Did you know that humpback whales -- I think I'm remembering this right -- fuck with orcas?

It's a curious thing. When orcas are trying to kill seals and such, sometimes a couple whales will intervene. They will even scoop up a seal by rolling over and diving under it so that they surface with the seal on their belly, where the orcas can't get to it. There's even a case of whales remaining in the area to protect the dead body of a seal the orcas killed, just to keep them from actually eating it.

At first the theory was that they look enough like whale calves that it's kind of a mistake. But it turns out they will also interrupt the killing of sea turtles, of just about anything. They go out of their way to fuck with orcas.

The current theory is that it's more or less revenge. Orcas do attack whale calves, and so the whales have a clear sense of who the enemy is, and they side against them, for no other reason, with nothing to gain from it. Two whales swim in and call other whales from miles away, and they'll all swim in a ring around the seals or whatever keeping the orcas at bay, and they'll do this for hours, were still doing it at dusk when the researchers observing them headed back to shore.

I feel there's a distinction here that you're not seeing. — Wayfarer

Oh I'm pretty sure I know what you think you see, I just think it's not there.

That we do things other creatures don't? Of course we do. And other creatures do things we don't. Where does the transcending biology come in? Is being a living thing not extraordinary enough?

Now and then, I look around the yard, trees and grass, deer, birds, squirrels, and I think there is really only one life form on earth -- it's DNA and cells packed with protein machines everywhere you look, the rest is just details, specialization. We share about half our genes with those trees, and more than half with the squirrels and deer. Is that not extraordinary enough? That cedar tree is my kin. That moth too. How we all got this way is an interesting story, but I don't see the transcending of life anywhere in it.

If we are capable of extraordinary things other plants and animals aren't, science and art but also weapons of mass destruction and chattel slavery, it's because life is capable of those things, and we just happen to be the specific form of life realizing those possibilities. We are apes that wear clothes. We have Mozart, but we also kill each other for made-up reasons. The "rational animal," sure we are.

Finally, a question I had, that came from looking into Capablanca a bit... Wikipedia says, '...Bobby Fischer described him as possessing a "real light touch".'

I'd like to hear your perspective, as speculative as it may be, on what Bobby Fischer might have meant by that. — wonderer1

Yeah I get that. I think he was a great influence on Fischer, although I'd say Fischer's real progenitor is Alexander Alekhine. Lasker is important to him too, but I don't know Lasker's style as well. Fischer used a famous quote from Lasker as the epigraph to My 60 Memorable Games:

On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.

I heard some writer on the radio once claiming that the great chess champions were all sadists, and Fischer is kinda the poster child for that. He didn't just beat his opponents, he humiliated them. I think somewhere he talks about this sense of the struggle, which he learned from Lasker but turned up to 11, the point of chess being to destroy your opponent's psyche. Fischer punished you for being wrong. He was Caissa's avenging angel.

Capablanca didn't so much punish you, as correct you, point out to you your mistake. The level of chess was admittedly a bit lower back then, so maybe it's true that when Capablanca revealed your mistake to you, the answer seemed quite simple because it was.

But I think it's more about Capablanca's clarity of vision about the game. He didn't go in for speculative play -- and neither did Fischer or Alekhine really. In fact, the only player who had Fischer's number was Mikhail Tal. Fischer, someone said, maybe it was Tal in his book, didn't like irrational positions, and Tal specialized in irrational positions. I think he's the only player who had a plus score against Fischer in international competition.

But now Capablanca, who like Fischer strove for clarity and directness, eschewing speculative play was also rarely taken in by it. Chess as he played it was clear and simple. He was oddly famous for little combinations that would simplify and clarify the position leaving him with a winning advantage, which you knew he could convert, given his level of technique. But he didn't push. His play was not particularly aggressive, as Fischer and Alekhine were -- and just about all modern players are in this mold. Fischer liked to play "sharp", force the game to a decisive point. Put up or shut up. But not Capablanca. His play was elegant, to the point in a way that seemed effortless.

So there's a particular sort of Augustan beauty about Capablanca's play. It's hard not to be a little awed by him, even if Tal or David Bronstein -- another great romantic swashbuckling player -- are more exciting, more appealing as characters. But Alekhine in particular ushered in a more uncompromising approach that Fischer picked up and almost everyone since plays more like that.

I probably haven't quite answered your question, about the "light touch." Maybe I have. I find it fascinating that chess despite being fundamentally a sport, and in so many ways unlike any number of media we would consider art, is very much like art in providing tremendous scope for having a personal style, a full expression of the personality, and the opportunity to create something beautiful, for there is certainly beauty in chess.

One of my favorite moments in writing about chess comes in David Bronstein's Zurich 53, his book about the great tournament to select a challenger to face then world champion Mikhail Botvinnik. There's one game, maybe Averbakh-Kotov but I don't remember for certain, where a truly extraordinary queen sacrifice is played. Bronstein brings play up to that point, gives a diagram of the position, and then begins "Creativity in chess ..." or something, anyway, he launches into a two-page essay about creativity and beauty before showing you the next move, indeed one of the most beautiful moves ever played.

But I see a radical break - an ontological distinction, in philosophical terms - at the point where humans become fully self-aware, language-using and rational creatures. — Wayfarer

Yes. I've read one or two of your posts. Is there a radical break when creatures started living on land? When they took to the skies? When they started using tools? No? When they developed communication? When they developed the ability to navigate across thousands of miles by sensing the earth's magnetic field? No? When they developed social structures? No?

None of the things characteristic of any other species count as transcending biology. Why on earth would something unique to us? Why do we alone transcend biology?

And I ask that, still not knowing what it means, or how it is supposed to have happened. Was it a biological process by which we transcended biology? Is there any way to know whether dolphins have too? Or maybe octopuses?

Are you advocating such a view? — wonderer1

He very much is, yes.

I don't have a wonderful alternative, but I'm not comfortable with this sort of "reality is whatever we agree it is." I get the impulse, and I think there's a kernel of truth there, but I also think that kind of formulation is probably incoherent.

Habits — apokrisis

Sure. I used the word "convention" because there was all this talk of what we agree on, and that's a pretty specific model I'm not sure can take in what it was trying to take in here.

It's a class and category thing. The first premise claims that rational and biological are classes, and a given phenomenon can be in one or the other but never both. The response (beginning with Anscombe) has most often been that rational and biological are categories, and there's no reason at all something can't be both. (Calling these both 'dualisms' obscures the distinction.)

Here's a bit from the conclusion of the article you linked:

In the early years of his career he was an absolute idealist and in no way could be considered a materialist. The second stage of his thought on this question, reaching definitive proportions with Experience and Nature, revealed him to be a neutralist: the ultimate reality is neither physical nor mental, but such that it permits the ascription of those properties through inquiry. The sense in which he might be considered a materialist at this stage is in his disavowal of mind as an independent entity shaping the destinies of matter. In the final period of his thought Dewey still affirmed the ultimately neutral character of natural events, but saw their transactional phases so inextricably linked in the situational complex that the hope was provided that with the advance of scientific inquiry someday the necessary and sufficient conditions for mental behavior might be given in terms of its physical matrix. Thus, if the hypothesis that the proper manipulation of the physical properties of the human organism can assure control of its mental properties is materialistic, then in his last years Dewey was indeed a materialist.

I've only begun reading Dewey, so I don't know him remotely as well as I should. His early essay on the importance of Darwin and how evolution ought to reshape philosophy I thought extraordinary. (Might make more sense for y'all to reach for James, who, though a genuine working scientist, always left more than a little room in his philosophy for spirituality and religion.)

I'm not sure what's to be gained from lining up on two sides to say "There's one kind of thing!" or "There's two!!" More interesting is what you can do with such a claim. Naturalism is pretty straightforward as a working assumption, rather than a dogma; you know how to proceed, what sorts of things to look for, how to design experiments, how to craft a research program. I'm not clear what the other side offers except a defense of people's common pre-scientific beliefs. How are we to investigate the transcendence of biology? Is there a way to do that scientifically? If so, bring it on.

This is why I have tried to force y'all to be more specific. If you say, here's something evolution can't do, what do you mean by that? Are you in the trenches of biology, offering an alternative theory? Evidently not. Are you challenging science's approach to knowledge production? No one will say so. If you're saying that here's something that by definition evolution can't do, then you're playing semantic games and the rest of us can ignore you.

What it means for one's credence to be 1/2 rather than 1/3 is a secondary matter. — Michael

Here's another stab at it.

Ramsey has that ingenious example when he's originally arguing for the very idea of subjective probability and both the possibility and the necessity of putting numbers on credences. You're walking from one town to another, but come to a point where you're not sure you're going the right way; there's a farmer working in a field alongside the road. You can count the steps you would take -- going out of your way -- to reach him and ask directions: the more steps you'd be willing to take, the less certain you are that you know the way, the fewer you'd take the more certain you must be that you know the way.

That's brilliant, but note there are no percentages here to start with, but there is specifically the possibility of comparing one level of confidence to another, and that leads directly to percentages, because you can say how much more confident one answer is than another.

But how does this analysis actually work? Is there a possible world in which Frank walks seventeen paces and another in which he walks thirty? It's all hypothetical, counterfactual even, and experiments that are not performed (I am told on good authority) have no results.

What it means for one's credence to be 1/2 rather than 1/3 is a secondary matter. — Michael

For my post too which expressed curiosity about what "1/2" means in this context.

I understand this is a sideline to the Sleeping Beauty discussion, but what "subjective probability" could possibly be is also kinda what the whole puzzle is about. I just thought we could pause and consider the foundations.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. — Whitman

Your use of the word 'finally' clearly suggests goal-directedness. — Wayfarer

'Finally' clearly suggests 'last', the last item in my sequence, since we have not seen further speciation since modern humans emerged.

This little inquisition to determine whether I have sinned against Science is pointless anyway. I was not telling the story of evolution but of the story of Shakespeare, beginning from the first mammals, so I know where my story ends (or 'finishes') and the plot highlights those events that lead there.

But that with the development of language and reason, we transcend purely biological determination in a way that other animals do not. — Wayfarer

A quick search yielded a couple of nice popular articles on the problem-solving abilities of crows: one at Ars Technica on a specific experiment and one from the BBC that ranges somewhat wider. Both articles struck me, as a layman, as pretty balanced. Both seemed to assume, more or less as I do, that our intelligence is on some kind of continuum with other animals. "Continuum" is not a great word there, though, because it may not be a matter of having more or having less of one thing, general intelligence, but of having more or having fewer cognitive skills, particular abilities. (I think the BBC article mentioned that chimps seem to have better short-term memory than we do, which I didn't know.)

I don't know how to fit your talk of "transcendence" with the way scientists and science journalists talk about intelligence in animals, including us. Language, for example, allows displacement, the ability to communicate about objects not in our present surroundings; you could describe that as "transcending" the limit of referring only to what other animals can or do perceive. What's not clear is in what sense displacement would transcend "purely biological determination," since it's not clear what that is, and if we have transcended it what other sort of determination is at play in what we actually do in our humble, biological way.

I took it as a reference to — Wayfarer

Good lord, yes, of course it is.

often invoked as an account of how life could have started as a consequence of chance — Wayfarer

Okay, maybe, sure, someone might've said that, but the use of the image for various purposes is long established, it wasn't invented just for talking about abiogenesis or for talking about evolution, though yes it's a favorite crackpot argument of creationists, which is why people like me refer directly to it in rebutting them. Do you really not understand how this works?

evolutionary threshold — Wayfarer

Define. Better yet, define it non-circularly so that Fodor's ghost doesn't haunt you.

capabilities which I don’t believe are reducible to biology — Wayfarer

Neat. Did we acquire these capabilities biologically?

By the way, what does it mean for a capability to be reducible to biology?

t threw up mammals, then simians, then hominids, then finally something like us. — Srap Tasmaner

I think you will find that any idea of there being progress in this sense is rejected by mainstream biology — Wayfarer

You may notice that the connectives there are then's -- not and then even better's. I could have said what you think I said, but, as it happens, I didn't.

But you read it that way, which means you assumed I was talking about progress, which means you ought to be chiding yourself not me. Go easy on yourself though.

Another way to read what I actually wrote was from the general to the specific, just taxonomy spread out chronologically, something speciation tends to do.

I agree that reality, in the determinate sense, is what is agreed upon intersubjectively. — Janus

We do know by example what it is for a group to agree upon a convention, either explicitly through negotiation, or implicitly through action.

Do we know what it is for everything to be a convention? Does that include the people engaged in the instituting the convention? Does it include the fact of their agreeing to the convention? Hard to see how they could agree to agree without already agreeing, and without already existing.

You can get around this by bootstrapping the convention non-conventionally, and that means granting that not everything is conventional.

Or you could say the point is not about what is real, but about how we talk and think about what is real, how we use words like "real" and "reality", and it's the use of these words and our ways of thinking and talking about reality that are conventions. The conventions at stake are conventions of our behavior.

But what's that supposed to mean? Are we granting that we are in fact organisms, entities of which it is permissible to posit behavior? If this too is only a matter of convention, then that's to say it's only a matter of our behavior (how we think and talk) that we are organisms that engage in a certain sort of behavior. How could such behavior be ours, how could it be behavior?

I'm not yet convinced there's a coherent way to make the claim you're making. I get the impulse, I think, and I even sympathize to a degree. But I can't help thinking this is an analogy that's been pushed to the breaking point.

You know, if you had seen little Will Shakespeare as an infant, as a toddler, you wouldn't have thought him capable of writing Lear, if only because until he did it, nobody knew it was a thing that could be done. And, of course, because his feet were muddy and he didn't know very many words yet.

But that child does grow into Shakespeare, a wonder of human history.

Well so it is with his species. To see those little furry things skulking about, burrowing underground or climbing trees to avoid being eaten my those freakin' reptiles, you couldn't guess their descendants would include Will Shakespeare, or that they would one day transform this planet's ecosystem or build machines that could take them into space. But we don't have to guess because we know it did happen.

(This isn't a rebuttal of anything you said, just some further thoughts in response.)

It's just the old "Make an apple pie from scratch" joke.

I took you to be saying that a monkey descendant has produced the work of Shakespeare. and thus that the experiment has already been run. Obviously the work could not have been produced without language, so I took the role of language in the experiment as implcitly given. — Janus

Sure, sure. I just don't have to commit to anything about the origin of language, I don't think.

It was an ape that wrote Lear. Obviously it was an ape that could write. So he was a member of a species that it is capable of language use, however that happened.

You know 50% is a ratio, right? — Srap Tasmaner


Pierre-Normand is saying that P(X) refers to the ratio of Xs to non-Xs in some given reference class.

I'm saying that P(X) refers to the degree to which I believe X to be true. — Michael

I know what you think you're saying.

But you want to express your degree of belief as a percentage. Fine. But percentages are just a funny way of writing fractions. So what do the numerator and the denominator represent?

If you want to say that you're just describing your confidence, somewhere between 0% representing absolute certainty of falsehood, with respect to some P, and 100% representing absolute certainty of the truth of P, you ought to be able to explain where these numbers come from. So where do they come from?

What exactly does it mean to say you have, say, 75% confidence? That you'll turn out to have been right 3 times out of 4? Out of 4 whats? Universes? --- That's ratio talk, because percentages are ratios. If you want to use percentages, you have to have some such account. So what's yours?

Personally, I don't read ↪Wayfarer's modest proposals as "challenging science" or arguing for "exclusivity" of philosophical reasoning versus scientific reasoning. — Gnomon

Did you read the OP?

Indeed. Conversely, what philosophical point do you think is being made by this oft-cited trope?

As someone somewhere on this forum once said, the answer to "How long would it take monkeys to compose the complete works of Shakespeare?" is about 300,000 years. That experiment has already been run. — Srap Tasmaner — Wayfarer

Probably not a great number for me to have chosen, since that's the emergence of homo sapiens. Something in the millions for hominids or for simians would have been a better choice.

Looked at from the perspective of ecology language is one enormous adaptive advantage in one sense — Janus

I wasn't making any claim about language, or about the adaptive value of language. The point stands if you ask "How long would it take mammals to produce the work of Shakespeare?" and move the starting-point back even more -- but it's not as picturesque as the monkeys.

I took the point to be the claim that life originates as a chance event. — Wayfarer

Truly bizarre. I am speechless.

The analogy of monkeys typing represents the random combination of elements that just happened to form themselves into organisms. — Wayfarer

Now, see, if you had thought about it for a minute, you might have realized that I was making exactly the opposite point. Evolution gets results in the timeframes that it does by not being random. It threw up mammals, then simians, then hominids, then finally something like us. Took millions of years to keep ratcheting up the complexity that would so dramatically increase our cognitive capacity that we might have among us one -- and even then only one, among all the humans who have ever lived -- with the mind of Shakespeare.

I don't have to claim that the ability to write blank verse revenge tragedies is an adaptive advantage. I'm not insane.

The point I have been making is only that the creature that produced Lear shares, what is it, 99.5% of his DNA with chimpanzees, and more than a little with plenty of other terrestrial life forms. He is a product of the same process that produced every living thing we know of.

Now you want to say that his body is, but his mind -- no, no, that's, I don't know, magic, or whatever it is you think makes humans dramatically different from everything else living. And yet it's perfectly obvious that evolution endowed other creatures with mind as well. We are not so unique as all that. And there's more and more evidence that our minds have little flaws that betray their evolutionary origins, just as our bodies do, just as all animals do. Evolution loves a workable kludge.

Credences … can be thought of as ratios — Pierre-Normand


They shouldn’t. One’s credence is the degree to which one believes a thing to be true. Often one’s credence is determined by the ratios but this is not necessary, as shown in this case.

If A iff B and if one is 50% sure that A is true then one is 50% sure that B is true. That just has to follow. — Michael

You know 50% is a ratio, right?

Yeah I think that's not dissimilar to the chess examples I was giving. What remains unexpressed in the moment is still expressible, in this case as clearly as possible in mathematics. It may very well be that there are activities complex enough that no human is ever able to give an analytical account of their actions while so engaged -- just too many variables, too many feedback loops, and so on. And then you have something that's expressible in principle but never in practice. I think sports can be like this, flow state activities like surfing and rock climbing -- these pursuits effectively require lots of very quick calculations and estimates and updates and very fast adjustments of how to weight different factors, things humans can clearly do but which outstrip the speed at which we could consciously analyze or explain them.

But there's another category where people believe there is a kind of judgment that cannot be reduced to analysis even in principle. Maybe judgments about art, for example. I think the idea is that there isn't even conceivably a predefined set of variables to work with, no real way to make the sort of calculations you conceivably could, say, about the wave you're surfing or the pitch you're trying to hit.

Even if you're an excellent critic and can articulate some of what appeals to you (or doesn't) about a work of art, no one even considers the possibility that we're establishing truth here -- as you could, say, determine with certainty whether there was any path by which a fielder could have reached a batted ball. Not only is criticism not plausibly objective, it is not plausibly exhaustive. There is always something in a work of art still to be articulated, even if you go on and on.

An interesting case is unsolved problems in mathematics. Lots of mathematicians will have a strong intuition about the truth or falsehood of something like the continuum hypothesis, but that intuition itself may be a little strange. We're talking about math after all, so the truth of a statement is directly tied to its provability, but provability may not be on the table given the math currently available and something that we will still recognize as math will have to be invented to support proving or disproving what's hypothesized. That's just how math evolves, but then what could be the basis for a mathematician's intuition today? Not just the math he knows, because that's not enough, so the math that could be? Intuitions about what other kinds of math are possible? Long before Andrew Wiles proved it, most mathematicians believed Fermat's last theorem to be true, but it took some major and somewhat unexpected (as I understand it) results from other mathematicians, bringing together disparate fields of mathematics. (Double-checking at Wikipedia, they mention right off that most mathematicians believed it was not yet provable, kinda the position we're in now with the Collatz conjecture, which seems almost obviously true but it does not appear a proof is coming anytime soon.) So what was the basis for that common intuition that indeed the theorem was true?

I may be misremembering, but I think he claimed that evolution by natural selection is blatantly circular, which is clearly horseshit, and not a criticism working biologists even considered taking to heart.

But, hey, you go ahead and add him to your list of voices crying in the wilderness.

You can always find a guy, but Fodor's writing on evolution found few defenders. Make of that what you will.

Is this David Lewis you are speaking about? — Janus

C. S. Lewis

But academic employment is dismal these days for many, including minorities. — jgill

Think law school, medical school.

perhaps because Tunisians walk in hidden pairs. When you meet a member of a Tunisian pair for the first time, their sibling ensures they are the next one you meet. — Pierre-Normand

I'm gonna come back to this, but I just want to point out that you're now describing a pickpocketing team, a stick and a cannon.

I foresee fun new variations of Sleeping Beauty.

It doesn't seem this ruling affects hiring practices at universities. — jgill

But it would likely affect the pool of qualified candidates in the future.

The point of affirmative action in education was to intervene early-ish in the employment and wealth pipeline, as a way to redress racial disparities that are the lingering result of our history.

It's a sensible plan, but it's not clear it's been successful -- but then, compared to what? Black Americans would probably be even further behind than they are without affirmative action. And of course there's been continual litigation since it began so programs have been continuously shifting their goals and methods.

I was thinking of Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo.

It's not important.

Only reason I posted was because there isn't really one thing in what @Darkneos posted that marks it as fake philosophy; the elements there, even the style, have all found use in serious work. (One element typical of the new age style missing here is the sort of talismanic use of numbers, four types of this, seven steps to reach that, five stages of whatever -- and again, that's not in itself indefensible, but its role in these texts is to convey authority.)

It's surprisingly difficult to draw a line that would put serious or valuable philosophy on one side and BS on the other. Which is interesting. Our little demarcation problem.

No. What gave you that idea?

Did you have a look through the threads? — Darkneos

No. Life is short.

Don't think of this sort of writing as an attempt at communication at all. Like a lot of bullshit, it's an attempt to assert dominance. I'm sorry you've been taken in before. Stick around here. Hardly any of that sort of social engineering. This site is much saner and safer than the rest of the internet.

Please do! — Wayfarer

It's the obvious ones, really.

I'll give you one, but only the definition: biological theory everyone thinks they understand.

I'm not hiding anything. I like to think of these as the philosophical equivalents of Godwin's law. So I am carefully not summoning those demons only because it amuses me.

What we have here is the unholy union of several styles of philosophy that are tricky on their own but dangerous junk when mixed.

(1) The oracular style. Nietzsche could pull this off, but probably no one since. Open to a torrent of obvious criticism, and only young people like Nietzsche's final period best.

(2) The discourse by tendentious definition or gloss. This is Heidegger's trademark. If you're not used to it, it seems like he's just making shit up. But he does have reasons, and his method is to burrow into those simple tendentious phrases and allow them to open up into something that by the end is usually both convincing and enlightening, or at least thought-provoking. (Derrida turns this into argument by innuendo, which is not as cool.)

(3) Logical persuasion, the typical informal argumentation of philosophy since forever.

Putting all of these together is sort of the do-it-yourself kit for new agey charlatans. The style must be pompous, tendentious without acknowledging it, and give the appearance of being logical. (Examples are, you know, everywhere. Pick any page of the likes of Aleister Crowley or David Hawkins or any other flavor of pseudo-philosophy.)

Needless to say, there is no method here. There is no logic, no real argument, no side-door into phenomenology like in Heidegger, there is just performance. It sounds to the speaker like philosophy, like wisdom, or at least like a text from a wisdom tradition -- but those texts were the product of living cultures; this stuff tends to lead to believers creating practices and lifestyles to go with the text, which is all backwards.

Do not be taken in. It's all a fraud, even if the speaker is fooling himself too. Just pass on by.

By the way, it's your model so I don't know what to do with this, but it might be worth bearing in mind that something that is invariably unarticulated might not be inarticulable, but simply not hooked up to the speech-producing system. There are phenomena like blindsight, where people have clearly acquired information about the world, but they don't know they have and cannot articulate it. And other studies that exploit left-right differences where people cannot report what they quite definitely simply because it does not reach their speech center. (Might have been severed corpus colossum patients, don't remember.)

No idea whether there's any room for such an idea in your thinking, but it is possible that the knowledge we have but can't quite put into words is not a different kind of knowledge but only knowledge that is not given access to speech.

Yes, yes, we all know there is another framework. What you need to argue for is exclusivity.

I think your position is that naturalism itself makes an unjustified claim to exclusivity, and you're just rebutting that. I mean, yeah, you do that all the time, but the argument from reason claims that biology needs to get off reason's lawn. And that has to be argued for.

It's worth noting that this idea of competition has of course been institutionalized in science. Scientific theories do face competition, but only from other scientific theories. It's for this very reason that cdesign proponentists have been trying to pass off their faith as just as scientific as something that's really science.

As I understand it, you are not proposing an alternative scientific theory, and imagine your quest as challenging a foundational assumption of science.

But already science allows such challenges. There are some really obvious examples I dare not mention.

Your choice then is (1) present your view as a genuine scientific hypothesis; (2) challenge the methodology of science. Mostly theists opt for door number 2, and defend revelation as knowledge producing.

There is one last alternative, which is not to challenge science but to live alongside it, as religion continues to do, but also art, sports, geez all the other stuff people get up to, and most especially our standard ways of talking about things like the sun rising, tables being solid, people picturing things in their head -- all of that is fine, and scientists also do all that stuff when they're not doing science.

But haven't you lost Sleeping Beauty's other constraint, that the chances of encountering one Italian or two Tunisians are equal?

The random process is fully specified by the equal distribution of coin toss outcomes (over the long run) and the longer "hang around" times of tails outcomes — Pierre-Normand

Haven't read all the recent back and forth here, but I think the usual examples of conditional probability do not apply.

If you want a closer analogy with pedestrians, it's Tunisians walking around in pairs. If the chances of meeting an Italian or a pair of Tunisians are equal, then the chances of meeting *a* Tunisian are either nil, since you can't meet just one, or the same as meeting a pair.

Look at how hang-around times affect the pedestrian-encountering odds. Roughly, if you miss a short walker, you've missed him, but if you miss a long walker you get another chance. That's not how Sleeping Beauty works at all. There's no way to miss your first tatils interview but still catch the second one.

One thing that strikes me as a little odd is that descriptions can be faithful without being exhaustive, and, knowing that, we expect there to be many faithful descriptions of a thing, only some of which compete directly. 7 is a prime number, a lucky number, the most common roll of a pair of dice, the average number of items a person can hold in short-term memory, etc., none of those to the exclusion of the others.

The same seems to be true, but maybe to a lesser degree, when we talk about explanations rather than descriptions. The macro-scale, observable phenomena we're talking about, things people do in the way of talking, reasoning, making decisions, all admit of multiple descriptions and explanations, depending, as you say, on context, on what we're interested in. --- It's even a standard technique in humor to switch descriptive framework in the middle of the joke, or to suggest one framework but reveal another. (Why did the chicken cross the road?)

Lewis's premise is that reasoning admits of only one description. He could have claimed that other accounts leave out what he's interested in, that they miss the reasoning in an act of reasoning and treat it like any other psychological or biological event. Instead he claims that no such description is even possible, and that nothing that could be so described and explained could be what he considers reasoning.

The question is, why would he think that? And it looks like the answer is: theology.

Right, right. Some of us tend to quote Ockham's with a little emphasis on the necessity. That was Quine's read, I'd say: anything your theory needs to quantify over you're committed to, whether you like it or not.

I haven't read enough of by the Russian authors discussed, to have a very deep understanding — wonderer1

Btw, me neither, I think, but it's been years since I looked at that essay. It's just part of the culture now. For instance, it's why 538's mascot is a fox ("Fivey Fox").