The fact that humans are physically embodied is not at issue, and ‘the fact of raising your arm’ is also not at issue. — Wayfarer

This is the sort of thing we were discussing when you interjected with the post I originally responded to. It might be that the timing, wording and lack of reference in your post made it sound like you were joining in the contemporaneous discussion. If not, ignore me since my response was in the context of that discussion.

I agree, the OP was misguided but I believe TMF has moved on somewhat.

But from that it doesn’t follow that the cause is physical or determinable in terms of physics. — Wayfarer

If the cause is non-physical, it won't be determinable in terms of physics by definition. What we'd see would be indistinguishable from an undiscovered physical cause minus human curiosity.

Precisely what is the nature of intentional action is what is at issue. What about the insights of mathematicians who solve conjectures and so on? What has physically transpired in those cases? — Wayfarer

I was merely treating:

Where everyone is making a mistake here, is in looking for 'the non-physical' as an object or a cause in the physical sense... So looking at for a mental substance or thing or cause, in that sense, is misplaced. — Wayfarer

A non-physical thing either gives rise to physically inexplicable behaviour, which is what the non-physical mind is supposed to do, or it gives rise to nothing, does nothing except insists upon itself to itself. I don't think anyone is arguing for the latter (except maybe Samuel Beckett), so we're very much in the area of non-physical causes of effects in physical stuff (I want to raise my arm --> arm is raised).

If it has any impact on physical outcome, it is a cause of physical effects. If I wish to raise my right arm and do so because of it, ultimately somewhere along the line that wish caused a physical event. Therefore ascribing physical causation to mind is perfectly accurate. — Kenosha Kid

The alternative to this is that the mind is a trapped, impotent spectator. Or perhaps telepathic but otherwise impotent. We'd not know if we were telepathic though, since no one can demonstrate any sign of it if mind does not have physical effects.

Where everyone is making a mistake here, is in looking for 'the non-physical' as an object or a cause in the physical sense. Where you look for it, is in the reason that you act as you do. Say you decide to disagree with what another poster is saying - that assessment, that weighing up, is the aspect of your activites that is not physical, even if there's some neural activity that is triggered by it. — Wayfarer

If it has any impact on physical outcome, it is a cause of physical effects. If I wish to raise my right arm and do so because of it, ultimately somewhere along the line that wish caused a physical event. Therefore ascribing physical causation to mind is perfectly accurate.

You're contradicting yourself. If it's scientific, it's better in the eyes of "someone". — TheMadFool

Yes, it's better in my eyes, but I'll leave it to you as it whether you think it's better. No contradiction, just not being arrogant about it.

I'm not interested in the merits of science. — TheMadFool

If you're not interested in why physicists do what they do, don't ask about them, or make ill-founded claims about them. Perfectly simple! :)

I mentioned in the OP about how a privileged person could choose to live in a place where he is extremely unlikely to encounter drowning children and thus he could avoid having to make personal sacrifices while it seems that others would arbitrarily have to make those sacrifices to avoid violating duties. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes, I was going to touch on this but went a different route for concision.

Morality is practical. Practically, the decision is never going to be whether to live in an area with drowning children or not. People do isolate themselves, have done for centuries, in stately homes, secure mansions, penthouse suites, or as hermits. This is really the only way to avoid living in the world, and living in the world involves opportunities for selfishness and callousness that are also opportunities for kindness.

I'd say that the penthouse dwellers and secure facility habitators are pretty much as you say, not because they are hiding from particular opportunities to help others (that's not practical) but because they are hiding from any opportunities to help others. They are at least antisocial. Whether you classify them as immoral -- not for avoiding a particular action but any moral action -- is more a linguistic problem. One could equally say that morality doesn't apply to people not in the world.

I’m confused. If you say that the bystander effect is a bug then I presume that you think it is bad. Yet, earlier in the post you seem to imply that the presence of bystanders eliminates your moral responsibility. — TheHedoMinimalist

It is bad, but it's a feature of a group not an individual. The fact that it's systematic and predictable suggests we don't have much choice in it, it's part of being human, and you can't blame people for being human, that would be illogical (since morality only concerns humans). Not everything bad is a moral agent. Tsunamis are bad but they're no one's fault (except maybe property developers in areas prone to tsunamis :D ).

even those climate "skeptics" are saying we should probably do something -- just in case all the world's climatologists are correct. — Xtrix

Except these guys maybe:



I'm usually an optimist but my gut feel is that democracies will reject any government that makes meaningful commitments. Rather, 'normal' will just be adjusted ever downwards until you're barbecuing your own son in a cave in a mile-high trash pile wondering if this is really what God intended.

It's better to posit a physical cause rather than a nonphysical cause if something inexplicable is observed. — TheMadFool

It's scientific to do so. I'll leave whether it's "better" to the eyes of the beholder.

Then they define the nonphysical as that which violates physical laws. — TheMadFool

No, they don't define non-physical at all. It's not on their radar; if it is, they're not doing so as physicists but as metaphysicists.

First, scientists and physicalists always maintain something physical is going on whether physical laws are being violated or not. — TheMadFool

Whether physical laws are apparently violated, yes. They see a physical effect, they seek a physical cause. Why so narrow-minded? Because it's proven a successful strategy for 500 years or so, no other reason. When undetected physical causes are hypothesised, they are then sought and typically found (neutrino, antimatter, Higgs boson, etc.) No more unreasonable than supposing every nail is amenable to a hammer (which is what physics is: a tool). It would be so rare to not find a physical cause that one would be justified in concluding that it's difficult to find rather than that an entirely new, entirely different, non-physical thing is at play, a pointless conjecture that cannot hope to be verified or falsified.

If you read this and didn't flinch, you haven't adopted the critical approach that is the essence of rationality. — Banno

Haha I stopped reading at precisely this point, whoops!

The article contains several obvious confusions. There's an implied version of Stove's Gem; and mistaking a methodological assumption for an ontological one; "nothng-but-ism"; a bit of mumbling about "quantum", and so on.

It doesn't reach any conclusion, just hand-waving. — Banno

And so much special pleading and of-the-gaps fallacy. An article enumerating the problems with the article would be much longer than the article.

What I want to know is what makes speech and words more powerful. I explicitly stated this: "Speech possesses no actual, physical power, insofar it lacks the capacity to transfer more energy than any other sound from the mouth." — NOS4A2

If the data transferred from my computer to my SSD is no more energetic than random bits, how come I can store files with high fidelity?!? :O Your move, scientists!

Speech is information. Brains are information processors. How much energy the medium requires is largely irrelevant. It's what's encoded and how it's processed that is important. If you instruct your computer to download fake nudes of Trump, as I expect you have, the energy requirements of this aren't what makes your instruction work: it is how your instruction is encoded ("cute puppy videos" won't work) and what system you are instructing (trying to get your microwave to do it won't work).

The issue with Trump is that he was encoding information that, while meaningless nonsense to microwave people (systems not prone to storming government buildings because an idiot told them to), was easily parsed by internet people (violent paranoid morons who'd walk off a cliff if a particular idiot told them to). That was the "power" (not the physical variable Joules per second but rather "influence") of Trump's speech: he spoke moron extremely well.

Read on, Fool.

One possible out is that X supervenes upon Y but Y does not supervene on X. This would be apparent as uncaused changes in Y and breaches of conservation laws (energy, momentum, etc.). However, if one saw such a thing, such as the strange angular momentum of galaxies or the accelerating expansion of the universe), one would probably and rightly predict an undetected physical cause over an invisible non-physical one. Such a prediction is scientific insofar as, should we detect the cause, we would predict effects of it being supervened upon also. — Kenosha Kid

So it begins... Very exciting!

In other words, according to physicalists who make the argument from physics, playing by their rules, their hypothesis about the nonphysical as compatible with both violation and nonviolation of physical laws (10 above) is utterly unscientific as it can't be falsified. — TheMadFool

It's a logical statement, not a prediction of outcomes. If X can act on (e.g. move, torque, annihilate) Y then X has a property of being able to supervene on Y and Y has the property of being supervened upon by X. This is precisely what physical properties are.

Mass is a physical property that dictates how a gravitational field (physical) will act on the body, how the body will act on the mass, for instance. Charge is a physical property that dictates how the electromagnetic field (physical) will supervene on and be supervened upon by the body.

One possible out is that X supervenes upon Y but Y does not supervene on X. This would be apparent as uncaused changes in Y and breaches of conservation laws (energy, momentum, etc.). However, if one saw such a thing, such as the strange angular momentum of galaxies or the accelerating expansion of the universe), one would probably and rightly predict an undetected physical cause over an invisible non-physical one. Such a prediction is scientific insofar as, should we detect the cause, we would predict effects of it being supervened upon also.

:up: Regarding C3, yes, that would be my answer too. In addition:

The most popular response to Singer’s argument seems to be to claim that his moral duty claims are too demanding. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes, but that's not the end of it. There are so many opportunities to go out of your way to help others that, if you started now, you wouldn't make a dent if you lived to be 100. You can treat it as an infinite reservoir of opportunities to help others, and what they have in common is that few people are better placed than anybody else to offer that help. Hotlines and websites to donate money to children in Africa are targeting the entire world's population, and succeed because, statistically, enough people will respond to make those appeals worthwhile. If you don't respond, someone else will.

However, a child drowning in a pond is an immediate problem that only those nearby can resolve. The responsibility to assess whether to do so falls to a few people out of everyone on the planet. If the only way to save the child was to dial the same telephone number that the rest of the world was somehow simultaneously privy to, that personal responsibility would not be present, even though first-hand sight of the problem still would be.

That personal responsibility to assess one's own involvement is actually seen to diminish with the number of people who have it. The phenomenon is called the bystander effect: the more people who are present in an emergency requiring human assistance, the less likely a given present human is to assist. We evaluate that, statistically, it is likely that someone who is not us is more likely to be the one to give it a punt.

The bystander effect is like a bug in our moral reasoning. It allows 100 people to watch a child drown and do nothing, when any one of them alone would have saved the child. (The 21st century equivalent is you'd get 100 videos of a child drowning uploaded to the internet.)

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Now it's probably entirely possible to develop institutions that can resolve these problems in an egalitarian and peaceful fashion. The problem is such solutions require experimentation before you get them right. — Echarmion

Actually (resurrector!) maybe not.

The Cree in Canada were a traditional immediate return hunter-gatherer tribe centred around kinship groups. They were quite expansive, too much so to share a gazelle or whatnot, but a) anyone could hunt where they liked, although they tended to do so in their own hunting grounds, and b) a sophisticated network of sharing established itself across the whole Cree area.

The Cree lived mainly on beaver (fnar) and traded beaver and (iirc) fox fur. In the 19th century, white trappers started devastating Cree hunting grounds, bringing their shares prey to local extinction or close to before moving onto the next hunting ground.

The Cree tried to get ahead of the white trappers by essentially becoming a delayed return group, exerting great effort to exhaust so much pray that trapping wasn't worthwhile. Interestingly, they had no concept of territory. They saw trappers as tricky competitors, not invaders, and tried to win the competition.

What happened next is that the state of Quebec stepped in around 1920. Various anthropologists raised concerns about the threat to the Cree, while various fur traders highlighted the threat to stocks. Quebec made a call: they carved up the area, with each hunting ground being the territory of the kinship group that lived there (thinking they were helping the Cree protect private property), banned white trappers, and insisted that an elected member of each group note and report on the health of beaver stocks, the presence of trappers, and invasion by any outside Cree group.

Quebec gave them millions in payment, settlement, and to exchange areas for development, as well as giving jobs to an increasing number of Cree people. Cree could get bank accounts to hide wealth, acquire vehicles, buy pretty much whatever. By the 80s, almost half of labouring Cree were wage-earners.

One would expect this would destroy the Cree way of life, however kindly meant. In fact, they seem to have absorbed their relationship with European Canadians without much damage. It is thought that probably some Cree are hiding wealth, but they can't do much with it since any overt wealth is seen as bad. Each household generally has a mixture of wage-earners and hunters, so so far there hasn't been much in the way of inequality in wealth aggregation. The beaver stocks returned to health entirely down to the management of the Cree, since they ignored Quebec's request, hunted wherever they liked, allowed hunting by whoever in their own grounds, and just made up the numbers they sent to the white man, recovering an entire ecology, their own economy, without changing their ways.

The Cree have managed to introduce delayed return living (wage-earning) through relations with a capitalist European power without becoming non-egalitarian. Part of this I guess is down to them not being immediate- or delayed-return exclusively, but rather operating a novel pluralism.

Interestingly, the Cree initially extended their egalitarianism to the white man, but now do not. In fact, one could argue that they're taking Quebec for everything they can. Their non-egalitarian attitude stems from difference, a lot like ours: the white man is not like Cree, and must be dealt with differently. It's not hostile, and this difference in absorbed into Cree way of life, but at the same time this new way of life is seen as additional and kept at some distance to Cree-ness.

It's quite remarkable. If anyone's interested, I got most of this from Colin Scott's 'Property, Practice, and Aboriginal Rights Among Quebec Cree Hunters', an essay from the book Hunters and Gatherers Volume II: Property, Power and Ideology but I imagine any decent anthro review article on the Cree would be just as interesting.

So it isn't just a case of immediate return tending to be flipped by environmental factors and opportunistic power players. While it's true to say that the Cree aren't really immediate return anymore, nor are they delayed return or non-egalitarian.

Pluralism was the key for the Cree, which, as a pluralist myself, is a nice surprise. Anyway, long post on niche subject in dead thread for an audience of probably just me, sorry.

I am talking more about the way in which at the present time, neuroscience can detect the underlying basis of brain processes but cannot see the specific images and ideas within our consciousness, because they are invisible to other minds. — Jack Cummins

There's nothing particularly special about this though. If you have a particular neuron wired into your brain, you'll get different information out of it firing than if you're staring at it through a scanner. Nobody speaks of an image/flavour barrier about grapes: we're quite happy that the same object made up of the same chemicals can look one way and taste another. Same works for neurons: they can appear one way in a scanner, another way under a microscope, taste a different way on a cracker. It's all down to different bits of the information about the neuron (or grape) connected to different systems designed to convert that information into different representations.

Can anyone tell me the correct philosophical response to: "You're traumatizing my little girls." — BitconnectCarlos

Use a cubicle? Have that talk? If the sight of difference traumatises the little girl, I'm not sure that's anyone's fault but the parents'. Otherwise you can use this excuse to excuse many an act of hate.

The Astrophysical Journal — counterpunch

Found your shift key, huh? Well done!

Otherwise, it's a slightly covert rendition of the conspiracy to eliminate Caucasians that has been binding fools to ignorance through fear for hundreds of years. — Cheshire

You might be onto something there... Caucasians that forced themselves on almost every indigenous peoples on the planet...

I'll let you talk - but frankly, you know less than I do. — counterpunch

:rofl:

I can only suggest you write to the astrophysical journal — counterpunch

The one astrophysical journal. :joke:

controversy over, problem solved by "insanely rapid" cosmic expansion! — counterpunch

It's the current reigning model, I take no credit for it (unless the name "insanely rapid" catches on, in which case I'll take credit for that). It's just the inflationary cosmological model for future reference, in case you ever have the epiphany that it's good to read up on a subject before spouting off about it.

Yeah interest rates will have to rise, they've been kept artificially low for a decade now.

Relevance?

No, I don't think so. But thanks for trying. — counterpunch

Well it is, whether you think so or not. Even Wiki opens with:

Inflation is a mechanism for realizing the cosmological principle, which is the basis of the standard model of physical cosmology: it accounts for the homogeneity and isotropy of the observable universe. In addition, it accounts for the observed flatness and absence of magnetic monopoles. — Even Wiki, how lazy do you have to be to not even Wiki

Another important thing which I have probably mentioned elsewhere in the past is that you cannot always prove personal experience this is endemic in sexual assault/consent cases. It is considered that most sexual assaults do not lead to criminal convictions because it is one persons word against another. — Andrew4Handel

Precisely why scientific evidence needs to be reproducible: if no one knows how to verify your results, it's not science.

On this, instead of inventing stuff, has it ever occurred to you to ask scientists how they actually do things?

If physicalism is true, how amazing is it that the mind (physical) can contemplate on that which it is not - the nonphysical?! The mind is clearly uncertain as to whether it's physical or not? — TheMadFool

It has no problem with the non-real (gods and goblins, souls and supermen, karma and... I can only think of K9, the robot dog from Doctor Who) so the non-physical isn't a stretch. Key is representations. The brain is good at representations, primarily for encoding information about real, physical things but inevitably about non-real, potentially non-physical things (errors, dreams). Add onto that human language, the ability to manipulate symbols that can stand for anything, real or non-real, physical or non-physical, and it doesn't seem _that_ amazing that the brain can comprehend the soul or whatnot. I mean, it _is_ amazing, but the sorts of amazing that are par for the course for the brain.

so the argument against science is that Counterpunch doesn't understand it. — Banno

No, he assured us he has read this stuff and has a good grasp of it.

Thanks! 14x2x2=56 - which only leaves 37bn light years accounted for by magic. I mean cosmic expansion. Close enough! — counterpunch

Well, much more than 37bn. Part of inflation theory is that the universe must be much, much larger than the observable universe. However, no magic necessary, just counting. 2c for two adjacent points. Next add a third. You have points A, B and C in a row. A is receding from B at almost the speed of light. B is receding from C at roughly the same speed. How fast is A receding from C?

And remember this happened in 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds during which the visible universe acquired most of the size it has now.

The largeness of the unobservable universe is a requirement that the inflation yield the observable, homogeneous cosmos we see now.

Some say it could the path to the beginning of the end of human civilization. — Corvus

That's Love Island, not science ;)

Yes, it's a matter of mentality switching from the comparable sanity of special relativity, in which an object cannot recede from another faster than c, to the insanity of general relativity, in which an object can recede at c while riding on a space that's also receding at c (making 2c). That no object can recede from another faster than c is a rule about _inertial_ frames, not curved spacetime.

When in Rome! — baker

Yes?

I agree. I’m claiming this analogy mirrors the OP. — avalon

Ah! Sorry, the typo threw me. Keep it up, comrade!!! :rofl:

the spin of the wheel has no mass, the wheel does (forgive the earlier typo) but otherwise my point stands — avalon

So the wheel is matter, and the spin of the wheel is energy. So far, so physicalist.

Oh, the daggers and stings! — baker

I'm not seeing any evidence that there was an interesting direction you wanted the conversation to go in. I naively thought, from

The implication being that ...? — baker

and

I want to see how they actually hold up against life's hardships, regardless of whether they are theists, atheists, or whatever. I want to take them to Rhodes, to see how they jump there. — baker

that there was some thinking on the horizon but, no, despite it being pointed out to you twice, you're still blocked by a need to be hostile, while complaining that the thread is blocked by the hostility of others.

Baffled, but I guess you never promised to make sense.

Matter is anything that has mass and volume.

...

The wheel neither gains mass nor increases in volume. Ergo, the spinning wheel isn't matter! — avalon

Something is wrong.

But you speak with great confidence. This is enough of a clue. — baker

For prejudicial people, maybe. I still like the old fashioned ideas of facts and logic, curiosity over never needing to ask. Different strokes for different folks.

Of course. But what I see in this is braggartry. When people say or imply in any way that they "have it all figured out", I want to see how they actually hold up against life's hardships, regardless of whether they are theists, atheists, or whatever. I want to take them to Rhodes, to see how they jump there. — baker

I haven't claimed to figure anything out. I've put forth no meaning of my own. Apparently I've been sufficiently even-handed that Carlos thinks I've more or less admitted to being a Christian while Wayfarer's accusing me relativism. I guess the moral here is that people fit information into their own frameworks any which way.

A thing I said before:

A good way of approaching the question imo is anthropologically: do humans tend to behave as if their life has meaning, not just value? There are people for whom this seems to be true, but they are likely exceptional. I doubt that I, being unexceptional, would live much of a different life whether it had meaning or not, which is as good an indicator as I can think of that it doesn't. — Kenosha Kid

So I agree: putting it to the test, seeing how people actually behave, is the interesting thing. Everything else is largely posturing imo.

You're welcome. First key thing is that the " inflationary period", while brief, was insanely rapid, with every point pretty much moving at speed c away from its neighbouring points... It didn't require a lot of time to become huge. The second thing is that it never really ended, it just stopped being quite so insane, and we've had a lot of time to get quite a lot bigger. Most important point is that inflation is like gravity: normal rules for inertial frames (including universal speed limits) don't apply.

You're creating a hostile discussion environment that is not conducive to discussing the topics I want to discuss.
At the same time, what the vocal antireligionists are saying are clues for the topics I do want to discuss.
Hm. — baker

I'm responding to your hostile posts in a very polite manner. If you don't like the state of things, you have the power in your hands to improve them greatly. You'd hear no objection or feel any pushback from me, just make that decision.

As far as I understand it, cosmic inflation occurred only very early on, shortly after the big bang - and on a small scale, 10 to the power minus 36 seconds after the singularity to 10 to the power minus 32 seconds. It doesn't explain how the universe is 93 light years wide but only 14 ish, billion years old. — counterpunch

But it does. Those estimates are themselves based on inflationary cosmological models.

The implication being that ...? — baker

Sorry, that it's no loss to an atheist/physicalist that we have no teleological meaning. That you can't compare the value of this meaning in a creationist (in its broadest sense) framework to, say, to maximise one's contribution to the gene pool, or to know the universe, or to make art, or free a people, in the respective frameworks in which those meanings have utmost import.