The “grounding” of appearances is exactly what noumena are supposed to be for. All I’m suggesting is that we don’t need to suppose there is anything about noumena other than that they ground such appearances. They do nothing besides appear to certain observers in certain ways. Or at least, we have no reason to suppose they should, since all we can know of them is the phenomena they supposedly ground.

This issue of grounding things is itself problematic though, for it runs into an infinite regress. If phenomena are grounded by noumena, what grounds noumena? Whatever it is that does, what grounds that in turn? Ad infinitum. To demand everything be grounded leads to Munchausen’s/Agrippa‘s trilemma: either you need an infinite chain of grounding, or you stop in a loop somewhere, or you just stop somewhere. Kant’s way out of that conundrum, and that of critical rationalists after him like Popper, is to turn that demand on its head: you don’t initially reject everything until it can be grounded from the (infinite) bottom up, you initially accept all possibilities and then progressively rule out the ones that you find reason to reject.

So on that kind of account, we don’t need to ground permanent possibilities of appearances: things just seem to us to be persistently available to observe, and until we have reason to doubt that, we don’t need any further justification to suppose that things just are as they seem.

NP :-)

FWIW, as non-portable as the Earth may be, I expect in the very long run (late life cycle of the Sun) it will be more effective to move the Earth to stay in the changing habitable zone than it will be to make very un-Earth-like bodies sufficiently Earth-like for the people who are accustomed to Earth.

There is also a lot of engineering that can be done on our starship's engine (the sun) to make it much more efficient and longer-lived. Build a Dyson sphere to harness more of its energy, then star lift it to prolong its life, and build a stellar engine to make it more portable.

The point of building an artificial SSBE is to do all of the stuff that the Earth and Sun do, but in a smaller, more portable form, that can travel.

The Earth and Sun together definitely do do that already, and they are in space, but they're not very portable.

Have you not heard the expression "Spaceship Earth" before?

So when I lie I commit to believing my lie? — Michael

if we assume a speaker is being honest and not manipulative — Pfhorrest

Self/meta-questioning (i.e. reflection) is thinking. — 180 Proof

:up:

It is reflexivity of attitude that I hold to make an opinion cognitive, apt for being found objectively correct or not. Intentions are cognitive but non-descriptive opinions; in the same way that perceptions are descriptive but non-cognitive opinions. I like to term cognitive opinions like beliefs and intentions "thoughts", and non-cognitive ones like perceptions and desires "feelings".

You asked whether

if we just split it in abstract and concrete we'll grasp everything of it? — Eugen

The answer is no, but that doesn’t mean that there has to be something besides abstract and concrete.

Dividing objects into two crisp sets doesn’t mean you know everything about them.

Every day in the future will either be a rainy day or not, one of those two, but that doesn’t mean I know what you will have for breakfast on April 3rd 2027, or anything like that.

In this case that is exactly what we’re talking about. The supposition of noumena is the supposition that reality isn’t “just an appearance” entirely in the mind, like Berkeley would have it, but that although everything we experience is inescapably conditioned by our minds, there is still something objective behind it all, that the appearances are of. That something, whatever it is, is the noumenal world.

I am saying that the difficulties that that might otherwise pose are dissolved if we dispense with any notion about the noumena besides their propensity to appear certain ways to certain kinds of minds. We are then left with something like the “objective idealism” of JS Mill, who held the "permanent possibilities of experience" to constitute the entirety of an object's existence. We could also call that kind of view “empirical realism” (which Kant himself embraced), or “physicalist phenomenalism”.

Good thread. :up:

My resolution to this apparent paradox is to distinguish between the speech-acts of "expressing", which is a demonstration of one's own mental state, one's thoughts or feelings, and "impressing", which is attempting to affect a mental state in another person; and to highlight how, if we assume a speaker is being honest and not manipulative, we assume an impression from them upon our minds to imply also an expression of their own mind. That is to say, when they impress upon us that X is true, if we assume that they are honest, we take that to also express their own belief that X is true. If they then impress upon us that they don't believe X is true, that impression contradicts the preceding implied expression of their belief. It is akin to shouting in a rage "I'M NOT ANGRY!". There is nothing self-contradictory in the content impressed, in either case — it's possible for someone to be non-angry, and it's possible for someone to disbelieve a truth — but just as the raged shouting expresses anger in contradiction to the impressed claim of non-anger, the utterance "X is true" implicitly expresses belief in X, and so contradicts the attendant impression of disbelief.

(The more common term "assertion" can, I think, be taken to be equivalent to my term "impression" here, but I like how the linguistic symmetry of "im-" and "ex-" illustrates the distinction: to "express" is literally to "push out", and one may imagine an illustration of expression as little arrows pointing out of the speaker's mind; while to "impress" is literally to "push in", and one may imagine an illustration of impression as an arrow pointing into the listener. Though I've spoken of impressions and expressions thus far only as they apply to statements, pushing thoughts from speaker to listener, the distinction can also be applied equally to questions, where an impressed question is a direct question figuratively pulling something straight from a listener, while an expressed question is a more open-ended wondering, a demonstration of the speaker's own uncertainty and openness to input should anyone have any to offer. Sentences of the forms "I wonder if X." and "Is it true that X?" clearly illustrate the difference. Since questions "pull" rather than "push", we might continue the clear Latinate verbal illustration by terming the "is it true" type of question an "extraction", meaning literally "pulling-out" of the listener, and the "I wonder" type of question an "intraction" — not "inter-action", but "in-traction" — meaning literally "pulling-in" to the speaker. The difference intended here is like the difference between billing someone for a service, versus putting out a hat so passers-by can donate what they like. The difference between impression and expression is likewise comparable to the difference between sending a product to someone directly, versus setting it out with a "free" or "take one" sign.)

The difference between impression and expression is somewhat analogous to, but not literally the same as, the difference between the imperative and indicative linguistic moods, inasmuch as an impressive speech-act is effectively telling someone what to think (or in an impressive question, telling them to tell you something), while an expressive speech-act is effectively showing others what you think (or in an expressive question, showing your uncertainty). However it is important to stress that I am not saying impressions are literally imperative and expressions are literally indicative, because I hold that the ordinary indicative type of statement that's generally held to be the plainest, most default kind of statement is itself a kind of impressive speech-act: saying "Bob throws the ball" impresses a belief in Bob throwing the ball, implicitly tells the listener to believe that Bob throws the ball, and so is kind of imperative-like in that way, but is still distinct from the literal imperative "Bob, throw the ball!". Similarly, expressive speech-acts, while they are indicative-like in the manner that they communicate, can be more imperative-like in their contents, such as "I think Bob ought to throw the ball", without impressing that opinion on anyone, much less Bob himself. But, of course, we can also merely express indicative-like, descriptive opinions, ala "I think Bob throws the ball", and importantly, I hold that we can also impress imperative-like, prescriptive opinions, ala "Bob ought to throw the ball". Expression and impression are about how an opinion is delivered; it's a separate matter as to what the contents of that opinion are.

Apply your theory to an actual case of disputed land, like the Palestine/Israel situation. Do you see Israel's right to Israel legitimate? What about to the disputed lands of the West Bank? If Israel follows its own rules in determining which land it settles does that matter? — Hanover

I don't know enough of the contingent particulars to apply the principle accurately.

In any case, much of the property is and was owned by individuals or families, not by states. If particular Jewish immigrants can show that they in particular had claim to a particular piece of land that was wrongfully taken from them in the past, then they deserve some kind of recompense for that, from the people who wronged them.

Some Arab who happens to be living there now, having acquired it fairly from someone who acquired it fairly from... etc... doesn't deserve to lose their home because someone else long ago wronged a third party.

If no perpetrator of any particular crime is identifiable, then those suffering from long-obscured harms deserve recompense from the public at large just like anyone else suffering from any other harm does.

In general, from what I know of the situation, I think the establishment of the state of Israel in Palestine was illegitimate, even more so than the usual establishment of any state. If Jewish people wanted to create a Jewish-majority and so Jewish-controlled democratic polity, and they didn't have particular historical claims to enforce (as above) to achieve that, then they could have done so by peacefully moving into some territory by ordinary legitimate means and then peacefully using ordinary legitimate political means to make the changes to the law of that territory that they wanted. (And if someone tried to use illegitimate violence to stop them, then violence in defense is warranted too).

Why do you label a clarifying question as derision? — fishfry

I mistook it for an attempt at derision; at putting down what we're doing here by comparison to what others do.

In any case, I already addressed the actual content of your question like this earlier:

You are equating a kid stabbing a doll with a knife, with a trained surgeon excising a tumor. You're claiming the actions are essentially the same. That's nonsense. — fishfry

It's not nonsense to say that what you need to do both is eyes, hands, a knife, and the ability to coordinate what you see with your eyes and the knife in your hand. You have to be much better at that to be a surgeon than to be a kid stabbing a doll, but the kinds of things you need are the same, differing in quality, not kind.

Weird, it was this post that appeared right before I commented, but now I see that post says it was posted 1d ago. And his site role still says "Banned". Not sure what happened there.

Or writer, artist, entertainer. Plagiarism is a thing, and I don't want the hard work of some to be copied by others without compensation. — Marchesk

Plagiarism is different from copyright infringement, or any other kind of "intellectual property" (which is only a very recent coinage; older US law refers to the granting of temporary monopolies, not "property" in ideas). There's at least four different things to keep separate here:

Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's work.

Trademark infringement is kind of the opposite of that: putting someone else's name on your work.

Both of those should be pretty well covered by prohibitions of fraud, because in both cases you're claiming something false.

Copyright infringement is making something that too closely resembles something someone else created. Even if you give them full credit, so no plagiarism. Even if you're clear that you are not them, so no trademark infringement. Even if it's free, non-commercial use. If someone else plays you a song they made up, and then later you play someone else that same song, for free, even if you say you got it from the first guy, copyright says you're not allowed to do that... without permission, which will cost you. If someone else tells you a story they made up and then you tell someone else that story, for free, even if you give the first guy credit, that's still copyright infringement. Never mind that people have been doing that for literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of years and that's how all of culture has been generated.

Patent infringement is doing something in a way that's too similar to how someone else does something. So if someone else has a good idea for how to do something better, you can't do it that way unless you pay them to let you. You have to keep doing it the worse way, even though you now know a better way to do it, and you doing it doesn't stop them from doing it too.


If you want to get paid for doing some creative work, get someone to agree to pay you for the work before you do it. You shouldn't be able to expect to do something unprompted, and get the government to force people not to use their own minds and bodies and equipment to share your ideas with each other, just so that you can then after-the-fact force them to pay you for the right to do so.

Good thing feudalism got replaced by capitalism [...] Personally, I'd rather people have their own property to live on — Marchesk

The problem with capitalism, like feudalism, is that most people don't get to own their own property to live on, and are then beholden to those who do, needing to borrow at interest ("rent") from those who own more than they need to live on themselves (otherwise they couldn't lend it out), which then retards their ability to buy their own property, and accelerates the ability of the property-owners to buy more property to further increase that advantage, etc.

If you got rid of rent, then you'd have a truly free market, a usury-free market, and the consequence of that would be the end of capitalism (because you'd no longer have an owning class and a working class, once the usury-free market forces shuffled property around), and the start of market socialism instead.

He appears to not be banned?

Not that I particularly want him banned, just seems odd.

So you would be surprised if a simple simulation of basic physics could produce simulations of chemical interactions, even just a few molecules interacting as expected by the known laws of chemistry?

Because I’m pretty sure that’s something someone could code up today, given that we’ve had complex protein folding simulations for decades already.

But if you simulate the universe and only simulate quantum fields, do you think you will not eventually end up with simulated chemical substances following laws of chemistry? I.e. do you need to add special chemical rules to the simulation in order for simulated chemicals to show up?

I just noticed your edit here, and thought I would share something that I wrote on this topic in the mean time, since I did already agree that moral courage is important:

For a person to actually use this faculty of sapience, to exercise their mind and will, to examine their thoughts and change them if needed, their mind must be sufficiently enlightened, and their will sufficiently empowered. Which is to say, they must have the curiosity to wonder whether their thoughts are the right ones, and the courage to admit when they are not, and so to change them. But this is not a faculty separate from sapience, rather only the refinement of it: curiosity is just more mindfulness to that of which one is unsure, and courage is just more willfulness toward that of which one is afraid. And more mindfulness of oneself, more willfulness toward oneself, more self-awareness and self-control, together just are sapience itself.

And yes, this means that in order to effectively use one's sapience, one must already have sufficiently developed sapience, but there is no paradox there. It is simply just like one can more effectively use one's muscles when one already has well-developed muscles. Sapience is a faculty, like many, that is further developed by its use, and the development of which enables and encourages its further use.

A 200lb pile of graphite and a 200lb solid diamond grandfather clock are both just 200lbs of carbon atoms, but the arrangement of those atoms makes all the difference. Saying that does not go against the reducibility of them both. — Pfhorrest

Sorry Pfhorrest, I don't understand the point? I'm not saying that reductionism qua analysis is invalid. I'm saying that concluding that there is nothing "above" that level of analysis is unwarranted. — Pantagruel

Somehow I missed this reply four days ago, sorry about that.

My point was that it's the arrangement of parts that constitutes the object of study at a higher level.

Physics takes its most fundamental things, say quantum fields today, and builds more complicated things like atoms out of those. At a physics level, even an electron is a rather complicated thing: "it" is actually an ongoing process of two types of proto-electron particles constantly interacting with the Higgs field and alternating between each other. Each type of quark likewise. Nucleons like protons and neutrons in turn are complexes of those quarks (which are already complex processes) interacting with each other and a bunch of gluons, and then atoms are even more complex processes of those nucleons and some electrons interacting with each other and the photons that constitute the electromagnetic field. Even a "simple particle" like a hydrogen atom is not just the sum of its parts, but the sum of its parts and the arrangement between them, including the temporal arrangement, or interaction.

Chemistry then takes the aggregate behaviors of lots of atoms together, only dipping a toe here and there barely down into the physics level, to build substances made of complex molecules, mostly not caring about stuff on the physics level anymore like the gluons holding quarks together into protons. A chemical substance isn't just the sum of the atoms it's made of, but of the atoms and the arrangements between them. A really clear example of this are isomers: octane and iso-octane molecules are made of exactly the same parts, but have very different arrangement of them, and so have very different chemical properties. But still, you could, if it mattered, bother to describe octane and iso-octane and everything they do differently from each other in terms of a bunch of quantum fields. It's just that at this level of study, that'd be a waste of time. There isn't anything new in the description of the world when you introduce the concept of iso-octane; that's just a useful shorthand for a particular pattern of things some atoms can do, which atoms are in turn just useful shorthand for particular patterns of things that more fundamental things can do.

Biology, likewise, takes aggregate behaviors of lots of substances together, various tissues and the structures formed out of them into the bodies of organisms, and only dips a toe here and there barely down into the chemistry level. You could, if it mattered, bother to describe an organism in terms of a bunch of chemical interactions, and for the very simplest of organisms, we sometimes do close to that. Those chemical interactions could in turn be described in terms of quantum fields, if you wanted to waste your time. There still isn't anything new in the description of the world when you introduce the concepts of organisms, species, etc: those are just useful shorthand for particular patterns of things that some chemicals can do.

Psychology likewise. It's about kinds of things some organisms do. It only occasionally dips a toe here and there just barely down into the biological level. But you could, if it mattered, in principle, just describe psychological stuff in terms of biological stuff. It would be a waste of time, because those details aren't important. But when introducing concepts like beliefs and emotions, we're still not adding anything new to the description of the world. We could, in principle, just describe what a bunch of quantum fields are doing, and get a picture (e.g. view a simulation) of human beings with all their thoughts and feelings. It's just extremely useful to have shorthand that hides all of that unnecessary detail when it doesn't matter for the purposes at hand; what one gluon is doing to one quark doesn't matter for the purposes of what Bob is feeling right now. But Bob's feelings still ultimately boil down to a bunch of quarks and gluons and stuff doing things to each other.

The very nature of procedural justice (as opposed to distributive justice) is connected to issues of property. Because just like analytic knowledge is about following the correct steps in sequence from the assigned meaning of words, so too procedural justice is about following the correct steps in sequence from the assigned rights that who has over what, which is identical to the concept of ownership, i.e. to have rights over something is what it means to own it.

When we assign ownership of certain things to certain people, which is to say that the will of those people controls what it is permissible to do to or with those things, we enter the realm of property rights, things that are right or wrong just in virtue of who owns what and what they do or don't want done with it, regardless of whether it actually inflicts hedonic suffering or not. This is a matter of perfect duties, of things being obligatory or forbidden, not just about merely supererogatory goods.

But that kind of justice in turn depends on the assignment of ownership of the things in question, and that is not something that is itself a matter of perfect duty, but only imperfect duty. Nobody inherently owns anything but themselves. Rather, sociopolitical communities arbitrarily assign ownership of property to people, and could assign it differently. Like words mean whatever the linguistic community agrees that they mean, people own what other people agree that they own, and so long as everyone involved agrees on who owns what, that is all that is necessary for that ownership to be legitimate.

But when people disagree about who rightly owns what, we must have some method of deciding who is correct, if we are to salvage the possibility of any procedural justice at all; for if, for example, two people each claim ownership of a tract of land and are each wanting to deny the other the use of it, they will find no agreement on who is morally in the right to do so because they disagree about who owns it and so who has any rights over it at all. Such a conflict could be resolved in a creative and cooperative way by dividing up the land into two parcels, one owned by each person, that would permit both people to get the use that they want out of it without hindering the other's use of it. Or the same property can have multiple owners, so long as the uses of the property by those multiple owners do not conflict in context.

(Initially, all property is owned by everyone, and in doing so effectively owned by no one; it is the division of the world into those people who own the property and those who don't that constitutes the assignment of ownership to it.)

But if no such cooperative resolution is to be found, and an answer must be found as to which party to the conflict actually has the correct claim to the property in question, I propose that that answer be found by looking back through the history of the property's usage until the most recent uncontested usage can be found: the most recent claim to ownership that was accepted by the entire community. That is then to be held as the correct assignment of ownership.

(NB that this means just taking or enclosing something by force doesn't make it rightfully yours, if everyone else protests but just can't do anything about it. If later on they get the force together to take it back from you, they have every right to do so; "hey I stole that first fair and square" is no retort).


From these two types of procedural justice, the perfect duties of respecting ownership and the imperfect duties of assigning ownership, we can derive a set of rights, which can be formulated in terms of obligations and their negations. Rights have been categorized, following the work of authors such as Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, into four groups organized across two different distinctions: the distinction between active and passive rights (not to be confused with positive and negative rights; either an active or a passive right can be either positive or negative), and the distinction between first-order and second-order rights. Active first-order rights are also termed "liberties", while passive first-order rights are "claims", passive second-order rights are "immunities", and active second-order rights are "powers".

A liberty is something that you are not prohibited from doing. It is the negation of the obligation of a negation, and so it is equivalent to a permission. Something you have the liberty to do may nevertheless be bad, but you are not forbidden from doing so; it is an action that you are within your rights to do. A claim, conversely, is a limit on others' liberty: it is something that it is forbidden to deny you, which is just to say that it is obligatory.

I, like most libertarians (at least nominally) do, hold that people have maximal liberty, limited only by the claim to non-aggression: the only things forbidden to do are things that flatly contradict the will of the owner of the thing you are acting upon, such as the body of a person.

But there is in turn an exception to that claim: there is still liberty to contradict the will of the owner of the thing you are acting upon when that someone was already contradicting the will of the owner of the thing they were acting upon. There is a liberty to defend against aggression, which constitutes an exception to the claim to non-aggression: an aggressor cannot invoke the claim to non-aggression to bar you from acting upon him or his property as necessary to stop him from aggressing upon someone else, or to undo the effects of his aggression upon someone else.

For example, someone trying to punch you has no claim against you punching him as necessary to stop him from punching you; and someone who destroys something of yours has no claim against being forced to repair or replace it. But that qualifier "as necessary" is very important: unnecessary violence, in excess of what is necessary to prevent or reverse other violence, constitutes an act of aggression itself, no longer merely an exception to the claim to non-aggression.


And that all depends, of course, on who rightfully owns what, which is where the second-order rights come in to play, which have to do with changing what is or isn't obligatory, by changing the assignment of ownership. A power is the liberty to do so, to change who has what rights, which is equivalent to changing who owns what, as ownership consists entirely of having rights over something. An immunity, conversely, is a limit on others' power, just as a claim is a limit on others' liberty.

I, like most libertarians again, hold that people have maximal immunity — nobody gets to change who has rights over what out from under them, things continue belonging to whoever they belonged to before — limited only by the power to contract, to mutually agree upon an exchange of rights (and consequently permissions and obligations), which power is how that ownership was initially assigned to begin with.

But that power, in turn, has its own exception, in the reflexive case just as with the exception to the claim to non-aggression above: nobody has the power to agree to agree (or not) to any change of rights or ownership, such as by agreeing not to enter into other contracts (as in non-compete agreements), or agreeing to accept whatever terms the other party later dictates (as in selling oneself into slavery, or as in the "social contract" sometimes held to justify a state's right to rule), or agreeing to grant someone a temporary liberty upon certain conditions ("selling" someone the temporary use of your property, as in contracts of rent or interest; letting someone do something is not itself doing something).

In short, the power to contract is limited to the simple trade of goods and services, and cannot create second-order obligations between people that place one person in a position of ongoing power over another person.

The implications of that limitation on rental contracts is especially important to my view on governance. And the limitations on both slavery and rental contracts by the same principle is no coincidence, for just as vandalism is an abstraction of battery (the latter regarding one's body and the former regarding one's other property), and theft is an abstraction of abduction (the latter regarding one's body and the former regarding one's other property), I hold that rent is likewise an abstraction of slavery (again, the latter regarding one's body and the former regarding one's other property).


At first glance, one would think a maximally libertarian society would be one in which there were no claims at all (because every claim is a limit on someone else's liberty), and no powers at all (because powers at that point could only serve to increase claims, and so to limit liberties).

But that would leave nobody with any claims against others using violence to establish authority in practice even if not in the abstract rules of justice, and no claims to hold anybody to their promises either making reliable cooperation nigh impossible.

So it is necessary that liberties be limited at least by claims against such violence, and that people not be immune from the power to establish mutually agreed-upon obligations between each other in contracts.

But those claims and powers could themselves be abused, with those who violate the claim against such violence using that claim to protect themselves from those who would stop them, and those who would like for contracts not to require mutual agreement to leverage practical power over others to establish broader deontic power over them.

So too those claims to property and powers to contract, which limit the unrestricted liberty and immunity that one would at first think would prevail in a maximally libertarian society, must themselves be limited as described above in order to better preserve that liberty.

How do you figure that? — Mww

In the way I just explained before the bit you quoted.

Isn't the problem with this, at least on the Kantian view anyway, that concepts such as "to produce", which are causal in nature, only make sense in the realm of phenomena and so to think that noumena produce phenomena in any circumstances is incoherent. I know Kant tries to make sense of the idea of noumenal causation to deal make room for freedom of will, but not entirely successfully. — jkg20

"To produce" is at best a loose way of saying what I'm trying to say, but all our language is causal and temporal so what else can I do. Noumena are supposed to be the things that phenomena are appearances of; they're the "really real" things "behind" the mere appearances. That relationship between noumena and phenomena, whatever the details of that might be, is what I'm talking about with this "produce" talk.

We can keep the notion that there is something "really real" and observer-independent -- unlike all the phenomenal appearances that are observer-dependent, conditioned by the structures of the minds doing the observation -- but at the same time do away with any notion that there is anything to those "really real" things besides their propensity to appear certain ways to certain kinds of observers.

I suspect we are all "doing philosophy" by simply making our way through life. — Frank Apisa

:up:

Waking in the morning and wondering, "What should I do first today?" is more "doing philosophy" — Frank Apisa

I wouldn’t say that exactly, but the immediate followup question of “How do I decide?” definitely is philosophy.

If you have a job as police or surgeon or important politician, then inaction is clearly immoral. — DrOlsnesLea

So the surgeon ought to kill a healthy patient and harvest his organs to save five dying patients?

If we give up any notion of noumenal properties besides a persistent propensity to produce particular kinds of phenomena to particular kinds of observers in particular contexts, then this whole problem goes away. By observing phenomena we are directly learning about the noumena, what kinds of phenomena they produce to whom and when, which is all we could possibly have reason to care about or to suppose might exist.

It seems to me that issues such as the ownership of ideas are of a different order than the ownership of land, labour or the means of production. — David Mo

The ownership of ideas is closely related to the ownership of labor and the means of production, because if one company owns the idea of doing some work a particular way, then nobody else is permitted to do that unless they pay the owner of the idea of doing that.

Thanks!

Please quote the exact phrase that set you off so that I can analyze it and adjust my programming — fishfry

It was this bit, which felt like an accusation that what I'm / we're doing here on this forum / in this thread is somehow deridable:

Or by philosophy do you mean typing idle thoughts into a philosophy forum, which is no more involved that watching tv; as opposed to excelling in academic philosophy, which typically takes years of focussed study? — fishfry

At my end it felt like sharp questions in response to vague and ambiguous thinking. You could just as well have thanked me. — fishfry

FWIW this also seems hostile to me. Because it seems condescending, I guess? (Not trying to attack you here, you just seem to want feedback like this).

By that standard a high schooler cutting up a frog in biology class is engaged in the same essential activity as an experienced surgeon. — fishfry

They are, just to different degrees of importance and with different degrees of skill. The important similarity for this analogy with philosophy (amateur and professional) is that if you were to build a robot to do both of those things, the robot would need to have basically the same abilities in either case (sapience not being one of them, but things like vision, dexterity, and the programming to interpret what it sees into contextually appropriate plans of action), it would just need much more refined and reliable versions of those abilities to do human surgery than it would need to dissect a frog at a high school level.

Similarly, if you were to build an AI to do philosophy, the important functions it needs to do either amateur or professional philosophy would be the same (different functions than a surgery robot needs), it would just need to be much better at them to do professional philosophy rather than amateur.

I wanted to follow up on 's good reply but beat me to it.

Everything, including everyone, is an object. But at least some objects are also subjects, persons, moral agents and patients, with thoughts and feelings, who matter as ends in themselves, not just as means to someone else's ends. To "objectify" someone isn't merely to affirm their objecthood, it's to deny their personhood.

In this specific case, someone (including the woman herself) can treat a woman as an object of sexual desire, without treating her as merely an object, without denying her personhood; and doing that is not objectification.

So I have this perfect vacuum right — Benj96

There's your first problem. You can't have a perfect vacuum. Even if you could build a container out of material that didn't give off any molecules into the center, and you could perfectly collect all of the molecules that were in the center and shuffle them out, there would still be stuff in the center of the container that you couldn't keep out... such as, for example, the photons that your heater shoots into there, and all the bajillions of neutrinos pouring through everywhere all the time.

More to the point, all of the energy fields the excitations of which constitute all the different kinds of particles exist constantly everywhere, just with different energy levels, different degrees of excitation.

Can I change the temperature of the vacuum? — Benj96

Yes. When your heater dumps radiation into there, it excites the electromagnetic fields inside of it, increasing the temperature in there. Of course those electromagnetic fields will dump that excited energy (the photons) out of it at literally the speed of light, transferring that heat to the surrounding container and beyond. Some of that might in turn scatter other photons back into the center of the container. Generally, by using your heater you're only briefly heating up the center of the container, but you're heating up the environment directly around the container which contributes to an ongoing increase of the temperature inside the container (as photons from the environment radiate back through the center over and over).

What temperature would my infrared camera measure in the center of the perfect vacuum? — Benj96

Your IR camera would see through the vacuum (because it's perfectly transparent to IR) and measure whatever is on the other side of it.

The average of "the other side of it" in every direction is effectively the temperature inside the center of the chamber. That's why the deepest of space, the most empty vacuum you'll find, is around 2.7 Kelvin: that's the average temperature coming from every direction, from the cosmic microwave background radiation.

How could my vacuum stay "cold" if it is enclosed in a jar with an outer ambient room temperature of 21c). If that were correct it would have a constant cooling effect on the room. Is it only the jar and outer world which would change temperature? — Benj96

Your vacuum chamber here is a perfect insulator of conductive and convective heat transfer, so even if we considered the inside of it absolutely cold, that wouldn't necessarily mean that it would constantly cool down the room around it, because no heat from the room could get conducted into it.

Consider for example why a piece of metal at room temperature in an average 21C room feels colder than a piece of wood at the same temperature. It's because the metal conducts heat away from your body much faster than the wood, so you feel the cold of the 21C (compared to your body's 37C) much more when touching the metal than the wood. Conversely, a piece of metal sitting out in the sun on a 40C day feels much hotter than a piece of wood that's been sitting out there. The vacuum is like the wood, but much more so: no matter how hot or cold it is in there, it's such a good insulator that nothing of your body heat (or the surrounding environment) is going to transfer into it or vice versa.

On the other hand, it's a perfect conductor of radiative heat transfer, which is just to say vacuum is transparent to all light. This means that the temperature of something on one side of it and something on the other side will equalize as quickly as radiative transfer will allow, and a thing on each side of the vacuum will observe the temperature of the vacuum to be exactly whatever temperature the thing on the other side of the vacuum is.

If I have one vacuum surrounded by an external environment of -100 degrees c and one that is + 100 degrees c is the center of my vacuums in both environments the same temperature despite the external conditions? I find this puzzling. — Benj96

One of them will be -100C and the other will be +100C, because they will both be surrounded on all sides by matter at those respective temperatures, so the amount of radiative heat constantly flying across them will be the amount corresponding to those respective temperatures.

Just like why deep space is 2.7K: that's how hot the CMB is.

I don't know why. If you feel you shouldn't respond to something I write, you probably shouldn't. I surely meant no offense and don't understand why you wrote that. But if it's true you shouldn't have replied! Or perhaps asked for clarification. — fishfry

I got a strong sense of hostility in your post, which was perhaps a mistake on my part. If so, my apologies.

It would be helpful if you say which use of the word philosophizing you're using: breeze-shooting or academic research or at least serious philosophy, even if done by amateurs. — fishfry

I don’t see those as different in kind, but more of a spectrum of quality: doing the same thing at its core, but with different degrees of skill and sophistication.

I don't think you could create sapient strong AI without making it sentient along the way -- which I think you could do in principle, NB, as sentience is on my account just another kind of functionality, and the corresponding phenomenal experience comes along for free in anything that has the same functionality.

Sentience on my account is the initial, first-order, unreflective interpretation of experiences into both a model with mind-to-world fit (perceptions) and another model with world-to-mind fit (desires), the difference between which drives the subsequent behavior. Sapience is what you get when you turn a system like that upon itself: reflective self-experience generating higher-order assessments of both what its own perceptions and desires are (self-perception) and what they should be (self-desire), and then self-behavior driven by the difference between those to change its own first-order perceptions and desires from what (it thinks) they are to what (it thinks) they should be.

You could totally have intelligence without sentience, as in a sophisticated problem-solving ability, but not sapience, since that just is reflective, higher-order sentience.

Please clarify your terms. — fishfry

I feel like I shouldn’t even respond to this, but I don’t mean that mere sapience is all it takes to do philosophy WELL. Just that people who do philosophy, well or otherwise, aren’t using any special faculties or abilities besides their capacity for reflection, honed to various degrees. And that other faculties like intelligence, as in problem-solving ability, all by themselves, no matter how well-honed, don’t make someone able to do philosophy, without first adding in that capacity for reflection.

So I think it also takes a degree of willingness to go out on a limb, in that you’ll often find yourself in disagreement with a lot of people, with nothing more to go on than your reasoned conviction. — Wayfarer

Agreed, and I think this is the same courage that 180 Proof mentions. But your examples also make me think that such courage must be countered as well by temperance or serenity, lest one be so eager to surpass the wisdom of the crowds that they buy into the first amazing-sounding account from the first supposed wise man they meet. One needs to be as skeptical of those who say they are wiser than the crowds as they are of the crowds themselves.

I use agent where you use "person" and agency where you use "sapience" — 180 Proof

Agency is the behavioral half of sapience or personhood as I mean them. There is also a corresponding experiential half. Agency, or will, is the self-control part, being self-directed. Just as important, though, is consciousness, self-awareness, or self-knowledge.

A person, however, I think of as an agent (that's) capable of anticipating and recognizing suffering other than her own, — 180 Proof

That is a consequence of sapience as I mean it, as I described in the OP. The ability to look upon yourself reflexively, as though in the third person, comes with it the ability to imagine a first person perspective for others who look, in the third person, like yourself.

sentience (which you seem to dismiss). — 180 Proof

Sentience as I mean it is the capacity for perception and desire, for feeling in general. I don’t mean to dismiss it at all — sapience is built on it, made by turning sentience upon itself, feeling things about your feelings, perceiving that you perceive and desire things, and desiring to perceive and desire otherwise sometimes. I only remarked that scifi writers often misuse “sentient” (feeling) when they really mean “sapient” (thinking). All sapient things are sentient, but not all sentient things are sapient.

No, because you trimmed off the part where I said I’m not using the word in its Latin sense, but in the sense that another non-human life form might be recognized as every much a person as ourselves. Sapience is that faculty that makes something a person; a sapient being is one that possesses those features that make humans count as persons. I analyze the structure of that faculty to be reflexivity of both experience and behavior, hence self-awareness and self-control. Sapience in that sense is not wisdom itself, but more like the capacity for wisdom.

Scifi commonly misuses the word “sentient” in place of this sense of “sapient”.

@Mww I understand you even less in that post, but I hope the above addresses something for you too.

That is a good addition. Parallel to the notion of courage, I think curiosity might be another good addition too.

I see no profit in allowing myself to do that which I am mandated by my very nature to have already done. — Mww

I don’t understand this sentence.

What it takes to do philosophy is the same as what it takes for a human to do anything of conscious intent: reason. — Mww

I agree, in that sapience basically is the capacity for reason, and consciousness and intention flesh out to that self-awareness and self-control that sapience consists of.

The scary question is, how can we know if this isn't how anesthetics already work? The patient is paralyzed during the surgery, and forms no memories, but is aware during the surgery and simply unable to express their pain, or to recall it afterward?

Universals is not such a thing because one could not even in principle describe what a person 'confused' by a model including them would look like. — Isaac

People who argue that universals don't exist sure seem to think that the concept of them is just a philosophical confusion.

Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof phenomenon

You realize that by this account all of the other supposedly meaningless philosophical questions discussed in this thread also become meaningful empirical questions in light of the confusion or clarity they produce in people? E.g. the difference between a world where "universals exist" and a world where "universals don't exist" is that in one world (whichever of them represents the correct answer to that question), people are not needlessly confused by intractable philosophical problems, while in the other world, people are thus confused.

I don't care to engage in the argument about whether it's possible to explore the implications of concepts a priori or only by a posteriori observation of other people. My point is just that the kind of question in that article you linked is the same kind of question as supposedly "meaningless" philosophical questions: it's a question of what's a useful way of thinking about something, not a question about the thing itself.

It's not only about the empirical facts of speciation in this case, it's about the empirical facts about how confusing/efficient different ways of thinking about them are for the humans doing the thinking. — Isaac

You do get that my entire point is about differentiating between exactly those two things? That there isn't a disagreement about the observed phenomena (the facts of speciation), but a disagreement about the observers (the humans doing the thinking about speciation).

My point is that one can no more work out the latter from one's armchair than one can the former. — Isaac

One can very easily work out whether certain patterns of thought lead to confusion or not from an armchair. When the question is about our own thoughts, the only experiments we have to do are thought experiments. We're talking about the a priori implications of our concepts about the world, given some particular world the details of which are not in question (what organisms exist and how their genes compare, etc). Figuring that out is like doing math, at most you need a pencil and paper to keep track of your thoughts, but it's all in the thinking where the work is happening.