Which statement are you referring to, and what do you mean by 'believe in the veracity of'?

A statement is either true or false. — curiousnewbie

Somebody that didn't believe in objective truth would not believe that, and hence would be liberated from a potential contradiction.

Of course they would also need to say "I don't believe in objective truth" rather than the "There is no objective truth" that you suggested, as the latter sounds like a statement that is intended to be taken as objective truth. But provided their position is the former and not the latter, there is no apparent contradiction.

The point remains, that in physics a wave is defined as a vibration in a medium. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, It doesn't, and it isn't.

I'm a big fan of CBT. It's not the solution to every problem, but it is the solution to many common problems. I also appreciate the commonality it has with Stoicism and Buddhism.

In your reply you seek first to counter my suggested definition of 'wave' by referring to the definition currently on Wikipedia - which anybody could change in two minutes - and then at the end of your third para to claim that part of the Wikipedia definition is nonsense.

The problem is that you come from an entrenched Aristotelian position that rests on an axiom that everything is 'substance'. As a remedy, I recommend a reading of Nagarjuna, who argues persuasively that there cannot be any such thing as substance.

Or you could listen to Alan Watts about the Prickles and the Goo views of the world,

The big mystery with the wave function is precisely its ontological status, whereas the same can’t be said for water or sound waves, as they propagate through a medium; they are indeed ‘phenomena’. — Wayfarer

To complicate matters, the 'wave function' is, I believe, a misnomer. It's not a 'wave' in the way waves are understood either in physics or in everyday discussion. It is an element of a Hilbert space, and there's really no more user-friendly way to describe it than that. It has nothing to do with electromagnetic waves, gravity waves, sound waves or any other sort of wave, and it's not a solution to the wave equation.

Fair enough. But we'd need to go on to acknowledge that even with ordinary old water waves and sound waves, the phenomenon is not the wave but the experiences it gives us - such as the sensation of our up and down movement in the water at the beach, or the sounds we hear, or the rippled patterns we see on a water surface.

I'll correct my statement to say that in physics a wave is a model that is used to predict phenomena, and the model does not require the assumption of any medium.

In an unusually forceful statement, Wallows is telling me to butt out. — Bitter Crank

I think the 'yourself' that Wallows recommend recuse themselves was the person at the switch, not you BC.

We’re talking about the entire human race not simply one life over another. — I like sushi

I don't see that it makes any sense to talk about the entire human race, since there is no remotely likely scenario in which any of us would have to make that decision. It's not ethics, but fantasy.

If you prefer to approach the problem from a “who should we save?” rather than a “Who should we kill?” proposition then why is this?

Because both are loaded questions containing a presupposition. But the presupposition in the first - that we would kill an innocent person - is false for most people, whereas the presupposition in the second - that we would try to save somebody - is not.

What? Are you saying people would prefer EVERYONE to die? And exactly how is picking who you want to survive better than picking who you’d want to die? That is EXACTLY the point! Don’t you see?? — I like sushi

Yes. I think most people would conclude that it is morally preferable to not kill one billion innocent people. Most people see killing a person as far worse than not saving one. How else can one explain the low rates of donation to life-saving charities like Oxfam?

If you want to argue that not saving a life is the moral equivalent of actively killing somebody, that would be an interesting thread. Although tradition and popular feelings both imply an enormous gulf between the two, there are plenty of philosophers that argue that the gulf is wider than is justifiable. But choose a more likely scenario than this sci-fi one. There are plenty of examples in everyday life. Peter Singer's pond example comes to mind.

People face situations every day where they encounter their prejudices and can choose to act on them or not. I can't see that conjuring up an impossible thought experiment helps shine any light on that, particularly as most people would refuse to kill anybody.

It would make more sense to ask who somebody would save, not who they would kill. Those decisions do come up in real life, in health policy, as has already been pointed out.

That's what a wave is — Metaphysician Undercover

Not in physics. In physics a wave is a phenomenon that behaves in accordance with the wave equation.

The point is not to answer this in your head. It is not to... — I like sushi

OK, so that's what the point is not. I thought you were going to tell us what the point is.

We'll save Australia - don't want to hurt no kangaroo!

Oh, don't be such a tease! :sad:

Can't you tell us now what the point is?.

we do make these kinds of choices all the time. For example when we invest money in cancer research over drug rehabilitation. I personally think it's important to think about whom we save and why and if our reasons for doing so are faulty. — NKBJ

I agree. The difference between those health policy decisions and the sci-fi thought experiments is context. Everything depends on context, so a thought experiment that just asks if one would kill a billion people to save the rest of the human race from extinction is just silly.

I’m more interested in what the process makes you think about and feel like. Not really interested in an actual reply — I like sushi

What it makes me feel is regret at the Hollywoodisation of ethics. Rather than deliberate over real problems that actually occur in our world, people make up sci-fi scenarios that have nothing to do with real ethics. The blithe amusement with which people have reacted is entirely appropriate.

I blame Phillippa Foote (sp?). But I don't see that anything is added by changing one person to a billion.

a wave without a medium doesn't make sense. — Metaphysician Undercover

That supposition was rejected more than a century ago given the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment. There is no medium in the model for electromagnetic waves.

I agree.

Yeah those brazen militaristic fascist European countries from WW2, such as Sweden and France — Maw

I don't know about Sweden, but France was far from the peace-loving victim that many WW2 narratives suggest. The way they behaved after the war in aggressively reclaiming and subduing their colonies in Indochina and North Africa, torturing and killing as many indigenous people as was necessary to secure their hold over the countries, was not that far off fascism. That continued until the early sixties.

The trouble is that the word 'objective' is inextricably connected to the concept of an 'object'. — Wayfarer

I dare say you are right.

Amazingly, I had not hitherto noticed that the first six letters of 'objective' are 'object'. Strange, for somebody with a keen interest in etymology, as I have.

Question to the UK members: was the prospect of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and the consequent risk of a return of the Troubles, highlighted in the referendum campaign as a likely consequence of leaving?

If not, surely that alone is sufficient reason to have a second vote, as it would be reasonable to assume that many people were not aware of that very significant consequence when they cast their first vote.

It occurs to me that the notion of QM undermining the notion of 'objective reality' only makes sense if one insists that only particles, not waves, can be objective.

If we adopt a worldview that the universal wave function IS 'objective reality' - Kant's Noumenon - then we have all the objectivity we could realistically wish for, without even touching on the question of 'whether the moon is there when we are not looking'.

The wave function explains the correlation of observations by independent observers, aka intersubjectivity.

I wonder whether Berkeley would have thought of such a view as confirmation of, or an attack upon, his Idealism. It certainly has no truck with Johnson's rock-kicking approach.

I'm saying that wave function collapse is a matter of knowledge. — Benkei

Putting this together with your earlier comment that you are not attached to locality, it sounds like you have an affinity to the 'non-local hidden variables' school, of which David Bohm's 'pilot wave' interpretation of QM is perhaps the best-known. In most other popular interpretations, the imprecision about location is not just epistemological.

I like Bohm. I have his book 'Quantum Theory' which is interesting because it was written before the modern Dirac notation for QM with 'bras' and 'kets' became standard.

FWIW Bohm was quite a mystic, and had a famous series of public discussions with Krishnamurti about physics and spirituality.

That Europe values peace much more than one hundred years ago is not in dispute. But 'too peaceful'? In which particular present-day or recent conflicts do you wish Europe would be more aggressive?

I think that we must be going wrong somewhere with our theories, because it's incoherent to have an existent with 0 length. — Terrapin Station

As per my previous post, we cannot measure the 'length' of a photon, because that would require two or more measurements - one at each 'end'.

Note also that SR doesn't say an object moving fast relative to an observer 'has a shorter length'. It says the observer will measure the length as being short. Since length measurement is impossible for a photon, that concept does not apply.

From our perspective as observers, if there were a “clock” on board a photon, it would appear to be entirely stopped to us. — Devans99

A photon is essentially an observation, and can only happen once. It is not possible to observe "the same photon"* twice, so it is not possible to observe whether any aspect of the photon "is changing". Hence the idea of a clock appearing to be stopped is invalid because, to appear stopped, at least two observations are needed.

*The scare quotes are there because even the expression 'the same photon' is of dubious validity. Ditto for "is changing".

It has negative connotations, but often unjustified. For instance people have criticised environmentalists and anti-slavery campaigners as 'do-gooders'.

The term is often used by people who have a vested interest in the continuance of a socially harmful practice to try to delegitimise those seeking to end the practice.

Kant defines a proposition as 'analytic' if its conclusion is 'contained in' its premise. The broad idea is that the set of analytic propositions is a proper subset of the set of all propositions that can be deductively proven.

The trouble is that the notion of 'contained in' is never defined, and unravels into a chaotic mess when one tries to pin it down.

How does a person motivate themselves to protest against animal cruelty when the initial instinctive emotional reaction subsides and they're acting upon rationality, but rationally they know ethics to be absurd/relative/meaningless without emotional conviction. — Edward

I think the answer is that rationality is not inconsistent with emotion. As Hume observed, reason is the servant of the passions, not the other way around.

The goal of mindfulness is not to destroy all emotion, but to escape from overpowering, harmful emotion. Most emotions are not like that, so there is no point in employing mindfulness or other techniques to minimise them.

That ethics might seem absurd without emotional conviction is an empty theorem, since we will never lack emotional conviction. Even the Buddha had emotional conviction.

So, where does one draw the line between patriotism and nationalism? — Wallows

My two cents' worth:

Patriotism is loving your country and wanting to help it succeed.

Nationalism is claiming your country is better than all the others, and disliking people from other countries.

The two are almost completely mutually exclusive, since nationalism tends to lead to disaster eventually.

In other words, even if we can’t imagine what it would be like, is an object that has nothing except logically-necessary or negative properties in common with, say, the Eiffel Tower, logically possible? — Troodon Roar

To make sense of the question you'd need to get a lot more precise about what you mean by property.
For instance, is being liked by a specific person a property? On the face of it, there's no obvious property shared between the Eiffel Tower and the feel of cashmere. But if Roberta loves them both then 'being loved by Roberta' may be a shared property, depending on what your precise definition of property is.

Also, excluding negative properties is unlikely to work. There are many cases in philosophy where people have tried to deliberately include or exclude negatives (eg apophatic theology). People then find loopholes all over such programs because most negatives can be recast as positives, and vice versa.

I don't see anything neurotic about someone taking up bodybuilding. It's just another sort of goal, and goals give meaning to our life. It does no harm to anybody else and, although a muscle-bound body-builder is less healthy than a lean athlete, I expect they are more healthy than if they were obese and sedentary.

Using drugs can be problematic, because of all the side effects. But I imagine bodybuilding without drugs could be as healthy and harmless as playing tennis or the cello.

Somebody said that a bodybuilder physique is considered the ideal. I don't think that's correct. Ancient Greek and Roman statues favour proportionate, healthy body types with sold, well-defined, but not overly large muscles. When I have discussed this with people that are attracted to men, that is the message I have received. My observation from these discussions is that the idealised body type is that of an Australian Rules footballer.

What if a patient was admitted into your hospital and said that they didn't want any black doctors operating on them? Would it be right to refuse the patient service and kick them out of your hospital? Would you give them what they want? — Harry Hindu

I've never come across that particular prejudice, thank goodness. But I recall a scene in a US sitcom years ago (I can't remember which one) in which a character, who was not Jewish, was taken into hospital and then freaked out upon learning that he was to be operated on by Dr Armstrong. He reasoned that all the best American surgeons are Jewish, so Dr Armstrong, presumed to not be Jewish because of his name, could not be any good.

the practice of psychiatry isn't politically neutral, either on the side of the patient who requests a diagnosis due to failing to conform to the social values of modern society — sime

It sounds like your concern about psychiatry relates to its practice in the criminal justice system, where the subject is not the doctor's client. That will always be problematic, just as it is with forensic pathologists and police surgeons.

But we can't avoid having that involvement, can we? What would be your preferred model for dealing with someone that is alleged to have committed a brutal crime and who pleads insanity or is suspected to be suffering from severe mental illness?

How could you know it? To know it, the info would need to be stored in your brain. But then your brain would contain all the information about what is in the brain, plus the info about whatever else is in there - such as what your eyes are seeing right now. So your brain would have to hold more info than it holds, which sounds like a contradiction.

What is any doctor without their diagnoses?

What is the point of that question? You could play that game with any profession: what is a lumberjack without their cutting down of trees, what is Chris Froome without his bicycle, or Serena Williams without her racquet?

What psychiatrists offer to society is that they can eliminate or mitigate the suffering of many people who suffer chronic mental anguish, and in some cases cure them for good.

That psychiatry has been used for terrible things in the past is not in dispute. But so has teaching - just read Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield or Tom Brown's Schooldays. Yet we don't blame today's teachers for the sins committed by teachers past. So has nursing, with many nurses involved in forced adoptions from unmarried mothers. But we don't blame today's nurses for that.

I think the use of general terms is that they work very well in everyday language, because context makes them clear and precise. The trouble philosophy sometimes encounters is that it takes terms that have a clear meaning in everyday situations, like 'truth' for instance ("is it true that you hit your sister?"), and then try to use them devoid of context, in a philosophical discussion. Sometimes this can be resolved by making a painstakingly precise definition of the word for the purpose of the philosophical discussion. Unfortunately, that is not often done and people just blunder ahead, accusing anybody that asks 'what do you mean by truth' of being deliberately obstructive. But there are cases where it is not even possible to give a satisfactory definition of the notion that is being discussed. I think 'free will' is an example of that.

It demonstrates the limits of language, which is an important and powerful philosophical concept to grasp. Thus, in the very process of failing in one philosophical endeavour, we get insight into another important philosophical notion.

My response to your question is similar to that of @Judaka: different answers work for different people. That there are many philosophical views is one of its greatest strengths, because it increases the likelihood that any given person will be able to find or develop a philosophy that works for them.

Some members of this forum do not agree with that approach. There is an alternative approach that says there is an absolute truth in relation to the issues that philosophical theories deal with, so that on any given issue only the theories that agree with the absolute truth of that issue are correct in that respect, and the others are wrong.

I think the split between these approaches can be somewhat roughly characterised as whether one regards philosophy as the search for wisdom, or the search for truth. For me it is the former.

Im talking about people who refer to themselves as SJW’s in general. — DingoJones

That might be the problem then., because I think that category of people is almost empty. As I understand it, the OP is about people that use SJW as a term of derision, not about people who voluntarily apply it to themselves.

As I understand the history of the term, it was used mostly by people self-identifying as SJWs up to about 2011, but then it swung completely around and now is used mostly as a sneer by hard right people, against progressives who would not describe themselves as SJWs, or as a criticism by anybody of somebody that is seen as too trenchant.

This reversal has been so marked that these days if somebody describes themselves as a SJW, they are being facetious, in the same way as they might describe themselves as a 'bleeding-heart lefty'.

I know lots of lefties but I don't know anybody that non-facetiously describes themself as a SJW, so I think the question of what to think of somebody that self-identifies as a SJW is a non-issue.