Okay, and these obtain by virtue of what? The agent simply thinking that they're possibilities? — Terrapin Station

No. The agent may mistakenly think that he has the power to do something and not have it. He may not be strong enough to lift the suitcase, say. He may also believe wrongly that he has an opportunity. The bus left the station earlier than expected, say. But when the agent has both the power, and a corresponding opportunity to exercise this power, and know that he has both, then that makes up an open option for him. And there typically are several such open options in each particular deliberative context. What then determine which one of those possibilities will become actual is the agent herself, through deciding what she has a good reason to do.

In the post that you elected not to read, I explained why there being thus several options that all are open (and hence possible) for the agent is compatible with the fact of there being only one of them that is possible from the perspective of an external observer.

Why must you type such long responses regardless of how short my replies are? Is it some sort of psychological inability to keep things short as if you're having a conversation? — Terrapin Station

Because those are complex issues and there is no point is repeating almost verbatim the same seductive albeit simplistic (and flawed) arguments that have already been expounded uncritically 10,000 times previously in very similar threads.

If you don't want to think deeply about the issue, and prefer twitter-like superficial exchanges, you are of course free to ignore my long responses. I produce them for my own benefit as well.

Re your two different types of possibilities, I'd say that (2) is simply a subset of (1) . . . — Terrapin Station

It's the opposite since there is only one possibility from the external non-interventionist Laplacean perspective (1) whereas that are typically several mutually incompatible options (powers conjoined with opportunities) from the perspective of an agent (2). So. (1) is a subset of (2).

Unless I'm not understanding something there, and I'd say that whether something is possible in way way rests on an observer

I agree that the fact that most options are impossible from the Laplacean perspective (and that the only one that is possible is thereby necessary) while several options are typically possible from the perspective of the agent boils down to... a difference in perspective. But only the Laplacean perspective is the perspective of an observer. The perspective of the agent is radically different, since the way she knows what will happen has nothing to do with her knowledge (or lack thereof) of the antecedent causes of her action (including her own character or states of mind -- those are enablers of her rational capacities, not premises of her practical deliberation). She merely decides what is best to do, by her own lights (rational and/or moral considerations) and forms the intention to do it. She thereby knows what she will do or is doing. Knowledge acquired through practical deliberation, and the formation of an intention, is what Elizabeth Anscombe called practical knowledge. You know what will happen through deciding what will happen, and you thereby know the reason why it happens: which is that it ought to happen by your own lights (and that it is hopefully in your power to accomplish it).

In a way, the Laplacean observer is more knowledgeable than you yourself are, as an agent, since he knows in advance what it is that you are going to do (or, at least, how it is that your body will move, although those motions may be unintelligible to him if he hasn't figured out what they mean in high-level intentional terms). But in another sense, you are more knowledgeable than the Laplacean observer is for, except in cases of self-delusion, you always know what meaningful and purposeful action your bodily motions are realizing, since the controlling intention is the outcome of your own rational deliberation. Thus, you know something that the Laplacean observer may be badly situated to know, which is that the bodily motions that he predicted would necessarily occur happen to be realizing some specific intention not by accident, but for a reason. This reason, which is the 'rational-cause' of your bodily motions coming to realize non-accidentally some intentional action that you may have an objective reason to do, by your own lights, explains why it occurred as the intentional action that it is. (The way in which the intelligible cause of your action -- i.e. the reason why you are doing it by your own lights -- explains why the underlying low-level neurophysiological processes and bodily motions that realize it precisely realize this specific sort of high-level intentional action is a typical instance of 'downward-causation', by the way. There is also a form of causation that runs in the opposite direction, but it is non-determinative; your neurophysiology enables your learned agential powers and rational abilities to operate. In that sense, the causal power of the low-level processes are enabling causes of your agency. They make things 'possible' for you, in the second sense previously discussed.)

In my ontology there are no real abstracts. Abstracts only exist as dynamic states in individuals' brains. In other words, they're particular mental content — Terrapin Station

There are different forms of explanations of events, and likewise there are different forms of causal processes that that are the topics of those different forms of explanation. For instance, biologists who make use of functional/teleological explanations of adaptative behaviors, or physiological processes, focus on different "causal structures" than do engineers who explain why a bridge collapsed. It really doesn't matter for the purpose of my argument if you are a realist or an anti-realist about universals or abstract objects. My only claim is that two specific forms of causal explanations don't reduce to one another and failure to properly distinguish them (or properly relate them) has produced mischief in the free will literature.

What two different sorts of possibilities are you positing? — Terrapin Station

The two sorts of possibilities that I was discussing were (1) an event being possible consistently with the system it is involved in being in some initial state and the laws governing the evolution of that system. And (2) some choice or action being possible as an action that an agent has both the power and the opportunity to perform at some time in the future, from the prior perspective of her practical deliberation. That an event is impossible from the standpoint of an external observer (e.g. a Laplacean demon) who observes the agent from some external non-intervening standing point doesn't entail that this event can't constitute an open option, and hence be possibly realizable in the second sense. Furthermore, and this is where I am parting company with most compatibilists, the possiblitity of this event being realized by the agent isn't merely a matter of the epistemic limitations of the agent. Finally, since I am not denying that this event, which is possible form the agent's practical perspective, may also be 'impossible' (in the first sense) from the external Laplacean perspective, I am also parting company with most libertarians. As I suggested, the apparent incoherence in holding the same event to be both possible and impossible, in the future, at the same time, from two different sorts of perspectives, only seems contradictory owing to the failure to distinguish two radically different forms of causation.

Couldn't disagree with you more here. There's nothing extant that's not a process. — Terrapin Station

It's not something extant that I meant to refer to. I was suggesting that two different sorts of occurrences -- agent-causation and event-event Humean causation, specifically -- exemplify different forms of causation. Forms of causation, or "causal structures" as I meant the phrase, are abstracta. They are exemplified by causal processes that are similarly structured in some respect, and it is this respect of similarity that I called "causal structure". Thus, what I was objecting to is the common belief that explanations of human actions in terms of rational-causation, or agent-causation, can be reduced, somehow, or identified with, or eliminated in favor of, explanations in terms of Humean event-event causation (rendered popular by Donald Davidson in the philosophy of action) relating either mental states to one another (and to bodily motions) or their underlying realizations into deterministically evolving neurophysiological states and events.

I haven't the faintest idea what this is saying. — Terrapin Station

It it really that hard? Apologies if it is badly formulated. I am simply referring to the fact that rational agents such as us, when we deliberate about what we are going to do, are contemplating a range of options that we have both the power and the opportunity to do. All of those options are 'possible', or so do we believe, just in virtue of our having both the power and the opportunity of realizing any one of them. The traditional compatibilist philosopher, on the other hand, claims that only one of those 'possibilities' is really possible, and, indeed, necessary; and that, consequently, the other options that seem open to us only appear to be open due to our unavoidable epistemic limitations regarding the past state of the universe and the implications from the laws of physics. I am further claiming that this claim by the compatibilist stems in part from a confusion over two different sorts of possibilities, or lack of attention to the way in which they relate to one another (allegedly, through supervenience, on Kim's influential albeit misguided account).

The actual causal structure of anything is a deterministic processes that is causal-chains of physical events, by the way. (There's no need for invoking supervenience or "underlying" there.) — Terrapin Station

This is a category error. A causal structure isn't a process of any kind. And yes, there most definitely is a need to invoke supervenience in order to bridge the categorical gap in the argument that you are attempting to make. Jaegwon Kim has developed such sophisticated supervenience based arguments to get from the determinism (assumed) of the laws of physics to the causal exclusion of high-level causal/explanatory powers of agents (or of mental states of agent). The supervenience of the events that involve the high-level entities (psychological processes, bodily motions, etc) over the microphysical events must be assumed in order that the deterministic causal efficacy of the low-level initial state of the "system" exclude the possibility of of their being independent causes of the agent's actions at the higher level.

But that "misconstrual" is what the debate is tradtionally about. — Terrapin Station

It is actually ignored by a majority of participants in the debate. The relevance of the metaphysics of substances and powers (which contrasts with the metaphysics of Humean event-event causation) to rational-causation is often ignored because libertarian agent-causation is taken to conflict with our understanding of physics and neurosciences. (But traditional libertarian agent-causation hardly is the only alternative to traditional determinism.) Hence, a recent discussion between proponents of four different main orientations in the philosophy of free-will: John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, Manuel Vargas, (Four Views on Free Will, Blackwell, 2007), who are semi-compatibilist, libertarian, hard determinist and revisionist-compatibilist, respectively, never mention the possibility of agent-causation (as opposed to event-event causation) except as a topic of joke.

What would an analysis of how we talk have to do with an ontological discussion? — Terrapin Station

It is relevant to the 'free will and determinism' debate because the way 'possible' is tacitly understood in discussions of the principle of alternative possibilities often loses touch with the 'possibilities' that figure as open options from the perspective of the rational practical deliberation of agent (conceived by them as powers and opportunities that they have). Paying attention to how 'possibilities' likewise are involved in our conceptions of the powers of ordinary objects can alert us to the manner in which they are often misconstrued within a Humean metaphysics of event-causation. Talking about objects having powers and events being historically possible, in a deterministic universe, are two different things. Philosophers who aren't attentive to the problematic connection between those two sorts of (im)possibilities (i.e. historical impossibilities of specific events versus merely unactualized powers of agents) are led to mischaracterize agents as bundles of events, or deterministic processes that somehow supervene on underlying causal-chains of physical events. And those philosophers thereby lose track of the actual causal structure of rational agency.

Yes. If you posit any possibility other than one, it's inconsistent with determinism. — Terrapin Station

The analysis is meant as a conspicuous definition that captures how we talk about dispositions of ordinary things. Those dispositions may be linked either deterministically, or merely probabilistically, in the analysis, to their normal conditions of actualization. Hence the possibility of such an analysis of dispositions makes no commitment whatsoever to the universe being deterministic or not. Again, where you seem to balk, is not over the specific analyses of abilities and dispositions that new dispositionalists are relying on. It is rather its relevance to free agency that you seem to be skeptical of. But you are dismissing the analysis on faulty grounds (implying falsely that it is inconsistent with determinism) before even considering how it my be used to support a compatibilist account of alternative possibilities that might be relevant to free will and agency.

I disagree. It is not consistent with determinism. — Terrapin Station

You are not disagreeing with the analyses of dispositions that I have mentioned being consistent with determinism, are you? If anything, those analyses are tantamount to the recasting of power ascriptions to specific kinds of objects as statements of universal deterministic laws that link the actualization of those powers to triggering circumstances. Maybe that's not quite true of Vihvelin's analysis of practical rational abilities in terms of bundles of dispositions, but those constituent dispositions are deterministic and the overall account is completely insensitive to the underlying physical and/or neurophysiological levels of implementation being either deterministic or indeterministic (e.g. quantum-indeterministic).

You didn't seem to understand my comment. I'm saying that hinging the whole thing on that particular linguistic characterization is silly. — Terrapin Station

What are you referring to as "that particular linguistic characterization"? It would be a mistake to view those conditional analyses as mere arbitrary semantic conventions. The analysis of G. E. Moore was a first attempt. Lewis improved on it to account for 'finks'. Michael Fara improved again to account for 'masked abilities' and Kadri Vihvelin improved the analysis even further to account for asymmetries in PAP (the fact that we want agents who acted badly to have had the ability of have acted well, but not vice versa, as a requirement for them being deserving of praise or blame) in a manner that rather deeply illuminates the metaphysics of rational agency.

No, I'm not. I'm saying that there's not the possibility in any sense. If you say that the possibility obtained, you're not a determinist. Hence not a compatibilist. — Terrapin Station

Sure, there is a sense of possibility that applies to unactualized dispositions (or unexercised powers or abilities). This is the sense that is captured by a conditional analysis such as those of G. E. Moore, David Lewis or their 'new dispositionalist' sucessors, and it is perfectly consistent with determinism. For sure, you may not be satisfied with the way this clearly defined sense of 'possibility' can be adduced to secure the 'principle of alternate possibilities' in a way that makes it adequate for the ascription of freedom and responsibility to rational agents. But you'd have to actually look up the details of the proposals in order to assess them.

Confusing. I think compatibilism is an off-road to nowhere. — Mongrel

I agree with you -- regarding traditional PAP-denying-compatibilism -- but I think traditional incompatibilist libertarianism also is on such an off-road. New dispositionalists also seem to have made a wrong turn, but their attempt is instructive for they seem to have traveled on the right track for a little longer than either of their two predecessors. And they are in the best position to see the shortcomings of both.

It would be silly to frame the whole thing around the "could have done otherwise" phrase. You can just state it as "there is more than one possibility that has a >0 probability of obtaining." — Terrapin Station

The discussion of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) has been central to the debate about free will and determinism for decades and it isn't silly at all. There is a genuine cost for accepting it (usually incurred by libertarians) and a genuine cost for rejecting it (usually incurred by compatibilists). The reason libertarian believe compatibilists to be silly, and vice versa, is because each side is acutely aware of the bullet being bitten by the other side. Compatibilists are resigned to accept that free agents only have the illusion of having several genuinely (as of yet unsettled) open options to them, and libertarians struggle with the problems of luck and control.

New dispositionalist analyses of the abilities of rational agents aim at providing an account of free will that avoids both of those costs. I am not a new dispositionalist myself, but I can credit them with seeing the blind spots of both libertarians and compatibilists, whereas those two traditional opponents usually only see each other's blind spots, not realizing that they themselves are paying too high a cost.

But I'm not getting how the dispositionalist is offering an option. Determinists don't disagree that talk of logical possibility is valuable. — Mongrel

That depends on what it is that you want them to offer as "an option". Since they are compatibilists, they are not offering "an option" for agents to "chose otherwise" consistently with the past state of the universe (and the laws of nature) remaining the same, as most traditional incompatibilist libertarian required. Rather, they are offering an compatibilist analysis of "could have done otherwise", as opposed to traditional compatibilists who rather accept the lack of alternative possibilities and rather argue for the compatibility of free will and responsibility with this alleged lack of options.

That's fine, but determinism, if we're indeed talking about determinism, DOES imply that the powers in question are not available. Otherwise we're not talking about determinism. We're talking about something else and calling it determinism. — Terrapin Station

When you are saying that the powers in question "are not available" you are merely pointing out that they are not exercised in the actual circumstances, which is something that is accepted by dispositionalists. But to ascribe a power to an object, according to them, is not the same thing as saying that it was actualized. It is not either to say that it could have been actualized consistently with the past state of the universe and the laws of nature remaining the same. Maybe it was indeed necessary that the power would remain unmanifested. But according to the conditional analysis of powers, this is no ground for the denial of the object's possessing the power. Rather, the ascription of the power is akin to the attribution of some sort of intrinsic structural 'causal basis' to the object that explains why objects of that sort manifest this specific power when and only when the triggering conditions are realized. This is perfectly consistent with determinism, and with common sense, according to which attribution of dispositional attributes to objects (e.g. solubility in water, to sugar) is true irrespective of the possible truth of determinism. If theoretical physicist were to prove tomorrow that the fundamental laws of the universe were deterministic, it would not follow that they would have discovered that dry sugar cubes aren't soluble in water.

I grant that issues get more complicated when "new dispositionalism" gets adduced to defend the compatibility of determinism with the requirement for alternative possibilities for freedom and responsibility. One issue concerns the problem of "ultimate responsibility" when the antecedent features of the rational/moral character of agents are construed as antecedent conditions that determine their choices "externally", as it were. (That is, as determining conditions that aren't under those agent's control anymore). But such objections also rest of very problematic presuppositions about the nature of rational agency. For some recent statements of the objections to new dispositionalism, see Randolph Clarke, Dispositions, Abilities to Act, and Free Will-The New Dispositionalism, and Chistopher Evan Franklin, Masks Abilities and Opportunities Why the New Dispositionalism Cannot Succeed. I don't think, though, that Clarke's and Franklin's objections are definitive though they point to genuine problems with the current proposals.

A determinist like Schopenhauer simply notes that apriori every event can only have one outcome. If the outcome of a die roll is that the 5 is face up, it is not possible that the 2 is also face up.

Talk of the "power of the die roll to produce a 2 face up" is an analysis of logical possiblity. — Mongrel

For sure, this is a common way to be a determinist. In his book The Refutation of Determinism, Michael Ayers (London: Methuen, 1968) calls this sort of determinism actualism. Actualism, as applied to human and natural powers (e.g. the powers of objects) yields the denial that objects (or humans) have unactualized powers. But the sort of conditional analysis of dispositions and abilities proposed by the new dispositionalists show that actualism isn't the only option. (And their view was anticipated by Michael Ayers although he isn't, himself, a compatibilist or a determinist)

If they had the ability to do something else then the world in question isn't deterministic. You can't simply rename the ideas and say "There, compatibilism works." — Terrapin Station

According to a dispositional analysis of powers, the fact that an object doesn't exercise a power on some occasion doesn't show that the object didn't have this power on that occasion: only that is wasn't actually exercised. This is a common sense difference between the non-actualization of an existing power and a lack-of-power, which can be recognized irrespective of the truth of determinism.

For instance, a sugar cube has the (passive) power of dissolving in water. We call this power solubility. The general circumstance consisting in this sugar cube being immersed in water can be construed as a triggering condition (or triggering cause) for the actualization of this power. We don't say of the sugar cube, when is it kept dry, that it is not soluble at that time, only that it didn't actually dissolve. It's still soluble. A conditional analysis of solubility (in water) would look like this: "X is soluble in water if and only if X would dissolves if it were immersed in water" where the conditional is understood as a causal counterfactual. The counterfactual conditional is true even in circumstances where the antecedent isn't true.

In order to adapt this sort of analysis of powers (or dispositions) to the problem of free will, you may have to identify the 'triggering condition' of the agent's practical abilities with some feature of this agent's rational will. In that case, the agent who choses to steal a book didn't actualize her power from refraining to do so. This doesn't show that she didn't have the power from refraining to do so, anymore than a sugar cube remaining dry shows that it isn't soluble. An incompatibilist may object that the 'triggering' condition that was missing for the agent to refrain from stealing the book (having a honest character, say) isn't something that the agent had any control over at the time of acting if the world is deterministic. But it is far from obvious that rational agents relate to their own rational/moral characters in an extrinsic way such as to restrict their freedom. This is a much more difficult argument to make than it seems.

Do you have the actual power to do otherwise and believe this power to do otherwise is somehow necessary for moral responsibility? Then you are not a compatibilist, but believe in libertarian free will. — Chany

Yes, I also noticed that jkop began by mentioning and defining compatibilism and then seemed to be describing a form of incompatibilist libertarianism.

There is an issue, though, with contrasting compatibilism with the traditionally incompatibilist idea that free will requires the 'ability to do otherwise'. There now is a variety of compatibilism that incorporates this requirement but maintains that the 'ability to do otherwise' (or 'PAP', principle of alternative possibility, in the literature) is compatible with determinism. Endorsers of this new variety of compatibilism (e.g. Michael Smith, Kadri Vihvelin and Michael Fara) also endorse a view called "new dispositionalism" (by one of its detractors: Randolph Clarke) that adapts to abilities a (revised) conditional analysis of dispositions first proposed by David Lewis. The core idea is that when an agent performs an action in a deterministic world, that doesn't entail that this agent didn't have the ability to do something else but only that this ability was not actually exercised. This is much more to this new dispositionalist form of compatibilism, and the idea isn't without trouble, but it is worth mentioning that some sophisticated contemporary compatibilists now accept the requirement for alternative possibilities that was traditionally only insisted upon by incompatibilists.

It's always difficult deciding what kind of an -ist one foremost is.

I'm all for eudemonia and flourishing. So I may primarily be a florist.
I approve of the locution chi va piano va sano. So, I may also be a pianist.
In other moods I simply feel like being a recidivist, a playlist or a quarterfinalist.

Jonathan Edwards - Freedom of the Will — Sineview

Nice. I notice that it's available for free on the Google Play Store.

Is that taking into consideration the paradigm between local and global spatial geometry? — TimeLine

I am unsure what issue you are trying to raise. The rotating disk is in a stationary state. It is not undergoing any sort of deformation as seen from the inertial frame in which its center is at rest, or the non-inertial rotating frame that is constituted by measuring rods and clocks affixed to it.

His book Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I was my introduction to Heidegger. — John

Me too! I read it as preparation for an undergraduate course on Being and Time. I would have been lost without it.

Reading philosophy by dead philosophers that didn't have access to the findings of modern science is like reading a science book written by some dead scientist who didn't have access to the findings of modern science. It's nice if you are interested in a history lesson, but not if you are interested in modern ideas involving modern knowledge. — Harry Hindu

What about older insights, scientific or philosophical, that have *not* been rendered obsolete by modern knowledge? Do ideas all come labeled with a expiration date? I would be hard pressed, myself, to think of a single Wittgensteinian insight that has been rendered obsolete by a recent scientific discovery. On the other hand, reading some philosophical musings produced by philosophically illiterate modern scientists, it often seems to me that what they are saying had already been rendered obsolete by Aristotle more than twenty-three centuries ago!

Isn't linear speed synonymous to tangential speed in this case? I'm not convinced that the spatial distance between the clocks located away from the centre of the disk would change considering that we don't even know whether the disk itself is Born rigid. — TimeLine

Yes, linear speed just is tangential speed in this case. I was not picturing a moving clock but rather an observer skipping from one clock to the next at various distances from the center of rotation of the disk and comparing their rates to the rate of the clock at the center. Such an observer could explain the various rates of those clocks as a result of their various positions in the apparent gravitational field. There is no issue with rigidity if the disk is assumed to be rotating at constant angular velocity.

Yes, but look at it from the perspective of the edge. According to SR, a clock on the edge, in its own frame, is stationary and thus runs faster, not slower, than the moving clock at the center. But that frame is not maintained for even a moment, so SR doesn't really apply. The change of reference frame, and thus the change of the instant with which the center-clock is simultaneous, is what makes the center clock steadily gain time, not lose it. The effect is a moment-of-acceleration thing: acceleration component multiplied by the distance of the reference object in the direction of said acceleration component. — noAxioms

Yes, that's true if you construe the rotating observer at the edge constantly shifting from one ("co-moving") inertial frame to another, and the simultaneity between this observer's clock and the moving clock at the center of the disk thus being constantly redefined. This constant redefining of simultaneity between the two clocks accounts for the fact that the accelerating observer sees the center clock running faster in spite of the fact that it is lagging as seen from the co-moving inertial frames temporarily occupied by the observer at the edge. This is also how one can account for the fact that, in the twin-paradox, the twin traveler sees her stationary twin aging more overall in spite of the fact that she sees her aging slower during the two legs of her trip (assumed to take place at constant speed) away and back. It's when the travelling twin rapidly reverses course at the far point of her trip, and she becomes stationary relative to a new inertial frame, that the other twin (and the whole Earth) skips to an older age due to simultaneity being redefined in the new inertial frame of the far away travelling twin.

The frame that I was discussing in my previous post is non-inertial, and both the center clock and the clock at the edge are stationary in this frame, since the whole frames rotates with the disk.

The ones at the edge will have the least elapsed time because those are accelerating the most. — noAxioms

Not quite. From the point of view of special relativity, as analysed with respect to an inertial frame, only the scalar speed along the tangent of the trajectory, and not the acceleration, is relevant to the ratio of time dilation of a moving clock. Of course, it's true in this case that the clocks located further away from the center of the disk are accelerating more (centripetally), but it's not because of that that they are running slower. It's just because of their higher scalar (tangential) speed.

The further away from the center of the rotating disk the clocks are, the most they will lag. This is in accordance with the familiar special relativity equation for the ratio of time dilation as a function of speed (dt = gamma*dt_0). That the trajectory is circular rather than linear is irrelevant to the applicability of this equation for a moving clock.

An interesting reference frame to consider, though, is the frame in which the disk is at rest and the rest of the world is rotating around its center. (But this is not an inertial frame and hence the Lorentz coordinate transformation equations don't apply to it.) It's a non-inertial frame in which a stationary observer slowly moving along the axis would measure a variable "pseudo-force" (the radial centrifugal force locally indistinguishable from a gravitational force) as well as a small lateral Coriolis force. It is due to this pseudo-gravitational force that such an observer would be able to explain why the clocks that are located closer to the center of the disk are running faster than the clocks that are located further away. They are effectively located higher up in a pseudo-gravitational field, and in accordance with general relativity, clocks down a gravitational well run slower than clocks higher up. (And due to the "principle of equivalence", a pseudo-gravitational force due to acceleration can't locally be distinguished from a "real" one due to gravitational attraction.)

OK thanks. Is it easy to convert the online book to PDF? — John

I found an online tool for that. Just PM me.

I'm interested to know what OCRing is... — John

Optical Character Recognition... to convert the raw images in the pdf files that I had generated into searchable text (that can also be underlined, highlighted, copied, etc.) I couldn't find a good freeware to do that, so I downloaded a 7-day trial version of Adobe Acrobat DC. Thus converted, the pdf book looks just the same but it now has a hidden text layer added to it.

I am going to use K. T. Fann's book Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy as a guide for much of my summary of the Tractatus, because I think it is one of the best summaries written on Wittgenstein's early and late philosophy. If you want to study Wittgenstein I would suggest getting Fann's book. You can get it on Alibris (used) for just a few dollars. — Sam26

Thanks for the recommendation. I noticed that Google Books makes the whole book available for online reading. (I grabbed it and OCRed it so that I could annotate it). This is strange since Google *also* makes available a free sample, and sell the whole book in the Books section of the Google Play Store.

Stumbled upon a great piece by Susan Haack — darthbarracuda

Yes, nice that's its freely available online. It's based on two lectures that you can also watch on YouTube.
Science, Yes; Scientism, No
Scientistic Philosophy, No; Scientific Philosophy, Yes

And also of interest: Six Signs of Scientism

Welcome back!

I remember that there was a very good thread on the older forum about Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Was that your thread? In any case, if you can repost the original post, and the date, it ought to be possible to find the old thread on the Wayback Machine.

That's fair. a "thick" present feels in line with my feelings about this theme. I wonder though, if the present reaches a sufficient 'thickness' is 'presentism' still a good name? — csalisbury

It isn't a bad name, it seems to me, if the idea that only the present exists from the perspective of an agent can be given a reasonable sense.

The sense in which the future doesn't yet exist is the sense in which future possibilities still are open from the present perspective of a powerful agent. It amounts to a negation of nomological determinism -- i.e. the idea that the historical past in conjunction with the laws of nature determines the future -- which is a premise that doesn't make sense from the standpoint of practical reasoning.

There also is a related sense in which the past doesn't exist. From the perspective of an agent, many opportunities pass by and the possibility of them being exploited become foreclosed. The past doesn't exist anymore in the sense that it has become settled history, forever beyond the reach of the powers of an agent to shape some of its aspects according to her will (though the past still 'exists' from her perspective in a different sense: as furnishing constraints on her present and future actions).

The present, then, exists in the sense that it consists in all the opportunities for one to engage one's agential powers in various ways: power/opportunity pairs which constitute possibilities that threaten to become foreclosed, but that are immediately relevant to practical deliberation. Since actualizing one's powers to exploit present opportunities (either through individual or collective action) is a process that typically takes time, and is thus described with the use of the progressive aspect of action verbs, this also accounts for the thickness of the present.

So then the concept of time is not needed for what mathematicians do, it becomes a question of frequency and repetition for them, not time. For the mathematician it is the manipulation of mathematical expressions in space? They don't try to capture the richness of the experience of a moment, only its basic abstraction. — Cavacava

This is not quite what I was arguing. I wasn't contrasting the language of pure mathematics with the language of ordinary experience. I was rather contrasting the language of mathematical physics, and of other so-called exact sciences, with the language that one must make use of in order to bring to bear physical laws (couched in terms of B Series -- universal law statements) to the results gathered from actual experimental setups (couched in terms of A Series -- actualizations of real powers). There has to occur a translation from claims reliant on a metaphysics of isolated 'event' (magnitudes of physical values at space-time locations) and Humean causation to claims reliant on a metaphysics of 'substances' (or 'continuants') and their powers in order that the former claims may become empirically meaningful (and hence objective).

The other conception of the B series is historical, what happened in a chronological or some other type of order, say cyclic, it seems to be more about time as we more commonly understand it.

It is a point of view that abstracts away from the identity relatons that hold between the temporal 'stages' of the powerful actors, and which seek to externalize or reduce their specific powers to universal laws of causation that hold between structureless events. It's a vain attempt to achieve a God's eye view on the empirical world.

So are you suggesting the B series is theoretically collapsible into the A series, probably no, but then where is the measure, how thick can a moment be before it is history? What separates the flow of time from its chronology. I don't think the experience of a moment can be separated into present, past and future, they stab too much into each other. — Cavacava

It's not so much that B Series reduce to A Series but rather that the conception of time involved in B Series descriptions of events abstract away (for mere purpose of universal generalization) from features of A Series that are essential to the understanding of time. Being abstracted away, they still remain in the background and must be appealed to when physical theories are brought to bear to particular experiences (i.e. the interpretation of singular experiments or the deployment of theories in pragmatic contexts). In other words, the mathematical apparatus of a physical theory can be couched entirely in the vocabulary of B Series alone (for instance as they formalize the universally quantified statements of the 'universal' laws of physics). But when this mathematical apparatus is brought to bear to singular experiments, then one single element in the B Series must be identified with "now" (i.e. coordinated with the present time of the experimenter) in order to acquire definite meaning and practical significance from the point of view of an embodied physicist. This is why A Series are more fundamental. They lay behind the interpretation of the abstract theories couched in terms of B Series.

Do you think that time's flow requires an individual self that can experience that flow. Seems as though there would have to be some point of reference to experience time as a flow if time's flowing is not an illusion or a physical limitation.

Yes, I think time flows only with reference to the perspective of an embodied living subject. This makes it subjective in a sense that isn't contrary to objectivity, but rather in a way that makes objective judgment possible. This is related to the Kantian idea that the categories of the understanding (subjective) must be brought to bear to intuitions in order that experience can be objectively valid. In the case of the experience of time, one's subjective location within the A Series (as occupying the present time) is a necessary condition for one being able to judge, objectively, that some future states of affair are within one's power to bring about while other states of affair already are settled and hence not within one's power to affect anymore. Subjectivity grounds objectivity.

The problem here is that GR would seem to support some form of eternalism. — Marchesk

I don't think GR supports eternalism anymore than the special theory of relativity (STR) does. One reason why STR can be taken to support eternalism over presentism is because there doesn't exist an objective criterion for singling out a unique concept of simultaneity, and hence a unique definition of a spatially extended present.

But a weak presentist, as opposed to a strong presentist (as I defined them very roughly in my earlier post with reference to Augustine and McTaggart) need not commit to the existence of a very thin present ('space-like surface') uniquely defined over vast spatial expanses (e.g. many light-years away). The weak presentist only must be able to single out the presently existing time with reference to her lived present (and local) pragmatic perspective. This perspective can also be joined to a shared intersubjective perspective through interactive conversation with others and the shared participation in collective projects.

All that is required from physics from a weak presentist perspective isn't a definition of the spatially extended present (stretching to infinity in all directions) but a distinction between those events that are entirely settled independently of the agents present powers (i.e. everything that isn't within one's 'future light cone'), those that aren't yet entirely settled regardless of what one has done in the past or is currently doing (i.e. everything that is within one's 'future light cone') and what is currently enmeshed into one's temporally thick present activity (one's pragmatically circumscribed space-time neighborhood).

Presentism is dumb because it wants to make everything happen at this very moment, but things don't happen at a moment. (When's the present? the current planck whatever? the current nanosecond? second? minute? doesn't experience itself happen over time? How long does it take neurons to fire?) — csalisbury

I think this objection only properly applies to some strong forms of presentism -- e.g. Augustinian "knife edge" presentism, maybe. Weaker forms of presentism (such as the presentism entailed by McTaggart's view that A-Series are more fundamental than B-Series) seem to me more plausible precisely because they don't assume any God's eye view of the 'flow of time', or of the thickness of the present. An A-Series can be comprised of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Today obviously is a thick present. If what is present is whatever can be synthesized in experience for purpose of empirical investigation or practical reasoning (e.g. assessment of present opportunities for action) then there is no a priori limit to how thick the present can be as it might be conceived to appear in the middle of some essentially subjective A-Series.