I couldn't see anything in that article that resembled a coherent argument against allowing the terminally ill to obtain assistance to end their life.

Stella said she would not mind living incapacitated and dependent. I wonder what her basis is for that claim since, based on what I know of her disability, and what she wrote in the article, she was neither of those things. If that's correct then she's just guessing how she would feel. Guessing how one would feel in a situation one has not experienced, and then assuming that everybody else would or should feel the same is not a good basis on which to make public policy.

There is a slippery slope. I don't think a tightly controlled program greases the skids to mass murder, but a very liberal approach might.

Actually that's an argument that there is not a 'slippery slope', as that term is used in arguments.

The slippery slope argument - beloved of religious zealots that don't want to admit that their true reason for opposing right to die laws is that they think it would annoy God - is that even a tightly controlled program will inevitably lead to mass murder - no matter how tight the controls.

Personally, I don't think God minds. If She's there, She just wants us to be happy.

If people support gay marriage in Australia on the ground that it promotes freedom, why don't they support polygamous marriage?

The question was never 'Do you support gay marriage?' It was 'Do you agree that the state should formally and publicly recognise long-term gay unions in the same way as they do heterosexual unions, and that it should use the word 'marriage' to refer to those unions?'

This became a matter for debate because a very large number of citizens wanted the change and campaigned for it.

A similar sequence of events has not happened for long-term polygamous liaisons simply because very few people have requested it. If it is important to you then you need to try to start a movement, just as those that wanted gay marriage did.

One cannot blame society for not responding to a movement that does not exist in any material sense.

Also, there is nothing in the law that prevents people living in long-term polygamous relationships. Indeed, to some extent this happened in the sixties in communes, although the long-term tended not to be very long. If the failure of the state to publicly and formally recognise such relationships bothers those involved, they are making surprisingly little noise about it.

Finally, the gay marriage movement was not bound up in notions of 'freedom'. The key theme was 'fairness'. I find fairness just as problematic a concept as freedom, as I believe neither is possible in this world. But nevertheless, it was fairness and not freedom that was the catchcry of the movement.

I wonder whether the confusion between blockchain and Bitcoin may be partly fuelling the Bitcoin price bubble. It seems possible that blockchain may become the dominant currency mechanism, and completely disrupt existing currency mechanisms. But if that were to happen, it doesn't imply that Bitcoin will soar further in price. It may even mean that Bitcoin crashes and disappears.

A limited but perhaps useful analogy is between the internet (for blockchain) and Cisco (for Bitcoin). People speculated in the nineties about whether the internet would completely disrupt existing communications technologies, and the prices of internet stocks were bid up to ridiculous-seeming levels as a result. Cisco was one such stock. STarting at around $1 in the early nineties, it hit a high of $80 in the late nineties. THen it crashed. It didn't disappear, but it is currently at $40, around half the late nineties high.

So Cisco didn't end up becoming the goldmine stock that many were hoping - although those that bought in 1995 and sold in 1998 would have done tremendously well.

Yet the internet has indeed proved to be an enormous disruptor of communication technology.

But you couldn't buy shares in 'the internet', and we can't buy shares in 'blockchain'. And buying Bitcoin is a very poor proxy for investing in the eventual success of blockchain.

Thank you Wosret.

That's just what I needed this morning.

This won't help much with speaking, but is great for growing your vocabulary:

Get an ebook such as a kindle or kobo, find some simple books in your chosen language, load the <other language>->English dictionary onto the device if it doesn't already have one, then start trying to read books in that language on the device. When you encounter a word you don't know, hold your finger down on the word for a second or so and a translaton will pop up.

A bit of effort is needed to locate learner-level texts in your chosen language, but they're easy to find in most common languages.

This technique got me from schoolboy to fluent in French and from almost nothing to schoolboy in German.

The parked car cannot be considered in isolation if we are to bring into consideration - as is done above - the relief of the owner when they see the car is still there in the morning. In that case, at a minimum, the system that needs to be considered includes the car and the owner, who certainly will change in the course of the night - possibly being sleepless and in any case being relieved when she sees the car is still there in the morning.

I suggest that, in order to make sense of the owner's worry, the system should also include all local car thieves and vandals. They will be out and about stealing cars during the night. The car is there in the morning because they chose to focus their efforts on other vehicles.

So it seems that change is critical to this example. By contrast, what if we were to postulate a universe containing only a single car and nothing else - no owner, no planet, no thieves? We'd further have to assume that the car was made of special atoms that never underwent radioactive decay and never shifted position. In that case we could say that there was no change and hence no time either.

So if we want real knowledge we need to approach this issue. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you feel that real knowledge is achievable? Do you think anybody has achieved it? Perhaps some might say that Lao Tzu, Jesus of Nazareth, the Buddha, Mohammed, Joseph Smith or Zoroaster achieved it, although I feel that Enlightenment - impossible to pin down as it is - sounds very different in concept to knowledge.

Consider, as I said earlier in the thread, that one could adopt the premise of process philosophy, and deny the need for substance altogether. — Metaphysician Undercover

If by process philosophy you have in mind the sort of thing proposed by Whitehead, then that would be my approach. Was it him or somebody else that said an object is just a slow event?

A similar (seemingly, to me) approach that comes from a very different heritage is that of Nagarjuna, who makes intricate quadrilemmic arguments that the notion of substance is incoherent. I don't agree with his arguments, finding them logically flawed, although I agree with his conclusion. Nagarjuna was not arguing against Aristotle. I expect he had never come across his writings. He was arguing against the prevailing Indian philosophies of his time. But those philosophies seem to have similarities with Aristotle.

A Nagarjunan phrase I really like (heavily paraphrased) is that each object, living or not, is just what the universe is doing at that time and place. Alan Watts says it is the universe waving (to whom? to itself, would be my guess).

we'll just end up turning to some other mystical principle — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, we need to turn to something mystical. 'Principle' sounds a bit too concrete for me - as if a 'mystical principle' might be an oxymoron. I would think that we just turn towards (contemplate, meditate upon) 'the fundamental incomprehensibility of the universe', which is a lovely phrase I picked up from a fictional philosophical book written by the Abbé something-or-other, that was being read by the heroine Flora Poste in 'Cold Comfort Farm'.

I would say that Newton's laws, and any other scientific theory, are rules of thumb that have worked well for us. Like the Hong Kong Dollar exchange rate, it is something that remains very stable until it stops doing so. So it seems to make sense to proceed on the basis that the stability will continue, while the more philosophical will bear in mind that the stability could cease at any instant.

or one could become a Relativist (there is no possibility of objectivity, only opinion- and all opinions are equal). — anonymous66

Hello anonymous.

Of your three options, I'd say I feel closest to the Relativist position, as I expect the universe is fundamentally incomprehensible, so that objectivity is impossible. But I would not go on to say that 'all opinions are equal'. If 'equal' in that statement means 'identical' then one can easily observe that all opinions are not equal, if only because they are spelled differently. If it doesn't mean 'identical' then I presume it assumes there is some measure that objectively places a real, numeric, value on every opinion so that they can be ordered by value, and that that measure gives the same value for all opinions. But that conflicts with the belief that objectivity is impossible - how can there be an objective measure of the value of an opinion if objectivity is impossible?

Rather, I suggest that being a 'Relativist' implies that one can see no objective way of comparing the worth of opinions. There are of course subjective measures. In my case, I like opinions that are conducive to flourishing.

As a young, devout RC with a very questioning mind I used to be tortured by transubstantiation. My devotion said I MUST believe in it (by which I mean that the consecrated host is actually the body of Christ - I acknowledge that a number of other meanings of transubstantiation have been used above), but my analysis of it said it could not make sense.

Now, being older, no longer RC and having since encountered Aristotle's Essentialism, I can see that that angst was unnecessary. If one accepts Essentialism - that every object has a metaphysical 'essence' which is what it really 'is', and which is only accidentally and unreliably associated with its sensible properties. If one accepts that then transubstantiation is simply the act of replacing one object with another that has the same sensible properties as the first but a different essence.

In a recent thread I opined to MU that the gulf between Aristotelians and non-Aristotelians was greater, more fundamental, than the gulf between theists and non-theists.

For an Aristotelian, transubstantiation is no contradiction at all. It fits in fine to the metaphysical framework. If one is not then it doesn't, and one rejects it. I'm not, and I reject it, but I don't think those that accept it are in cognitive dissonance, as they just have a different (Aristotelian) worldview within which it makes sense.

Here's my question then: Is there any more to it than that?

And - a supplementary question: if there is no more to it than that, why did the scholastics feel the need to write thousands of pages about it (and a nineteen-page thread about it to pop up while I was asleep!)? Why not just summarise the Aristotelian doctrine of Essences (which can be done in a single paragraph) and then say the last sentence of the second para above? Was it perhaps that they were focusing on how or why the transub happened, and what its consequences were, rather than trying to prove that it could happen?

Yes

I'd call those philosophical assumptions, not scientific assumptions.
I'm a Shut Up and Calculate person. When I want to connect scientific theories to ideas about reality or existence I take off my science hat and put on my philosophy hat.

The problem with that is that the foundational axioms of science are unfalsifiable — MonfortS26

I don't think science has any foundational axioms.

The only scientific axioms I know of are those that are part of a theory - eg the postulates of quantum mechanics. Those postulates are open to falsification by doing experiments where the predictions of the postulates are not realised.

I'm afraid I don't know. We'll need to wait until SSU wakes up to hear about that (it's currently 4am in Helsinki). I thought you were asking what 'ethnically homogenous' means.

However, I can see how homogeneity might make a country more likely to have good welfare, as it may make it harder to dismiss people as 'not my tribe' and refuse to help them in their misfortune. There are plenty of heterogenous countries with good welfare though: France, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada.

Sorry, I don't understand your request. What information are you seeking to obtain?

About what?

I've got a pretty good idea of what it means, but I wonder if it's correct. Doesn't Finland have a large population of people of Swedish descent, and who still speak Swedish as well as Finnish? Sibelius - arguably the most famous Finn - was of Swedish descent. But he also wrote the country's most famous patriotic music (Finlandia) so perhaps it's that, although there is diversity, it is harmonious diversity?

I can't find the text on the internet. But I saw the page on Amazon and was interested to see that the first user review says:

'The purpose of the book is to prove the existence of God, and Aristotle's arguments are just a tool to that end, and a tool that Feser has no qualms about changing and adapting to fit his needs.'

If that's correct then I imagine that in the proof that Feser describes as Aristotelian, the 'simultaneous cause' bits were added by him, not present in Aristotle's (or Aquinas's) original version. He would have done better to have presented the Aristotle or Aquinas version.

I do not think that "simultaneous cause" is Aristotelian. — Metaphysician Undercover

Now that you mention it, that sounds right. , do you recall where that statement about 'simultaneous causes' came from?

Isn't that because books and SEP articles are monologues, and disputes only arise if there are two or more people communicating?

I don't find their notion of causality to be coherent. The notion of a simultaneous cause (item 5) goes against the common understanding of what a cause is, as well as all coherent philosophical definitions I have seen. I have seen an attempted defence of the notion of 'simultaneous cause' using terms like 'logically prior, rather than temporally prior'. But Logically Prior is usually left undefined and when one tries to nail it down it evaporates.

There are attempted examples out there of 'simultaneous causes' (eg the dent in a pillow from a rock that is sitting on it) but they generally rely on failing to understand physics.

I don't experience a sound. I would say that you are gifted with synaesthesia, except that the article says that 70% of people experience the sound. So perhaps it is rather that I am missing a common mental faculty (it won't be the only one I'm missing! :D )

I am more optimistic. I have learned a great deal from discussions on this forum and its predecessor. Even in that discussion, while no agreement was reached, I emerged from it feeling I had a better understanding of the Aristotelian worldview and why some people are very dedicated to it.

Non do I find the arising of such disputes surprising. You and I would both agree what 'big' means when we are talking about a cat, as it is in the context of things like cats that we learned to use the word 'big'. Why should we be surprised that we have different interpretations of 'big' when it is applied to things like universes or multiverses, that are completely removed from the scope in which we learned those words and in which they are applicable. I would be astonished if such disputes did not arise.

This thread has all three - critiques, dismissals and ridicule, as well as a spirited defence of Aristotle's position put up by some of the worthy resident Aristotelians. If you don't mind having to sift out the critiques from the Ds and Rs, you may find it helpful.

My impression was that the key differences of opinion were over what constitutes a 'definition', and what constitutes a 'proof'.

It is valid, but care needs to be taken not to take it out of context, as that can lead to an incorrect statement.

The conclusion, stated in its most complete form (and taking the language as assumed) is:

In any theory T in which A and B are theorems, the sentence A⊃B is also a theorem.

If we move outside the context of the theory T, the consequent of that conclusion no longer holds.

What is a 'fiscal liberal'? It sounds like somebody who says we should not have to pay tax. There are plenty of those, but for some reason you seem to call them 'libertarians' rather than 'liberals'

They are simultaneous. The fact that I don't see the point on the paper without moving the pencil out of the way does not indicate that there is no point that has appeared there, only that I do not see the point. — Agustino

Usually, the pencil has to move before the paper is marked. That's because the mark is made by the pencil leaving behind part of its graphite tip on the paper. For that to happen, a force is needed that breaks the bonds that bind the graphite that will make the mark to the rest of the tip. That force is created by moving the pencil sideways which, by the operation of friction, stretches the bonds to the point where some break.

A similar analysis applies when the motion of the pen is just up and down rather than sideways.

The only instance in which the pencil does not have to move before a mark arises is when particles of graphite freely fall off the tip without being subject to a force. This could happen with a very flaky pencil tip. But in that case the pencil does not even have to touch the paper for a mark to appear.

An article on arXiv is no more holy scripture than a pop-science book.

I asked you to link to a proof for your claim. Those papers contain no proofs.

The closest the Vilenkin paper comes is on p7 (2nd para of section IV) where it says:

All histories consistent with exact conservation laws will have non-vanishing probabilities and will occur in an infinite number of O-regions

Right there, in that sentence, Vilenkin asserts that E having a nonzero probability in a single trial entails that it is impossible for there to be an infinite sequence of trials in which E does not happen. That is, he simply assumes the conclusion that you assert. He does not prove it.

That's because he's writing informally. That becomes blindingly obvious in the paragraphs that follow, where he whimsically contemplates things like O-regions in which Elvis is still alive.

Aren't you neglecting that the matter density must be uniform?

The homogeneity part of the cosmological principle requires that mass-energy be uniformly distributed 'at the large scale'.

but multiverse theory strikes me as suffering from the same type of problem — fishfry

It's possible to dislike multiverse hypotheses but not blame it on physics, because it's all unfalsifiable and hence doesn't count as science. I regard it as metaphysics.

Smolin's complaint is that the same applies to string theory. If he's correct (I don't know enough about string theory to comment) then string theory also is not science and so should not be getting large parts of physics funding. Also, it should be called 'String Hypothesis', as a requirement of any 'theory' is that it be falsifiable.

We need another assumption. the cosmological principle, which says in effect that there are no measure zero misbehaviors! — fishfry

Well actually the author has misused the cosmological principle, which implies nothing of the sort. The cosmological principle states that each constant-time hypersurface of the universe ('this spacetime') is homogeneous and isotropic at the large scale. When formalised (which is quite tricky to do - see this discussion), this is a statement about observed average quantities as the size of the hypersurface subsets we average over approaches infinity.

So the cosmological principle says absolutely nothing about microphenomena such as whether a particular teensy-weensy arrangement of molecules like the Earth recurs - even though the author of that article appears to think it does. I am confident that neither ergodicity nor the cosmological principle, either alone or together, can imply the conclusion that there is certainly a duplicate Earth in this spacetime.

I've quoted from Vilenkin's book. Nerither he not Tegmark were speaking informally. — tom

They do not say that they are speaking precisely and formally in their books. It is only you that says that. The evidence points to the opposite being the case. The absence of equations is a big clue.

In any case, the books are not holy scripture and we are not in the helpless position of those trying to interpret holy scripture and work out what the Author intended. Either mathematical analysis supports a conclusion that there does not exist a single level 1 spacetime lacking a duplicate Earth, rather than the set of such spacetimes merely having measure zero, or it doesn't. If it does, you should be able to point to a rigorous proof of the former. So far you have not done so.

Very nice. I always liked that Roxy Music song, but never listened to the lyrics closely enough to realise how deep it was.

For those interested, the argument that, as a generic consequence of inflationary cosmology, there almost certainly exist exact duplicates of Earth (among other interesting things) is given here: Many worlds in one, J. Garriga, A. Vilenkin, Phys.Rev. D64 (2001). (This is still within the parameters of "level-I multiverse.") — SophistiCat

Hi Sophisticat. I skimmed that article you linked and was interested to note that Vilenkin makes statements like:

"there are an infinite number of O-regions with identical histories up to the present"

where I think what he means is "there is almost surely an infinite number of .....". That is, I think he over-simplified his statement, presumably because he wanted to make it more accessible to the non-physicist reader, since it is a non-technical article.

I note that in your post you included the crucial qualifier "almost certainly", although it does not occur in the paper. Interestingly, Tegmark also omits the qualifier (bottom of first column on page 4 of this article you linked) but, like Vilenkin, gives no explanation for the omission, and his article is also more pop science than academic.

Do you have a view on why they omitted the 'almost certain' qualifier from their articles?

There are no measure zero events, as explained multiple times in this thread. — tom

I have not noticed such an explanation. But it's a long thread and I haven't read it all. Can you please point to one such explanation?

Are you of the opinion that the answer is 1? If I agree to that opinion for the sake of furthering the discussion, how do you think that helps your argument?

Of the latter type of understanding, the intuitive one that relates rules to things, do you not agree that there is a better and a worse intuition? — Metaphysician Undercover

I would partially agree, but I expect it would not be the sort of agreement you would wish.

First, the agreement is partial because I would see the set of intuitions about relationships of rules to phenomena ('things') as a partially ordered set. In such a set, for some pairs of intuitions we can say one is better than the other, but for other pairs we cannot.

But we also need a definition of 'better'. The one I would instinctively reach for is 'more useful'. One intuition is 'better' than another under my interpretation if it enables more accurate predictions.

Based on past posts, I have the feeling that you would reject using 'usefulness' as a benchmark for quality of an intuition. But that then begs the question of what definition of 'better' you would like to use in its place. Again I might guess that you would prefer a definition that had something to do with 'truth'. Personally, I would reject such a definition, as I do not believe in Absolute Truth.

Now my understanding is that Aristoteleans form a proper subset of those who believe in Absolute Truth. So there should be no difficulty finding a non-Aristotelean that believes in Absolute Truth, who thus could continue down that line of discussion, by accepting 'truth' as a measure of the quality of an understanding. But I am not such a person.

OK then, my answer is simply "No, I do not intend to contact Mr Tegmark, as I have no reason to believe he needs correcting".

I see your suggestion about contacting him as irrelevant, as was the reference to the Nobel committee.

Perhaps you would like to get in touch with Max Tegmark and give him the bad news? — tom

I am not aware that Tegmark made the mistake of aggressively claiming that probability one means 'certain' in an infinite sample space, as you did.

I suggest you read up on the precise, important mathematical notion of 'almost surely' (also rendered from time to time as 'a.s', 'almost certain' or 'a.c')