Whatever. If you want to be the eternal child, your choice.

You sound like the kid who doesn't believe in Santa. And maybe you will never recover from the shock.

And you know this how? — Rich

I was there. Saw it with my own eyes. Idiot.

what the heck is a volume of points? — Rich

A holographic quantum mind projection. Just without the "mind" part you like to add.

how can a universe that has expanded from a point explosion be anything other than a sphere, — T Clark

It was not from a point but a volume of points. Or rather a volume of points changed their scale. They always had a size (and an energy density) from the start. Then that size expanded (and cooled).

And while we're on the subject, how can portions of the universe which were next to each other 14 billion years ago be more than 14 billion light-years apart now? — T Clark

If two of these "points" were to either side of us back then, they are now to either side of us today. So we all swell together.

Next question is "swelled into what?". We want to imagine a collection of swelling points as swelling within some further embedding space.

Imagine instead every point was some compacted tangle of thread. Expansion of the point is the thread being stretched out so that it takes up more room. Imagine a whole volume of such points untangling together and creating an expansion that is also now very sparsely occupied by any thread.

The Big Bang can only be understood if you see the way it is both an expansion and a cooling. So if you want some intuitive mental image, you have to supply an analogy that represent both parts of that "explosion".

... which, in turn, suggests that something is missing. — jorndoe

It doesn't feel like it makes a lot of sense talking about the initial conditions of the Big Bang as being either finite or infinite. Both alternatives feel metaphysically suspect. So something "beyond" these traditional choices may be needed.

What we know for sure is that the Big Bang did not start from just a single of Planck-scale point right at the beginning. And indeed, something like inflation is needed to guarantee that the initial region that "banged" was already humongously large.

But to then jump to that extent being "infinite" is a large assumption - if also a pretty natural one.

There are alternatives. The initial conditions could have been "infinite" yet finitely closed - like the surface of a sphere.

Or they could have been the opposite - open and "infinitely" finite in being utterly disconnected and hyperbolically curved at every point. So we might imagine a dust of points which are disconnected as they all curve away from each other with maximum energetic violence. They don't glue together to form a connected volume - a single actual space with shared dimensionality. And then the Big Bang is in fact the gluing together moment when the curvature (which physically would be the violent energy of the Planck density/temperature) started to connect and create a generalised flattening out.

Using the threads analogy, threads would start to connect to other threads and the whole "infinite" fabric would start to knit together and so share a common story concerning their stretching out and flattening out.

Perhaps something an established unification of relativity and quantum mechanics could shed light on? — jorndoe

Yep. That was what loop quantum gravity approaches were looking at. An emergent spacetime knit together out of the pure potential for a cooling~expanding interaction. We start with an "infinity" of points so hot that they can't even connect. Then everywhere there is a phase transition like water crystallising to ice. The points start to align everywhere, flattening out and tying together, to form our familiar cooling~expanding spacetime metric.

To the extent that he associates race with riches, there's a racist element to his thought, but primarily he's thoughtless and speaks from his gut fear of / contempt for the dispossessed. — Baden

It’s also been tracked back to his phobia of contamination.

Donald Trump, who has on many occasions called the tradition of shaking hands “barbaric,” confessed in his 1997 book The Art of the Comeback: “One of the curses of American society is the simple act of shaking hands, and the more successful and famous one becomes the worse this terrible custom seems to get. I happen to be a clean hands freak. I feel much better after I thoroughly wash my hands, which I do as much as possible.”

But Trump’s germophobia goes beyond an unwillingness to shake hands—an aversion he has had to forgo during his run for the presidency. Trump is also reported to have a preference for drinking with straws and eating pizza with a fork, a distaste for pressing elevator buttons and a revulsion to fans and the public getting too close to him, such as for autographs.

In an op-ed for the U.K. newspaper The Independent, Gurnek Bains, author of Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization and founder of a corporate psychology consultancy, suggests that Trump’s fear of communicable diseases is the root of his anti-immigrant political stances.

His obsession with cleanliness is why he prefers mass-produced or processed food. His preferences are not complicated: KFC. McDonald’s. The occasional taco bowl.

“I like See’s Candies.” “I like hamburgers.” “I’m an ice cream fan from way back.”

“I don’t like rich sauces or fine wines,” Trump wrote in his book Surviving at the Top. “I like to eat steak rather than pheasant under glass.” So long as the steak is well-done—so well-done, according to his longtime butler, “it would rock on the plate.”

His simplistic palate is a function of his desire for cleanliness. “One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s,” he explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this year. “I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food’s coming from. It’s a certain standard.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/the-7-oddest-things-donald-trump-thinks-214354

The entire observable universe is finite. — tom

And continuous? That was the issue.

The observable universe is finite due to the constraint of there being a lightcone limited observer. So its a special kind of boundedness. And again a reminder of the lack of a definition of an observer in QM ontology of course.

A bit like the old questions, only more pressing. — tom

Maybe it will answer the question whether reality is either fundamentally continuous or discrete then? :)

Of course I argue for the third option - that it is fundamentally vague. The continuous and the discrete are then both mutually emergent.

And that is remarkably compatible with a quantum interpretation that sees indeterminism as fundamental, and a classically structured Cosmos as emergent.

I mention that just because you post as if it is already case closed when it comes to anything His Holyness, Pope Deutsch, has said on the issue.

Saying that a number is anything that's number-like is a circular definition. No better than the poster above who said that a quantity is anything that's quantitative. You are defining a thing in terms of itself. It's not a definition. — fishfry

No it's not. It's defining something in terms of its relational qualities rather than in terms of its supposed essences.

The whole point is that "number" is elusive as an "abstract object" because that is wrongly to seek some constant essential thing that is more primary than the relations that ensue. So the right way to look at it is to switch to a contextual, constraints-based, metaphysics where objects are defined in terms of structures of relations.

But if you want to complain, write a letter to the Department of Category Theory. Let them know it is from the Department of Set Theory. That will help them make a speedy decision just where to "file" your complaint. ;)

Matrices can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and sometimes divided. In fact the set of nxn matrices for fixed n forms a ring, an important algebraic structure. But matrices are not regarded as numbers. — fishfry

Not even complex ones?

I was surprised at the, let's say, passion of some of the responses to this tame and factual assertion. — fishfry

Or maybe you are wrong?

It's surprisingly tricky to give a good definition of number. I hope my examples bear that out. — fishfry

It seems curious that you can both claim numbers don't have a good definition and then so easily rule lots of things in or out as numbers.

I wonder what criteria you use?

The paper that proves that any finite physical system may be emulated... — tom

Finite might be an important qualification don't you think?

Deutsch certainly believes so....

The statement of the Church-Turing principle (1.2) is stronger than what is strictly necessitated by (1.1). Indeed it is so strong that it is not satisfied by Turing’s machine in classical physics. Owing to the continuity of classical dynamics, the possible states of a classical system necessarily form a continuum. Yet there are only countably many ways of preparing a finite input for T . Consequently T cannot perfectly simulate any classical dynamical system.

Of course I realise that you take as unarguable that the MWI interpretation (your so-called non-interpretation interpretation :) ) is proven and quantum computation tapping unlimited resources is as good as a done thing. But I wonder what Popper would have said about such unqualified conviction?

Numbers do number-like things. What are the important things left unsaid?

You can quit with the apologetics. The context was...

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, after being presented with a proposal to restore protections for immigrants from those countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal.

So it is not about whether shithole is a factual description of the countries. It is about whether they have the right kind of people to favour as immigrants.

This casual and unwitting racism just tells us so much about Trump and those who leap to his support with their bullshit rationalisations.

No time for that level of idiocy.

Ditto.

I don't deny colonialism — Thorongil

You seem to be adopting a self-servingly narrow definition of colonisation. There really isn’t much point debating further unless you can make some actual counter argument.

If a country wants to refuse you entry, they can, and it's tough luck for you. — Thorongil

Yep. Might is right. A stellar ethical argument. The winning race is the superior race. Any Darwinian analysis tells you so.

Sorry, I just don’t have time for this racist bullshit.

New Orleans was a shithole before Katrina though, and that's why Houston didn't want New Orleanese coming there. — Hanover

Wilful ignorance of your own country’s recent history too....

Early reporting during Hurricane Katrina heavily used racist tropes and stereotypical narratives that often vilified the victims of the hurricane, whose impact disproportionately affected the low-income, but vibrant Black communities of New Orleans.

During the crisis, commentators from CNN to Fox News lampooned Black and poor New Orleanians for being unable to leave the city quick enough, while others devoted special news segments highlighting the “criminal element,” which condemned the “looting” by Black residents, many of whom had just lost their homes, their possessions, and who were facing dehydration and starvation.

These early reports helped shape the narrative that some were undeserving of national assistance and help, while heavily drawing on historical fears and tropes of a scary, lazy, poor Black underclass that is deserving of oppression and neglect.

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Deserving-and-Undeserving-Victims-Reporting-Hurricane-Katrina--20150827-0041.html

A man with a guilty conscience, hey? Well, some hope for you perhaps.

You seem to be one of those people who imagines precolonial life in countries like Haiti to be paradises without problems. — Buxtebuddha

We are talking about failed states and their reasons. So only an idiot or moral simpleton would attempt to judge an indigenous culture according to the social construct of “a state”. Ie: only a racist.

Again, how did my source contradict my point?

If you need more help with your history, try this...

Before the arrival of Europeans, Arawak (also known as Taino) and Carib Indians inhabited the island of Hispaniola. Although researchers debate the total pre-Columbian population (estimates range from 60,000 to 600,000), the detrimental impact of colonization is well documented. Disease and brutal labor practices nearly annihilated the Indian population within 50 years of Columbus’s arrival.

www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/History/Haiti-history.htm

We come to know moral truths in a very similar way to how we come to know mathematical or logical truths — darthbarracuda

You need to decide if this is your story or not. If it is, then structuralism accounts for how deep “truths” are “pragmatically” emergent rather than Platonically transcendent.

To be consistent, I guess you would have to be a mathematical Platonist. Hence your notion of intuitionism is really the one relying on mystical revelationism rather than inferential abstraction.

That gets us back to my feeling that your position is not well thought out. It is pick n mix and dependent on whatever best suits your personal ethical preferences.

Checking out Audi, his epistemology in fact seems like standard pragmatism. We make abductive leaps to get our arguments going. But maybe it lacks the follow through - the inductive confirmation of the ethical theory thus produced?

Anyway, ethical intuitionism seems pretty bust on most accounts.

Ethical intuitionism suffered a dramatic fall from favor by the middle of the century, due in part to the influence of logical positivism, in part to the rising popularity of naturalism in philosophy, and in part to philosophical objections based on the phenomenon of widespread moral disagreement. C. L. Stevenson's emotivism would prove especially attractive to Moorean intuitionists seeking to avoid ethical naturalism.[11] In the later parts of the 20th century, intuitionism would have few adherents to speak of; in Bernard Williams' words: "This model of intuition in ethics has been demolished by a succession of critics, and the ruins of it that remain above ground are not impressive enough to invite much history of what happened to it."

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

A country is a great or terrible place regardless of why. — Hanover

If you can’t see through your own shitty rationalisations then that’s on you.

The links you provide prove the opposite of your argument. — Buxtebuddha

You might have to explain why if you want to be taken seriously.

So, Mr. Politically Correct, how many Congoians would you want coming to the UK versus how many Dutch would you want? — Hanover

A sovereign nation can pick and choose who immigrates to it for a variety of reasons. The operative reason for denying Haitians, say, might be that they wouldn't contribute economically. — Thorongil

These are racist views to the extent to which they deny colonial history. Calling a country a shit-hole is implying its own people have shat in it. That nicely absolves your country of any responsibility. But the truth can be inconveniently different.

The Congo Crisis (French: Crise congolaise) was a period of political upheaval and conflict in the Republic of the Congo (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo)[c] between 1960 and 1965. It began almost immediately after the Congo became independent from Belgium and ended, unofficially, with the entire country under the rule of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Constituting a series of civil wars, the Congo Crisis was also a proxy conflict in the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union and United States supported opposing factions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis

Haitian poverty is a deep-seeded problem that started many years ago. During the 1700's Haiti was under French rule and was the wealthiest country in the New World and represented a quarter of France's economy. In 1801 a Haitian slave revolt defeated the French army and the newly independent colony became the first country in the New World to abolish slavery. France agreed to recognize Haitian independence if Haiti paid a large indemnity. This kept Haiti in a constant state of debt and put France in a position of power over Haiti's trade and finances.

The 20th century brought three decades of American occupation, multiple corrupt regimes, natural disasters, environmental devastation and HIV to Haiti. The United States gained complete control over Haitian finances, and the right to intervene in Haiti whenever the U.S. Government deemed necessary. The U.S. Government also forced the election of a new pro-American President, Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, by the Haitian legislature in August of 1915. The selection of a President that did not represent the choice of the Haitian populace increased unrest in Haiti. In 1929, a series of strikes and uprisings led the United States to begin withdrawal from Haiti. By the time U.S occupation ceased in 1934, Haiti was left with a decimated economy and facing a future full of poverty and desperation.

http://poverty-haiti.weebly.com/causes-of-poverty-in-haiti.html

It is no secret why there are so many failed states around the world. To shove blame on the victims is indeed just shameful racism.

Yet there is not one single definition of number. It's an amorphous concept. Mathematicians "know one when they see one." I don't know if this has caught the attention of philosophers. But there is no definition of number. — fishfry

Probably worth mentioning that category theory and structuralism have moved past this good old set theoretic view....

The theme of mathematical structuralism is that what matters to a mathematical theory is not the internal nature of its objects, such as its numbers, functions, sets, or points, but how those objects relate to each other. In a sense, the thesis is that mathematical objects (if there are such objects) simply have no intrinsic nature. The structuralist theme grew most notably from developments within mathematics toward the end of the nineteenth century and on through to the present, particularly, but not exclusively, in the program of providing a categorical foundation to mathematics.

Mathematical structuralism is similar, in some ways, to functionalist views in, for example, philosophy of mind. A functional definition is, in effect, a structural one, since it, too, focuses on relations that the defined items have to each other.

A structure is the abstract form of a system, which ignores or abstracts away from any features of the objects that do not bear on the relations. So, the natural number structure is the form common to all of the natural number systems. And this structure is the subject matter of arithmetic.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/m-struct/

So if it looks like algebra - it can be added, subtracted, multiplied and (perhaps) divided - then its all numbers.

OK, which of these two Wiki positions do you align with?

Intuitionism....

In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality.

Structuralism....

Structuralism is a theory in the philosophy of mathematics that holds that mathematical theories describe structures of mathematical objects. Mathematical objects are exhaustively defined by their place in such structures. Consequently, structuralism maintains that mathematical objects do not possess any intrinsic properties but are defined by their external relations in a system.

The historical motivation for the development of structuralism derives from a fundamental problem of ontology. Since Medieval times, philosophers have argued as to whether the ontology of mathematics contains abstract objects. In the philosophy of mathematics, an abstract object is traditionally defined as an entity that: (1) exists independent of the mind; (2) exists independent of the empirical world; and (3) has eternal, unchangeable properties. Traditional mathematical Platonism maintains that some set of mathematical elements–natural numbers, real numbers, functions, relations, systems–are such abstract objects. Contrarily, mathematical nominalism denies the existence of any such abstract objects in the ontology of mathematics.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, a number of anti-Platonist programs gained in popularity. These included intuitionism, formalism, and predicativism. By the mid-20th century, however, these anti-Platonist theories had a number of their own issues. This subsequently resulted in a resurgence of interest in Platonism. It was in this historic context that the motivations for structuralism developed.

So you claim to be an intuitionist, yet argue like a structuralist. Like me, you believe that existence is the product of emergent structures or constraints. These structures are selected on the basis of some deep functional principle, such as the least action principle of physics.

Plato was a sort of structuralist in fact. The mathematical forms were somehow an expression of the telos of "the Good". There was some optimisation principle going on in terms of least action, or the invariances due to symmetry.

But the Good is of course then a warm, fuzzy, human concept of essential cosmic value. So what we now look for in nature is just a straightforward optimisation principle - like least action. A structure is good (it can endure and thus exist) as it expresses an equilibrium balance.

This structuralism can then be applied to the understanding of social systems. It is how we get down to a view of society as a functional equilibrium balance of competition and co-operation - or give and take.

So if you want to appeal to some general "transcendent" moral principle that transcends particular societies, then structuralism gives you the immanent story on what is "objectively" rational or optimal. There is a deep structure that works. And this is "intuitive" only in the sense that humans can guess at the shape of deep structures by inference to the best explanation. We are pretty good at guessing general principles (as a result of that being a selection constraint on human cognition in the first place).

So between realism and idealism, social constructionism and Platonism, there is as usual pragmatism or structuralism. Reality is ruled by the deep structure that is "what works" in a developmental sense.

I remember we had this difficulty over ontic structural realism. You sort of liked it, but then backed away into some confused mix of constructionism and absolutism.

You seem to want absolute truths - where that would fit your personal beliefs about ethical matters. But then just as often you will argue against people that their ethical positions are mere social constructions.

Only structuralism can bring dualist or transcendent Platonic ontologies back down to Terra Firma. A constraints-based metaphysics can explain why there is a deep structure to reality without having to invoke anything outside of nature itself as the cause.

Acting mindfully, thoughtfully and consciously means never having to apologise. — charleton

Correct. But it also privileges the fully self actualising self over that self’s social milieu. So as a moral stance, it is tied to a modern abstract notion of society.

And it does still leave open the fact that apologies can have useful transactional values within such a “purely rational” setting. Other folk still tend to have feelings that can get hurt. It can pay to recognise that even if no moral ought is involved.

(I should add that we then ought still to apologise when we are responsible for accidental harms from negligence. If we pretend to mindful action, we have to live up to that. Obvious really.)

There's nothing "spooky" or "queer" about objective morality under an intuitionist view. I think we come to know moral truths in a similar way we come to know mathematical truths, or understand logical reasoning — darthbarracuda

So this intuitionism is really structuralism? I could agree to that.

I'm of course championing intuitionism - I think there is a clear difference in kind between facts and values, and that any sort of morality that can be recognized as morality must employ some form of rational intuition. — darthbarracuda

Oh shit. No wonder I couldn't make sense of your position if you subscribe to that.

If you were saying that the intuitions are rooted in our biology - our evolved circuitry which rules our social behaviour - then that might be something though.

Like for instance - The neurobiology of moral sense: facts or hypotheses?https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3616987/

"What works for society" is ambiguous, because it hides the fact that society only works if people do actually believe in some form of transcendent value - even the social contract theory implicitly holds that life, or something similar, is good. — darthbarracuda

Do you mean transcendent in the deflationary sense of just being hierarchically organised? Perhaps you do in stressing the general vs the particular earlier.

Its a big difference. Of course we can organise our social thinking into general rules and particular exceptions. This gives our thinking its organised complexity.

But to talk of morality transcending that socially-constructed framework is to talk about it having some human-independent, and nature or evolution independent, basis.

I'm not sure from your words whether you have clearly disentangled the two incompatible positions and chosen a side to stand on. Either our morality is the normative product of natural circumstances or it has some super-natural basis.

Our premotor cortex moves our bodies before we are even have made the decision to move. I very much think we have an illusion of free will. — FlukeKid

It is worth noting the details. First the task set-up...

From: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.520.2204&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The subjects were asked to relax while fixating on the center of the screen where a stream of letters was presented. At some point, when they felt the urge to do so, they were to freely decide between one of two buttons, operated by the left and right index fingers, and press it immediately. In parallel, they should remember the letter presented when their motor decision was consciously made

Note the demand that one or other button should be pushed "on impulse". The urge was to be "conscious" when it happened, but the choice not consciously debated or timed or justified. There was no external complexity to be handled - like make a decision if also X and not Y.

Also attention - that limited high level resource - did have a specific job to do. It needed to note the particular letter in a flow of letters that happened to coincide with the emergence of the urge. So attention was kept out of the button choice as much as possible by the experiment's design.

It was a good test of our ability to dissociate between habitual and attentional level action. But ordinarily, the two might go together in integrated fashion.

Then the more detailed results of what lit up when...

The temporal ordering of information suggests a tentative causal model of information flow, where the earliest unconscious precursors of the motor decision originated in frontopolar cortex, from where they influenced the buildup of decision-related information in the precuneus and later in SMA, where it remained unconscious for up to a few seconds.

This substantially extends previous work that has shown that BA10 is involved in storage of conscious action plans9–11 and shifts in strategy following negative feedback12. Thus, a network of high-level control areas can begin to shape an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

So the task demand was to find a way to push the button without a feeling of overtly planning and controlling the act.

And then we see BA10 kicking off a preliminary connection with the precuneus. So this is frontal working memory - a scratchpad for future intentions - talking to the bit of the brain that is concerned with a high level orientation towards locations in space. An intention to go left or right has been warmed up as a coming direction of action.

Next that fires up the SMA, the high level motor area needed to turn an intention in regards to a direction into a physical act - a motor instruction that will drive the hand.

But still no actual go signal. The SMA has to go through the premotor and the motor cortex yet, not to mention recruit all the lower brain anatomy, like the basal ganglia and cerebellum.

And the task shaping the subject's mindset demands some kind of "unconscious" or unattended delay period to ensure that the eventual go signal is not a voluntarily timed act. So the experiment is a test of just how long a future intention can be kept on the back burner using working memory scheduling. Inserting a delay was part of the task demand - of which the subject was thoroughly aware if he/she was listening to the experimenter.

Then the impulse can be held dormant no longer. Something relaxes. The balance tips. At this point, to actually release the action, the motor cortex must broadcast the feeling of what it is going to be like - warn the rest of the brain that your hand is going to suddenly reach out and hit a button.

We have to be told in advance what our body is about to do just so that we know it is "us" who are the cause of some sensation, and it is not the world causing those feelings. So consciousness of the urge is just the standard reafference messaging which must precede all motor acts. We are experiencing at a reportable attentional level the advance warning of an imminent sensation - the feeling of a hand reaching out.

And of course, given the right attentional set-up, we could be keep a close eye on such impulses. There might be - in some other experimental situation - the demand that we be ready to shut down the impulse because the moment is "not quite right" for other reasons, also stored in working memory as part of the intentional mindset.

But again, that is not the case in this experimental set-up which is designed to show how great a dissociation between habit-level and attentional-level control over "decisions" there can be. So here, there is nothing that should stand as a filter on the expression of the urge - except that it was held back without conscious deliberation as long as possible. Long enough not to seem at all controlled or planned. And then attention was kept busy to make that easier. Subjects had to fixate on a stream of letters and catch the one letter that happened to show when the urge also happened to show.

The take-home is thus that we are very clever at meeting experimental task-demands. We can take a normally integrated functionality - a seamless feeling marriage of habit and attention - and turn it into the kind of strongly dissociated outcome that makes people go "wow" in the context of the standard folk psychology notion of the freewill debate.

"Hey. We are meant to actually be the "I" who makes the decisions in here. So it is very disturbing to admit that this "I" is somewhat a fiction."

But a better response is to recognise that this "I-ness" is an integrated combination of all our learnt habits and our attentional capabilities. We are usually conscious of what we want to get out of life in terms of what may happen in the next seconds and minutes. Then we just get on doing that with as little deliberative oversight as we can get away with.

It is inefficient to over-think things. So the brain is cleverly set up to avoid that.

The decisions the skier makes are based on what his body understands, its training, its memory, the same habitual movements. I think the phenomena you are referring to is similar. It does not impinge on the notion of an existential will, in my opinion. — Cavacava

Yep. Indeed, if we didn't let habit do its thing, we would be as helpless as babies still. We completely rely on habits so that we then can do more interesting things with our limited attentional capacities.

There's nothing incoherent from what I can tell with the notion that there is an actual transcendent morality but it's muddled and "gray" in the colloquial way of looking at it. — darthbarracuda

Of course it is incoherent. Either the basis of morality is transcendent of society or it is simply whatever society does in terms of what works for it.

If there is some moral absolute, then there is no excuse for a moral agent to ignore that. Moral relativism becomes simply indefensible. One's duty is not to the whims of society but the absolutes we claim to have transcendent status.

And then vice versa. If morality is relative to the social good - what works for it - then that is the standard to which a moral agent ought to direct their strategic reasoning.

Things are then only gray or muddled to the degree that moral agents can't make up their minds which is the case.

But yes. Many really are muddled in just this fashion.

But I will say that apologizing only to get to a better standing with another person is insincere, even manipulative. — darthbarracuda

Or normal social behaviour. What you call manipulation is merely rational social strategy surely?

Again, either morality has some socially-transcendent reality or it just is simply that which enables society to exist in a functional fashion.

If you believe that morality is socially transcendent, then I can see how you would feel an individual, as a perfect moral agent, would have to be "true to themselves" by being "true to the morally absolute" ... so far as they discover that within their own (not at all socially derived) belief system. :)

But if morality is about collective social goals, then we instead hope that mature individuals are rational game players. They don't merely just follow norms blindly, nor ignore them selfishly, but play the social games creatively and strategically.

I don't agree with what I see to be your reduction of moral rightness/wrongness to subjective or inter-subjective opinions — darthbarracuda

But I wasn't. I was pointing out that you look to be claiming that the personally subjective has an objective basis here. I say the nearest to any objective basis is the prevailing social norm of which an apology would be a token of recognition.

So whether you feel you are really in the right, or really in the wrong, is not really relevant to the norm. Social circumstance rules whether apologies are required or not.

But then apologies have a social function. They mend hurt feelings. They bring people together where otherwise they might be pushed apart. So - from a personal perspective - you would use them to your own best advantage, depending on what you want from a social situation.

The fact that there is a norm, and that you can then choose whether or not to conform, gets you into other social games - like those of status hierarchies. You can make rational decisions about whether you want to be the assertive/non-apologetic one, or the submissive/apologise for your very existence one.

So we just keep moving further away from any personal absolute necessity to apologise or not. There are layers of quite normal social gaming involved. The existence of a norm becomes the basis for playing with that norm. Not apologising gains a secondary meaning.

In any human interaction, there is you, me, and the group. The good old Peircean semiotic triad. Apologies then serve as part of the symbolic currency of our social interaction. They are a way to trade status and salve hurt status feelings. And I can then show you which social group I am part of, which I think you are part of, depending on which group's norms I apply, and whether I feel they extend to cover you.

I guess you don't see it in these pragmatic micro-social terms as modern western society stresses a social style in which social norms are as abstracted as possible - made an impersonal moral code secured, if need be, as enforceable law. And that approach to running society then needs every individual to act as a rational moral agent. There just is a rule to cover all occasions. We are all forced into the one social group and meant to be equal, so there should be a rather black and white story about when apologies are either necessary or not required.

But how ideal is that socially constructed ideal? Maybe it is good, maybe it is bland, maybe it is a rule for fools, or the basis of a modern civil society. That at least seems the proper level at which to be addressing the "moral" question implied in the OP.

I'm feeling for myself, after some deliberation, that apology is part of a ritual or symbolic exchange. — mcdoodle

Yep.

So now it is about property damage and adequate compensation?

Correct me if I’m wrong but the OP was about personal insult. If you hurt my feelings, you might want to show me that you are hurting just as much, and now we can be all square. Everyone equally happy in being equally unhappy. :)

People can do the wrong thing knowing it is the wrong thing because they do not care about morality, and care more about themselves or whatever. — darthbarracuda

That's what I wonder. Can people actually choose to do wrong? If they are making real world choices, they must weight the decision with many factors. And of course it is easy to rationalise and tip the balance the way that favours yourself and your interests. But that just says people construct some belief about whether they are overall in the right or in the wrong. And having done that, by definition really, they pick what is for them the "right".

Talk of intentionally picking the course you know to be wrong doesn't sound coherent. You are really talking about people picking the course they know you would likely judge wrong - but they would rather see what they want to do as right.

So the point is that all such choices are already constructed to be defensible as "right". It should be no surprise that the wrong-doer starts with that general belief. It is only if you can appeal to something outside the person's private intentionality - like a social norm of what was the right action - that you then create some different standard other than the person's own freedom to construct their choices.

Unless you are arguing some absolute basis for morality, you are stuck with having to rely on social norms. And when it comes to apologies, even the law doesn't generally like getting involved in that.

If I were to crash my car into someone else's on accident, I would feel compelled to apologize even though I didn't do it on purpose. — darthbarracuda

Yeah, but that is then normally going to be a case of your negligence. So it isn't literally an accident - an act of God. It is culpable negligence.

If you are instead forced into the car in front of you by the car behind you, would you still feel as compelled? As a matter of form, you might say "sorry about that". But just as quickly, you would point out who was really to blame.

So your OP seemed to want a black and white absolute moral principle. But morality is normally pragmatic.

Apologies are a social tool. People use them to get away with stuff. Blame the accident, it wasn't me. And people demand them because they care about dominance hierarchies. They want someone who has attacked their social standing to humble themselves. But mostly apologies just grease the wheels and lower the potential for confrontations. They are a friendly habit where there is not enough at stake to want to risk a test of wills.

So I'm saying the OP seems to want some general metaphysical-strength position of the giving and withholding of apologies. But really, is there anything more going on here than social game-playing and norms of maturity? Apologies would be tools to use to your best advantage, whatever you judge that to be in a social situation.

So, if I accidentally back my car into your mailbox, I am not responsible? It's "the accident's" fault? — T Clark

The law says you are responsible. It says you can't have been paying due care and attention. So now there is a social standard in place. And the OP seemed more directed at some kind of personal absolute morality than at social/legal norms.

If you insulted DB, called him an idiot, and there was a law that said you must apologise, then personal moral choices aren't really involved. It just a norm in play. You don't have to mean it when you do what you are supposed to do. It doesn't seem a character flaw to abide by a norm even when you don't accept it should apply in your circumstances. Instead, isn't that even more admirable? :)

So what would you actually do if you knocked over my mailbox? Would it depend on there being possible witnesses?

The problem with real life is there are always extenuating circumstances. Right and wrong can never be so black and white.

Does doing the wrong thing unintentionally (perhaps out of ignorance or fear) free a person from the responsibility of saying sorry? — darthbarracuda

But if you intentionally do the wrong thing, surely you must believe that in some larger way it is the right thing? So it would then be unreasonable to apologise - unless you have also come to believe you were in fact wrong and so changed your mind about what is right.

Whereas if you do something wrong by accident, then apologising is no big deal. You are not to blame. An accident is. You are apologising for an accident for which you are not responsible in any intentional sense.

Thus either you intentionally did it because it seemed right - so why apologise? Or you accidentally did it - and your apology is now essentially vacuous. The accident bears the burden of the blame. You are really saying you would have acted right if you could.

So these mark the two extremes. And neither accurately describe the majority of the real world encounters you are likely concerned about.

Where are apologies both morally warranted and meaningful? Well if you thought you were doing the right thing and later see it as being the wrong thing.

Then in practice, an apology is just a good way to head off social conflict no matter what the wrongs or rights. It is a pragmatic response if you don't want drama.

But what is life without drama? >:)

I have a strong sense of the numinous which I am disinclined to give up on account of a belief that to do so would be to impoverish my life. — Janus

That's fine. You seem interested and serious. I am just arguing for a particular point of view which represents a logical metaphysical methodology.

I asked you before what would be a universal presuppositon-less criteria for judging whether a metaphysics "works" — Janus

Any reasoned position must start from suppositions. How else could it work? The alternative would be perhaps some claim about "direct perception" - personal revelation - in regard to the truth of the Cosmos.

So yes, there must be some well-chosen suppositions to get the metaphysical game going. As I've said, the first is that something exists. The second is that something developed. The third is that development must be dialectical or dichotomous - a separating out or symmetry-breaking which speaks to a prior unbroken potentiality. The fourth is then that we must be dealing apophatically with some kind of "perfect potential" as the initial conditions.

Whether this metaphysics "works" as a whole then depends on how other alternatives stack up against it. It could either be challenged at some particular step (perhaps the Big Bang never happened, there was never a developmental story), or it could be challenged as a whole - as transcendent theism would likely do.

I have a terrible time trying to prevent a loss of enthusiasm and interest when confronted with mathematics. — Janus

I find Whitehead dire. Personally I would waste no time there.

The beauty of mathematics lies in its Platonic structures. It is the fact that fundamental abstract patterns can be the bones that underlie the flesh and blood materiality of the world.

A better read than Whitehead would be something like Ian Stewart's Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry.

A universe of cartoon characters? A universe which is just a giant hamburger? A universe consisting of fairy floss? A universe where the inhabitants are heavier than the planets they inhabit? An infinitely complex and changing world which nonetheless consisted in absolute thermodynamic equilibrium? Or could any world such as our present one simply pop into existence 'fully formed' and without a history? I mean imagination's the limit; — Janus

Have you already abandoned apophatic reasoning?

We start with where we are. We accept that there is a creation issue because we have the clear evidence that our existence has developed. Cosmology and fundamental physics then let us wind back our story all the way down to a quantum-level scale where radical indeterminism is known to set in - the Big Bang scale of about 10^-33 cm, 10^-44 secs and 10^32 degrees.

So it is from that set of physical conditions that the metaphysics continues to extrapolate.

Yes, imagination is needed. But it is now extremely constrained by the facts we are sure of. So all your suggested worlds, chosen because they are silly and contradictory, are already ruled out - unless apophatic reasoning finds some way they are a logical consequence of the "whatever" which would be the kind of potential which also produces such a highly constrained Cosmos such as the one that works to produce us.

So the question about other possible worlds would be about physical basics such as the number of dimensions, the strengths of constants, the number of different emergent forces. And none of your imagined universes suggested something different about those.

So it seems impossible for me to imagine that there would not be an actual lawfulness inherent in the primordial indeterminate potential, that always already limits what could possibly come to exist. — Janus

Well it helps to start by getting down to a starting point based on what we know. So it we are looking for what lies immediately before the Big Bang, we know that we are talking about some kind of quantum mechanics that lacks the kind of dimensionality which gives quantum fluctuations a strength and a direction in "our" universe.

And there is a ton of speculative physics on the issue if you want concrete proposals. There are models like the many loop quantum gravity approaches that seek to show how our 4D spacetime world could arise emergently from naked fluctuation. There are thousands of papers on the issue. There are computer simulations of self-organising spacetime metrics. People are trying to bring the right mathematics to bear on the question.

And I do think it should, and probably inevitably will, remain ultimately an individual matter. We are not constrained by what the "community of enquirers" will ultimately come to think, because we cannot have any idea what that will be. — Janus

Again, the scientific community is on to it. It's not about personal belief. It is going to be about whatever mathematical-strength model shows our particular dimensional set-up was always necessarily emergent from whatever an utter quantum indeterminacy can be understood to be.

There's a well defined approach and goal here. It's actually a pretty interesting story unfolding before our eyes if you check out the science.

I mean what is the opposite of an actual potential? — Janus

Saying a potential was actual is the after the fact view. So it says something was possible rather than impossible.

An infinite potential would then make anything and everything possible. At least at the "beginning". What is then now the actually possible vs the actually impossible is whatever actually happened and whatever actually didn't.

The reason some potential things would be impossible would be because constraints emerged to limit their being. Their existence was suppressed. And thus actuality gets defined by whatever it is that constraints can't suppress. Actuality is an expression of what can freely happen.

So you are wanting to make the initial potential some kind of concrete actual. You want it to be already substantial - limited by form so that it has definite being ... ahead of there in fact being any definite being.

But that is the mental hurdle you need to move past here. And I agree it is really difficult.

The problem is that an infinite pure potential that is not actual makes absolutely no sense. — Janus

That doesn't help me understand what you could mean by in-finite mind here.

And I already said that - apophatically - the unbounded initial potential would be defined in terms of it being "not actual".

It's the same way we talk about "nothingness" - the absolute absence of things. But with nothingness of course, there isn't then a potential. Potentiality is what has been absolutely suppressed. So the difference with an Apeiron, Firstness or Vagueness is that we know it must have had a potentiality that was un-actualised. We know there is that actuality. So if we read it correctly - in terms of symmetry-breaking - that justifies our saying something concrete about that which is not the least concrete.

Again, I believe I have spelt out a metaphysics with an actual logical machinery. It is even mathematical in being framed in terms of reciprocal or inverse relations. It is certainly scientifically inspired in being a tale based on fundamental symmetry breaking.

So that is why I ask you to offer something as well developed if you want to argue for "in-finite mind". It seems fair enough to me.

No, Apo; I'm not playing. You win. — Banno

Ever the sulky child, hey? Beats me what you think you have to lose.

In-finite mind is not "spread" anymore than infinite being is. You need to free your thinking from it's customary presuppositions to get this. — Janus

Or you could explain what you are thinking as the alternative.

What even is in-finite being? You could be agreeing that it is the Apeiron - a potential not yet limited and thus not yet actualised. Why not explain in your own words to make it clear.

And what then is in-finite mind? If we follow the same formula, it is a potential that is not yet intelligibly structured and so not yet "intelligent".

Or maybe you are talking about sentience, or qualia, or soul, or something similarly substantive - a universal simple. So now you are either defending dualism or idealism. That becomes un-Peircean as Peirce is all about the psychological structure, the growth of universal reasonableness.

The Peircean claim is clearly argued in terms of an actual logical mechanics. The process is laid out in plain view.

Can you do something similar for "in-finite mind" if it is really universal sentience you are talking about, or universal will?

You talked about intelligence and creativity. That fits with a basically physicalist approach like Peirce takes. It avoids just presuming a dualism or idealism as the ontology.

But if you really meant in-finite sentience or in-finite will, that is what you need to defend.

No, I'm not proposing any kind of dualism; that it might seem so is again due to your own prejudice. How can you tell, beyond its failure to gell with your own particular set of presuppositions, that a metaphysics is not working? — Janus

Just because I tell you plainly what my position is, and then ask you to be plain about yours, doesn't mean I can't get past my beliefs.

It means I have arrived at my beliefs through a contest of the alternative views. And one of the fundamentals of epistemology is that offering up theories that are "not even wrong" is worse than a concrete theory that just is wrong.

So again, what I am hoping is that you will put forward a sharper account of the world-creating mechanism you have in mind as an alternative here.

If you are not talking dualistically, then what is this "mind" of which you speak? Is it synonymous with being, and so monistic in the idealist sense, or what?

If you leave me guessing, you can't really complain if I fill in your side of the debate too.

But it is off the topic of this thread anyway. — Banno

So you've prepared your excuses already? Coitus interruptus signalled in advance?

It seems to me that language use involves a world that includes a community of some sort for the language to be used by; but a self - that's potentially a whole other thing. — Banno

The usual vague response from you.

I made a specific argument. There is a community level self that is instantiated through "being linguistic". And semiotics makes the case that this kind of self-making is also taking place at the level of individual felt experience. So we are dealing with social and biological levels of the same general process.

This is a problem when folk like yourself go on about epistemology without speaking to this distinction. The "self" is critical to there being "a world". And to pass over the nature of this self in silence, not offering a full account, is a cop-out.

Is that your explanation? So because language involves signs and symbols, it must involve a self? — Banno

Is that really the best summary you can make? Try again.

You've had my explanation. What did you disagree with?

Don't start trolling if you don't want to be "disrespected". :)

If we look to use rather than meaning, then since use involves the world, then a statement's being true involves the world. — Banno

Did I say something different? I just continued on to point out that that involvement in turn involves "a self".

Which is where things get slippery again. Who does language speak for? The communal self? The biological individual?

That is the further issue I am interested in clarifying. If you want to leave it unsaid, that's a cop-out.

Yep. As I've said.

We know that language captures the truth of the world as we experience it or all our discourse would simply be nonsense. — Janus

Again, what I was pointing out is that of course it will do this. Language, being semiotic, is producing the very self for whom such an experienced world would be the true one.

This seems straightforward. Is something getting lost in translation?

I'm not denying there is "a world". We couldn't form a notion of self-hood unless there was a physical reality to kick against. Moore's hands speak to the discovery of that fundamental counterfactuality.

But to be a self requires that we form a "selfish" image of the world. And that changes the game so far as theories of truth are concerned.

As I argued earlier, a big part of the epistemic tension arises because humans operate both as biological animals and social creatures. We are "grounded" in the truth of the biological animal claim Sam and perhaps Banno. But even that grounding is a self-interested umwelt. It is the self-interested view that a living organism needs to form to be a self with useful levels of autonomy.