I've got the original British edition, which evidently organizes the chapters differently (and includes a final section omitted from most U.S. editions, I believe). Does your Chap 21 start the same way my Part 3, Chap 7 does?: "What's it going to be then, eh?" And does it end with: "Amen. And all that cal." ?

The ear is very complex, and it's parts are moving, so there are physical entities which are moving. It's just that description, that the tones are moving, which is inaccurate. In reality if there was a physical entity called the melody, it is an arrangement of parts, which can't really be moving because that would mess up the arrangement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, that's it. Yet the illusion is extremely strong.

Well, the whole thing is a fantasy. Kind of a "what if?" story. But the novel helps us think about other forms of conditioning that are all too real. See Foucault.

Very thought-provoking, and I want more time to reflect on your ideas. But just quickly:

This points to a structural parallel between mind and life as different facets of the same underlying logos. — Wayfarer

This is a major reason why I suspect it will turn out that only living things can be conscious. Sorry, AI!
More to follow . . .

What could happen is that we could install extreme empathy chips in criminals so that the rest of us can then punish them for their crimes by triggering their empathy for others -- the empathy chip itself could be put to horrible uses. — Moliere

Yes. But even if the chip is only put to a "good" use, Burgess' novel asks, "What have we done to a human being if we remove the choice to be good -- freedom, in other words?"

An interesting example of the continuity problem occurs with sounds, as can be easily seen with music. We describe a melody as "moving from start to finish"; we say the pitches "go up" or "go down"; we say that a tune is "slow" or "fast". In fact nothing like this happens -- there is no physical entity doing any "moving". It is strictly a (delightful) acoustical illusion. But our senses -- irresistibly, it would seem -- analyze the sequence of sounds as movement.

Sorry for any misunderstanding. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No worries. I wish I too was a model of clarity!

"If it is not possible, then it is in some sense necessary."
— Count Timothy von Icarus

This proposal is a neat and simple way to bring out different alleged senses of "necessity." We look at event X; it is no longer merely "possible," since it has occurred, been actualized; therefore we're tempted to say that it must be necessary, since it has been removed from the realm of possibility.

But what exactly is the "necessary" part here? Compare two statements:

(1) "It is necessary that X occurred."

(2) "It is necessary that, since X occurred, it cannot un-occur, or not be the case."

Statement (1) is pretty clearly not what the proposal means. My cat is named Bunny, but it could have been otherwise.

Statement (2), though, does seem to express what we mean by the original proposal. Now that my cat is named Bunny, we can't rewrite the past so that she is named Methuselah. Her being named Bunny is "necessary" in that sense.

In fact, before I develop this any further, let me ask whether you think (2) is a fair elaboration of what you meant by "If it is not possible, then it is in some sense necessary."

And in defense of Christian social values, surely the idea that humans should be custodians of the environmental order can't be bad one. — Wayfarer

It's a very good one. But we'd have to say that either 1) institutional Christianity has paid little attention to it, or 2) institutional Christianity regards the wholesale slaughter and torture of billions of animals annually, along with the destruction of our planet's resources, as exemplifying being "custodians of the environmental order." That is taking Newspeak way too far, in my opinion.

In fairness, there are Christians, and Christian communities, who take seriously the idea of stewardship of the environment, but they are a small minority, and even they usually draw the line at saying that we don't have a God-given right to use animals for our own purposes.

I also very much value a further extension -- did the Greeks have a word for it? -- that would refer to love of Creation itself, and all the beings, not just humans.
— J

Didn't that come about to some extent with the Bible? God seeing the world as 'good'? — Wayfarer

Certainly you can find that in the Bible, but in general Christianity has tended to stop at "loving humans" and not considered what it might mean to actually love animals -- or the environment in general, as we are now seeing, to our dismay. Or maybe we should say: Far too much traditional Christian doctrine places humankind at the pinnacle of creation -- made in God's image, dontcha know -- and sees nothing inconsistent with preaching agapē while at the same time claiming the right to use other animals for our own purposes, no matter the pain this may cause. This is a terrible failing. And I speak as a Christian.

I recall the folk wisdom often quoted at wedding ceremonies, about the different kinds of love - eros, philia, agapē, storge and so on (there's eight). I think in English all of these tend to be congealed together under the heading of romantic attachment. Whereas the Buddhist 'karuna' or 'mudita' is perhaps closer to the Christian agapē, which 'pays no regard to persons'. — Wayfarer

This is good. I would amend it slightly to say that "love" in English also tends to be construed as family love (storge), not just eros. The "impersonality" of agapē can perhaps best be seen as the crucial step in the widening of the circle of compassion/connection. Romantic love for an individual, family love for your kin, loyalty to your tribe/community/nation -- these are increasingly more general, until finally we arrive at agapē, which loves without condition. I also very much value a further extension -- did the Greeks have a word for it? -- that would refer to love of Creation itself, and all the beings, not just humans.

we still need to ask: Relations among what? I don't think we can talk of "relations" that have no relata.
— J
In the context of this thread, intentional conscious acts (cognitives) could be considered as relata. What is important is that each of these relata can be decomposed into a bundle of interrelated mental activities. — Number2018

OK, let's try to plug that in to the quotes:

"Hegel shows that the condition for the truth of an immediate experience is that the things that appear to consciousness are perceived as objects whose identities are constituted by a forceful dynamic of negative and reciprocal relations among intentional conscious acts (cognitives)."

Does that really work? We're talking about what constitutes the identities of apparent "objects" -- why we perceive them that way. But now the quote seems to be saying that it's all within the intentional conscious acts themselves. Either I'm misunderstanding, or we haven't left any room for the "flow," the "things that appear to consciousness."

"The experienced identities and differences presuppose the dynamics of dialectical progression, which make these experiences meaningful. However, they are grounded in underlying forceful relations among intentional conscious acts (cognitives) that are not directly present in sensuous experience itself."

This seems to exhibit the same problem. The experienced identities and differences, which are required to make experience meaningful, are grounded strictly in relations among conscious acts. How could this answer the question about the role of "flow" in our constituting consciousness?

This just seems bizarre to me. A lie is true if enough people believe it and then becomes false when people discover it is false?

As misattribution is correct until it is corrected?

I don't recall Kripke ever advancing such a claim, but it would essentially amount to defaulting on truth being anything other than the dominant current opinion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course not. Our wires got crossed here. Your wrote:

You could consider "George Washington was the first President of the United States." Is it possible for this to become false? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I took you to mean, "Is it possible for this putatively true statement to be shown to be false?" and responded accordingly. I thought you were giving it as an example of a "physically necessary" truth.

I now see you must have meant, "Is it possible for this true statement to become false in the future?" which requires a totally different answer.

The rest of your response bears this out. We have no disagreement. True statements can't become false in this sense (barring some bizarre extremes we might imagine, which aren't to the point). If it is the case that I am sitting in a chair now, that statement, with appropriate tense modifications, stays true. A more interesting question is, Was it true before I sat in the chair? This is a version of the question that arises in philosophy of history: Is it true to say that the 1st president was born in 1732? Yes, we reply. Well, but was it true in 1732? Hair begins to be pulled out . . .

If it is not possible, then it is in some sense necessary. If you just look at frequency over possible worlds, where "possible worlds" gets loosely imagined as "whatever we can imagine" then it will be impossible to identify this sort of necessity though. But what then, are all facts about the past possibly subject to change in the future? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a different matter, and quite interesting. First, help me with the grammar. Is there a typo or a word missing in your final question, about change in the future? I can't quite parse it.

Is there a "possible world" where the sun didn't rise yesterday and we just think it did? Only for the radical skeptics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, yes. How would that make it impossible?

You want to say that, in our world, the sun rising tomorrow is physically necessary.

I never said that though. I said that if conditions are sufficient to bring about the sun's rising then it will necessarily rise, and that this can be explained in terms of physical necessity in that things necessarily act according to their nature. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wish you had said what you now say, as it would have avoided misunderstanding. What you did say was, in response to my asking if 'The sun must necessarily rise tomorrow' was on a par with 'The rock must necessarily break the window':

"The sun must necessarily rise tomorrow"?

Why not exactly? To be sure, there might conceivably be something that could stop the sun from rising. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which says nothing about sufficient conditions to bring about the sun's rising. This is no big deal, I'm sure you meant to be clear, as did I.

I wonder if you've ever read the novel "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, or perhaps seen the film. The story explores exactly what's wrong with the idea of conditioning people to be good (or empathetic).

Those all seem like physical necessity to me. — Count Timothy von Icarus

"The sun must necessarily rise tomorrow"?

Why not exactly? To be sure, there might conceivably be something that could stop the sun from rising. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But if something could stop the sun from rising -- or, in the case of the rock and window, prevent the rock from breaking the window -- why would we call the event "necessary"? You can of course stipulate that "necessity" can refer to something that is overwhelmingly likely, such as the sun rising tomorrow, but I can only reply that this isn't what discussions about necessity are usually about.

A large exo-planet could utterly destroy the Earth, leaving nothing for the sun to rise on I suppose. Perhaps similar cosmic-scale events could occur as well. But barring any of these, the sun will rise. To deny this would be to deny that the past determines the future, — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is what I meant by ceteris paribus conditions. Sure, if certain conditions hold steady, then certain results will occur. This is the same as saying that in some possible worlds the sun will rise, while in others it may not -- which is hardly "necessity". This has nothing to do with denying that the past determines the future; if some unlikely intervening event occurs, that will be the past in that possible world.

I think the best argument against this view of physical necessity is to ask: Where do you draw the line? Exactly how likely does a certain set of circumstances have to be before you're willing to declare the result "physically necessary"? Even phrasing it this way seems contrary to the idea of what "necessary" is supposed to mean, but let's grant it. You want to say that, in our world, the sun rising tomorrow is physically necessary. Suppose we get warning of a breach in spacetime -- has the likelihood decreased? Suppose the rapture occurs? Still "necessary"? You see what I mean: You have to make a judgment call on each of these possibilities, or else outright deny that they are possible, which you don't want to do, and rightly so. I would argue that this approach takes us much too far away from how "necessity" is used and understood.

The former case is necessary in the sense that the present appears to in some sense contain the future. Causes contain their effects in a way akin to how computational outputs are contained in the combination of input and function perhaps — Count Timothy von Icarus

"The former case" refers to "9 is necessarily greater than 7", yes? Are you positing "7" as being in the present, and "9" in the future? And that 7 thus causes 9? I must not be understanding your meaning here.

You could consider "George Washington was the first President of the United States." Is it possible for this to become false? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Certainly. As Kripke helps us understand, this could become false in two different ways. 1) We might discover that someone else briefly held that office, but this fact was suppressed for conspiratorial purposes. 2) We might discover that the man who first held the office was not the man we designate as "George Washington". It turns out that the real George Washington was murdered as a young man, and replaced with an impostor.

These are absolutely ridiculous suppositions. But something doesn't become necessary just because the possible counterexamples are ridiculous. Necessity is supposed to mean that there are no counter-examples -- that it is not possible for the truth to be other than it is.

Perhaps you don't accept that as a working definition of "necessity." But then I think the burden of argument is on you to make a case for why extremely likely events should be given the same name as absolutely necessary events.

This all gets very complicated, but the upshot is that what is immortal is not an individual ‘I am’ , but a pre-individual ego. This ‘absolute ego’ has more to do with the structure of the immortal flow of time than with the traditional notion of the soul. — Joshs

Again, this doctrine is remarkably like the traditional distinction between "soul" and "spirit" (psyche and pneuma). The one is individual, particular; the other is the "stuff" of which all living beings are made.

Hegel shows that the condition for the truth of an immediate experience is that the things that appear to consciousness are perceived as objects whose identities are constituted by a forceful dynamic of negative and reciprocal relations, — Number2018

The experienced identities and differences presuppose the dynamics of dialectical progression, which make these experiences meaningful. However, they are grounded in underlying forceful relations that are not directly present in sensuous experience itself. — Number2018

But we still need to ask: Relations among what? I don't think we can talk of "relations" that have no relata.

A flow is something that can only be known immanently
as the ontological condition of the things that flow. — Number2018

And there's the rub: what are "the things that flow"?

It is not the business of science to study the lived experience of subjects. That is the province of phenomenology, leaving aside the question of whether it delivers coherently and usefully on that. The epoche in phenomenology (bracketing the question of the existence of an external world) is the methodological counterpart to science's bracketing of questions about subjective experience. Those questions simply aren't relevant to the practice of the natural sciences. — Janus

This seems a little too conclusive to me, but it basically affirms what I was suggesting about separating the two senses of "consciousness." I just think we have to be careful about putting limits on what science can or can't do. There's a natural tendency to regard "science" as meaning "everything we know now, which is all there is to know." A moment's reflection shows how wrong this must be; why would we imagine we have reached the End of Science? Or that we have the conceptual equipment to declare what science must be? So I'm willing to keep an open mind on whether both 21st-century science and phenomenology may one day be shown as antiquated descriptions of a much deeper understanding of reality -- one which, in 25th-century (e.g.) terminology, is understood to be scientific.

It's a really great book [by Sokolowski] though and I might not be doing it justice in trying to stay brief. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I read his Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions -- first-rate essays.

Logical form or syntactic structure does not have to issue from inborn powers in our brains, nor does it have to come from a priori structures of the mind. It arises through an enhancement of perception, a lifting of perception into thought, by a new way of making things present to us.

What does the bolded phrase mean, exactly? And is this what happens for an infant (which was my original question)? I hope you can fill this out a bit more; it sounds interesting.

Hmm. Well, some things are conscious and some are not, unless you're a hardcore panpsychist. Understanding why this is the case seems perfectly legitimate to me.

Consciousness is the processes of interaction by which both world and subject are revealed — Joshs

Yes, but only to some beings. These processes do not occur for a grain of sand (again, leaving aside strong arguments for panpsychism). Chalmers wants to know why, as do I.

In any case, I don't think infants "replace" anything under the theory. — Dawnstorm

"Replace" may not be quite the right word. I'm asking into whether an infant, when she sees a shape, is already constrained by the textures of "flow" to see it in a particular manner, quite apart from how the human community (which she will join, but has not yet) sees it.

scientific objectivity also excludes the qualitative dimension of existence — the reality of Being. This exclusion lies at the heart of the hard problem of consciousness, which is inextricably linked with the Cartesian divide. Scientific objectivity seeks to transcend the personal, but it does so at the cost of denying the reality of the subject¹⁰. — Wayfarer

I agree with nearly everything you're saying (very well!) in Part 3. I would slow down a bit for the above, however. Can we differentiate between "consciousness" as a possible object of scientific knowledge, and "consciousness" as a lived experience of a particular subject? I think we can. Good science can remain noncommittal about subjective experience while pursuing an understanding of the Hard Problem. Chalmers isn't saying that solving the Hard Problem will require an objective account of what it's like to be a subject. He only (!) asks that we discover what consciousness is, and why it necessarily arises in the way that it does, and no other. Must we insist that only an account of subjectivity itself will answer this? I'm willing to give science a lot more leeway here.

What's key is your phrase "denying the reality of the subject." Obviously that is not what I mean by remaining noncommittal! Good science can and should acknowledge the experience of subjectivity, perhaps bracketing the question of the nature of this experience, which would leave room not only for philosophical description, but even for an argument à la Churchland and Dennett that the experience is an illusion.

Perhaps we might use "tautology" only for analytic necessities, such as that there in every possible world there is a number greater than seven, and not for synthetic necessities, such as Hesperus = Venus? — Banno

That might work. Or "tautology" may be more trouble than it's worth, since it has two common usages that are easily conflated. In logic, a tautology is meant to be true by virtue of the logical connectives alone, so very similar to analytic necessity. But when we ask if two statements are tautologous, we usually mean something different. We're asking if they "say the same thing", a much looser conception. "9 is greater than 7" is analytically true, and so is "10 is greater than 7", and for the same reason. It would be impossible to understand one without understanding the other. But do they say the same thing? Kinda sorta -- depends on how you want to frame "the same thing". They surely say the same thing about arithmetic.

This is perhaps a good place to pose two related questions that I think we ought to try to answer, if we're serious about a Husserlian "underlying reality" that is formless but has features such as texture, consonance, and dissonance.

1) Is this theory meant to be a psychological description of how infants begin to constitute objects? If so, how do infants replace the shared-lifeworld aspect that seems so necessary to the description? Some equivalent of a Chomskian universal grammar?

2) Does Husserl mean that what we encounter in the lifeworld must be as he describes, or only that it may be, for all we know? A similar question can be posed about Kantian noumena: Do we know that noumena do not resemble phenomena at all, or is it merely the case that we can't know either way?

Another version of this second question, posed by a realist, would be something like: If we grant that consciousness plays a vital role in constituting the objects and events of our experience, must it be the case that the result is different from what might obtain in the absence of consciousness? Suppose objects like trees are "really out there"; we couldn't know this, of course, but do we know they aren't? Do we have a transcendental argument that can show this?

While refreshing my memory, I stumbled on a pretty interesting article about this, which I'll save here for myself (and I hope it's interesting for the topic at hand):

Being a Body and Having a Body. The Twofold Temporality of Embodied Intentionality - WEHRLE, Maren — Dawnstorm

Thanks, I will check it out.

At what moment does the air in your lungs become part of you? This feels like a pretty silly and inconsequential question, but if we assume "entities", we'd need to answer that, or at least figure out in what we can't — Dawnstorm

It isn't silly at all. Along with many other similar questions we could ask (what about all those microbes that live inside us?), it reveals that entity-talk is always going to be loose talk, more or less appropriate for particular contexts. A pulmonologist may need a very specific answer to the question you pose; ordinarily we don't need such an answer; our sense of "human as entity" varies accordingly.

Does this give indirect support to the Husserlian flow? Possibly, as it suggests that even our rough-grain constituted objects ("your body") are not as obvious or "common-sense" as we suppose them to be.

Very interesting stuff, thanks.

Returning to my question about "accidental necessity," let's consider your example of the rock and the window.

If you throw a rock through a window, it will necessarily break (physical necessity), but the window is not "necessarily broken" per se. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This introduces a concept of "necessity" that is unclear to me. Which of these two things are you saying?:

1) The act of throwing a rock through a window is, by definition, the breaking of that window.
or
2) If a rock is thrown at a window, the window will necessarily break.

Since you use the phrase "physical necessity," I'm guessing you mean #2. A definitional necessity such as "'through a window' means 'breaking a window'" presumably isn't to the point here.

If I've got that right, can you explain the necessity in #2? Why must the window necessarily break? Is there some sort of ceteris paribus series of premises built into the necessity? Would we equally want to say that "The sun must necessarily rise tomorrow"? These necessities, if that is indeed what they are, seem very different from either "9 is necessarily greater than 7" or "Water is necessarily composed of H2O". Why would all three be described as "necessary"?

whereas I'm inclined to grant the subject a kind of ontological primacy. — Wayfarer

My remarks above about ontological primitives shouldn't be read as excluding this possibility as well. Subjectivity may be as primary as "flow".

The nature of the flow that Husserl described is not without order, even though it lacks formal features. How can this be? Husserl is not the only philosopher who has depicted the primordial basis of reality in these terms. We find such thinking also in Nietzsche , Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger , Derrida and others. What is common to them is the idea that no entity in the world pre-exists its interactions with other entities. The patterns that arise obey no analogies or categorical placements. Things are not identities , they only continue to exist the same differently. — Joshs

I've bolded the question above. We want to understand how something called a flow can have order and patterns while lacking formal features. We also want to understand how this flow is not an entity, nor is it composed of entities. Would an analogy with water help? -- it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "flow." The problem here would be that water is composed of entities, and the ways in which water is ordered and patterned give rise to features such as depth, velocity, waves, eddies, etc. (Arguably, these are not formal features, but then we need an account of what a formal feature would be.) We could say that the "entities" of which water is composed -- I'm thinking of molecules -- are themselves composed of smaller entities, right down to the subatomic level, at which it's unclear whether we can speak of entities at all. Might this level be closer to Husserlian "flow"? But do we really perceive that flow? If we could imagine -- and I'm not sure we can -- an epoché that bracketed everything, would we get the quantum world?

We cannot ignore events which thwart our purposes, even though what stands in the way of our goals emerges by way of those very goals — Joshs

OK.

The subject is itself produced as a continually shifting effect of organism-environment interactions. The person-world dynamic isnt a subject-predicate propositional structure, with a subject representing a world to itself. Instead, both the subject and the object ‘inhere’ as the result of their interaction. — Joshs

There's some unwitting ambiguity here, I think, brought on by the term "subject". I didn't mean "subject" as opposed to "object". Let me rephrase without that term:

Is it possible, e.g., to have “texture” without its being of anything? Texture is meant to precede our constituting any specific intentionally constituted object. But surely textures and consonances need to inhere somewhere. We can't say that they begin to appear after the act of intentionality, since they are precisely supposed to be the material out of which such an act is constituted. — J

This now looks like a version of the first question about flow. We might ask, Is flow ontologically primitive? That fits with @Wayfarer's remark above about chaos. It may also fit with current scientific speculation about how to represent an abstraction such as "quantity" in strictly physical terms. Here's a very good recent paper on that. The question discussed is whether quantity is simply a primitive property of the physical world, or whether it can be explained in non-mathematical terms. The relevance here would be that quantity might be an example -- like texture and consonance -- of something that appears ontologically primitive, part of the "flow" we encounter in the lifeworld. But maybe not, as the paper discusses.

Mary's usage is entirely non-standard, and if she chooses this definition, it needs to be stated up front, else she is indeed just plain wrong. . . .

In philosophy, words like 'exist' might have more definitions than you'd find in a dictionary. — noAxioms

Yes, I think we're on the same (or closely adjacent) page. The proliferation of definitions/usages of "exist" in philosophy makes it a poor candidate for dispute. Arguments about existence quickly become wrangles over terminology, which is a shame, because I'm convinced there are important things we can understand about metaphysical structure without trying to plug in the "existence" terminology and argue for it, in the hopes that someone will finally agree with us! Theodore Sider's Writing the Book of the World is in that spirit, I believe

And BTW, a bachelor is a device to sort a large collection of laundry into workable batches of like colors that fit in the wash machine.
The term is also used in the old mainframe days, a process to submit batch jobs to the mainframe at a pace that it can handle.
Sheesh, don't you know anything?? :) — noAxioms

:lol:

I'll get out my heidigger and see if I can get to the bottom of it . . .

"The evening star' is a description, picking out the brightest star in the western evening sky, which for half the time is Venus. Of course, many objects might satisfy the description - Jupiter and Saturn, perhaps, when suitably positioned and Venus is visible in the morning; or Sirius, the brightest of the stars, might all be suitable candidates. But The Evening Star - capitalised as a proper name, and also called "Hesperus" - is Venus; that very thing, and not Jupiter, Saturn or Sirius. "Hesperus", then, is a rigid designator, as is "the Evening Star". — Banno

I think you're saying that "the evening star" (description) is not a rigid designator, but "the Evening Star" (name) is? So "the evening star" is like "President of the US in 1970"; another celestial body could be the evening star (the celestial body in the west), but only the Evening Star can be the Evening Star, just as only Nixon can be Nixon. And this plunges us right into questions about possible worlds. We know what we mean when we say "Someone other than Nixon might have been president in 1970", but do we know what we mean when we say "Something other than the Evening Star (aka Venus, Hesperus) might have been the evening star"? That is not the same as saying "Something other than the Evening Star might have been the brightest object in the evening sky" -- as you point out, other objects could satisfy this description; we know what that would mean. We seem to want the term to function both as a description and -- in upper case -- a name. Whereas "Nixon" is only a name; "Nixon" doesn't describe him in any further way.

In that small subset of possible worlds in which Socrates is sitting, necessarily, Socrates is sitting, and modal collapse is avoided by not considering those worlds in which Socrates is not sitting, and so avoiding the situation where he is both sitting and not sitting.

But for any other set of possible worlds, Socrates will be both sitting and not sitting, and modal collapse will ensue.

Necessity can be understood as "true in all possible worlds that are accessible from a given world", and if we then restrict accessibility to only those worlds in which Socrates is sitting, then (by that definition of necessity) necessarily, Socrates is sitting.

So I think that Quine is mistaken, if he thought that collapse occurs regardless of the domain... or of accessibility — Banno

OK, I can see that. Going back to the integer domain, though:

As explained above,
(30) (∃x)(x is necessarily greater than 7)
will result in modal collapse if the domain includes more than integers. — Banno

I'm not sure why including more than integers would be the same kind of domain change as the one involving Socrates sitting. In the latter case, the domain has been restricted to certain possible worlds; what would be an equivalent (or similar) restriction for integers?

mis-post

If two people have different definitions of some word they're both using, they will end up talking past each other, but with neither of them being wrong. — noAxioms

I take the point about definitions being sometimes non-truth-apt, but in the case you cite: Joe defines "bachelor" as "unmarried male", while Mary defines it as "a fir tree". In ordinary usage, we would say that Joe is right and Mary is wrong. Granted, either can simply stipulate a definition, but we would say that Joe is stipulating the dictionary definition and Mary is not, so there is some kind of wrongness attached to what Mary is doing. But what kind? What allows us to go from "Mary is using an unconventional definition" to "Mary is wrong about what a bachelor is"? I don't have a ready answer, but the question underlies why I think "resolution of a dispute by definition" is more problematic than you do.

OK. I will think about this vocabulary of "textures," "consonances," "dissonances," and "affordances." These terms pose some obvious problems, as you are well aware. But I'll see if I can clarify them for myself before posing questions.

Indeed. In this matter, we're in much the same position as 18th century scientists speculating about Democritean atoms. We don't even have a vocabulary in which to form the questions.

Granted we don't understand how [consciousness] happens, but the question being asked is perhaps an impossible one. If it is to be answered, I can't see how it could be anything but science that answers it. If it is unanswerable, then what conclusions could we draw from that? — Janus

Agreed. Or as I said in the "Mind as Uncaused Cause" thread:

"[We need] a completely different understanding of what terms like "physical," "mental," "subjective" et al. mean. The "hard problem," I think, has all the hallmarks of a question that has to have been stated incorrectly, though it's the best we can do at the moment . . . we shall see."

I would be astonished if consciousness as a phenomenon didn't turn out to be biological, and capable of scientific explanation. Subjectivity -- what it's like to be conscious -- may be a different matter.

I looked for a juggler emoji but couldn't find one! So I'll just smile :smile: I hope you do come back to this discussion. Obviously I don't think I'm doing anything semantically dodgy, but happy to hear your thoughts, which are always interesting.

As explained above,
(30) (∃x)(x is necessarily greater than 7)
will result in modal collapse if the domain includes more than integers. — Banno

Welcome back.

As Quine explains it, doesn't the collapse occur regardless of the domain? It has to do with existential generalization itself, no? But maybe I'm missing it.

You want to know what is out there as the underlying reality for Husserl, apart from iintentionally constituted objects? An utterly formless, structureless flow of change. — Joshs

This was posted seconds before my post above, responding to a similar concern. So now I can ask: Is the utterly formless, structureless flow nevertheless constraining, in some degree, of what we can constitute as an object or event? How is this flow not "whole cloth," as it were?