Who could ever want to 'disprove' (odd word) scepticism? I like to know that annoying little terrier is always snapping and yapping at my heels.

I think of 'brains in vats' tales as imagined by the idle rich, who can somehow conceive of such scenarios without the many labourers and other resources and energy that would be needed for each brain. In short, it brings out the old socialist in me who is otherwise usually asleep these days.

Dammit, one day I wish I could just meet an archetype. I just don't get out enough I suppose. (1)

(1) personal inexperience

If you want to criticise an economically illiterate decision to separate, Robert, I think there's a premium on correct spelling.

A reminder: I voted Leave. And I claim to understand economics too :)

The short-term economic impact of the brexit vote has been minimal. An odd thing abourt the 59bn figure being talked about today is (a) it's just another future forecast, over several years; (b) it treats the impact of the fall in the value of sterling straight after the referendum vote as 'an effect of Brexit'. Sterling needed to fall anyway, say many commentators.

There will be an adverse economic effect next year - of uncertainty not precisely of Brexit.

The leading parties were all, and still are, led by supporters of Remain, or equivacators like Labour. So they are struggling to find a direction. Obviously I'm waiting for the call!

I think the EU is too large, has become dysfunctional and imposes a German view of macroeconomics on other countries to whom it's disadvantageous.

So, you are defending the assertion that..(quote from Cartwright) — tom

No. I defend its coherence, I'm agnostic about whether it's true, it's obviously a radical opponent of metaphysical realism, but some realists go along with the sort of thing Dupre and Cartwright say about 'ontology'.

What I was doing was responding to you saying...

Well, there is indeed "no inductive reason for counting these laws as true"- because there is no such thing as an inductive reason for any explanation, let alone for arriving at an explanatory scientific theory. — Tom

...by asking you what you meant. I'm not being sarcastic, jokey or offensive. I genuinely don't know what you mean by the sentence I'm quoting. I tried to posit a banal way of constructing an inductive argument in the hope you would then show me what you meant. How do you arrive at an explanatory scientific theory other than by inductive reasoning?

I guess that Nietzsche's understanding of Platonism is a standard one in which the realm of Ideas is to be pursued because it is not corrupt like the phenomenal world. It is the true realm where "things" are the way really are and this alone makes it good. — Πετροκότσυφας

...of all errors thus far, the most grievous, protracted and dangerous has been a dogmatist's error: Plato's invention of pure spirit and of transcendental goodness....Of course, in order to speak as he did about the spirit and the good, Plato had to set truth on its head and even deny perspectivity, that fundamental condition of all life... — Nietzsche: Preface to Beyond Good and Evil

Later in s34 he goes on:

It is nothing but a moral prejudice to consider truth more valuable than appearance; it is in fact the most poorly proven assumption in the world. We should admit at least this much: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspectivist assessments and apparentnesses... — Nietzsche

Feeling annoyed with myself for being flippant earlier in the thread, I have actually spent the morning reading Nietzsche. I think we should beware of the argument you quote about neo-Darwinism.

Physiologists should think twice before deciding that an organic being's primary instinct (Trieb) is the instinct for self-preservation. A living being wants above all else to release its strength; life itself is the will to power, and self-preservation is only one of its indirect and most frequent consequences. Here, as everywhere, we must beware of superfluous teleological principles! And this is what the instinct for self-preservation is. — Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil 13

Well, there is indeed "no inductive reason for counting these laws as true"- because there is no such thing as an inductive reason for any explanation, let alone for arriving at an explanatory scientific theory.

I must at your quote to my list of generic ways to deny reality - the direct appeal to fallacy — tom

Sorry, I don't know what you mean.

From premisses via inductive reasoning we arrive at conclusions. Premiss 1: There are well-demonstrated laws X in the lab. Premiss 2: Lots of things that are lawful in the lab turn out to be lawful outside the lab. Premiss 3: Laws X are one of those sorts of thing. Conclusion: Laws X apply all over the place.

How do you think lab findings end up as (supposed) neutrinos passing through me and you outside labs?

...perhaps it is physics that is not complete, and that, maybe, this is because physics is not, in the end, a complete description of what is real. In other words, that what is real, is not physical. — Wayfarer

This is a most enjoyable thread to read: thanks to all the participants. Sorry I've been too busy to contribute. Here is Nietszche (from another thread really!):

...even physics is only a way of interpreting or arranging the world...and not a way of explaining the world. — Nietzsche

I have been fretting over the distinction between epistemology and ontology, surprised by its use in this thread. I don't think science in its practice deals with ontologies, and I don't think physicalists think so either. For example, I'm working on something about placebos. Scientific discourse about placebos uses 'beliefs' as data and refers to 'beliefs' in its hypotheses. But I don't think that commits physicalists to an ontology including mental terms like 'belief': they may perfectly well claim that such epistemic terms stand for an equivalent more fundamental physical term, or that the mental supervenes on the physical.

Conversely, there is nothing forcing someone who debates physics - while accepting the methods of science - into an ontology of one kind or another. There's a whole Stanford group of philosophers of science who would say this, including Dupre and...

...we have no grounds in our experience for taking our laws - even our most fundamental laws of physics -as universal. Indeed, I should say 'especially our most fundamental laws', if these are meant to be the laws of fundamental particles. For we have virtually no inductive reason for counting these laws as true of fundamental particles outside the laboratory setting - if they exist there at all. — Nancy Cartwright

Could you expand on this? Would that be called conviction? — Mongrel

I was just being a bit flip, suggesting that he doesn't regard his own certainties - like the impossibility of not willing by mystics - as 'convictions', only other people's.

I began on the left, I'm 67 years old and I'm still on the left, though it's a Green ecological vista nowadays rather than the old anarcho-syndicalist fellow I used to meet in the mirror. I don't know why people talk about some sort of inevitability about moving right as you get older, I just don't feel it, nor do I feel my fundamental values have shifted in 50 years. Perhaps it's that my main imaginary adversary has always been Self-serving Authority, not conservatism. Diatribes against The Other Side in a debate leave me cold: in the ordinary business of making civil society happen I work, sing, discuss, set out chairs and make posters and laugh and write and just do stuff with people all across the political spectrum. Caroline Lucas in the UK and Jill Stein in the USA are my sort of leader. We may be in a minority, but we know we're making sense.

There is a later reference, in the AntiChrist, (http://4umi.com/nietzsche/antichrist/55)

Is there any actual difference between a lie and a conviction? — Nietzsche

I find the argument quite compelling, and his attack on 'the party man' of conviction on the mark.

The attack on mysticism on the other hand is a convoluted notion that the Schopenhauerian will is undeniable, yet mystics purportedly claim they can deny it. Here Nietzsche calls his own conviction about the impossibility of not willing 'truth' and thereby gets it wrong. Well, so it seems to me.

I agree. I push on in the knowledge that some people matter to me; that some activities matter to me; that I find caring, respect and curiosity in me and follow where they lead me. All this 'purpose' business: what sense can we make of finding a desire for purpose in us? There's a beginning.

Once two people get into a ding-dong it's hard to butt in! I liked what you said anyway, Cava :)

I went to a live talk by a bloke called Marcus du Sautoy only 24 hours ago, in which he argued among other interesting things that the Many Worlds Interpretation was to him a good argument against intelligent design. Of all the gin joints in all the worlds, every equation and constant necessary for life is present in this one gin joint world we're in, while there are zillions in which the math doesn't add up. I'm thinking about it :)

I believe I'm in a similar zone to MU. A moment is one of those artificial notions that leads to paradoxes and other confusions, because you can't sum the moments and get a quantity - whereas causes and effects are surely quantifiable and seep through time.

I am reading a rather technical account by Nancy Cartwright which seems at heart Witty rather than ontological: that there are many languages of causation, most of which appear to work in some circumstances. It feels to me as if 'the moment' may be a use of language that befuddles such languages, for it forces a micro view of a non-micro phenomenon. Still you'd think there'd be a way of putting it and still get your bread toasted.

Yes, I think that's the David Lewis counterfactual account. It's a neat sidestep:) If I don't take my umbrella it's sure to rain.

I've been thinking about this stuff again because of some reading about causality. Does a causal event precede its effect, with a time gap in between? If so how does it do its causal work? Conversely, if cause overlaps with effect, an equally muddling scenario is present (sic) in which we then have to explain what brings the causal event to an end?

Jorndoe, I radically disagree with Christianity and Islam but the weakness and awful bias of your argument is persuading me to defend them. Can this be really your aim?

I use wordpress.org for loads of simple websites and don't find it 'pretty terrible'. You can always fiddle with the css and code if you can't find a plugin to do what you want. But perhaps you mean wordpress.com, which is more restrictive.

Well, I'm back at Uni after all these years, there are more women students than men which is refreshing, and these bloke-ish remarks seem a bit last century to me. Blokes rate women; their criteria belittle the women; it looks like the blokes are going to go on doing it; their symbolic punishment is richly deserved.

Of course Facebook was founded only a decade ago on blokes rating women, so I still don't fel feminism is on a rising tide quite yet.

Around 200 children have been killed as collateral damage in US drone strikes on Pakistan in the last ten years. I don't recall the moral justification for this in the Founding Fathers' words of self-constitution. These are actual deaths, not imaginary ideologically-inspired deaths.

The dispute in this thread is not about people's experiences, it's about the propositional claims--such as the existence and action of a supernatural agent source--of their experiences. — Brainglitch

One would first accept some sort of validity to the religious experiences described, as a premiss to a claim, if that were the basis of the dispute.

The epistemic criteria for scientific claims typically require independently observable empirical corroboration, specifically rule out intervention by supernatural agents, and entail independently observable predictions. — "Brainglitch

Isn't this an idealised version of scientific claims? I'm just studying a module on metaphysics of mind, for instance, where the claims for 'physicalism' and 'causal closure of the physical' are extrapolations from metaphysical claims arising from studies other than the one in hand. This is not to knock extrapolation as such: i we weren't often using extrapolation, in biology for instance, we'd never get things done.

Science is educated guess work — taylordonbarrett

I have to agree. In the circumstances, it's doing a brilliant job. How else could we be here, on the Internet, talking to each other? Living our lives of comfort and banality? Unless some of those guesses turn out 100% right, too?

You sound like you're arguing for some better basis for public knowledge than 'educated guesswork'. How would that go? I'm thinking it's the best we've got.

Sorry I missed this thread, which seems to have reached too far into the yes-I-did no-you-didn't phase for a newcomer to contribute much, so I'll say this and pass on. I'm a hardline atheist but mostly in Wayfarer's corner. There doesn't seem much talk here about religious experience, which is where the thread began. I've been a practising creative writer all my life, love art, and think our aesthetic (for want of a better word) sense is an abiding mystery, and a great source of pleasure, insight and consolation. For many people this artistic experience, as maker and art-enjoyer, seems to approach something very like what others describe as spiritual experience. I find people like Dennett and Dawkins - from both of whom I've learnt a great deal about stuff like consciousness and genetics - to have a crass insensitivity to this whole sphere of human life. They try and apply ways of thinking they feel they have learnt from science to areas where such an approach only reveals how limited are their sensibilities.

One small area that might require another thread is to observe how (in my view) their approach to religion bypasses the sociological and anthropological work that has been going on for a couple of centuries; as if the social sciences weren't scientific. The wave of physicalism that has swept through philosophy while I was alive and busy with other things seem to make observers like them think they're looking with exciting fresh neuro-enlightened eyes at matters that have been studied far more carefully and sensitively for a long time across the campus - where those pesky relativists believe everything is just social, ungodammit...

Thanks for the background Wayf

Relationships are patchy. But they have made a big contribution to any meaningfulness I've found in the course of my life. There seems to me a sort of opportunity cost question here: when i spent time being friendly and training myself to understand if poss the other person's point of view and all that, would i have done better to do something else instead? On the whole, for me, I'm glad to have loved and been loved. Mostly it enabled other things rather than got in the way of them.

The Nelson mass was written when Haydn was confined to his room suffering from exhaustion: an apt example :) Choir-singing has turned out, for me, to be a way of experiencing pleasure and occasional joy in collective action while not having to be friendly. But I'm not as ambitious as you in my type of choir!

'Fundamental', there's a word I've been enjoying lately, especially as it also has a rude meaning. It is where one sits, on one's fundament. That's where my metaphysics is, fundamentally. But have I chosen to sit there, or did I somehow find myself in this seat only it took me a while to understand, once I was sitting here, quite where this seat was?

My current metaphysical problem relates to 'mind' in the analytic literature. There's a lot of talk about 'the causal closure of the physical', over there; and yet from Russell onwards there's a good century (as I'm discovering) of grave doubt about whether any philosophy can reasonably bottom out (forgive me) at a discipline like physics that has largely given up on talk of the causal and can barely bring itself to think much of time's arrow - except, that is, for the vital touch of (statistical) asymmetry between past and future that apo will like.

Or would our mental terms be abstractions over the matter it is composed of? — Andrew M

I hope I can butt in to ask, one puzzle for me in this area is why some terms are deemed 'mental' and some 'physical' and where the border falls. For instance, a description of a chemical compound, while arguably an abstraction over more primitive physical terms, is deemed physical, but words like 'thought' are deemed mental. I presume the one is vertically constitutive of and the other is just supervenient on the physical, but I'm not clear. To describe someone's character I might call them 'hot-blooded' or 'cold-hearted' but these are understood to be mental descriptions.

I'm interested for instance in the practising medical scientist's use of terms. In dealing with pain in a phantom limb, for instance, the patient's belief seems central, and we have no idea what the physical equivalent of their belief in their limb is. So the working scientist has to engage in methodological dualism. And yet a different, theoretical scientist argues that this 'belief' is non-primary, even though they can offer no empirical model of explanation.

That is nothing more than an expression of ignorance. Yeh sure, the Standard Model and fairy-theory are intellectually equivalent. — tom

It's difficult to be precise about this stuff, but I think precision is a good idea. We haven't got to my personal views, although your remarks are becoming unnecessarily personal, we're just trying to discuss the right terms for the debate. Panpsychism is a legitimate area of philosophical enquiry, even if, like you, I doubt it's a goer. Your sentence 'Do you think that the unification of the Standard Model with General Relativity will render the statement "Everything obeys the laws of physics" false?' seems to me empty: it asks me to speculate about a future event that you seem to think is certain to happen in some way you don't explain. I don't know what's exclamatory about 'placebo effects': they're a puzzle that requires explanation, since they mess up a lot of drug trials, for a start. I'm doing a lot of reading about them at the moment, if you want some references.

...the pros and cons of following a system vs not following a system? — anonymous66

I'm not following a system except systematic questioning. Of course scepticism can go too far. I think 'systematic questioning' demands of the questioner that they accept a certain structure to the sorts of questions that can reasonably be asked, but then it feels like 2500 years of philosophy provide a good basic structure. I start from Nelson Goodman's 'Ways of world-making', which argued that there could be several intellectual worlds, as long as each was internally consistent. And I start from a dislike of the univocal, which includes being anti-monotheistic: the idea of One Truth or One Good seems to be intrinsically fascist. Adorno and Horkheimer's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' leans towards saying that very thing. So...consistent anarchism, that the thing. It strikes me that self-organising nature's pretty much like that :)

Over the last 200 years, the understanding of the laws of physics has reached a point where we know certain principles that all future laws will respect: unitarity, conservation laws, computational universality, Lorentz invariance ...

When quantum mechanics and general relativity are unified, do you really think that will render the statement "everything obeys the laws of physics" false? — tom

I'm asking for precision here. If you're referring to future laws of physics, then you should say so. If you are referring to them, how can you know what will be in them? If you accept structural realism about future physical understanding, which is what your first para seems to say, then I think you should define physicalism that way and not refer to 'laws'.

Consciousness is very much a mystery, but pretending to solve it by declaring that matter possesses some unyet discovered physics that only manifests itself in the human brain, seems strikingly unscientific. — Tom

Well, panpyschic material is not more nor less undiscovered than your 'unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity'. They're both speculations. I too think panpsychism is unlikely but I think we need to unpack what 'unscientific' would mean. Many people are claiming that first person testimony about consciousness is not susceptible to scientific investigation, and I wonder if this is what lies behind the word 'unscientific'. So-called special sciences use testimony all the time however and make excellent science, if somewhat looked down upon by enthusiasts for physics chemistry and biology.

This is the particular area I'm reading about at the moment in fact - those sciences where a mixture of mental and physical terms are accepted in scientific discourse, like the study of placebo effects where 'mental states' are central, or the neuroscience of prosthetic aids where 'belief' or 'directed will-power' has to be used by people who have implants to 'train' their implants. I am wondering whether a general argument about 'mental' and 'physical' terms can be assembled from such cases or whether we're stuck with interactionist dualism, as this approach looks to be on the surface.

I'm doing a grad diploma at a late age, and meeting a lot of grads and undergrads. I agree with Nagase, (welcome here Nagase, btw, your experience and intellect is a boon to any forum) I'm getting a lot out of the face to face meetings with practising philosophers, and sitting in on seminars where people present papers and have their careful work kindly torn to shreds by their peers. It's a terrific challenge. Even if you radically disagree with some current viewpoints, the prevailing ethos where I am is a dialogic or dialectical method, so no viewpoint is too far out, as long as you understand how to put together an argument - there are Christians and Buddhist digging deep, logicians writing incomprehensible symbolic brilliance, aesthetics folk writing silly stuff about possible worlds (ok I don't get aesthetics), people nagging at persistent unsolved problems in many fields. I do think it's the sort of discipline though where shy people might well lose out, that would be my one caveat. But getting your head round complex problems and other people agreeing you have done, that's good for the self-confidence.

A guaranteed income sufficient for shelter, food, and basic health care would be great. A modern civilized society should be able to afford it, like it can afford infrastructure for transportation which enables all to travel, meet, and generate businesses, culture, intellectual life, sports, crafts, inventions, sciences etc. — jkop

I wholeheartedly agree. I went to see Caroline Lucas, UK Green leader, speak this week. If only she were running the UK.

A word people seem to be avoiding here is 'supervenience'. Current Academe mostly argues that the mental supervenes on the physical. So everything is physical underneath, as it were, but mental events have their own language and descriptions. That's some sort of starting-point for physicalists. Then - if I may be so bold as to try and summarise - the issues are

(a) Is this even a reasonable starting point? 'Everything obeys the laws of physics', for instance, won't do: is that the current laws, liable to be overturned in future, or the future imagined perfect ones? But if it's the future ones, mightn't they actually include what's currently called 'mental' within their purview? So should we just define 'physical' as 'non-mental'? There are various formulations to try and summarise what 'physical' would mean, and to counter the argument that you just end up in Galen Strawson's phrase with 'physicSalism'.

(b) If it is a reasonable starting point, what's the phrase 'the mental' doing? What are beliefs? What is phenomenological experience? What meaning do first person accounts have? Is all our mental stuff just epiphenomenal? Or does it occupy a discrete realm (as Davidson's anomalous monism argues)? Or is every little thing mental, hence panpsychism, which might leave a physical explanation intact? Or is every little thing protopanpsychic, a more attractive version to a naturalistic explanation, since it would say, all stuff has the potential to be experiential, and at some point in evolution various biochemical events occurred to trigger 'consciousness' or whatever it is?

Pardon me, I'm actually immersed in a module about this stuff at the mo'. See, and I managed to describe it without using that awkward beginning with qu-....

It takes quite an acrobatic feat, in my view, to accuse Heidegger of solipsism. 'Being with' is not a propositional idea that one can take or leave; it is just how it is to be Dasein, we are 'thrown' into such a state of being. I think you have to leave your propositions at the door like outdoor shoes to enter the realm of Dasein. Later they return through the door marked 'science' to be castigated by him. But for me, while I don't take that further step, I find the initial basics illuminating: analytic philosophy often seems preoccupied with 'the scientific image', and here is a strain of thought that instead hurls us into the primaryness of human experience. I don't see how you shine a light on such a view by imagining someone who is somehow born motherless on a desert island and miraculously survives into adulthood.

Slabs!

But what is basic language for? For the hominims? I'd suggest - imperatives. Then the negative must be ready to hand: to be able to refuse.