Do any of you know of qualitative infinity? A non-numerical infinity? Does this even make sense? — TheMadFool

Part of my summer reading has been Levinas' 'Totality and infinity'. You might care to give him a try if you are interested.

Levinas takes the face-to-face encounter with the Other as one of irredeemable separation. We transcend the finite and potentially enter the infinite through our relations with Otherness - other people, the otherness of the world, the other in ourselves.

My interpretation is that this is contrasted with a 'totalising' view which constantly identifies forms of sameness. Such views, like the view of a scientiser for instance, believe that all is knowable by this method of totalising, of systematising. All can be numbered.

By contrast the I-you encounter isn't bounded. Through dialogical language we can express something of this infinity.

For Levinas personally this leads to religious conclusions: after a tough war in which he was imprisoned as German POW and many of his family were murdered, he returned to Jewish religion.

But it need not be religious. For Levinas it was a long-term response to Heidegger, who had influenced him deeply in his early days as a philosopher, a way of adapting a phenomenological approach to understanding without going the way of Sartre.

Personally I accept the profound insight, albeit re-interpreted in my own terms: qualitative infinity makes excellent sense. To be confined to the quantitative is to deny the profundity of experience, which is in and of a boundless world that we constantly strive to make boundaries in, in order to understand it.

Do you and/or Heidegger have a general definition of "(B/b)eing" that can be used as a starting point for conceptual development, and how does that relate to the historical "Categories of Being" proposed by Aristotle, Kant, Peirce, and others? — Galuchat

Heidegger is pretty straightforward about this issue (there's a sentence I never thought I'd write). It's the difference between ontic and ontological. The categories of Being in other philosophical hands are about entities and are ontic. Heidegger's more fundamental ontological question is about what is even the basis for such ontically divisible aspects of being. What are the presuppositions?

He then proposes that we can, in a long circle as it were, get at the presuppositions - at something about the ultimate nature of Being - by studying Dasein, which is humans' Being-in-the-world but also has, unique among aspects of Being, the ability to disclose Being to itself. So we come to phenomenology, as shaped by Husserl and redrafted by Heidegger.

Just to note that people might be interested in this long article by the Cockburns - father a journalist, son now an artist living with schizophrenia. It's an interesting study in itself of how to report such an issue from all points of view.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/schizophrenia-henry-cockburn-mental-illness-father-son-patrick-art-folkestone-triennial-art-festival-a7940126.html

You have my attention. Please elaborate upon the connection. Thanks. — Galuchat

I'm not sure how elaborate I can be. I wrote a paper about mood earlier in the year (I was doing a graduate diploma) so I read a fair amount about that particular subject. An interesting example of the sort of person I mean is Matthew Ratcliffe, a Brit now teaching theoretical philosophy in Vienna. He's written a fair amount about depression, a philosopher working with psychiatric researchers, and his work about mood reached back originally to Heidegger, although more recent work has referenced Husserl more heavily. 'Being and time' of course related everything to angst, to fear/anxiety, but one can take the Heideggerian model of Dasein thrown into a world of bewilderment and conjure different ideas of what being in the world involves.

What is it to 'be in the world'? The approach that links phenomenology, analytic phil and psychologists examines 'mood' as the foundation of emotions and cognition. Ratcliffe argues for the notion of 'deep mood', which manifests itself for instance in depression or bipolar disorder, as such problems are generally viewed as 'mood disorders', although we have little concept of what an orderly or ordered mood would be. Mood is a mental state that's hard to shift and not easily susceptible to analysis. Ratcliffe also uses the notion of 'existential feeling' to approach these deeper states.

There is quite a lot of psychological work about 'moods' in a vaguer and more superficial sense, developing binary scales of positive/negative emotion, relating them to bodily states. The conceptual foundation of this work doesn't go down very deep, so there are many alternative models of day-to-day mood.

Being is an English language present participle (i.e., present tense verbal form used as an adjective) which refers to something that actually exists....
Things may be a property, condition, context, action, event, process, interaction, or behaviour. — Galuchat

This is all very anti-metaphysical. Maybe that's where one ends up but I think it would be fairer to Heidegger, and to Tim, who is asking metaphysical questions, to acknowledge that there is a more complicated and yet primal place to start. What is this philosophical enterprise trying to address and understand?

One pleasure I got from reading Heidegger is that, wordily strange as he is (and a Nazi and all the rest), he confronts this question head-on, What is philosophy about? And from the question, in quite a small space of 'Being and time' - which I know better than the Metaphysics - he unfolds/discloses how he sees human life and its place in the schema of Being. So he rapidly arrives at the notion of humanity, 'Dasein', 'thrown into life' as we are amid a zillion notions not our own - amid, as he initially characterizes stuff, more simply than you, two sorts of thing - the ready to hand, i.e. stuff that Dasein uses, and the present at hand, the rest of our context.

So it is a systematic working outwards from Being, the elusive bedrock of everything, to human life and its concerns.

It's interesting to me that when I've lately wanted to explore the philosophy of emotions and mood, I've found that even analytic philosophers writing about such matters find themselves going back to Heidegger, because there is a route-map there from the basic primitive of Being, through the basics of how we humans are in the world, to the complexity of all our actions and ideas.

whether the notion of honesty could apply to my mother's nonverbal communication, and if so, whether it was honest or dishonest?

I'm inclined to think that she did not any more want the intimacy I presumed, and conveyed it by subtly ridiculing me for wanting it, without actually denying me by pushing me away. And I cannot say in this situation, and in so many others, whether this is honest or dishonest, because it is the relationship transforming itself, and in the transformation, both my and my mother's identities are transformed (mine more so). I suppose one could translate this into English as the instruction, "Grow up." where being grown up has a particular social meaning, of physical separation with attendant implications of emotional independence. — unenlightened

'Honesty' is interesting, MacIntyre for instance sets much store by it as a virtue, and its virtue is not something I understand.

My equivalent moment to yours about your Mum was when I was being bullied at school at the age of 9 and my Dad found me crying late at night. But he couldn't bring himself to be comforting, and he told me I had to learn to fight back and be a man. Even now, all these years on, this appals me, for I think he was saying, this is who I am, I'm not going to comfort you, I'm going to Tell You The Truth As I See It. (and he knew more about bullying than being bullied)

It's a lack of good emotional education that brought them to this. It seems to me part of the very culture that values propositional knowledge and honesty over-highly, and I speak as one who greatly values propositional knowledge.

Why is calling someone a racial slur hate speech but calling someone a jerk, asshole, etc. isn't? — Harry Hindu

Hate speech is about groups, surely? The hater singles out people by a mean epithet for their group. They are usually hoping to foster prejudice against the group, as well as to demean them.

It seems to me that much of the rest of what you say is that you wish people were other than the way they are. Well, I think the cards have been dealt. People are sensitive to status; shame lies at the bottom of the pit waiting for all of us to fall into it and if someone says a trigger word we fall.

However the term cracker is newer, and doesn't have as much meaning attached to it (i'm pretty sure it's just reflective of an actual cracker; white and flakey). — MPen89

Cracker has been going since the late 18th century.

Well, this would suggest that without language you simply would not Be, which is of course not the case. — MPen89

Excuse me butting in. There is on Heidegger's view in this essay a clear set of relations between being and language:

...in the breakaway of humanity into Being...language, the happening in which being becomes word, was poetry. Language is the primal poetry in which a people poetizes Being. — Heidegger Metaphysics

His language often becomes tortured but the insight is sometimes worth digging for, I think. He argues that 'apprehension happens for the sake of Being' and that this what Parmenides, back at the start of this philosophical enterprise, understood. Humanity - Dasein in Heidegger's formulation - both illuminates and does violence to Being, the primitive state, through the emergence of logos, of making sense, through language.

[using a different translator from tim wood]

I always attribute the notion that 'Not bad' is my highest accolade to inbuilt dour Yorkshireness :)

Let me just remark that there seems to be a foundational, unreflective immediacy of intersubjectivity that is prior to language that can be exemplified by mother and child relations that are non-verbal in the first instance. — unenlightened

By an amazing coincidence (!) this relates to work I did on 'mood' last year. I partlyused the work of Edward Tronick (E Z Tronick in the academic world) who is a lifelong researcher into infant cognition, meaning-making and mood.

I am thinking here of deep mood, of the way one is in the world, as well as of passing mood, the way the world currently moves use and those around us. There seems to be very little work on shared adult mood, because so much literature is focused on the individual, so writing about mood and emotion assumes we are talking about an individual's mood or emotion. To me mood is often a subtle intersubjective set of relations. One sulker, or zealot, or powerful person, or bully or clown, can make their mood permeate a group of people. Moods can feel like patterns in water, with ebbs and flows, undercurrents and stiff breezes.

Anyway regarding infancy Tronick has this to say:

I...believe that [infant] moods are cocreated by the interplay of active, self-organized biorhythmic affective control processes in the infant and the effect of the emotions expressed by others during routine social/emotional exchanges on mood-control processes. Thus, although we attribute moods to an individual - the infant is in a mood, and the mood is in her - I argue that moods are cocreated by the infant interacting with others and they organize the infant and communicate that organization to others. — Tronick

It doesn't look like there's going to be much discussion of intersubjective consciousness. :( — unenlightened

I am game to talk about it. :) Per LInell, whom I mentioned earlier, talks about the inter-world. In his online 'dialogical notebook' which you can find by Googling, he has (pp 46-49) sections on this and intersubjectivity, they are little more than stray thoughts like ours but illuminating to me! Part of the dialogical approach is that ideas rarely happen in an 'inner world' but rather in the inter-world. Conversation for instance doesn't happen in the way fragments of talk are exemplified in philosophical textbooks. People just don't talk the way they are quoted as talking. All those neat sentences from Frege onwards are idealised-into-written-language sentences. Most actual talk is a flow between people who anticipate each other, fill in gaps, take things off at a tangent, speechify for a bit, grunt, explain with gesture and mutual touching.

Well, that's the rough outline of the approach. Does that speak to you?

Quite frankly, many therapists hereabouts and psychiatrists would call this homeopathy. Sadly enough. — Posty McPostface

There do seem to be initiatives in north America. Like this one: http://www.dialogicpractice.net

(*) [referencing Chaucer] This one only as an age-old and renewable torture device for young students. — szardosszemagad

Shame on you :)

Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me — Wife of Bath

thanks for the homework assignments — unenlightened

Pardon me, I'm about to plunge back into the academic fray so I'm thinking that way :)

I'm considering starting a new topic, but I'll let it stew in here.

Isn't this therapy essentially against psychiatry? Everything psychiatry is built on is rejected in this form of therapy. There is a divide between psychiatry and psychology that seems to be brought out hereabouts. Is anyone else seeing it? — Posty McPostface

Posty, glad to see I've returned from holiday and you're still about. I regard the idea is not so much anti-psychiatry as taking a step back to ask what the context is. At any given place and time there are norms about how mental distress gets named and alleviated. The very idea of 'psychosis' for instance was invented in the mid-Victorian era out of a Latin vocabulary as the right sort of way for how experts and sufferers could name certain experiences. At other times and places different names are used.

Then one steps back into the present, armed with contextual understanding. The label 'psychiatrist' covers a multitude of sins and virtues. It may be as some maintain that the invention of Largactil in the 50's turned most psychiatrists into pharma peddlers rather than talk therapists, but there's still quite a range. Open dialogue can still happen while someone is a 'therapist' or 'psychiatrist', can't it? (On a personal note my ex still remembers fondly her uncle Denis Martin, who ran a hospital called Claybury in the 50's to 70's: he was most definitely a psychiatrist and he ran a 'therapeutic community', as he saw it. There can and probably will still be experts, whatever one's base assumptions about mental distress)

But my particular interest in this thread is to explore the notion of intersubjective consciousness, if anyone is up for it. And the particular thing that I want to keep to the fore, that I take from all the above, is the way in which the manner and tone as well as the content of our contributions actively shapes what I have elsewhere indicated as our morale, but here will call the intersubjective consciousness we are and will be constructing. — unenlightened

Un, I am very interested in this from the philosophical perspective. The philosopher you quote briefly, Christian de Quincey, seems since to have wandered off into stuff about spirituality, consciousness and mind. But the very idea of re-examining anglo-american philosophy from the second person point of view is, I'm told, quite a hot topic in some corners of academe. This summer I've been reading Stephen Darwall's 'Second Person Standpoint', (written in 2006) which proposes basing analytic ethics upon our mutual regard and respect. (One odd thing about it is how reluctant he is to use the word 'you', as if that wasn't part of the point)

There is also a whole strand of Continental thought issuing mostly from Mikhail Bakhtin about dialogue. I'm interested in how to apply this, not so much to ethics as to the philosophy of language. A Swedish guy called Per Linell has been working away at this for years, rethinking things dialogically. Everything we talk is talk-in-interaction, on this reading. We bring our presuppositions to the table, adjust as needed to communicate, act or not as we fancy and move on to the next interaction.

It does involve re-imagining a lot of ideas from the ground up, because you are not an 'I' thinking about a world out there, you are an 'I' talking to a 'you' about a shared world.

To me this not only makes sense, I suspect it just is how I feel about how I am in the world. 'Objectivity' to me has always been a point of view, one we can both, or several of us, can agree to adopt for its utility, but which none of us need mistake for 'reality', something fundamental. This probably links to having been a dramatist/scriptwriter for much of my life :) To me there is only drama ('action').

A bunch of billiard balls — Pneumenon

On the wiseass front...it's always struck me as surprising that the classic example (who first cited it?) is 'billiard balls'. This places the entire motion of the balls in a framework that is wider than the balls, and in a culture derived from France and England, and ultimately dependent, as my great uncle Ludwig might say with glee, on the rules of a game.

From this wiseass angle the reductionist and irreductionist seem part of the same narrow perspective.

...the problem is presented in terms of game theory — Galuchat

It's true, I would need to go back to square one with individualistic game theory, to criticise its relevance to another discipline. I just thought quickly in answering, from the heart. I don't know enough about game theory to talk in its terms. I know 'cooperative game theory' is regarded as something of a poor man's game theory, but I don't understand why: as you can see, my instinct is to examine alliances to explain behaviour. But I speak from ignorance, not of tag (!), but of your model.

But if the meaning of future-contingent propositions are their use, then before the future has arrived they are reducible to the assertion or denial of present behavioural dispositions. — sime

The Wittgenstein line is that the meaning of *words* is mostly their use. Propositions are a different kettle of fish, surely. A future-contingent proposition is a sort of judgment. Actually I don't think it becomes 'false' if McDoodle doesn't in the fullness of time get his distinction: they are judgments at the time they were made. As TGW said earlier in the thread, logic is timeless in this setting.

From what I've read, the point of logic is to capture only those elements in a sentence that have logical import — TheMadFool

But what then do we do with what's left over? There will always be some surplus of meaning left behind in ordinary language which logic hasn't captured. Logic, then wouldn't provide a translation, nor an interpretation, but a narrowing of meaning.

What do you think? — TheMadFool

It's a couple of years on. And McDoodle did get his distinction!

My view now is: the ordinary logical form does not and cannot accurately reproduce the sentence-meaning. It makes an entirely different statement. That in a way is the point of Wittgenstein's shift from the Tractatus view to the Investigations view: most 'propositions' are judgments, not statements of fact. What is the logic of judgments?

Maybe there is a form of logic that can render the sentence in logical form, but I don't know enough about Logic to know what that would be. In ordinary language, it also matters who is saying P, and to whom: any 'logical' interpretation will have difficulty covering all the bases and will have to make assumptions about 'context'. It might be for instance spoken by someone who knows McDoodle is a lazy arse so is certain not to get a Distinction: how is that covered? 'Other things being equal' has to be brought into action here :)

See https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/download/2946/2607 — apokrisis

Thanks, good paper.

Why is kindness, mercy, bravery, love, generosity, creativity the prime motive of my life? Tbh all I wanna do is fuck bitches get money... forever... — intrapersona

I've got to tell you, debating things on a philosophy forum is not, in my view, going to help these stated objectives. You may need a better strategy.

One of mine is to read Samuel Beckett. The novels are underrated. They are all about men enjoying pointless lives, and for me they're curiously uplifting. Ah, so *that's* why I go on. 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'

Another comes from my current reading of Emmanuel Levinas. The world of order, science and reasoning on his view aims for 'totality', a complete explanation. But the I-world, the I that encounters the other - that world is infinite, untotalize-able. Even without gods we are infinite subjects. When I compare my feelings to reason, there is always an I-surplus. 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom': though Blake didn't have your hedonism in mind, I don't believe.

It feels like there's a political analogy here -- something about how democratic or even market practices can fail to produce the expected or desired social result, but I'm not sure there's an analogy for being "it", for having temporary control of the game and the direction it takes. — Srap Tasmaner

I have a similar reaction to Hanover but from a different angle: that the tag-example is oddly individualistic. It would only start applying to political economy if alliances, whether overt or not, began. If Hanover's bully were subtle they wouldn't get ostracized - they would get allies - and the game would enter social psychology.

I feel Monty Python should re-form specifically to answer this question: What did the Enlightenment ever do for us?

- OK, apart from inaugurating mass literacy.
- Yeh, but as well as showing us how the cosmos works even if there aren't any gods.
- No, but, aside from liberating millions of poor schmucks to enjoy art and culture and everything.

I just don't know how that scene ends. Maybe : 'Yes, but they never resolved a single important question, did they?'

not in a irrational sceme of perception

'Not in any rational scheme of perception.'

There, it ll makes sense now, right?

It surprised me that I felt personally offended by your posts, Mariner. I felt peripherally touched by the Arena bombing because I passed through Victoria station where it happened an hour before the bomb went off, and was privy to a lot of the local reaction afterwards. It seemed weird to me that someone faraway would isolate some conspiracy theory out a tragic event with an official narrative that I - often a sceptic about official narratives - felt happy to accept. And then that person far away would comment in passing that I might not have followed the press at the time - whereas I'd followed it avidly. These conspiracy theories seem to me to derogate from the suffering of the people involved, and the intense engagement of hundreds of people in trying to resolve the causes of such an event, for the sake of an intellectual game. But I quite see that thinking that is partly a reflection of my feeling affected by the bomb - a few hundred metres from where an IRA bomb went off 21 years ago.

There's still a sad little shrine at the foot of the steps up to the still-closed Arena, I passed there on Thursday night.

I ink, therefore I am.

OK, I haven't read those two and nor do I intend to. If what you say exemplifies their view, then I would say that it seems like a myopic, or one-dimensional view to me on the face of it.

Does not virtue ethics consist in saying that one ought to live a virtuous life? Surely not all 'oughts' consist in following rules. One model of morality says that it consists in following rules, and another says that it consists in moral intuition; in following a cultivated natural moral conscience; whichever way one understands morality it makes sense to say that one ought to be moral. — Janus

I think there is a third option, consequentialism, that one should take account of outcomes, besides virtue ethics and deontic or rule-based notions.

Your 'ought' here is a meta-ethical question, or so I read it, and I quite agree, if we are even going to bother with ethics, it makes sense to say that one ought to be moral.

It's hard to extend the 'ought' to particular acts, whereas rule-based people and consequential people seem to find it easy. Of course this is all part of a debate stretching back to Hume about 'ought'. I don't understand why you say in advance you won't read certain philosophers: they have something interesting to say, in my opinion - they both fiddle with the is/ought problem en route to their ethical views - and they set the scene for modern virtue ethics between them. A couple of years ago I was never going to read any of this ethics stuff, but here I am, all the same.

"The unexamined life is not worth living"

It seems fair to say that both Plato and Aristotle, in their perhaps different ways, recommended the pursuit of eudamonia and the 'good life'; and that such a recommendation is certainly an "ought" of sorts; although obviously not an "ought" imposed by a transcendent authority; which is the narrower way you seem to be interpreting it. — Janus

Well, what do you mean by 'an "ought" of sorts'? That's the question. I still want to emphasize that I'm reporting a view of the ancients which was specifically revived by Anscombe's paper 'Modern moral philosophy' of 1958, which you can find online, and greatly reinforced by MacIntyre. Their view is that 'ought' is about a law-based version of ethics, which Plato and Aristotle didn't hold; that the virtue-based view of ethics is quite different.

If it is "the nature of humanity to pursue eudamonia" (and this is taken in a positive sense as 'flourishing'), and the "route to this is the good" then why would these facts not justify the conclusion that we ought to pursue the good (meaning, of course. nothing other than 'take that route')? — Janus

I was just trying to be pedantic about the source in ancient Greek, not express an opinion of my own. It's commonly accepted that the ancient world didn't have this sense of 'ought' in the language, so if one thinks they must have meant it all the same, one has to go by a roundabout route. That's part of what Anscombe says: that the very idea of duty, of 'ought' in our cultural traditions derive from a God who was unknown to the classical world.

Really showing your age here, doodley. — Buxtebuddha

I'd have said I was flaunting it, buddie.

What is motivation? Where does it come from? Why do we do what we do? — Gotterdammerung

I think these are two separate questions. 'Motivation' is a word we use for reasons we ascribe for our behaviour. 'Why we do what we do' is best answered scientifically, or with a shrug, but a well-informed shrug - one, say, by shoulders whose resident person has read plenty of good novels.

...if we forsake forming bonds in order to focus entirely on getting ahead in life... — Eric Wintjen

There's no necessary relationship between (not) forming bonds and getting ahead in life. If you pursue your education and fail to make bonds in the process, you are doing the education wrong. Other people will make a pleasant and rewarding difference, even if you don't want to have sex with them. I'm 68, and walk every week with a bloke I shared a room with in college when I was 19. On a Friday I play bridge with a woman I've known since I was 20, when she married my schoolfriend. Some relationships around you are going to turn into bonds like this, which will be profound and rewarding, when you end up knowing someone for nigh-on fifty years.

If I remember, Aristotle just takes it as axiomatic/self-evident that man truly ought to desire what is good. That it is constitutive of his nature, in a normative way. It is self-evident like 2+2=4 is. Am I correct here? — Modern Conviviality

I think your 'ought to' isn't right, but otherwise, yes. It is for Aristotle the nature of humanity to pursue eudaimonia, flourishing, and the route to this is 'the good'. The details of the virtuous dispositions that will enable us to enact the good are mostly acquired from what people say is blameworthy or praiseworthy, i.e. from the shared Athenian culture which we all know is the best possible culture the world has ever seen - kind of thing.

There's a lot of modern work on virtue ethics which began from Elizabeth Anscombe's paper of 1958, 'Modern moral philosophy', which you can find online. The major work I've read and thought about is 'After Virtue' by Alasdair MacIntyre, which tries to construct a virtue ethics for the present era. Pardon me if you know all this.

read one of his literature reviews and thought it presented a very confused picture. For me, nothing about emotion makes sense until you can clearly distinguish between a neurobiological level of evaluation - what all animal brains are set up to do - and the socially-constructed emotionality of humans, which is a cultural framing of experience. — apokrisis

Well, my memory of Cowie's stuff is he too was grappling with a similar distinction. For him, in trying to re-imagine emotion to talk computer language about it to computers and computer people, the gulf lay between contemporary human psychological talk about emotion, and how emotionality actually happens.

The hard part - to my mind - in analysing psychological talk is separating the wheat from the chaff. There is quite a lot of chaff in this field: alternative lists of emotions, differing claims about 'basic' emotions, specious little bits of research that mistake the countable for the insightful. All that.

As for the wider issues, I quite agree (before reading pages 3,4, and 5 of this thread after your post) that the Western reason/emotion distinction is part of the problem. But it is a problem for any of us as it's still twisted around inside our language and psyches.

I suggest a bracing read of Peter Singer, who will be stringent about your ethics, while playing some favourite tracks through headphones.

Hello! I am a philosophy student who is passionate at this point about each field. I know that studying philosophy is no game even though it might seem so, reason why I am curious how you started studying it or if any of you has any schedule regarding this :)
Any tips about comprehending concepts and playing with them would help me! Thank you. — Abeills

I have only been studying philosophy in my 60's. I think following your nose is quite a good way to get going. I started that way, then I went to college, where they made me initially scrutinise something Ancient and something Logical. I realize these are two good starting points, and they certainly enable you to hold your own when people start knowledgeably bandying about things that look like equations with Ǝ in them, or quoting concepts that they say can only really be understood in the original Greek.

Now I have wandered off into the philosophy of emotions and mood, which nobody here is much interested in because they're mostly Very Logical Chaps, in between wondering whether there is time for me to rewrite the philosophy of language from scratch (it's important to have a barmy but obsessive project of one's own, I think).

Let's say that we are each put in a shared simulation that may or may not represent the world outside the simulation. We assume that the simulation is an accurate representation of the outside world, and so assume that when we talk about it raining when it rains in the simulation we are talking about it raining outside the simulation, and that our claim is true if it is raining outside the simulation and false if it isn't. — Michael

My Wittgensteinian claim is that 'it's raining' and 'it isn't raining' do not exhaust the possibilities. I live in the Pennines, where yesterday it was neither raining nor not-raining. That's just the way it is here: perhaps we can rename ourselves ExcludedMiddlesex.

To talk about the law of the excluded middle is to talk about a formal language, not about natural language. Natural language accepts excluded middles and enjoys contradictions all the time.