there are no meaningful non-scientific questions — Kenosha Kid

Is the question of whether there are meaningful non-scientific questions a scientific questions?

But what if S is infinite? — EnPassant

Then it wouldn't be representable by a repeating decimal. Only series that converge (not diverge to infinity) can be represented by repeating decimals. So you'll never have this problem with a proof of that sort.

To support this thought, they define "motion" in very strange ways, as Kenosha has demonstrated. This makes the thing described as "motion" something completely different from what we commonly refer to as motion. — Metaphysician Undercover

We ordinarily talk quite readily of motion or change with respect to a dimension other than time as we usually experience it. Hence the mountain that gets smaller with altitude even though it stays the same size with time; the pipe along its side that gains altitude as it moves westward, even though it’s not moving with respect to time; the abstract line that moves in a y-ward direction over the x-ward direction, even though it too doesn’t move with respect to time.

Eternalism just says that motion and change over time is no different than such “motion” or “change” in one spatial dimension over another, except that we experience the dimension of time differently.

I've been following. I told you earlier, your depiction of eternalism is a straw man. You're arguing against something that nobody is defending. Eternalists don't think that the universe is motionless. They think motion has to be with respect to something. 3D objects move with respect to a fourth dimension of time, tracing out a 4D shape as they do so. Those 4D objects have nothing defined to move in respect to, but they don't need to move in order for motion as we normally think of it to be possible, because that's the motion of 3D objects with respect to time, not the motion of 4D objects with respect to... what exactly?

Are you wanting to argue that the 4D object moves? — Luke

Moves with respect to what? Time is one of the four dimensions.

If you're looking at a 4D object, where one of the four dimensions is time, then you're standing outside of time, and there is no dimension that seems timelike to you in which for the 4D object to move.

An object moving in three dimensions with respect to the fourth will just look like a 4D object to you, though.

This is why I brought up the line thing. (And the tower, and Kenoshi brought up the mountain, and I brought up the pipe). This is the thing you're really not getting, and explicitly denied is what eternalism is about earlier.

the Eternalist part at t and the Eternalist part at t' cannot be considered to be the same part (by Eternalists) — Luke

They are not the same part, any more than the top of a mountain is the same part of the mountain as the bottom. But they are nevertheless still parts of the same object.

No, it doesn't. It says time is really static (inside spacetime). — Luke

If that’s what you think eternalism is, then you’re arguing against a strawman that nobody else is arguing for.

I said an unobserved particle doesn't have a classical state. It's in a superposition, which you can decompose as you just did into a distribution of possible classical states. But "a classical state" is definitionally not a superposition. If an unobserved particle is in a superposition, it definitionally does not have a classical state of being either decayed or undecayed.

Just like France doesn't have a king.

If it makes the analogy better for you, imagine that instead of having one king, or being a republic, France had a council of many co-kings, who all had hair of different lengths, some of them completely bald. Still "the" king of France does not have a specified hair status, because there is no "the" king of France, even though that's for a different reason (more like a superposition) in this hypothetical than in reality.

No fancy quantum anything needs to be invoked to explain how there is no hair-status of the king of France in such a scenario, yet the LEM is still not violated there. The LEM is not violated by superpositions for the same reason.

There is, though.

|atom> = a*|decayed> + b*|not decayed>

They're on the right. :) — Kenosha Kid

That is a superposition, not a classical state.

Try this instead then:

You have a line drawn on a grid with axes labelled x and y.

The y-position of the line changes with respect to the x-position. It’s not changing over time as you experience it, you’re just looking at the line sitting there, but when you talk about where the line is on the y-axis, you have to specify which part of the x-axis you mean it in respect to, because the line isn’t just a point, it’s a continuous line.

Now relabel that same graph so instead of “x” it says “longitude” and instead of “y” it says “altitude”. The line is exactly the same, we’re just talking about it in terms of longitude and altitude instead. The line gains altitude as it crosses longitude. It’s still not moving in respect to your experience of time, but still the line changes in altitude with respect to latitude. This is like the pipe on the mountainside I was taking about.

Now relabel the graph again, so that “latitude” is now “time” and “altitude” is now “space”. The line is unchanged, only the labels are different. But now, the line is changing its position in space with respect to its position in time. Not its actual position in space as you experience it over time as you experience it, but changing its space-coordinates relative to its time-coordinates.

Eternalism says that if you could somehow step outside of our normal space and time, you would see thing still in it like that line. The things change their position in space relative to their position in time. But you are now outside of space and time, so nothing seems to be changing relative to your experience of time, because you now have no experience of time. Time is only down there in the universe that you’re looking at from outside. But still, you can see in that universe that at different places in the time dimension, the same things are at different places in the various space dimensions. That means they’re moving, changing, with respect to time. You are just outside of time now, so you don’t experience time in a timelike way. But the things down there in the universe still do.

Calculus does not speak about literal infinite sums. It speaks about finite sums approaching a limit. — EnPassant

It does though. It defines the sum of an infinite series as the limit that the partial sums approach.

I think it would be nice if it were possible to rank the quality of a post or thread, and then people could sort or filter by quality and look as low down the ranking as they feel like, rather than having to rely on the admins to make a hard judgement call on what is quality enough or not.

The defaults sort of the front page could factor in this quality rank, so the front page remains full of only high quality posts.

And perhaps the amount of votes that can be cast by any user should be dependent on their own history or quality rankings.

I know this would depend on software changes though, but it’d be nice to see.

I understand what superposition is, thanks. You’re still not getting the point I’m making.

If someone asks about the hair status of the king of France, neither “bald” nor “hairy” is true, but not because the LEM had failed, just because there is no king of France to be either bald or hairy.

If someone asks about the decay status, a classical state, of an unobserved atom, neither “decayed” nor “undecayed” is true, but not because the LEM had failed, just because there is no classical state of an unobserved atom to be “decayed” or “undecayed”.

I’m not at all questioning your description of quantum mechanics, I’m pointing out that the same apparent problem of the LEM violation occurs in entirely non-quantum situations too, and in either case can be explained without throwing out the LEM.

The atom, in my thought experiment, does exist. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, but a classical state of the atom does not.

Superposition is not a logically indeterminate answer to the question of what classical state is true. It’s there being something other than any classical state at all.

Just like France being a republic isn’t a logically indeterminate answer to the question of whether their king has hair, it’s there being something other than any king at all.

Sorry, I don't understand what you're getting at. I didn't claim that it wasn't the same mountain. — Luke

What I’m getting at is that the latitude and longitude of the same one single pipe changes with altitude, the pipe moves east the lower down the mountain it goes, even though in a full 3D picture the pipe is just laying there, not changing or moving at all. When we say its latitude and longitude “change” or it “moves”, we mean with respect to altitude, not with respect to time. If we consider altitude just another dimension like latitude and longitude, in that 3D picture nothing is changing or moving, but when just looking at a 2D picture with respect to a third dimension, we see change and movement.

Likewise when we look at a 4D picture, or at a 3D picture with respect to a fourth dimension of time.

You missed the whole point of that post. Kings are classical objects. Yet “the present king of France is bald” and “the present king of France is non-bald” are both false. That might superficially seem to violate the law of the excluded middle, but they technically don’t, because there is no present king of France.

Likewise, “the classical state of the particle is decayed” and “the classical state of the particle is non-decayed” are both false for an unobserved particle, but not because the law of the excluded middle has been violated, rather because there is no classical state of the particle, just like there is no present king of France.

In both cases the apparent violation of the LEM is actually due to making reference to a non-existent referent.

The gradient of the mountainside is not a change in the spatial position of the mountain, as you implied earlier. The mountain hasn't moved. — Luke

It may help to imagine a pipe going down the mountainside. The answer to where the pipe is on the 2D surface of the Earth depends on which altitude you’re asking about: the pipe changes 2D location with altitude. If the pipe is on the east side of the mountain, for instance, it gets further east the lower down the mountain it goes. It’s not moving over time, but the relevant segment of it at a given altitude is further east the lower the altitude. Yet at every altitude, it is still the same pipe.

I can point to quantum mechanics where the law of the excluded middle does not hold (e.g. either the radioactive atom decayed or it did not) — Kenosha Kid

That is more a case of asking whether the present king if France is bald or not. It looks like that must violate the principle of the excluded middle, because there is no present king of France, but technically that just makes the answer “no”; the mistake is in thinking that a “no” answer means “the king has hair”. Similarly, there is no classical state of the particle until observation, so the answer to whether it has decayed or not is “no”; but not in a way that means it is definitely classically undecayed, simply in a way that means it is not classically anything because it’s not in a classical state, it’s in a superposition.

When I was young I used to think there was something about me that was just better than other people, in ways very similar to how you describe children’s superiority. And I mean young as in a young adult, and in comparison to people my own age at the time. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been traumatized and scarred by life, and found myself feeling broken and less functional than I was in my youth... in the same ways that everyone else has always seemed less functional to me. This experience has made me realize that there was never anything inherently superior about me in my youth, I had simply been spared somehow from the traumatic experiences that beat the light and life and joy and peace and curiosity and courage, etc, out of other people at a much younger age.

The point I’m making is that that “...” is an important difference.

0.111 does not equal 1/9. It’s close, and you’re saying it might be close enough for some purposes, but for others you might need more 1s. But so long as you have finitely many 1s, it won’t equal exactly 1/9.

But 0.111... (with that “...”, that’s very important) equals EXACTLY 1/9, by definition. It has infinitely many 1s. That’s what the “...” means: “keep repeating the preceding pattern forever.”

0.111 x 9 = 0.999, which is not 1.

0.111... x 9 = 1/9 x 9 = 0.999... = 1, exactly.

Picture if you will a skyscraper in a timeless world; it is eternal and unchanging. Also, every floor of this skyscraper is strictly two-dimensional; it’s really a bunch of flat sheets stacked in a tower, but I’m going to talk about them like they’re floors of a building.

The top of the tower is a point, and the floors get wider toward the bottom. We don’t have to worry about where the bottom is for now, for our purposes the tower may as well be infinitely tall, and we’re looking at it from the top down.

Every lower floor is identical to the floor above it except for one tiny change to each thing on the floor. These changes have to follow certain rules, and over time interesting patterns in the things on the floors develop. Patterns that, under the influence of the rules, lead to more copies of themselves being around on the lower floors, tend to become more common the lower you look in the tower, for obvious reasons.

One such kind of pattern turns out to be having as a part of its pattern copies of other patterns from upper floors, arranged in order by floor, and also extrapolations of that series of patterns into ones likely to appear on lower floors. Lower-floor variations of those patterns continue to build on their series’ of images from upper floors, and update their projections of expected images of lower floors accordingly.

So within these 2D patterns of stuff are contained representations of 3D sections of this building, sections that span multiple floors, but are represented inside of things that exist on just a single floor. In a sense, an image of part of the 3D building is contained within one thing that only exists as such in 2D.

I hope I don’t need to spell out this analogy.

I did read what you said, my point is that this isn’t an issue of accuracy at all. Nobody is worrying about 0.999 here at all. They’re only talking about 0.999.... Which is an exactly accurate number, if the number you want is 1, because they’re the same number.

0.999 — christian2017

0.999... is not equal to 0.999

0.999... minus 0.999 equals 0.001

The total sum of an infinite series is defined as the limit of the series of partial sums. The sum of the infinite series
{0.9, 0.09, 0.009, ... }
is thus the limit of the series
{0.9, 0.9 + 0.09, 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009, ...}
or in other words the limit of the series
{0.9, 0.99, 0.999, ... }
which you can clearly see converges to 1.

“0.999...” is of course also equal to the sum of the infinite series
{0.9, 0.09, 0.009, ... }
because that’s just what decimal notation means. And since the limit of the series of partial sums of that infinite series is 1, that means the total sum of that infinite series represented by 0.999... is also 1, so 0.999... = 1.

we do not really interact with a material world so much as the information about a material world — Pop

That information just is the material world.

How do you reconcile these observed medical qualities with ideas such as pan-psychism consciousness is a fundamental force of nature, or inherent to all matter — Benj96

All the contemporary panpsychists that I’m familiar with (including myself) say that it is only the metaphysical whatever that’s necessary to have any first person experience at all that is inherent to everything, and the particular kinds of experiences that particular beings have are completely dependent on their functionality in a way that drugs etc can totally influence.

I think by saying “it’s all ghost” Chomsky is being figurative, in several ways: all physics as we now understand it is in terms of what pre-Newtonians would call “spooky” or “occult” forces at a distance, but that’s just normal physics now; and also Chomsky is a panpsychist and phenomenalist (you can be both a physicalist and phenomenalist; I am also both) so on his account everything is made up of something like “mental contents” and also has something like a “mind”, so all of the ordinary physical stuff is itself kind of “mental” in nature.

Chomsky is also clearly arguing against Cartesian substance dualism in those videos, saying the mind-body problem is a non-problem once we understand “bodies” to be made of “mind” in the metaphysical sense Descartes meant. And he certainly believes in both consciousness and free will, but that doesn’t exclude minds in our ordinary sense from being made of matter in the ordinary sense either. It’s all one kind of stuff, that doesn’t fit neatly into either of Descartes’ boxes.

I don’t know for certain, but given the rest of his views I expect Chomsky probably also endorses functionalism about mind and compatibilism about will.

There are, as you’ve noticed, different senses of the term “materialism”.

The sense in most common colloquial use today is the one that means the denial of things that aren’t ontologically made of the same kind of stuff as rocks and trees and so on. That seems to be the kind you’re principally against. The kind that denies that there is more than just one kind of stuff, the same kind of stuff that ordinary things we’re familiar with are made of.

Another sense, typically only understood by philosophers today, means a specific subtype of the first type, one that holds that that one kind of stuff is some kind of material substance that is in principle separable from its apparent attributes, a solid, extended stuff that only interacts with other stuff by banging into it and pushing it around.

Modern physicalism is an evolution of “materialism” in the first sense, but a rejection of “materialism” in the second sense. It says that there’s only one kind of stuff, the stuff that rocks and trees and tables and chairs are made of, but that stuff isn’t the hard billiard balls that Descartes thought it was. Rather, physical stuff as we understand it today is made of force fields embedded in a malleable spacetime, interacting with each other and with spacetime in ways that give rise to what macroscopically seem like hard little billiard balls, but also all kinds of other things, like gravity and electromagnetism and many much much weirder phenomena. But it’s still all understood to be the same kind of stuff, manifesting in different ways.

So far as I can tell Chomsky is a modern physicalist like that, as am I, and Kenosha it seems. Chomsky and I are also panpsychists, who hold that all of that physical stuff has a mindlike aspect to it; but it’s still all the same physical stuff, no ghosts or gods or other weird woo.

You don't necessarily own your body at least until you are dead. Because you cannot dispose of it, you cannot sell it or at least, arguably you didn't ought to be able to — unenlightened

Disposal and sale are not necessary conditions of ownership. Lack of ability to do so just means you can’t stop owning it.

Thanks for the link. I watched the whole thing and Chomsky is saying what I expected, just that the world is not like Descartes thought it was. Everything he says is consistent with what Kenosha Kid is saying.

It’s half an hour long, that’s not “short” just to confirm what I expect to find: that Chomsky is a modern physicalist panpsychist, and is only denying (like @Kenosha Kid has explained) that everything is made up of Cartesian billiard balls, but rather that the physical world as understood today is more subtle than that and not clearly differentiable from the “mental” in a metaphysical way.

Timestamp please?

I watched 5 mins into that video from the timestamp you started at and he didn’t say anything against materialism yet. He said that since Newton’s universal gravitation we’ve had to throw out contact mechanism in order to preserve naturalism, because nature evidently does not operate in a contact-mechanical way. He didn’t use the word “materialism” in there, but “naturalism” is much closer to the usual sense of “materialism” than “mechanism” is.

Quote please?

:up:

Do you believe that doing philosophy is, whether privately and/or professionally, indispensible for 'eudaimonia'? or that something more, some other endeavor, is needed to facilitate 'well-being'? — 180 Proof

These seem like different questions, one asking if it’s necessary, the other asking if it’s sufficient. I think it’s necessary but not sufficient: you need to do philosophy to attain eudaimonia, but just doing philosophy isn’t enough.

It's like politics; necessarily everyone does it, but most of you are entirely wrong. — unenlightened

I do really like the political analogy, and I would enjoy suggestions for how philosophy can be made more participatory in the sense of participatory democracy. I support a political regime where there is not a clear divide between the rulers and the ruled, but not one where there are no well-trained people in leadership positions and just a lowest-common-denominator rabble calling the shots. There need to be professionals, but they need to be in constant dialogue with non-professionals, and there has to be a way to rise gradually from non-professional to professional, or to one’s optimal place in the continuous spectrum between them, through excelling in that dialogue.

I think that is currently lacking both in the political sphere and more generally in the philosophical sphere. I myself feel rather awkward in that regard in the philosophical sphere. I have some professional education, but not enough that I would feel comfortable trying to engage in the professional dialogue of journals etc. (At least, not inserting myself into there; if someone else thought I was worthy and invited me, I’d be comfortable with that.) But the kind of dialogue I want to be engaging in, like in my writing, seems too professionally focused to be of much interest to most laypeople.

There is a spectrum enough downward, where I can talk to laypeople about their philosophical interests and bring in my philosophical education to the discussion and in doing so bring them up closer to my level. But there doesn’t seem to be any upward spectrum: there doesn’t seem to be a way to engage less-than-fully-professionally with the true professionals, and in doing so become more professionally adept myself, without just fully committing to becoming a full-fledged professional philosopher myself. There’s a discontinuity in the philosophical dialogue there.

Chomskyan panpsychism (which I subscribe to too) is still physicalist. It just says that physical stuff all has a first-person perspective, not that there exists non-physical stuff.

Another argument, more or less following similar thinking, is whether a number could be found between 0.999... and 1.000... (like the mean).
If no such number can be found, then we might reasonably say they're one and the same. — jorndoe

This argument isn’t actually valid, because it could arguably be the case (if not for other, valid proofs that 0.999... = 1) that 0.999... is the very last number before 1, so there is nothing between them even though they’re not (this hypothetical person would argue) the exact same.

or else the abiding law must be seen as merely arbitrary and the whole concept of property, whether communal or private, becomes ultimately arbitrary. — Janus

Exactly. The assignment of ownership, besides the one necessary ownership of one’s own body, is entirely a contingent social fact. A person owns whatever the political-economic community agrees they own. It’s like the assignment of meaning to words: no word necessarily means anything, the meaning is just a contingent social fact of agreement by the linguistic community. In both cases there need to be procedures to handle disagreement within the community, and I don’t think a simple majority vote is good enough procedure, but that doesn’t mean there is anything more to it than community agreement.

And that is the point that I am disagreeing with. It is only valid in a communist or fantasy world. Not one that I inhabit. — A Seagull

So you think the world was created with particular parts of it pre-assigned to particular people, rather than initially belonging to everyone equally before getting divided up and privatized? That sounds like the real fantasy to me.

So if you steal something from the community that stole it from you in the first place it is 'justice'? — A Seagull

If the community actually stole it from you, yes. But David's point was that everything belonged to the community initially, and everything that is privatized ("property") is therefore theft from the community. The community can't steal something that rightfully belonged to it, so them taking it back is justice, and you taking it back again is just theft again.

I don't agree that everything privately owned is stolen from the community, and I think if pressed David and those like him won't either, making a distinction between "personal" and "private" property, where "personal" is rightfully owned by an individual and "private" is something that rightfully belongs to the community but from which most of said community are wrongly excluded. That's just a terminological thing though. Some things owned by individuals ("private property") are rightfully so, others aren't. If the community takes the latter, that's not theft but justice, and an individual taking it back again is just theft again.

In principle, all property is a theft from the community. — David Mo

Then it follows that community ownership is theft from the individual. — A Seagull

"Stealing" something from someone who stole it from you first isn't theft, it's justice.