But the larger point is clear. The laws of physics are historically contingent ideas made up by people. — fishfry

Yet in your example with objects falling down, all the historical theories from Aristotle to Einstein say that objects consistently fall down rather than up or in random directions. The later theories give more accurate predictions than earlier ones but from all of them it seems that the phenomenon of objects falling down is highly stable. How do you explain that if not by a stable regularity in the world?

But perhaps by "laws of physics" you mean the "ultimate" laws of physics that our contingent theories are only approximations to. But what makes you think that (1) there are any such things; and (2) even if there are, that they don't change over time? Those are two metaphysical assumptions, not supported by empirical proof. — fishfry

There are obviously persistent regularities in the world that we know have been observed for millennia and have been used to make successful predictions. This doesn't mean that the regularities cannot change but they are obviously highly stable.

Your point of view has a name, Scientific realism. It is a metaphysical stance, not an established fact. — fishfry

Yes but I don't know of a better alternative. Realism explains that our theories work because they correspond to reality while Instrumentalism offers no explanation why our theories work.

I once heard an astrophysicist on NPR claim that in certain conditions at the quantum level it would be possible for an expanding bubble to be created with a different laws of physics. As this bubble expanded it would eat everything in it's path as our current reality couldn't function within that bubble. — Foghorn

Sounds like false vacuum decay, an event very unlikely in our universe, considering it hasn't happened here for billions of years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay

The notion that reality may contain the potential for many different sets of laws is indeed fascinating. — Foghorn

From the perspective of reality as a whole there is no difference between potential and realized laws, as everything that is possible is also realized. But we can use the anthropic principle and maybe also probability over possible worlds to explain some properties of our world.

That is a problem, and because it is immoral to plunder another’s money against his will, it needs fixing in my opinion. — NOS4A2

So far no one has found a better fix than taxes. And it's not completely against your will because taxation is influenced by your voting in elections. You may not like the result but that's what happens when your life is intertwined with the lives of others.

Given for free? When it comes to government, no goods and services are free. I would settle for piecemeal reforms that trend in the direction of liberty. I think a voluntary system where you pay only for the services you needs would suffice. — NOS4A2

The problem with common/public goods and services like street lights, police or army is that anyone can freely benefit from them. It is practically impossible to exclude anyone from their use. That's why they are paid for with taxes. You can't buy them voluntarily like you would buy a car.

So what's your alternative? Your vote overriding those who want taxes? Voluntary payment for goods that are given for free? Anything else is denial of your liberty?

Why would I see democracy as a threat to liberty? — NOS4A2

Because that's how we vote on stuff like taxes, but you see taxation as a denial of your liberty.

Proponents of slavery argued the economy would collapse with abolition. Slavery worked, sure, but it was evil. My point is, the idea that taxation works is not much of an argument when it is premised on the denial of someone’s liberty and the appropriation of the fruits of his labor. — NOS4A2

Well, you can vote for political parties that propose less common goods and less taxes to finance them but I guess you see democracy as a threat to your liberty too. I wonder what alternative would work for you.

Those who want to do so voluntarily. — NOS4A2

Yeah, because economy works when stuff is given for free and people pay for it voluntarily.

It is legal robbery, plain and simple. — NOS4A2

Who should pay for street lights when anybody can freely benefit from them?

As you can see literally the country which does not invest in taxation has the best quality life system ($86.000 per capita is quite a lot and 2nd place HDI). So what is happening here? — javi2541997

On the other hand, Nordic countries have high taxes and their HDIs are in Top 10 or so.

Tax havens attract foreign capital which can boost the country's economy and the government then collects substantial tax revenue even at lower rates. But if every country was a tax haven, the low tax rate would not be an incentive for capital to move, so I guess it wouldn't pay off.

I provided a proof of what you have just flatly denied. — Bartricks

Where? You just asserted, even before your premise 1, that only a mind can create laws of reason. And I say that the law of identity and all logic that follows from it are not creations of a mind but necessary facts because, as I pointed out, there doesn't need to be a mind to ensure that a tree is a tree. You think that without the existence of a mind, a tree could be a dog? That a mind issues an instruction to the tree to be identical to itself? No, the mind can only observe the necessary fact that a tree is a tree and not a dog. A tree that is not a tree just cannot exist.

That doesn't make sense - by premise 4 it has already been established that the imperatives of Reason are the imperatives of a mind. — Bartricks

What do you mean by "imperatives"? If a mind is reasonable, it follows the laws of reason. It doesn't create them.

This has been the problem throughout - I have described the second purpose, central to justice being done. And that purpose is retribution. To harm us for what we have done — Bartricks

But which country has a justice system where the prisoner is denied knowledge of what he has been condemned for, even for the sake of causing him additional suffering by this ignorance? It seems that retributivist intuitions usually involve a desire to let the enemy know why you cause him suffering.

You haven't identified a premise that you deny. — Bartricks

I deny this premise:

4. The mind whose laws are the laws of Reason is omnipotent

I don't think that instructions or commands of a mind constitute the laws of reason, as you put it. The laws of reason are constituted by the necessary law of identity (the principle that every thing is identical to itself), not by a mind. A mind can follow or contemplate these laws but not create them. And a mind itself is bound by the law of identity (and hence by the whole reality that is based on this law) because it must be identical to itself; what would be a mind that is not a mind? Even if you constrained the concept of omnipotence with the laws of reason, it is not clear whether there is an omnipotent conscious mind. You might say that the universe is omnipotent but is it conscious or is it a mind? If it's not a conscious mind, what does omnipotence even mean? Same for omniscience or omnibenevolence.

Again, you're missing the point: it's not supposed to have an edifying affect. — Bartricks

Yeah, I guess I don't see the point in punishing someone by making them forget what they have done wrong unless this also has an edifying effect.

Because the law of non-contradiction is an imperative of reason. So, I've shown that imperatives of Reason entail God. You've said "ah, but imperatives of reason do not entail God, because they're derived from an imperative of reason". That doesn't make sense as an objection to my argument. To put it another way, which premise in my proof do you deny? — Bartricks

I deny that it requires a mind for a tree to be a tree. It seems that a tree can be itself without needing a mind for that. Actually, it seems necessary that every thing be identical to itself, because what else could it be identical to? Minds can only contemplate the consequences of the necessary law of identity but they are not needed to ensure that which is necessary anyway.

And as a good god wouldn't do that unless we deserved it, we can conclude that we deserve the suffering that befalls us here. — Bartricks

See, the suffering of amnesia does seem to have an edifying effect on you. Suffering sucks, it makes you want to know what went wrong and rectify it.

As for your proof of God, I think laws of reason or logic follow from the law of identity or non-contradiction, which means that every thing is what it is and is not what it is not. I don't see why a mind would be needed for that, let alone a conscious mind.

When prisoners were made to do shot drill, it was not to reform them. It was to harm them. It was to fill their day with an arduous but obviously pointless task. — Bartricks

But they knew why they were suffering, didn't they? They knew why they were sent to prison? The hardships in prison could motivate them to repent and avoid doing bad things again. It doesn't make much sense to punish someone by making them forget what they have done wrong, unless the suffering from such an amnesia also has some rehabilitative or edifying purpose.

Do you believe the universe is inherently deterministic or indeterministic (and why)? — Paul S

It seems that structurally, spacetime with the distribution of matter in it is a mathematical structure that exists timelessly, all at once. Does that make the universe deterministic or indeterministic? On one hand, it is deterministic in the sense that everything that will ever happen already exists and cannot change. On the other hand, if QM is right, it is indeterministic in the sense that it is not possible to logically derive a single outcome from initial conditions and laws of physics (laws of physics being regularities in the structure of spacetime and distribution of matter in it), which means that a single future state cannot be predicted from past states. If many-worlds interpretation of QM is right, it is deterministic in the sense that it is possible to predict all future states from past states (since all possible outcomes are realized) but indeterministic in the sense that it is not possible to predict the single future state that we will observe (since all the other possible future states are realized in parallel worlds which cannot interact with each other and we cannot predict in which world we will end up).

No, I don't see why one would expect it to be clear that we are being punished, or clear why. Ignorance of why exactly we are here is plausibly part of the punishment. To be punished one does not have to know 'why' one is being punished. And we - that is, we humans - sometimes punish people in a relevantly similar way. They used to give prisoners pointless tasks to do, for instance, and used to make sure the pointlessness was apparent (shot drill, the treadmill, etc.). Of course, it was not entirely pointless - the point of giving them pointless tasks was that by making them expend energy on something obviously pointless they would be harmed more than if they thought their activities were serving some purpose. Ignorance of why we are here could very plausibly function in the same way. Indeed, it is hard to think of another function for it that wouldn't imply a less than perfect purpose giver. — Bartricks

We usually want prisoners to understand what they have done wrong so that they may learn from their errors. They know why they have been condemned to prison. So it seems more plausible that if we did something wrong before being born on earth then our earthly amnesia has other reasons than punishment; those reasons may serve the purpose of isolation (because we may be less dangerous for the outside world if we don't know about it) or they may serve the purpose of rehabilitation (so we may focus on earthly activities without being distracted or maybe even traumatized by what happened before). Amnesia might also be a natural consequence of moving to earth from another world; that would explain why we don't know where we came from even if we came here for a different purpose than imprisonment (for example to get a job done or enjoy something) or if we just accidentally got lost or stuck here. As if you fell asleep and entered a dream but forgot about the outside world.

And if the Earth was a prison or a rehab facility, wouldn't it be clear why we are being isolated, punished or rehabilitated here? What have we done? I don't remember anything from before my birth.

I didn't say this is a playpen world. I talked about dangerous jobs, hobbies and pleasures.

The purpose of your being here is threefold. A) it is to protect innocent others from you. B) it is to give you your just deserts. C) it is to rehabilitate you. — Bartricks

If we are assuming an intentional purpose of an otherworldly origin, two more possibilities come to mind:

1) The purpose of you being here is to do a job. Some jobs are dangerous, e.g. those of soldiers, relief workers, firefighters, missionaries, explorers...

2) The purpose of you being here is to do something you enjoy. That may include some dangerous jobs as well as dangerous hobbies or pleasures - running the gamut from well intentioned to innocent to perverse to harmful...

And that will be full knowledge, the learning of the singular. — frank

A universal just tells you some of the properties of a particular, namely those that the particular has in common with other particulars of the same kind. So yes, it is incomplete (though maybe still useful) information about the particular. The particular also has other properties, which differentiate it from other particulars of the same kind.

However there is now a century of detailed experimentation which shows that those Laws cannot (yet) be applied to all circumstances to achieve a single outcome. — Gary Enfield

In quantum mechanics it is not possible to derive a single outcome from a given cause but it is possible to derive a single cause from a given outcome. At least that's how I understood Kenosha Kid's claim that QM is backwards deterministic.

Looking back in time, there could be many ways to achieve the result "2" but only one will be correct. — Gary Enfield

Looking back in time, and assuming that known laws of physics are complete and constant in space and time, the current state of our universe can only have a single cause (or single set of causes): Big Bang singularity some 13.8 billion years ago. That's backwards determinism.

Name a quality that can't be/hasn't been viewed as a relation. Nothing springs to mind. — TheMadFool

Red color. How is it a relation? Surely it is related to electromagnetic wavelength of about 650 nm. But what is red about number 650 itself? Or about a wave function?

I'm approaching the matter from the position that once a relation is in place, quantity automatically enters the picture — TheMadFool

Quantity is a relation, it means how many things there are. Or if you meant to say "once a relation is in place, quality automatically enters the picture", I agree. There can be no relations without non-relations (qualities) and there can be no non-relations (qualities) without relations.

Reality consists of relations and non-relations. Quantity is a type of relation and quality might refer to non-relations. Ontic structural realism says that there are only relations - relations between relations between relations etc. I think it's ok for there to be relations between relations but relations would be undefined if they were ultimately not grounded in non-relations. Relations and non-relations are inseparable, so it's no wonder that a quality like color is related to a relation like the wavelength of electromagnetic waves.

So why am I me? — Ori

Do you also wonder why number two is number two instead of, say, number three?

Its a very unique way of defining both effects and causes as "states of the world". A billiard ball's motion as cause for another billiard ball's motion as effect is not "a state of the world at time t" unless one equates the billiard ball's motion at time t to the state of the world at time t - which we don't do in practice. — javra

Yes, in everyday life we just say that one ball caused another ball to move but this couldn't happen without the world in which it happened, which includes space, time, distribution of matter in space and time, and laws of physics (which are regularities in the distribution of matter in space and time). So the whole world caused the second ball to move, but in practice we can predict the causal effect fairly accurately while neglecting much of the world and just considering the two billiard balls, their immediate environment and laws of physics.

But more to the point, to logically derive a cause is to epistemically determine what the cause was. To be clear about what you're saying, are you by the underlined sentence affirming that logically deriving what a particular cause was is - or at least can be - what determines (sets the limits or boundaries of) the given cause's occurrence ontologically? — javra

My unstated assumption was that the world has a logical structure. That just means that every object in the world is what it is and is not what it is not (law of identity or non-contradiction) and every object is a collection of objects (non-composite objects being empty collections). The structure of every such world is described by pure set theory, which is a foundational theory for all mathematics. So, if the world has a logical structure, our logical derivation of causes from effects (or in classical determinism also effects from causes) is a description of the structure of the world. Our description (an epistemic determination) does not ontologically determine causes from effects; it just states how causes are ontologically determined from effects in the structure of the world.

Are you suggesting A) that the outcome/effect can *ontologically* determine its cause(s)? Or only B) that we can at times *epistemologically* determine cause(s) by the outcomes/effects that are observed?

If (A) - if the effect ontologically determines its cause - by what means can the notions of cause and effect retain their cogency? — javra

Given an effect (state of the world at time t) and laws of nature, the cause (state of the world at time t-1) can be *logically* derived. That may include both ontological and epistemic determination. The difference between the cause and the effect is given by the arrow of time (causes precede effects), which is the result of the second law of thermodynamics.

Now do not get me wrong - the use of probabilities in these circumstances applies the best tool that we have available, but by failing to provide an true single outcome, this type of mathematics becomes a description rather than an explanation. — Gary Enfield

QM probabilities mean that given initial conditions and laws of nature it is impossible to derive (and thus predict) a single future outcome. Nature may still be deterministic in the sense that all possible outcomes happen with certainty (we just observe one of them and the probabilities express their frequencies) and even that they already exist if time is just a kind of space, a timeless mathematical structure.

What is reality? Collections of collections of collections etc. What else could there be?

And I mean all possible collections, because what is the difference between "possible" and "real", after all?

Our material world is a part of that, perhaps a rather small part.

If instead "the properties that perceptually appear to us" are not conceived as part of a "subjective state presented to my consciousness", they're conceived as part of my agent-environment relation specific to me at the time... They're then "extrinsic relational properties" of the sort given the okay by the paper. — fdrake

But when I experience the redness of a tomato, I experience it not as a relation between me and the tomato but as something that is confined to the tomato. So the experience of redness is intrinsic, not relational. Of course, the experience of the redness of the tomato is caused by a perceptual relation between me and the tomato, and it stands in the relation of being a part of my consciousness as a whole, and it also stands in relations to other parts of my consciousness, but the redness of the tomato is not experienced as a relation, and in this sense this experience is non-relational.

Can you explain what it means to be constituted by qualities? Is that like a sort of pansychism? — schopenhauer1

A better term might be "panqualityism", which means that reality is made up only of qualities. If you think that all qualities deserve to be called "conscious" then it is panpsychism. But I would reserve the term "conscious" only for qualities of certain complex collections.

It seems like non-structural identity (quality) needs to be explained. What is this such that a collection of neurons would instantiate it? — schopenhauer1

In my metaphysics, every object is something in itself (which constitutes its intrinsic identity), as opposed to its relations to other objects (which constitute its extrinsic/relational/structural/compositional etc. identity). A collection is an object too, so what are its intrinsic and extrinsic identities? Its extrinsic identity is defined by its relations to other objects, and among these other objects are its parts because none of the parts is the collection; the collection is an object in its own right, additional to the objects that are its parts. (The extrinsic identity of the collection constituted by its relations to its parts may also be called its "compositional" identity.) The intrinsic identity of a collection is something else than its parts or its relations to its parts, so it is not its structure; it is something structureless, so I also call it "quality". It is the "object in itself" that stands in relations to other "objects in themselves". Every object has such a quality (or we can say that every object in itself is such a quality) but only the objects that are complex in the sense we agreed above have "conscious" qualities, that is qualities that are contents of what we call "consciousness" (qualia or qualitative aspects of consciousness).

Yes, so why would a collection of neurons be qualitative, first-person experience without simply positing a dualism somewhere in there already? — schopenhauer1

My view is that reality is constituted by qualities and relations between them.

It's neurons encoding for this or that.. but then encoding itself has to be explained as for why it is mental states. The problem lies in positing a hidden dualism. Mental states exist, yes or no? If yes, whence mental states? We keep referencing another complexity of physical states. It's not like if you pile on more physical explanations, "poof" mental states appear. — schopenhauer1

A certain kind of complexity seems necessary for our consciousness; from neuroscience it seems to be a dynamic (causal-spatio-temporal) kind of organized complexity (rich differentiation and integration). It seems that an object needs to be complex in this way in order to be "conscious". A single neuron is probably not conscious but a complex collection of neurons may be; but it's difficult to describe how because while we may be conscious of the quality of a collection of neurons we don't know the qualities of the neurons themselves and we don't know how the qualities of neurons compose the quality of a collection of neurons. The quality of the collection is not identical to the qualities of the constituent neurons because the collection is not identical to any of the constituent neurons; it is an object in its own right, with its own intrinsic/non-structural identity (quality).

You may think that a collection of objects is not an object in its own right but all objects you see around yourself are collections of other objects. What is a "real" object then? One that is not a collection, one that has no parts? But that may be just a special kind of object, an empty collection, that is no more "real" than non-empty collections. I think our problem with collections is that when we imagine an example of a collection we usually imagine something like a collection of apples and we see no usefulness in regarding this collection as a separate object and so we deny its separate identity. We may be right about the uselessness of such an identity but wrong about its existence. On some introspection, we then generalize this conclusion to all collections and conclude that only non-composite objects are "real". William James expressed something similar: a collection of conscious people does not have its own consciousness. From this we are tempted to conclude that a collection of neurons (which are probably unconscious themselves!) cannot be conscious. But as a I wrote above, a conscious object needs to have a certain kind of complexity, and examples like a collection of people or a collection of apples may be far from complex in this sense. It's difficult to imagine how the qualities of parts compose the quality of their collection (beyond perhaps some vague sense of "blending"), let alone if it is a highly complex collection and due to the significance of its dynamic nature the collection is not just a 3-dimensional spatial object but a 4-dimensional spatio-temporal object.

If you can't know anything about the think in itself, then why insist on talking about it?

It drops out of the conversation. — Banno

Even if you can't know the thing in itself directly, you know it must be something; a thing cannot be nothing. And you can know the thing in itself indirectly - you can know its representation in your mind that is created via sensory perception, by mapping of at least some properties of the external thing onto your neural network. The representation is not the same as the external thing but there may be useful similarities between the two.

who needs the philosophical term "qualia" when "music" or "colors" or "sensations" exist and can do any philosophical work that "qualia" was made up to do? — Olivier5

Qualia are a synonym for sensations that emphasizes the qualitative, as opposed to structural, aspect of sensations. The structural aspect is more amenable to description - verbal or mathematical ("I see two triangles and a square.") while the qualitative aspect seems ineffable ("The square is blue."). It also seems more conceivable how the structural aspect of a sensation could be encoded in a neural network than the qualitative aspect, which again seems to be a problem of description: we can more easily describe experienced shapes and their numbers in relation to configurations and numbers of neurons, than we can describe the quality of "blue" in relation to the qualities of neurons when we don't even know their qualities (we don't have a conscious experience of them, probably).

That'd be because the notion of a thing in itself is an odd piece of philosophical nonsense. — Banno

Why, a thing without itself makes more sense to you?

You can't directly know a thing in itself... unless you are that thing.

To my understanding, qualia are a special kind of "things in themselves". Every thing is something in itself (which constitutes its intrinsic identity), as opposed to its relations to other things (which constitute its extrinsic/relational/structural/compositional etc. identity). Qualia are the intrinsic identities of certain things in our brains that constitute the content of our consciousness. They have a reputation of being ineffable because they are difficult to describe in relation to the myriads of electrochemical processes in the brain. But we don't even know what the electrons are in themselves, let alone how their intrinsic identities and the intrinsic identities of other particles in the brain add up to the intrinsic identities of the spatiotemporal wholes that we experience as contents of our consciousness.