See Aristotle's Revenge, Edward Feser. — Wayfarer

Nice to see an appropriately disparaging review of Feser. :up:

If the resistance is infinite, there is no voltage, or potential. — frank

I'd say something more like "infinite resistance" is kind of meaningless in absolute terms, and in practical terms "infinite resistance" is used to indicate something along the lines of "such a high resistance that I can ignore it".

I wouldn't say there is no voltage between the terminals though. The voltage differential between the terminals of a battery is there regardless of whether there is any current flow from the positive terminal to the negative terminal. To say otherwise would be analogous to saying there is no gravity well, unless something is falling into it. I'm not seeing any good reason to look at things that way.

That's one way to address the problem. There are others. — frank

What is your favorite?

Say you have a 12V battery with infinite resistance across the terminals. What's the current? If you say zero, then Ohms Law (which relates potential to kinetic) will tell you that you've multiplied zero times infinity and ended up with 12. — frank

Perhaps better to think of it as "Ohm's rule of thumb". It is not a fundamental physical law, but more of a useful way of looking at emergent properties in some cases.

Well, the concept of potential is used all the time in practical matters, e.g. the counterfactual analysis that makes up a great bulk of the work done in the sciences, engineering problems, "potential energy," potential growth in economics, attracting "potential mates" in biology, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say the word "potential" used in such cases is useful way of talking about emergent properties, but drops out when looking at the subvenient details. For example, the potential energy of a bowling ball on a shelf...

PEgrav = m • g • h

...doesnt have a potency term, and adding a potency term would seem like a matter of unneeded overdetermination.

It's really more in the realm of metaphysics or something like the amorphous "metaphysics of science" that the prohibition on talking about potentialities seems to hold. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd think it is because (regardless of the usefulness of "potential" when discussing things in terms of emergent properties) there is no need for "potency" when things are considered at more fundamental levels.

being good modern empiricists, we have no need for potency. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps the "have no need" is the key factor rathet than observability?

I'm no mathmatician, but it seems to me that in a practical sense we need at least the mathematical ideas of infinity and continuums. I'm not seeing a similar need for potency.

Scientists so far are unable to reproduce experimentally how this occurred however I’m not basing my argument around this non-reproducibility... — kindred

Scientists don't have labs the size of the universe or grants lasting billions of years. In any case, supposing scientists did find a highly detailed and plausible account by which abiognesis might have occurred on Earth, I don't know how it could be shown that such an account is the correct account.

I’m making the rather bold claim that intelligence is an inherent part of nature whether this is existed just post big bang is debatable and that in fact it has existed before. — kindred

Do you think intelligence can exist sans an infomation processing substrate for intelligence to supervene upon? (E.g. a brain.)

If so, why?

If not, what would have served as such an information processing substrate before the big bang? (BTW, it is questionable whether "before the big bang" meaningfully refers to anything. It may well be similar to "north of the North pole.")

...it must have always been around not just because life and intelligence is special but because the step from inanimate matter to organic life is just to big to have happened by chance alone and would imply a pre-existing intelligence. — kindred

Have you ever studied the evidence for biological evolution, and the rather Rube Goldberg like mechanism that have often resulted from biological evolution? (Consider the perception thread for an example of the consequences of such Rube Goldberg like 'design'.)

In any case, do you have an argument against abiogenesis that amounts to more than an argument from incredulity? Can you show your math as to how you have calculated the probability of abiogenesis occurring anywhere in the universe?

I can't follow any of this ... — 180 Proof

Here's an article on pseudoprofundity that might be more worthwhile.

The is a question of a species needing color because, from the perspective of color fictionalism, color is a fiction. I’m just not sure why a species would adapt to a fictional view of its surroundings. — NOS4A2

I'd think it would make more sense to be dubious towards the color fictionalism theory one has in mind.

Light comes in a spectrum of wavelengths. Objects reflect some of those wavelengths more completely than other wavelengths. Our visual systems are able to capture some of the detail of how white light interacts with objects, and it provides an adaptive advantage that our visual systems do so. However, we might say that our visual systems do so crudely.

We might imagine a species with 'superior' color vision, in which each photoreceptive cell in the retina is a spectrophotometer, and can transmit to the brain lots of high accuracy data about the intensity of each spectral component of the light landing on each photoreceptor. There would be an information overload problem though. Such a species would need much thicker optic nerves than we have, in order to transmit such highly detailed visual information to the brain. Furthermore, the brain of this imagined species would need to be much bigger than ours, in order to make use of all the highly detailed data coming in via those thick optic nerves. Brain is metabolically expensive (and in the case of humans, already verging on too big to pass through a birth canal) so although we can imagine such a species it isn't a plausible outcome of biological evolution.

Instead we have visual systems that allow us to gather a useful amount of data about the optical environment while retaining the ability to run away from things that want to eat our brains.

Why would a species need color? — NOS4A2

There are plenty of species that don't need vision at all. Why is there a question of a species needing color?

There are species that have color vision because for those species it was adaptive to have color vision, and via biological evolution such sensory capacities evolved.

I'm not sure if you read the paper I attached — cherryorchard

My device is wonky about downloading pdfs, so I tried, but gave up. I tried again, and I've had a chance to read it now. Interesting!

A dog cannot know calculus. Can he?! — cherryorchard

More realistic sounding to me is that dogs (and people) use a gaze heuristic..

Instead of thinking of the subject as being passively subjected to a world of activity, therefore producing an effect from that causation, it is much better to think of the agent as actively causing the world, as perceived. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not seeing how the latter is better. It sounds solipsistic to me.

I'd think it better to recognize that neither of those options is very realistic, or the only options.

:up:

Those who see red and green as grey ARE picking between the same apples. — creativesoul

I'm not sure what you are saying here. I'm picturing a scenario where there are multiple different fruit, some of which would be seen as green (unripe) and others as red (ripe), by people with normal color vision. Unripe fruit aren't the same as ripe fruit, so I don't know what you mean by "the same" here.

As an aside, I decided to look up the spectral sensitivity of rod cells (which would be the only functional photoreceptive cells for someone with complete achromatopsia).



Because rod cells have little to no sensitivity to the red part of the spectrum, a red fruit would appear much darker shade of grey than a green fruit, to someone with complete achromatopsia.

Achromatopsia tends to come with other visual problems, so generally probably no.

Although if someone had complete achromatopsia without other visual problems, I suppose there would be special cases where there might be some advantage to achromatopsia. However, there's a lot of visual detail available to those with normal color vision that would not be available to someone with achromatopsia.

For example, is the grey of a ripe tomato distinguishable from the grey of an unripe tomato? I don't know, but it would surely be more difficult than distinguishing a red tomato from a green tomato.

I don't even know what a colourless visual sensation could be, and so I think without colour sensations you'd just be blind. — Michael

People with complete achromatopsia are not blind.

Sadly, there is nothing to prevent a scientist being a bad scientist and even a racist scientist. — Ludwig V

In US academia these days there are internal review boards which proposed research on human subjects must be approved by. My first wife was the the administrator for such a human subjects IRB, so I got to learn a lot about how they work.

The IRB that my wife was administrator for had members from outside academia, including a couple of local clergy. I don't know as much about nonacademic human research subjects review, but I doubt there is as little oversight as you suggest in most scientific research.

You didn't answer my question. Do you want to hear my best guess at what the answer is?

Did ye ken aboot kennings? — Amity

wonderer

Kenning-comprehender

:wink:

I took a Tolkien class in college, and one of the things discussed was Tolkien's work on Beowulf. I can't say I remembered the word "kenning", but I was familiar with such use of language in Old English poetry, and such.

To that end, he [Shannon] ignored the inconsistent variable analog... — Gnomon

Gnonsense. Shannon worked on analog computers before essentially inventing digital logic. His communication theory was very much about communicating uncorrupted digital data through the noisy analog world. So no, he didn't ignore the analog.

What is with your obsessive need to propagate misinformation?

I think the word 'mate' can grate, just like the word 'friend' can offend. Or 'pal' can appal. It's like, man, people trying too hard to be part of a crowd, man. — Amity

:smile:

I think that the notion of causality fails to allow for complex system-wide inputs leading to a particular output. — Tarskian

The notion of causality or simplistic thinking about causality?

To argue that because positions change and therefore psychiatry does not hold knowledge seems to be like the religious fundamentalists who say that science is bunk because science changes its paradigms over time.

Anyway, I'm going to leave this one here since there is no end to a debate like this and it's not really my role to defend psychiatry, which is an imperfect and evolving profession - and I am no expert. I simply know from decades of personal experince that psychiatrists can work scrupulously to provide extremely helpful life saving interventions for people. The profession is generally demonized and poorly understood. Which was my original observation. — Tom Storm

:up:

It makes no difference if you know the molecular analysis of the balls - the causal relation has no more to it than "if and when p, then q will follow". — Ludwig V

Well, I'd think it could only seem so from an awfully 'high level' view, where a lot of the causal detail is coarse grained out of consideration. The causality involved in anything I'm apt to find interesting is a lot more complex than "if and when p, then q will follow". In digital logic terms, that can be implemented with a wire 'from p to q'.

It's pretty deeply engrained into my way of thinking, to see causality as a lot more complex than that.

His discussion is in the "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" Section IV, Part II. — Ludwig V

I just finished reading it, so I have a better understanding of the context in which he was using "powers".

These powers, as Hume keeps emphasizing, are "secret", "hidden". — Ludwig V

It's interesting to consider how much less secret and hidden these days, is the power of bread to nourish. These days if I go buy a loaf of bread many of the bread's nutritive 'secrets' are likely to be listed on the packaging. :smile:

Thanks!

People often forget that he also says that, in spite of the fact that inductive reasoning is deductively invalid, we will continue to act on that basis, but not from reason, from custom or habit. He also says that inductive reasoning is all the proof you will ever get and provides a basis that is "as good as a proof". (In the context of his discussion of miracles, he slips up, or gets over-enthusiastic, and says that induction reasoning (against miracles) is a proof. He excoriates radical scepticism, which he calls "Pyrrhonism" even though he acknowledges that he cannot refute it. He recommends a month in the country as a cure. All he wanted to disprove was the Aristotelian idea of a "power" hidden behind the phenomena. — Ludwig V

[Emphasis added]

I'm not familiar with the Aristotelian idea of a "power" hidden behind the phenomena. However, based on my considerations of neuroscience, calling our subconscious recognition of patterns "a power" doesn't seem inappropriate.

I'd be interested in hearing more about Hume's disagreement with Aristotle, if it isn't too much trouble.

Pleasantly surprised by this. Not what I was expecting in 'Feedback'. — Amity

Yeah, I know that was a bit strange, but at the time I didn't care. Glad to hear the surprise was pleasant.
:smile:

I was thinking that writing that down might help me get out of the mental state I was in. I can't say it worked as I was hoping it might, but you responding with Let It Be was very helpful. I can't think of any song that could have been better for me to have in mind at the time.

It reminded me of other creative writing by TPF members. And, annoyingly, I couldn't find them.
First, you need to sign in to see the category 'The Symposium'... — Amity

Thanks for the pointer. There is much to TPF that I haven't explored.

Thank you very much for sharing and for the advice. I am not american but italian BTW, and here it seems that is generally assumed by the general population that 'autism' is always a very, very serious condition. Even 'Asperger's' is seen as something that must be 'self evident' (at least in hindsight) and 'serious'. Forms of autism that are 'not obvious' seem an impossibility.
Of course, this is different for therapists, neurodiversity movements and so on. I think that here we are '10 years behind' the US, so to speak. — boundless

I don't think things are so different in the US, although for some time now there has been ongoing effort in the US to communicate that there is an autism "spectrum".

Thinking about this prompted me to take a look at the Wikipedia page for Hans Asperger. Not a very flattering picture. I wonder if Hans Asperger's association with Nazism and eugenics impeded the propagation of his insights.

Curiously enough, I manage to both 'fade away' in 'real life' and be very talkative, sociable, humorous and so on. But even when I am talkative/sociable/humorous I still feel 'out of synch' and in fact I do not do that in a 'ordinary' way so to speak. — boundless

I'd be very interested in hearing more, if you are comfortable elaborating.

I know for me there are confounding factors, resulting from being more intellectually inclined than many people I'm around, and having a reticence towards letting people see that aspect of me because of early experience with it being alienating to do so. One thing I like about TPF is that I feel comfortable here using whatever vocabulary comes to mind, rather than feeling like I need to consider whether the person I am talking to will see me as ostentatious if I am not circumspect in my use of language.

I guess I say this to point out that there may be psychological and/or neuropsychological issues involved, and it may not be easy to disentangle them.

Regarding online discussions, yeah, I find generally easier to speak about my interests and make discussions online and I too risk sometimes to spend too much time in them. This is due to both shyness and, so to speak, a lack of motivation to speak about my interests if I am not sure that the other person shares them. — boundless

I can very much relate to this.

I am very sorry for hear that. I hope that you'll be good soon! — boundless

I'm still experiencing occasional PTSD 'aftershocks', but I am much better now. I can't think of anything that has come along so 'out of the blue' and triggered a reaction in me the way that self defense thread did.

If you and I are making use of different language games, then performances like riding a bike , playing chess or waving my hand which appear justified to me will not to you. — Joshs

It seems to me that there is an important distinction between riding a bike and playing chess. I don't need to know anything about another person's language game to understand that a person confidently riding a bike has developed (at least) some intuitive understanding of the physics involved in riding a bike.

Can you show an example of bike riding that I will find unintelligible?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230112-why-some-people-cant-tell-left-from-right# — Joshs

Interesting article. I had never really thought much about this. To me it seemed an odd subject to start a thread about, but after reading that article I can see how my strengths in visuo-spatial cognition likely make it easier for me, than it is for others.

How does habituation work if a person doesn't have any innate sense of leftness vs rightness? — frank

Diligent Hokey Pokey practice?

Why?
— wonderer1

I think it is an important question, but do not think it is for the purpose you suggest. — Fooloso4

I wasn't suggesting, but I was asking Bob, because I was curious as to his purpose. Granted, it might have been better for me to stop at, "Why?"

I will address this generally, whether or not it applies in this case:

I think the reason is the desire to arrive at clear answers where none are available. It is, however, in my opinion, misdirected. Ethics is not a matter of discovering or inventing equations or formulas or exceptionless rules that can be applied to whatever situation that arises. It is, as Plato and Aristotle knew, a matter of phronesis, of good judgment. It is pragmatic, involves compromises, and may not yield agreed upon or totally satisfactory results. The desire for wisdom becomes foolishness when we attempt to abstract from the confusion and messiness of life. — Fooloso4

:100: :up:

Thanks Amity,

I'm going to take a few days off from TPF, but I saw you had responded and I greatly appreciate it.

@Bob Ross @Philosophim

Just a reminder...

But I've got that off my chest now, so carry on. — wonderer1

The space with Michael

I see him in the car carrier on the floor, on the night I rode around with Jeff.
Jeff was looking for Patty, with a rage which was a mystery to me then and now.

Again, I see Michael in the car carrier on the floor,
and that I need to prevent Jeff from drunkenly stepping on Michael as I yank Jeff back.
That image is flickering though,
from Michael,
to Patty in terror,
to what I can see of Jeff as I grab him from behind,
and back to Michael...

I see Michael lying on his back on my lap. Here I can linger for awhile.
Here the view is always worth the pain.
I watch Michael as he looks at my hand,
and somehow I know how to move my fingers in a way that tells him,
"I am here with and for you."

I see Michael in Patty's arms.
He is near a year old.
As Patty approaches though the crowd of strangers Jeff reaches out to take his son from his wife,
but Michael has spotted me,
and reaches out to be held,
by me.

But there is so much emptiness in this space now.
Thirty eight years,
and I only see bits and pieces of one.
Many of the bits are so faded,
amidst those that seem indelible in this space.

Yeah, I was figuring you would be raging. I'm not really seeing much point in responding to that kind of stuff right now.

I appreciate your response. I'm kind of in a dark place right now, and I'm not sure when I'll have the equanimity that I want to have in responding to you, but I will get back to you.