It's difficult to address a criticism which is just a slur.

Anyway, Kent doesn't like MW. His solution is to append some extra mathematical structure to QM in order to make it a single-world theory. He is thus an advocate of hidden variables. The trouble with this is that no hidden variable theory that does not contradict QM exists.

So, Kent advocates changing the physics, because he does not like the implication of currently known physics. — tom

The criticism was not 'just a slur'. It was a chapter of reasoned argument of which I gave you the summary and another paragraph of exposition. You didn't address the criticism at all, you just went on to say 'Anyway...' - and then began an entirely different point. The criticism is, to start with, that the axiomisation is invalid in certain reasonable circumstances. It's hard to discuss if you won't answer reasonable points raised. Your entirely different point may be interesting in its turn, but there remains a substantial argument Kent made which you hadn't addressed.

You went to re-recommend me to watch Deutsch's video on probability, which for some reason you find convincing. I've already told you I disliked it, and thought it was particularly weak in that he never represents any of the positions he disagrees with fairly. It's the polemics of a lecture. I doesn't mean it's wrong, I just mean it's obviously a diatribe not a carefully-reasoned piece. I'm happy to read essays which interact with other essays in an academic fashion, but I've never understood why a superficial video is an adequate substitute.

You do, you know, regard 'just a slur' as a reasonable way for you to speak to other people on this forum. It's not ok. If you don't like slurs, I don't think you should make them at other people's expense either.

I'm with you on all of that, mcdoodle. — Terrapin Station

Well, blimey :)

As for polite discourse, perhaps you should tell that to, for instance, the Bangladeshis who have been hacked to death by Muslims for daring to blog (yes, blog) about topics which they find disagreeable. I am sure the machete-wielding mobs will be highly receptive to your pleas for a civil discussion. — Arkady

For me this is a prime example of why one needs to distinguish Islam from Islamism. You make it sound as if 'Muslims' are violent extremists and 'Bangladeshis' are the victims. But most Bangladeshis are Muslims - Muslims who oppose machete-wiedling violence; most Bangladeshi Muslims support, albeit precariously, the separation of religion and State in their country even though it's 94% Muslim; the vast majority of Bangladeshi Muslim clerics have by way of a fatwa categorically and publicly opposed the killing of secular bloggers. It's a mistake to single out the 'Muslim'-ness of the extremists as if this were what sets them apart from their fellow-countrymen/women.

That's my persistent disagreement with this 'war' metaphor. The overwhelming majority of Muslims in my country, neighbourhood, accept the secular state. You cannot categorise 'Islam' because of the behaviour of some 'Islamists'. If you do that, you begin to Other a large number of innocent people.

Why do you say that statement is contingently true? — Mongrel

The thread has moved on a lot and I don't have enough time to keep up with such a fast-paced exchange.

But, going back, forgive me if this is the sort of point that means I just don't understand, I do think there is some illumination missing for me. 'This table is made of clay.' To me that is contingent upon who is speaking, in what location, when, and what contextually they mean by 'clay', which has a rather imprecise meaning to it. So what is necessary about it?

I see that the end-point is attempting to arrive at a logical formulation that expresses natural language as if it were an expression in modal logic. 'There is something and it's a table and it's one and only (one table and it's in a certain location) and it's made of clay,' with the addition of the word 'necessarily' in there somewhere which has a relation to 'in all possible worlds'. I've just not grasped that this makes sense. I can see in my mind's eye the symbolic logic that's its purported counterpart and I'm happy manipulating that; I don't grasp how that happens in the flow of natural language.

A cool way to look at the impetus behind rigid designators (the answer to the question you asked is at the end:) — Mongrel

The quote from Soames is very useful, thank you. My perennial difficulty with all these arguments is that I don't understand how the examples are examples of necessity. To take his four...There are Soames's known by different first names; there are Saul Kripke's that are pet rabbits as well as human beings; 'this table is made of clay' is an entirely contingent statement; the idea that a table is 'made' of molecules is contestable.

I know I have a great reluctance to accept the project of making natural language over into logical form. Perhaps I'll never get over it.

Or perhaps a light bulb is going to go on soon in a great room where all the wise people are gathered and I finally understand what you all mean? I do hope so. In the meantime I hope you'll all carry on part-enlightening me while talking to each other :)

The importance of Kripke's intervention though (imo) has to do with the way in which he tackles questions of modality - that is, necessity and contingency with respecting to naming. For Kripke, a name is necessary - but this necessity is itself contingent (upon what he calls a primal baptism). It's no accident that Kripke more or less invented modal logic. It's where all the good stuff is. — StreetlightX

You can however modify descriptivism - that a name has a description lurking invisibly behind it - so that it works in conjunction with modal logic. Or you can call names anaphoric, like pronouns. I confess, having recently driven myself half-crazy trying to understand all this academically, I still don't accept rigid designators. I think however TGW has done heroic work in this thread in explaining the established position.

One difficulty I still haven't resolved in my own mind is what world we're in when we talk about these names, and what 'possible' worlds are. TGW follows the accepted view about 'the world of evaluation' or 'the world of the utterance' but I'm dissatisfied with that. It seems to me a pseudo-objective way of saying who the interlocutors are. Among philosophers, for instance, Socrates is just Socrates, but among football fans he's a Brazilian great, and if you're a philosophical football fan, you need a context to know which is which. (Of course you could be a MOnty Python fan and merge the two) So the pro-rigid-designator says there is no such thing as the meaning of a word 'to you', but there is a meaning of a word in one language community rather than another. I find that awfully muddling. But maybe it's just me.

For whatever it's worth, I agree that I dislike burqas. I also disagree with general burqa bans (excepting particular circumstances such as driver's license photos, workplace dress rules, etc). I believe that people should be permitted to engage in foolish, demeaning behavior if they so choose, without laws preventing them from doing so (and no, I don't find the rhetoric of some apologists that the burqa is "liberating" for women to be persuasive: a prison is never liberating, even if said prison is made of cloth). — Arkady

Fair enough, Arkady.

Dworkin I know was against the idea of female superiority, but my point was that some radical feminists continue to believe that men ought to be exterminated, and are highly sex-negative. — darthbarracuda

Well, where are they? I found a men's rights blog quoting a woman writer under the headline 'Radical feminist advocates for the extermination of men', for instance, but the headline is a paranoid lie. There is not talk of killing, extermination or anything of that ilk in the woman's article, just dreams of women working together with other women, together with some admittedly far-out imagined solutions to the man problem, like genetic modification :) If you then follow the trail of that blog, the 'men's rights advocate' subsequently engaged in a creepy stalking campaign to out the woman who was writing under a pseudonym. The radfem collective blog is now an archive, perhaps the women have had to go underground, I don't know. The lesson of that to me is that the male misogynist bullies are still winning when they can pick the ground to fight.

I'm sure there are groups of women who are highly anti-men, and some who are 'sex-negative' as you put it. To me the rich recent feminist literature is much more worth exploring than chasing after a threat that to me isn't there.

What is the difference between "everyday feminism" and "radical feminism (radfem)"? — darthbarracuda

This specific debate is surely a historical debate nowadays? I've lived through the various phases of feminism as a pro-feminist man of some sort. You know, on a personal level, bras were out, then bras were in; shaved legs were submission to the patriarchy, then they were ok if they made you feel good. Once people have overthrown some petty prohibition they can be free to make their own choices. But it's still not clear whether women have been able to 'reclaim the streets' or occupy the corridors of power in a lasting way.

Here in the UK, at any rate, the era of radical feminism was the 70's and 80's, and the ones I read were really intelligent and provocative: Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Mary Daly on a radical theology, Andrea Dworkin on pornography, Miller/Swift on 'Words and women'. There doesn't seem to me to be any substitute for actually reading them, and/or the poetry of Adrienne Rich, the novels of Attwood, of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, in philosophy later, Judith Butler and bell hooks.

I don't know how I would get back to a view of feminism as 'just...egalitarianism': even in the mainstream it requires a rethinking of who each of us is. In virtually every society and era except our own women have been treated as second-class: that needs some reflection and resolution.

Nor, however, have I ever known a made-by-women feminist list like yours, except the ones drawn up by antagonistic men who were trying to discredit a much subtler and more illuminating set of ideas. I don't think such lists ever make sense. There is an analysis of patriarchy, there are theories, there are ideas for action. There aren't simple bullet-points of anti-men statements to swallow before a radfem bedtime. Perhaps I'm naive, but overthrowing patriarchy always seemed to me a good idea.

Now things are different, but fragile. I don't know where the old radfems are and who their successors claim to be. It's quite a leap, in two or three generations, for young women now to outperform men at university, for instance; my generation of women were having to fight for every little concession for a long time: these may be fragile gains if a more conservative mindset takes a hold.

I think your mutual misunderstanding here is excellent evidence that neither of you is part of the other's mind.

The emphasis on the burqa is interesting, It is very Othering. Some French people find it - but nothing about the way the supposedly oppressive male Muslims dress - so offensive they want to ban it.

I really dislike it too, very occasionally in Bradford I'll pass a woman wearing and it gives me the creeps.

It's not the sort of thing to go to war over, though. Islamic women aren't Other, they're my fellow students, my wife's co workers, strangers in the next street, bbc newsreaders, local councillors. Mostly round here they wear Western dress, or lots of variants on discrete dressing that are nevertheless colourful and fashionable. I have no cause for war with their religion, although in religious debate I explain I'm an atheist. It seems that in common with women in both Iran and Saudi, British Asian women outnumber men as graduates these days. Perhaps big changes are bubbling up while all this warlike rhetoric is being exchanged.

Aristotle in Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics argues that self-love is central to being a good man (sic). But this is not hedonistic, it's at the heart of a debate about virtue and goodness. The self-loving man is in tune with the virtuous in himself, his rational and deliberative (part of his) soul. Only thus can he for example be a virtuous friend, by fully immersing himself in the friend's outlook and plight. Or so I read it.

On the scale of history modern Western society doesn't seem awfuly corrupt to me. There's a thing: we could each take that proposition and examine it in relation to evidence, other theories and Madame Sosostris' tea leaves. Logic helps in all this. Often the sum of intuitions leads to mere populism.

Ive been a creative artist most of my life and I can't say i recognise the intuitonist and the logical approach as mutually contradictory. Creativity involves pattern-making and pattern recognition. It helps to free up from preconceptions, but then, that requires some learned quality, the ability to discriminate. Only bad artists use no logic at all.

You think you have a void at the heart of things? Just wait! Once the Void Elect takes office you'll see a black hole enlarging from it's starting point at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. — Bitter Crank

:::laughs::: I'm already peering nervously at the event horizon.

Ah, so you can read. — Thorongil

I don't understand how rudeness aids any debate. To repeat: to talk about 'a war with Islam' is indeed 'controversial' rhetoric. To talk about it in public in that way in my community would align you with the extreme right-wing. Evidently you live among people who are happiter to talk in such an inflammatory way about the beliefs of their neighbours and friends than the people I know.

Or chapters 5 and 6 of this book by Wallace: — tom

Thanks for the list, Tom. I don't have access to the book, but David Wallace has lots of papers on his Academia page so it's easy enough to read his arguments. What I'm not clear about is what the up to date arguments are. I'm looking at 'Many worlds', a 2010 collection of essays by people of all sorts of opinion, including Wallace, though some of the essays seems to have had online updates later.

Both Wallace and Deutsch along the way have offered 'proofs' relating to their approach, which you have tended to gloss as 'They have proved...' I don't have the maths to spot the problems in the proofs, or not, but it seems clear once you read around the literature that the key issue is what assumptions one brings to the party before proposing a so-called 'proof'. It's all, for the moment, metaphysical debate of one kind or another. Some ideas lack empirical support and have fallen by the wayside, but there are many that are alive and kicking.

The strongest critic of Wallace in the book above is Adrian Kent, a Reader in quantum physics at Oxford. Here is how he summarises his criticism:

Wallace's strategy of axiomatizing a mathematically precise decision theory within a fuzzy Everettian quasiclassical ontology is incoherent. Moreover, Wallace's axioms are not constitutive of rationality either in Everettian quantum theory or in theories in which branchings and branch weights are precisely defined. In both cases, there exist coherent rational strategies that violate some of the axioms. — Adrian Kent

I've got to say, because I didn't know much about this field before being stimulated by the frequent forum debates to have a closer look, I'm amazed the Deutsch-Wallace approach hinges on decision theory and assumptions about rationality. Decision theory is quite a hotly-debated topic in its own right so I wouldn't build a mountain on it. Well, maybe a rough algorithm for how people act, but no 100% right view.

They (D-W) end up arguing, as I understand it, that we can by fiat state what rational agents should do (and therefore by implication do do) in certain situations, including the knock-on situations - the first 'sub-branch' in one language beyond the initial branching. And if certain probabilistic arguments are empirically sound, then the 'weights' of the supposed branches in the Everettian world(s) are, as Kent says, going to have known values, and there are rational-for-agents decisions that don't fit Wallace's axioms.

I'm not clear that they do then answer the question that opened this particular thread? I don't see how an idealization dissolves the question of echoing footfalls - where do the other branches go? It seems in some of them our laws of nature won't apply? - most elegantly put by T S Eliot:

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. — T S Eliot

From ~25mins for the purely QM stuff. — tom

I agree that the ontology of probability is interesting. This 'from 25 mins on' wasn't 'purely QM stuff' at all, though, it was a prolonged lecture about metaphysics. My view of philosophy is that you imagine all the best arguments people can put up against you, and you rebut them. In this lecture Deutsch seems instead to be imagining a series of feeble opponents who haven't considered the slightest subtlety in their position. Even an actuary has a defence to the notion of probability, let alone proponents of statistical mechanics and so on. I don't see how this sort of stuff furthers the debate. Plenty of people who disagree with Deutsch's interpretations of MWI will agree that probability is epistemic, especially scientific realists, for they don't want 'the world' at heart to be indeterministic. And, it must be something you're not seeing because you admire Deutsch, but to the uncommitted outsider the lecture seems to show a pompous man over-reaching himself. Why isn't all this in a peer-reviewed paper where his intellectual equals like Wallace and Timpson could respond and critique it?

This article is from Demos Scotland, who have their own axe to grind: preparing the ground, as they see it, for an independent Scotland (which would have great economic difficulties, on the face of it, since the rest of the UK subsidises Scottish public expenditure).

But no doubt about it, the UK is traumatised. The political classes are bewildered and confused: all the leaders of all the main parties, and even most minor parties bar UKIP, backed Remain in the referendum. The government and the civil service had made a decision not to prepare in advance for the possibility of a Brexit vote, so they're scrambling to catch up. There's a void at the heart of things. Time to think hard about truthmakers, epistemology and the meaning of meaning, in my view. Until they call me in to help solve the crisis, obviously. :)

Boy are you a cliche. Equate "conservative think tank" with "right wing extremism" and "racism," cite the SPLC, and play the Islamophobia card. Can I be sure I'm not talking to a robot?

I think her words in that interview were spot on and courageous. We're in real trouble if they now meet the standards for "controversy." — Thorongil

This is surely going too far. Her words in the interview are very controversial. They easily 'meet the standards' for that. I live among Muslims, I am not at war with their religion or beliefs, and those who advocate such a 'war', however metaphorically - and hers doesn't come over that metaphorically - are of extreme views, on my spectrometer. In my locality, to vote in accordance with the beliefs she expresses would be to vote for an extreme right party.

I feel we are all here, dabbling or paddling in philosophy, in search of meanings, however the term is defined. It's an enjoyable pursuit, it tests the mental faculties, and brings me into contact with other interested people.

It feels to me that the human is a meaning-seeking animal. That'll do me.

Despite the mis-representations of Timpson, the argument is not that parallel processing takes place therefore there are parallel universes, but precisely the opposite! — tom

The point is that the mathematics that we can perform - including proofs - is determined by the laws of physics. This also goes for the computations that any physical system can perform. This is why some functions are computable, but most are not.

Life is essentially a computational process, which you claim can not exist prior to mathematics. While it seems that the timeless truths and objects of mathematics must have always existed, I'm not convinced that they cannot be regarded as novel at the time of their discovery, or rather, invention. — tom

Well, I see this is one crux of the question.

If I am understanding the disagreement correctly, it does boil down to how one interprets Turing in the first place, and what in one's opinion comes first, the maths or the physics. Timpson says that Turing was writing in the 1930's when 'computer' actually meant a person doing computation, as distinct from 'machine', and it was his insight in relating the two that convinced Godel to accept his basic principle. The original Turing notion was about 'every function which would naturally be regarded as computable'. (That quote is Deutsch's summary of Turing) Timpson goes on to argue that Deutsch has gone on to argue what you're arguing, when in Timpson's view the Turing notion is about what humans regard as computable. Here's a quote from Chapter 6:

We always need to start with a putative computational model, a listing of states and their evolutions one is considering; and given such a model, it will precisely be logic (and mathematics) which will determine what could be computed by such a system and thus provides a limit. Physics provides no constraint at this stage. Physics only gets into the game afterwards, when we ask whether or not those states and evolutions can be physically realized. The mathematical (definitional) and the physical are very different kinds of constraints; but both are important. — Timpson

So for Timpson physics 'only gets into the game afterwards'. The humans assess the parameters of what can be computed, then examine whether these parameters are physically possible.

Deutsch’s emphasis on the possible physical existence of the universal computing machine, encapsulated in his Turing Principle, misrepresents its significance; missing the definitional role of determining the mathematical meaning of the evolution of physical states. — Timpson

These are two different methodological claims, although to me Deutsch's and yours are metaphysical: a claim to know the nature of the world, 'Life', and that it's computational: whereas Timpson is making the lesser claim, which is also what he believes Turing to have been claiming, that humanity assesses functions that might be computable, then considers what physics constraints there are on such computation. It's hard for an outsider to see them as anything other than metaphysical choices which one will make in accordance with one's wider beliefs and one's own response to the way the arguments are put.

You only need a quantum computer to simulate processes involving quantum coherence, so a laptop or something similar is all that is needed to exactly simulate consciousness. — tom

I'm trying to understand this simulation business. I am using the critical eye of Christopher Timpson in 'Quantum Information Theory and the foundation of Quantum Mechanics'. He argues that your/Deutsch's argument is a 'simulation fallacy': that simulation is not a like for like business. Here are a couple of directly relevant paragraphs. Do you have a Deutsch rebuttal to this line of argument? It's part of a wider case, as I grasp it, that Deutsch is conflating the mathematical and the physical in 'the Turing principle' through a misunderstanding (in Timpson's view) of the original thesis.

Imagine that there is some physical process P (for example, some quantum mechanical process) which would require a certain amount of communication or computational resources to be simulated classically. Call the classical simulation using these resources S. The simulation fallacy is to assume that because it requires these classical resources to simulate P using S, there are processes going on when P occurs which are physically equivalent to (are instantiations of) the processes that are involved in the simulation S itself (although these processes may be being instantiated using different properties in P). In particular, when P is going on, the thought is that there must be, at some level, physical processes involved in P which correspond concretely to the evolution of the classical resources in the simulation S. The fallacy is to read off features of the simulation as real features of the thing simulated.
A familiar example of the simulation fallacy is provided by Deutsch’s argument that Shor’s factoring algorithm supports an Everettian view of quantum mechanics (Deutsch, 1997, p. 217). The argument is that if factoring very large numbers would require greater computational resources than are contained in the visible universe, then how could such a process be possible unless one admits the existence of a very large number of (superposed) computations in Everettian parallel universes? A computation that would require a very large amount of resources if it were to be performed classically is explained as a process which consists of a very large number of classical computations. But of course, considered as an argument, this is fallacious. The fact that a very large amount of classical computation might be required to produce the same result as a quantum computation does not entail that the quantum computation consists of a large number of parallel classical computations. — Timpson

... I am using desire as synonymous to concern, with two sub-categories involved: needs (pressing desires) and wants (relaxed desires).

Pleasure is the experience we normally receive when we satisfy a desire....

But our brains were not meant to be stimulated like this — darthbarracuda

I disagree with all three of these opening claims. We should not confuse philosophy with a belief that we can understand human psychology.

(1) To me 'concern' is quite different from 'desire'. Concern is like sorge in German, it's about what matters to a creature. 'Desire' is a word we give to a tendency we see in ourselves. I am with bc here, you seem to regard 'desire' as some kind of independent force.
(2) It would sound rational if pleasure were indeed the normal reward for satisfying a desire, but I think this is to rationalise or give un-evidenced reasons, not to explain successfully. Much of the pleasure I see other people having, or that I observe in myself, has nothing to do with satisfying desires, and the satisfaction of many desires does not result in pleasure..
(3) It's hard to be sure what our brains were meant to be stimulated by. I don't know what would support a good claim.

The author of the book I recommended is a philosopher. David Wallace works in the philosophy department of Oxford Uni. — tom

Wallace is committed though to a very particular view. Here is part of Chapter 1 of his book:

The algorithm may be ‘ad hoc, under-motivated, inherently approximate’, but it still allows predictions of stunning precision. Isn’t the point of science to make predictions? Why care about supposed ‘problems’ with a theory if it still generates predictions of this degree of accuracy?

But this misses the point of science...the purpose of scientific theories is not to predict the results of experiments: it is to describe, explain, and understand the world. And quantum mechanics—as described in the previous sections—fails to do this. No ‘description of the world’ is to be found in the quantum algorithm (p.25) of section 1.3. At best, we will find an approximately specified description of the macroscopic degrees of freedom. About the microscopic world, the algorithm is silent.

One robust response to my comments might be: so much the worse for what we thought science was for. Could it not be that our hopes of ‘describing, explaining and understanding the world’ turn out to be optimistic—even naive? Could quantum mechanics not be telling us to lower our sights, to be content with a more modest picture of science as a mere predictive tool? After all, ‘experiments’ can be construed quite broadly: the quantum algorithm suffices to predict all macroscopic phenomena. Why not be content with that? — David Wallace

Personally I am content with that and find Wallace's view of the philosophy of science overblown and too dismissive of alternatives. But then I am a die-hard empiricist, and don't accept that the desire for an elegant theory should override scepticism about metaphysical claims. Obviously, Wallace goes on to express his discontent with what he calls an 'instrumentalist' view of science, and his argument for metaphysical (scientific) realism.

Peter Woit's blog is an entertaining alternative that treats multiverse claims with some scepticism, while insisting on scientific rigour, if anyone is interested: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

I think we should at minimum be clear that the Deutsch view is a minority position within physics; it doesn't stand for science against ignorant philistines masquerading as amateur philosophers.

And some might say things aren't that thingly. I've borrowed this from Anon before: An object is a slow event.

Even physicalists (as many materialists have taken to calling themselves) don't claim to know the intrinsic nature of matter. (Of course, it could be question that's beside the point) Perhaps energy is eternal delight, as Blake announced. Or was it bert?

We have to say 'illness' to merit 'treatment'. But I'd prefer to say 'distress'. I like it that there are ways that people in distress can get help, whatever the labels. The positives I look for are autonomy and a sense of power - perhaps these are 'strengths'. I quite agree with un that 'incapacity' is a dodgy word. When people lack autonomy, feel powerless in the face of distress - that's when help is needed.

Gooseone, your account is of someone who's shown great strength of character to make it thus far. Well done to you. It's never too late to take time out to study, you know, if you can work out a way of paying for it :)

The scientific method - or rather the range of scientific methods, sometimes idealised as 'the scientific method' - works brilliantly.

Metaphysics is another matter. For instance, even if it could be demonstrated according to some principle or other that every word Tolstoy wrote had a computable micro-physical cause, would you learn more about life by reading David Deutsch who invented the principle ? Or Tolstoy?

Natch, my reply is Tolstoy. There is a way of knowing which is scientific, but there are other ways, at present and for the foreseeable future irreducible to computation, which are just as if not more important: ethical, artistic, political, spiritual. Personal; emotional.

I am here channelling the absent spirit of Landru, a former forumite.

You will doubtless find Deutsch and his followers rather adamant in their advocacy of the Principle. To be frank that makes me suspicious: their rhetoric seems too sure of itself and unable to imagine disagreement.

The summary is of four categories of attitudes outlined in Tolstoy's A Confession. But the rhetorical point Tolstoy eventually makes in that essay is indeed the exact opposite of the conclusion db (and the op) draws. Tolstoy affirms that the lives of 'milliards' of people show him that all these rational categories of despair-in-life are mistaken, and that their example shows him that life has meaning through faith - though he then goes on to criticise the Church hierarchy too.

I regard the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, however flawed, as a fine example of the possibility of a politics of forgiveness.

Mutual tolerance happens all the time. It requires constant reminders and reinforcement, though. I live in an area where Muslims of several generations live in mutual tolerance with white racists, feminists, reactionary Christians, hippies, black activists and quiet family people...Really, we all get along. We keep having to adjust to each other and sometimes it takes a scandal or a big legal case for big adjustments to occur -but they do. A lot of people of different persuasions just want to get along - and work at it. I think much trumpeting of people's supposed incompatibility is lazy polemics by those inactive in civil society.

I don't think it does. — jamalrob

Go on, tell me :) 'To give a bodily form to, to incarnate...' Doesn't that make the body a wrapper?

I read a bit about 'embodied cognition' but stopped to wonder: that very phrase implies that the body is some sort of wrapper.

My body makes me, the 'me' others address as 'you' or 'him'. But the 'I', as db says, resists incorporation. Wittgenstein says some key things, early and late, distinguishing the I from LW.

Now my body is crumbling I catch myself thinking: This creature is going to die.

For some reason such thoughts plunge me deeper into bodyness. Flesh. It's interesting how much work has gone into creating thinking systems, and how little into creating flesh. In the Enlightenment we mistook ourselves, perhaps, and we haven't yet drunk deeply enough of Darwin, who seems to me to say: We are a population of bodily creatures, evolved thus far - that's all folks.

What is the world independent of us? — Marchesk

Sorry I'm late to this party, been busy trying to write philosophy :)

I'm with TGW and Agostino, as far as I can see...there is no simple answer to such a question. I've been fretting about 'the world' lately. The idea that we can talk about 'the world' in some univocal way is often assumed without argument. But it's just a metaphysics, argued for alike by some monotheists or by believers in fundamentalism about particles. (An unholy alliance, as it were) As Landru used to argue on the old forum, there are many discourses and no single one of them seems exhaustive.

None of this stops us calling certain phenomena or concepts 'real' in some contexts, but the -ism tag is awfully constricting. An -ism gives a certain shape to your beliefs in discussing them with other people, but it also leaves you arguing for some nitpicking detail you're secretly not quite sure about.

referring to multiple poems that were simply deleted by the moderators. In many of these threads I would rather post my opinion using poetry which expresses more than the stilted words of academics infamous for having an extremely poor and dry sense of humor and promoting western viewpoints by suppressing all others. — wuliheron

It's bad luck about the poems, wuli, although to be frank when I've seen yours I have sometimes more admired the actual overall shape of them on the page than the way the words are ordered. I have been a poet in my time, and poetry can be a precise way of putting something complex, like petals on a wet, black bough, or whatever. But sometimes they can also be a blurring. And after all a forum like this just is the sensibility of its inner core of members/moderators. I'm amazed they delete your poems, I thought they would only delete racists or rude people (and to be frank I am much more offended by rude people on this forum than by your poems), but perhaps they thought you were taking the piss. I'm still not 100% sure you weren't. Still, I hope you find a home for them elsewhere.

I think in terms of how a carer or parent acts towards children. You set boundaries. What words you use doesn't exactly matter. Both parties like boundaries. Children like to know where they stand, and sometimes to transgress. Grown-ups would go crazy if they didn't decide rules of some kind: you'd end up justifying everything from first principles every time Zak asked 'Why not?' or Imogen claimed something wasn't 'fair'.

Then you become grown-up, and rebel against the rules, or work most of them back into your own boundaries, or modify them according to taste. Hm, tying people up can be fun, but only if we all accept we're pretending. Drinking/drugging to excess provides release. Various transgressions.

Likewise in the wider society, there are actions that are not ok. Driving down the wrong side of the street can kill people, building on a park spoils things for people who want greenspace, and so we make laws which proliferate. Anyone can transgress any time, but if caught they have to take the sanctions on the chin, as well as live with the consequences of their actions, if driving down the wrong side of the road, say. We use 'ought' and 'wrong' pretty willy-nilly about these things, and systematisers roll some of them up into systems. I can't be doing with systems apart from something like a virtue view of ethics, but I'm still going to say 'ought' and 'wrong' to people and hope to get a reaction.

Klein, in his SEP article on skepticism, contends that the Dream argument conforms to the following schema:

1. If I know that p, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that p.
2. U is a genuine ground for doubting that p.
3. Therefore, I do not know that p. — Klein, 2014, Skepticism, SEP — Aaron R

I've just been reading Fogelin on skepticism so I may be writing Under The Influence. My feeling is that this is all what he would call 'Cartesian' rather than Pyrrhonian skepticism: some rules for debate are pre-assumed in which 'genuine' can reasonably be defined, for instance, so it's only skepticism within a certain framework, not skeptical of the framework.

I can imagine - indeed a friend told me there really is such a thing, but the reality or not doesn't matter for the argument - a society in which dreaming is held to make more sense than awakeness, and to bring one closer to the divine. In their society the boot is always on the other foot: how can you be sure you're not awake when you hope and believeyou are dreaming?

Even to be able to imagine such a society is to say that any assertion can be doubted, any claim to knowledge is in some way contextual. It depends upon the company you've been keeping and what you're talking about with them, on what mutual terms.

Mostly this doesn't matter, for 'knowing' is understood in a certain way as between, say, scientists, or lovers, or people who have an intuitive mutual understanding, or philosophers talking about epistemology. So Pyrrhonians - on this view - happily say 'Yes, I know' and mean it at the time.

Is this position already known in the literature?
What do you think about it? — Babbeus

The first paper on this page, 'Idealism without God', outlines such a view: http://yetterchappell.net/Helen/papers.html

Ehmmmm I don't understand this "need" to have anyone agree with you. That seems to me to be the height of absurdity - going to a person, or talking with someone just so they agree with you, because, if you have any brain, chances are that you know they only agree for show. I've gone through life with most people - including my parents - always disagreeing with me. I never felt the need to have someone agree. I live my way - you have yours. — Agustino

You miss my point here. In the song it's a progression. When even force fails, after love and justice, in settling a problem, you talk to your imagined mother, the one who will always forgive you whatever you've done, who won't disagree with you when the chips are down. (In the song this provides no relief, as it turns out Mom is a robotised State).

You say that 'the abstractions are what people use to negotiate'. I agree, but I'm saying it's the negotiation that's primary; the abstractions are just tools to use; for me, they aren't important matters that require Capital Letters.

I feel living with others is about (in)tolerance, power-relations and negotiations and what happens beyond them, not about these abstractions of truth and rightness.

I've always been fond of Laurie Anderson's O Superman. I never realised for years till an American told me that the voice quoting Herodotus was actually a voice quoting the US Post Office motto :

And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds. — Laurie Anderson

The message will get through. But how will it be received? She says it starts with love - when that fails...

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom! — Laurie Anderson

In the last resort we talk to the person who will always think we're right, won't she?

So in all those rather strong looking hinge cases, it is possible to have brain trauma so that you actually do doubt what seems to be undoubtable, in a real, every day lived sense. — Marchesk

I agree Marchesk these are interesting cases relating to the issue of doubt. My feeling is though that they do not contradict what Wittgenstein was saying, though I haven't gone back to 'On Certainty' to check. I think the fundamental point remains that doubt can only rest on some certainties. The certainties these people with brain trauma accept are by 'objective' standards wrong, but those people still act on them. (Mostly: in some cases they seem to act on knowledge they avow that they don't consciously have)

In a sense each of us, existentially, is in the same position: I accept that some things I am certain of may be objectively wrong. There are moments when I was sure something was the case, and then a few moments later - as in a card game, say, when I was convinced all the hearts had been played except mine, then one turns up in an opponent's hand - I realise I was mistaken. The trauma-sufferers have, in the specific respect for which they have a trauma, lost the ability to realise they were mistaken.