But when you stipulate an actual world, then the others are no longer (metaphysically) possible. — Metaphysician Undercover

No.

It really would help if you read some logic.

, , I suspect I don't disagree, which is most disagreeable. But I'm not confident that I understood what you said, so I may be wrong.

You do think so. — noAxioms

"The universe is not composed of true statements" contains no indexical expressions. It contains no indexical terms (no “I”, “here”, “now”, “actual”, “this world”, etc.).

"The actual world is the one we are in" is indexical. It contains "we".

...this particular universe is the actual one due to your presence in it — noAxioms

On this account, any possible world in which you exist would be an actual world.

This all seems a rather odd thing on which to focus.

That usage has both of us detecting the same public actual coffee. That usage is not a reference to the experience of the scent, only to the action of detection of the public substance. — noAxioms

Pretty much.

Can I sugest

Boxes and diamonds: An open introduction to Modal Logic
as a companion to this thread.

HTML at https://bd.openlogicproject.org/bd-screen.pdf

Here's the definition of extensionality, from p.205, Appendix A:

Definition A.1 (Extensionality). If A and B are sets, then A=B iff every element of A is also an element of B , and vice versa.

It's the rule that these are all, extensionally, the very same: {a, a, b }= {a, b }= {b, a}.

And if the item a is also called "Fred", the they are extensionally the same as {Fred, b}.

The main point here, unless I am misreading, appears to be that modal logic (logic that uses the necessarily and possibly operators) is intensional, not extensional. — NotAristotle

Better, that it was thought to be intensional, until Kripke. Read on.

if we assign to one of the possible worlds the status of "actual world" by realist principles... — Metaphysician Undercover

We are stipulating that that one world is the actual world, not deducing it. Any world can counted as w₀. It's built in, not contradictory. There is no modal difference between the actual world and other possible worlds. The difference is metaphysical, not modal.

No wonder I'm so confused — Metaphysician Undercover

You have yet to study modal logic, but insist on your opinion. That's why you are confused.

the world generally operates on US Eastern Standard Time. — Hanover

Not down here.

It's not a live chat. It's just a conversation like a regular ChatGPT page, but with the AI interjecting.

Since it violates the rules of the model for one of the possible worlds to be the actual world — Metaphysician Undercover

:roll:

It doesn't.

"Intersectionality", as it's called.

Central to both the social and critical models of disability, but external to the medical model.

Fine. Bear in mind that what I said here is in response to a request. In my opinion, the social security system in the US is appalling.

I can go in to the deficiencies of the US social security system in more detail, if that's where you want to go. That's usually seen negatively, as bashing America, and would be a bit off-topic, but happy to do so if it serves some purpose.

All of which is not to say that our system is ideal. Far from it.

Cool. — frank

Yeah, not so much. Leaves me pretty cold, really. :grimace:

These are people she has met personally.

And yes, we have also been involved in exposing scams.

You're such a compassionate person Banno. — frank

Come on, you know me better. Not I, Wife.

I'm not posturing, I'm pointing to a problem. And you did ask.

How would you say it stacks up to the USA's? — Moliere

We've sent aid packages to folk we know in the US who have not been able to get the support they need.

Yeah, I know. Shocking.

Everyone I've ever met who was living "on disability" (receiving SSI payments) was doing pretty well. — frank

Not what we see, on various international forums for folk with disabilities. The situation is pretty dire.

And you have a president who openly mocks disability.


Hey, you guys asked.

None of the possible worlds could be the actual world, as that would constitute an invalid difference, within the collection of possible worlds, one would be the actual world. — Metaphysician Undercover

Risible.

One of the possible worlds is the actual world.

Either that, or the actual world is not possible.

I've always seen it as a way of re-framing the debate in analytical terms — Wayfarer

Analytic philosophy is a broad church.

But that last paragaph is somewhat ambiguous. You see qualia as a way of undermining Chalmers? But for him the “hard problem” relies on the reality/cogency of qualia.

I keep seeing "right winger" as "right whinger".

There's something very deep in that.

It is like saying 'you are intolerant because you do not tolerate racism' — unimportant

Yep.

Tolerance is often insufficient. It will not do to simply tolerate divergence while still despising it. The further step is to accept divergence. We accept multiculturalism, LGBQTI+, disability and so on as aspects of human variation. Racism, we don't accept, but tolerate; that is, we refrain from denying them civil rights or using coercion against them so long as they abide by the law. This is quite different from accepting racism itself. Acceptance applies to people’s identities, capacities, and ways of life; tolerance applies, in limited fashion, to people whose doctrines we reject.

The grammar of tolerance and acceptance is context-dependent. Acceptance cannot apply to doctrines that deny the very conditions for ethical coexistence. Coherent belief revision requires distinguishing between beliefs about human variation (to accept) and beliefs about harmful ideologies (to interpret but not accept).

The left doesn’t conflate tolerance and acceptance; it simply applies each concept to its appropriate domain. Flattening them into a single “more vs. less tolerant” scale misses the ethical point.

So for some p, the possibility of p ends when p occurs and for other p it doesn't. Furthermore, the ending of the possibility of my winning the Kentucky Derby 2025 does not depend on whether I win or lose or even take part. It depends only the the race happening. The disappearance of this specific p depends only on the date, not on whether I win or not. — Ludwig V

Yep. This is formalised by accessibility relations. metaphysically, before the race is run, both the worlds in which you win and those in which you do not are accessible; any might become the actual world. After you win, only the worlds in which you win are accessible. Semantically, both before and after the race is won, we can access both the worlds in which you won and those in which you did not.

Conflating these is the exact error Meta repeatedly makes.

What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. — hypericin

I don't think so. Rather what you see as epistemic - an inability to know if someone is conscious - is the result of thinking about a family of related notions as if they were a single notion.

It's a mistake to think of consciousness only in terms of having a particular object, some private quale. The very idea of a private definition of consciousness is a philosophical artefact born of misusing words like “experience” and “inner” together with a misguided notion of essential characteristics. A picture that holds us enthralled.

Now I think I've demonstrated that, over the last page or so. I don't see that there is an account of qualia that can hold it's own.

None of what I've said here is to claim that we are not conscious. That's a common error hereabouts. What is shown is the poverty of adopting only one account, the possession of quale, as the arbiter of consciousness.

Thanks for doing your homework... :wink:

For what it's wort, the NDIS here differentiates disability/impairment on the one hand form medical issues on the other, using the following criteria:

1. A disability is permanent.
2. A disability involves a substantial reduction in functional capacity.
3. A disability must affect a person’s ability to work, study, or take part in social life, and they must likely need long-term supports.

The impairment must be functional and permanent and require support. That's very much following the medical model. It reinforces the deficit model, framing disability as a problem for an individual body, not as a disjunction between that body and its environment. It presumes the evaluative place of a "normal" body, an unquestioned baseline. It arbitrarily rejects chronic illness, which would otherwise count as a disability. It ignores lived experience of fluctuating or episodic disability.

Now my advocacy has been towards a capabilities focus, looking at the valued human capabilities that are restricted, and what supports enable the person to actually realise them. In this framing consideration of the impairment is replaced by consideration of what supports are needed to allow the person to achieve their capabilities. "assistance with daily living" and "mobility supports" changes to "self-care" and "social participation".

This approach has wide recognition, and underpinned the initial vision of the NDIS, but met opposition in the implementation, the bean-counters not being familiar with capabilities-based metrics. The dynamic between medical and social models is ongoing.

Given that dynamic, considerations involving critical theory are a long way from the centre of the discussion.

If you take a set of possible worlds, and apply some realist principles to deduce "the actual world"... — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, again, again, That's not what is being proposed. Any of the possible worlds could be the actual world - hence, "there is no modal difference between the actual world and the other possible worlds". Modal theory does not tell us which possible world is actual.

Your presumption that it does is exactly your confusing the modal and the metaphysical, your denial of p→◇p.

This is a pretty tedious conversation. You make the very same error, repeatedly. The actual world is one of the possible worlds. If you deny this, you must also deny reflexivity, which is to say you deny that we can talk about the actual world. You restrict yourself to quite simplistic and unusable modal systems.

All of which was set out formally, last week, and remains unaddressed.

But it's helping my post count. So carry on.

So we accept a poor definition over contemplating that consciousness is an ambivalent notion?

In first aid we are taught to test to see if someone is unconscious by asking for a response - "can you hear me? Open your eyes! What's your name? Squeeze my hand!". Some folk tend to forget this sort of thing doesn't apply to jellyfish and rocks.

In extremis, people may be conscious but unresponsive, which has led to a body of work looking for "no-report" tests for consciousness. One suggestion is that medical folk look for the "neural correlate of consciousness", which face the problem of how to establish conscious experience without first-person evidence. No-report paradigms rely on eye-movement, neuro-imaging, or physiological measures as indicators of consciousness. The trouble with no-report approaches is that they tend to diagnose cases of consciousness as cases of unconsciousness, the “bored monkey” problem, in which a monkey appears unconscious because it fails to follow the red dot, when it's just bored. Perhaps the panpsychists are right, and we are attributing unconsciousness ot rocks that are simply bored.

At the other extreme, would it make sense to insist that someone was unconscious, despite their protests to the contrary?

Is it that we have not yet found a clean and clear definition of consciousness, or is it that consciousness is not one thing, with a clean and clear definition?

Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity?

That's true. But the fact that the existence of the statement that Mount Everest is 29,000 ft high depends on human beings, does not show that the existence of Mount Everest depends on human beings at all. De re and de dicto. — Ludwig V

Thank you.

The semantic model does not commit us to the existence of its content. But if the actual world is affirmed to be a part of that semantic model, as you and others here continue to insist, then this is contrary to realism which assumes that the actual world is independent from any semantic model. — Metaphysician Undercover

As if we could not talk about the actual world.

You can't have it both ways, assert that the actual world is a part of a semantic model, with no claims to existence, and also assert that there is a real independent, existing actual world. — Metaphysician Undercover

Because, as explained many times, it's not the semantic model that shows which possible world is actual.

But you cannot see this. That's about you, I suppose.

A bit of a stretch, maybe. But there is a respect for persons in, say Nussbaum and Witt, both classists, that is not found in what passes for Aristotelianism in the forum; and there might be some overlap. Witt is pretty wild in some regards.







That second tension, the deconstruction of normativity, is something I have time for, and outside of Aristotelian thinking.

Fair. We don't have your background.

There's a huge body of critical theory relating to disability. "Crip theory" in particular.

Given the response to the pretty modest proposals in the OP, the audience here might be a bit too... shocked for a productive discussion.

Seems simple enough. For the staff, one grumpy patient. For the man, yet another trip to an unfamiliar space full of people who will not listen. The cumulative effect of emotional micro trauma, of having to repeat the same thing over an over. It's a common grievance for folk with disabilities.

...but I think he'd be able to eat, though he might end up with mashed potatoes on his hands. — frank

Two things. Why should it be you making that judgement rather than him? For you to decide that him getting in a mess is OK? And what hospital is this, so I can avoid it. Sounds like the staff morale is shite.

Added: AS in, this seems not to be an issue of disability, but of hospital management.

Pardon me, but I didn't think you meant morally when you asked that question. — L'éléphant

The presumption that a disability is a deficit does exactly that, no? Perhaps not moral - although there are those who say disability is caused by the sins of the parents - but it's at least evaluative. This is the experience of folk with disabilities.

The point was to increase staff time at shift change. — frank

In order to save them having to come back when the poor bugger couldn't eat. Call me picky, but being able to eat seems important to patient wellbeing.

The study of human anatomy is where to start. — L'éléphant

SO a statistical average? And that provides an ought here?

Are you sure that's a good argument? How do we go from "you don't have a hand" to "You ought have a hand"?

Was his request unreasonable?

He saved staff time by improving communication at the shift change.

Why should a semantic model commit us to the existence of the things quantified over? Your whole edifice still depends on an equivocation between what is and what is said. It's as if you were to chastise Tolkien because Hobbits are not real. nThe confusion is yours.

I've answered already. Several times. Here's the best I am willing to do.

The song remains the same.

Yep.

If I recall correctly, @Philosophim had strong reservations concerning regret after gender-affirmation surgery. Studies I found show that regret is a factor, however at low levels, but note methodological issues. It doesn't appear to be a strong enough factor to inform policy.

The presumption, in , seems to be that transitioning does not treat gender dysphoria.

That is, from what I have seen, factually incorrect. Meta-studies are readily available to justify this position.

Note that we have moved to empirical studies, rather then considering conceptual issues. We are no longer doing philosophy.

Only in that I'm here when I could be setting more seed trays. But I like doing both, and think I've a reasonable balance. Wife might disagree.