But yes I tend to criticize violence, rioting theft, and the destruction of property — NOS4A2

Ah okay, so when black people protest, however peacefully, it's still a violent crime, so you can freely substitute those occurrences as if they were the same. I guess this is the logic certain police officers employ too. Anyway, good to know the world hasn't turned upside down.

But yes, wherever a faction of human beings is in control that’s where the powerful and powerless alike seek influence and favor. — NOS4A2

A faction of human beings in control is powerful, they don't need to seek favour. Or do you mean between factions, like land owners and politicians? Then yes.

I don’t believe there is a natural egalitarianism in our species — NOS4A2

I suppose people imagine human beings to be approximately like them. I don't know how seriously you take science, but the reigning wisdom is that, yes, human beings are naturally egalitarian and altruistic by default. We've had tens of thousands of years of social cooperation within groups; the exploitative power dynamics we're used to are thought to be relatively recent, post-agricultural. There are still many hunter gatherer tribes in the world now who, far from civilisation, remain egalitarian and altruistic.

However, key to their success is staying small. Basically it relies on everyone being close. This gives everyone a reason to want to help each other, while also allowing everyone to keep everyone else in check.

Power differentials are at odds with that, and that's one reason why you need a state to maintain them. I don't think there's anything untotalitarian in brainwashing people into thinking that their disadvantage from birth isn't real and enforcing the point with violence and dual-standard policing. It seems infinitely better, if we must have a state, to have one that ensures everyone's stake in society is comparable. After all, the lie that is the American dream is meant to appeal to precisely that sense of egalitarianism and self-realisation.

You're more certain that physical matter exists than of pretty much anything else? What do you base this high level of certainty on? — RogueAI

This is becoming my mantra, but an objective physical universe is overwhelmingly the simplest and indeed currently only viable explanation for phenomena.

do you believe that something that is functionally equivalent to the brain will be conscious, whatever the substrate? — RogueAI

A brain doesn't have to be conscious, so I'd word it as: something functionally equivalent to my brain would have the capacity for consciousness. You're conveying incredulity but there's no way this is news to you.

If science can't solve consciousness, then it's first going to appear as an "explanatory gap" until people realize science isn't equipped to solve it. — RogueAI

Even whether science can fully explain it is irrelevant. Again, the advent of science is not a prerequisite for brains producing consciousness.

The reason walking/running and legs isn't like consciousness emerging is because we have an explanation for walking/running and walking and running and legs all belong to the same ontological category. We don't have an explanation for consciousness (we don't even have an agreed upon definition of it), and mental states and physical states are ontologically different things. — RogueAI

An of-the-gaps argument. Science hasn't explained it, therefore it's not scientifically explicable, therefore <insert pet theory here>. Science isn't done yet. Irrespective, the answer to the OP still holds: there is no scientific problem with consciousness not creating matter for the same reason there is no scientific problem with walking not creating legs. This is true whether or not we have a good scientific explanation for walking.

But we do spend our time thinking about such stuff, and science prides itself on its explanatory power, and in this one area, there has been a definite lack of progress that is starting to become embarrassing — RogueAI

There's been a huge amount of progress. Just saying there's been none doesn't make it true: this ain't religion, there's a paper trail. Your argument is reminding me of this lady:

https://youtu.be/YFjoEgYOgRo

But the proponents of this sort of thinking can't prove that it's true. — god must be atheist

I dunno, what if we built the greatest microscope ever and found, written on each elementary particle:

Made in Heaven
Do not dry clean

The end result of Rabin and Arafat was not going to be a Palestinian State though. — Benkei

Do you practically, or nominally? It certainly was the intention that the 5 year interim period would be used for negotiations for a permanent government of Palestine. If you mean practically, yeah well... look where we are. :'(

No, I think you've misunderstood.
— Kenosha Kid


We see in the second link (can't read the first as I reached my limit) that the recognition is a prerequisite for aid and is about Hamas' charter.
— Benkei — Benkei

Okay, maybe _I_ misunderstand. I don't see the relevance of:

We also need to see through the ploy of submitting demands to enter into negotiations. — Benkei

to the quartet demands to continue funding, which is what I thought you were responding to there (although you didn't quote it).

I agree that we have to use our 'impressive brains' and not expect divine revelation'. The problem is that even rationality and knowledge are limited. We come back to the question interrelated to what is reality, which is, how do we know? — Jack Cummins

We'll, they're not _that_ limited. Thanks to the best of us, we're exploring beyond our solar system and building machines that can answer questions we can't. We know an insane amount about the universe and ourselves. We don't know everything, true, and we don't know some of the stuff that's most important to us, but I think we're doing alright for a bunch of hairless apes who, a few thousand years ago, were firing sticks at birds and dying aged 28 of toothache.

And we're doing it alone while the majority of us are engaged in land wars, holy wars, race wars, etc. Imagine how much more we'll achieve when we form an intergalactic federation with advanced alien races founded on science, peace, and cooperation. Good idea for a TV and movie franchise, actually.

Do you believe the brain is a prerequisite for consciousness? — RogueAI

Yes, uncontroversially. This is a philosophy forum, I'm well aware of the difficulty in claiming to know anything beyond that I'm a thinking thing, but as much as one can be certain of anything else, I'm at least certain of that.

If so, why do you think it's taking so long to come up with an explanation for how the brain produces consciousness — RogueAI

Those are not related things. There is no necessary cause for a brain to come to understand consciousness. If humans hadn't evolved, perhaps no brain would even have a concept of consciousness. I don't think rats, crows and dolphins spend their time thinking about this stuff.

For example, suppose 1,000 years from now the Hard Problem remains. Would you reexamine your belief that consciousness arises from matter? — RogueAI

The hard problem is not a problem, it's a protest. It's even worded by Chalmers as such. There is nothing to wait for.

As for running and legs and brains, we have an explanation for running/walking. We have no explanation for the emergence of consciousness from the actions of neurons. — RogueAI

An of-the-gaps fallacy again. Science hasn't explained it yet, therefore it must be God/panpsychism/dualism/whatever other ism I favour. If you find yourself making this argument, stop, catch yourself, and remember: no one finds this a good argument when it's not used in the service of their pet theory. And more honest people don't think it a good argument period.

If physical states can cause mental states, why not vice-versa? — RogueAI

You've already had the answer to this.

I recall my first conversation with you in which you criticised the lawlessness (a statist notion) and implicit communism (a boogeyman of the American state) of a group of people protesting their oppression and lives lost in the hands of a violently oppressive state.

Now here you are bemoaning the oppressiveness of any state at all. You've come a long way (too far, perhaps). Or is it just hypocrisy? Someone who is against the state oppression of its most victimised demographics is in charge, time to rally the people against the state sort of thing?

Anyway, I kind of agree with you in principle of not in practice. The state exists because large, self-policing social groups are untenable but agriculture favours large social groups. Historically the state has favoured the owners of production over its consumers, hence the importance of private property laws, trespass laws and more severe punishments for proletariat crimes than for crimes committed by the powerful, which remains true in a less severe form today. The state is oppressive because the powerful favour oppressive states

It needn't be that way. Yes, there has to be some degree of policing because the larger the social group, the higher the number of people who end up with no stake in it. But there's no reason not to have a state the does the opposite to what ours does: protecting the natural egalitarianism of our species rather than the greed of its more resourceful, violent, and antisocial elements. That is, after all, the principal mode of our natural self-policing: to stop freeloaders, exploiters and other maniacs from taking control of the group.

Ensuring that everyone has an equal stake in their town would be the most effective route to minimising state interference: it would allow people to do what you guys say you want people to do (decide for themselves, do the right thing out of self-interest, etc.) Problem is, sounds kinda like communityism.

Take for example the Jeopardy! incident, which showed an audience of highly educated leftists going into almost Q Anon level rabbit hole over "secret Nazi hand gestures."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/business/media/jeopardy-hand-gesture-maga-conspiracy.html — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you have any examples that aren't behind a paywall?

Defining "Wokeness," is a project in itself. However, one negative aspect of the Culture Wars on American intellectual life that ties in is the argument that "if people feel they are being oppressed/mistreated, then whoever is responsible for that feeling has a duty to act to alleviate that feeling."

This is simply nonsense. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Correct, but yours. Wokeness is about awareness of issues, not a schema for solving them. You say that defining it is a project, but it's not. Definitions centre around usage, not vice versa. Wokeness is used and defined as, e.g.

awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial justice

being aware of social movements

a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality

etc. Pretty consistent, and easily Googlable :)

"Walking from legs" is not the same as "consciousness from non-conscious stuff". — RogueAI

His general point stands: legs are a prerequisite for walking; walking does not cause legs. Atomic structure is a prerequisite for materials; material structure is not a prerequisite for atoms. A prerequisite for atoms is massive, charged particles; atoms are not a prerequisite for massive, charged particles. Or, more simply, trees are a prerequisite for forests; forests are not a prerequisite for trees.

You have an invalid assumption: that every hierarchical relationship in physics is or ought to be a two-way street. That is not a peculiarity of physics (just your conception of it) so, no, it's not* a problem for physicalists that consciousness is a function of brains but cannot create brains.

*EDIT: thanks Shirley

Yes I think that is correct. As we have outlined earlier, it is not possible to reach that underlying reality absolutely, so we will only ever have interpretations of it. Some closer to the truth then others but none can ultimately be true! This is a long held belief in idealism, and is the best understanding in physics, as Kenosha Kid has pointed out.

We can say we can never reach reality, or we can say it doesn't exist - that we in fact create it in our path, by collapsing interactions to conceptions. Either expression will do, imo. — Pop

Yes, I agree with this. There's no divine revelation. Science grants us no direct access to objective reality. We have to use our impressive brains to interpret* wisely from phenomena.

*I distinctly remember typing interpret. But it came out interpolate. I don't think I can blame autocorrect for this one.

We also need to see through the ploy of submitting demands to enter into negotiations. In some rounds to start negotiations, the recognition of Israel was a requisite to start negotiations. We see in the second link (can't read the first as I reached my limit) that the recognition is a prerequisite for aid and is about Hamas' charter. Hamas consistently says Israel's status and recognition is subject to negotiation and should be part of it, so they will always reject what the PLO did : recognise the State of Israel before negotiations start. They will not recognise Israel's right to exist in their charter because of this. I do think people read too much into that because It's about territory and we know Israel doesn't recognise Palestine either and Likud's charter pretty much denies establishing Palestine too. It shouldn't be a barrier to negotiations either way. — Benkei

No, I think you've misunderstood. This wasn't about starting another wave of negotiations, it was about continuation of aid to Palestine following the election of an organisation that had declared the destruction of Israel as one of its aims. I don't think there's anything too dark going on in the quartet: it seems perfectly reasonable to me not to provide funds to such a party, whether or not one is sympathetic to the origins of that party (as one might be sympathetic to the IRA but not want to enable it's violence).

I couldn't disagree more that failure to recognise the other side as a state is a barrier to the implementation of a two-state solution. You cannot have a successful two-state solution when one side will not recognise the other. It was a huge achievement to get Israel to recognise the PLO as the legitimate negotiator for a future state of Palestine: the Palestinian side was not a problem here until 2006 afaik.

Likewise you cannot work toward peace with an opponent who does not have peace as a goal.

So it was somewhat more reasonable than I remember. Here's a NY Times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/world/middleeast/hamas-is-facing-a-money-crisis-aid-may-be-cut.html

I remembered this as a demand to recognise Israel as a state, which is an essential component of the two-state solution. Apparently we were just asking them to back down on their commitment to the destruction of Israel as per the Hamas covenant.

Ah. So the US reaction references the more assertive demand of the two-state solution: https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/Pcaab448.pdf

Interestingly, their analysis is that it was a ploy to stoke sympathy and attract broader funding. Personally I think it's just religious mania on the back of (rightful) indignation.

A correction to my earlier correction, it was the Oslo agreement after all. The PLO recognised the state of Israel in 1993.

EDIT:

It is true, by the way, that they've rejected all the Camp David and Oslo Accords because those didn't establish a sovereign state and probably didn't adequately deal (in their view) with Jerusalem and the right of return.

It's a simplistic-seeming summary, but I suspect it's the thick end of the wedge. Or rather Hamas came to power in the first place as a reaction to that. I think Hamas itself is just another bloodthirsty jihadist nutjob organisation, a sort of Palestinian Trump monster emerging like a cry of desperation from a thwarted people with no good options.

I'm still on my phone, on my way home though. It was back in 2006, right after they were elected. It shouldn't be too hard to find: Palestinian aid from the UN, US, EU was contingent on Hamas agreeing to a peaceful two-state solution (which encapsulates (a) and (b)) and sticking to prior agreements. By refusing, Hamas cost the Palestinian people a lot in terms of aid, so it was a pretty big deal at the time.

I'm not sure Hamas are as much moderate as moderated, that is to say I'm less convinced they'd be as chill if they weren't in coalition. Btw I wasn't suggesting Hamas were at Camp David, just that they declined to continue along that course.

Yes, it was the failed Camp David talks, not the failed Oslo agreement. Hamas were asked to ratify that position on Israel: a) recognition of the state of Israel, b) commitment to non-violence, c) adherence to prior agreements from future governments of a state of Palestine. Hamas declined. Point remains: what inclination towards a peace treaty with someone who refuses to work toward peace?

Like I said, I'm not defending Israel here, Hamas is on them. That's about as close to a defence of Israel I can muster.

Ah, might not have been Oslo actually. Can't check this on my phone, bear with...

Well, to be fair, this was more stream of consciousness flow from the idea posited in God Debris as per my OP. — CountVictorClimacusIII

Ah okay. We'll, like I said, the idea is attractive, by which I meant as mythos. I think there's more to ordering narratives than historical data points, and I find Christianity the most fascinating (no doubt because it's the dominant religion in my upbringing), so I'm not down on creationist myth in and if itself. I like that yours incorporates the sacrifice motif of Christianity with the scientific motif of completist, self-justifying curiosity.

I've flirted between atheism / agnosticism, and toyed with the idea of pandeism — CountVictorClimacusIII

Which your OP qualifies as, and which counts Einstein among its adherents. Good company.

Then, I should try to clarify, whether you're a deist, atheist, etc. at the stage of older child to adult, we may feel this feeling regardless (abandoned / alone / lost / despairing) (?), and perhaps we each attribute that feeling to something different, based on subjective / personal experiences and individual beliefs. — CountVictorClimacusIII

Fair enough, but then this can't be used to demonstrate the explanatory power of your theory. One can accept your theory (perhaps a la Sebastian Flyte on the grounds that it's lovely, which it is) and then posit this as an explanation for feelings of abandonment in a separate theory, but to assume that those feelings are a good demonstration of your theory is circular, relying as it does on a degree of interpretation proceeding from the assumption that the theory is true.

I think our feelings of abandonment have a lot more to do with the society we mature in. I don't think these are spiritual, rather are interpreted as spiritual when seen through a religious lens which, for most of the last couple of millennia, things have.

I was thinking back to the "spiritual" pull that I, an atheist from birth, felt when hearing a choir and organ in Durham cathedral. It was the first time I thought I might get what Christians interpreted as spiritual. It was rather melancholic but also comforting, beautiful and sad. It made me want to bear all to an invisible father figure who would definitely definitely not judge and keep my secrets.

I told a religious friend of mine who likewise saw this as demonstrating the explanatory power of religion. But of course Christianity has had millennia to refine its articles and accompaniments to better achieve a feeling that they claimed for religion, while teaching people throughout that time to associate that feeling with the spiritual.

I'm confident if this is achieved that Hamas too, will recognise Israel as a State because then the borders, Palestinian rights and status of Jerusalem would be agreed so there's no risk in recognising the other party as sovereign. — Benkei

But that is precisely what they've refused to agree to, along with, on the establishment of a Palestinian state, the government of that state ceasing hostilities against Israel.

Israel doesn't recognise a Palestinian State either and even when Rabin and Arafat got close, Palestine would not be a State but an "autonomous region". — Benkei

On the first point, true, but then Palestine isn't an autonomous region yet, Israel is and is globally recognised as such (with a few exceptions). In the failed Oslo agreement, both sides agreed to recognise the other as a sovereign state and cease hostilities once the autonomous state of Palestine was established. Hamas reversed that. I don't see this as a barrier to a two-state solution from Israel's point of view, but at the same time it would be extremely trusting, naive even, to think the conflict would end there when your opponent has actively reneged on a promise not to attack you if it gets what it says it wants.

I'll notice that except for a few diaspora Jews nobody seems to have defended Israel here. And other than Khaled I think they're mostly white males from western countries. — Benkei

As a white male from a Western country, it's still a tough sell. I think I'd tend to take a stronger position on Palestinian violence than my lefty peers on this: violence is a perfectly acceptable last resort in the face of an existential threat, and the Palestinian crisis, caused and perpetuated by Israel, most certainly qualifies as an existential threat. As such, the prior discussions on "if Israel can't be violent surely Gammas can't be violent" are disingenuous in my eyes: Israel have, or at least had, the power to end this peacefully; the PLO did not, and a peaceful PLO would not have neutered the existential threat to the Palestinian people.

However... The Israel-Palestine conflict of today is not that of the more optimistic past. While most Jews and Palestinians support a peaceful, cooperative two-state solution, Hamas has consciously put itself at odds with peace as an ideal and the mutually agreed conditions of the two-state solution.

It's still impossible to defend Israel, since Hamas' MO is a beast of their own creation, but in fairness it's now difficult to negotiate a peace treaty with an entity that a) refuses to accept peace as a condition of a peace treaty and b) refuses to acknowledge the existence of the other state. Even for the now bipartisan PA, this still strikes me as the most immediate barrier to peace.

That said, given that Israel does not face any kind of existential threat from Palestine, meeting a lobbed, homemade explosive over a fence with multiple strikes to kill many civilians is still indefensible. It's incommensurate. The deterrent defense is untenable: they are killing and angering people who recognise Israel and support a peaceful two-state solution. That is not a deterrent, that's an inticement. I've never felt that Israel had any intention of working toward a peaceful two-state solution, rather their own MO has been to stall in times of peace and kill as many as they can get away with in times of conflict.

So, if you are a filthy POS like Trump, you might be able to find a safe space where you can continue to thrive, compound your beliefs in a confirmation-bias echo chamber and, if enough people like you, then you can find a following there. — James Riley

Speaking of... As far as I know, "cancel culture" and "wokeness" are primarily concerns of the somewhat unhinged right-wing US media that idolised Trump, a man who fired, attacked, and tried to rise the people against any person or institution that dared disagree with him (except Fauci). They worshipped cancel culture as it was practised by the most important person in the country while bemoaning it if ever it were seen as in service of somewhat more considerate ideal than Trump could ever think of. It doesn't seem like a legitimate issue (admittedly from safely far away in the UK).

Subjective, personal experience perhaps — CountVictorClimacusIII

You can't have a subjective, personal experience that deists generally feel something more than atheists.

Also yes, it would be something more felt if raised as a deist, and then perhaps through own research and enquiry, after a change of mind / heart followed by the inevitable questions to ponder. — CountVictorClimacusIII

Is that based on anything, other than being in service of Exploding God Theory?

I don't even think it's a misnomer: the goal is a theory of every thing. Not counterfactual thing, not opposite-of-thing, but every thing. Every thing in the universe has an explanation (is the idea). From the set of all things in the universe, select an element P. P' (not P) is the subset of that set which isn't P. A TOE is obliged to explain P and P', not P and ~P.

A visit from my grandmother would be nice.

Seriously, I miss her.

But, it did make me wonder how energy works in life — Jack Cummins

Energy and entropy are key; I don't expect generalisations of the physical concepts to be any more useful, but interested in trying it out. Energy is the ability to do work. What is work? Work is rearrangement of something contra to opposing or restorative forces. Getting out of bed is work against gravity. Walking is work against inertia and friction. Reading a paper is work against disorder. The first two aren't especially interesting with regard to life, but the third is.

Imagine a universe in which entropy naturally decreases. Structures would form naturally, requiring no work to order them. Information would be created spontaneously. Nothing could be learned, merely known, and since that information has not been created through any effort, it would be meaningless. Ink could fall onto a page in a way that neatly and precisely spells "You're out of milk" but because it was spontaneous, it would have nothing to do with how much milk is in your fridge. And, besides, that would have no bearing on what you learn from the ink. You could read "You're out of milk" but learn "Emily Blunt was defenestrated by militant vegans". Jackson Pollack would throw paint at a canvas and make the Mona Lisa. Music would, at best, have to write itself, but you'd remember something else anyway. And you'd have no meaningful sense of identity. You could go to bed thinking "I, Oscar Brainworthy, really nailed that movie pitch" and wake up thinking "Only three more double agents that I, Barry Grimm, need to assassinate".

Not that you'd have been born since procreation is also a battle against entropy. In anti-thermodynamics, a virgin truly could bear a baby boy, or a bear for that matter, in this universe in which the Daily Star and National Enquirer would be the only reliable news sources if only they could control their content. In fact, evolution itself is an intergenerational war against entropy, the incremental addition of information to minimise predictable death, competition for resources, and low reproduction rate. The only barrier to a man being created from bacterial cell division would be the sheer size of him.

Not that you could have bacteria without entropy... And so on. At any scale, life is about energy working against entropy in their precise physical conceptions.

Ah yeah tbf that is consistent with your previous post too, I just didn't really nail my objection well. Perhaps the context of Russell's idea is dualism as much as physicalism, which would make some sense of introducing the mental world even if to refute it. The habit of dualism is more ingrained in philosophy. There's obviously interesting theories about the role of mind in measurement in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, but the either/or/neither is uncommon in physics at least.

Anyway, the stuff about events sounds very in line with my own way of thinking. I wrote (and will shortly update) a trilogy of threads on determinism and quantum mechanics with some counterfactual examples that demonstrated my view to some extent: that events, particularly creation and annihilation events, are what matters; classical ideas of trajectories are underdefined for good reasons. I will fast track some Russell reading asap!

In general that the "new physics", as it was when Russell wrote about these topics, renders the ideas of objects as not being tenable. He thought we should think of the world as being composed of "events". — Manuel

Thanks Manuel. I am sympathetic to the above. Less so to:

This "new physics" was also the final nail in the coffin of our idea of impenetrable matter, and "has become as ghostly as anything in a spiritualist séance." — Manuel

Scientific progress rarely throws ideas in the bin. Science is self-correcting, which means that old ideas about matter (among other things) are iteratively adjusted on the basis of new findings. Traditional ideas of matter are still accounted for, however they are not fundamental. The laws of physics explain why your tabletop is hard, rigid, doesn't change its shape, doesn't allow your cup to pass through it. These are old ideas of matter, but while the theories about them change, our predicted everyday experiences don't.

I see a lot of discussion on here about the nature of the material world in modern physics. Traditional ideas had to be reworked here and the notion of the material world doesn't really help anymore. The rigidity of your tabletop is largely due to the property of electric charge: that's the important bit for discussing the material properties of your table. But in terms of celestial dynamics, charge isn't very important at all, rather mass is what's paramount. While most particles that have mass have charge, not all do (e.g. neutrinos), and on a more elementary level, other properties are far more important than mass.

For this reason, physicists tend to talk about the physical world rather than the material world. All of these headscratchers disappear when one moves from categories refined for describing everyday experience to categories refined for describing the universe generally at any scale.

In this sense, the notion of the material *world* (but not materials) has been dropped, but the concepts that notion is associated with have not. The everyday usefulness of the material world would be ambiguous to a modern physicist: the first thing they'd have to ask is what you mean? Are you asking about the properties of condensed matter, or the properties of the cosmos, or the properties of particles, if so all particles or just massive ones, or just charged ones? Do you care about the structure of atomic nuclei? The physical world is unambiguous: this covers all particles in the standard model, all universal constants, and spacetime, i.e. all the objects and parameters of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

This combined with his view on how little we know about psychology prompts him to say that we don't know if "the physical world is, or is not, different in intrinsic character from the world of mind". — Manuel

I'd have to read it, but this stinks of bias. I've never seen a logical argument for the primacy of mental content from physical considerations, and strikes me as driven by a preference for, rather than an understanding of, what the universe is fundamentally like. From what I do know of Russell, that seems unlikely.

Thanks again for the synopsis. My reading list is large!

Galileo’s method leaves something out. It’s not that significant when it comes to calculating trajectories, but it becomes very important when science aspires to becoming truly universal. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure what this means. Tbh I've been a bit lost as to what you're getting at since my comment that observation is important to the observer.

What is 'marred forever' is the prospect of literal omniscience on the part of science. And that doesn't bother me in the least. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure literal omniscience was ever an expectation. A complete set of laws is the ideal. I get your point though. When Gallileo rolls a ball down an inclined plane, he expects to be able to describe what happened from setup to measurement. It's not omniscience, but at least a solid grasp of what happened when on this particular occasion. Quantum mechanics rather trashes that, at least for now.

:up:

It would explain why we feel so alone, so abandoned perhaps? — CountVictorClimacusIII

At what point do we start to feel alone and abandoned? Because I get the sense that's an older child thing, not a baby thing or a toddler thing and, furthermore, occurs whether one is raised a deist, an atheist, or anything else for that matter.

Ha ha, yeah I meant to end that with "and expect to be taken seriously".

If you go through some of Russell's works such as The Analysis of Matter or An Outline of Philosophy, I think you could find some connections to metaphysics with sound scientific basis. — Manuel

I'll grab those, thanks :) In the meantime, anything in particular you had in mind (while I'm being a tad kinder to metaphysics than usual)?

On consideration, the posters here have been overwhelmingly in praise of science, but concerned about consequent social and environmental issues. — Banno

Well good :) The data we're concerned about is, of course, scientific data. If science is telling you you're destroying the planet and you ignore it, you can't blame science for the planet being spoiled.

Well, it has philosophical significance. — Wayfarer

Oh definitely, for us, particularly as it presents a limit. Whatever else happens, we know the world must appear classical and coherent to us. This emergence might appear at the scale of a bacterium, or a cat, or a robot, but it definitely has to have occurred by us. Again, the role of the observer is important to the observer.

Einstein's moon, Schroedinger's cat, Wigner's friend... These all make similar complaints that the observer can't be special in any universal sense since there are clearly macroscopic processes involved in between the quantum mechanical system being measured and the observer doing the measuring where classical physics is meant to hold. I.e. they are arguments against an ontological interpretation of the wavefunction.

Bohr was a founder of the Copenhagen interpretation with its epistemic wavefunction, though this guy reckons he really believed in an ontic wavefunction:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33753316.pdf

If you believe in both the ontic wavefunction and collapse, you still can't escape the question of when collapse occurred. Was it the measuring apparatus, or the computer? Was it my lab assistant or me? Positing the human observer as the actual collapse mechanism seemed to me to betray the sort of anthrocentrism that has marred human enquiry forever.

Right! Do you think so?

We’re all observers, and the absence of human beings, what observers are there? Now that’s a question you’re not going to find the answer for in physics. — Wayfarer

That might be a little too speculative for a physics text. Personally I think it's overwhelmingly likely other intelligent species exist, or have existed, or will exist, out there somewhere. Unsure of the relevance of this though.

That is, science was misused for private purposes then blamed when things fell through, giving a pretext for less reliance on the science

The danger is that it is when science is most needed that it is rejected. — Banno

Precisely my point. You can do unethical science quite easily, as totalitarian states and corporations attest. Just take the bits you want and ignore or lie about the rest. That's not a measure of science, but of totalitarian states and corporations.

I would have thought that working together to prevent the spread of a virus via masks and vaccination would mean that people will die in far fewer numbers.

The significant barriers to this are clearly the positions people hold on government and freedom and what counts as evidence. — Tom Storm

On any major ethical issue, there is always vocal, indeed strident opposition to implementing change for ethical reasons, sometimes for maintenance of personal advantage, sometimes misguided antisocial principle. Slavery, colonialism, suffrage, civil rights, environmentalism... It seems so obvious to many that there is a clear ethical path that it's stupendous that so many would disagree.

Here's the thing: these people do not give a rat's arse who they hurt. They didn't care about the plight of slaves, the right to self-determination, the rights of women and other marginalised demographics, or whether they leave the world as a burning husk. And they sure as hell don't care if their need to feel special kills a bunch of people.

The fact that you label anyone who has reservations about receiving an inadequately tested vaccine as a paranoid anti-vaxxer shows that you are not capable of rational argument or balanced views, so I'll leave you to your rabid fantasies. — Janus

Except you didn't. Also, I cited paranoia as an example among others, not the unifying trait. There's also insane people and idiots, remember? But tbh anyone who wilfully puts others in harm's way is not someone whose wrong opinion on other matters will rob me of much sleep.