The lone H₂O molecule floating through space is not wet, and so there are some predicates which apply to water but which do not apply to H₂O, and so we can say that these are two different things. — Moliere

The lone molecule of H2O is equally understood to be a lone molecule of water, so I don't think this argument stands up.

People may argue that we don't know how the brain produces consciousness, but this applies to other emergent phenomena as well. We don't know how agitated molecules in substances produce heat or how applying heat produces agitated molecules in substances which in turn causes the substance to rise in temperature. We can say it's due to friction, or due to photons, but we can then ask, " how does friction produce heat or how do photons agitate molecules"? And so on....

What we do know is that there is no evidence of consciousness existing anywhere apart from biological organisms, so we really have zero reason to think that consciousness can exist apart from biological organisms, and every reason to think it cannot.

Of course, this does not prove consciousness cannot exist apart from biological organisms, but as I already said, nothing in science is ever proven; proof is only possible in rule-based formal systems such as logic or mathematics.

Why would there be a motivation to believe empirical facts that are of no practical consequence? — Janus

This was not addressed. I think all this thread helps to demonstrate is the absurdity of the notion that there could be moral facts in any sense analogous to the way that there are empirical facts.

Well, there is such a thing as being English, but it's not a biological or behavioural feature of people; it's a legal status. — Michael

Yes, but being English in the sense you've described is a matter of fact, not a quality of "Englishness" manifested in behavior.

If humans are conscious and if consciousness is non-biological then consciousness is evidence that humans are more than biological organisms. — Michael

Right, but there is no evidence that consciousness is non-biological—all the evidence points to it being a biological phenomenon.

We don't know whether or not consciousness is biological and so we don't know whether or not humans are just biological organisms. — Michael

If by "we don't know" you mean that it hasn't been proven, then I agree; nothing in science has been proven.

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Thanks for the explanation—it seems I misunderstood your point, failing to realize you were being ironic with "fake physicists".

Because no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge? — Michael

I did say "if Englishness exists".

And, of course, the assertion that humans are just biological organism begs the question. — Michael

We know humans are biological organisms; do we have any evidence that they are more than that?

If it is you're not going to find it by putting my body under a microscope. — Michael

No, that's right, it would be observed in behavior, also a physical phenomenon.

When I describe myself as English the word "English" is an adjective, being used to describe me, but "Englishness" isn't some physiological thing. — Michael

Would not "Englishness", if it exists, be some manifest quality or qualities?

That seems right...ice absorbs less, and reflects more, heat than liquid water...the so-called "albedo effect:

The Greenland ice sheet may be even more sensitive to the warming climate than scientists previously thought.

A new study finds that rising air temperatures are working with warm ocean waters to speed the melting of Greenland’s seaside glaciers.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shed new light on the forces driving ice loss on the world’s second largest ice sheet.

The Greenland ice sheet is losing an average of around 250 billion metric tons of ice per year. These losses are speeding up over time, studies have found—and there are two main processes causing it.

Warm air temperatures cause melting to occur on the surface of the ice sheet—that process accounts for about half the ice Greenland loses each year. The other half comes from glaciers at the ice sheet’s edge crumbling into the sea.

Losses from these seaside glaciers have, until now, been mainly attributed to warm ocean waters licking at the edge of the ice. But the new research finds that rising air temperatures have a big influence as well.

Warm air causes the surface of the ice sheet to melt, and that meltwater then runs off into the ocean. When that happens, it churns up the waters—and that turbulence helps heat rise up from the depths of the ocean and warm up the waters coming into contact with the ice. That, in turn, melts the glaciers faster.

Lead study author Donald Slater, a scientist at the University of Edinburgh, likened the process to ice cubes in a glass of water. They clearly melt faster when the water is warmer. But they also melt faster when the water is stirred.

Rising air temperatures in Greenland “effectively result in a stirring of the ocean close to the ice sheet, causing faster melting of the ice sheet by the ocean,” he said in a statement.

The researchers used a combination of observations and models to investigate the melt rates at the edges of Greenland’s oceanfront glaciers, and then to tease out the roles of ocean versus atmosphere.

From here

I have some ability of course. I live by the sea, and empirically I observe none of the supposedly world-shattering trends that people talk about. So I'm having to take someone else's word for it that there is in fact something going on. — Tzeentch

Sea level rise may show up much more in low-lying areas for obvious reasons, but also it has to be taken into account that it is understood not to be uniform over the planet, so what you observe locally may indeed not exhibit the more radical changes being experienced elsewhere.

So Darwin explains Kant? — Wayfarer

I wasn't referring specifically to Darwin—he certainly has no patent on the idea of evolution. It seems plausible to me that over the course of human history, ("history" here taken to include so-called "prehistory") humans have progressively reflected on their experiences and exercised their imaginations, constrained by logic (itself the child of such reflections) which has culminated in the last few thousand years in the evolution of the dialectical process we refer to as "the philosophical tradition". A major part of this has consisted in generalized characterizations of the necessary nature of human experience, which is what constitutes the categories relating to phenomena such as Aristotle and Kant, for example, have explained them.

A similar, but less radically evolutionary, because more traditionally constrained, process also happened in the East. This difference between East and West is also reflected in the arts. music and literature and of course the evolution of science in the West.

Though it seems to me that Kant is saying something different to Hume, in that we can know certain axioms existent in the world of necessity and universally. The question is, how exactly? — RussellA

I think we can only know what experience, and reflection on the nature of experience tells us. We can also elaborate and extrapolate from formal rule-based systems like logic, mathematics, chess, Go etc.

So you don't believe you have any ability as an educated layperson to critically assess the plausibility of scientific claims?

I'm asking why there is a motivation to be moral if moral facts have no practical implications. — Michael

Why would there be a motivation to believe empirical facts that are of no practical consequence?

I just take note of typical grifty tactics, like narrative shifting, and as the list grows my trust shrinks. — Tzeentch

So, for you it's all a matter of trust or lack of it, not a matter of exercising your critical intelligence?

Yes, and it's an unjustified generalization to say that models are always wrong in any case.

Which just shows that because something is explicitly agreed to by citizens in a kind of "social contract" sense it doesn't follow that it is morally right.

Also, I saw what @Vera Mont posted as demonstrating the child's plight in "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas" is not inherently different than the plight of those we oppress in order to enjoy our accustomed lifestyles; I did not take her to be claiming, or even suggesting, that any of it is morally right.

I agree; the content of experience is endlessly variable, so it is the general character or forms that experience in general takes which is at issue.

The laws of metaphysics do not follow necessarily from logical possibility. — Lionino

I agree with you, but would just repeat that we don't, can't, know what the laws of metaphysics (if there be such) are. Logical possibility informs us only about what is possible, not about what is necessary.

If naturalism is true, and there are laws of nature, I suggest the true natural laws would be invariant. The way they manifest might be contingent on local conditions. That's why I think its important to refer to laws of nature, as you have done, rather than the laws of physics- which are based on our current understanding, and subject to revision as we learn more. — Relativist

The Laws of nature may evolve (as Peirce thought) but if that were so they would still be invariant over long periods (unless there were some kind of "punctuated evolution" as S J Gould postulated in regard to biological evolution). The laws of nature may be understood simply as the 'observed habits of nature as formulated by us).

There is the case of psycho-somatic medicine and the placebo effect, wherein subjects beliefs and emotional states have physical consequences. — Wayfarer

If the subjective beliefs and emotional states that produce the placebo effect are neural (physical) states, why would they not be expected to have physical consequences? Physicalist presuppositions make such things easier, not more difficult, to understand. Presuming that such beliefs and emotional states are somehow non-physical existents makes it impossible to understand how they would have physical consequences.

:cool: Excellent points!

I agree with you in that the way I interpret Kant the a priori is both dependent on and independent of experience. As you say it initially comes, not sui generis, but from a careful reflection on the nature of experience (and of course also becomes culturally established), so in that sense it is dependent on experience. It is independent of experience in that once established it is clear that all possible experience must conform to the a priori categories. So, I'm with you in thinking that the a priori is evolutionarily established.

It's also about the fact that no objective description of brain-states can convey or capture the first-person nature of experience. The kind of detailed physiological understanding of pain that a pharmacologist or anaestheologist has, is not in itself pain. — Wayfarer

No objective description of trees, mountains or rivers can capture the nature of trees, mountains or rivers. The physical understanding of a tree, a mountain or a river is not itself a tree, mountain or river.

Kant holds that such representations or ideas cannot be abstracted from experience; they must be the product of careful reflection on the nature of experience.
And what would provide the basis for such ‘careful reflection’ in the absence of an innate grasp of the issue at hand? — Wayfarer

It seems to be no mystery to me. We experience ourselves as causal agents and as being acted upon bodily. We can manipulate things, bend things, break things, variously crush them, smash them, cut them up, etc., etc. We also experience ourselves as acted upon; we can feel the heat of the sun, the wetness and temperature of the rain and the force of the wind on our bodies. We also feel the weighing of gravity, the impact of falls, and the caresses or blows of various objects, including animals and other people.

So, Hume was correct that we don't see the actual operations of causation, we don't see the forces at work, but when our bodies are involved, we can certainly feel them, I don't know if that was the point Kant was making in the quoted passage of course, but all it does take is reflection upon our felt experience to naturally form a notion of causation. I have no doubt animals also have an implicit sense of causation, but it seems most likely that language would be needed to formulate that sense.

The empirical meaning of SR is demonstrated by the experiment and results of the Michelson Morley experiment that partly motivated it. This empirical meaning does not refer in any obvious way to the sentiment that "faster-than light travel is impossible". If a physicist is asked to describe the meaning of this impossibility, he will likely refer to empirically observable Lorentzian relations that he argues are expected to hold between observable events. In other words, his use-meaning of the "physically impossible" is in terms of the physically possible!

So physical impossibilities shouldn't be thought of in terms of impossible worlds, but rather as referring to the application of a linguistic-convention that supports the empirical interpretation of language. — sime

Of course, I must agree that physical impossibility is grounded in physical possibility; there is that which is physically possible, and the rest is not; so I'm not sure what you are aiming at with that.

I realize that an hypothesis such as that travel faster than light is impossible can never be verified by any number of observations. I was only concerned with the notion that there should, or even merely might, be physical impossibilities, regardless of whether we can know what they are or even whether there are such impossibilities.

If we adhere to the idea of universal natural law and assume that what we understand about that law is valid and reflects necessary or universal invariances, then within that context, we can talk about physical impossibilities. But the caveat will always be 'given that the laws of nature are themselves invariant".

The idea that there might be worlds (or universes) which enjoy very different laws would then transcend this notion of physical impossibility which is based on our familiar laws. So, I would refer to that as metaphysical possibility. The question then would be as to whether there should or must be any constraints on metaphysical possibility other than those of a merely logical nature.

Being fundamentally a skeptic, of course I will answer that we can raise these kinds of logically derived questions, but we cannot decidedly answer them. They remain exercises of the speculative imagination.

I agree that most people don’t know what they implicitly consent to unless it relevant to their every day-to-day lives; but my thing is that conscription to the military seems fair (to me) if it is for self-defense style wars because adults in the society are benefiting from the protection and help of that society—so why wouldn’t they be obligated to defend it? — Bob Ross

Defending your society if invaded is a very different matter than conscription to fight in wars that are based on political alliances. The point really is that just because some ethos is entrenched in societal law, on what we might want to refer to as " the social contract", it certainly does not seem to follow that it is therefore somehow objectively, or even inter-subjectively, validated.

You don't see the relevance of counterfactuals to questions of possibility and necessity. Ok, then.

I gather this doesn't help... Counterfactuals? — Banno

The problem I have is that we cannot know if the possibilities we can imagine are actual possibilities or merely logical possibilities. It doesn't seem that hard to determine what can be coherently imagined; that is we can coherently imagine whatever is not self-contradictory.

When I have some more time, I'll read the article you linked; then I guess I'll find out if it helps me to see that counterfactuals have relevance beyond just what we are able to coherently imagine, or if it cements the intuition I already hold.

All I want is open and reasonable discussion. I don't see the relevance of such counterfactuals as "Janus might have been wearing red shoes" for considerations of how identity might be established and the role of genetics in determining identity, which is what I thought this thread to be about.

Okay I was not thinking of the consent of the child, but of the consent of the majority who implicitly accept the social contract. I could have been conscripted when I turned 18, voting age, a few days before that it could not have been argued that I was able to consent to the social contract, now on the advent of my eighteenth birthday I suddenly can? How many people even explicitly think about the contract, and by the time they reach the age of consent, what other choice do they have but to live in a society they have become reliant on anyway?

It's not that I've not previously understood this, but that I see little philosophical significance in it. This modal notion of possibility, counterfactuality, is merely in the realm of fiction; tells us nothing significant about anything other than how we are can imagine stuff.

"Janus might have been wearing red shoes"—how many Januses are there in the world, and how do we know which Janus is being referred to, or even whether Janus is a real, or merely fictional, character?

Yes, that's what I'm asking you. — Banno

Okay, well I'll rephrase the question: on what grounds, other than sharing the same genome, would any entity in an imagined universe count as being schopenhauer1?

On what grounds would any entity in some imagined universe count as being schopenhauer1?

If schopenhuaer1 is a biological organism, then he necessarily has the genome he has. This would seem to be an empirical fact about all organisms.

Right, "social contract", but if people living in the society wherein the child is tortured implicitly consent to it via the said contract, then the same principle would apply, no? Additionally, any existing law, no matter how unethical it might seem, could purportedly be justified by this argument.

Would you agree with the following?

“Questions, what things ‘in-themselves’ may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding, must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that things exist? ‘Thingness’ was first created by us” (Nietzsche, WTP 569). — Joshs

I would not agree with that; the questions "what things 'in themselves' may be like" and "how could we know that things exist": are two different questions. We know things exist for us because we sense them, but we cannot know what things in themselves are like even though we know what they are like for us. So, we know how things appear to us and we have good reason to think things exist apart from our perceptions of them, because other animals, judging from their behaviors, sense things in much the same ways we do. We naturally come to the concept of "thingness", but this is a linguistically mediated concept. We can be fairly certain that things stand out for other animals as gestalts, but we cannot know if there is any prelinguistic conception of "thingness" as opposed to merely "a sense of things".

So, I see Nietzsche's statement as being too anthropocentric.

Good­man puts it succinctly: “We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described” (Goodman 1978, 3), or “talk of unstructured content or an un­conceptualized given or a substratum without properties is self-defeating; for the talk imposes structure, ascribes properties.”

I don't agree with this, because we can impute mere existence without claiming, or being required, to know what the nature of that existence is.

Thanks...these are the definitions given there:

p is metaphysically possible iff p is true in at least one possible world.
p is metaphysically necessary iff p is true in all possible worlds.

p is metaphysically possible iff p is consistent with the laws of metaphysics.
p is metaphysically necessary iff p follows from the laws of metaphysics.

I see the first as being circular and uninformative, because we don't know what worlds (if any other than our own) are possible unless we count possibility as being simply what we can coherently imagine.

I see the second as also being uninformative because we don't know what the laws of metaphysics are, unless, again, they are what we can imagine without contradiction.

In both cases if metaphysical possibility is just what we can, without contradiction, imagine, then metaphysical possibility would seem to collapse into logical possibility.

It seems we may have very different notions of what 'metaphysically possible' means. As I see it, if there is only one world then what is metaphysically possible would just be what is physically or actually possible. If there were other worlds, then different sets of physical laws might be metaphysically possible and actual. If there were a non-physical world, then whatever constraints operated in that world would be metaphysical (and of course logical) constraints. But all of this is only, for us, in the realm of the imagination, pure speculation: we have no way of knowing otherwise. If you have an alternative understanding, I'd be happy to hear about it.

As a friendly reminder, we do know that different ontologies are metaphysically possible. — javra

How do we know that?

But I guess considering what is a "significant difference in different gravitational forces" would embark us too far astray — javra

I would say it would be difference great enough to make a significant difference to biological "age".

... and in the realm of metaphysical possibility, which this thread is in part about. — javra

We don't know what is metaphysically possible, and we only know what is physically possible given the assumption that our understanding of natural laws is correct and comprehensive.

Yes, if the theory of relativity is in fact correct it operates everywhere. Since the different gravitational forces would not make for much of a difference, and it may well be impossible for objects to travel at anywhere near the speed of light, such thought experiments as would allow for huge differences in the progress of biological processes, and hence significant differences in aging probably remain in the realm of fiction or fantasy.