How can You convince someone, who thinks that philosophy is just idle talk, that at least not all of this kind is mere empty stream of words? — Pez

Demonstrate the social ninjitsu skills that come from long involvement with philosophical arguments?

ChatGPT has adopted the philosophical approach. Everything seems factual and devoid of evaluation, at least until the conclusion that "belief in the existence of the world is generally regarded as a foundational assumption of human cognition and inquiry, underlying our understanding of the natural world and our place within it," for which no support is provided. — Gary Venter

Do you think the statement is lacking in support? I would think randomly polling people on the question would show general agreement with ChatGPT.

Both, I guess. The fallacy of composition is to assume that because a certain type/element of thought is linguistic, that all aspects of it must be — e.g., if there are things we like about a piece of music or art that we can't put into words, this je ne sais quoi isn't contained in "thought." — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's an interesting way of looking at it. It reminds me of recent discussions on TPF, of variation in the extent to which people experience an inner monolog. I wonder if there is much correlation between the degree to which people experience an inner monolog, and a tendency to categorize things that cannot be put into words, as other than thought.

I'm not at all sure what you said there. I don't know what a "physical reference" might be... — Banno

By a physical reference I mean a physical system used in comparing a second tier reference standard to the current definition of a physical unit (e.g. metre). The physical reference for a metre is something that has changed over time.

The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's polar circumference is approximately 40000 km.

In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar, the bar used was changed in 1889, and in 1960 the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length. From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. After the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, this definition was rephrased to include the definition of a second in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs. This series of amendments did not alter the size of the metre significantly – today Earth's polar circumference measures 40007.863 km, a change of 0.022% from the original value of exactly 40000 km, which also includes improvements in the accuracy of measuring the circumference.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre

...nor an "actual metre". — Banno

I wasn't suggesting that you had a concept of an "actual metre". As I said, "I assume you aren't suggesting there is such a thing as an actual metre, aside from there being such a consensus on how "metre" is defined." I suppose I was mostly concerned that people might misinterpret you saying "...no more a fact than the length of the standard metre was 1m." as suggesting there is a fact of what an actual metre is, apart from the human consensus.

Are you aware of the difference in opinion between Wittgenstein and Kripke?

A thread on its own. Or a career. — Banno

Not very aware.

I have a career very much involved with metrology (though not metres specifically). I suppose I'm inclined to get pedantic on the subject.

I am questioning the idea of anything being perfect. I am saying that it could be impossible, or simply a made up concept, since there is no evidence of it. If this is the case, according to your definition, goodness also does not exist. Now, something is clearly amiss here. This would suggest that there is something wrong with your definition. — Beverley

:up:

Language as the defining aspect of thought or mental life appears to be a sort of synecdoche, or maybe a fallacy of composition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fallacy of composition or division? I could see it as a fallacy of division, i.e. 'thought is language all the way down' or "In the beginning was the word." I'm not seeing how a fallacy of composition might be in play, however.

In any case, this is a very interesting topic to me personally. I'd love to see an OP where you delve into the topic further.

Can you see an analogy with the idea of the conservation of energy? — Janus

I'm not seeing any very good analogy.

I'm suggesting that perhaps the conservation of energy is no more a fact than the length of the standard metre was 1m. — Banno

From my perspective the standard metre is an agreed upon physical reference as to what distance is to be considered 1m. It seems to me the point of a standard metre is that a bunch of people agree to use it as the definition of a metre, until something better comes along. I assume you aren't suggesting there is such a thing as an actual metre, aside from there being such a consensus on how "metre" is defined.

With science we force the object to present more of itself than it wants to. — Jamal

So a connotation of animism? :wink:

Maybe you can help Janus? Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious. — Jamal

Something obvious to me is how much is not being talked about with a statement like "Things we perceive present themselves to us." There are a lot of details that might be understood, that are seemingly brushed under the rug with such a statement.

I'd be curious as to what connotations "present" has in this context and how those connotations might contrast with a scientific view on the matter.

Well, another problem would be that human experts tend to be continually learning, so the system you describe would seem to inevitably lag behind human expertise. So unless the system is going to have a perceptual system, enabling it to become the world's leading expert at everything, how can it avoid lagging behind human experts?

My goal is (1) to make Boolean True(x) computable. (2) This requires that a machine has an understanding of the world at least equal to the best human experts in every field. — PL Olcott

Sounds like a wildly unrealistic goal to me.

Currently humans do not have as much as a good guess between truth and well crafted lies. — PL Olcott

I'd have to say that there is a lot of variation from human to human and subject to subject.

The database that I referred to has always been the the set of general knowledge of the current actual world that can be expressed using language. For example it is true that "cats are animals" thus disagreement is simply incorrect. — PL Olcott

Why is what is "general knowledge" so important? Typically, when I am talking about sailboats, I am talking with fellow sailors who understand "cat" is short for catamaran, and what a cat looks like:

For, "cats are a type of sailboat" could no doubt be defined as an "analytical truth," by fiat and entered into a database, but this would not make it true that cats are a type of sailboat. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Cats are my favorite kind of sailboat, because they are fast.

Perhaps Kant can help us? Or phenomenology? What methodology do you think you have access to that can answer the above and determine what direction this enquiry should take? Or do you think straightforward empiricism can resolve this matter? — Tom Storm

I don't think our science is so incomplete that we can't determine that there are regularities in nature independent of our cognitive faculties. For example, I routinely capture highly regular sequences of events using an oscilloscope, where the time intervals between events are measured in microseconds or nanoseconds. I have no reason to think that my cognitive faculties are capable of distinguishing events at such temporal resolutions, let alone impose such regularity on the events.

I don't see any sensible of interpreting such high speed events as products of my mind.

However, if we're going to amend these accounts of words to incorporate useful delineations, then we 'perceive' directly the representations which we are 'seeing' indirectly, — AmadeusD

I would think the representation is some collection of neurons in our brains firing with some relationship to a brainwave phase. However, I don't think it makes sense to say that "I see such a representation." At best I only vaguely imagine such a representation.

If the Direct Realist suggests that the dot "is" Mars, this reintroduces the problem of identity, in that how can a 1mm diameter dot in a person's visual field "be" a 6,794km diameter planet? — RussellA

Saying "I see Mars" is in effect saying that the photons which cause me to recognize that I am seeing Mars were reflected by Mars.

I'm afraid that it is rather mystifying to me, that someone capable of using the Internet, doesn't understand why an object the size of Mars at the distance of Mars would have the visual appearance that it does.

But should laws not refer to something? Law itself being nature sounds, for me at least, a bit inconceivable. — Pez

Is it inconceivable that there are naturally occurring negatively charged particles called electrons and positively charged particles caller protons that are naturally attracted to each other? Or is it more conceivable that electrons and protons don't actually have such properties, and are just following laws?

Quantum physicist Karen Barad has produced a model
of interaffecting matter that was inspired by the double
slit experiments.

Phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without pre-existing relata... — Joshs

Does Barad claim a scientific justification for the claim?

Under your criterial demand the only "direct link" would be if the object was the experience. If the object is separate from the experience of it, then you would presumably say there is a gulf between them, and that this gulf justifies saying we do not experience objects directly. As others point out it all comes down to what is meant by "direct". I have long thought that experience can be thought about as direct or indirect, depending on the definitions and framing. So, the whole argument is undecidable in any absolute sense and is thus really a non-starter, another confusing artefact of thinking dualistically. — Janus

Very well said.

Non-Magical Intuition :
Intuition is a form of knowledge that appears in consciousness without obvious deliberation. It is not magical but rather a faculty in which hunches are generated by the unconscious mind rapidly sifting through past experience and cumulative knowledge.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/intuition — Gnomon

Did you read the last paragraph?

It is possible to hone your powers of intuition. To some degree, intuition stems from expertise, which relies on tacit knowledge. Strengthening intuition requires making use of feedback, comparing the real-life outcomes of situations with the intuitive decisions you made. Even so, being highly intuitive in one domain of experience doesn’t guarantee reliability in every area.

:up:

:up:

Can there be a notion of progress in ethical or scientific understanding that doesnt need to rely on a true-false binary? — Joshs

In the case of scientific understanding, a spectrum from naive to well informed to me seems more relevant than a true false binary.

Can we make progress in understanding and navigating the world by continually revising this scheme, without having to declare the earlier versions ‘false’? — Joshs

Along the same lines, declaring the earlier versions naive seems more descriptive of the situation than false.

Yup. From what we have seen of quantum fluctuations, we know that's a possibility, given enough time? — Patterner

I'm not sure how we could say we know that.

I'm then questioning his suggestion that we can dismiss the conclusion that we are most likely Boltzmann brains a priori, as that then entails that we can dismiss some empirically well-supported scientific model a priori. For example, as per RogueAI's comment above, one supposed solution is to dismiss (4) a priori. Is that really rational? — Michael

First off, I don't know what you might be referring to with "really rational". As members of a social primate species go, (a social primate species which only began to develop literacy ~5500 years ago) I'd say Carroll is one of the more rational ones.

You see, there is empirical evidence we can intersubjectively consider, for a wide variety of scientific matters outside of physics. Carroll is certainly not ignorant of sciences outside of physics. It seems likely Carroll is inclined to consider The Big Picture.

It looks like you two are talking about the same thing. How many virtual particles have been observed in the same place at the same time? Because quantum fluctuations need to account for something like 1.4 x 10^26 atoms (I don't know how many particles that is) coming into existence all at the same time in the space that takes up a brain in order to make a Boltzman Brain. Not just that number, of course, but also the variety. — Patterner

:up:

And not just the number and variety but also the complexity of the arrangement.

As in, "wouldn't it be nice if we could avoid that circularity?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Consider the degree to which people interact with the the world, including each other, avoiding circularity seems rather unrealistic. Just try to comprehend the feedback loops involved in the interactions of two good friends over a period of years, and perhaps the naivete of avoiding circularity will be obvious.

For me, as an electrical engineer, dealing with loopy causality is routine. So I can understand this not being so obvious to others. However to me the OP issues seem more a matter of trying to fit the complexity of the situation into an overly simplistic box.

Perhaps that's why I don't see the problems that you see. The problems you point out are where supervenience fails to explain something, or fails to rule out things that would be *bad* explanations. I don't see that as a problem, because I have much smaller ambitions for what supervenience is supposed to be. — flannel jesus

:up:

It’s tantamount to sorcery. — NOS4A2

I personally think, that in your specific case, it may be best to leave you thinking so.

This also seems to rely on disembodied cognition as a logical possibility. Logical possibility alone does not warrant belief/assent. — creativesoul

Boltzmann brains don't involve disembodied cognition. Cognition embodied much differently than ours for the most part, but not disembodied.

So, it seems to be exactly what I said above. The best evidence supports (1)-(4), and (7) follows. And his argument is that because (7) is just silly, we must reject (1), (2), (3), and/or (4) despite the evidence in their favour. It's a conceded dogma. — Michael

Did you read the full paper? If so, do you think that you followed Carroll's reasoning well?

I'm asking if that's rational. — Michael

It would be a straw man to claim that your argument and psychologizing stand in for Carroll's perspective.

Conclusion
We therefore conclude that the right strategy is to reject cosmological models that would be
dominated by Boltzmann Brains (or at least Boltzmann Observers among those who have
data just like ours), not because we have empirical evidence against them, but because they
are cognitively unstable and therefore self-undermining and unworthy of serious consideration. If we construct a model such as ΛCDM or a particular instantiation of the inflationary multiverse that seems to lead us into such a situation, our job as cosmologists is to modify it until this problem is solved, or search for a better theory. This is very useful guidance when it comes to the difficult task of building theories that describe the universe as a whole.
Fortunately, the criterion that random fluctuations dominate the fraction of observers in
a given cosmological model might not be as difficult to evade as might be naively expected, if Hilbert space is infinite-dimensional and local de Sitter phases settle into a truly stationary
vacuum state, free of dynamical Boltzmann fluctuations. That conclusion depends sensitively on how one interprets what happens inside the quantum state, an issue that is unfortunately murky in the current state of the art. If any were needed, this gives further impetus to the difficult task of reconciling the foundations of quantum mechanics and cosmology. [Emphasis added.]

Is there something that you disagree with in Carroll's conclusion?

Nah, it's a matter of my understanding of the strength of the evidence.
— wonderer1

So you're a cosmologist who understands the sigma level of each of (1), (2), (3), and (4)? I wasn't aware. — Michael

No, but just think about it. To have strong empirical evidence of BBs fluctuating into existence would require gathering evidence from the future, and lots of it. I'm fairly confident that physicists aren't doing so. This is a matter of modeling based on theories which have important matters unresolved, not a matter of observations of the proposed processes (BBs) occuring.

Do you think you might have a naive faith in the reliability of modelling based on incomplete scientific understanding?

You're dismissing some outcome on purely theoretical grounds irrespective of the strength of its evidence. — Michael

Nah, it's a matter of my understanding of the strength of the evidence.

You're claiming that the "absurdity" of (7) is sufficient justification to reject the evidence that suggests that (1), (2), (3), and/or (4) is true. — Michael

No. I am claiming 1-4 are insufficiently justified given the present state of scientific knowledge and my ability to distinguish well evidenced science from highly speculative science.

My view is along the lines of Sean Carroll's. (Again, from The Big Picture.)

It makes sense, as Wittgenstein would say, to apportion the overwhelming majority of our credence to the possibility that the world we see is real, and functions pretty much as we see it. Naturally, we are always willing to update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. If there comes a clear night, when the stars in the sky rearrange themselves to say, “I AM YOUR PROGRAMMER. HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR SIMULATION SO FAR?” we can shift our credences appropriately.

The argument here provides a more precise account: either (7) is true or at least one of (1)-(4) is false. — Michael

Whether (1) is true is unknown. As far as I know, the universe as we know it might end with a false vacuum decay tomorrow.

It's hasn't been clear to me that when you say, "or our science is incorrect", that you recognize the relativity of incorrectness.

Which is why, as I said earlier, either we are most likely Boltzmann brains or our science is incorrect. — Michael

Are you familiar with The Relativity of Wrong?

How so? There will be Boltzmann brains that have the same observations as ordinary observers; and in fact, there will be significantly (infinitely?) more Boltzmann brains that have those same observations as ordinary observers. — Michael

Okay, show your math.