Comments

  • The Everett Solution to Paradoxes
    :up: and if we follow the explanatory burden, we find that it implies the existence of a shared reality, or medium, in which the rules of p or not-p are distributed and selected, just as the superposition in the "original" universe did, at which point we have to acknowledge that that medium is the true reality, making the Many Worlds superfluous.
  • The Everett Solution to Paradoxes
    If I say p & ~p, p goes "this town ain't big enough for both of us" to ~p and vice versa - one has to go! However if p in one town and ~p in another, there's no issue at all.Agent Smith

    Yes, but it adds the explanatory burden of new universes being created with every superposition collapse. An alternative that doesn't necessitate the creation of new domains is that superpositions are potentials, and with observation, a value is selected-in from the medium which does the selecting (which is the medium in which p or not-p are contraposed, e.g. the medium contains the logical syntax).
  • The Everett Solution to Paradoxes
    Paradoxes appear when one rejects the self-justifying nature of logic.

    Regardless of how someone tries to "resolve" the apparent illogical nature of a superposition, the implication is always that all possible worlds are unified in one reality, and that one reality has the property of being able to mentally "select" collapses of state. In line with this, science has demonstrated the validity of quantum contextuality.

    I'd reject the Many Worlds Interpretation on the basis that it adds ontic baggage without solving anything.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    It isn't a given that the statement "there's nothing outside of everything" or your other statement "anything that interacts with what is real must also be real" are true so therefore trying to state that it is a given either one of them to be true is a non sequitur fallacy.dclements

    What you claim my statement is, is not what a non sequitur is, nor is my statement what you describe it to be. I said if you think one is false, then you can explain why. Requesting an explanation is not a non sequitur. I'm not saying either "is a given". Even if I were to say that, that wouldn't be a non sequitur. A non sequitur isn't an unjustified assumption; it is a conclusion that doesn't follow from a presented argument.

    Your responses to me here all fall under the category of denying that there is an invariant guarantor of truth to base any axiom or definition on. What you're failing to notice in each case, is that this is self-refutational, and that is the basis for accepting that there are such self-justifying means for ruling the truth or falsehood of propositions that cover all cases.

    Are you talking everything in this universe or about everything in this universe and ALL other universes? If you are talking about ALL other universes (if there happens to be such things) then it is obvious that you nor anyone else in this universe (who has no experience with interacting this other universe) has any authority to speak about how this other universe operates since we know nothing about it. Even with this universe, human beings have a very limited knowledge on how things actually operate and the rules that most be followed.dclements

    Without noticing it, you've actually instantiated the very truth that "there's nothing outside of everything" in your attempted refutation of my position, since the very format of your argument relies on something being false outside of some domain (having any true knowledge about these other universes)in opposition to what is true inside (having true knowledge about the universe one resides inside) of the domains excluded by the outside. So the fact that I'm right is hiding within your response claiming that I am wrong.

    Despite claiming that there's no objective meaning to the word "everything", and that human beings have no authority to decide on how things foreign to us operate, you've proceeded to use the quantifier "ALL" as if it does mean something intelligible and in way that does apply to and produce knowledge regarding any entity we can imagine. There's another 2 contradictions.

    All you are really doing is saying is that "YOU" define something that is "real" to be something that interacts with something else that is real. But what if the thing that is being interacted with in the first place isn't even "real" but only thought of as real in the first place?dclements

    The presence of an interaction itself is what defines being real - is the feature that a real thing has - proposing interacting with an unreal thing is an oxymoron/self-contradiction. For something to not be real means for it to be incapable of changing anything in reality. This very point is pretty much in the OP.

    like pretty much all axioms that anyone postulates they are only true because one believes them to be true.dclements

    But you also said
    it isn't a given that the way you think what "everything" is and means is actually the way it really isdclements

    wherein you claimed that there is "an actual way it really is". So is there, in fact, an axiom that's stance-independently true? You seem to be claiming there aren't such axioms but then using axioms as your justification.

    All of these objections ultimately stem from you thinking that true might not under all circumstances be the negation of false, which is the general form of what you've said here, including insinuating that what is real could turn out to be, or interact with what is, unreal. It is for systematic reasons that anyone holding the position you are holding about true definitions ends up contradicting themselves in any claim they make about those definitions or about what can be known using them. These errors perpetuate because you are not noticing them.
  • Global warming discussion - All opinions welcome
    Western countries are continuing their trend in decoupling CO2 emissions from economic growth.
    This is in spite of, not because of, the policies that the green movement support and in many places have had governments bring into force.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    you haven't pointed out any non sequitur in anything I wrote.

    If you think either "there's nothing outside of everything" or "anything that interacts with what is real must also be real" is a nonsequitur, then you're free to try and explain why they are.

    appealing to ungrounded skepticism by insisting that we don't know in the way that you're doing is like claiming we don't know whether true is the opposite of false.
  • All That Exists
    Cantor's theorem must give way here, because it is not based on a self-referential model of logic. Logic has to be self-containing (self-justifying on its own) and has a set theory compliment.

    P(E) = E. The universal set contains itself, just as logic contains itself.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    Imagination has to be real, since it has a self-evident connection to whatever you might call reality. What isn't real is nonsense imagined within imagination, which doesn't follow the rules of reality (e.g. logical contradictions).
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    Anything which physically interacts, or interacts in any way, with our world, is real enough to interact with it, and so must be contained within reality to affect the rest of what we know to be reality. Proposing that something unreal is affecting reality is just a contradiction (because it affecting anything would make it real), like claiming something can exist and not exist simultaneously. This places imaginary things in the same reality as anything physical, since what we imagine affects our actions and physical reality from moment to moment.

    This principle is not hasty, rather, it is one which covers any alternative scenario you could come up with and renders the question of what can exist to be quite simple, contrary to the claim that the subject is complex due to having no clear principle of what may be known or unknown and having to rely on rules of thumb taken from experiment.

    The result is that the principle that reality is self-changing is grounded in binary logic, rather than it being an ambiguouis concept. Any changes that we observe are inside reality, and there's nothing outside reality, so the only place those changes could be coming from is inside reality, since there's nothing real outside reality to be changing it.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    All content of imagination influences reality because at the very least it delays the point at which you imagine something that you manage to create some semblence of in the perceptual domain. This places it within reality, since the interaction between the imaginary content and perceptual content is real.

    What is truly not real is imaginary content which does not share the syntax of reality, even if it shares states (e.g. Superman does not share the syntax of reality, but he is describable in terms of real states). This equates to "nothing".
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    "YOU" is the participant in the dialogue who does not say that there is something outside of everything. That is "SOMEONE", the interlocutor who you're claiming has caught "YOU" in a compromising position.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    But imagination can change reality.unenlightened

    Yes, this supports the point. Imagination is within reality.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    First you go on to say reality is everything; then you posit something outside of everything;Agent Smith

    I think you're getting the lines mixed up.
  • Do you know the name of this informal fallacy?
    Huh. Yeah, it is, thanks. I hadn't spotted it even though I often point out equivocation fallacies! Just not of the same format. Usually I've got my eye out for when someone equivocates a term in what they are *criticising* to mean something it doesn't, rather than actually equivocating on what they themselves earlier said.
  • Could we be living in a simulation?
    It depends on how you're defining it.
    A computer simulation? Run by a CPU? No. We aren't a program, you can prove that to yourself by observing that you can define anything however you want, or by observing that you can make up any symbol you like to stand for any meaning you like. There's no program for that; it's protocomputational.

    A self-simulation, (a la Chris Langan) whereby reality as a monic substrate is replicated within all of its constituent parts? Yes, that's how anything is allowed to interact with everything else.
  • Criteria for a stance-independent definition and the definition of involuntary suffering
    I think I worked this problem out. What you can call preferences are actually 3 things together: the perception of the object that is preferred / disliked, the cognitive process of the preference itself, and the functional property of motivation or repulsion that the cognitive process harnesses.

    Obviously the way we perceive is stance-dependent. Some people are colorblind, can't taste asparagus etc.
    Also, our cognitive capacities and dispositions are different, so the way our own individual brain processes a perception into something that is either liked or disliked, is stance-dependent.

    But, the very force of either motivation / approach and repulsion / avoidance, that is stance-independent. If you say that liking / value / approach motive is dependent on the perceiver, then this leads to absurdity. It means you would have no means of deciphering what people mean when they say "I like x", some people could mean things they like, others what they're neutral to, and others what they avoid. There has to be a consistent definition of approach/avoid, value/disvalue, liking/disliking, even if everyone's dispositions and perceptions are different. People obviously can tell what "liking" means, despite the fact they've learned this definition from many observations of different people liking or hating different things.

    Another thing this illustrates is that stance-dependency and definitions are different. I can define perceptions, I can define cognitive dispositions / preferences, and I can define value/disvalue, but only one of those things is stance-independent.

    If I couldn't define something, I suppose this would be neither stance-dependent or stance-independent, because there'd be no definition for that stance to apply to.
  • Generic and Unfounded Opinions on Fascism
    My favorite is when people criticise what they see as censorship or authoritarian as fascism. Typically, it's conservative boomers reacting to deplatforming or some figure they agree with being silenced... that's fallacious because fascism is more than just speech control... it's also counterproductive because liberals are never going to listen to someone calling them fascist.
  • truth=beauty?
    In a biological sense, fitness = beauty.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    Some cities with high rates of violent crime have fewer police killings than those with higher violent crime rates, a situation that can make police killings feel wanton and baseless.StreetlightX

    This is data on cities and states - that's not the same as the relationship between the violence of a group of people and their rate of getting killed by cops.

    Cities and states have laws and procedures which affect the way police behave. A reason why a city with a high violent crime rate but a low police kill rate may be that the high level of violence in that city has caused people to adapt, for example by adopting regulations like banning certain chokeholds, or simply just police becoming more experienced with subduing violent people. The same reasoning applies on a state level. Likewise, a city or state with a low violent crime rate can have a high police kill rate, if those police aren't inducted on how to handle bad situations and they're allowed to do whatever they like to bring people under control. Then, when an uncooperative (or even cooperative one like Floyd or Tony Timpa) suspect comes along, the situation can result in a death. In either of those two scenarios, higher rates of violent behavior from an ethnic group or sex resulting in a higher rate of being killed by police is still perfectly consistent with the trend you are pointing out with cities bucking that same trend.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    They’re saying that the numbers being similar DESPITE the black populations being smaller SHOWS that they are target more; the numbers targeted COMPARED TO the population number is where the “more targeted” claim comes from, and that’s why people are mentioning populations.Pfhorrest

    And the reason for that, as I was trying to say, is for the same reason that men are killed 7 times more than women DESPITE populations of men and women being the same.

    The group with the higher violent crime rate ends up having a higher death by cop rate per capita, because they encounter police more often in a violent context.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    Yes, absolutely, all men too should be absolutely furious at the rate at which they die by the hands of police. Why aren't you?StreetlightX

    This is the first time I've heard this.

    I believed everyone understood why many more men die during police encounters than women, it seems I was wrong.

    Is there something which, unlike population share, explains both why more men than women are killed and why more blacks than whites are killed?

    Well, I said what that might be in my first post - the violent crime rate of each group.

    Is the violent crime rate of men higher than women? Yes it is. ☑
    Is the violent crime rate of blacks higher than whites? Yes it is. ☑

    It seems we've found the variable we should be dividing those per capita rates by

    "Controlling for population (that is, looking at killings per million people) shows that it is black Americans who are most likely to be killed by police officers — that they are nearly twice as likely to be killed as a Latinx person and nearly three times more likely to be killed than a white person. Black Americans are also about 1.4 times more likely to be unarmed in fatal interactions with police than white Americans are (and about 1.2 times more likely to be killed unarmed than Latinx Americans).StreetlightX
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    There's nothing here that contradicts anything I've said.

    I'm pointing out the exact same thing using percentages instead of per capita figures.

    If there were 20x more men than women and 95% of victims were men, then that would be equal numbers per capita by sex.Pfhorrest

    Literally the point of my post, I simply said "50% men/women" instead of "If 20 times...".
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    Try answering the question.

    Your argument is that likelihood to be killed by police should be determined by population size.

    Population share of men: 50%
    population share of women: 50%

    Fill in the blanks,

    Percentage of people killed by police who are male: ___%
    Percentage of people killed by police who are female: ___%.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    Controlling for population (that is, looking at killings per million people) shows that it is black Americans who are most likely to be killed by police officersStreetlightX

    What makes you and Vox writers think that population size is important?

    Do you think that's also why 95% of police victims are male? Because the population is 95% male?
  • Will A.I. have the capacity of introspection to "know" the meaning of folklore and stories?
    This is the Chinese Room problem by Jeffrey Searle.

    Syntax is not semantics. Machines can compute syntax (that's what "computing" is) but they don't have semantics, they don't know the meaning of what they're computing. They don't know anything.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    ... and I'll add to that by stating that the insistence that this is a racial issue is entirely counter-productive to finding a solution.

    Insisting against the evidence that this is racial, so that you can join your political tribe and start beating your chest about it, is what has sucked the entire nation into a never-ending argument where nobody's going to listen to each other and decide on an actual fact-based solution. Even other nations are weighing in on it, based on the false premises that this is all about racism. Then we end up getting side tracked into literally every race-based discussion, about reparations, about slavery, about microaggressions. When actually there's just as many white corpses that were killed by police out of negligence or sheer malice as the black ones.

    People just turn the entire issue into something to score status points out of and engage in tribal cheering over.

    In fact that's what everything is. Status games and tribalism in a million irritating variations. Screw finding solutions, I guess. Any solution needs to benefit my "group" at the expense of another.
  • Systemic racism in the US: Why is it happening and what can be done?
    There is no good evidence that there's a trend of systemic racism in terms of police brutality.

    For a nice summary see Tucker Carlson, unlike 99% of media sources, he dives into the numbers.

    About 1,000 people are killed by police every year in the USA. The biggest group being white.

    Any disproportionality of any other group with respect to their population share is simply due to how much violent crime they commit. Otherwise you'd be complaining about "systemic sexism", since it's almost always men getting killed by cops, and nobody is complaining about that.

    The Guardian did a project called "the Counted" where they collected the stories of everyone killed by cops for a few years. Take a look at it.
    Almost all male.
    99.9% of them being stupid, reckless, threatening and uncooperative.

    Even the term "unarmed" doesn't really help decipher who is "innocent" in being slain by a cop - the vast majority of those who are unarmed and die were also being stupid - like Mike Brown, trying to grab the officers gun, fighting or charging the officer, etc.

    But what about George Floyd, Eric Garner etc! Surely they are evidence of racism in the police?

    Nope. There were an equal number of white men, Like Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver, killed in exactly the same kind of infuriating circumstances as Floyd and Garner.

    But you don't know about them because the media chooses not to catapult their deaths onto the front pages for days until it instigates a riot.

    So what's the solution? Well, States have wildly varying death-by-cop rates versus their violent crime rates. Some states have high crime rates and low numbers of police killings. I'd recommend starting there. Find the differences.

    For example, New York banned the police from using dangerous chokeholds, - like the one that killed Floyd - and that may be the reason that state has fewer deaths by cop compared to other places.

    A decent president would have found plausible quick fixes like that based on data from states and signed it into an execute order, maybe that would've quelled the rioting.
  • Why x=x ?
    If x is not x, then all logical reasoning is undermined. It would be impossible to argue any conclusion from any premise.

    "Is" and "is not" are exhaustive and comprehensive operators, there is no third option, which means that x must be x, since it cannot be not x because that undermine all syntactical reasoning.
  • Hard problem of consciousness is hard because...
    wrong way around. The former is simply a system of symbols assigned onto perceptions... assigned by the latter, consciousness.
  • The "Fuck You, Greta" Movement
    I mean just think of how dumb it is to lead a charade of outrage by pointing specifically at European leaders and scream at them "you've deprived me of my youth!" while the greenhouse gases emitted by the EU as a share of the global total is about 20%. Selective crticism much?

    And then the EU politicians are all tripping over themselves and fawning over her with smiles in their faces while they get castrated by a little girl, because they're so terrified by the press, who mostly support the left/green parties of Europe.
  • The "Fuck You, Greta" Movement
    My main problem with her and her movement is they point the finger of blame and criticism primarily at nations which
    1) have low carbon emissions as a percentage of the global total, bar the USA (so, Europe, Canada, Australia)
    2) whose carbon emissions are already dropping year on year and have done since the early 1990s.

    The "solutions" they come up with are all going to slow down innovation. And innovation is, funnily enough, the very thing that's allowed us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions per capita in the first place.
  • Why x=x ?
    I'm not sure there's an explanans to this explanandum.

    If x is not x, then it's a contradiction.

    X is x because I perceive it to be.
  • Why are We Back-Peddling on Racial Color-Blindness?
    Are you reading these studies? This latest put heritability of intelligence by 12 yrs at 0.46, less than half. Ie intelligence at 12 is caused more by external factors than it is by genetics.Isaac

    Yeah, did you read the several places that heritability of intelligence for adults lies between 60% and 80%? Why are you cherrypicking what it says about 12 year olds?

    ...and proceeded to cite a study which demonstrated exactly what Artemis said - that IQ (in the context we're discussing) is determined in huge part by environment.Isaac

    No, it says that IQ is determined 60 - 80% by genetics.

    And just to underline, the original article Artemis posted doesn't show that IQ is determined largely by environment either - it doesn't even address the question of nature vs nurture - all it shows is that adoption is associated with a 4.4 point IQ gain, which is small, but close to the biggest environmental effect that the literature shows.
  • Why are We Back-Peddling on Racial Color-Blindness?
    Are you reading these studies? This latest put heritability of intelligence by 12 yrs at 0.46, less than half. IeIsaac

    At 12 years. In adulthood it is about 80%.
  • Hume's Failed Attack on Newton's Law of Cause and Effect
    Science assumes the uniformity of nature in order to prove it. That's what Hume identified in the problem of induction and why science is flawed.
  • Why do people choose morally right actions over morally wrong ones?
    I think that people do make some of their choices on logic. Most of what people do is noncognitivism, error theory, mixing different ethical systems together etc. But occasionally, logic wins out.
  • Brexit
    I have difficulty telling the difference between remain MPs who accept the vote and those who simply want to stop Brexit and bin the vote. Parliament appears to be doing whatever it can to stop Brexit, exemplified by Hilary Benn passing a law in his own name to "stop the catastrophe of No Deal" only to reject voting for a deal when he is given one.

    All bets are off until tomorrow evening, it's basically a coin toss whether Boris's deal will pass, but as Cameron puts it "the greased piglet will slip through".
  • Why are We Back-Peddling on Racial Color-Blindness?
    and tests a pretty narrow range of abilities.Artemis

    Completely wrong. It predicts lifespan, lifetime earnings, hesd circumference, success in many school subjects, the sizes of numerous brain gyri and the size and speed of your brain cells.

    Adoption studies have shown over and over again that environment plays a huge role in determining IQ.Artemis

    By huge, do you mean 20%?

    It's a mixture of nature and nurture. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4403216/Artemis

    How many studies which actually measure heritability, which this one doesn't, did you have to disregard before cherrypicking this one?

    From the study itself:

    "Although the 2- to 5-IQ-point advantage in the adopted-away children is smaller than differences reported in earlier and smaller studies, it is important to bear in mind that the environmental difference between the adoptive and biological families was not especially large, compared with earlier adoption studies that intentionally sampled children from extremely deprived backgrounds."

    The genetic effect on IQ is far bigger than 5 points.

    Exactly.Isaac

    No, not exactly. https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105
  • Why are We Back-Peddling on Racial Color-Blindness?
    It demonstrates a correlation between IQ and future wealth.Isaac

    I am referring Gregory Clark's research.