But gas is just more... I've lost track; is it real, or is it experience, or is it mere phenomena, or is it an idea, or is it information...? — Banno

Phenomena are things that are experienced, by definition, so those are the same thing. And I’m saying there’s nothing more to those phenomena than the information that is conveyed in the experience of them, so on my account that’s the same thing too. But an idea is something in a mind, so in a universe with no minds, just gas, there aren’t any ideas per se.

Then what we "experience" is made entirely of sodium ions. — Isaac

Or the photons that mediate the chemical interaction with those sodium ions, sure; at least, if you draw the border between “self” and “world” at the edge of the brain, rather than the edge of the whole body as I was doing earlier. Exactly where to draw that border is a fuzzy question to begin with and I don’t have a hard opinion on which of those is the more appropriate place.

Isn't "empirical" a property of justifications or knowledge? — frank

No, “empirical” just means related to experience. It can be used of knowledge—that which is gained from experience—but it’s not limited to that use. To say that reality is empirical is just to say there is nothing real that is beyond all experience, e.g. nothing supernatural.

So you're saying there are no unstated true propositions? — frank

Nope, I don’t see where you get that from.

every question has an answer
— Pfhorrest
....the principle grounding empiricism and rationalism generally;

every answer must be questionable
— Pfhorrest
....the principle grounding objectivism and critical rationalism. — Mww

You got those backward: answers being questionable implies empiricism and rationalism generally; questions being answerable implies objectivism and critical rationalism specifically.

Empiricism and objectivism are ontological positions in this context, while rationalism (including critical rationalism) is epistemological, so each of those principles has implications on both ontology and epistemology.

The brain is, if you recall your high school biology, the organ that coordinates all the other organs - far removed from a chaotic system. — TheMadFool

I think you’re still not understanding the technical meaning of “chaos” being employed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

For a very quick example, ontology has an impact on the possibility of the existence of God which has an impact on people’s ethical views and thereby their politics and their impact on many people’s lives.

experiences cannot be disembodied — Banno

“Observation” in a quantum mechanical sense happens even in a universe full of nothing but gas. Our human observation is just a complicated form of that. I mean “experience” here in precisely the same way.

Think of Quine's holism — Banno

I thought Quine's holism seemed obvious when I first heard about it, but then I was already a falsificationist by that time, and from a falsificationist viewpoint of course you're only ever testing the entirety of all your theoretical assumptions at once and can modify any of those assumptions you want to fit the new observation. Confirmation holism is only novel if you're already a confirmationist, which I'm not.

It's fine to question anything, but absurd to question everything. — Banno

I didn't say to question everything (at once). Like I said, I'm not coming from a place of Cartesian doubt; I only described the relationship of Descartes' thought (and later commentary on it) to mine.

You callin' me names? — Banno

If "critical rationalist" is a name, then it's a good one.

I don't see that disembodying ideas by calling them "information" relieves you of the charge of idealism. — Banno

The disembodiment is the whole crux there. If the "ideas" can exist without there being minds to be thinking them, as they can on my account, then they're not really "ideas" as usually meant by that word, so I don't use that word.

Brains are chaotic physical systems — Pfhorrest

How do you know this? — TheMadFool

I'm not sure if you're questioning the "physical systems" part or the "chaotic" part. I'll admit that I'm not absolutely certain on the "chaotic" part, but given the ridiculous complexity of brains, that seems a safe bet.

Snowball effect. — Outlander

This is basically what "chaotic" means: prone to the snowball effect, or more usually, the butterfly effect. Tiny differences at one time amplify to enormous differences at later times.

The antidote is the realisation that not just certainty, but also doubt, requires justification. — Banno

You seem to be arguing here for a critical rationalism, which I also support. But that's an epistemological position (which particular beliefs are justified), not an ontological position (what even is it for something to be real). The two are not in conflict, and are in fact necessitated by the same deeper principles.

Empiricism is necessitated by the same principle that necessitates rationalism more generally: every answer must be questionable, which means not taking anything on faith, which means not entertaining claims about anything that can't be tested.

Meanwhile objectivism is necessitated by the same principle that necessitates critical rationalism specifically: every question has an answer, which directly entails objectivism, but also demands a rejection of justificationism, as that leads via infinite regress to nihilism, leaving only the options of fideism, which we've already ruled out above, or else critical rationalism.

In any case, I'm not arguing for empirical realism from a place of Cartesian doubt. I haven't actually presented much of an argument here at all, merely an exploration of the relation of empirical realism to other threads of philosophical thought, including Spinoza (it's a neutral monism but not like his), Mill (it's much like his ontology), Descartes, Gassendi and Lichtenberg (it's not like Descartes because of the reasons Gassendi and Lichtenberg give), and Whitehead (it's very much like his ontology).

My argument for this position would just be an argument against nihilism (including solipsism, relativism, and subjectivism), and an argument against transcendentalism (meaning in this case basically supernaturalism), leaving us with the position that there are objective answers to questions about reality, but that those answers consist entirely of claims about the kinds of experiences there are available to be had in what circumstances.

How can mind-like stuff be just the activity of brains — Banno

"Mind-like stuff" is not the activity of brains, on my account. Actual minds are. "Mind-like stuff" is a loose way of saying essentially "information": it's the kind of stuff that minds process. Minds, being the behavior of brains, are made of that same stuff, because all physical stuff is. In a computer, every program is made of data, and what those programs act upon is more data. I'm saying reality is analogous to that, or maybe not even so distant as to be an analogy. Reality is made of information, of the kinds that minds process, but information that exists whether or not minds are there to be processing it; minds, being (behaviors of) real physical things like anything else, are made out of that same information, that they then process. The data is first, execution of the data comes later, and only certain data constructs do any interesting data-processing when executed; most just crash. (Which is why not all this information-stuff reality is made of exhibits consciousness like we normally think of it, despite being made of the same stuff as brains that can be conscious; it's not structured correctly, into a thinking machine. It's data that doesn't do anything interesting when executed).

Are they particles, and hence Pfhorrest is a realist, or are they "occasions of experience", and hence Pfhorrest is an idealist? — Banno

a vicious little circle if ever there was one — Banno

"Minds are an action of physical things, but physical stuff is made of ideas in minds"... sure, that's a primitive way I once thought of this line of thought decades ago, when I was tempted by both idealism in ontology class and materialism in philosophy of mind class.

The resolution to that apparent conflict is neutral monism. There isn't mental stuff and material stuff, or just one or the other, but a neutral stuff that's kinda both or neither. Physical stuff is phenomenal stuff, the kind of stuff you can empirically observe, but that isn't dependent on you observing it, that is independent of your particular subjective experience, without being something completely beyond all possibility of being experienced.

One direction away from that position lies supernaturalism, believing in stuff that can't possibly be observed, the existence of which could only be taken on faith, but "it's really objectively real I swear" if you do take it on faith. In the other direction away from it lies some kind of subjectivism, relativism, solipsism, or nihilism, denying that there is any reality to the stuff you experience beyond your experiencing of it, such that it would cease to exist if you did. Carefully avoiding anything like either of those leaves you where I am: empirical realism, or physicalist phenomenalism, or anti-supernaturalist anti-solipsism if you really prefer.

Brains are chaotic physical systems, which means they are extremely sensitive to initial conditions, and rapidly diverge in their future behavior based on accumulations of tiny tiny differences in ongoing conditions. Two identical chaotic systems sitting right next to each other undergoing “the same” (to the limits of our measurements) experiences would be expected to diverge in their behavior, even if physicalism is true, even if determinism is true.

If determinism were false, conjoined twins could diverge even if all their experiences were EXACTLY the same, without undermining physicalism. And even if determinism is true, because the experiences of the two brains are ever so slightly different, and brains are chaotic, we would still expect divergent behavior between them anyway.

In the medium term, at least. We would still expect convergent long-term trends between conjoined twin just like we expect between ordinary twins, ordinary siblings, or just people living similar lives, for the same reason that we can predict climate more accurately than weather.

In the very act of setting out this fabulous journey you use, and hence must admit, the language in which it is embedded. Here's a certainty that escapes mere experience. — Banno

How is language something beyond experience, or behavior? It’s something we do to each other, and experience each other doing — as well as something we do to ourselves, and experience ourselves doing.

The stuff about the Higgs etc is really an addendum to the overall thesis, though I do think it's one of the more interesting things in there.

The overall thesis is that there is nothing to reality besides the observable features of it, nothing hidden behind our experience, of which our experience is merely a representation -- our experience is direct contact with a very small part of reality (the parts that we are literally in direct contact with: the photons hitting our eyes, and mediating the kinetic interaction between air molecules and our ears, or between anything else and our skin, as well as the chemical interactions with our olfactory sensors), and we (intuitively) infer the rest of reality from the behavior of that very small part, in exactly the same way that we can infer wind from the motion of leaves, or infer gravitational waves from the changing interference patterns of two carefully set-up lasers.

It's almost a kind of idealism, except that reality isn't "in" any mind(s), it's just made up of "mind-like stuff"; the actual (e.g. human) minds experiencing it being presumably just the activity of brains, those brains being made up of matter, which is made up of this "mind-like stuff", these "occasions of experience" as Whitehead called them.

It also ties into the mathematicism we were discussing in my other thread. Those "occasions of experience" are equally interpretable as behaviors of thing A upon thing B, as much as they are experiences by thing B of thing A; those are just two ways of looking at the interaction between things A and B. The things themselves in turn are just the bundles of their properties, which are all behaviors, or propensities to behave certain ways in response to certain things that are done unto them, i.e. in response to certain things they experience, i.e. certain other interactions. So every thing is entirely definable by its function from its experiences (inputs into it from its interactions) to its behaviors (outputs from it through its interactions). The interactions/experiences/behaviors are the edges of a complex graph, and the nodes of that graph, the things experiencing and behaving, interacting with each other, the functions mapping the stuff done to them to stuff that they do, are the objects of reality.

The stuff about the Higgs etc is just an interesting observation at the end of all of that, noting that a posteriori empirical science, which began by investigating big compound nodes in that graph (macroscopic objects) and has investigated over time into the smaller and smaller components, seems to have finally arrived a posteriori at components that can be taken as identical with the the very same constituents of reality that we've arrived at through a priori philosophizing here. Massless particles like photons (and the particles that get "blended" into electrons etc by the Higgs) are exactly like the "occasions of experience" that philosophers like Whitehead wrote about, and that in my elaboration upon that (viz the mathematicism stuff above) can be taken as signals passing between the mathematical functions that constitute the abstract object that is our concrete reality.

I don’t know, you’d have to ask a representative realist how they account from that. I think their view doesn’t make sense, that’s why I disagree with it.

I just thought of another way of relating subjective experiences to objective reality in my view. Subjective experience are like partial sums of an infinite series; objective reality is the total sum of that infinite series, which is the limit of the series of partial sums of it.

I’m not completely sure I understand your question, but if this helps answer: it’s a kind of direct realism wherein subjective experiences are just small, incomplete, and possibly distorted views of reality itself (rather than either an infallible complete view of reality, or only some kind of representation of a reality that might be nothing like its representation).

Is it a coincidence that Michigan is one state where the republican legislature might appoint it's own electors? — Echarmion

And one of only two such states with Democratic governors.

Trump Says He’s Stopping Stimulus Talks Until After Election — Michael

And then immediately backpedals... ish:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-kills-stimulus-talks-tweets-no-deal-until-after-i-n1242312

It is possible that oneself is the world, sure; that self and world are the same thing. But then you just have solipsism, which is trivial: even if the world just is oneself, there is still a divide between the parts of it that one has direct knowledge and control over, and parts that are beyond ones knowledge and control. Even if that whole world-self is all there is, there is still the same practical reason to investigate into and act upon the parts of it that seem ‘other’ exactly as one would if it were in fact other. In the end, identifying the world with oneself is no different than identifying oneself as just a part of the world, which is uncontroversially true.

I did a similar thread to this a while back with a bunch of more specific questions:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7036/whats-your-philosophy

If it is known that there are some elephants that look, walk, and quack like ducks...

On what topic?

Oh right, and vampires are even more closely related to bats than we are. Makes perfect sense.

I thought he was a vampire. Can vampires even get COVID?

If I may...

I think Oliver’s point is that we can never be sure whether any observed failure of predictability is due to nature being non-deterministic or just because our measurements and theories etc are imperfect: the answer to whether or not everything in the universe is perfectly deterministic if forever hidden beyond the limits of our knowledge, which while ever-growing is never absolute. So we can’t answer for sure whether determinism is true or not.

I think Kenosha’s point is that despite the above, indeterminism sorta has the burden of proof here, because so far everything that we have been able to know has turned out to behave deterministically, so we should expect that to continue to be the case as the limits of our knowledge push further and further out. If something seems unpredictable at the moment, it’s probably just because of shortcomings on our measurements or theories, not because it’s inherently random.

I think that even more than indeterminism just having the burden of proof, we pragmatically always must assume that it is false and that we merely haven’t developed the right theories or made accurate enough measurements to make accurate predictions yet. Because to do otherwise is simply to give up on trying to figure out what the deterministic laws behind things are. It’s true that there always might be none, but we can never know for sure that there are none, only that we can’t tell what they are YET. So all we can do is just choose one way or the other: either give up hope of ever figuring it out, or at least TRY by assuming that we can.

Information is the right track to be on.

Remember also that all programs are just data being executed, and all data is executable in principle, most of it just does nothing interesting when executed.

For example, french was the most beautiful and clear language in the world. — bcccampello

French is the most poorly pronounced Latin in the world.

Maybe I missed part of the earlier conversation, because I thought you were on the “we can falsify determinism” (as in “it is actually false”) side of things, and Kenosha was saying that nobody has yet done what would be necessary to falsify it.

That just means we are unable to be sure whether determinism is true or not.

I can explain for him.

Determinism is true if and only if:
- given a particular state of affairs,
- and the laws of nature,
- a particular future state of affairs is guaranteed.

So to prove determinism false, you need to:
- know a particular state of affairs
- know the laws of nature
- observe something contrary to what those ought to guarantee

Those are basically his three criteria.

Especially since I've never come across those criteria before, and yet have read 90% of Popper's opus, and he's the guy who came up with the criterion of falsifiability in the first place... which means that your criteria appear very much to be your criteria. So let's see some definitions. — Olivier5

I think you’re misreading Kenosha. He isn’t proposing alternative criteria for falsification generally. He’s saying what criteria would need to be met specifically to falsify determinism. Every hypothesis will have specific criteria by which to falsify it. He's suggesting the criteria by which determinism could be falsified. In other words, what observations would show that determinism was false.

Okay, so your wife has an insanely high-paying job. That's your secret. She is rich, and you live off of her.

I calculate that if your rent is about $750/mo, and all your other living expenses at least that much, and you can save 60% of it, then your household income must be at least $750*2*(10/4)=$3750/mo.

If your wife works an average of 13.5hr/wk, that's about 58.5hr/mo.

$3750/58.5hr ≈ $64/hr.

The median US household makes approximately $68,000/yr, usually with two people working full-time, for a median hourly pay of about $16/hr.

So your wife gets paid so much per hour, four times as much as the average American, that she can easily support two people at the median US income with only a half-time job.

That's why you and she don't have to work so much. Because she has a really good job.

Circling back to the main topic, that's why people care so much about getting a good job. So that they can live like that. Work fewer hours, do other stuff, still keep a roof over their head.

I don't know how your wife managed to secure such an amazing job. That's the real mystery.

Also, if you guys own her parents' house, but don't live in it, are you renting it out? That's more free money and so even less work you and she have to do.

If you don’t own property then you must rent. That is the biggest cost sink for most people, just having a roof over their head.

How much is your rent, and for how many square feet?

How much do you get paid, and for how many hours?

Most importantly: What other sources of income do you have?

Trump died — Maw

Link?

Your life story just raises the question of where the money to live that life comes from if not work. If you just lived in some kind of very cheap area AND nevertheless somehow had access to high-enough paying work that part time would cover it, I could see just living a simple life on part time jobs. But then you have all that expensive extravagant travel. Something doesn’t add up.

Lots of people would love to live the life you do, but simply can’t. I don’t know what advantage you have that you can, but your life vs theirs reflects that advantage, not their values.

Also those are dolphins not porpoises.

There are two important sub-questions: what use is philosophy to any given individual, and what use is philosophy to society as a whole.

To the first sub-question I answer that doing philosophy is literally practice at being a person, exercising the very faculty (sapience) that differentiates persons from non-persons. Doing philosophy literally helps develop you into a better person, increasing your self-awareness and self-control, improving your mind and your will, and helping you to find meaning in the world, both in the sense of descriptive understanding, and in the sense of prescriptive purpose.

It is much like martial arts for the mind: as the practice of martial arts both develops the body from the inside and prepares one to protect their body from attacks from the outside, both from crude brutes but also from more sophisticated attackers who would twist the methods of martial arts toward offense rather than defense, so too philosophy develops the mind and will from the inside, and also prepares one to protect their mind and will from attacks from the outside, both from crude ignorance and inconsideration but also from more sophisticated attackers who would twist the methods of philosophy against its purpose, into what might better be termed "phobosophy".

In a perfect world, the latter uses of either martial arts or philosophy would be unnecessary, as such attacks would not be made to begin with, but in the actual world it is unfortunately useful to be thus prepared; and even in a perfect world, with no external attackers, martial arts and philosophy are both still useful for their internal development and exercise of the body, mind, and will.


To the second sub-question, I answer that philosophy is the lynchpin of the entire chain of activities conducted by society, and so is instrumentally useful, in some distant way at least, toward any practical end whatsoever.

Every practical activity involves using some tool to do some job. That work may be the original jobs of keeping our bodies alive using the original tools of our bodies themselves, i.e. medicine and agriculture. It may be the jobs of making new tools to help with that, i.e. construction and manufacturing. Or multiplying and distributing our power to do that, i.e. energy and transportation industries. Or multiplying and distributing our control over that power, i.e. information and communication industries.

At the lowest level of abstraction away from the actual use of whatever tools to do whatever jobs, technological fields exist to maintain and administrate those tools, and business fields exist to maintain and administrate those jobs. A level of abstraction higher, engineers work to create the tools that those technologists administrate, while entrepreneurs work to create the jobs that those businesspeople administrate.

Those engineers in turn heavily employ the findings of the physical sciences, which could be said to be finding the "natural tools" available from which engineers can create new tools tailored to specific needs. And though this step in the chain seems overlooked in society today, the ethical sciences that I envision could be said to find the "natural jobs" that need doing, inasmuch as they identify needs that people have, which we might also frame as market demands, toward the fulfillment of which entrepreneurs can tailor the creation of new jobs.

And those physical and ethical sciences each rely on philosophical underpinnings to function, thereby making philosophy, at least distantly, instrumental to any and all practical undertakings across society.

I hold that the relationship of philosophy to the sciences is the same as that between administrative fields (technology and business) and the workers whose tools and jobs they administrate. Done poorly, they constantly stick their nose into matters they don't understand, and tell the workers, who know what they are doing and are trying to get work done, that they're doing it wrong and should do it some other, actually inferior, way instead, because the administration supposedly knows better and had better be listened to. But done well, they instead give those workers direction and help them organize the best way to tackle the problems at hand, then they get out of the way and let the workers get to doing work.

Meanwhile, a well-conducted administration also shields the workers from those who would detract from or interfere with their work (including other, inferior administrators); and at the same time, they are still watchful and ready to be constructively critical if the workers start failing to do their jobs well. In order for administration to be done well and not poorly, it needs to be sufficiently familiar with the work being done under its supervision, but at the same time humble enough to know its place and acknowledge that the specialists under it may, and properly should, know more than it within their areas of specialty.

I hold that this same relationship holds not only between administrators and workers, but between creators (engineers and entrepreneurs) and administrators, between scientists (physical or ethical) and creators, and most to the point here, between philosophers and scientists. Philosophy done well guides and facilitates sciences, protects them from the interference of philosophy done poorly, and then gets out of the way to let the sciences take over from there. The sciences are then to do the same for creators, they to do the same for administrators, they to do the same for all the workers of the world getting all the practical work done.

I kind of find it funny how there's so much emphasis upon 'earning money' or a 'decent job' — Mayor of Simpleton

In our capitalist society money will be demanded from you even to allow you to live the simplest life, and a good job is the only way to get that money efficiently enough to have time and energy left to do anything else with your life. Prioritizing those things is not reflective of the inner values of a person, but just practical recognition of the extant threats to a peaceful life that allows the pursuit of other values, and the proactive addressing of those threats.

What's become apparent to me is that not only do people not care about the truth, their truth is always how they want the world to be. — Kenosha Kid

Observing my religious family members, it’s pretty clear to me that that is the reason they are religious: because it would be just awful if God didn’t exist, therefore he does.

These various “truther” movements, who think that they alone are aware of the secret truth that THEY don’t want you to know, are effectively proto-religions already. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that they choose their beliefs on the grounds that it would be too awful otherwise, too. Even beliefs about malevolent cabals controlling the world etc, because the alternative to that is that evil is banal and omnipresent, and nobody is really in control of anything, which is much scarier than just a few villains without whom — if only the good guys could defeat them — everything would be just fine.

I am talking.

I am made of neurons, molecules, atoms, and particles.

They, and so I who am made of them, are shaped in part by society and culture, including our ancestors.

Where is the university? All you've shown me are buildings and grounds and students and faculty and books and equipment. Where in all of that is the university you promised to show me?

What I am saying is what I am saying. But why am I saying it? If there is some answer to that question, then that's a cause of me saying it. If there is no answer to that question, then I'm saying it for no reason -- at random.

Me saying this at random makes it much less my choice to say it than if I said it for some reason. That's why indeterminism is a much bigger threat to freedom than determinism.

It is of value both to yourself and to society for you to be familiar with the ways of thinking, the questions thought about, and answers people have come up with to those questions, in philosophy. (In descending order of value).

It is probably not a good monetary return on investment to pay a formal institution to teach you to do so.

If you can get some of that formal education "for free" as part of getting a more lucrative and practical formal education, though -- or if money is no object to you somehow -- I found that it was a great way to learn a lot about the topic.

If that's not an option for you, there are lots of options for studying it for free (besides the cost of your time and effort), since much of the material is freely available on the internet. It just might be harder to get as much out of it without a well-trained helping hand.

But that's what some of us are here for.

This kind of agent causation is nonsense. Everything that doesn’t happen for a definite cause happens randomly — that’s what randomness is. So the agent’s act of choosing is either caused by something that’s caused by something that’s causes by something ad infinitum, or it happens randomly. The latter is much worse for free will than the former.

Yeah 'cause the choices are between petitioning daddy Biden and doing nothing — StreetlightX

I am curious what other options you're thinking of specifically.