But even these more "obvious" categories have been philosophized as to what "degree" what was the "intent" etc. — schopenhauer1

"Have been" is inarguable, but I see no reason to think philosophy is the origin of the taboo against kin-slaying, for example.

The point being with all of this is what counts as moral is not immediately realized, nor does it have to be to still be considered moral. — schopenhauer1

I take your point, and I could see how someone would find the comparison to, say, veganism compelling.

I remember Freud describing how an overdeveloped superego could make a person miserable, insisting on standards of thought and behavior they could not possibly meet, but at the same be a source of pride, because look what high standards they have!

If AN is a matter of human beings developing a standard of morality that human beings can only meet by not existing, that's at least paradoxical.

Rather than steal your thunder and debate AN here, I've been trying to figure out what makes people even less likely to accept AN than, say, veganism. The arguments are interesting, but they're far from the whole story. You see the rest of the story as a process of realization, or consciousness raising, and that's plausible. You could say I'm just looking at the other side, at our resistance to that process.

I find that resistance reasonable, but I want to get the facts right first.

(I could be helping your cause by figuring out what you really need to argue against, rather than just making the same arguments all the time without convincing anyone.)

Oh yes, I know you and I suspect there's not a real question here. I was hoping to get others to wonder whether "better" and "worse" make sense here.

In fairness to @ToothyMaw's approach, I suppose it's better to ask if "better" and "worse" can be made sensible here. But then we're back to the whether whatever sense can be made with this question --- people think they're doing something when they talk about it --- actually engages with the sense that people think of as their moral lives. If they don't hook up, it's still just a little logical puzzle.

All I would argue is that reasons should always be considered when procreating, and that people do consider reasons for procreating more than you think. — ToothyMaw

People consider all sorts of things --- whether they can afford to take care of the child, whether they feel prepared to handle the responsibility, whether they want that responsibility, whether they think they are capable of being a good parent, a loving parent. It is a great moral undertaking, raising children.

But hardly anyone considers the possibility that not being alive is better than being alive. Does that mean they assume being alive is better?

Maybe? Or maybe "better" and "worse" don't make sense here.

My little story attempts to go around the question by noting that living things exhibit a preference to continue living. (Plants defend themselves against parasites --- do they do so because they think it's better to go on living?) That gives acts like saving a life or creating one a certain moral sheen: we act in accord with a norm that is prejudiced in favor of life, and we do so knowing that we act in accordance with that norm. The question of whether living is better than not living need not arise.

But we, not being plants, can form the question:

All that said, asking the question (no matter how absurd) is a possible step towards understanding it to be absurd and that not all sentences with '?' at the end warrant a '?'. — I like sushi

Does that mean we can answer it?

You made an argument in favor of an ethical theory, and didn't acknowledge my counter-argument. Why don't you have to address it? — ToothyMaw

Is a philosopher, then, like a troll guarding the bridge to parenthood? He pops up saying, "You may not pass until you have answered my riddle!"

Most people just ignore the troll, and that's what I find interesting.

"But the child might immediately fall into a pit of lava!" cries the troll, as people stream past him.

"What lava pit? There's no lava pit around here." someone calls as they pass by. "Why would I give birth in a lava pit?" asks someone else.

"Well," says the troll, "Life is kind of like a pit of lava."

The crowd is unconvinced. "No it isn't." They keep crossing 'his' bridge.

"But it might be!" responds the troll, sensing an opening. "You don't know for sure that it isn't."

"If life were kind of like a lava pit, I would have kind of caught fire and kind of burned to death years ago," says someone, and gives the troll a little shove so he topples back under the bridge.

It's a bit like the argument from error: because someone, sometime, in some specific circumstances, was 'deceived by their senses', everyone, always, and in all circumstances, must accept the possibility that they are, at that moment, in those circumstances, being deceived by their senses.

"So you're saying that. because a straight stick looks bent when it's half in the water, that bent tree branch there might actually be straight?"

"It might be. How could you know for sure that it isn't?"

"But where's the water?"

There are circumstances in which people feel that whether to have a child is a moral choice, and that they should weigh, as best they can, what they know against what they don't, what is good in life against what is bad, and so on. But does that entail that absent those circumstances, and absent any such concerns, everyone should always feel that it's a moral choice, and that what they ought to consider in making that choice is just the issues that the anti-natalist raises, and weighted in just the way he does? You agree with the AN, prove him wrong, or admit that you're irrational -- that's the trilemma you're offered. And almost no one believes it.

I have enjoyed the intellectual challenge of trying to refute AN, but I never for a moment thought that if I couldn't come up with a refutation then my only remaining options were agreement and dogmatic disagreement. Mostly I think of it as a minor paradox: something that feels like it might be a moral principle leads quickly to a patently absurd conclusion. Either it's not a moral principle, or we oughtn't be trying to do ethics that way. You can learn from looking at paradoxes.

It just seems plain to me that, curious though it is, AN is a free-floating theory that doesn't actually engage with the moral lives of people. When it tries to evoke moral sentiment in its audience, it's ridiculous. ("But the lava!") It's just a strange logical artifact. (I'm reminded of Ariel Rubinstein here, by any estimation one of the world's leading game theorists, who always says that game theory is just an interesting branch of math and has nothing to do with real life.)

I doubt you're convinced, and that's probably because nothing here is exactly an argument either. It's a question of how you approach the doing of philosophy. People say all kinds of shit, and only some of it is taken seriously by other people. It might be worth thinking about why that is. Dewey somewhere says that most problems in philosophy aren't solved, they just no longer feel "live", compelling, or important to philosophers. AN is a solution to a problem only it believes in: it both asks and answers the question, is it immoral to have children? No one else asks, but AN keeps insisting it has an answer.

That isn't an argument for anything. — ToothyMaw

No, it isn't. I know.

a person who procreates or saves a life cannot guarantee that the person given life will share their value system - what if they are a Schopenhauer? — ToothyMaw

No one can guarantee anything. I claim it is perfectly reasonable to assume, without argument, that people want to live. And I claim that if you reflect upon humanity, then you do also have a reason in support of the premise. And if you think about it a little more, the fact that everyone seems to assume this about everyone else is only more reason to count on it.

There will be occasions when you're wrong, or when the circumstances incline you to look for more.

Then we aren't discussing ethics, because reason is central to any ethical theory — ToothyMaw

Then I'm certainly not offering an ethical theory. What difference does that make to our discussion? (For the record, I lean toward "moral sentiments" as a foundation, so this whole line of thought comes naturally to me.)

You genuinely seem to be ignorant of all of the good anti-natalist arguments. — ToothyMaw

I am not ignorant of the arguments, though I may be ignorant of the good ones. I think the AN position is prima facie absurd. I've enjoyed trying to figure out how it works, but I thought I'd try something else for a change.

I'm not directly addressing the arguments for AN here. There's always two or three places to do that, if you'd like. I do think it's reasonable to discuss why I don't think I have to address them.

The inconsistency lies in an adherent’s inability to accept the full consequences of their premises. — khaled

Sure. You can argue that someone holds B because of A, but A also entails C, and they shouldn't hold C, so they should give up A. That leaves B as an option, just unsupported.

As I said, that can be fun, and I'll probably keep doing that, but it's also possible to start, as I do, from the position that B is insane.

claiming that if it is natural it requires no reason — ToothyMaw

Ah, no, not really. I'm saying people behaving in this way do not experience themselves as needing a reason to do so, do not experience the need for decision at all.

But according to an anti-natalist it does need a justification — ToothyMaw

On the one hand, I'm claiming that there is a way to construe our behavior as reasonable -- this is the claim that the person affected by our actions would want us to behave that way, because they have the same instinct we do. (Oh! Note this also implies reciprocity: they too know we have the same instinct they do, and would do the same for us. And we know that they know ..., and they know that we know ... Nice to get all that for free.)

That's an argument.

On the other hand, why? Why should it need justification? I claim that this is an assumption of the moral theorist, despite the evidence that most people do not believe these actions require justification.

Right. I'm not defending the instinct for self-preservation. But I am arguing that we can rely on all members of our species having the same instinct.

I also claim that we already do this, in rendering aid to people in peril without analyzing whether they want it or not, and in most people who decide to have children not considering it a moral issue at all unless there are specific circumstances that raise the issue --- hereditary disease, a parent's personality disorder, extreme poverty. Such circumstances make it an issue; reproducing itself needs no justification.

I think I'm comfortable claiming that this "extended instinct" is also rationally defensible, that we are perfectly right to rely on the approval of those whose future life we attempt to guarantee.

So the whole claim is there's something we can rely on, and that we generally do, and that we should, but only defeasibly, taking into account all sorts of reasons when we find ourselves in circumstances that seem to call for a decision.

Insofar as this relates to AN, it might be around here, if there's an assumption that reproducing is always a decision faced, always a moral question, always requires analysis of reasons. Of course, maybe AN only claims that something like that should be the case.

We both reject the conclusion of the anti-natalist argument.

Does that conclusion follow from the premises offered by the anti-natalist? I think, by and large, it does. It's not a complicated argument.

Perhaps they rely on some suppressed premise, one you could conceivably get them to reject. Perhaps they make an inference that is unsound in some very subtle way.

Figuring out how a paradox works is fun, but it's not necessary for rejecting its conclusion.

You could look at this thread as an "argument" for starting from different premises.

As a matter of fact, it was they who accused me of being "ignorant" (and of lying) and not for the first time — Apollodorus

1. We are, all of us, ignorant and stupid, and have to expect others here will point out where we have shown that we are. (Our patron saint is famous for proclaiming his own ignorance.) We are not, all of us, liars.

2. "He did it first" is a an excuse, not a justification.

I didn't accuse anyone of anything. I simply asked what they would call the obviously incorrect statements they keep making. Hence the question mark. — Apollodorus

Uh huh.

It's right here in the guidelines:

2) Tone matters:

A respectful and moderate tone is desirable as it's the most likely to foster serious and productive discussion. Having said that, you may express yourself strongly as long as it doesn't disrupt a thread or degenerate into flaming (which is not tolerated and will result in your post being deleted). — TPF Site Guidelines

Accusing your interlocutors of lying, no matter the grammatical form of the accusation, is not "respectful and moderate".

I respectfully ask you to reconsider whether, upon reflection, you want that accusation to remain in the record of this otherwise vigorous and valuable discussion.

compulsive mendacity — Apollodorus

I would appreciate it if you did not accuse forum members you disagree with of lying.

I can appreciate it more forcefully if need be.

Here's my first stab at it --- don't know if it's any good.

What we want, think we want, is for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to our vision.

Suppose we maintain a sort of catalog of scents we have smelled. What matters here is not quite the individual and possibly unique quality of each one, but how we can arrange them. You could imagine a sort of graph or map that would keep similar scents near each other shading off around the periphery into other groups that are more similar to each other than to these, and so on. The point here would be that we would have the opportunity to catalog new unfamiliar scents by their relations to ones we already know, and we could describe scents we have smelled to others who haven't relying on systematic similarities and differences.

I'm not concerned with whether the underlying psychology here is accurate; what I want is a sort of model of how we think about familiar and unfamiliar sense impressions, how we talk about them with other people, how we might link such behaviors to our actual sensory experiences. Something like what I've described seems good enough for a start.

And now we can flesh out what it would mean for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to vision: the idea is that they would occupy similar positions in our respective sensory catalogs, near the same sorts of things and distant from the same sorts of things, showing the same pattern of similarities and differences, and describable using the same comparisons.

But there are at least two reasons this doesn't work at all.

First, the various sensible qualities of objects just fail to match up for us this way. Things that appear to have similar texture -- baby powder and cocoa powder -- have almost nothing else in common in their other qualities. The scent of cocoa leaves might be close to a combination of the scent of powdered cocoa and other sorts of leaves, but it looks like one and unlike the other. Failure everywhere. The way things group together, the whole pattern of relations, the map, is different for each sense.

The second reason is that the maps don't even have the same population: there are an enormous number of things we have only partial experience of. I can walk through the grocery store and see everywhere foods that I have not tasted but that I now know the look of. The population of the visual catalog explodes here with no additions to the taste catalog at all, not just at the moment anyway. Of course there's no reason to imagine we catalog absolutely everything we see in this way, but the point remains that we have to expect there are objects we took enough interest in to note their look or feel or scent, whatever, but for a large number of these we won't have a complete set of sensory impressions and thus cannot conceivably rely on the same set of similarities and differences to catalog them.

Is this at all close, you think?

I'll try to take another swing at why we might think things should match up better. I'm not sure I really get that yet, and it's the most interesting part.

That sounds specious — ToothyMaw

Excellent! Seriously, this just what I'd like to hear.

You actually do cite a reason for giving life in absence of of a good reason not to — ToothyMaw

It's true. Maybe now that I've spent a little time with the idea I'd express this differently.

should we not always act for reasons? — ToothyMaw

On the one hand, we don't. On the other, we couldn't. On the third hand, no.

I think our behavior can be described in terms of reasons or in terms of causes. If someone else talks about my reasons for acting as I did, they're at most reporting what I said; but they can refer to things I may not even be aware of, and that will sound more like a causal explanation than a rational one. (Is that obvious, or do we need examples?) We sometimes speak of ourselves in these sort of causal terms as well, but I think it's more natural, more common to speak of our reasons because we're more confident we know them. (Again, the causes driving our behavior turn out often enough to be things we're unaware of to be discomfiting. I blame Freud.) ((Also not saying we do know our reasons; I'm trying to avoid doing much psychology here.))

To connect that with the talk of "instinct" I've been throwing around: I don't think we experience our instincts as reasons for behaving the way we do; I think we experience them as needing no reason at all for what we do. (Only for the specific elements of our behavior we think of as wired in, of course.) But now I can come along, as an amateur philosopher, and I can look at the behavior people engage in without thinking, as the saying goes, and I can offer an explanation -- and in this case it's the bit about self-preservation and so on. (Another amateur philosopher might say, instead, that everyone has "bought into the Narrative" or something like that. I hope I'm more convincing.)

Procreation is admittedly the messy part of this, so I think a person in peril is an easier place to start. It seems to me we do not reason our way to offering help or trying to get help, we do not feel there's a decision to be made here at all --- not as a rule, mind you, but if say there's great risk in helping and little chance of success, then yeah you might start to think about your chances of success. More than that, I think most people would be somewhat repulsed by the idea that someone would make a rational analysis and reach a decision before helping someone else in peril.

All I'm trying to do is shine a spotlight on this element of our lives. It's not an argument for anything, just trying to understand how we really think about life and death questions. Or, rather, mostly don't think.

If you are correct in your OP and reasons for not giving life are basically the only reasons that matter, — ToothyMaw

I don't think that's what I said. My claim, in a nutshell, is that we do not, as a matter of course, need a reason to save a life or create one. Under some circumstances, there may be an obvious and powerful reason not to, and then you can begin to weigh this against that, collect your pros and cons, etc. An extraordinary prima facie reason against first gets you to this point, to it being a decision, and maybe it carries the day, maybe not, but what it will square off against is not the assumption in favor of life, but actual reasons, stuff we like about life or value or feel some obligation to, perhaps even religious obligation.

Perhaps it's still not clear what I'm saying, and if I can't somehow make it clear, then maybe this is just a lousy idea.

One oddity of my claim is that I've presented it as if our knowledge of self-preservation is itself a reason. That might be true, but it's a little weird. It is a convenient way to present the tremendous evidence that life needs no argument, no justification.

Does your pleasure actually give their life value? — ToothyMaw

This is not even in the ballpark of what I've been posting. Maybe that's why I haven't been able to understand your responses.

In the case of procreation, and with reference to khaled's remark, what particular person? And how? And when? — tim wood

Human reproduction is a fact. I would like, if possible, not to become entangled in the metaphysics of how two people become three people. At some point in this process, the two we all agree on treat the third as a person, or consider them as they would consider a person. That may happen before conception, during pregnancy, at delivery, or even at some other time. Doesn't matter to me which, for the sake of this discussion.

He makes a distinction between starting a life and continuing a life. — schopenhauer1

I think English had already enshrined the distinction.

There are different things to consider with both. — schopenhauer1

That is a true thing to say.

Not interested. There's plenty of opportunity to have related discussions on their terms. I'm offering an alternative, not a counter-argument.

The whole notion of "giving" life evaporates — tim wood

What whole notion? Did you think I'm doing science here? Anyway, I provided an alternative if colorful English fails to meet your standards of precision.

It's an idiom.

Here it's meant to cover keeping someone from dying, resuscitating them, and procreating.

If you want to be pedantic, something like "taking steps to further the goal of a particular person being alive at a future time."

So what is the point of C? It is just stated as to what is happening. — schopenhauer1

Just making sure.

Set aside birth just for a moment. You haven't, so far as I know, claimed that procreating is just wrong; it's wrong because it's an instance of a sort of thing that is wrong. I'm trying to figure out that part.

A is lacking enough information — schopenhauer1

Enough information for what? You could be claiming that being forced to experience anything is unjust. Are you?

C is ignorant of the connection — schopenhauer1

Connection to what? C is only about experiences that are inevitably in part bad; would you describe having such an experience as an injustice? It's a simple question.

Unjust remains but the connection of the birth to the situation of inescapable situation is not recognized. — schopenhauer1

There's no birth at all in my questions. I'm trying to ask about the general case of which procreating is supposed to be an instance.

Yes, our commitment to continue living appears to be instinctive. We might, in considering our own situation, choose to discount it as a bias; but when making a decision about whether to give life to another person, we can rely on it --- that is, you don't need to know anything else about the person (their tastes and preferences) to know that this is exactly the sort of thing they would want. I can't assume that random person who's just been in a car accident would wish to own a copy of Brilliant Corners; I can assume they want me to call 911. That's all.

we need to assess the overall hedonic value of life — TheMadFool

By and large we apparently don't. I think there are really unusual boundary cases, sure, just as real people do face circumstances that can overcome their commitment to self-preservation. But the evidence says people will put up with a lot.

if it is so likely that people will appreciate existing, and natalism is the default, then the most important factor is whether or not there is some sort of condition that will prevent them from appreciating existing after being given life. — ToothyMaw

I really thought I had said almost exactly that. (But then the OP also mentioned instinct and people are still pointing out to me that it's instinct.) My point was that the presumption for life is so strong, that you need a pretty extreme negative on the table before you're anywhere near the threshold of it being a close call, worth thinking about.

There have been people who took "be fruitful and multiply" as a divine commandment; on that view, having children is a moral duty, and you should have basically as many as you can manage. I'm not saying that. I could also hold a view that life is pretty swell, and I could count that as something on the "pro" side when considering whether to save or give life, to be weighed against whatever negatives come up. I'm not saying that either. I'm saying, more or less, that life needs no argument. It is the default. The cases where the question even arises are already at some extreme of experience. The behavior of billions and billions of people shows this clearly. And I'm saying we might want to acknowledge that in the way we think about it.

Did I say that minimizing suffering is so important we should shoot people in the head for having toothaches? — ToothyMaw

Just having a little fun. I wasn't impugning your character or your intellect.

I'll add one more point before calling it a night: if objects are assembled out of our sense impressions by our internal model-making machinery, we might expect this fact to be disguised better. That is, we shouldn't have to learn to associate the scent of just cut grass with the look of just cut grass --- our model should have already taken steps to convince us that this scent and this look go together perfectly naturally. We shouldn't be surprised that they go together, and have to learn that this is normal. The model should be a better liar than that.

I think it's an excellent question, the best question I've seen on here in a very long time. I think it might be a really fruitful way of looking at how we think about our senses, so heading in a very different direction from yours I think.

If we had not seen a horse carrying a cart before, I don't think we would associate the sound the object produces in us with the object. It's only once we become habituated to hearing this specific sound, that we say it was caused by a horse carrying a cart. — Manuel

Okay, I thought that might be it. A little like Hume and the billiard balls.

Let's say something like this: we can take an object, look at it, touch it, smell it, get it to produce a certain sound by the way we manipulate it or bring it into contact with another object; we know all of these sensory impressions are produced by the one object (or, for many sounds, by a pair of objects), so even though we recognize that our senses respond to particular aspects of the object -- I would like to say "separately" but this is known to be false, for instance, when it comes to taste and smell -- we think there ought to be some analogy, or even homology, between the different impressions. That is, the look of cut grass should be to vision as the scent of cut grass is to smell as the texture of cut grass is to feel, something like that.

We may come to associate the scent of a lawn that's just been cut with the look of such a lawn, but I don't think anyone would really claim that how the lawn looks to us is what its scent would be if it were a visual impression rather than olfactory. Nor the other way around. We know the connection can be explained, grass being what it is means it looks a certain way and smells a certain way when it's just been cut, and we can associate those impressions, but that association can't help but seem somewhat arbitrary.

The question really is why it should seem arbitrary, why would we expect our sense impressions to be nearly homologous like this? It's almost as if we aren't supposed to notice that we have these largely independent subsystems -- vision, hearing, and so on. Over here on our side, there's supposed to be a unified person, a self, that experiences objects in its environment; and over there, those objects are also individual entities. The look and feel and taste of that object to this person are supposed to be abstractions, in a sense, aspects of an interaction between that single object and this single subject. But it doesn't feel like that; it feels like a particular look arbitrarily associated with a particular texture and a particular scent, and so on.

The point for me is that such things we take so utterly for granted, are created by us. We take poor stimulus and create rich meanings associated with sounds, etc. — Manuel

Should we infer that everything about the interaction of that object and this subject is assembled somehow, maybe that the object is just a sort of bundle of impressions, a bundle we assemble? Maybe we also conclude that we are such a bundle. That's Hume's word, I guess, but I'm not trying to insist that there is no structure here, only that there is some assembly required to get a subject and an object.

But maybe we don't have to do that. Maybe there's just something odd here in how we think about what our senses are and how we think about having more than one of them. Most people, I'd guess, will think there's something terribly foolish about expecting any kind of similarity between the "reports" of our various senses, but I'd much rather ask this very strange question and get an actual answer for why we shouldn't expect it.

Sounds appear or are represented (if you prefer this word) by us as belonging to certain objects automatically, but they need not produce these specific effects in us. — Manuel

I'm still confused. Is it the association of a given sound with the object we think of as making the sound that is puzzling?

Yes, and I was hoping someone would say something like this.

I'm inclined to say that people feel attached to life whether they want to be or not. People who have suffered tragedy, loss of loved ones, go on, but might be inclined to say they'd rather not.

What are we to make of that? Anything?

The bridge example doesn't seem to originate with Turing, but comes up in an earlier lecture:

Watson: The reason why one thinks that in all such cases of agreement and disagreement there must be a right and a wrong is that in the past there have been mistakes in mathematical tables, with the result that if one used these tables when building a bridge, it would probably fall down.
Wittgenstein: The point is that these tables do not by themselves determine that one builds the bridge in this way; only the tables together with a certain scientific theory determine that.

Turing: The sort of case which I had in mind was the case where you have a logical system, a system of calculations, which you use in order to build bridges. You give this system to your clerks and they build a bridge with it and the bridge falls down. You then find a contradiction in the system.--- Or suppose that one had two systems, one of which has always in the past been used satisfactorily for building bridges. Then the other system is used and the bridge falls down. When the two systems are then compared, it is found that the results which they give do not agree.

I tried excerpting the relevant bits from a pirated pdf found online, but it needs considerable reformatting. The whole book is essential reading if you're interested in Wittgenstein.

It's in lectures 21 and 22 of Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathcrnatics, Cambridge 1939. Turing is present throughout the book on and off.

It seems to me should not is both more pertinent than should and exists independently of should. — ToothyMaw

I'm not following this. Can you take another swing at it?

I think it reduces suffering. — ToothyMaw

So does this: you come to me with a toothache and I shoot you in the head.

this is not exactly an argument for natalism or against anti-natalism. — T Clark

No it's not. Just a stray thought. Procreating is the default. One way to describe that is by chalking it up to reproduction being instinctive (insert selfish gene theory if necessary). Saving lives is the default, with the same explanation (insert something about the evolutionary expansion of kin affinity if necessary).

Maybe it's not all that unusual -- if you see someone beating up someone else, there's little reason to think the victim won't approve of you intervening, and if they could stop the beating themselves they would. Life-giving and -preserving actions are just the most extreme version of this. I was thinking about this point of @Outlander:

Yet we still seem to be deviating or at least dismissing (which if you choose to admit and broadcast will result in utter failure of any alleged important goal) the fact that some people like how it is, the good and the bad, the give and take, the uncertainty. — Outlander

and how @khaled regularly (since his conversion) mentions that most people like life. I was just thinking that we can say a bit more: almost everyone is fanatically committed to having their own life continue and will gratefully be the beneficiary of almost any (within some ethical boundaries) effort to bring that about. People who lose everything to wildfires or hurricanes don't kill themselves en masse. The overwhelming majority of people who suffer all sorts of tragedies don't respond by immediately taking their own lives.

Meanwhile the neighborhood anti-natalist suggests that having to wait in line sucks, having to hold down a job sucks, and you add up these and similar injustices and life just sucks. Humanity at large has considered this question and disagrees. I think almost all of humanity, if they think about it, agrees with @Outlander; I thought I'd throw in something about why they don't bother to think about it, why it's not only a matter of instinct but a perfectly reasonable default view.

the fact that some people like how it is, the good and the bad, the give and take, the uncertainty — Outlander

Absolutely right. Everyone knows that, for us, maybe because we didn't evolve for it, utopia would suck. There's that Star Trek movie where Kirk is dumped in some fake utopia and it dawns on him out horseback riding that he never misses a jump. Whatever that is, it's not real life at all.

life sucks because the pendulum swings from striving for goals because of boredom, and feeling boredom after you've strived for it — Albero

I really don't think I've ever been bored for more than five seconds at a time in my entire life. I have more goals than I know what to do with. I just wish I didn't have to sleep.

This is a curious thing, because LW approaches philosophical problems in a way that suggests practicality -- think of the opening lines of the Blue Book, say. And people often take him to be advancing a theory that emphasizes "the practical", as I've vaguely done here, talking about practices as the ground of this and that.

But then Dennett sees Turing as the practical one here. (And I think that's right. It reminds me of Anscombe's thing about Wittgenstein being a philosopher's philosopher, not an ordinary man's philosopher, or however she put it.)

Does any of this really address @Banno's bumper sticker claim that "maths is made up"?

Well, it is just amusing you picked calculus as the place for no contradictions. Perhaps I misread you. — Ennui Elucidator

A little? Maybe? Most people who use calculus everyday couldn't prove the mean value theorem from scratch. (I could have done it several decades ago on demand, but no longer.) You just don't need to understand the theoretical foundations of calculus to use it consistently. I expect we all agree on that. If you want to claim that calculus has no foundation, that it is contradictory, help yourself. I'm not (any longer) competent to rebut you, but I don't recall any of my professors saying, "By the way, this doesn't make any sense."

Instantaneous velocity means what, precisely? — Ennui Elucidator

Do I have to be able to answer that question to build bridges?

Allowing contradictions in how you do calculus would cause all modern bridges to fall down. Does that matter? Is it different from the point about foundations?

Here's another way of looking at it: we have always intended to do mathematics consistently, since long before the modern study of foundations. That's our practice. A theory of that practice is not supposed to disturb it by introducing inconsistency. But it does happen -- and mathematics is a prime example, but I think also music -- that the theory you come up with is somewhat more powerful than you need, so it supports some existing practices but also others. Now suppose some of the others it supports are not consistent with existing practices. (Not everyone wants to hear 12-tone compositions.) Are you forced to engage in these new practices because the theory authorizes them, or do you carry on doing what you were doing?

You are arguing that (B3) represents an injustice. What about (A2) and (C3)? Are both or either of them unjust?
— Srap Tasmaner

Not sure where you are going, but A would be an injustice if that something was bad (like B). If C is a known fact, then it conflates into B, essentially. — schopenhauer1

Is that a no to both then, neither of the others are in themselves unjust?

It's certainly common these days to treat set theory as fundamental, and for kids to learn naïve set theory, and I agree that's useful. But you didn't learn ZFC in elementary school and weren't taught anything about alternative axiomatizations or independence.

What were you taught then? A lot of the mathematics people learn in classrooms is definitions and techniques. This is what we mean when we say .., this is how it works, this is what you do. Questions about whether those definitions, which support those techniques, are "good" just don't arise. And that continues to be true for much of mathematics.

It's one of the curiosities of set theory that now and then people do worry about whether the axioms are "good", not just in having the usual mathematical virtues of being powerful enough to do the job but not more powerful than needed, but in the sense of "natural". The axioms are supposed to be like Euclid's old axioms, just spelling out our intuitions clearly. Of course there was a massive failure there relatively early on with the axiom of comprehension and Russell's paradox. We teach kids you can make a subset of "all the blue ones", but we don't tell them there are rough waters ahead if they think they can always do that sort of thing.

Maybe this is what I'm trying to say: children are not actually being taught foundations, and not even really being taught set theory as they are taught other mathematics --- definitions and techniques. What they're being taught is an application of something they already know, that things can be grouped together, and they can be grouped together according to rules. In order to apply this basic intuition, it gets tidied up and even formalized a bit (though not much at this stage). But the idea is that sets are not introduced the way, say, tangents are later: here's the definition, it's just a thing, and we promise it'll turn out to be interesting. They're expected to nearly understand sets already, but not to realize just how much they can do with them.

That last part -- what you can do with sets -- might turn out to be all of mathematics, but not in practice, not by a long shot. No one proves theorems starting from ZFC, and certainly no one does calculations that way. There's a sense in which the difference between calculus before the development of set theory and after is just a change in notation.

I guess the question that's left is something like this: does our ability to express all of mathematics in the notation of set theory mean that set theory is the foundation of mathematics? Both answers to that are tempting, but perhaps that's because it's a bad question. There is no single thing that is set theory, in that sense; there are various competing ways of axiomatizing our intuitions, all of which are adequate to doing mathematics (and you actually need less than ZFC I believe to do most math).

One last example: having later learned about cartesian coordinates, you can readily think of a line as a set of points defined by a linear equation, an infinite set. But that's not how you were taught what a line is; you were taught that it's "straight". When you learn that y = mx + b produces a line, that feels like a result, not a definition, because you already know what a line is, just as you already knew what sets are.

On the one hand, I think I agree with Turing about contradictions mattering, but on the other hand it does seem clear to me that practice and intuition is the foundation of theory not the other way around, and you don't really need the theory, even when it comes to mathematics, insofar as foundations counts as the theory, to practice. Which is not to say that it can't be helpful. Maybe it's just that mathematics makes it clear there are at least two approaches to theorizing: one to justify what you're already doing, but one that is expected to feed back into practice. A whole lot of mathematicians do the latter without ever bothering about the former, starting from when, as tots, they learn about sets for the latter reason much more than the former.

The idea that engineering calculations would somehow remain unaffected is like saying: the logical foundations of mathematics are purely decorative, pure aesthetics, they do not actually matter at all when doing actual mathematics. They can be self-contradictory all you like, just like a poem can. — Olivier5

There is middle ground here though. Foundations of mathematics is nearly a separate field of study, and unnecessary for the doing of mathematics. You can teach high school kids (and engineers) calculus without teaching them about Dedekind cuts and making a deep dive into the nature of continuity. (And it works the other way too: you might be thoroughly conversant with the independence proofs but pretty bad at solving systems of linear equations.) As @unenlightened says, theory follows practice, and in some ways this is true of mathematics as well. It's a bit confusing here because mathematics is also a theoretical subject, and when theorizing the practice already in place, mathematicians inevitably see opportunities to fiddle with things: if we need these nine axioms to ground what we've been doing, what happens if we drop number 3 and number 8? that sort of thing. The result of that sort of thing doesn't touch existing practice but does generate new, additional mathematics.

But it's worth remembering that engineers are not waiting to find out if the continuum hypothesis is true, and the vast majority of mathematicians aren't either. A lot of the basics of probability are well understood centuries before we get Kolmogorov's axioms.

So, could the liar paradox cause a bridge to collapse? — Banno

On balance, I think the answer might be yes.

The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which a bridge may fall down or something of that sort [] You cannot be confident about applying your calculus until you know that there are no hidden contradictions in it. — Turing

And it's yes in part because of Turing. Nowadays engineers will to some degree rely on software to design bridges. It is fact that software complexity has created enormous challenges, and that it is not nearly so simple to verify correctness as one might wish. (In some fields like aircraft design there are strict, explicit standards for the provable correctness of programs, and still ... 737.)

I don't know enough about this stuff to point to examples, but Turing's general point that allowing contradictions can be dangerous is almost certainly correct, precisely because of the emergence of computers.

And it seems Sokal needed to pretend that "metatheorems" are not part of the game of mathematics to protect mathematics proper from what he thought of as monsters. Seems overkill. — Banno

I think you misread that. Sokal is only saying, what I thought was widely known, that the overwhelming majority of working mathematicians have nothing to do with foundations at all. It is functionally a sub-field of the discipline, just as much as complex analysis or differential topology.

The type of argument I am talking about here is the type which attempts to prove the truth or falsity of a premise. This is the issue, how do we determine whether premises are true or false. So, for example, in the dialogue The Sophist, there is a premise that the sophist, the philosopher, and the statesman, are three distinct types. But then in the course of the dialogue, it is demonstrated that this premise is not true. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agreed. Earlier today I was thinking a bit about the several "What is philosophy?" threads around, and thinking that the choice of terms, of the categorization of data, the work you do before engaging in inference, is a domain to be governed by reason but not logic, and thus a domain for philosophy distinct from both logic and science. (Certainly science is very much concerned with classification, but in a quite different way.)

I am not saying that a philosopher would not divide things into kinds. I am saying that an argument which proceeds in this way could be deceptive. Because of this we have to be very careful to analyze, and carefully understand the proposed divisions, and boundaries, to ensure that they are appropriately created. — Metaphysician Undercover

And I agree with this too, and precisely because this work is not covered by the rules of inference, it certainly presents an opportunity for deception, but also for simple failure. Philosophers do seem to spend a lot of their time re-classifying things.

Very glad you brought this up.