I'm not going to countenance such claims. So we won't progress here on that basis.

Cheers.

We already know that brains EM field that we measure as EEG is the NCC — Ulthien

No, we don't.

If qualia are private experiences, we can still talk about them. — AmadeusD

Sure, Then they are 'just what we ordinarily talk about using words like "red" and "loud".'

But there is more going on on here.

I'm seeing something that you don't — Wayfarer

Seems so. But is it an hallucination?

Maybe. And?

Your behaviour is dependent on their behaviour. Presumably. That's why you ask, isn't it?

...whatever the pain is (kind of a weird question) — frank

Isn't it? Point is, you do not need an answer to "what pain is" in order to do whatever it is you do. You just need the comparison to indifference. I hope that you are seeking to return the folk you are talking to, to that state of indifference, but then I don't know what your job is... :worry:

Why, thank you.

Your drunk is not wrong. If the keys are outside the light, he has fuck all chance of finding them, then if he must search, he is in the right place.

I've pointed out a few times that you keep searching when you probably ought stop... :wink:

See the post just above this.

The discussion of relative levels of pain is what decides your next actions. The doing is the thing.

Incidentally, the pain stuff fits well with Ramsey's account, beginning at a point of indifference - neither pain nor pleasure - and looking to how the present state differs from that point, and what is to be done to resort equilibrium.

But that point of indifference is not a mental object, nor is the pain.

The issue left hanging is how to sort out the inconsistency in our coffee drinker. We want ot know, do they really dislike coffee?

But that is to presume to much. Life is complex and dirty, and that while coherence might be a worthy goal, it is not always possible. Messiness is a feature, not a bug - a very Wittgensteinian point. There need be no "fact of the matter", but rather a series of interactions in which our coffee drinker makes decisions amidst conflicting normative demands for social harmony and good taste. They behave as if they like coffee for the sake of social harmony, which is a consistent position.

The question "do they really dislike coffee?" presupposes there's some determinate inner state that could settle the matter, which is precisely the picture Wittgenstein is rejecting.

So on to the other horn. It's seeing the only alternative as to

deny entirely this talk of consciousness and declare it ontologically non-existent and say language is all there is. — Hanover

Rejecting intentional attitudes as private objects does not entail rejecting intentional attitudes altogether. It is instead to reconceptualise them. Not being objects, they are not how things are in a hidden noumenal world, but normative constraints on how we want things to be. They are not objects we detect, but commitments we recognise and undertake.

All that stuff I've written elsewhere about direction of fit, goes here.

So onward. Intentional attitudes.

Two things to think about. The first is Wittgenstein's observation:

Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you. — PI Page 207

Supose we come across someone who behaves as if they like coffee. They drink coffee, make it for themselves and others, and so on. From their behaviour we infer that they do indeed like coffee. But suppose that our inference is mistaken, that they actually are indifferent or even dislike coffee, but go along with a pretence, perhaps for social reasons, in order to "fit in", or whatever.

Is there dislike for coffee a private object in the sense Wittgenstein discusses?

They now say "I've always disliked coffee - my behaviour was all pretence". Wittgenstein might reply "But how could you know that? Perhaps you are misremembering. Perhaps yesterday you liked coffee - you apparently drank it with gusto - but now your recollection is mistaken."

Now I want to be clear as to the point of this argument. It's not that the misremembering has indeed occurred, but that it might occur - the point is the fragility of the belief that they do not like coffee. Since there is no public evidence that supports the contention, it has no grounding, no way to be confident that the person does or does not like coffee. It's ephemeral, changeable... and indeed, it seems wrong to count it as a thing at all.

What is being rejected here is a picture of mind as a set of objects - mental furniture, as "...meanings that are generated from noumenal inner states", that our feelings, beliefs, desires and so on are things in our mind to which our language points.

This is a continuation of the rejection of the meaning of a word as the thing to which it refers, found in the first few pages of PI. Our beliefs are not found in some metal object, but in what we say and do. An intentional state is not a mental thing that grounds our actions, but a bit of language that keeps what we do consistent.

This view aligns with Wittgenstein’s critique of private language, with Davidson’s rejection of inner “causes” for beliefs in favour of interpretation, and with Ryle’s dismissal of the "ghost in the machine" and the myth of inner objects.

And it constitutes a rejection of the first horn of 's dilemma, the

...swirl of language we see take place that is caused by the noumenal, but the best we can say is that the noumenal is there but talking about (it) doesn't help us — Hanover

What is rejected is this two-level picture, in which the visible behaviour and language is caused by a hidden noumenal world. Meaning is not hiding behind our language but consists in what we do with our words.

There's a lot to unpack here, but I think I am rejecting both horns of the dilemma you set.

First, let's settle an ambiguity, one that might explain 's response. The use of "internal" might be understood as referring to the physical state of the brain or of the neural net in an LLM - the physical substrate on which the supposed program of consciousness runs. But I don't think that is what Hanover and I are talking about. We are interested in that we might better call the intentional state, the beliefs and desires and so on that supposedly exist and yet are not directly accessible to others.

There are two issues here, the relation between the physical substrate and the intentional state, which I'd like to set aside for a bit, and the relation between the intentional state and our behaviour, which is the topic Davidson and Wittgenstein give us so much to think about.

This?

https://philpapers.org/archive/CHACAL-3.pdf

It basically says watch.

A fine mind, has ChatGPT; such a good judge of intellectual virtue.

I either did not see this reply, or I left it intending to come back to it. My apologies.

Or perhaps I thought I had addressed it in the "On Certainty" thread, . I don't recall.

But I had reason to revisit Bayesian analysis as a stand-in for belief recently while reading Davidson's last book, such that I am re-thinking my response to the OP. Davidson makes use of Ramsey's account gives us a way of understanding what a belief and preference amount to, using just behaviour.

But that's different to saying that a belief just is a neural structure.

That unit is prior to multitude isn't really about the Holy Trinity, it's just relevant to speaking about the topic. Unlike Bob, Aquinas does not think the Trinity can be known through natural reason, only that God exists. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, Bob deviates from the True Path... and we agree he can't deduce the Trinity within Natural Philosophy. Cool.

I'm not relying on the Trinity being deducible. I'm taking it as it is presented, in the Shield of Trinity, and working out the consequences. And in that Shield transitivity is denied, which has the consequence of modal collapse.

Separately...

But that a fire is hot, heats, and illuminates, does not require three distinct flames or three distinct composite parts of a flame. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Analogical predication. Interesting, since it was the basis of logic in Mohism. The idea is that heat and light are caused by flame, but that the flame remains one. But god's will and his knowledge are not caused by god, not results of, so much as inseparable from, his very nature.

The moment you begin to say something like, “God knows Himself as good, and so wills Himself as good, and hence his will is Love” you relying on a sequence of conceptual moves that require some functional or modal distinction within God. What has the appearance of having a sound logical structure is no more than a series of analogical or poetic moves.

In the end, what appears to be metaphysical precision turns out to be a kind of rhetoric —using philosophical forms to say things that only make sense if you don’t push them too hard, and which are accepted not on their own merit, but for the completely different grounds of revelation and faith. Hence the criticism offered earlier in this thread, that the conclusions of the reasoning are already a given, and the reasoning is just huff and fluff.

It's more honest, to my eye, to say that such things are a mystery than to pretend they are the necessary product of philosophical analysis.


And...

article 9 — Count Timothy von Icarus

...does not address the particular objection I raised.

If he thinks it, he wills it, if he wills it, it is so. — Banno

Either the Trinity is a mystery, and logic doesn't apply, or it's logical, and a contradiction.

Again, understanding this in terms of substitution drops all the huff and fluff.

If we say that the Father and the Son are “the same” in virtue of sharing in transcendental unity, that may avoid numerical identity — but then we are no longer using “same” in any logically tractable way. Substitution still fails. The contradiction arose precisely because we were trying to preserve intelligible substitution, transitivity, and logical identity while claiming that the Father is not the Son, &c.

The cost is, you can no longer track sameness with logic.

God’s knowing and willing are not separate faculties or processes but identical in the unity of divine being. — Wayfarer

Perhaps.

He still can't think about what it would be like if you had not replied to me. If he thinks it, he wills it, if he wills it, it is so.

God results in modal collapse. Either he is a contradiction or a divine mystery.

, , if your aim is to show that the Trinity is a Devine Mystery, your have succeeded.

But why the recourse to logic? Why not just stick with "It's not supposed to make sense"?

Why all the contrivance?

In this case, “is” doesn’t mean numerical identity (as in "Clark Kent is Superman") but rather participation in a common essence. — Wayfarer

Well, that's problematic in itself... (See what I did there?)

To say that they are not "numerically identical" is to say that substitution fails.

If transitivity is denied, then the Son cannot be substituted for the Sprit, and hence they must be different.

But they are the same.

Contradiction.

SO back to the point, that the notion fo the trinity is incoherent.

Here's maybe an odd little nugget that might clarify the problem with such Thomistic reasoning. I've already mentioned this problem, but it might be helpful to expound and expand it.

6. Since He is absolutely simple, His willing and thinking are identical.

So we should be able to substitute his will for his thinking.

So what god wills, god thinks, and what god thinks, god wills. Hence he cannot think what he does not will, nor will what he does not think.

So he cannot think about what might have been the case had I not written this paragraph. To think about it would have been to will it, and hence to make it so.

Perhaps then Thomism commits to Lewis' counterfactuals - that every possibility is an actuality. That would be an odd result.

Following the way of using equivalence just set out, we could substitute "God" for "Father, or for "Son", or for "Holy spirit"; but not "Father" for "Son", and so on.

The substitution is not transitive.

So yes, it does set out something of what is implied in the idea of a trinity.

Without doing the calculation, I suspect that this would result in modal collapse. That might not be a good outcome.

As I said, Thomists will be able to mount a defence for each of these objections.

Must a glass that is called "half empty" necessarily be a different, distinct metaphysical entity from the same glass when referred to as glass "half full?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can you substitute "half-empty" for "half-full"? In most cases, yep. We call those cases "extensional contexts", and we may use substitution for our definition of equivalence. Doing so drops the whole archaic discussion of "real metaphysical distinctions" and "beyond the category of being".

Seems to be a much cleaner approach.

I thought retribution semantically referred to restoration. — Bob Ross

ok, that makes sense of some of the things you have said. Thank you.

Retribution has a curious etymology, apparently referring back to considerations between the three tribes of Rome - from tri..., tribe, tribune, tribute, and retribution. So it originally had more of the flavour you suggest. Now it is about punishment.

You never address what I write though — Bob Ross

I devoted just under three hundred words to directly addressing a single paragraph, .

But I'll do it again, for your 36-point argument.

I think it a terrible argument. It pretends to be syllogistic, to be of the form of a series of syllogisms, but mixes metaphorical statements, leaps over unarticulated premisses, sliding from ontological claims to personalistic language, without logical mediation. The pretense of syllogistic form masks a series of conceptual sleights of hand, category shifts, and metaphorical intrusions.

This is the nature of the Thomistic style, featuring notions such as divine simplicity, pure actuality, pure intellect, and causal emanation via knowing and willing, all of which are to say the least questionable.

Despite claiming god to be a simple, it juxtaposes will and intellect; subject and object; father and son and so on. But those distinctions are the very thing denied by divine simplicity. The argument rests on this contradiction. Now we know that a contradiction implies anything, so we should be wary of an argument that is so dependent on contradiction.

Then there's the idea that if god thinks something is real, it becomes real. Let's set aside the issue of how this debars god from thinking about things that are not real - the common "what if..." of modality. In thinking about himself he somehow brings about the Son. Is the Son then the same as that thinking, and so not more than a thought, or is the Son a second being caused by God's thinking of himself - in which case he is not simple, not One Being? These and other objections will result from the very notion that to think something, for god, is to create it, since in doing so god must drop the distinction between existing and being thought about. But we have that distinction for good reason.

In more modern terms there is a play on the use of the existential operator, a slide from using it as second order predicate to a first order predicate, that is invalid in ordinary predicate logic. Assigning a predicate to an individual presumes there is an individual, it cannot create that individual. See Inexpressibility of Existence Conditions.

Then there is the point I made earlier, the use of anthropomorphic language on which the charge of presuming what you wish to conclude rests. Is this language built into the argument, or is it stretching abstract reasoning to meet revelation? It smells like Anselm's "...and this we all call god"; a conclusion unsupported by the proceeding argument, but fitting it neatly into already accepted doctrine. A slight of hand.

Let's look at a sample.

. 6. Since He is absolutely simple, His willing and thinking are identical.
7. Therefore, Him willing something as real is identical to Him thinking of something as real.
8. Therefore, when He thinks of something as real it must create something.

It's not a syllogism, since it misses the hidden assumption that thinking of something as real necessarily makes it real. God, then, can' think of things that are not real, something that is routine for us. So what we have here is a loaded metaphysical claim, not a deduction, as well as the contradiction in being an absolute simple and yet having identifiable will and intellect.

Reiterating, one problem is that the argument assumes divine simplicity but proceeds by introducing various juxtapositions and differentiations.

Another is that it unjustly slides from the language of necessity into the language of revelation.

Another is that it apparently invalidly moves from a second level existential predication to a first level existential predication - it derives the existence of a thing from it's properties.

Another is the ambiguity of key terms such as "create", "real", "person" and so on.

And the main objection, that it is guided by a doctrinal target.

Now I am sure you will be able to mount a defence for each of these objections. That in itself is problematic, since it will add to the count of 36 lines... Sure, you are able to add and add and add, explaining to yourself why this argument makes sense - but is that enough? Don't you aslo want an argument that others will accept? At what point do you give up the whole enterprise as a Bad Lot?

I've already done so.

It's a curious calculation. Other policies that would save that many lives would be quickly adopted. Yet this policy is resisted so ardently in the US, and not elsewhere.

That is a discord that is worth following up on.

:rofl:

I hadn't read your other post until you replied to me directly, but thanks for providing an example of the pathology I am pointing too. Yes, the US has this more in common with Brazil and Mexico than with France, the UK and Australia.

Is that a good thing?

I generally supported the Australian Governments Covid precautions. — Wayfarer

As do I. The misrepresentation of the policies notwithstanding.

What's perhaps most interesting here is the extent to which folk are willing to not see what your graph so plainly shows - or to attempt to explain it away, or change the subject.

Plainly, they want their guns and will not be swayed.

Now psychosis is "a mental state where a person loses touch with reality, experiencing symptoms like hallucinations and delusions."

Madness.

I want you to demonstrate to me where the argument from change, going back to Aristotle, depends on divine revelation to demonstrate the existence of God. — Bob Ross

But that's not what I pointed out. The conclusion that god is father, son and spirit is not a cogent consequence of natural theology, but is dependent on revelation.

I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN. — Bob Ross

I noted that earlier. I don't much mind what you choose to call yourself. I'm trying to address what you have written.

Do you have anything to contend with in terms of the actual concepts of divine simplicity, pure actuality, etc.? — Bob Ross

Those terms are at least specialised Thomist terminology with their own language game, or perhaps just language on vacation, verging on word salad.

You are pretending to know my motivations for accepting arguments like the one from change; and you are painfully mistaken. — Bob Ross

I attempted to infer what might justify your accepting what to me appear quite odd, idiosyncratic bits of language. In doing so I made reference to why others have done much the same.

It appears that you are trying your best to give a logical and reasoned account of a narrative that is inherently incoherent. I'm sorry if pointing this out appears disrespectful, but looking into logic and language is what we do here. You seem to be justifying an iron age myth using Greek logic. We might have moved on since these things were fashionable.

Blessed are the cheese-makers, for they shall inherit the earth. — frank

Obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

Seesm to me there has been some movement in your position. That's good.

My point was that we don’t have to agree on what is sinful to agree that if we sin then there must a punishment; and from there my argument begins. — Bob Ross

Justice, then, is fundamentally about restoring the order of things and not punishment — Bob Ross

It remains that a just god would not seek punishment s such, but restitution and restoration.

Eternal damnation remains inexplicable.

I've giving you every reason to believe that I believe that I can justify my claims through natural theology; and you keep acting like I haven't done that. — Bob Ross

Yes, you believe that you have justified your claims through natural theology. But have you? Again, the trinity and the son of god, which you apparently believe are conclusions of your argument, are actually ad hoc add-ons. Look again at your second paragraph, for example, where you move from an impersonal absolute simple to "him" to

The Father is the one that is known; and the Son is the knowledge of Himself. — Bob Ross

There is no argument there that reaches the conclusion that a simple must also be three, just a confusion of misused words. I haven't payed much attention to your actual arguments becasue as arguments, conclusions reached from premises, they are truly dreadful.

"God is absolutely simple". Ok, a stipulation, god has no parts. "His pure act of will and pure act of thought are identical". Where does the "He" come from? Despite having no parts we can differentiate his will from his action... how's that? But Ok... "He creates by willing something as real" yet "His will and thought are identical", and "His perfect knowledge of Himself is Him thinking of Himself as real" and so on... again and again differentiating parts within the thing that has no parts. "Him knowing Himself generates something real out of Himself"... then isn't he no longer one, and no longer simple? Yes, since "His object of knowledge of this creation is Himself", and yet isn't he seperate from his creation? "He is both subject and object" and yet he is still simple, and undifferentiated... And then, like a rabbit pulled from a hat, "The Father is the one that is known; and the Son is the knowledge of Himself." Where did the father and the son come from? Why those words?

Becasue the bible describes god as male and the father and the son.

That's not natural theology. (Spinoza does a much better job of taking this style of argument to it's natural consequence, but the pantheist conclusion is not in keeping with revelation, and so is not acceptable to Christians)

Now we might accept that a paragraph such as that might serve to express a divine mystery, and not be dependent on things such as coherence and validity, but not if you offer it as a piece of philosophy, and so ground it in that narrative.

That's not a man of straw, but a reflection on what you have actually written. I do not believe I am being unfair to your position, but showing its inadequacies.

That gun is far more likely to kill you or someone you love than a home invader.

You are kidding yourself, and putting your family in danger.

Sad, but that's it.

They’re full because it’s a good pyramid (ponzy) scheme. — Punshhh

It is, but I suspect that's more process rather than cause.

I think your equation of Thomism with scientific method risible.

What to make of the shenanigans of the Nationals, wanting to drop zero emissions?

So bring on the Revolution...!

The root of the whole issue is the equation of weapons with civil liberty. — Wayfarer

Yep.

And no, I don't see it as a distraction. — MrLiminal

That explains a lot.

Countries that have banned guns also have wealth inequality and violent criminals. — MrLiminal

:rofl: Such logic!

Remember this?


Don't get me wrong, the demise of US democracy is a tragedy.

So @Bob Ross might be right? Trivially, of course. The methodological point stands.

You will have a hard time justifying Thomism on falsifications grounds, but if you think you can, go ahead. Using Popper to justify Aquinas would indeed be against time. But trivially, not invalid.

There's a hint of becasue the theory hasn't been shown to be wrong, it must be right somewhere here. I doubt, and hope, that Bob is not content with a demonstration that he might not be wrong. I hope he wants more than just that.