I'm a maximal constitutional conservative thus long-time rabid anti-trampist, ejected from the ongoing political continuum and the republican party. Which means maximal opportunity for free innovative capitalism to allow society to adapt and advance, and maximal stasis of the Constitution but not of social progress within constitutional limits.
How are my votes reflective?

Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1032a -- Each thing itself, then, and its essence are one and the same in no merely accidental way — Metaphysician Undercover

And this is supported by reference to Plato's Socratic discussion of 'snub nose' and form of 'Snubness' at 1037a?

Unfortunately, Aristotle was a logician and not a foundational mathematician like Plato, and distinctions implicit in Plato's discussions directed at Pythagorean mathematicians were lost in the translation.

My take is that Aristotle's metaphysics requires flat single level 'nominalist' logic as further developed in the first half of the 20th century. More recently this has been implemented as relational database systems. Plato used two-level hierarchical logic where higher level forms inform many lower-level particulars. In the Dialogues, Plato attempts to define Forms by induction from bottom up, and also conducts pathetic witch hunts for sophists from top down in a hierarchical database schema.

I can try to formalize this, as what is A=A for an Aristotelian is just A for Plato's forms and A>{a1,a2,a3,...} for his particulars.

The question I asked was, doesn’t ‘the number seven’ have an identity? Which was a rhetorical question, in that I take the meaning of ‘7’ to be precisely ‘ the number that is not equal to everything that is not 7’, or, ‘7 = 7’. — Wayfarer

Maybe your question is not well formed? To Plato, there ought to be only three forms of number, namely none, one, many.

7 is not a platonic form capable of formal identity but is derived from iterated copies of the One. An issue is that if 7 then why not 77 or 777 which lead to an explosion of copies of the One. But still, there is only one Form for One.

Logic and language relies not just on representation, but on a potential relation to the possible existence of some [x] as it is. Otherwise what IS the point of being able to abstract? — Possibility

Just to clarify the "potential relation to the possible existence of some [x] as it is", what is abstract and what exists in the following identities ?

A=A :: Cloud=Cloud :: Knowledge=Knowledge :: 9bananas=2apples :: Virtue=Wisdom

It's unfortunate that the law of identity uses the equation symbol, = — jgill

I would think that = is appropriate for equivalence in physics for symbols or quantities with mixed implicit or explicit units attached, as in E=mc^2. In some computer languages = might stand for arbitrary assignment of value to a variable, like x=3. Clearly, neither is an identity in either mathematical or philosophical meaning. ≡ might be too strict for philosophy?

Well said and I agree with you.

Let me just point to a clearly written CNN article on COVID mutations which may not be entirely exhaustive but is still relevant to what we're discussing.

... imagine this not as a single door into a room, but 10 different doors. There will be nine other keys that will be able to get you into that room." That’s because people usually make more than one type of antibody against a virus. …
All viruses mutate, or drift. Some do so more than others. Influenza "drifts" constantly, forcing annual changes to the vaccine mixes used to fight it, while any changes seen to measles have not affected how well the vaccine works. Scientists hope coronavirus is more like measles than influenza. ...
If we could magically get 60-70% of the population vaccinated tomorrow, we wouldn’t have to worry about drift because the virus would pretty much go extinct.

Plato, I think, takes identity "all the way" — Garth

Plato was concerned with the identity of the transcendent soul, the identity of Forms in relation to particulars, and the identity of abstract parts with the whole. Accidents, essence, object are not in Plato.

it is quite controversial to place science within empiricism — Garth

If there were any connection, it would be the other way around.
Philosophical empiricism arose in response to the challenge presented by theoretical mathematical science to classical philosophy. Empirical science is not an outgrowth of philosophy, it has its own roots in observation of nature.
Philosophical empiricism is hardly reflective of empirical science, that being perhaps the central problem of philosophy of science.

I am amazed that a grand master can stroll around in a hall and play simultaneous games against say 50 opponents. She seldom pauses to think and hardly ever stops to calculate.
What is the kind of thought process that can give away a 1:50 advantage in response time to reasonably decent players?

mathematical curves are only followed by natural phenomenon to some approximation over some finite time; nothing "grows exponentially" but nothing grows "linearly", or "logistically" either, other than to some descriptively useful approximation — boethius

No doubt, mathematical models are projections built upon other numbers, data which originally had reasonable connection to the real world at the time these were collected. But things can change.

For Covid, I found a description for mutations history in Nature, Sep.2020

Viruses that encode their genome in RNA, such as SARS-CoV-2, HIV and influenza, tend to pick up mutations quickly as they are copied inside their hosts ... But ... coronaviruses change more slowly than most other RNA viruses, ... a rate of change about half that of influenza and one-quarter that of HIV ...
Before March — when much of the continent went into lockdown — both unmutated ‘D’ viruses and mutated ‘G’ viruses were present, with D viruses prevalent ... In March, G viruses rose in frequency across the continent, and by April they were dominant ...
But natural selection in favour of G viruses isn’t the only, or even the most likely, explanation for this pattern.

Mutations are random and all viable versions of the virus will continue to spread into the foreseeable future. If one mutation spreads faster then it will become statistically 'dominant' but the others are still around. For comparison, influenza doesn't go away and flu vaccines are updated and re-administered each year.

The evidence the strain is more infectious is that it displaces the previously dominant strain — boethius

Statistically, perhaps. 50% of one, 30% of another, and 20% more undiscovered. We have lots of black birds, some years more of one kind then in other years more of some other kind. They just come and go due to unknown circumstances, like someone feeding them corn or dry cat food a mile away.

Shannon's "information theory" does not deal with "information" at all, as we commonly use the word. If we do not recognize this, and the ambiguity which arises, between the common use, and the use within the theory, we might inadvertently equivocate and think that the theory deals with "information" as what is referred to when we commonly use the word to refer to what is inherent within a message. — Metaphysician Undercover

This ambiguity of the word information needs to be emphasized in trying to grasp what Shannon's theory says and what it does not say. Shannon was talking about transmission of data over a neutral but imperfect channel not what that data means to a sender or to a receiver.

Think of a semaphore that sends a signal between two mountain tops. The issue is how much of signal content is mislaid in theory over years of use.

In a more complicated case perhaps the channel or method of transmission is not neutral. In the verbal transmission of rumors some content is lost, embellished, and added as the content is passed from person to person. Here, content is not the letters, words, or sentences but a human intelligible meaning with both cognitive and emotional elements.

Philosophically, a mathematical model is an ultra-materialist quasi-concrete representation of the world. One's happiness with the model reflects one's philosophical world dispositions. Inseparably, precision of representation is accompanied by proportional loss of global understanding of the real world.

:flower: Merry Christmas to all you old humbugs :sparkle: :hearts:

... but we still assume it has some basis in reality — TiredThinker

We would have to assume that I am real so is my experience in flowing continuous time. But I am not so sure about other people whose experience is obviously different from mine and from one another therefore cannot be absolute or even just objective.

Just as a finite number of letters could conceivably be used to create an infinite number of sentences — NOS4A2

But for the majority of cases the mind uses a different model more like pictograms, rather than letters and rules of grammar for the minority of rational thought.

Well, our days are full of slop that isn't worth remembering anyway, so there's that. The upside of that is that since our brain neurons last a lifetime, the vast majority of them are on the job for life. — Bitter Crank

Since you seem to agree with the aviary model for long-term memory with very old birds sitting on their perches, you will need a positive explanation not only for the loose haystack memories but also for forgetting over time, and for the methods of associative recall. Not that I have any of these, but it becomes an issue eventually when we want organized or creative thought.

If the brain was a philosophical aviary then that argument would hold for any number of birds. But the brain is a biological organ with cells that die and are replaced by new cells each day. Analogously, as if new birds were placed in the aviary each day. It's a miracle we remember anything.

Kind of a crap analogy though imo. — ToothyMaw

That's partially the point, a simple crap analogy is the place to start. A car and a plane are extremely similar from a systems perspective, cut off the wings and there's a car. When taken apart, the parts will reveal themselves to be very complex. Materials, designed shapes, machining, tolerances, the way the parts must fit to create functioning subsystems are the work of 500 years of culturally acquired cumulative knowledge and technology. Even if it is an exact copy of the car, it will never work as well as an original because you are lacking a lot of the undocumented educated intuition of the original engineers..

Natural systems are vastly more complex than this because we are not familiar with 99% with what went into their construction.

It is funny how we live on, telling our stories on our stage like green idiots, but what else could we do? We are not the greater themes that guide our movements, we are those movements. Our actions are embedded in a process of development that guides us in all ways by telling us the ways to be guided, but has nothing to do with what am I doing now, I am a self guiding process towards ends I am sensitive to (thank you, dear myth and dear light) but cannot comprehend. — fdrake

Imagine having a car and wanting to build a plane out of the car parts. If you take the car apart how will that help you in your project? why?

I think this friend of mine is using Quantum theory as some sort of metaphor he can jam into philosophy. — Brett

Well then I have to agree with your friend 110% or more. Although nothing is nothing like being the two being categorically distinct.

"nothing and the vacuum. They are just fundamentally different concepts that we are trying to blend into one." — magritte
Do you mean they are onto something or trying to make the impossible happen? — Brett

I'll take it from the top,

A friend of mine is trying to explain his theory of “nothing” through quantum mechanics. My feeling is that the very nature of quantum mechanics precludes it from doing this and that we can only approach it through philosophy. — Brett

I agree with you that 'nothing' can only be discussed sensibly in philosophy. Something like the vacuum is not properly part of the philosophical lexicon, OTOH it is also the case that quantum mechanics only encompasses its own mathematical-physics constructs and thus 'explaining' the philosophical concept 'nothing' is not within its scope.

Nothing has many possible meanings. Here I take it to mean universal nothing which is the absence of the conceivable Universe, where conceivable includes anything physicists can conceive and more. The problem is the more part. Philosophically universal nothing really means nothing, nothing at all.

But even looking at the vacuum there is a problem. The vacuum cannot be physically empty, cannot be physically the equivalent of nothing. There is a deep difference between philosophy and QM here. Philosophers are always searching for some underlying substance, material or otherwise. Physically the Universe consists entirely of various forms of potential energy which has no philosophical existence.

This is a highly technical subject, seriously, if you can't even be bothered to provide citations there's not much point in commenting. — Isaac

You have it backwards. Science doesn't work your way.

Citations can always be cherry picked from diverse sources to support just about anything, which is what you are doing for your reckoning against other people's reckoning. It's still pure speculation either way.

What matters in science is consensus of experts in a particular specialty. What really matters is accepted secondary sources, like reviews and textbooks. For the current virus there aren't any of those yet, so even experts cannot tell us the answers to some of our questions !

firstly, that a rushed vaccine based on new technology may be either falsely effective, have unexpected side effects ..., or too expensive to help poorer countries.
And secondly that a huge proportion of the deaths are in poor communities coupled with poor healthcare services. Investing in core service provision and community healthcare is a far more efficient as it helps not only this pandemic, but also future ones. — Isaac

Firstly, These are legitimate concerns but that's not how the process works. Effectiveness is established in the labs in thousands of test tubes by mass laboratory techniques. Before they ever take a vaccine outside the lab effectiveness is already solidly established.
Biological testing with live animals and humans is different. This is where side effects, persistence, and other unknowns are expected to show up before a vaccine goes for approval.
The vaccines are effective if they say so, but unknown side effects may not show up in the human trials or be known for years or decades. This is partially unknowable, even in theory.

Secondly, Here you are just pushing a political agenda that is completely unrelated to and is ignored by viruses and vaccines. Viruses do not attack individuals or communities or the poor. Viruses attack the entire extent of the human genome anywhere and everywhere even in the most remote regions of Earth, sooner or later. There is no escape. The choice is whether to be infected by the virus or by the vaccine, with no exceptions.

Poverty only comes into play in the speed of the spread of the virus. Poor people are less able to hide to postpone infection because they have to be out there to make enough for food for their families, which makes them more exposed to early unprotected infection. Once infected the virus runs its course and the poor suffer the sometimes very serious side effects of the virus but otherwise gain some immunity, but see below.

Two more factors might be the availability of rapid and accurate testing and reporting with medical details, and...and that we might not be just talking about the virus but a family of very similar mutating cluster that should probably survive most of the current vaccines — magritte

And it begins, see news from the UK.

theory of “nothing” through quantum mechanics. My feeling is that the very nature of quantum mechanics precludes it from doing this and that we can only approach it through philosophy. — Brett

fields themselves. They exist as immaterial mathematical statistical relationship patterns, that tend to organize matter into certain physical patterns — Gnomon

Mathematical patterns are hypothetical after the fact descriptions. How could they organize anything else but other numbers? Similarly, physical patterns are hypothetical and arise from the minds of physicists. But matter is something we feel, touch, smell, taste with our material senses. The same problem seeps into the problem of nothing and the vacuum. They are just fundamentally different concepts that we are trying to blend into one.

Do you know of any philosophers who espouse(d) OntPlu? — Daemon

Do you know of any philosophers who deny ontological pluralism? No abstracts, no numbers?

Antirealism is not a competing religion. There are different types realism each of which can be affirmed by that type of realist and denied by the corresponding antirealist. For example,

our perception doesn’t literally have to be “real” even though it’s based on a real outside world — Michael McMahon

those represent two different types of possible realism, either perception is real or the outside world is real, and an antirealist can deny either one or both, all will prove to be philosophically valid though incommensurate, and each of these can be scientifically useful in some applications. Then there is this,

Feminist postmodernism rejects traditional conceptions of universal or absolute objectivity and truth — Michael McMahon

reads as though they accept some objectivity such as their own views being consistent, but not "traditional" absolute objectivity and truth by correspondence.

Beginners are taught objective forehand, backhand, and serving grips for tennis shots. Advanced players extend their repertoire to a half-dozen or more that then they can objectively discuss. But pros are antirealists, they can and will use any grip for any shot depending of what they are trying to accomplish with the results being magical or circus shots as seen by a knowledgeable spectator.

Seems to me that much of this discussion is based on a misapprehension of what antirealism means. — Banno
What I’m trying to say is that our perception doesn’t literally have to be “real” even though it’s based on a real outside world. — Michael McMahon

When someone takes you seriously enough to critique what you say you should not just flippantly repeat what you're trying to say. Assume that the critique is valid and see where you went wrong. Else forget philosophy and take up tennis or something.

The best introduction available online might be
Daniel Chandler's Semiotics for Beginners

From my own perspective, I am intrigued by the philosophical differences between the approaches of Saussure and Peirce. Is meaning a fleeting thought or an object to be examined? Is information more than the vehicle for meaning?

Hollywood movies are usually written to evoke emotional responses from viewers, the stronger the better. Visual effects such as scenery, action as part of a story, and the looks and personality of the actors imply some moral or existential message then follow from the sum total of the two hours of imaginary life experience gained. Or maybe is it just entertainment without meaning?

A picture is worth a thousand words. When I attempt to describe a quite familiar picture or just any picture I happen to come across this old proverb proves to be convincing. Looking at it the other way isn't simple either. It might be quite a challenge to illustrate this paragraph so that any meaning can somehow be passed on to a non-English speaker.

One issue is whether there is any meaning in the passage itself without the contributions of a writer and a reader. Is there a message at all if the reader is naive to the subject and the language employed? A writer might or might not have intended to convey a message to specific or all readers. Am I just spinning meaningless words?

Information in the digital world is alluringly concrete, manageable, and purposeful, for computers that know how to write and read it, yet also for human purposes at a higher level of meaning. It would appear then that information and meaning are not simple, and I am correct in being confused. Clearly the keys I press somehow create meaning that reach your mind with the help of or perhaps in spite of the hidden electronic information that made it possible.

Moderna will soon begin testing its vaccine in 3,000 teens age 12-17. ...The study is set to finish in June 2022 ...it’s normal that studies are conducted first in adults, then older children and teens down to young kids....hopeful that by the school term of 2021 … we will certainly have a vaccine I think that we could administer to children over 12 ...Moderna is currently awaiting emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its mRNA vaccine that could be distributed shortly. ...Moderna said it expects to have 20 million doses available in the U.S. by the end of 2020 and between 100 million and 125 million doses available globally in the first quarter of 2021. -- Boston Herald

I take it that Pfizer has claimed that they have already tested 12-17 year olds?

I understand that medical-pharmaceutical research is complex and problematic. Therefore, it would stand to reason that it cannot be held to the same rigorous statistical standards as most other sciences where the variables can be minimized before data is collected for statistical analysis. Then all pharmaceuticals developed and released to the public carry relatively high risk to be counterbalanced against vastly greater gain.

The real issue lies in the political pressure and interference coming from the President who treats watchdog agencies like the FDA as worthless bureaucrats. He may well be right about that, I don't know. But public confidence in the process of approvals is eroded if the FDA is threatened and berated.

So you assume it went through all the nursing homes? It's not like the pandemic has gone through the population, which is obvious when you look at the debate around herd immunity and the Swedish-model (or the first adopted UK-policy). — ssu

Those charts are US figures. The US is geographically more spread out, the population is more diverse, and the economic gap between the haves and the have nots is significantly wider. The first wave of the virus only effected the East and West coast which are the hubs of global aviation traffic.

Although in China and Europe the pandemic was under way well ahead of the US, our Leader denied the 'Chinese Hoax' and local politicians, even the political opponents of our Leader, suppressed data collection and medical preparedness efforts. Testing for the virus was not generally available and the hospitals were ill prepared for the first influx of intensive medical emergencies.

By the second wave, a different wider range of patients appeared to be effected. These were the poorer service workers who were forced by the necessities of keeping their families fed to work in supermarkets, small stores, and delivery of goods to those who have shifted to work from home, or can otherwise afford to stay at home in isolation.

The third wave primarily effects, at least to date, the Trumpist Midland and Southern states who have rallied, partied, and mocked the leftist commie facemask-wearing fools.

Just looking at the graphs, The death statistics are much more certain, more reliable, more real than what's reported by biased authorities which should only be used in an indictment. The hospital ICU stats are the ones that I would most like to see for further pandemic speculation.

It should be remembered that there are possibly social or racial differences in addition to socio-economic status on the chronology of the pandemic. All those in isolation will eventually be immunized or become victims as well, but later when the hospitals have become more adept at avoiding deaths.

Two more factors might be the availability of rapid and accurate testing and reporting with medical details, and, and that we might not be just talking about the virus but a family of very similar mutating cluster that should probably survive most of the current vaccines, depending on the vaccines method of attacking their target model.

We can assume that there has to be at least similar if not larger amount of infections at the spring as now. — ssu

Maybe not. The charts are too complicated to be simply summarized like that. The data included is hidden from view, and the statistics are not uniform from beginning to end but reflect different portions of the potential population. We see three waves.The initial wave culled the most vulnerable portion of the population both from the point of view of first quickly finding those who were open to getting infected and those with the highest mortality rate by age and sex. The nursing home patients.

why, in this wonderful scientific age, are we all so badly educated — unenlightened

Science has become more and more compartmentalized and specialized to a degree that the language of science is not easily accessible or comprehensible to the otherwise generally well educated. Even scientists need to consult other specialists when they stray out of their own area of expertise. The tower of Babel is upon us.

I'm a metaphysical pluralist in the strongest sense. And I don't mean the usual metaontology confused synonymously with metaphysics, where the debate is often about the existence of things such as fictional beings or abstract entities or numbers.

Philosophy of philosophy is meta-philosophy which could branch out to the topics of meta-metaphysics meta-ontology meta-epistemology meta-ethics meta-aesthetics, where one or more of these might make sense to some philosophers but not to others.

modern physics has rendered traditional materialism obsolete — Marchesk

Physics, matter, physicalism, and materialism belong to entirely distinct logical universes that do not intersect. Obsolete is a value judgment coming from personal intuitions that in this case cannot possibly be applicable to independent world systems. None of them can ever be refuted or obsoleted either logically or empirically.

Aristotle divided his encyclopedia into two volumes based on fundamental categories of human knowledge : discussion of objective substances (Matter, physical) and subjective non-substances (Form, mental). “Aristotle famously contends that every physical object is a compound of matter and form.” A technical term for this ancient doctrine is Hylomorphism (matter + design). — Gnomon

The student of Aristotle usually begins with the Categories; and the first thing that strikes him is the author’s unconsciousness of any distinction between grammar and metaphysics, between modes of signifying and modes of being. When he comes to the metaphysical books, he finds that this is not so much an oversight as an assumed axiom — C.S. Peirce

Basic algebra tells you that X can take on any value including Y or Z. Point is that it seemed like something. I later call it "red" or "pain" or whatever. — khaled

You aren't entitled to just call something pain any more than calling something duh.

the fundamental issue, the basic problem, whatever, is that all modern science - big statement! - relies on objectification. ... But mind is not an object. — Wayfarer

:100:
Which is why social sciences are so difficult. There are very few convenient object names, like apple, to anchor isolated changing processes.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness — Wayfarer

And also the other way around. Kant have either one without the other.

infants as young as 2 months show strong object recognition in this primary mid-level system, but not until 18-24 months do they have an equivalent grasp of object recognition in the higher system.
So higher level it might first go... hidden state properties > some constrained model space > cultural/biological modelling process > object christening — Isaac

A 2-month old is a different animal from an 18-24 month old. Adding another circle to the model can't do justice to the phenomenon or to the statistics. For a moment, consider comparative psychology of infants, apes, cats. Apes and cats are comparatively smarter than infants at the earliest stages. If you can agree even to a degree then how could that be?