No, they do not. — StreetlightX

How don't they?

. It is the phenomenal which is the real and if we desire to understand it we cannot subsume it under some abstract system. — StreetlightX

Only problem with this is that the hard sciences do exactly that. One can argue that some of the ancient Greek metaphysicians were getting at the reality beyond the senses in a pre-scientific manner. Democritus (atomism), Pythagorus (geometry), and Heraclitus (logos) would be three examples. Plato's cave can be seen (from a modern POV) as an analogy for the scientist leaving the cave of the senses to appreciate the mathematical equations describing the hidden reality revealed through experimentation.

Martin Luther said that human nature is like a drunk trying to ride a horse. He falls off one side, gets back on vowing not to fall off that side, and then falls off the other side.

Which is ironic, given that the great reformer himself fell off several issues. The point is human beings have this tendency to go overcorrect in response to a previous wrong. Prohibition in the US over alcohol and drugs is one such example.

I sent this message, then typed it in. True story. Things have been happening out of order with me for a while now. — Hanover

You might have some kind of superpower. I would check into. You could be investing successfully or winning the lottery before you use your money!

That's really disrespectful. Not that it surprises me, but an elected official usually doesn't mock a citizen in public, particularly one claiming to have been the victim of a crime. Trump just doesn't care.

I don't know if there is a way to structurally protect SCOTUS from political sturm and drang. Packing, enlarging, establishing term limits for justices... replacing them with Martians... Just don't know. — Bitter Crank

I've heard that the Canadian SC is not at all politicized like SCOTUS, so it's not impossible.

The ground of being God escapes this sort of objection. But in that case, it's misleading to say that God created the universe, as if God were one more thing in existence, thus requiring an infinite regress of explanations. Some of the atheistic objections are based on less sophisticated notions of the Abrahamic deity.

I don't think God exists, but there are different versions, some of which don't have the same objections.

What we do know is that under pressure, Kavanaugh turned more than a bit vicious. Not a good thing for a potential SCOTUS justice to display. Not a good thing for an appellate judge to display, for that matter. — Bitter Crank

That's true.

but at certain periods in the past the game has been played with better acting than it is being played now. — Bitter Crank

I recall when Bill Clinton was first elected. I was taking a class. Two of the Republicans in the room refused to give him a chance. That just seemed like ugly tribalism to me, and a lack of respect for the presidency. The radio and news programs catering to the right since then has been equally tribal. It's not surprising when the left responds in kind.

Without acknowledging this basic, self-evident truth, this hinge proposition, — Banno

Oh, that was good. You've out-goated yourself.

I doubt very much that God, if such a being exists, would have much to do with human wants and reasoning. We're just apes that evolved on one little rock in a vast cosmos. Why would God be anything like us, or care whether we argued for it's existence?

No. The experiment can also be considered at a macro scale using Schrodinger's cat as Banno suggests above. — Andrew M

Wouldn't the cat be doing the equivalent of taking a measurement, creating a definite result? I never understood why the cat could be in a superposition, but the scientists conducting the experiments were not.

The experimenters send a photon through an interferometer where one path has event A followed by event B and the other path has event B followed by event A. The paths are recombined and measurements of the photon match the predictions of quantum mechanics rather than classical mechanics (where the photon travels only one of the paths). — Andrew M

Is the indefinite history only a product of thinking of a photon as a particle instead of a wave?

Only if you imagine the Great Goat to be at the top of the Great Chain of Eating. But if instead you think of the Great Goat as that which makes eating possible, you would recognize the infantility of your western presuppositions.

There is no Utopia. But there's better and worse, and tradeoffs. We might decide as a species at some point that humans just can't be trusted with power once we have another option. Current democracies are the best we can come up with so far. It's telling that we call it the least worst form of government.

Eliezer Yudkowsky calls democracies vote-maximizing systems, which isn't what was intended, but it's what ends up happening.

The problem I have with US democracy is that only two parties matter, the Electoral College is outdated but will take a constitutional amendment to remove, which senators from the lower population states will never approve, large amounts of money are spent on campaigns, both parties are heavily influenced by big business, gerrymandering is a thing, and Supreme Court nominations are hugely political because everyone is worried about how the nominee will swing the court on a few key issues.

Also, debate between the two parties that matter has turned into a feces throwing contest presented in terms of good versus evil. Granted, the Republicans are more to blame for the debate degrading so much, particularly their media apparatus. But it has proved to be a working strategy, as was obstructing the Obama administration, so we can look forward to a downward spiral of that from both parties in the future.

Can we acquire knowledge of that which is not existentially dependent upon language? — creativesoul

Animals can, we're animals, ergo obviously yes. It's just very useful for us to put that knowledge into language.

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This seems to be where much of philosophy has been hung... — creativesoul

One can see that as a symptom of philosophers being hung up over words, since disagreement so often hangs on the meaning of words.

Alas, the whole notion of justice is so far betrayed by both sides, that they might as well dissolve the committee and the supreme court both. Justice counts for nothing, and nobody believes in it. — unenlightened

Maybe in a few decades the machines will be ready for us to hand such matters over to them. I can't remember which book it was, but I'm thinking off quote about how certain decisions are too important for humans to be trusted with, like running a country or interpreting law.

Or you could be having a psychotic episode. — Purple Pond

By me you mean the human race? I guess that would be one possibility we'd be forced to consider.

It could be something that can't be explained by science but is not in conflict with laws of nature. It other words, it is complementary with nature not opposing it. — Purple Pond

Wouldn't that just depend on the situation? It's easy enough to imagine convincing scenarios. Just watch any show like Supernatural, or the movies like Dr. Strange and Harry Potter.

If the stars in the sky all of a sudden formed the words, "I Am that I Am", then we would be forced into considering non-natural explanations.

Apathy kills — Evil

And if we're going to be abusing terms, then it's not apathy that does the killing, it's ideology. Apathetic people are too apathetic to get worked up to do bad things to their neighbor. It's always some passionate desire to recreate or cleanse the world that inspires the killing.

Passion is what kills. Of course it's the wrong kind of passion, but then again, all things in context. Some philosopher wrote an article in the NY Times about how cats were selfish narcissists except when it comes to their young, but at least you don't see them committing mass murder, since cats can't be convinced to care about that sort of thing.

Apathy kills — Evil

Nah, that's just a BS mantra by society to try and shame people into doing what the collective wants them to do. So basically you should vote for the less terrible candidate instead of abstaining or voting for the desired candidate who has no chance to win, because everyone else reaches the same conclusion that voting for the lesser of two evils is the way government ought to work.

It's also an abuse of language. Killing kills, just like power is power, not knowledge.

I'm surprised at that, or maybe I'm just incredibly cynical about politics. I hate both parties and most politicians.

and the Democrats are against the confirmation because they believe that he's guilty. — Michael

You really think the Democrats are against the confirmation for that reason? They don't want him because of how he might vote as Supreme Court justice. This is just a way for them to try and prevent it, or at least make the Republicans look bad and gain seats in the midterms.

This is all political, as far as the two parties are concerned. To think otherwise is naive.

Republicans don't want to investigate because of the time it would take. If Democrats take the Senate in November, they'll leave the Supreme Court seat vacant hoping to win the presidency in 2020.

This is why the Democrats dragged their feet on even having a hearing until yesterday. — frank

I really wish the Judicial branch was entirely independent from all the politics of the other two branches, but I guess that's part of the checks and balances.

Still, it bothers me that Supreme Court judges are often nominated according to how the ruling party in power thinks they will rule on certain issues.

And, as a writer for The Guardian put it recently, particularly in response to the reaction of many women to the Kavanaugh controversy, Republicans have galvanized a backlash that will have profound electoral consequences. — S

That depends on whether the backlash is amongst swing voters or people who would have otherwise stayed home. It doesn't help if it's just those of us who voted against Trump.

Also, two years is a long time to remain the same outrage in today's world, although Trump is admittedly good at keeping the flame burning. More likely the backlash would occur at midterms in the House and Senate.

The Democrats need to nominate someone who motivates people like Obama or Bernie to want to care about voting. Too many people saw Hillary as more of the same. The Republican candidates ran into the same problem against Trump. They were either seen as insiders, or lacked the personality to carry a movement.

Also, It's hard to put much stock in what people predict about future elections, given how almost nobody thought Trump could win. It was such a shocker.

But finding out that your assailant has been nominated to the Supreme Court is [clearly sufficient motivation to speak out. — Michael

Could also be that he might be instrumental in overturning Roe v Wade if he's nominated. But there are other accusations, so ...

whether the words themselves have inherent meaning — MindForged

To quote MCU Thor: "All words are made up."

"The Democrats are working hard to destroy a wonderful man, and a man who has the potential to be one of our greatest Supreme Court Justices ever, with an array of False Acquisitions the likes of which have never been seen before!" — Pierre-Normand

What a freaking drama queen. Everything is either the best or worst ever for Trump. He gets to appoint another judge if Kavanaugh is "destroyed".

Nothing about "red" inherently makes the mind conjure up a particular range of colors, just ask a pacific islander who doesn't speak a lick of English. — MindForged

Right, using 'red' to denote a color is arbitrary, but the debate is over whether words have an internal meaning in the head of speakers, or the meaning is from the language use in a community, and thus external. Therefore, the beetle in the box we can't talk about, and the impossibility of private language.

The way to get to the facts is to look for them. The Republicans don't want to do that. Therein lies the problem. — Baden

Fair enough.

But that's not necessarily the victim's fault. And that's where we need to disentangle things and be careful how we approach the issue. — Baden

Agreed. That's up to each senator.

No, that's not the way it works. Eye-witness testimony is evidence. — Baden

It is, but I question whether humans are reliable enough to count it as evidence. There have been cases of picking the wrong person out of a lineup, or remembering the wrong face where a person gets convicted, and is later exonerated by DNA.

The Steven Avery rape case is one famous one. Another involved a man driving home with his fiancee who looked like the perp and was picked out of a lineup. The accuser became convinced it was him, and he was convicted. Years later, an investigator tracked down the actual culprit and got a confession out of him. The case got overturned.

There was also the whole false memory thing with the recovered memory therapy that was big in the wild 80s and 90s Satanic Ritual Abuse cases.

If your rhetorical point is the conspiracy theory angle, that's been dealt with several times already in this thread. — Baden

Calling it a conspiracy theory makes it sound like politics doesn't involve attempts to smear people or dig up skeletons to prevent them from taking office.

And how it's been dealt in this thread doesn't change my sense that the accusation is being used politically. How do you think the Senate vote will go? Democrats against, Republicans for?

^ Those two questions are rhetorical.

You're wasting everyone's time here if you don't even know for sure what age he was when this happened or the circumstances surrounding how the accusations were released and the background to that. — Baden

Those questions were rhetorical. The one that wasn't was about statistics involving controversial political positions.

And you'll find the answers. — Baden

I doubt that. From what I've read and heard so far, opinion tends to break along political lines.

But I'll agree with the posters who said each Senator should weigh the testimony of both and the available evidence, for what it is, and come to a decision.

This paper gives a 5.9% false reporting rate for the US. — Baden

But what's the probability when a big political decision is at play? Why is it that accusations come out right before someone controversial is about to be elected or appointed? Isn't this accusation from decades ago when he was 17?

I'm not sure that's enough to bar his nomination. Seems to me there are better, more recent reasons to oppose the nomination. Maybe Ford is telling the truth, but the Democrats are definitely using it for political reasons (not that the Republicans are above that either).

Apart from Meta, is there anyone willing to defend the notion of words having essential meanings? — Banno

I don't think the meanings of words is exclusively in their usage to the extent that we can ignore what the brain is doing cognitively. There's an cognitive component to meaning which makes the usage possible. I don't know about the essential part, since language is fluid and evolves. But if you tell me a word, it does cause mental activity in me.

"How could it?" How could it not? It's not indefinite, the members of the "set of natural numbers" never increases or decreases, it is exactly what it is and has always been. — MindForged

Well, I'm not sure that's quite the case under intuitionism, where infinity is only a potential, and the only natural numbers that exist are the ones which have been stated, written down or computed.

If that's so, then under one philosophy of math, natural numbers can be added over time, in a sense that they go from potential to actual. Otherwise, one might be seen as committed to the reality of infinities and numbers we haven't constructed yet.

Some of the reading I've been doing that somewhat inspired my thread has been precisely on the link between gesture and math, and the fact that math is unthinkable without gesture. — StreetlightX

Depends on whether one believes computers can think, or whether it would require a robot for a machine to understand math. Humans learn math because of gesturing, but that doesn't mean math has to be learnt that way. Maybe that's just the ape way.

Insofar as all language is normative, so too is math: it does not reflect some other-worldly eternal reality. — StreetlightX

No, but it does reflect the countability of the world, and possibly more.

In the movie (and book) Contact, SETI detects an alien signal because it's broadcasting a repeating sequence of prime numbers from 1 to 101. The idea being that math is universal. Also, the aliens have broadcasted at the frequency of hydrogen times PI, which combines basic chemistry with basic math, which is a frequency SETI actually listens to, and one Sagan came up with when writing the book. Any alien civilization capable of broadcasting a radio signal will also know chemistry, since they live in the same universe.

As such, the assumption is that basic math and science are universal among any technological species, otherwise, they wouldn't be capable of sending or listening for radio signals.

If an alien can broadcast, then it understands "PI".

I think one could make a persuasive argument that the concept two the english word "two" denotes is an essential meaning, since there is going to be the idea of two in any language, since there are distinct countable things in the world, and it's very useful to be able to say that.

If a lion could talk, it would say that a gazelle in the mouth is worth more than two in the grass.