Yes.
It is readily proven that for any positive integer n, there is only a countable number of different n-tuples from a countable alphabet. One proves this by constructing a one-to-one map from the positive integers (which are countable) to the set of all such n-tuples.

It is also readily proven that a countable union of countable sets is countable (it is in fact the proof from the previous paragraph, applied to the case n=2). The set of all finite strings from a countable alphabet is the union, for n going over all positive integers, of the set of all strings of length n, each of which we know is countable from the previous paragraph. This is a countable union of countable sets, and hence countable.

individual names would have infinite length and so you would have to wait an infinite time to discover whether the reference is to Jim...............my or his brother, Jim............mi. — apokrisis

One wouldn't have to wait an infinite time for that, if we know that the reference is to one or the other, because two different infinite strings must have a first character that differs, and that first character must be in a finite-numbered position. It's just that one wouldn't know how long one has to wait to see the differing character.

It would however take an infinite time do indicate exactly which individual one was referring to.

Then most of them cannot be referred to individually. Only a countable number of objects can be referred to individually, because there is only a countable number of names (aka 'constant expressions') that can be used to refer to them. They can be referred to as part of a group - like 'all real numbers between 3 and 5' - but not individually.

My understanding is that it is this feature that caused Thorvald Skolem to question whether the unnamable real numbers really exist. If they don't, then the real numbers are countable.

Don't ask me what 'exist' means in this context though. I have no idea.

If the alphabet is countable and names are required to be finite, then the set of all names is countable. If either of those is not the case, the set of names is uncountable.

Note - the requirement that names be finite does not mean there has to be an upper limit on the length of a name. With a countable alphabet, there could be names of length n for every integer n, yet the set of names would still be countable as long as no names were infinitely long (or even, as long as there were only countably many infinitely-long names).

I have the feeling that this situation of indeterminate references is much more common that one might think. Most speech contains shortcuts and omissions. People often use a name for somebody that they don't realise is not the name used for that person amongst those to whom they are speaking. Sometimes this leads to confusion. More often we manage to make sense of what is said. That's why I think concepts like 'failing to refer to someone' miss the whole point of language analysis. That makes it seem as if speaking is a multiple choice exam, for which one gets points for each sentence part that was correctly executed.

In my experience, verbal communication is not like that. Each speech act needs to be assessed as a whole (by speech act I mean the smallest part of speech that conveys an entire idea or proposition, which may usually be a sentence but may occasionally be more or less). It succeeds if the listener grasps the purpose of the act. It fails if the listener has no idea what the speaker is on about.

I can see your point about possible worlds being useful in considering counterfactuals or hypotheticals. I have a different approach involving imagination (although recently I have been wondering exactly what imagination is. It is a very strange concept from a philosophical point of view), but different approaches suit different people.

I concede that Kripke's approach may well be useful in metaphysics. Where I don't see it as being useful is in relation to language. To me it seems to bear almost no relation to the way people actually speak to each other, or how people learn to speak.

Is your claim that if someone says 'Gödel was a brilliant mathematician,' but if it turns out that Schmidt came up with the theorems, then what they said was that Schmidt was a brilliant mathematician? — Snakes Alive

Not quite. My claim is that if they said that because they believed Godel did the Incompleteness Theorems and that's all they knew about Godel then their intention was to praise the person who wrote the incompleteness theorems.

Suppose Gödel was a fraud, and I say the above sentence. It turns out he is a terrible mathematician, and stole all his work from Schmidt. Was I right or wrong about what I said? — Snakes Alive

Again the question is too vague. Part of what you would have said was based on a misconception. Trying to classify natural language statements into two boxes - right and wrong - is way too crude.

What about the real life version of this? Substitute Shakespeare for Godel and Francis Bacon for Schmidt. WHat do I mean when I say I love Shakespeare. Do I mean I love whoever wrote the plays attributed to S?

The point is that 'Gödel' refers to Gödel, not to Schmidt. — Snakes Alive

If that is Kripke's point than he has a very strange idea of how humans communicate.

If Schmidt wrote the theorems and the speaker doesn't know that and the only thing she knows about Godel is that (she believes) he wrote the theorems, then it makes no sense to me to suggest that the speaker is referring to the man named Kurt Godel rather than to the creator of the theorems. I'm sure if we outlined the situation in full to the speaker and asked her which she meant, she'd say it was the creator of the theorems.

You can take a different approach and insist that it still means she was 'referring' to the man Kurt Godel, but the difference between us then becomes one of arbitrary choice of labels or categories that we apply to a statement. It certainly is not one that can be empirically proven right or wrong.

Yes. Let's focus on one of Kripke's examples - the Godel-Schmidt one. His objection appears to be that the definite description 'Godel' in the sentence 'Godel was a great mathematician' has an ambiguous referent, and that is a fatal flaw in the descriptivist approach.

My response to that is firstly that Witt's approach, which I prefer, would be to look at the whole speech act and its context, who is speaking, what they know about Godel and the theorems that are attributed to them, and infer from that whether the person was referring to the author of the Incompleteness theorems (Schmidt), or to the Godel that ended up at Princeton, and to whom those theorems are attributed.

But even the descriptivist approach, despite the fact that it has a certain rigidity, can easily be adapted to accommodate this case by recognising that any proposition we utter or imply is preceded by a silent, implicit 'I believe that...' The implied prefix is there even when we are being dogmatic, but perhaps accompanied by a suffix long the lines of 'and I also believe that anybody that doesn't believe that too, is an idiot!'

Then, if the speaker doesn't know about Schmidt, the definite description Godel probably means, for her:

I believe all of the following:
- there once was a man named Godel
- he lived in Austria in the 19th-20th centuries, then the US
- he was a great logician
....... (maybe some other beliefs about Godel)
- he did a lot of important work in logic (excluding the incompleteness theorems) and physics
- he invented the famous incompleteness Theorems

If the speaker does know about Schmidt, we drop the last proposition from the DD.

If the speaker doesn't know about Gödel's other work, we drop the second last proposition.

Either way, the statement is, when expanded out, a conjunction of the above with the proposition
'I believe that that man was a great mathematician'.

If the Schmidt story is true, and the speaker didn't know about it, we can say that the statement is thus false, because one of the conjuncts ('G invented the incompleteness theorems) is false. That is exactly the same as how R deduces that the statement 'The present king of France is bald' is False.

I don't think categorising statements between False and Meaningless (which are the two crudest choices available) is helpful. What we aim to do in communication is to understand the purpose of the speech act. In this case we are trying to work out whether the speaker is expressing her admiration for the creator of the incompleteness theorems, or for Gödel's other work, or for Godel on the assumption that he wrote both the incompleteness theorems and the other logic and physics stuff. To understand that, we need to know more about the speaker, and what they know about Godel, about incompleteness theorems, and about Schmidt.

In short, the definite description is still there, but it may or may not contain some wrong beliefs, like 'the present king of France', and we need more context to understand whether that is the case. R's approach, with the amendment suggested above, covers this, and W's approach covers it easily.

I've already talked about this

Are you referring to the link above to https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/211811? That link is to a series of examples of how one would use Kripke's RD concept. That is not a presentation of a philosophical problem that cannot be solved by any other approach. Indeed, it doesn't seem to present a philosophical problem at all. Are you referring to a different post? If so could you please link to it?

For instance, if 'Donald Trump' means 'the 45th president...' etc., or some other description, then the predicated behavior of the name in all of these modal environments is wrong, empirically, not as a matter of personal taste.

The question 'what do the words "Donald Trump" mean' is malformed, because meaning depends on context. A coherent version of the question would be 'to what were those words intended to refer in <a particular speech act containing the words>'. One cannot usefully discuss what the words mean without a context. Both R's and W's theories recognise context-dependence. Indeed there is no apparent difference between the example here and Russell's one about 'Bismarck' vs 'the current chancellor of Germany' (or 'Walter Scott vs the author of Waverley').

What do you not understand? — Snakes Alive

Put simply, what philosophical problem or question is Kripke trying to solve? If it's a musing then it doesn't need to be about a problem or question. But if it's supposed to solve a problem, or answer a question that has not been answered, or to which the pre-existent answers were inadequate - what is the problem or question?.

I'm afraid I'm still not seeing how Kripke's approach aids understanding of the use of language in those linked examples. They are all readily explained by even Russell's approach, and are even easier to understand under Wittgenstein's. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

Is it perhaps just a matter of preference, that Kripke's approach resonates with some people where R's or W's doesn't, and vice versa for others? Is Kripke claiming that R's and W's ideas were wrong, or just that he prefers to think of things his way (and clearly plenty of philosophers feel likewise)?

Can you provide an example where Kripkean analysis helps to understand a speech act in a useful way, that is not available by a different approach, in particular a psychological approach, which is what I see Wittgenstein's as being..

I don't agree that our ability to express is limited by the literal meanings of words. We all frequently make interpolations to cover when people say things that literally make no sense, but where we are able to divine by context what the aim of their speech act was.

Sure if the words were just random noises, we'd be unlikely to make anything of a speech act. But each word, even when misused, will have a bunch of connections to a variety of concepts, which we understand by seeing how these words are commonly used, and we infer meaning from a speech act by searching a pattern of connections between words in the speech act that enables us to interpret it as a whole. Those connections are enormously varied, covering things like 'sounds like', 'would be pronounced by somebody with a lisp like', 'is a French word for', 'is an archaic term for', 'is the legally specified name for', 'is a slang name for, commonly used in the East End'. Our brains conduct an amazingly rapid search of all these possible patterns of connections when we hear a speech act, to come up with an interpretation of it in a fraction of a second.

It seems to me that this is psychology, rather than philosophy.

I am glad the discussion has turned to Kripke, because that's the element of this subject area that I find most mystifying of all. There is no doubt that he was a very clever person, as his work in classical logic demonstrates, But try as I might, I am unable to see any point in his rigid designator (RD) idea, and those other notions that attach to it.

To me, it looks as though he had never read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The RD idea focuses intently on a very small part of most speech acts, and builds an enormous, complicated metaphysical edifice around it, to do with its 'meaning'. Yet Wittgenstein showed us that:

(1) speech is not about meaning, but about purpose. We make a speech act in order to achieve something.
(2) parsing speech acts, while occasionally useful, is often misleading and can lead to wrong conclusions, because often the act as a whole has an impact or intention that differs from what might be inferred by zooming in on constituent parts.

Sure, when we analyse a speech act from a Wittgensteinian perspective, we will pay close attention to any parts that look like a proper name. But we don't need to get hung up on consideration of the metaphysical meaning of the proper name. All we need ask ourselves is why did the speaker use that word in that part of the act, and what effect were they aiming to achieve.

From such a standpoint, we can effortlessly deal with all the cases that Kripke spends so much time on, like imaginary and fictional objects, misheard names, confusions of the speaker, 'mis-speaking', differences in language, mistaken conclusions about the chemical composition of water, and so on.

I read the SEP page that was linked above about Causal Theories, Madagascar and Marco Polo and it just seemed to be so many words about a non-issue. From a Wittgensteinian perspective, the varying uses of the word 'Madagascar' by Polo and others is completely sensible and explicable, in a very simple way.

I'm not saying that all Kripke's work on RDs was pointless. I still hold out hope that one day I might be persuaded that there is some point to it - that it doesn't just address a problem of its own creation.

Thoughts which do not respond to any necessity, which are not motivated by the milieu in which they come to be: — StreetlightX

This immediately makes me think of Australia's new PM's making loud noises about the need to legislate religious freedom. Under questioning he's been made to admit that there is no social problem that currently needs solving in this regard. Yet he ploughs ahead, justifying it on the basis of a need 'to prevent future problems arising'.

I would like to call this transcendental stupidity. But actually it's quite a cunning way of dog-whistling to religious bigots, that he will seek to restore the permission to discriminate against others that they used to have before the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation (which in most cases is at least a couple of decades old).

The only necessity to which this line of thought responds is the necessity of avoiding or lessening the electoral annihilation that is approaching for his government.

My current definition of possible is:
p is possible with respect to a set of propositions, S, if p does not contradict the propositions of S. — Dfpolis

That is exactly my approach. To say that something is possible or necessary without relating the statement to the reference set S is to say nothing at all. In ordinary speech the reference is omitted, but the implication is that S is the set of everything we currently know about the world and how it operates. That then leads to the definition I gave above that an impossible event is one such that, if I learned that it happened, I would be astonished and have to radically revise my worldview.

When philosophers pick up that habit of ordinary speech and assume that the omission of an explicit reference to S means that no S is implied, they get themselves tied up in all sorts of unnecessary difficulties.

A distinction is sometimes made between 'physically possible' and 'logically possible', and a possible world can be thought of as one that is logically, but not physically, possible. This distinction is easily handled in the above framework by changing S. For logically possible, S is the bare minimum - the axioms of logic. For physically possible, S is those axioms together with everything else we know about the world.

This distinction also feeds through to the degree of astonishment in my personal definition. The astonishment I would feel, and the severity of the revisions I'd have to make to my worldview, would be vastly greater if I learned that something I had considered logically impossible had happened than if I heard that something I had considered physically impossible had happened. In the former case I would need to try to revise every aspect of how I think, whereas in the latter I would only need to revise my beliefs about certain things.

What do you think about the points in the argument you quoted where God demands obedience? It seems to me that believing that is very problematic because there are different sacred scriptures - Bible, Quran, Vedas, Book of Mormon etc - which demand obedience to different rules, or in some cases (Vedas) do not demand obedience at all.

I find it easy to believe that all of those might be love letters from God to Her creations, but not that they be sets of rules to which She expects us to adhere. Love letters can vary in tone, metaphor and mode of expression, but rules can't.

PS: on re-reading your OP, I was delighted to notice that which escaped me at the first reading. That is that Dr Aikens, like me, believes that God is female.

The problem is the common sensical notions won't be able to be used broadly to understand many instances of how we use modal concepts and so it fundamentally doesn't do the job we use possible worlds semantics to accomplish (that is, to give a rigorous account of these ideas) — MindForged

I am open to persuasion, as some clever people have spent a lot of time on possible worlds and modal logic, and I'm reluctant to believe that lots of clever people have wasted time on a chimera (although it does happen from time to time). What I've never seen, and it's not for want of looking, is what that field of inquiry achieves. It doesn't explain ordinary language, because people don't think in terms of possible worlds.

I'm still trying to find a demonstration of what it does clarify or explain.

That example is of something nobody would ever say and expect to be taken seriously. I don't regard the lack of applicability to something nobody would ever seriously say as any reason to discount a definition.

I am pretty confident that, given the choice between my interpretation and one involving all the metaphysical baggage of the possible worlds paradigm, that average person would say that mine is the closest to what they meant.

If a person does not understand modality, they will not understand the meaning of "possible worlds — Dfpolis

My understanding is that the modality the possible worlds paradigm seeks to explain is not the fancy modality of modal logic, but the modality of everyday speech, when we say something is possible, impossible or certain.

If that's correct then it would be hard to find someone that doesn't have at least a folk understanding of those notions. I think only a small proportion of those could clearly articulate their folk understanding.

FWIW my attempt at articulating what I understand by those concepts is:

- if somebody says X is impossible (certain) they mean they expect that, if X happened (didn't happen), they would be so astonished that they would have to revise major parts of their worldview
- if somebody says X is possible they mean they expect that, if X happened (didn't happen), they would NOT be so astonished that they would have to revise major parts of their worldview

There's no need for possible worlds in that interpretation. I can't personally see any value in the possible worlds paradigm.

to put it another way, 'everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts'

Do you feel that religion, as you understand it, deals with facts, or with mysteries?

I cannot deny that some religions appear to claim to be in possession of certain facts - such as the RC doctrines of the Ascension and the Immaculate Conception. Do you regard such claims as assertions of concrete truth, to be taken literally, or as ways of approaching a mystery? The former will be truth-apt, the latter not.

From Maverick Philosopher - an abstract of Josiah Royce’s philosophy of religion:

a) There is a paramount end or aim of human life relative to which other aims are vain.

b) Man as he now is, or naturally is, is in danger of missing his highest aim, his highest good.

To hold that man needs salvation is to hold both of (a) and (b). — Royce, quoted by Wayfarer

This strikes me as a terribly narrow definition of religion. I know there's no point ultimately in arguing definitions so I won't say it's wrong. I'll just say that I find it unpleasant and unhelpful.

Why? Because rather than just saying that I feel a need for a teleological religion, it implies that anybody whose religion is not teleological is wrong and is leading a deficient life. At least it encompasses Buddhism and some Indian religions, but it excludes many ancient religions, including most folk religions. It even implies that there is a single highest aim and that some may - be they ever so devout - have a different aim, and hence be wrong.

The quoted person goes on:

The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory;

Again I recognise in this only a restricted group of religions. One can enjoy and get great fulfilment from one's religion without believing that anybody who doesn't do likewise is 'radically deficient'.

What would I offer in place of the above, given that I find it so distasteful? Perhaps something like the following. It would benefit from workshopping no doubt.


1- There are mysteries of this life that we will never be able to comprehend, yet which many people find deeply moving. We might call these 'ultimate mysteries'.

2- Many people have a yearning for connection with others, which includes love but is not limited to love.

3- Religious activity consists of practices of meditation, reflection, communication attempts or ritual focused on the above notions of ultimate mysteries and connection.

4- A person that regularly engages in religious activity may be described as religious.

5- Many people find that their life is enhanced by regular religious activity. In some cases it may be that they felt their life was deficient before becoming religious. In others it may be that they felt no deficiency, but nevertheless found the religious activity to be a positive experience and hence continued it.

6- A particular set of religious activities that is practised by many people could be described as a 'religion'. But this can only ever be a rough approximation, because variation in practices is continuous. No two people will have exactly the same set of practices.

Reading that back, I notice that the concept of 'belief' is not mentioned. I tried to find a place to insert it, but couldn't find a place that it fitted. After further reflection, I concluded that, while belief is often important to religious people, it is not universal. Religion, prayer, ritual can be just a question - "if there is anybody out there listening I greet you". One can revere sacred mysteries and send attempts at communication without having to believe in particular answers to the mysteries or that anybody is listening. As with all new ideas I have, I was shortly reminded that that one is not new. The homosexual Roman Catholic priest James Alison expressed it in this interview, where he said that it was inaccurate and dismissive to refer to religions as 'faiths'

Consider if you were actually doing the experiment with water and not with photons. Would you produce the same interference pattern regardless of the rate of flow? — Wayfarer

If by 'flow' you mean wave height then Yes, subject to irregularities caused by turbulence.

Water does not flow in a linear manner when the water has waves. Each particle executes a roughly circular motion. It is only the wave that flows, not the water. A better sense of this can be gained by considering the wave in a cracked whip. The whip cord doesn't flow from the handle to the tip. Only the wave does.

In the water analogy, the analog of the 'rate' of the electron gun is the height of the wave. The technical term across both cases is the amplitude of the wave. The wave amplitude affects only the brightness, not the shape, of the interference pattern. The shape depends only on the wave frequency and the distance between the sources.

with the caveat that 'only up to the point where the rate is so high that the interaction between different electrons can no longer be neglected'. — Wayfarer

I saw that caveat on the PF discussion, and I suspect it's wrong. But it doesn't affect the discussion here, so we needn't bother investigating whether it is.

whatever is showing up, is not 'inside' time and space — Wayfarer

I reiterate that I think to call this gobbledegook is uncharitable and, I think, bordering on rude. But I have to confess that I cannot imagine what it would mean for something to show up that is not inside time and space.

I don't have a clear idea of what you mean when you say time is not a factor. When the experiment begins, there is no pattern on the screen, and when it finishes, after some time has elapsed, there is a pattern. So the experiment cannot be done without time. I suppose that goes without saying for any experiment, or indeed any action at all because to 'do' something is to arrange things so that a property of the world that did not hold at time t1, holds at t2.

Similarly space must be a factor because the pattern on the screen can only be understood in terms of spatial measurements. The pattern is a mapping from the spatial coordinates of points on the screen (a pair of real numbers) to a real number that indicates brightness.

I think the problem is that the statement that something is or is not 'a factor' in an event is too vague. I get the sense that you have a strong idea of what you mean by it but unfortunately it is not coming across.

I think I'm raising a serious and possibly novel argument in that thread, and I don't think the person there I was discussing it with understood it. — Wayfarer

You raised a question, which was whether the particle rate (BTW more accurately characterised as the field strength) determines the degree of undulation in the bars. The answer to that was No, and that answer is correct. In your later posts you tried to articulate a point about time and space but the point was not expressed clearly enough to understand. I too could not understand what point you were trying to raise. I thought the way people said the point was not understandable was regrettably curt.

I hadn't noticed DrClaude's comment about a particle 'interfering with itself', so I do not include that amongst the statements that I said I agree with. On a literal level the statement is not truth-apt. It just points towards a way one might think about something. I think that way is unhelpful, because it de-emphasises the probability field, which is the key to understanding.

Perhaps you could have another go here, at explaining what the argument was that you were trying to make in the PF thread.

With the problem as expressed in your quote, the widely-accepted solution is decoherence, which is mentioned later in that wiki article. There are other suggested solutions, which I am not familiar with, and which I haven't bothered to investigate, because decoherence provides such a satisfying answer to the question of why we observe only one of the outcomes that were regarded as possible before the measurement.

As the article explains, decoherence is not tied to a particular interpretation. It can be used in both Copenhagen and many-worlds, and maybe in others too (but not in Bohm, I suspect).

I read your discussion on PF, and I agree with the answers, although I would not have used the word 'gobbledegook' myself.

As to whether wave functions or probability fields are 'real' I prefer to leave those questions to ontologists. They have no meaning to me. For me, what is 'real' is subjective experience, and everything else is speculative theorising.

But doesn’t the whole question of ‘which interpretation’ - Copenhagen, MWI, etc - revolve around ‘the measurement problem’ — Wayfarer

To get into that I think we'd first need to take a step back and try to reach a shared understanding of what 'the measurement problem' is. It is often talked about but rarely defined. It is often presented just in terms of a vague gesture towards quantum weirdness in general.

My closest guess is that, rather than being a problem, it is a question, the following one:

'Does conscious observation change the physical universe?'

One can adopt an interpretation of QM in which the answer is Yes, or another in which it is No. QM itself is silent on the issue. For me the question is moot because I see consciousness as primary and the 'physical' as an artifact of our consciousness.

What do you consider the measurement problem to be?

I've read that blog post by Sean Carroll more than once in the past. As far as I can recall it is about which are the most popular interpretations of QM, and doesn't even mention the measurement problem. Its point is simply that there is no consensus interpretation of QM. I don't know whether he was being facetious when he called it an embarrassing graph. I suspect so. I don't see anything embarrassing about it. Since interpretations are metaphysics, not science, I see the diversity of interpretations as a healthy sign.

this is the subject of the Brian Greene quote that I mentioned — Wayfarer

I would say "don't believe everything written by physicists in non-peer-reviewed books" but I don't think I need to tell you that, given your disdain for Stephen Hawking's non-peer-reviewed writings, which I share.

I think the video is OK. I posted a question about this experiment on Physics Forum and that is exactly what I was told there. — Wayfarer

It depends what you mean by 'OK'.
Does it give a good general idea of how the basic double-slit experiment is conducted and what is seen? Yes.
Does it demonstrate that a Laplacian view of the world as consisting of small hard billiard balls bouncing around is unviable? Yes.
But does it accurately represent how the interference pattern arises and why it disappears when we take measurements next to one of the slits? No.
If you think you've read a credible technical argument to the contrary, and you wanted to discuss that, you could post a link to it here.

The video is a classic example of science being so oversimplified as to make nonsense of it. A number of the key claims are nonsense, including the one that an electron 'interferes with itself'. It does no such thing. What the electron gun does is create a probability field at the screen. Consequently, flashes appear on the screen, which we think of as electrons hitting the screen, in accordance with that field. The probability field is undulating, so we see the patterns of bright and dark bars.

What is 'interfering with each other' are (is?) the two probability fields emanating from the two slits. It is not electrons interfering with each other or with themselves. When there is only one slit there is no interference because there is only one source of the probability field.

When the electrons are observed passing through a slit, a device needs to be used that physically interacts with the probability field near one of the slits, as that's the only way to get an electron observation near the slit. It is that interaction that changes the field, not the fact that 'the electron knows it's being watched'. The change to the field causes the probability field at the screen to be one of a large smudge rather than interference bars. The mathematics of this is quite straightforward, and not at all mysterious.

The attraction of the many-worlds interpretation is that it introduces a straightforward way of explaining why QM has probability distributions in it. In a sense it is a way to uphold Einstein's 'God doesn't play dice' objection. I don't think it really has any bearing on what is called the 'measurement problem'.

There are a number of different double-slit experiments, and all of them (or at least, all the ones I know, including several 'delayed choice' and 'quantum eraser' versions) are completely explained by the mathematical analysis, which does not hold any mysteries, beyond the mundane technical difficulty of working through them. They do not necessitate the adoption of any particular interpretation of QM or any particular philosophical position.

Without knowing which double split experiment the OP was thinking of, and what aspect he thinks requires an idealistic worldview, one can't say much more. The idea that observation changes the world because of something to do with consciousness is not supported by QM. What causes the interference pattern to disappear when particles are detected going through one of the slits is the interaction between the detector (including the recording apparatus connected to that) and the particles, not the fact that a conscious entity looks at the results of the interaction. The interference pattern would still disappear if nobody looked at the screen or the detector.

I write that as somebody with strong idealistic leanings. Those leanings stand on their own and have no need of a misconstrued version of QM to justify them.

This picture depicts a mass of people fleeing the economic crisis in Venezuela. — Marcus de Brun

No it does not!

Read the article it came from, which you can get to just by clicking on the photo. At no point does it say these people are fleeing. They are returning from Colombia, which they have briefly visited to buy goods unavailable in Venezuela.

The photo caption says:

Venezuelans carrying groceries cross the Simon Bolivar bridge from Cucuta in Colombia back to San Antonio de Tachira in Venezuela,

Your assertion is based on the words 'Refugees fleeing crisis flood into Colombia: UN', which is not the photo caption but the headline of the article from which it was taken.

You have no idea what plight the actual refugees are in, and the picture has nothing to do with the refugees. Indeed, it is a picture of those people that are in a good enough situation not to have to flee Venezuela.

If I were you I would delete the OP and request that the mods delete the thread in its entirety. All it demonstrates is a failure to perform due diligence before making an accusation.

At least most of the terms in the OP are criticisms that by definition can only apply to the left - eg Social Justice Warrior. I dislike the use of such terms, but at least they are honest. It says 'I don't like people that prioritise social justice over individual freedom (and I doubt their sincerity)'. I don't share that sentiment, but I can understand that some people hold it.

The term that I find more silly is 'Virtue Signalling', which can apply to either side, but seems to be accepted as exclusively applying to the left, criticising statements of wishing for tolerance, equality and helping the downtrodden. It suggests that people are saying things to make them look virtuous, rather than taking on the more difficult task of acting virtuously. No doubt there are plenty of people on the left that do that, but there are at least as many on the right.

My favourite 'virtue signalling' expressions from the right are:

'I pray for the victims'
[of a gun massacre for which I am partly responsible by opposing any form of gun restriction]

'We must support the military'
[Who are only in personal danger because me and my colleagues sent them there, from our comfortable, heavily guarded, Wachington offices]

'We must never give up our support for freedom'
[Even though my government, with its massive ramping up of the police state and winding back on privacy laws and personal legal protections such as habeas corpus or the presumption of innocence, has done more to reduce freedom that any government since WW2]

Yet somehow theses are not regarded as virtue signalling.

But then, public political debate is 95% rhetoric, and I see no point in complaining if the forces of darkness, while having very poorly crafted and logically inconsistent policies, have well-crafted rhetoric.

What a pointless "if". It is, by its nature, in conflict with reason, else it wouldn't be a matter of faith. — Sapientia

I don't see Michael's 'if' as pointless. Faith is usually considered to be believing something for which there is little or no evidence, not believing something against which there is strong evidence.

If I were to believe, as many do, that Goldbach's Conjecture is true (or the Four-Colour Hypothesis, or Fermat's Last Hypothesis, before they were proved), it would be a matter of faith, even though there is no evidence for its falsity.

The God debate has been going on in some form or another since the very beginning of theism (often the debate has been a private one) and we're at the same place we were when we started. In the very beginning some people believed, some people didn't, and others weren't sure. And this is just where we still are today, after at least centuries of discussion which has often been led by some of the best minds among us on all sides.

So what are we to do? — Jake

For me the answer is to recognise that religious beliefs are predominantly formed by upbringing, peer group, culture and personal spiritual experience, not by logical argument. Logical arguments for or against religious beliefs only very rarely sway people. I think the exceptions are people that already feel an impulse towards or away from the belief. An attractive argument can form the catalyst for somebody that is already inclined towards a position to take the final step and adopt it. But such a person will usually not be one of the protagonists in the argument.

In most cases the arguments are between die-hard adherents of the opposing points of view, and the lack of resolution doesn't matter. The argument is had for the pure joy of intellectual sparring - like a jousting match but less lethal.

So, for those of us who enjoy a bit of jousting - and I confess I do from time to time - have at it and enjoy it, but try not to get personal. For those that don't, sit back and watch the entertainment, or else change the channel and read something more uplifting.

What I have said, I have said.

You don't need to convince me that all humans rely on faith. — andrewk

I am not sure I have ever heard of someone claiming theism, acknowledging omniscience, and benevolence but excluding omnipotence. Can you fill in some more on that for me. — Rank Amateur

What do you want to know? I am by no means knowledgeable about all types of theism. I am just observing that omnipotence does not logically follow from creating the universe, or from omniscience or benevolence, and I have seen people who are devout theists talk about the limitations of their god. I even saw a Christian book about it a few years back. I'll look for it but I suspect it may have gone back to the second-hand book seller (It was not mine). The theme was that the incarnation and crucifixion was God's attempt to redress the harm from mistakes that She made.

Personally, I find such types of theism attractive. For me, being fallible is a prerequisite for being lovable.

The world is full of well-meaning creators that have not had full control of their creations. Just look at Frankenstein, or any parent.

Ok, cool, so I'll ask again...

Will atheists make the same acknowledgement you are requesting of theists? Which was... — Jake

I have already answered that.

Some atheists do and some atheists don't.

Just like Christians.

THEISTS: Are holy books the word of God? There is no proof, so such a claim is faith.

ATHEISTS: Is human reason applicable to everything everywhere? There is no proof, so such a claim is faith.

See? Both sides are doing the same thing, accepting the validity of their chosen authority without proof, as a matter of faith. — Jake

You don't need to convince me that all humans rely on faith. David Hume demonstrated that conclusively in the eighteenth century. Hume was accused of being an atheist, and many these days suspect he was, but of course he did not say so, as doing so at the time was tantamount to suicide.

In your last sentence you seem to be implying that all atheists believe that human reason is applicable to everything everywhere. Such an application would be wrong. Many atheists reject that idea, starting with Thomas Nagel and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Indeed - that's exactly what I'm angling for.

My response is that it is impossible to interpret the 'est' to mean 'equals', because the equals relation is transitive and the est relation in the diagram is non-transitive. So it must be some other meaning of est. I chose the 'is a member of the class...' interpretation, but any other interpretation, whether in current use or not, would do as well.

On reflection upon Banno's diagram, I wonder what's so mysterious or illogical about the Trinity. Trinities are everywhere.
The following one looks perfectly logical to me.



If anybody wants to complain of equivocation we can proceed to examine what emerges in an investigation of such a complaint.