes that there is no justified suspension of free will, or that the free actions of man must never be impeded in any way, even if only to stop the most abject horror from occurring. That is, a proponent of the free will defense is committed to believing that for God to intervene to stop the Holocaust (or even just to make it one iota less horrific) would be a greater evil than the Holocaust itself. This view is not only absurd from a rational standpoint, but is rather morally repugnant, in my estimation.

It's as if God has an entirely different standard and still gets to be called good. Even though we view it as a major failing that the world permitted the holocaust to occur.

In general, these defenses don't seem believable to me either. The larger array of problems makes the traditional God of theism implausible.

Regardless, happy holidays y'all.

Addendum

So, what about reasoning then? Useless posturing? No, of course not. It's not to abandon reasoning, or throw hands in the air in futility, rather the opposite. It's to recognize the difficulties involved in knowledge acquisition; something students of history (of science and philosophy in particular) should know all too well. Common sense, heuristics, careful inductive and abductive reasoning are indispensable for anyone wishing to learn, and that's the natural modus operandi of most healthy individuals in any case. (Outside of philosophy, solipsism is largely pathological, reported by doctors and asylums.)

Numerous philosophical branches have been charged with solipsism, including, but not limited to, Cartesian skepticism (obviously), (pure) phenomenology, subjective idealism (and some other idealisms), postmodernism (when applied in metaphysics). It crops up in numerous places, and is occasionally used argumentatively to deny just about anything, i.e. a rhetorical tactic.

But, in the requisite Wittgensteinian tradition, languages sure help. Regardless of whether or not there are private languages, public languages enable sharing of experiences.

I've been "diagnosed" with a tendency to stress out. Be it worrying about deforestation, or how well my better half's speech/presentation is going, or world war 3 (or running out of coffee at home). :) Nothing serious, though. But might explain getting gray hair.

And a wickedly annoying (and occasionally painful) case of sciatica. Did a lot of bicycling, running, and martial arts in the past. Apparently bicycling can, in part, cause this stuff, if you're prone to it already. My bicycle got stolen anyway, so no more of that per se.

That many people suddenly moving around is bound to invite problems.
At least it's not exclusively horror stories.
Here are some tired, thirsty, worn out refugees, having made it to Northern Europe, traveling through Denmark on foot, most bound for Sweden.
Some even have infants with them.

Link to some photos (TV2, Danish News Station)

The amount of people having been displaced swiftly by ISIS is staggering.
I saw some reports a while back that we're talking in the range of 200,000 children alone.
But, the Danish right wing is on the move much like other places, regardless of the friendly police officer in the photo below.

Hilarious :D

Reminds me a bit of the Monty Python hunting party, except it's for real. Crazy Brits.

- That's my take too, well one of them. (As long as decluttering comments doesn't become too large a task in itself.) :)

Here's RationalWiki's article:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo

Woo is a term used among skeptical writers to describe pseudoscientific explanations that have certain common characteristics.

The term comes from woo-woo, an epithet used in the 1990s by science and skeptical writers to ridicule people who believe or promote such things. This is in turn believed to have come from the onomatopoeia "woooooo!" as a reaction to dimmed lights or magic tricks. The term implies a lack of either intelligence or sincerity on the part of the person or concepts so described.

As a coincidence, the Chinese word "Wū" (巫) means a shaman, usually with magic powers. — RationalWiki

Invited Ying over as well.

Hmm.. At least the numbers have utf super/sub-script characters..
And some other characters.. Which..isn't quite the same..

superscript 0 ⁰
superscript 1 ¹
superscript 2 ²
superscript 3 ³
superscript 4 ⁴
superscript 5 ⁵
superscript 6 ⁶
superscript 7 ⁷
superscript 8 ⁸
superscript 9 ⁹

subscript 0 ₀
subscript 1 ₁
subscript 2 ₂
subscript 3 ₃
subscript 4 ₄
subscript 5 ₅
subscript 6 ₆
subscript 7 ₇
subscript 8 ₈
subscript 9 ₉

Dang Nov 3rd, that's in a good week from now.

- Hear!
Didn't Wittgenstein think philosophy is an activity? (Pardon if my memory failed me.)
There's a "living" aspect to philosophy, more than reading the books of old, but also chatting (socializing), and forming one's own outlooks.

- Love the New Years Eve Nietzsche. :)
Hypatia is nifty too.
Could go all weird like the attachment. I like the Hypatia better, though.

- I might have been long burnt out in your shoes. As good a time as any to move on. :) Thanks for all your good work/efforts.

Wonder if I can.. — jorndoe

Attaching a small snippet of html which has mathjax in it, did seem to work, albeit a slightly more cumbersome way to share formulae.
Clicking the attachment opens a separate window, your browser, depending on local configuration.

Wonder if I can..