There are possible worlds in which aliens exist and possible worlds in which they don't.

1. I believe that aliens exist but I don't know that aliens exist.

I believe this world is one in which they do, but I don't know it for a fact.

2. I claim that I might actually be wrong.

This world might be one of the ones in which aliens don't exist.

3. My claim that I might actually be wrong is true even if aliens happen to exist and I'm not wrong.

This world might, for all I know, be one of the ones in which aliens don't exist, even if it is one of the ones in which aliens exist.

The problem here is that we still have subjunctives, because we're layering the epistemic issue on top of the, let's say, metaphysical one. What we want is all indicatives, so we can quantify properly:

There are possible worlds in which I think my world is one of the worlds in which aliens exist.

That looks fine. Can we also say this?

There are possible worlds in which I think my world is one of the worlds in which aliens exist, but I am wrong and there are no aliens in that world.

Of course. What about this?

There are possible worlds in which I think my world is one of the worlds in which aliens exist, and they do, I'm right, and (new scope here) there are possible worlds in which they don't.

Yes.

There are possible worlds in which I think my world is one of the worlds in which aliens exist, and they do, and I think, in that world, there are possible worlds in which they don't exist, and I'm right (or wrong, whatever).

If the sorts of available possible worlds are clear enough, but the problem is knowing which sort this one is, then you can still analyze it as sets of possible worlds in which you're right about which sort of possible world this one is, and possible worlds in which you're wrong.

I'm not just saying that. I'm saying that she might not be 30 in the actual world. When we admit to the possibility of being wrong we're not saying "I'm actually right, but in some possible world I'm wrong". We're saying "I might actually be wrong." That's fallibilism. — Michael

Try this: there are possible worlds in which she is 30, and possible worlds in which she is not; if you do not know whether she's 30, you do not know which bucket this world goes in.

To say, I know she's 30, is to say, I know this is one of the worlds in which she's 30. You can happily say I think she's 30 but maybe I'm wrong, because that's just saying, I think this is one of the worlds in which she's 30 but it might be one of the others.

But if you want to say, I know she's 30 but I might be wrong, then you're trying to say, I know this is one of the worlds in which she's 30 but I don't know if this is one of the worlds in which she's 30. That's a tough sell.

If one specifies the conditions under which a sentence is true, one specifies the meaning of that sentence. — Banno

Then you don't get to be deflationary about truth. Which is it?

if "aliens exist" is true then "aliens exist" is not false, and it could not possibly be false without negating "aliens exist" being true — Janus

Possible-worlds semantics makes this all clearer:

• "Aliens exist" means [ Aliens exist in this world ]
• "Aliens do not exist" means [ Aliens do not exist in this world ]
• "It is possible that aliens exist" means [ There is at least one possible world in which aliens do in fact exist, and in that world it would be true to say "Aliens exist" ]. This might or might not be our ("this", "the actual") world.
• "It is possible that aliens do not exist" means [ There is at least one possible world in which aliens do not in fact exist, and in that world it would be true to say "Aliens do not exist" ]

Therefore

"Aliens exist and it is possible that aliens do not exist" means [ Aliens exist in this world, and there is at least one possible world in which aliens do not exist ]

If you like, you can say, "There exists at least one possible world -- not this one, obviously -- in which aliens don't exist."

It is emphatically not the case that aliens existing makes it impossible that they don't exist. That would mean everything that exists exists necessarily, and every proposition that is true is true necessarily. If you want to claim specifically that, go ahead, but don't get there just by misinterpreting the now generally agreed understanding of the modal operators.

"Necessarily" always includes our world because it always includes all possible worlds. "Possibly" is explicitly non-committal on whether our world is the one described. If aliens are known to exist here, they are known to be possible; they may even be necessary, who's to say? But if you claim their existence is contingent, you're explicitly not claiming that in addition to existing here they don't exist here; you are claiming there is a possible world (maybe nearby, maybe accessible, whatever) in which they do not. Again: in that world, they do not; in this one, they still do. "Possibly not" just isn't about the facts here being different here. That rather misses the whole point.

our tribal conceptual norms — Pie

Not one of those paid private teachers, whom the people call sophists and consider to be their rivals in craft, teaches anything other than the convictions that the majority expresses when they are gathered together. Indeed, these are precisely what the sophists call wisdom. It's as if someone were learning the moods and appetites of a huge, strong beast that he's rearing—how to approach and handle it, when it is most difficult to deal with or most gentle and what makes it so, what sounds it utters in either condition, and what sounds soothe or anger it. Having learned all this through tending the beast over a period of time, he calls this knack wisdom, gathers his information together as if it were a craft, and starts to teach it. In truth, he knows nothing about which of these convictions is fine or shameful, good or bad, just or unjust, but he applies all these names in accordance with how the beast reacts—calling what it enjoys good and what angers it bad. He has no other account to give of these terms. And he calls what he is compelled to do just and fine, for he hasn't seen and cannot show anyone else how much compulsion and goodness really differ. — Republic 493a-c

This talk of norms, is it an advance on Plato, or is it sophistry in modern, perhaps even scientific garb?

[deleted]

I think perhaps a lot of the time the philosopher is in the job of classifying the habits of thinking which accompany our particular forms of life — Isaac

This is an interesting and valuable enterprise but I would call it "cognitive psychology" rather than "philosophy". A whole lot of what I post, including almost* everything in this thread, also isn't philosophy, but "psychology of philosophy" -- at least as I'm inclined to use the terms, which is no doubt idiosyncratic.

You seem to have "bracketed", as they say, the issue of whether a classification, or a classificatory scheme, is "correct", in any sense. You might do that (1) for scientific reasons -- that is, that you don't care, since what you're investigating is the landscape of human classificatory habits. You might do that (2) for another reason, one we might call "logical" or "philosophical" or even "mathematical", that given any set of phenomena (or objects, whatever), there is no single way to classify them. (Which sounds like a theorem.)

Either is sufficient, but it's still slightly odd, since philosophers generally worry quite a bit about their classificatory choices and would never consider them all equivalent, as you implicitly do. You also imply that a classification is, shall we say, "external", "imposed" on the set:

The librarian noting that "How to make Curries" is a book about cookery is not discovering something about the book, they are classifying it, it's not a necessary part of the process, the book didn't need classifying to be understood, and used. — Isaac

The librarian has discovered that the book contains instructions for cooking; the predicate "... is a cookbook" is true of it, while many other predicates are not. It doesn't completely determine your final decision on how to classify the book (because there are many predicates you can use to partition your set, and many combinations of them), but it's now available. (As a bookseller, I can tell you I wouldn't trust the title alone: it could absolutely be a novel, and not unlikely a memoir.)

All this does relate to the sorts of things I've said earlier in this thread, like this: the usual way of classifying classificatory schemes is by their purpose. You pick the overlapping axes of your partitions based on suitability and usefulness for your purpose in so classifying items. (There is one section of the bookstore where I work that I have arranged, believe it or not, by the color of the book.) It might matter a great deal that "purpose" takes a possessive there -- any classificatory scheme might be treated sort of functionally, as itself the definition of "a" purpose, some purpose, but the issue in choosing it is whether that purpose is the same as yours.

And I've been suggesting that philosophy has no purpose, not in itself, so to speak, even though pointless activities, as a group, including, you know, art and all that, may have some purpose. Whether that's so, I've bracketed. I just take it as a fact that people do lots of pointless stuff, which kinda suggests there's a reason to do something pointless so I'm walking a bit of a tightrope here -- we need to do something we don't need to do, but that doesn't mean that something has to be philosophy, and philosophy only fits the bill if you don't need to do it.

And my reason for going through all that rigmarole is to bring us back to the moment of wonder, the moment of questioning, of curiosity. What is my purpose in watching a spider build its web? If there's survival value in that, it's a long, long way away. I don't think it's there at all. I can do that, because of how natural selection built me, but that doesn't mean I am constrained to act in ways that enhance my ability to survive and reproduce. And I am free not only of that purpose but of purpose as such. I don't have to have a reason to watch the spider build its web. That activity need have no purpose at all.

Which is not to say that there aren't psychological explanations for my spider-watching available. Of course there are. But they don't count as reasons for me. (We are still very close to the prompting thread after all.)

--- Anyway, this is all beside the point, because reasons and causes play no part in the moment of wonder itself. I can and do experience the world without there being any particular reason for my doing so. If philosophy ends up being striving to understand, it requires a beginning where understanding is absent, even if that must be relative rather than absolute. Which means I should backtrack a little: curiosity is a clue, a retroactive experience of recognizing that you have already not understood something. It is a valorization of that failure as the proper starting point.



* There is a single word in what I've posted here that, as I wrote it, I felt like I was verging on actual philosophy. There are a couple other points where I was at least in the neighborhood. The rest is chit-chat.

Can you perceive of any purpose for the universe during this time apart from its happenstance progress towards a lifeform capable of asking questions? — universeness

What, indeed, is the point of it all?

Some time back, there was a thread that amounted to attempting to answer this question:

Where is the universe?

Okay, there are some problems there, and it's not hard to see that there are problems there. And yet we ask. Why? Why are we so inclined to ask questions that don't quite make sense?

One common answer is that we are misled by the surface similarity of this question to a question like "Where is Belarus?" As it happens, Ryle's original example of a "category mistake" was a visitor being shown libraries, dining halls, classroom buildings, and so on, and then asking, "Yes, but where is the university?" We know that we can engage some little sentence generator within us to produce "Where is X?" for any token X, but why would we? What did that young student want to know that he was not getting from his tour guide? Why do we think of the universe as being somewhere? Why do we think it might or might not have a purpose?

There are two sorts of responses to questions like these that I want to head off:
(1) Your question is just a mistake; don't do that.
(2) It's a question, so let's start arguing for one answer or another.

Answer (1) often involves an argument that some canon of logical, or, more often, semantic, purity has been violated. Answer (2) generally presumes that a sufficiently pure (logically and semantically) analysis is available, and once discovered will yield an answer. (Thus if you've never beaten your children, you should cheerfully answer "no" when asked if you've stopped -- because logic.)

If your suspicion is that something like answer (1) is appropriate -- that, say, it makes no sense to ask where the universe is -- how will you proceed? Well, that's a curious point, because the natural thing to do in many cases is look for situations where answer (2) is appropriate -- that is, where we believe we are already in possession of the correct analysis, like "Where is Belarus?" -- and then point out that our situation is not enough like these. Hence the violation. But that's a pretty weird place for philosophy to end up -- are we only to ask questions we already know the answers to, or at least know how to get the those answers? "No one's ever asked that before," should be about the highest praise we can give, but that's not the vibe here at all.

If answer (1) shows, in some sense, too much humility, is too deferential to received wisdom, answer (2) shows too little: we presume we can or already do understand what's at stake, what the question means, where it comes from, why it's asked, how to go about answering it, what the answer will look like. It's impatient, which ought to be a sin in philosophy. (It was Kafka who said that all sins spring from impatience.)

I started this thread with the idea that we should stop turning away from the phenomena that puzzle us in our rush to have some explanation or some answer to the questions we begin with, but more and more I seem to have been defending the moment of questioning itself, that engagement with the world in wonder and curiosity; I also want us not to be in such a hurry to get un-puzzled.

I'm genuinely sorry this is all so meta, but actual philosophy is hard.

Does the universe have a purpose? If it makes sense, that's a yes or no question, so three options are immediately available. Must we choose among those? Must we simply choose among those?

I'd counsel not thinking much about the answer yet at all. It's a question people can and do ask. Even philosophers. What's going on there? Why do we ask the question? Is it a matter of psychology? Before even getting to the why, maybe we should spend some time just thinking about the situation the question implies -- here we are, considering our home, the universe in which we evolved, and on the one hand this is unquestionably where we belong, and yet we have this doubt, or uncertainty, about what that belonging really means, a doubt so strong we wonder if this is our true home or whether we have come from elsewhere. ("I ain't nothing but a stranger in this world. I've got a home on high.") Which word in "Why am I here?" gets the emphasis?

@apokrisis has a charming just-so story about this, which I'm sure he'd be willing to tell: what I call "unnecessary", he'll call "hastening the heat-death of the universe" -- that's why if there weren't people, the universe would need to invent them, and why people need to do (for the universe) things they don't need to do (for themselves).

Should I object that my use of "necessary" was pretty clearly circumscribed in what I wrote? It's just about the oldest move in philosophy, to climb up a rung or two toward greater abstraction -- "maybe we are ourselves unnecessary ..." What are we doing now? Are we trying to understand what it means for something to be "necessary", or, as we might say, "necessary in general"?

As it happens, the idea of "necessity" sits right in the middle of the issue that prompted this little thread: causes are supposed to be "necessarily" linked to their effects, somehow. But reasons are part of a constellation of concepts that seem to presume some sort of "freedom", since you are not forced into a particular course of action by your reasons. (But then it gets even squirrelier, because reason has its own version of necessity -- if x + 2 = 5, then x must be equal to 3. And we see this further as some sort of obligation on us, that we "must" so conclude, or that we "should" so conclude, and those feel oddly equivalent in this case.)

Questions of "necessity" play an outsize role in our cultural history, in a way that many people find particularly valuable. "Must it be so?" is a powerful question. Must we keep Black people as slaves? Must some have so much more than others? Must we kill one another in war?

We forget how pious, even traditional, Socrates was and remember that he asked a lot of questions it turned out no one could answer. When that looks like social activism, we applaud; when it looks like playing with words, we boo. But underneath is the same questioning impulse.

Someone (I forget who) described the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy as a neat little man, wearing a bowler hat, carrying an umbrella, and standing at a slight angle to the universe. Philosophy should aspire to stand at such an angle, and then to look.

"Are we necessary?" is an excellent question, and that's so even if it turns out to be unanswerable, even if it turns out not quite to make sense. My real concern was to counter the assumption that it, and all such questions, are to be settled simply by argument, by arraying the case for "yes" against the case for "no", rather than spending a little time in the moment of questioning, and then seeing where the question itself might take us.

The universe can exist without us. — Jackson

And did, practically forever.

Should that bother us?

Everyone examines their lives at some point - usually in the late teens - early twenties. They question their existence and their purpose. The real question is how much of an examination does your life need before you can get on with just living it? — Harry Hindu

And the answer come back: "Just enough."

That looks like fear to me. If we're not careful, we'll all turn into Chidi Anagonye. Henry Miller called it "Hamlet", the excessive questioning and analyzing that gets in the way of living, that can cripple you as it cripples Chidi.

If I have a point, it begins with the opposite assumption: people do manage to walk across rooms, even though I have an analysis that suggests this is impossible or illusory, and in figuring out where my analysis fails -- as it evidently does -- I can come to understand more about how people do that than I did before. I don't wonder whether it's possible, and my puzzlement about how it's possible doesn't prevent me from walking across a room anymore than it does anyone else.

So why does the specter of Chidi/Hamlet in that ivory tower hang over philosophy?

You ask, "How much of an examination does your life need?" There are a couple ways to go here. (Analytical habits die hard.) Maybe a little reflection is good, but too much is Chidi. Chidi is just immoderate in his reflection. But (second way, now), at what point do we call this philosophy? Not that it matters, but there's a hint here that maybe philosophy could be defined as: excessive and unnecessary reflection. Maybe in some cases, just unnecessary, but in some unnecessary and positively harmful, disruptive, crippling, Chidi.

Anecdotal interlude. W. H. Auden named two sorts of poets: "Prospero" poets have something to say; "Ariel" poets like playing with language. The response to a bad Ariel poem is, "This needn't have been written"; the response to a bad Prospero poem is, "This shouldn't have been written."

Is poetry necessary? Painting? Music? Is philosophy? Once they're about in the world, the answer becomes "yes" to many people, who find their lives thus enriched. But for all that, it's still perfectly clear that there's little "survival value" in such undertakings. I'm perfectly happy to say that art and philosophy are unnecessary in exactly this sense. They are a bonus, above and beyond survival. And I'll say more: it seems to me that human beings need not, individually or in aggregate, engage in any one such enterprise, taken by itself -- not everyone needs to paint or play music or engage in philosophical reflection -- but it also seems to me that human beings, both individually and in aggregate, do have an actual need to do something unnecessary. The evidence for this view seems, strangely perhaps, overwhelming, because my god look at all the stuff people get up to, and have gotten up to down through the generations. First chance we got, we began doing all sorts of things we didn't have to just to survive and we've been doing more and more of that extra stuff ever since. No one needs to know how the universe began and gave rise to fundamental forces and matter and all that, but damned if we aren't bending heaven and earth to find out. Good for us. And so it is with philosophy, says I.

So what about that fear of the ivory tower? What is that? Why does it haunt philosophy? I think you can see it at work whenever someone claims, as they will around here, "Everyone has a metaphysics, just mostly unexamined," that sort of thing. People want to insist on the importance, on the relevance, of philosophy -- and claiming that everyone is actually doing philosophy all the time, though they may not realize it, is one way to do that. The great fear is that we'll all be taken for Ariels, just playing with words, or Prosperos, declaiming our ridiculous and embarrassing theories as if anyone wanted to hear them, as if they could possibly matter to anyone. (For the record, Auden thought only those who begin as Ariels have any chance of becoming great poets.)

My suggestion in the OP was that what we should really worry about is a methodological ivory tower, where we shut ourselves off from the phenomena we realize we don't understand and attempt to turn philosophy into either a branch of mathematics (which has its own ivory-tower, head-in-the-clouds PR issues) or a branch of literature, a sort of hyper-intellectualized belles lettres. I want us to remember that what we do as philosophers springs originally from a certain unusual sort of curiosity about the lives we are actually living, an unnecessary curiosity, to be sure, but valuable for that very reason, I say, rather than in spite of it.

This is very close to Mary Midgley's idea of philosophy as plumbing. We don't need it until things start to leak or smell. — Banno

That's awfully close to Dewey's conception, as I understand it. Problems. Problems that are live for us, that engage us, problems that maybe we think need to be solved, or think maybe we could solve.

I'm not sure I want to be quite that single-minded. I like peculiar questions, and I've asked a few on this forum. (Why do we want to avoid being wrong? Why don't we understand nature completely, why do we have to work at it?)

There are also questioning sorts of interests that are hard even to formulate as simple questions. For instance, language seems to work, but what it even works at is not clear, what it even does is confusing. And there are ways of conceiving of language that suggest it cannot possibly work at whatever it's doing, which we still don't know. I don't think I'm ever going to shake my fascination with that little knot.

So here the plumbing is, to all appearances, working fine, at something. But it's easy as pie to show how little we understand it. Why is it so easy? That's a new problem. I mean, it takes some pretty heavy physics to show that various things about the world are actually pretty odd -- but with language, it takes no more than a few questions to pull you up short, and those questions occur even to a six year old.

The germ for this thread is something I've tried to address before, the ongoing problem of causes and reasons. It looks to me now like one of those "antinomy of pure reason" sorts of things. But I also think we are foolish to dive right in making arguments as if we know perfectly well what it means for one event to cause another, or for a person to have a reason for what they believe or what they do. I don't think we do, and I don't think arguments that take such things as given get us anywhere.

Take a week off. Take two. Not just not posting; don't even login to see what's going on.

In mil-speak: Do not allow the forum to dictate the tempo of your actions.

paranoid nuclear scenarios — Manuel

Thomas Schelling's Nobel Lecture is interesting viewing. As I recall, he doesn't talk about himself or his work at all, but goes incident-by-incident from 1945 to 2005, times when we almost had another nuclear war but didn't. I think he offers a tentative theory for why too, but it escapes me.

Maybe there's a difference between having no choice and thinking you have no choice. (For some sorts of analysis, that difference won't show up at all.) What's needed then is what Seamus Heaney calls

a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances

(And you can safely assume he had the Troubles in mind when he said that.)

War is death and destruction on a massive scale carried out by people who would rather not be doing what they're doing.

On some readings, Putin believed he had no choice but to invade Ukraine. And then his army believed it had no choice but to do as he commanded. Perhaps earlier Ukraine believed it had no choice but to seek alliances to the west. And so it goes. We can point at any link in the chain of events and say, but you did have a choice, or say, it's understandable that you thought you had no choice, or both.

The material conditions, then, might come down to this: are the options more than theoretical? Can you come to believe that you do have real competing options, requiring a choice? I want to say that this is what you see with the most effective government programs, the most effective NGOs, that they make options real for people. That's true, of course, but it's not like those things fall from the sky; that's still just people. At some point, people have to create their own possibilities.

My oldest son recently read 1984 and reminded me (decades since I read it) that the state is not in fact all powerful -- it just makes people believe it is. And this is always the trick.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
― George Orwell — FreeEmotion

Yes, that is an apposite quote. Is it true? If it is true today, must it always be so?

Those men on the wall, is what they are doing noble? As members of the non-fighting caste, we are inclined to engage in nuanced, systemic analysis of the role of the fighting caste, but many of them are not so inclined. Many people in uniform actually believe what we might dismiss as propaganda.



The "not built for this" issue has another side. Whether people wear the uniform and take up arms willingly, even eagerly, they will pay a price. I think we ask more of soldiers and police officers than should be asked of any human being. It is not only a question of the harm they might do, which is considerable, but of the harm to them.

They wouldn't even dream of resisting an invasion by a force that threatens their existence as a people without great powers "convincing" them to fight. — SophistiCat

(Just to be clear: I put "powerless" in quotes in my first sentence and called this "a can of worms" for a reason.)

My gut reaction is to feel a sort of pride and wonder at Ukrainian willingness to fight: they are the underdog; the aggressor is autocratic while they are at least trying to be democratic; and, since the war has a great and obvious material cost, it is fought not for material gain but for ideas, for feelings -- country, family, neighbor, home. @Benkei says we should never send anyone else to fight for abstractions, but to be willing oneself to fight for, if not abstractions exactly, non-material goods seems noble, so long as what you're fighting for is worth it. (Keeping in mind the myth of the lost cause, which is still powerful in my part of the world.)

That a few saints might come up with some genius method of passive resistance — Isaac

Like Leymah Gbowee?

Leymah is best known for leading a nonviolent movement that brought together Christian and Muslim women to play a pivotal role in ending Liberia’s devastating, fourteen-year civil war in 2003. — Nobel site

Why the dismissive tone, Isaac? What if nonviolence works and violence doesn't?

There are so many layers here -- including @StreetlightX's interesting points about "legitimacy", which I'm sorta passing over only because it's the whole thing, and I precisely don't know what to say about the whole thing -- but I'm not sure I want to discount the ethical as you do. "It's up to you not to heed the call up," you know? We talk of dictators sometimes, but no dictator ever single-handedly terrorized a nation; there must be others willing to do his bidding. Any of the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine could have refused, could have not joined the army in the first place. You can say that, if you're inclined, to mark them as morally culpable; but it's another way of saying that these people, as a group, if they acted as a group, if they acted in solidarity with those they are charged with doing violence upon, have more than enough power to make Putin irrelevant. He is not, himself, fighting a war in Ukraine.


But all of that just leads back to my questions. What are our options in a world with people willing to use violence? Here's a different problem: is it violence that we should be concerned with, or control? But is there genuine control that is not backed by the threat of violence?

Thanks @StreetlightX, @Benkei, @FreeEmotion, @Isaac for thoughtful responses all.

(Just on the practical side here, might come back to the more philosophical point about violence later.) — Baden

I can't contribute anything on the practical side. Even on the philosophical, all I can manage is asking some questions.

@Baden, @StreetlightX

Recent posts from you both (you'll forgive me for not quoting) have made undeniably powerful points about power and how those we might identify as "powerless" -- that's a bit of a can of worms, though, right? -- inevitably suffer, and particularly suffer when they're caught in the middle of a fight between one power and another. I appreciate how clearly and forcefully you have reminded us -- well, me, at any rate -- of how the world is made to turn.

With that as a given, I think I can also understand @Isaac's disgust for one great power encouraging some relatively powerless nation or people to take on some other great power, and offering them support to do so, in essence convincing them to be complicit in their own inevitable or continued pummeling. It is conceivable that the misguided powerful might do so out of ignorance, but if we have reason to believe they know exactly the sort of outcome they're pointing someone else toward, and if they offer their "support" in the name of "solidarity" or some such idealism while actually pursuing their own ends, not only getting it wrong, but getting it wrong on purpose, deceitfully, and exploiting the admirable courage or patriotism of others -- unforgivable, and it's understandable that one might find such underhandedness even more distasteful than forthright if appalling aggression.

So much for the status quo. It is abysmal. The dinosaurs died (again tonight on RadioLab) to clear the way for us to do this.

I want above all to ask you impractical questions. What is our relationship to violence? What is the place of force in human society? Can it change? How could such change be brought about?

Is violence inherently illegitimate? I genuinely don't know, but it's a question even the luckiest of us are compelled to think about almost every day now, possibly the most important question there is. (If it's not obvious, I have not only war but policing on my mind.) No one in this thread, I think, has suggested that Ukraine, or Ukrainians, ought simply to turn the other cheek. We tend to believe in the legitimacy of self-defense, and, even if we didn't, it's unseemly to suggest that someone else submit to force, just as it's unseemly to suggest that they fight back at risk to themselves. It is a situation in which we will tend to find either choice understandable, perhaps even laudable in the circumstances, but somehow we are barred -- by our conscience, I mean -- from giving advice (much less encouragement or inducement). In the same way that it's at once appalling to deny aid to the aggressee, as if we had hearts of stone, or to offer aid to the aggressee, thus prolonging their suffering. Violence, once set in motion, transmutes all choices and all outcomes to bad ones. You would think we would have learned by now how to avoid it. Is it conceivable that we will ever do so?

ban — Isaac

suppression — Isaac

Can you explain how you're using these words?

I have seen many responses directly rebutting the claims at issue.

I have seen many dismissive non-responses (that the claims need not be discussed, much less rebutted, because they are irrelevant, unimportant, overblown, etc.).

Does any of that qualify as "banning" or "suppressing" discussion for you?

What I cannot understand — ssu

I'm surprised that the American and European sympathy for Ukrainians, but not, say, Yemenis, isn't taken at face value, but counted as racist.

Reuters.

<nvm>

anyone with eyes can see that there is no stronger bond of solidarity and unity than among capitalists themselves. There is plenty of unity and brothery love. Dead Ukrainians be damned. — StreetlightX

Dead Ukrainians, dead Russians, dead Belarusians perhaps.

How do all these dead serve Capital?

Did Putin invade Ukraine to enrich himself? Someone else?

Maybe the world's arms merchants are buying additional vacation homes this year, but no other sector has much use for war. Businesses like predictability, stability. And Capital, at heart, wants a borderless world. (Since the world still has borders, you might as well use that, but at bottom politics is a nuisance.)

"Liberal democracy" literally sustains itself off the back of corrupt thugs like Putin — StreetlightX

As I said, in dark moments I wonder if liberal democracy (without scare quotes) is a sham, there is no social contract, and the whole enterprise is propped up by the threat of violence. I think this is essentially the worldview of Trumpists. It's a world in which everyone is out to exploit everyone else and you can't even trust your immediate family, friends and co-workers.* Even if they're wrong to believe this is just "the way it is", they can make it so by behaving as if it is true.

There are tens of millions of Americans who will tell you that gun rights are the most important rights because they are the guarantor of the others. That sounds like failure to me.

These people believe that all social control is ultimately backed by the threat of violence. But even if that's true (and I doubt it), so long as the masters rely on other means of control, there's a chance of finding a way of opposing them. People strike, protest, organize, withhold rent, and so on -- but you can't do any of that with a bullet in your head. Putin has made it clear that he has no reservations about just having you killed if you're in his way. Not manipulating you into buying a new car; not cutting your hours if you make a stink with HR; not raising the interest rate on your credit card debt a few percent; just having you killed.


History is what it is, so the history of liberal capitalism is entangled with something else that might have played out much the same even under very different sorts of political economy: oil. It is surely no coincidence that a number of repressive regimes sit on top of oil fields. It's not only American and European oil barons who put up with these thugs: it's all of modern civilization, powered by fossil fuels, and we might very well have made the same deal with the devil even if no one were making obscene profits by doing so.


*

imagine trusting the US — StreetlightX

This is a harrowing read: George Packer's piece on the evacuation of Kabul for The Atlantic.

For me and Christoffer, what Putin does is the most interesting thing. — ssu

I find him very troubling. His annexation of Crimea seemed to me at the time like thumbing his nose at the liberal world order, calling their bluff. "Suppose," he seemed to say, "Suppose I don't play nice. Suppose I just take what I want. What are you really prepared to do about it? Public statements denouncing me? I'm quaking in my boots." It's disturbing to see in modern times such a brazen commitment to violence, such a brazen disregard for norms and institutions.

And then my country elected Trump president.

I'm not blind to the problems of modern liberal capitalism, but at least it leaves some room to maneuver, to try and make something better. In the United States, for instance, there has always been some hypocrisy in our talk of freedom and equal rights; we all know that. But some of our talk, and our publicly stated beliefs, amounted to "fake it until you make it". How people behave can, over time, change how they feel and how they think.

The Trump era might have shown this doesn't really work, that American racism, narrow-mindedness, anti-intellectualism, nativism -- the whole basket -- were there all along, hiding from public view. (Imperfectly, of course, because there has always been open racism too. But ordinary people just behind the times had learned to watch their tongues.)

But it might have shown only that such a scheme is fragile, and vulnerable to loss of confidence. If people don't agree even to play along, you can lose a lot of ground quickly. (We're not exactly starting over from scratch. The United States is a better place than it was a hundred years ago.)

That's what bothers me about Putin. He behaves as a non-believer, and like Trump can encourage others to give in to their doubts about the whole game. Why shouldn't I just outlaw the opposition party? Fuck 'em. Why shouldn't I skip even that much legal nicety and just take what I want by force? You hear this sort of embrace of the primitive, of a sort of hyper-masculine approach to politics from Trumpists all the time. (Trump practically bragged about cheating at everything. So much for the social contract.)

I have two worries: (1) that they're right, that it's all been a sham (in the strange way that Trumpists and the left share a lot of talking points); (2) that our progress has been real, but it requires our belief and it turns out this is easily undermined, creating a sort of run on the liberal bank.

So Putin bothers me as another sign that the wheels are coming off.

Residents of a village in northern Ukraine (sorry, US-backed neo-Nazis) trying to stop Russian tanks with their bare hands: — SophistiCat

Jesus.

Thanks for sharing that.

I'll try a different approach.

You propose a hierarchy of existence: light is lesser than material elements; material elements are lesser than living things; living things are lesser than God.

Taking physical elements and adding to them a lesser thing, such as light, to create a living being would be an absurdity.

Taking physical elements and adding to them an equal thing, such as other elements, to create a living being would be an impossibility.

Taking physical elements and adding to them a greater thing, such as a living being, to create a living being would be a redundancy.

But taking physical elements and adding to them a greater thing than a living being, such as an omnipotent being, to create a living being would be a metaphysical possibility. — Joe Mello

Your principle relates the levels of this hierarchy:

No combination of lesser things can create a greater thing without something greater than the greater thing added to the lesser things. — Joe Mello

It is possible to create a thing of level $n$ out of things of level $n-1$, but only by adding something of level $n+1$. The canonical example of this is God creating living things out of non-living matter.

Are there any other possibilities? Can living things create matter out of light? If there were something less than light, could matter create light out of it? Could there be a higher level of divinity that could create God (or gods) out of living things?

I'm asking in all seriousness, because your principle is explicitly stated in these hierarchical terms, "greater" and "lesser". Are there any other examples of how the levels are related?

One more question. I assume the hierarchy goes something like this:

1. impossible that it be living (light);
2. possible that it be living but not necessary (matter);
3. necessary that it be living (god).

And then we can subdivide (2):

2a. capable of living but not living (objects, let's say);
2b. living.

Have I understood you correctly?

What are we doing here, Joe?

First off, if there's an us, folks already hanging around this corner of the internet, and a you, the newcomer -- assuming for a moment that's a reasonable way to sort the participants in this thread, which I'm not sure about at all, but it's come up repeatedly in your view of the thread -- then I'm going to remind you that you came to us.

Now, why did you do that? You had something to share with us.

Did you come for an exchange of ideas? That's plainly "no". You may not agree with me about that, but I don't know how else to look at what's happened here. You came to inform us.

Did you expect your ideas to be tested? Maybe you assumed they'd be rejected or challenged, as you seem to be used to that, and if you've been hanging around with people into Sam Harris, before coming to us, then evidence suggests you have been seeking out people you expect to disagree with you.

But then what? You offer no intellectual defense of your views -- which is odd, and I'll come back to that -- but instead distinguish between yourself, who has had particular, special experiences, and been divinely singled out for the reception of special revelation, and, on the other hand, everyone else who lacks that special experience and did not receive such revelation.

I don't have much to say about your experience. I don't know what it would make sense for me to say about it. But then what are we to talk about?

So I'm still puzzled about why you're here, and what you expected. I have had no such experience. I think it's interesting that you have, but I don't know how we're to talk about it. In particular, I don't know how we're supposed to talk philosophy about it. I can look at Rothko's paintings or read Herbert's poems and try to open myself to some inkling of their religious experience. I don't think they intend me to analyze their work as I might some argument in philosophy.

But then there's also the matter of what you came to share with us. And oddly enough, what you had to tell us has an oddly analytical ring to it. It's not the sort of thing you expect to hear from a mystic. And apparently, rather than passing right by science, it's supposed to be open to scientific scrutiny. After all, you complain that scientists -- or, not enough anyway -- don't seem to understand this principle and incorporate it into their work, and you hold out the possibility that it could be refuted by some scientific discovery, only it hasn't been.

All of which would seem to indicate that what you came to share with us is entirely effable, rational, analysable. Again, that seems a bit odd, and it leaves you in the position of defending an idea that doesn't look all that mystical by reference to your personal experience of revelation. They make an odd pair, your life story and the results of your unique experience.

It's a little like going to a math forum and explaining that you have meditated for eleven years and know for a fact that the Continuum Hypothesis is false and offering in support your life story but no mathematics, and then, on top of that, deriding everyone who questions your claim as narrow-minded nobodies who have not been granted the revelation that you have.

So what's the deal? Are we supposed to talk about what you told us or not? And how are we to do that? I won't ask what you expected in coming here, but what did you hope for?

Creating a great forum on the Internet is far from a reality. It always becomes home to wannabe know-it-alls. — Joe Mello

Welcome, brother.

the Metaphysical Principle that I discovered — Joe Mello

How? How did you discover it? How did you know it was a Metaphysical Principle -- which is what exactly? like the law of identity, that sort of thing? -- rather than, say, a thought or an idea? Were you looking for Metaphysical Principles or did you just stumble upon it?

People do tend to read that statement taking "language" as the ground term, and deriving the limits of the world from language's limits. But it could be the other way around, as you point out: the limits of language are derived from the limits of the world, and its logical structure, leaving room, as you also point out, for the transcendent. That looks like a somewhat Kantian move...

The thing is, the logical structure LW finds in the world is clearly deduced (not to say "projected") from the logical structure of language. That's fine for logical primacy -- what's discovered is the conditions of possibility of the given -- but there's a whiff of circularity about such an inference as a philosophical act. Which is also fine -- at least I think so, since I don't see a way around that sort of hermeneutic circle -- but ought to be faced up to, acknowledged, and looked at squarely.

as Russia's sovereignty strengthens and the power of our armed forces grows

I mean ...

Understanding is always understanding something in terms of something else — SophistiCat

I like this answer enough that I have given it myself on this forum several times, and even referred to Feynman in doing so.

But I still have some questions.

It's as if we're describing explanation as solving for an unknown in algebra: there is some leveraging of known information, using it, referring to it, describing the unknown in terms of the known, the known determining the unknown, and so on. How far does this analogy generalize?

For instance, how does one bootstrap such a system? If we are born with no information, then we can acquire none. If we are born understanding nothing, then we have nothing "in terms of which" to understand or explain anything. Do we then conclude, as Chomsky urges us to, that there must be something "wired in", as they say? The only explanation anyone will offer for such wiring is Darwin, and it's not obvious that even is an explanation.

Another issue: to say we understand something new (to us) "in terms of" something old (to us) makes sense, and everyone has had such experiences, but it also gives people the willies: everyone nurses doubts that they are doing justice to the novelty, to the strangeness, of the new, and we are all also familiar with cases where this enveloping of the new by the old is to some degree a sham. Ordinary people worry about this sort of thing with relationships -- that is, projecting past experiences, memories of previous relationships and so on, onto new relationships. That phrase "in terms of" is a little scary, and with good reason. (It's why the arguments about relativism and incommensurability don't go away: it's cold comfort that you wouldn't recognize a genuinely alien perspective as either alien or a perspective, as you choose.)

What about circularity? Is that an option? Might we explain X given framework A, and an element Y of framework A in terms of framework B, eventually -- the longer the chain, the safer -- working our way back around to X? Within each framework, you're fine, but only by artificially defining the boundary of the "framework" so that circularity lies outside it...

Is there no rock bottom? It begins to look like the institution of science is embedded in an already given, "taken for granted", as you say, system of cognition. This sense of a science being embedded in something else can be disconcerting. One area I know a little about arises in philosophical logic: look at a dozen introductory textbooks and compare how they introduce the "schemas" or "templates" that will make up the bulk of the book; there's no agreed upon way to introduce these things, no agreement on what they are, what their logical status is, and so on. Each author seems to go his own way with this because if you want to use logic for problems expressed in a natural language, you have to cross that divide somehow. (There's something similar in getting mathematics going, teaching kids what sets and numbers are, and so on.) There is no obvious way to do that, so textbook authors take a variety of approaches with varying amounts of hand-waving. It's hard not to wonder exactly what you're ending up with if this messiness is apparently required around the edges, and particularly required somewhere uncomfortably near the foundations of your science. (And again, mathematics and sets.)

Your reference to vision suggests that some of what's going on here just isn't what we think it is, that we are consciously building systems to try to understand how we are unconsciously managing so well, and so, in that sense at least, it is just ourselves we are always trying to understand. As you note -- much to your credit! -- there is more to cognition than science, and more to us than cognition. There's religion and spirituality, gestalten and feelings.

And now we come all the way back around, because if cognition, and, in particular, scientific cognition, are embedded in us, then we have to face up to our uncertainty about what is being understood "in terms of" what. To what degree are we alien to ourselves, or at least to ourselves qua scientists? The newborn of the empiricists is always presented as a small, admittedly inexperienced but astonishingly capable scientist, observing patterns and theorizing about them. Put so baldly, we can't take that image seriously, but I wonder if we don't secretly believe something very close to it. But what if we are not scientists in human clothing? Can we understand our own strangeness if we only have frameworks that will filter out that strangeness?

Eh. Thanks for a lovely response I don't think I've done justice to. I'm just rattling cages again...

Maybe we could say something like this:

(a) The goal of science is to understand everything.
(b) The process of science is to separate what you understand (about a given phenomenon) from what you don't, and then of course try, gradually, to enlarge the bits-we-understand part, shrinking the bits-we-don't part.

We corral what we don't understand into a we'll-get-to-you-later holding pen. Insofar as there's anything to the unity of science, we might find the not-yet-understood bits of various domains overlapping, leaving one last (hopefully little, and smaller all the time) pocket of things we don't understand yet.

One concern perhaps relevant to this discussion is to remember that this is what we're doing: it's all too easy to think that by naming what we don't yet understand, we do understand it. Thus we use words like "energy" and "matter" and "force" as if they mean something. We can show how we use those terms in our theories, and thus how they connect up to things we consider explained and understood, but there's some lingering suspicion that we don't really understand our explanations. (If some of our variables are still unbound, the logician might remind us, we don't yet have a proposition -- only something like a proposition generator.)

That's a sort of engineering take. The philosopher in me would like to approach the issue backwards:

Why don't we understand everything?

Seriously, why don't we? Most people are just going to say, well, you know, human finitude and all that, of course we don't. Is that an explanation, or is it just putting a name on what we don't understand?

Why aren't we gods?

Why isn't the way the world works perfectly clear to us, with nothing hidden?

Why should it take effort to understand something?

And here maybe the response will be more specific: something about our senses, information, modeling, all that sort of thing. Which would be fine -- to see ourselves as science does leads to no inconsistency -- except it seems to create an unsolvable problem: what about the stuff in the not-yet-understood box?

In a suitably limited domain, our partitioning procedure worked just fine; you can circumscribe what it means for a tool to work, and what will count as an explanation relative to the stuff you're not dealing with. You can puzzle over the interpretation of statistical data without saying, "Hang on -- what are numbers anyway?"

But this perfectly reasonable and practical process does not generalize: we have no way of establishing that our research tools (our own minds) are in good working order (there's no standard we could possibly reach for) -- and if that's the case, just what do we think we're doing? We don't know. We'll have no way of saying whether what we don't understand belongs to us or to the domain.

So I'm not convinced you can just science your way to an understanding of why we don't understand everything.

Of course the question I'm asking -- why don't we understand everything? -- is almost equivalent to asking why we need science. I'm just going to point out (again) that there is a funny doubling-back of the question: we do science because we don't understand everything -- which is just a presumption here -- and we do science by separating what we understand from what we don't, and we also presume we can do that. Can we? How would we know whether we can do this?

(Does it make sense to say, maybe we do understand everything but think we don't? Why or why not? Is it possible to be mistaken about whether you understand something?)

@Manuel, what do you think? Why don't we understand everything? -- Oh, and maybe I should ask, do we just happen not to? Or is this the same as asking, can we understand everything?

What would the opposite look like? If the world was rich, and our nature poor, I'd expect all species to have essentially the same cognitive capacities, which doesn't seem to be the case. — Manuel

So precisely because we are so intellectually gifted, our ideas are not to be trusted. Where does that come from? Is that suspicion of the smooth talker, the over-educated, the city slicker? It’s not without foundation, but it’s an odd peg to hang a worldview on.

I cannot get a fix on what the source of your anxiety is. Each time I think I have it, you veer off into something else. But it’s been an enjoyable exchange all the same.

Your predicament seems to have this structure: reason tells you that color, objects, music, and so on, are things you or we have added to the world, and, by telling you that, at the same time reason tells you that you or we can take all that away, at least imaginatively. Thus we can say, that's not really a mountain, it's just a bunch of particles or fields or something that we happen to call a "mountain"; <mountain> is not really there, but something we add to the world.

I'd want to look closely at how this argument works. For instance, is this the real argument, or is the real argument the other way around: that is, because we can imaginatively subtract, we conclude that we must have added. Just how strong is this argument, in either direction? How do we imagine this adding and subtracting business to work? What convinces us this is how it works?

Instead of (one of the versions of) the epistle I could post here, I'll just say this: your principal concern seems to be with the perceived conflict between our everyday understanding of things and the scientific view; my principal concern is that we don't generally understand our everyday view at all. For me, the value of the step of wonder or bafflement is to see the everyday view as a view, to scrub off the patina of "natural" it has acquired. (Really don't like the word "view" here, much less "theory", but there you go.)

The apple falling does make sense to us and probably should — Manuel

There's nothing in experience that guarantees that apples won't go up next time they "break away" from a tree. — Manuel

I guess in our context here, the idea is that we can see no reason for the apple to fall, but we have observed the constant conjunction of <apple detaching> and <apple falling> so we have induction to justify the reasonableness of the apple falling — but nothing justifies our use of induction. This is tricky territory if we expect making sense and being justified always to go together. Or maybe not — if we allow that induction itself doesn’t actually make sense!

The wonder thing — it’s got two sides: there’s mystery, the confrontation with what exceeds our understanding; but then there’s seeing what’s familiar in a new light, and that involves a step of defamiliarizing — the temporary mystery — but the experience is completed in an illumination of the familiar, a deeper understanding of what we had understood somewhat superficially. We can, sometimes, through discipline, defamiliarize the ordinary, but that’s not the final goal. (I’ll keep quoting poets, this time Eliot from Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”)

At a glance, it looks like the first sort would be primary, and that we defamiliarize the ordinary because we have had the experience of confronting something new, and then learning to understand it. We aim to mimic that experience by making the familiar new. Sometimes this may be more or less forced upon us — if we’re brought up short, if our expectations of how something familiar would be behave are not met. But it’s hard to see how we could mimic that experience. Instead, it looks like we need to begin with something like a suspicion that perhaps there is more here than meets the eye. We have to imagine that our understanding — which has proven its adequacy — is incomplete. That’s a curious thing. Having merely opened the door there, it’s generally not hard to begin asking questions that are difficult to answer. — But maybe it takes no such effort of imagination; maybe most of our beliefs show themselves inadequate at some point, and we’re just adept at ignoring their shortcomings. In that case, the trick would be catching yourself in the act of sweeping problems under the rug.

The problem starts when we become puzzled about this common sense. — Manuel

Yes, one result of this sort of thing might be a scientific theory that works, whether we exactly understand it or not, or do in some senses but not others. (It's Asimov, right? Discoveries begin not with "Eureka!" but with "That's funny...")

On the other hand, you might note that the apple falling makes sense to you, but shouldn't.

In both science and philosophy, theorizing ought to save the appearances, even when that's our own habitual worldview. For example, a theory that we have nothing like what we think of as free will ought also to explain why it seems to us that we do. Or, in the case of the falling apple, there ought to be an explanation for why we don't find its behavior surprising.

But first there's the imaginative leap (something like Pound's "Make it new!") of seeing the ordinary as strange. It's the crucial step for everything from science to poetry to political activism. And by definition, that step is all about us, about, at the very least, our expectations and prejudices. You can see this beautifully in Plato's dialogues, when Socrates's interlocutors so often experience a sort of vertigo. ("I thought I knew what love is, but now that you ask, I don't know.") And there again it's a question of how our various capacities hook up one with another -- not everything you understand can readily be put into words, for instance.

What then, after all, are we up to when doing philosophy?