Yes making it better is worthy only if there is the struggle to make it better. Believers want paradise, because after living a life in hell, one wants a quietus. But that's only AFTER the great struggle is over, not before. — Agustino

What was the plan before Adam & Eve screwed the pooch? Just give people virtue up front and a free ticket straight into paradise?

If it would do everything that it is claiming to be able to do then I'm sure everyone would, and probably someday will be pushing a similar button for at least a few hours a day. — Wosret

There is already a lot of hours spent watching screens, and plenty of people still enjoy escaping into a book. If and when we do have a Star Trek Holodeck quality VR, it will be interesting to see what happens. It's rather hard to believe that the characters on ST spend relatively little time in the Holodeck. But then again, most of those characters have rather exciting and demanding careers, being on the frontier of exploration with alien contact and spacial anomalies, so maybe that keeps the temptation at bay.

Star Trek didn't focus on regular folk much. Picard had a brother in France who maintained a vineyard. I guess that's still rewarding work in the 24th century?

You can't equate idealism with solipsism. As we've gone over many times before, they're not the same thing. The idealist's position is that all things are mental in nature; it's not simply the position that all things are a product of one's own mind. There can be other minds, each with their own thoughts and experiences, that continue to exist even when you're dead — Michael

This is true, and it has been defended many times. But I can't get over the fact that the idealist is making an exception for other minds, epistemologically speaking. The idealist is hand-waving the issue away by asserting that of course other minds exists. Don't be silly.

The solipsist is more consistent. We only know about other minds the same way we know about objects, which is via perception. And if to be is to be perceived ...

n fact, the greater the opposition, the greater the victory, the greater the triumph. — Agustino

If only we could all endure the holocaust. What titans of virtue we would become.

God overcame the impossible to create the world - made the world out of nothing. What greater triumph than possibility beating impossibility? — Agustino

Making a better world than this. Question for you. Why is it that believers wish to enter paradise when they die? Why not more character building?

No - because a world tailored to my needs takes away from the merit of my character. The world we live in isn't tailored to anyone's desires. That's great! — Agustino

I'm glad you find it to be great. Very Nietzschean of you. Here's a thought, though. Do you ever wonder why we live in such a technological world? It's probably because people were never entirely happy with the way the world was, and figured out some way to tailor it. We could all just be overcoming lions and thirst on the Savanna with our two legs and opposable thumbs, but someone clever was always dissatisfied.

I don't find that entertaining, actually that's fucked up and disgusting. If I was in charge, I'd ban all horror movies for teaching and entertaining psychotic mindsets. — Agustino

Guess what? In your envatted world, you get to be in charge and ban all such shows. Although, it won't affect any of the other envatted minds, so you might not get the same satisfaction from doing so. That's one strike against being envatted. I suppose you could choose to delude yourself during the envatment procedure.

You mean a world where my overcoming is guaranteed instead of merely possible? I would refuse, because then it wouldn't be my merit. My virtue, my character - neither would be the result of me, but rather the inevitable result of history. — Agustino

I mean more like playing a video game, where you can accomplish goals, or fail to, but one tailored completely to your desire to suffer and overcome. The world we all live in isn't tailored for anyone. Shit just happens to all of us in meaningless proportions. Some people manage to get enough money and power to make it a little more tailored. But that's no guarantee against a thousand things that could go wrong at any moment.

I mean, people regularly watch all kinds of horrendously violent TV drama; and I'm pretty sure they don't want their lives to be like that. — John

Yeah, The Walking Dead is entertaining to watch, but it would be hell to live.

But not everyone wants to get rid of their sufferings. For example if someone told me they will fulfil all my desires - anything I want - today and get me rid of all my present sufferings, I will say no. That would be the absolute worst thing someone could do to me. The whole thing is that I want to do it myself, I want to overcome obstacles, develop my character, and learn myself. I don't want someone else to do it for me. That would be the horror of horrors. — Agustino

And if you get to suffer and overcome in the best possible world for doing that as Agustino, instead of this life, with all it's happenstance, would you still refuse?

As for others, the truth of this life is that some people do live a horror of horrors. There have been very many horrors in human history, and a great deal of suffering.

have yet to meet anyone who wants to be a brain in vat. — wuliheron

Then you just haven't argued with any of the dream machine advocates yet. They do exist. Their position is basically to hell with truth and reality, experience is what matters, and having the best possible experience trumps everything else.

Based on what I've seen said about the Cyrenaics, my guess is they would have agreed, since pleasure is the only good for them.

I think of 'brains in vats' tales as imagined by the idle rich, who can somehow conceive of such scenarios without the many labourers and other resources and energy that would be needed for each brain. — mcdoodle

Fully automated society = envatting everyone into their ideal world? Was that Marx's true goal???

But in ontological terms, there exists no forest in the absence of mind. At least that's my opinion. — dukkha

How do you account for minds inferring that forests existed before minds to think about them as forests? If the world only exists for minds, then why does it seem like the world existed prior to minds? Why is it that minds find themselves to be dependent on the world?

there's a difference between philosophy and science fiction although it's sometimes a hard thing to explain. — Wayfarer

Brain trauma and the sometimes odd disorders which result aren't science fiction. The rest is, for now, but notice how nobody has shown that it's technologically impossible to create a simulacra indistinguishable to our senses from the real thing. The most I've seen anyone try to refute it is Dennett, who claims that the combinatorial explosion of providing a brain in a vat with all the inputs every moment dwarfs any future computing capacity. But there are computer scientists who dispute that claim.

This is false. Wittgenstein disproved global skepticism by his analysis of hinge beliefs. Global skepticism is self-defeating. — darthbarracuda

I don't think he quite succeeded. Consider a possible hinge belief. My left arm belongs to me. I can't doubt that. I can wave my left hand in front of my face. Seems like this a great candidate for a hinge belief.

Except it turns out there is a rare brain condition where people come to believe that a certain part of their body doesn't belong to them. There is even a brain condition where people ignore an entire side of their body as if it doesn't exist.

Let's try another hinge belief. I'm alive. I can't doubt that, right? I breathe, I pinch myself and feel pain, I experience hunger, thirst, I interact with objects and others, etc.

But then again, there is yet another brain condition where people feel like they're ghosts. Everything seems hollowed out to them.

One more. I can't really doubt that my partner or family member is someone else that looks like them in disguise, right? You can't live closely with someone over time and actually believe they are some kind of doppelganger. Another hinge beliefs.

But yet again, there is a brain condition where people come to believe that someone close to them has been replaced by a double. This has to do with losing access to the feelings they used to have for that person.

So in all those rather strong looking hinge cases, it is possible to have brain trauma so that you actually do doubt what seems to be undoubtable, in a real, every day lived sense.

Beyond that, we have the Truman Show, The Matrix, Brains in a Vat, being stuck inside a Holodeck program indistinguishable from the real world, etc. that all show at least the possibility of global beliefs being radically mistaken. And if our current computing technology continues to advance, some of those scenarios could become possible. The latest VR is quite a bit better than the VR of the 90s. We can only imagine VR or total immersion in the 2050s, or the possibility of whole brain emulation.

Nick Bostrom has even written about the death of realism given future technologies, where we lose the ability to distinguish generated experiences from real ones.

ike pretty much every commentator on the Election you seem to have conveniently forgotten that Clinton received nearly 2 million votes more than Trump and that Trump's triumph has almost nothing to do with a significant shift in popular feelings only the bizarre electoral system that turns a 1.3% lead in the polls into a 13.8% deficit in the final result combined with the lowest turnout for decades. — Barry Etheridge

Yeah, but a lot those votes come from states like California and New York, which were going heavily Democratic no matter what.

Clinton lost in states she should not have lost, like Michigan. Voters who voted for Obama in Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, etc. switched to Trump, voted third party, or didn't bother voting. That's the problem.

The Democrats had a popular candidate in Bernie, but they wanted to go with an insider who represents the establishment. I think Hillary would have been a good president, but she didn't inspire anyone like Bernie or Trump. What was the message to the Bernie supports and moderates? Vote for the lesser evil. Hearing that every single election is fatiguing. It's hardly inspiring. Hillary didn't represent change. Bernie did. Voters in states that mattered wanted something different. Plenty of the swing votes would have gone to Bernie if he had been the candidate.

As for the electoral college, I'd be all for reforming it, if the states could agree to do a percentage instead of winner take all. There's plenty of people in California or New York or Texas or any state that always goes one way who would like to see some of their electoral votes go for the candidate they voted for.

I'd be all for breaking up the two party system, and having a ranked choice voting system. Just getting rid of the electoral college isn't going to solve everything (which is bloody unlikely to happen since it takes an amendment, and those red states aren't likely wanting to see the big cities dominate the election).

It is pretty amazing that whoever won was going to have like 25.x% of the eligible votes. Maybe if you can't get at least one third of the eligible votes, the current president just stays in for another term.

Well, yeah, depending on the specific example and context, you might want to not just settle on stage (1) or (2) of that. I'm just noting that the question of whether unobservables are real can be taken and answered in different ways. — Terrapin Station

Yes, especially in theoretical physics.

(1) We can treat them simply as instrumental utilities where it doesn't matter if they're real in any sense beyond being useful for the theories in question (and one might say that's "real enough"), — Terrapin Station

Except for when it comes to school funding or medical treatments. Then you might want to know whether they are just instrumental utilities or actually real.

I can tie this into another thread where the OP asked about aliens.

Kris Kelvin arrives aboard Solaris Station, a scientific research station hovering near the oceanic surface of the planet Solaris. The scientists there have studied the planet and its ocean for many decades, a scientific discipline known as Solaristics, which over the years has degenerated to simply observing, recording and categorizing the complex phenomena that occur upon the surface of the ocean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)#Plot_summary

In this story, scientists have gathered their data on the Solarian ocean. However:

Thus far, they have only compiled an elaborate nomenclature of the phenomena — yet do not understand what such activities really mean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)#Plot_summary

If anti-realism were the case, I would expect that factor analysis would never get farther than what the scientists in Lem's story have gotten with the alien ocean. Scientists and statisticians collect a bunch of data on a wide variety of phenomena which they classify accordingly, but no hidden factors can be inferred to make sense of it.

Can you show a concrete example with some specific observable and unobservable variables? — Babbeus

I'm just learning how to use it. You can do a search for factor analysis studies. There's plenty of scientific results and papers.

Or are you simply asking whether there "really are" unobservables? — Terrapin Station

That's stated as the motivation for the people who invented factor analysis.

Latent variables are inferred, a mental construct, part of a mental model. Thus, consistent with an anti-realist metaphysics. — Brainglitch

Yes, in the model of doing factor analysis. But the fact that it works suggest something more. You can't use the mental construct, as I mentioned above, to explain why the model works on real data.

IOW, this isn't just a mathematical concept. It's use to get at unobserved factors in real data. That's the reason statisticians came up with it. The theory being that there really are such things explaining the data.

My understanding of the role of unobservables is that they are well-understood concepts that cannot be directly quantified, and for which proxies are used. For example IQ test results are used as a proxy for intelligence, or life expectancy may be used as a proxy for quality of life. — andrewk

Perhaps often this is the case, but there is exploratory factor analysis, where you might not know which concepts play the role of the factors. You can take any data set with related variables and do an exploratory factor analysis on it.

Well, assuming that there are such things, I'd assume they'd be called "unobserved and unconceived phenomena". — Michael

Why add "unconceived" to the mix? If it's not observed, then it's an unobservable, period. We might conceive of it, but for one reason or another, we don't observe it. They are two entirely different things.

I prefer this one (making Earth great again):

I think that epistemology leads to and structures ontology, not the other way around. What we believe we know, determines what is, not what is determines what we think we know. — Cavacava

So our reason imposes structure on the world?

I wonder what happens if we do make contact with Aliens at some point. Who is the measure of what is, us or them? What mediates between the two?

The objective as you have described it has no meaning, it may exist and have existed but that existence is meaningless without us. It was all meaningless until we came along and gave it meaning. It more a question of how we play into the schema of things, since there is no schema without us. — Cavacava

Meaning is a loaded word. Ontological structure is better. Does the world have an ontological structure independent of us? Is it differentiated somehow? If so, can we know this? Do any of our current schemas approximate it?

When you say 'objective' what do you mean? Are geometry, physics, and the other sciences all strictly objective, or are they also subjective. Or when you say objective do you mean 'real' as existing in the world outside of us, separate from us as things? — Cavacava

Mind-independent. The objective world doesn't depend on us perceiving, knowing, or talking about it. It's objective precisely because it doesn't vary based on individual perception, cognition, etc. It's also objective in that it doesn't depend on us being human. Man is not the measure, if anything is truly objective.

Didn't Kant connect the subjective with the objective, uniting or mediating them with reason which is objective universally necessary, reason which is the paradigm example of objectivity, yet is also a subjective ability, — Cavacava

Sure, if you accept Kant's account of reason. Then we can't know the noumena. Evolution is only true as it's correlated to us, not independent of us, even though evolution claims a time and process long proceeding humans, leading to human reason.

Side Note:

The Solaris alien is compared to an infantile God at some point in the book. I think it would have served as a decent explanation for the Cyreneacs of our experiences.

Stanislaw Lem's sentient ocean in the book Solaris which has been made into two movies. He was critical of popular science fiction depicting aliens as either humanoid or something that comes from our nightmares. In either case, meeting aliens is about us. In the most recent adaptation of Solaris to film, a recording of a scientist studying Solaris claims that our enthusiasm for space exploration is a sham. We're looking for mirrors, not the truly other (aliens).

The book and movie Contact get around this problem by having the aliens take the shape of a human known by the characters (Jodi Foster's in the movie). This is to make communication more comfortable (and possible for us).

Which is interesting, because in Solaris, a deceased loved one appears to the main character, possibly as an attempt at communication, but unlike with Contact, it's painful and incomprehensible.

If science fiction is believed as correct, then a lot of absurd consequences follow — Metaphysician Undercover

Frozen block-time comes from the physicist Brian Greene. I don't know whether he came up with the interpretation, or just wrote about it in one of his books.

This isn't about what might happen. Your already have your data set. The theory is that there are hidden factors explaining your data. You might be measuring one hundred different things, but they can be reduced to a dozen factors that explain those hundred measurements.

So if we want to explain why kids succeed or fail in school, and we measure a bunch of things, then we want to be able to reduce our data to what explains success in school. And then we can act on that (assuming an ideal world absent politics).

Now, on a possible anti-realist view of things, if there are no hidden factors, then some kids succeed and some fail, and there are a bunch of observations we can make. But there is nothing beyond that explaining the success and failure. Nothing beyond what we measure. This is in direct contradiction to what factor analysis assumes to be the case. There are things we cannot measure, so we have to resort to a statistical analysis to tease them out.

Let's use a hypothetical example. Human civilization lasts for a billion years, and it continues to advance over that time, until our descendants are virtually god-like compared to us. But they fail to create an FTL drive. They also fail to colonize the galaxy using generational ships.

If a Humean is asked why the galaxy isn't colonized, they will say that our future civilization just didn't do it. A necessitarian (pro causality) will say they didn't do it because FTL proved to be impossible, and the generation ships were just too slow to be worth it. The second explanation is more plausible, because if FTL is doable, then it would have been invented over a billion years. They just didn't do it isn't an explanation. But it works for the generation ships, which would be doable, but perhaps not worth it.

On the Humean view, neither is strictly impossible, as there are no laws ruling out galactic colonization. It just doesn't happen. On the necessitarian side, one is impossible and the other is not, but the second is a poor means of galactic travel, so it's not done, whereas FTL would be a great means of travel, but it can't be done, and thus the galaxy isn't colonized.

And maybe that's why we haven't received any alien visitors yet, or didn't find ourselves already part of a galactic civilization (this is basically Frank Drake's answer to the Fermi Paradox).

A Humean would just say that any aliens out there haven't bothered. A necessitarian would say they can't go fast enough to make it worth the effort.

Regardless, why does it work is the question. FA assumes there are such possibilities to be discovered. The math is based on that assumption.

The current theory of Thermodynamics says it is impossible. But one thing we mostly believe is that all of our current theories are wrong, and will be replaced by newer, better theories over time. — andrewk

Wrong or incomplete? Newtonian gravity is incomplete, not wrong in the sense that Relativity invalidates everything laid down by Newton. I guess it's a question of whether science is mostly building on and refining an edifice of knowledge, or completing restarting every big discovery (or paradigm shift, to use an abused term).

On the first view, we're not mostly wrong, we're just somewhat ignorant. We have a lot of the fundamentals in place, and now we're slowly learning how they fit together. We don't expect radical changes to the fundamentals in a thousand years, we just expect a far more complete structure of knowledge.

On the second view, science in a thousand years is radically different. We're not much different than medieval scholars in that regard. Our entire scientific understanding of the cosmos is way off, waiting to be eliminated in favor of better models.

I believe possibility is an epistemic situation when we don't know for sure what the factors are. It's possible that working memory is a factor in explaining the assessment results. But whether it actually is requires further confirmation.

The question is why there would be an actuality. Why would working memory or any latent variable exist, if the anti-realist view is the correct one?

This Humean can't see any problem, because we don't know that we can't do those things. All we know is that nobody has managed to do them so far - from which we can infer nothing about what might happen in the future. — andrewk

Does physics admit to the possibility of making a perpetual motion machine at some point in the future, or is it ruled out as impossible? There are different categories of things that haven't been done yet. Some we know can be done, like setting foot on Mars. Some we think can be done, such as terraforming Mars to be self-sustainable for Earth life. Some we don't know, like cold fusion. Some we think impossible, such as FTL. And some are known to be impossible, like knowing the exact position and momentum of a particle.

How does a Humean explain the differences? It's one thing to say that I will never walk from the northernmost tip of North America to the southernmost tip of South America, and another that it's impossible for me to walk from here to the Moon. Why the difference?

As opposed to Humans, yes. There's other weird creatures walking amongst us, like the Kantians and the Witty folk.

Possibility is not actuality. There is no problem for the Humeans. They never claimed radical difference has occurred or must occur, only that it might. We can't do those things becasue, so far as we've encountered, they are only a possibility. To do them, they would have to be actual. And indeed, this means we might never do them at all. — TheWillowOfDarkness

The problem is the lack of explanation for why they might never be actual. Or more fundamentally, all the patterns we observe are brute. There's no reason the universe appears ordered. It just so happens to be that way, at least in our region of space, for the past few billion years. That's an awful lot of contingency.

I have. Up until last Tuesday, the USA had operated as a reasonably well-intentioned, albeit heavily flawed, democracy and world citizen. Then it suddenly elected a fascist as president. — andrewk

Non-zero probability of multiverse interference? Human free will violating laws of nature? Trump campaign got hold of Man in the High Castle video reels?

When we talk about possibility, we are discussing what's beyond the empirical, what the world cannot and cannot do based on logical reasoning, as a way of discounting the incoherent states which cannot (as opposed to "do not" ) exist. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yeah, and our imaginations are not constrained by what nature can or can't do. We can imagine a perpetual motion machine (and people try to claim they've invented one), but nature allows for no such thing. Just like we can imagine FTL or time travel to the past, but we might never be able to accomplish either.

In fact, that's a problem for the Humeans. Why can't we do those things?