I'm interested in seeing more in detail what Turing said, not so much Wittgenstein himself. Mathematics, much less foundations of mathematics, is beyond me.

But some paradoxes are interesting. It may be due to mathematical considerations, or linguistic ambiguity or lack of comprehension, so looking at Turing's reply might be instructive.

Yep. Pretty much.

That's why we say "it sounds like X, Y or Z".

Ah, thanks. :up:

I still don't know what you mean when you say "sound completely different from what they appear." What does a sound appear like? — T Clark

Suppose you hear a particular sound, perhaps one reminding you of a glass jar breaking. You've heard glass break before, so you associate a particular sound to this phenomena. One of two things can happen here:

You check the source of the sound and find out that indeed, it was a glass jar that broke because the window was open and the breeze toppled it over.

You check the source, but find out that the sound was produced by a metal wind chime. Apparently wind chimes can sound like glass breaking in certain circumstances.

Or the very example you used, you associated a sound with thunder. Only that it wasn't thunder, it was a truck. The sound appeared to you as belonging to thunder. Sounds appear or are represented (if you prefer this word) by us as belonging to certain objects automatically, but they need not produce these specific effects in us.

I thought I'd throw in something about why they don't bother to think about it, why it's not only a matter of instinct but a perfectly reasonable default view. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, it's difficult. I suspect that, despite claims to the contrary, AN is connected with personal disposition. They happen to be the kinds of people who feel the negatives of life more than the positives.

I believe most people don't like to think much, it can set one off in a series of endless, often unsettling questions.

But if I had to guess, it might simply boil down to the fact that experience is almost infinitely rich, whereas in non-being (what before birth and after death presumably are) there is nothing at all. The differences couldn't be higher.

Is there a transcript for this discussion between Wittgenstein and Turing? It would be interesting to see the entire conversation.

What would it mean for the sound of a horse pulling a wagon to resemble a horse pulling a wagon? — T Clark

That it would be the kind of object of which one would expect that specific sound it produces. If we have not heard something sufficiently well, we won't know what object caused that sound. We take it for granted that horses pulling a wagon sound like they do, or fans, etc.

You've run a bait and switch. It's not a question of the red sensation resembling red. It's a question of the sight of an apple resembling an apple. In what sense does the sight of an apple resemble an apple that is different from the sound of a horse pulling a wagon resembling a horse pulling a wagon. — T Clark

Good. This is the part which confuses me, so I'm trying to work this out, no bait and switch is intended.

I am trying to point out sensations, the way ice feels to our fingers, the way thunder sound to our ears, etc. A horse pulling a carriage produces a sound which I would not initially associate with such objects, that these objects could sound this way. They could sound completely different from what they appear to me.

But when I experience a colour of any kind, I personally don't expect an object to produce any other colour effects than the one it currently has. Of course, apples can be yellow or green.

But it could be my personal quirk.

I saw a black dog on the sidewalk, lying down but trying to move get up. It was disturbing. On closer examination it turned out to be a black plastic back being moved by a breeze. It was a strong resemblance until once examined, it was not. — Bitter Crank

These types of phenomena are rather eerie. But on hindsight, really highlight how wonderful our minds can be. How could it be possible for a plastic bag to resemble a dog or pavement on hot day resemble water? It's pretty cool.

Semblances add to the interesting features of experience. — Bitter Crank

Absolutely.

They made a good starting point, but reified the issue in terms of objective causation. The phenomenologists made much ore headway here — Joshs

Sure. I mean, starting off is often the hardest thing to do. We just take it as a given that fans produce such a sound or rocks feel such a way. Until you reflect that, it's me that is creating the effects off of relatively poor stimulus. In this respect, the classical figures of the 17th and 18th centuries were geniuses.

Most of what we see is not there in front of us but filled in by us. Resemblance plays a crucial
role all along the way here. What is closely similar becomes unified for us — Joshs

I agree. Also that the phenomenologists do plenty. And there's a lot more to analyze.

One would have to explain how the fan induces the model to work in the first place. If that can be established somehow, then progress could be made.

At the outset, it looks as if someone is taking one set of terms "sound" from a "fan", to another set of terms, "models" in the "brain". The problem has been re-phrased, in this case. With more detail, maybe I could understand what they're getting at.

I'm not suggesting this problem has a solution. I'm looking to see how people think about this, is all.

Well, you've expanded on the usual notion of "family" that tends to come to mind automatically. It is legitimate to do so, because in a certain sense, we are brothers and sisters. But family's have problems, as everyone knows.

It's as Robert Fisk once pointed out, the biggest, nastiest fights we have in life are with family, not with friends or strangers. If applied to the whole of society, then some of our family members believe things that kill other family members and are odious. So it's still a problem, though this way of thinking can be useful.

The religious depictions can be argued for a long time. But you could also take the idea that aspects of society can be used for familial improvement. That's the impulse for things like social security, health care and the like. The word "state" is subject to fierce controversy these days.

So we have a definition of "democracy", which is good, it works for me.

I also agree that large portions of the population are confused by ideological propaganda. Of course, I am not free myself of my own ideology, but I try to look at the evidence and arrive at conclusions on this merit alone. But I could be wrong.

People who, for example, believe in the Q conspiracy theory or think vaccines are modes in which we will be controlled by microchips have a distorted apprehension of the evidence. Likewise with people who think Trump is amazing. This is a big problem in political discourse.

We can quibble about the causes of bureaucratic problems, no problem. But I've yet to understand what is meant by family values. I won't be a nuisance and ask again, I'm curious by what you mean here.

Yep, in fascist societies one indeed has to tow the party line or you're in trouble.

What does loyalty to democracy mean? Belief that it should be the way that a nation is governed? If it means that, OK, I don't see a problem. But the word "loyalty" has connotations of subservience.

I still don't know what family values are supposed to mean.

I'd like to know what "family values" are. It's often thrown around as a warning, but its meaning is quite elusive.

Or, it could simply be a phrase used as an excuse for sensible policy.

When it comes to the case of monistic idealism in particular, I’m pretty much agnostic on it at this point. I’ve read some very interesting and convincing arguments for it and against materialism/physicalism, but we just don’t really know for sure. — Paul Michael

I think it's a semantic issue at this point. I don't want to go over my spiel for the 100th time, it will bore others. So let me put it in a different way:

What difference is there between "materialism/physicalism" and "idealism"?

Assuming this distinction holds up for the sake of discussion, then either the universe is made of the stuff physics describes - at least in part - and we too are part of the world physics describes. The mind and the quantum world are both quite strange and "insubstantial".

Or, if the world is not made of the stuff physics describes, then it is made of the stuff of mind. But this does not imply that the most accurate knowledge we have - which, again, is physics - is incompatible with the mind. There is nothing in physics which says anything against the mind.

But we can "compromise": we know the world as it is presented to us given our cognitive architecture and the world is made up of the same type of stuff as our minds are - at least at the very bottom.

So we then emphasize a semantic preference.

I am explicitly not dealing with "materialist eliminitavism" here, I don't think this view merits much attention or discussion. But even if it were true, by some miracle, we are still left with a monist view.

Does this not necessitate the use of language towards the descriptions of these fictions or literary figures in apparent reality?

Of course... — Shawn

It is closely connected with the issue of language and thought. The question would be to what extent is thought exclusively connected with language? I don't know. But I don't think all thought is expressible in language.

Where is Santa Claus?'
'At the North Pole, of course, my child!'

, then, nothing further can be said, than what was told was a lie. So, there's an ontological commitment once treated as a statement or proposition, that can be elucidated when treating these fictitious entities as non-existent or truth apt. — Shawn

In the fiction that is Santa Claus - to my knowledge, which is very limited here - Santa Claus lives in the North Pole, just like Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street. This is a fiction. A lie would be to say that Santa Claus lives in Mars or that Sherlock Holmes is a woman.

We are keeping to the fiction of these characters' universes and we can speak about fictitious entities with no problem if we drop an ontological commitments.

If we include these commitments, then it is a problem to say that Santa Claus lives in the North Pole, because Santa Claus does not live in this world of facts.

If we really want to take this seriously, then we simply state the ontological "area"/"region"/"place" where they exist as fictitious entities or literary figures, no? I see this as a necessary condition when talking about things such as Pegasus or Santa Claus, no? — Shawn

Yes, I agree we need to speak of "area" or "place" or "realm" for fiction. But I don't see this as an ontological problem, if by "ontology" you are speaking about mind-independent things.

He is emphasising an underlying thought about a potential end as understood as a cultural idea. He argued that it was bound up with a linear conception of history and assumptions about history as something which may finish. How does this connect with real threats in the world. But, to what extent is it the end of history, as the end of civilisation. Or, is the idea of the 'end' a myth? — Jack Cummins

Sure. History will finish eventually. Even if climate change, nuclear weapons or pandemics don't end us all in a few decades (at best), we have the solar system to consider, specifically the sun, which will eventually bloat to a red supergiant and burn the whole planet to dust. That's just a fact of the universe.

Unless there are some radically super-extreme discoveries in physics, that allow us to move to another habitable planet very, very, very far away, we are finished. And while I don't think physics is close to being finished, I suspect that such radical technology just won't happen, given time constraints and capabilities.

It's true that the end of the world has been proclaimed many times. But only once does it suffice for the wolf to appear for all of us to perish (or most of us, anyway). The wolf will come someday. We cannot control nature as much as we think we do.

Battle against? You can say that, sure. Some like to distinguish between intrinsic nature and extrinsic nature, though I'm skeptical that we ever get to intrinsic natures. Perhaps we graze the surface of these things, or the structural properties of phenomena.

Yes, those questions of what if a good life and what should I do and all that is part of the tradition going back thousands of years. These questions don't have easy answers, or we wouldn't be asking them still.

It's also mental masturbation, which I don't object to, nor do I think you do either.

I can understand it being everything to some, meaningless verbal quibbles to others. But I don't know about the wise.

As far as I'm concerned, go on as long as you wish. I don't see any problems with it. Though I'm unclear at what you're getting at.

I agree with you that we should keep in mind the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, while keeping in mind that these very distinctions aren't always clear cut. At least not as neatly as we would initially suppose.

But I don't personally agree with the idea that by using language we are committing ourselves to anything. Unless you assume that words stand in for things in the world, which I don't think is the case most of the time. Sometimes we do posit an object in the world, say, a tree, and I can point to the tree I have in mind. Most of the time, we don't posit an object for our language use.

If we drop ontological commitment, we can speak of these fictional entities with a bit less difficulty.

However, we soon enter into very obscure territory, it seems to me. When we speak of Pegasus or Santa Claus, we have in mind an idea, not an object. So ideas and how they relate to the world is crucial here.

Yet, even if Pegasus and Santa Claus don't exist ontologically, we can go to a shopping mall during Christmas and say "that person" is Santa Claus. Well, not exactly. Likewise, we can point to a statue of Pegasus and say "that is Pegasus", but again, not really. These are representations, in the everyday use of the word, of our fictitious ideas.

It is a complicated topic.

Schopenhauer praised Vedanta and particularly the Upanishads to no end. Aside from him, not many of the classical figures in philosophy interacted with Eastern philosophy.

Unless monistic idealism is true. Then body is actually just an image of mind. And your last comment conjured a pretty disturbing image in my mind that made me laugh :lol:. But you’re not wrong. — Paul Michael

Yes. I mean, I believe that some form of monism is ultimately true, that is, everything is made up of fundamentally the same stuff. I don't think the universe cares for metaphysical dualisms. It seems nature prefers simplicity, meaning that there has to be something that accounts for everything in terms of constitution.

So far, we cannot account for 95% of the mass-energy in the universe, hence label it "dark". But I suspect that in some respects, it will have to share some simple property with "ordinary matter".

Then body is actually just an image of mind. — Paul Michael

I agree that it is.

But then my body is not fundamentally different from mind, if it is the same stuff in some sense. If my body is fundamentally different from my mind, I could not see how my mind could represent itself in a body. So some similarity must be assumed.

other species possess some level of consciousness and that their consciousness might also be considered to be one of the alternative contexts of consciousness that could replace or be replaced by another... there very well could be conscious (though not necessarily intelligent) life on other planets in the universe. — Paul Michael

It doesn't solve the problem of how consciousness first arose, unless you accept some form of panpsychism. Which is fine. I don't personally see good evidence for panpsychism, but it's not something I can outright reject. It's unfalsifiable, though it does solve the problem of emergence in a certain way.

If you say something like, human beings can be said to represent one large mind or brain, I think there are ways to formulate that into something coherent.

the ‘self-void’ left by the dead conscious being would be ‘filled’ by one of the other existing selves or one of the new selves. Now, I have no proof or evidence that this actually happens, but it’s an interesting possibility to entertain, at least to me. — Paul Michael

It could. And I have nothing against entertaining these ideas, to be clear.

From my perspective, this creates more questions than it solves. It forces mind to be something separate from the body, but there's no evidence that mind can exist without an accompanying body.

So to be consistent, you'd also have to entertain the view that (say) your arm is created in part, by the arms of a dead person. I can't make sense of that.

But if one person’s consciousness ceases to exist while others’ continue to exist and new consciousnesses come into existence, could it be the case that the consciousness that disappeared is in a sense ‘replaced’ by one of the others? — Paul Michael

I don't see how that follows. Take the number of people who've been born in the 20th century alone, we're beyond 7 billion people now.

For the "replacement" to work in any coherent sense, you'd want to say something like, for every person that dies another person "takes in" or is influenced by the consciousness of the dead person. But population growth has gone up globally, this would require a single experience to subdivide into many people.

How would a newly born person "make up" for the experience they did not receive from the dead person? They'd need to get it from there own internal resources meaning genetics, brain activity and whatever else plays a role in consciousness.

So I think you can eliminate the whole thought experiment and assume that our individual experience does not affect other individual experiences without direct interaction of some kind.

And perhaps my use of the term ‘naturalism’ here was ill-informed. — Paul Michael

Few of the terms in philosophy are well defined. So there's no problem with your formulation. I was using my own too. :)

If I understood correctly, it follows that other people with experience would remain. But not that anyone dying would be the cause of another experience coming into being.

There's no reason to suspect that such a thing happens.

I don't think naturalism says much about experience or lack of experience. We can only point out what looks like consciousness to us, as is found in other people, and some animals. But what happens after death or why we even have experience at all, likely does not fall under the purview of naturalism.

As I understand the term "naturalism", it's useable for publicly observable phenomenon (things everyone can see).

But for private phenomena, it's of less use.

I mean perhaps reading all those books you mention could help. They likely wouldn't hurt.

As for me, it looks to me as if the "answer" to the issue is straightforward, in a sense. Life is very complicated. If it were easy, then all we would need is to find that one book that gives you the solution to this problem. Thousands of years later, there is no clear answer.

If an issue persists for this long, it implies that there are too many variables. We can speak of good tendencies or habits in quite general terms. But beyond that, every person is an entire world to themselves.

Echoes - Pink Floyd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBca3xf-j3o

Overhead the albatross
Hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine

And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the where's or why's
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb toward the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance, two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can?

And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
No one speaks and no one tries
No one flies around the sun

Cloudless everyday
You fall upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky

Well, that's true. On the other hand, it is a legitimate question to ask, does physics touch the noumena? In other words, does physics tell us about the world "in itself"? Perhaps. Our knowledge of physics has advanced drastically since Kant.

But Russell, who knew physics and mathematics very well, stated that physics tells us about the structural properties of the world, leaving the intrinsic nature of atoms (and quarks, fields, etc.) unknown.

But, point taken.

Well put.

It's extraordinary that we imbue the "external world" with so many things. Properties, qualities, substances, richness, depth and on and on and on. It's devilishly difficult to think away what remains of objects once you take away what you put in them.

I'm not speaking of "atoms or fields remain", I'm thinking of an ordinary sized object, such as a statue or a tree.

It is a total mystery to me. And that's "only" the external world. The "world" inside is a whole other issue. What with the infinite amount of ideas a person can have, many of which share virtually nothing of what can be called effects from the objects outside us.

I've always though Russell had it right in his In Praise of Idleness.

You can take a job doing what you love to do, but the demands of the job will make you hate it—or you will pervert what you love in order that it conform to your job. — Leghorn

I find this to be extremely accurate to my experience. I think it's kind of a psychological quirk that's inside of many people, not all. It's very curious.

:up:

That's a pretty good sketch.

Here's a short article just about targeted ads: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/05/targeted-ads-fake-news-clickbait-surveillance-capitalism-data-mining-democracy — Benkei

It's pretty bad. It's even hard to find words to say if one considers the very real consequences of this phenomenon. Making everything reducible to terms of profit is going to kill us all.

What a way to go.

:up:

Absolutely.

In a trivial sense, philosophy is the mother of the sciences. Which is true, out of philosophy came physics, biology, chemistry and everything else. Needless to say Leibniz knew physics quite well for his day, Schopenhauer wasn't horrible in biology and Priestley, who discovered oxygen, contributed a lot to metaphysics, though his work is criminally neglected.

Those are just the names that I came up with now, I'm sure you can think of many other examples. So in a traceable sense, philosophy is the most successful of all fields of enquiry.

But as "science" got its name from Whewell and was developed by others, philosophy at around the mid-18th century pretty much got left with the very hard questions.

It's a bit of a contingency that the name "philosophy" is now associated with "unanswerable questions", as these questions were very much what interested many of the classical scientists.

But to be fair, philosophers still contribute to linguistics, neuroscience and psychology. So there's still overlap.

It helps me to think of it as a historical subject. We try to understand the world and ourselves. When we arrived at the scene, when the first human beings acquired the capacity to articulate thought, we tried to comprehend what was happening.

At first we told stories. Stories usually related with dietes associated with the creation of the Earth, the rivers, the sea. Gods moved the winds and sacrifices guaranteed good fortunes. Thunder was the anger of the Gods.

At some point, we gathered in large enough numbers to refine our thinking into more precise and accurate accounts of the world, not relying on myths, but on observing the world closely.

By these means, we achieved considerable success in mathematics and parts of astronomy. But many questions pertaining to us and the world remained problematic:

How can we step on the same river twice? How can we reach a target if there are an infinite number of events separating an apple from an arrow? How do we speak of one entity being the same person if they've gone crazy? How can thought arise from matter? And so on.

Fast forward thousands of years and we get science, based on observing the world under the guidance of an explanatory theory. We reduce the entities analyzed and focus on select things to study, putting aside phenomena that interfere with a theory.

We couldn't, after all, fire a canon ball around the Earth's surface. But given certain conditions (removing friction, for instance) we find out that the same force that causes an apple to fall causes the movement of the moons and planets.

But after all this, questions still remain. Important questions and hard ones. What is a self? Do we have free will? Is the world independent of me or a product of our way of ordering the world? What is a good life? How can matter produce thought? What is causation? How many things are there in the world? And so on.

Philosophy, then, is the rational enquiry into very hard question, on topics we have barely been able to make progress in for thousands of years.

The confusion on what philosophy is likely stems from the fact that some of the best philosophers in history, were also scientists. If you asked Hume, are you a scientist or a philosopher he could not say. Same with Descartes and Kant and Leibniz and Locke and many others. To them, there was no distinction.

For the Greeks even less so.

At least that's how I think of the topic.

I am way outmatched here in terms of knowledge of Plato, so forgive my ignorance, I won't be providing quotes nor anything like that. I'll have to re-read some aspects of Plato sometime.

With that important note out of the way, there is something very alluring about Plato's forms. I am not speaking of mathematics here, which I know is extremely important, but more so of ideas. The ideal horse or tree or river and down the line with all the objects we categorize.

In a modern-ish context, it could be said that we are born with certain ideas latent in the mind, which grow as we grow up, both as a biological creature and as persons. The idea would be that if there exist other creatures capable of thought, they would have these objects "in them", only waiting to come to fruition as they develop.

Of course, there's the overwhelming possibility that minded creatures may have a nature that differs from ours and thus would not have exactly the same conceptions we have, but similar. This cannot be proved and resides outside of science - not in principle - but in our limits of understanding we bring to bear when we encounter the world as we are.

It's a beautiful train of thought - on the whole - and could even be useful to develop further with modern day knowledge being used.

Fair enough. :up:

Do cars, houses and trees exist mind-independently? No. But it doesn't follow that they're not real, unless you define the use of the word "real" to mean something mind-independent.

I mean, I'm going to say that this laptop isn't real or that the tree outside my window isn't real? This is crazy talk.

But then if you say is this laptop I see or the tree outside my window mind-independent, I'd say no and we'd agree. Which makes talk of "realism" a matter of semantics and not substantive.

Unless you want to talk about ghosts, then we have to clarify a little. :wink:

Ah, I see definitions vary from "isolated" systems, to all systems. And it is frequently connected with the "arrow of time", as Sean Carroll talks about - and others too.

I fully admit to not understanding it, no jest. But I do think that associating it with "order" or "disorder" is subjective.

Thanks for the clarification. :smile:

I don't know if I'd call this "logic" as is understood technically.

The weather may be cold for me but hot for you. This is a fine book for me but meaningless to you.

On to more weighty topics:

Over 5 million people have died during Covid.

One view, which is accurate, would say that this is quite a high number of people. And more are dying.

On another view, this is actually not that many, compared to other viruses which are much more lethal.

And so on.

Don't hold your breath.

Maybe, but communication would be a big problem.

I suppose the Earth is due for another Carrington Event. The globally disruptive after effects would go on for weeks or months at least, making "2020" look like a kindergarden food fight by comparison. — 180 Proof

Everything is quite sunny, literally.

If it isn't extreme heat, let's get our electrical grid fried. Damn man, yeah life entails suffering and all that, but these are premium level problems, we are here to witness some crazy shit going down. The privilege of being born now. :smirk:



It would be quite problematic actually. Not because of the humor-ish aspect of not being able to go to Facebook or AlJazeera or ABC or YouTube, but because lots of financial data, all kinds of data actually, now belong online almost exclusively. It might well cause a significant market problem, with who knows what else.

So not good.

Objective idealism is a perfectly sound and sane philosophical outlook, even though it is a minority view. — Wayfarer

Is this the same objective idealism of Peirce?

Not to drag this into anything too lengthy, but what would be the basic definition?

I know of "transcendental idealism", a bit of Berkley's idealism and finally Kastrup's idealism. These are rather different, and Peirce never seemed to express his view clearly. I mean no quarrel here, as you know of my strong sympathies with many aspects of what you believe.