Comments

  • Do People Have Free Will?
    ↪Isaac
    You confused me with someone who is out there to demonstrate something. I repeat: I'm perfectly happy with you keeping your model. It just doesn't work for me, for reasons that I have explained: likely to fail in case of equivalent options, unable to account for random choices. That's all.

    I have in fact kept your model intact. All I said is: the model is not complete, it needs a random decision routine as an add-on in case the comparison of preferences fails to yield an actionable result. With this small add-on, the model now looks to me like something that could work, and account better for human experience.

    It's a very little tweak to your model, a proposal for a simple and light improvement. I don't understand why you are reacting so defensively to it.

    But once again, to each his own. If someone doesn't like his models to be tampered with, it's no skin off my nose.
  • A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs
    Of course the term 'passing theory' is a bit pompous. You can translate it by "one's understanding of what happened".
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    One interesting way to look at (biological) life — the only interesting way I could come up with to think about life — is in systemic terms. And in system theory there is this concept of resilience or survivability, as the capacity of a system to take shocks and yet survive and thrive. It’s really central to the systemic outlook I think, this capacity of living systems to absorb shocks and keep going. A simple system cannot do that. Resilience requires redundancies, self-monitoring and self-repairing loops, a whole machinery of behaviors and ultracomplex mechanisms that constantly maintains and repairs the system while the system is constantly failing here or there.

    Like an economic system can absorb shocks and even sometimes make the best of them, a living organism (or species, or ecosystem) is able to take some hits, and repair itself. And even sometimes learn something and improve upon itself under adversity, by experience or darwinian evolution.

    A mechanical clock for instance cannot absorb much shocks. It’s a system obviously, but one far too simple to survive in the jungle, because it cannot repair itself. And you can hit a clock on the head as many time as you want (in the morning usually), it won’t start to avoid you as a risk-mitigation strategy. But living systems do.

    Hence the need for a pilot in the system. Life is not mechanical, it’s adaptative. And animals try to avoid trouble and search for food. They move around opportunistically. And every moving system needs a piloting system...

    You’re the pilot. Them little cells composing your body gave you the job. What you gona do, let them down? You can quit but it hurts.
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    So do you universally trust your experience to give you an accurate account of your neurological processes, — Isaac
    More precisely, I expect my theories about my neurological processes to give an accurate account of my experience. If a theory doesn’t fit with the facts, it must be rejected or improved upon.

    We have only one process for delivering oxygen to the brain, — Isaac
    There are fours arteries entering the brain, two carotides and two cervical, all connected inside the brain so they work with and even up one another.

    we need not impute any other factors than preference when looking to their initiation. — Isaac
    Initiation? You mean explaining mechanism? Because you also need a process of comparing preferences with one another.

    And as any process, this comparison can fail to provide usable information... HENCE it stands to reason that it needs a backup.
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    I've no reason to commit to the idea of this process existing, have I? — Isaac
    Of course not. If this simple and mechanistic view of yourself suffice to account for your experience, you're more than welcome to hold on to it.

    I experience, personally, a capacity to choose options at random. I can also think about randomness and even compute probabilities. Therefore the concept of randomness is ubiquitous in our thoughts. It's no stranger to us and to who we are: the product of a haphazard evolution.

    I see life (biologically speaking) as robust, heuristic, extremely complex, risk-taking, adaptative, creative and opportunistic. Within this view, it would be simplistic in the extreme to assume that we have one single procedure for making choices, one single logical process that works under every and all circumstances.

    Life is much more messy than that but also much more robust than that, in my well informed opinion on the matter.

    Surviving system failure is essentially what life is about, and any system may fail. Redundancy in mechanisms is a pretty general phenomenon in biology for this reason. There are by-pass, duplicate veins all over you, because one may fail. Likewise any mental process may fail under certain circumstances.

    That would be why we rely on several tools from our mental tool box to make certain decisions, and not just on one tool. At least in my experience.
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    You have to now commit yourself to the existence of a mental mechanism for initiating random action, the alternative uses mechanisms we already know exist. — Isaac
    You're afraid to commit? To what? The idea of randomness?

    You know what I find hard to commit to? The idea that the plum I will choose tomorrow has been in fact chosen for me in all eternity, a split second after the big bang... The idea of a totally closed universe, decided once and for all (by whom?), static, in which time means nothing, and in which we’re not the captains of our own souls on the choppy waters of life, but rather some kind of deluded automatic pilots quite likely to crash when offered something as trivial as two identical and equidistant plums.
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    Nearest to their hand is one option. — Isaac
    We've seen that already with Buridan's ass: sometimes one cannot determine which option is nearest, it's impractical or impossible.

    Two plums at the same distance from one's hand, never stopped anyone from picking and eating a plum.

    How is not wanting to appear impolite not a preference? — Isaac
    Of course it's a preference, one that in the circumstances says something like: "I must not appear picky or distrustful by looking at all the plums closely or by hesitating. Given the circumstances, choosing at random is my best option."
  • A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs
    Note that the explanation I offered for the odd success of malapropisms eliminated Davidson's notions of prior theory and passing theory. — creativesoul

    I take "passing theory" to mean a non-canonical, no literal interpretation of a sentence or text, a creative, sui generis interpretation that may be required to understand each instance of malapropism. When a sentence does not compute within correct language conventions, one searches for an alternative explanation, a 'theory' of what happened in this particular malapropism. And as you described there's two or three candidates: a speech impairment, an error in one's choice of words, or the pretense of an error, i.e. a joke of some kind. Or a freudian lapse, which is an interesting case in which someone betrays his thoughts by some malapropism.

    Personally, I see not how this 'theory' is by necessity 'passing'. It may be that the malapropism is so funny or so easy to make by mistake that the language retains it and legitimizes it after a while. So sometimes these alternative ways of saying things, at first deemed incorrect, become embedded in correct language and 'conventional'. In any case, some malapropisms endure either as jokes or as frequent errors, and therefore their 'theory' is not necessarily 'passing'.

    I have two colleagues who say 'axe' instead of 'ask'. It's their way to say 'ask'. I may not like it but I understand them, when they do, and unfortunately it doesn't seem to be passing...
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    Intuitively, I don't think one could ever present me with two options identical in every way, — Isaac

    When asked to 'have one' from a basket of plums, people often choose one without looking closely at them (doing so is considered impolite for a number of reasons) and they often do so by reaching out to the basket and choosing one at random. They all look the same so there's no point in doing otherwise. Like one would pick a card at random... This is something that does demonstrably happen.

    Otherwise how would they chose a plum, do you think? Is it your contention that their predispositions to certain hues, certain smells, certain shapes would always predetermine their choice? If we are absolutely predetermined in that way, then has the plum I will choose tomorrow from a basket been predetermined of all eternity, written somewhere in the grand book of the universe right after the Big Bang or something? Is that your theory?

    Because mine is much much simpler: we just pick plums at random.
  • A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs
    It's about what Davidson missed. — creativesoul

    He tested three hypotheses that couldn't explain a particular fact. Picking up the reasoning where he dropped it, another set of hypotheses is required to explain malapropisms.
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    It's the circumstances you're placing it in that I'm claiming is impossible. — Isaac

    How would you know a) that the options are exactly equivalent in every way, and b) that the donkey correctly perceives that they are? — Isaac

    Whether or not the donkey is correct in its appreciations of its options is not the point.

    The point is that in life, one frequently encounters a certain type of situation, where one needs to make a choice in a limited amount of time (e.g. one doesn't want another donkey to eat one's barley), and yet the options appears equally valuable (correctly or not). In such situations, one has to step back from the assessment and make the following choice: does one 1) continue to assess the situation further in order to improve its precision, knowing this will require time and energy and may not change the assessment of both options by a significant margin; or 2) just go for any of those options, randomly chosen, which may save you time and energy for more important things.

    People chose stuff at random all the time. Donkeys too. You cannot survive without this ability; your mind would go in a state of metastable stasis everytime you need to chose between a light grey and a slightly darker grey pair of pants, of anytime you have to chose which of two similar plums to eat.

    Computers have this problem of having to make decisions in time. "Metastability" is what happens to a computer when it cannot do so. The thing freezes. You have to switch it off and on again. Does you mind ever freeze when you have to chose between two similar plums? No? That would indicate that you are a lot smarter than a computer and at least as smart as a donkey. You can make decisions based on nothing. It's a feature.
  • A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs
    Thanks for the succinct and precise overview. It helps clarify.

    If our linguistic competence and/or ability were limited to those three aforementioned principles, we could not ever know what the speaker meant, as compared/contrasted to what they said [in malapropisms]... but we do.

    Did I miss anything important with regard to the odd success of malapropisms?     — creativesoul

    Why yes: what changes in those rules would or could account for our capacity to understand malapropisms? What does this discussion tells us about how to make progress, and update/improve upon Davidson's hypotheses?
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    You must not have spent much time with donkeys in your life. — Olivier5
    ( note to self: the Buridan’s ass paradox is only understandable by people who have some familiarity with actual donkeys and with how they behave, eg how strong-willed and earnest they can be)
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    ↪Isaac
    You must not have spent much time with donkeys in your life.. Any donkey out there is able to chose between two equivalent options in a nanosecond, especially when hungry. They won’t let themselves die of hunger because of a trivial philosophical problem. They are smarter than that.

    You're welcome to try the experience by yourself if you don't believe me. Don’t use donkeys — you don’t understand them. Put two dozen people in as many booths with a red and a green button in front of them and ask them to chose and press one button every 10 seconds for a few minutes. You will see that even the people who like green more than red press red once in a while. It’s not like all of them will chose to press their favorite color for the entire damn test. Since they are explicitly given the latitude to chose, and since there’s zero consequence, they will chose their less favorite color quite often. People are not automatons.

    Why is it so hard for you to envisage a mental coin flip?
  • The More The Merrier Paradox
    That's precisely the problem. — TheMadFool

    So agreement does happen on this site, once in a long while. That’s good news. :-)
  • Mathematicist Genesis
    bring me forth a continuous set of numbers that I might truly count the horrors in store for Man. — The Lord
  • Mathematicist Genesis
    ↪Kenosha Kid
    You should publish this.
  • Mathematicist Genesis
    ↪Kenosha Kid

    You crack me up.... Best nerd jokes I ever read. :rofl:
  • Deep Songs
    He turned his life
    Upside down
    To know if existence
    Made sense

    He asked a lot of people
    Quite happy
    Happy happy
    To give their opinion on la vie

    He walked through the mist
    Of the whirling dervishes
    Smoking hashish
    And he said

    Life is worth nothing, nothing,
    Life is worth nothing
    But when I'm holding
    In my two dazzled hands
    The sweet little tits of my girlfriend
    Then I say
    Nothing, nothing
    Nothing's worthier than life

    He saw the vast space
    Between the jet set,
    The splendours, the palace
    And the technicians of surface

    Others offer
    In steeples and monasteries
    To see the old Sergeant Peper
    But it's only Richard Gere

    So he honed like an insect
    On Internet sites
    With the people in the sects
    And he said

    Life is worth nothing, nothing,
    Life is worth nothing
    But when I'm holding
    In my two dazzled hands
    The sweet little tits of my girlfriend
    Then I say
    Nothing, nothing
    Nothing's worthier than life

    He saw the lack of love,
    Lack of money
    How life is a detergent
    And how it cleans up people

    He played 'Forbidden games'
    For sleeping friends
    Oh nostalgy
    And then he said

    Life is worth nothing, nothing,
    Life is worth nothing
    But when I'm holding
    In my two dazzled hands
    The sweet little tits of my girlfriend
    Then I say
    Nothing, nothing
    Nothing's worthier than life

  • Brexit
    gQaLIiK.jpg
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    The point is, even if it was possible, the donkey would chose immediately with no hesitation whatsoever.

    No donkey in this world will ever let itself die of hunger because it is faced with two equally attractive bags of barley. It would just go straight to whatever bag. Trust me on this.

    What you are saying would work with a machine, though. I mean, a poorly programmed one. If the coder has not envisage a situation of equal desirability of two options, then the program will not be able to chose. So a good programmer would include a routine to chose haphazardly if all the options are weighted the same.
  • Deep Songs
    Break On Through (To The Other Side) - The Doors
  • Deep Songs
    Lilly Wood & The Prick - Prayer In C


    Jah, you never said a word
    You didn't send me no letter
    Don't think I could forgive you

    See, our world is slowly dying
    I'm wasting no more time
    Don't think I could believe you

    Jah, our hands will get more wrinkled
    And our hair will be grey
    Don't think I could forgive you

    And see, the children are starving
    And their houses were destroyed
    Don't think they could forgive you

    Hey, when seas will cover lands
    And when men will be no more
    Don't think you can forgive you

    Jah, when there'll just be silence
    And when life will be over
    Don't think you will forgive you
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    ↪Isaac
    It's an old thought experiment. What would happen to a donkey (Buridan's ass) asked to chose between two equally desirable options, such as two equal bags of barley? If your theory is correct, it should be unable to chose and die of hunger, but anyone familiar with donkeys know that this will never happen. The donkey would just make a random choice, because it doesn't matter which bag it choses so it will just chose one of them. Any one. Likewise, a guy with no preference between green and red is perfectly capable of chosing between a red and a green button...
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    ↪Isaac
    What if the person has no preference? How can she possibly chose then?
  • Platonism
    independent existence. — Srap Tasmaner

    :chin:
  • Platonism
    Without asking Alice, the discussion is vacuous. — Gary M Washburn

    Well, I called Alice over the phone to ask whether she did think something about the rain or not, and she referred me to the {expletive} weather channel.
  • Do People Have Free Will?
    I'm struggling to think of a behaviour to which no likes/dislikes could be attached, and so can't see the explanatory need for this additional factor other than that you'd prefer it to be there. — Isaac

    One example would be chosing between two equally inconsequential options, like in some experiments where one is asked to chose between a red and a green button to press, repeatedly.
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    When children die, they become angels. When they live, they become demons.
    -- Mohamed Choukri
  • Mathematicist Genesis
    ↪Kenosha Kid
    You should keep it and publish, this is great stuff.
  • The ultimate technique in persuasion and rethoric is...
    Rhetoric is an embellishment, a decorative touch, added to written/spoken words in order to evoke a positive response by virtue of its aesthetic qualities. While the value of rhetoric can't be underestimated in debate, one should also be wary of its power of "empty persuasion" and by that I mean rhetoric can move hearts and change minds even when there's no real substance to what is being said or written. — TheMadFool

    Yes, rhetoric can be overdone, but there's no possible way to avoid some of it so I would encourage people to use rhetorical effects at a small dose, and try and vary.

    Whatever you do, you will always use some style of delivery or another, based usually on what you think is more effective to get your ideas across. Hence a form of rhetoric or another is always the case. Even a total avoidance of any rhetorical effects would in itself be a rhetorical effect, that says: "I'm better than these rhetors, I'm a (wo)man of substance."
  • The More The Merrier Paradox
    A Hobson's choice then. — TheMadFool
    I don't know anyone called Hobson. Intersubjectivity is a very simple and useful concept, allowing to bridge subjectivity and objectivity somewhat. Which is what you are talking about.

    I know what's wrong with you calculus. Your observers are no observer at all if they only are correct half of the times. If they can't do better than a coin toss, their power of observation is null. One can tie as many dead horses to a carriage as one wants, it's not going to help pull the carriage. Scientific observers need to do much better than 50/50 for repetitions to work and increase experiment power. And if you set your risk of error to a more realistic 10%, then it works.
  • The More The Merrier Paradox
    Several people sharing what each perceives subjectively = intersubjectivity. The principle of repeatability is basically saying that several people sharing what each perceives subjectively is a good way to approach tengentially the ideal of objectivity.
  • The More The Merrier Paradox
    ↪TheMadFool
    I would rather say that objectivity is an ideal which we can approach through repeatability (aka intersubjectivity) but never reach.
  • The More The Merrier Paradox
    ↪TheMadFool
    Well, the truth is that replication of observation is not generally considered a good way to increase certainty in arts. Just because they all love Beyonce does not force me or anyone to recognize she's a great artist. What people generally conclude after hours of debate (usually during their teens) on the Beatles vs the Stones, or any other artist which one debater likes and the other not, is that art is more deeply subjective than a COVID test. So repetition of observation doesn't work on all topics.

    What you are really trying to refute (or play about refuting) is the idea that to duplicate observations is a good way to reduce incertainty (or increase certainty) in sciences, not in arts or beauty tastes.

    Therefore you are already pre-defining events in your premise, having already postulated a certain type of generally agreeable event (perhaps unconsciously but you still did exclude art).

    And you have already assumed something else: that it is a kind of event that observers can perceive unlike, say, a neutrino passing by. So let's agree about a more specific example, a narrower type of perceivable objective events.

    Like elephants for instance (I love elephants). It doesn't need to be one specific elephant like Dumbo. We can remain more general than that.
  • Stove's Gem and Free Will
    We shouldn't be expected (in philosophical terms) to "get out of them" in order to remake the will as we desire. — Luke

    I think yours is a good argument for free will. It's the (or a) compatibilist argument, if not mistaken.
  • The More The Merrier Paradox
    ↪TheMadFool
    A few additional issues:

    - O is too vague. Certain phenomena are more subjective than others. Like if it's a change in the lighting (O="the lights went off") the probability that X will correctly notice O is very high, like 0.9999. If O is about something more subjective like, say, the beauty of a woman (O="A beautiful woman entered the room") then X may agree or disagree that this happened, and repetition of observers may not bring any certainty because the beauty of a woman is a matter of taste.

    So give an example of O, ideally not too subjective, so that a realist probability of noticing it can be at least imagined.

    - What you ought to compute is the odds of all three observer being wrong at the same time (not noticing O when O actually happens) because replication is to control for the faillability of individual observers.

    Eg O=the lights went off

    Prob(X doesn't notice)=0.001
    Idem for the other guys.

    Leaving aside that dependency between observations that I was speaking about sooner for ease of calculus sake, and using your procedure, the prob that all 3 fail to notice O=1 in a billion.
  • The More The Merrier Paradox
    ↪TheMadFool

    There is a simple statistical answer to the OP, which is that the procedure you use, multiplying the odds of discrete events to obtain the odds of a combination of them [ p(A&B&C) = p(A)*p(B)*p(C) ], only works when the events are independent from one another. In this case they are not: if I see a flower on a plant, the chances that my wife will see a flower on that plant are very high. If X sees O, the chances that Y sees O are very high. Etc.

    If the probability of event B is affected by wether or not A happens, then the two events are not independent and you cannot just multiply the probabilities like you did. Another procedure applies, though covariance and correlations, more complicated.
  • Deconstructing the Analytical Complex of Truth
    I'll go with ill-founded. One important methodological issue here is this: under what conditions is the activity of philosophical analysis logically well founded? What are the necessary axioms of analysis, the basic premises that may generate a fruitful, useful analysis, and without which analysis does not 'work', and instead tends to crash or just produce white noise? What are the limits of productive analysis? And where is analysis unproductive, and why?

    I (and I think Jersey) contend that the concept of truth is necessary for any analysis, that if you take it our of the axioms, analysis crashes (or the axiom reasserts itself automatically unconsciously). It's not that is is muddled, it just doesn't work. Nobody can do any better than Davidson on the topic because in that territory the function "analysis" is out of its domain of definition.

    In short, a philosopher trying to analyse truth is sawing the branch on which he sits.
  • Deconstructing the Analytical Complex of Truth
    ↪Banno
    Meh... He just says that they assume unconsciously the concepts that they critique, and thus that their critique is ill-founded.
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