Believing that putting the ball in the net counts as a goal is not an act of faith but simply to understand how to play football.

Consenting to our social institutions is not an act of faith. — Banno

The act of faith here is not believing in specific rules, but belief in the relevant institution's (IFAB here) authority to will rules in and out of being, and for their intercessors, ritually outfitted with uniform, cards and whistle, to arbitrate them.

Similarly, faith is not in a rule that stomping babies is bad, but in the belief that underpins that rule, be it God/Gods, religions institutions, or the sanctity of human life.

You put a lot of emphasis on change. I'm wondering if you are under emphasizing a more fundamental epistemic problem.

As I see it, the core problem of knowledge is that we don't perceive reality itself, but rather we experience sensations which are something like signals emanating from reality, much like Plato's shadows. Based on these signals, we construct models of the reality that produced them. The problem is, there are always multiple models that fit the signals we receive. Some seem more likely, some less, some seem absurd, yet for any set of observations there is never just one possible model. This is true both of everyday life and of science.

This directly leads to the Gettier problem. The businessman saw the clock , and saw the train arrive at the proper time. Naturally he assumed that the clock was functioning, and had told him the correct time. He probably never considered the alternate model which also equally fit his observations: that the clock was broken, but by chance was stopped at the correct time. With imagination you can construct still less likely, yet consistent, models (i.e. the clock was painted on the wall, or a hallucination sent to him by a benevolent train spirit).

Notably, this problem would obtain even in a static, unchanging universe.

What do you think? How does this jibe with JTC?

Faith is the attitude of consent toward social/institutional realities. Without evidence, these are treated as if they were objective realities, not anthropological realities. Faith sustains these entities, as these social realities can only exist through collective human consent. As faith goes, so goes the reality.

This is true not just of religions, but of nations, currencies, laws, companies, and ethics. There is no objective evidence of any of these, beyond the actual practice itself. Because they consist in the practice, and the faith that engenders and sustains it

Not withstanding some everyday uses, i.e. "I have faith the bus will come in time".

I agree with pretty much every thing you say. The one part we may differ is that I question the validity of the Gettier problem. In the sense that it attacks JTB. If the businessman was not justified in his belief, then it is not a counterexample of JTB. It's just that, to truly know whether something is a JTB, we need to adopt the omniscient perspective implicitly taken in the thought experiment. In the real world, empirical knowledge is always provisional.

Hmmm, remind me why Gettier is even a problem.

The businessman believed himself to be justified that the time was correct. However, in retrospect, after learning that the clock was broken, he would realize that his belief wasn't justified. The clock was right only twice a day, and just by chance he picked one of those. His belief wasn't justified, it was only apparently justified, and it was true merely by luck.

Truth, as @flannel jesus points out, is always uncertain. Perhaps the same holds for justification as well. What counts as justification is always subject to revision in the light of new information. We only ever think something is true, and we only ever think its truth is justified. Therefore, we only ever think we know something, and that belief needs to always be held in proper suspicion. At least for what @DasGegenmittel calls dynamic knowledge.

Could that be all there is to it?

This hoary false paradox certainly says nothing about the actual nature of space or anything.

In this exercise you are imagining the state of the tortoise/hare at a time closer and closer to the time that the hare catches up. But never reaching that time.

You can use this method to approximate this meeting time. No one does, since obviously it can be exactly solved. But if you perform enough iterations of the hare catching up and the tortoise moving on, you will arrive at the effectively exact time and distance that they meet.

The hare never reaches the tortoise, because time, in the thought experiment, never reaches the moment that the hare does pass. As soon as you imagine time proceeding beyond this meeting time, you must imagine the hare passing, for your thought experiment to tension consistent.

Furthermore, he is a professional philosopher in Argentina and has written interesting books. — javi2541997

I'm curious, what books?

When you pour coffee into a cup, is it cup or space in the cup which holds coffee? If there were no space in the cup, coffee won't be contained in the cup. — Corvus

It seems clear it is held in the cup. The shape of the cup is such that it can hold coffee. No need for a separate entity, "space".

Consider this: You are a school principal. Every classroom can hold no more than 25 students, by law. You are given X students this year. As a manager, you develop an accounting trick: instead of thinking in terms of students, you think of slots, that is, empty places in a classroom. After all, that is the limiting resource, you have plenty of students. After juggling the slots around on your spreadsheet, you conclude to the school board "I'm sorry, I can't fit that many students, there aren't enough slots!"

"Slot" is a noun, and your statement is true: you don't have enough slots. If you had more, you truly could fit all the students. Yet, "slots" don't actually refer to anything in the world. They refer to an idea, specifically an absence of a student, turned mentally into a thing.

This is what I mean as placeholder, and this is what I am suggesting space is. An idea you mentally frame, nounify, and pin onto your mental map of the world. But it doesn't actually refer to any entity in the world, it is a (very useful) idea, absence formalized into a mental thing of its own, and thoroughly reified by constant use.

Now do I actually believe all of this? Not necessarily, but I think it is valid idea, worth pushing until it breaks.

On the other hand, you can make the same sort of arguments for time you make for space. When you watch a clock, or any physical process evolve, you are experiencing time. You experience it every time you say to yourself, "this is happening right now", and that present utterance and moment transforms irreversibly into a memory, pointing to the past.

Time functions as a real constraint on what is possible. It is likely possible for you to arrive in Paris from wherever you are, within a day, if you really had to. And it is likely completely impossible for you to arrive in Paris in an hour. The only difference between these two requirements is one of them has an inadequate amount of time. How could time function as a physical constraint on what is possible and what is not, if it didn't exist?

My overall point is, if time falls, so does space. Since they really are the same sorts of things.

What do you mean by "fictitious"? — Corvus

Some words have substantive [referents outside the web of language, some do not. Some do not but pretend they do. Time may be one is them.

When you say "a placeholder", would it be in the form of concept? Or would it be some other form or nature? — Corvus

A kind of concept. An eminently useful mental tool we use to engage with the world. We ideate it as having an essential reality of it's own that we can't clearly articulate. But it does not.

I understand space as physical entity. Do you mean the placeholder could be in space somewhere?
Could it be in the form of property of space or principle of motion? — Corvus

I wouldn't call space an entity, and I don't think you perceive it any more or less than time. When you think you perceive space, you are only perceiving objects and their arrangements. You unify this set of arrangements under the umbrella concept of space. Time may be a similar thing, but with relative motions. We perceive relative motions and imagine an umbrella concept 'time'.

Put another way: What if you abandoned the notions of space and time as metaphysical containers, and thought only of objects and their relative arrangements and motions. What would you thereby lose?

What could that "some separate, ineffable, metaphysical entity" be? We need more elaboration on this. — Corvus

My suggestion it that it is a fictiticious placeholder, an abstraction of derived from physical process.

But if there is such a thing, it is the same sort of thing as space. Space is the medium of arrangement, as time is the medium of sequence.

While the arguments are fallacious, I might agree with the basic premise: maybe time is a placeholder, an abstraction, there is no actual entity corresponding to the word.

What really is, is casual processes. These processes can be mentally separated and made independent. Then, when we compare placeholders that are significant to us in these processes, such as revolutions of the earth, ticks on a clock, beats of a heart, you can compare the two: some amount of X placeholders in one process have transpired as some amount Y of the other has.

This is what we ordinarily call time. But this description doesn't seem to necessitate some separate, ineffable, metaphysical entity, the way the noun 'time' seems to suggest.

Why do you think he wants Greenland and Canada? — frank

The thought has crossed my mind. If so, that is a particularly odious kind of evil: at the one hand, deny climate change as strenuously as possible, dooming most life on the planet to catastrophe. One the other hand, profit from it, by any possible means.

Words fail me.

@Pierre-Normand You have posted many very impressive conversations. In your opinion do you think AI has achieved "AGI", whatever that is supposed to mean? Given any reasonable definition I have to say it has.
Phil
If any of these conversations were posted 10 years ago, people would have agreed without hesitation that any hypothetical AI which has achieved conversation at this level represented AGI. Now that it has been achieved it seems the goal posts have shifted.

Speaking of jazz and metal, here is Napalm Death as performed by NY arty jazz musicians. It blew my young mind when I heard it first.



The "technicality gap" mentioned by @Arcane Sandwich is evident. Ain't no metalheads playing this. They could play it note-for-note live:

We do not directly experience matter. — Art48

But this I agree with. Your original claim was that we don't experience matter at all.

Your argument is with the direct realists, not with me. But, that one was long, exhausting, and done with.

The point of the original post is we can be 100% certain of the sensations we experience but we can not be 100% certain of the cause of the sensations. — Art48

It might be the case, but this is not what you posted in your op. Your original claim was that we experience sensations, not matter.

We can experience things without being 100% certain of them. I experience you via this interaction, but I am not 100% certain of your existence, as you might be a LLM. I can doubt you in a way that I could not if we were speaking face to face. But that does not mean I am not experiencing you and your communication (assuming you are real).

Matter is not what we experience. Rather, matter is our explanation of what we experience. — Art48

Matter is both what we experience, and the explanation of our experiences.

When we see a tree, we experience visual sensations. These visual sensations are experiences of a tree.

The word "experience" can refer to the phenomenology, or to the cause of the phenomenology. When I go to a concert, I experience sounds, and by doing so I experience the instruments, and the players. When I visit Prague I experience a beautiful city, and I experience all the sights sounds and smells this city induces in me.

It's just that one, the phenomenology, is an "experience of" the other, the object.

For example, perhaps you think that someone who says, "I think Putin is a nut," is not thinking self-consciously. That may be, but the I think of Kant or Rodl is not based in that sort of off-the-cuff, half-conscious utterance. — Leontiskos

Clearly not, the "I think" of common speech self-attributes or weakens a claim, it doesn't reference consciousness in any way. What I'm pointing out is that language itself isn't the source of this confusion, since "I'm thinking about thinking p" is available if we ever need to point out we are self-consciously reflecting on our thought.

If someone says "I think p" they are thinking p self-consciously. This seems pretty basic — Leontiskos

Not really, since "I think" as a attributer/weakener dominates English usage, any other use is very unusual and requires clarification. Far from being learned in either philosopher's work, I nonetheless see two possibilities for a "philosophical" "I think".

1: Thinking p.
2: Self consciously thinking p.

Given what was posted in the op, I favor 1, at least for Rodl.

Claiming that stating 1 immediately leads to 2 muddies the water. Even if this were so, this doesn't change the meaning of 1. Especially since we are speaking philosophically, not over the dinner table.

Would you like to say more about how you understand "include"? — J

I mean include in a textual proposition describing my mental state .

If I think p, in response to "what is going on in your head", I must include "I think" in my response, if I am to be strictly accurate: "I think p". "p" alone will not suffice.

In this sense, "I think" is always bound to any proposition that is thought.

I don't think this is vacuous or tautological either. "P" strictly speaking cannot occur in a brain. What can occur is a mental perspective on p. Given any proposition p, each of us considering it will mentality instantiate it in our own way. Rather than p, thinking p, the thought of p, is what is going on. This all happens without necessarily self consciously considering the thought of p itself.

So if the three cases you gave are all inaccurate notations of "I think p," then it looks like they won't function as counterexamples. — Leontiskos

That's fine. I don't want to overfocus on natural language, and I think the sentence of mine you quoted was mistaken. For one, self-consciously thinking p would be rendered as something like "I'm thinking about thinking p", not "I think p". So, I don't think there is necessarily ambiguity there.

The confusion is a philosophical one, not a linguistic one. There are three distinct propositions under consideration:

1. p
2. I think P
3. I think about thinking about P

Rodl says, afaict, only 2 and 3 can occur in thought. Pat's confusion is conflating 2 with 3.

I have in mind speaking in a language you don't understand. Speaking on a subject you don't understand. Lying.

Also, you might include cases such as LLM speech.

The issue I see is that you cannot notate that you are thinking p without self-consciously thinking p. If the words "I think p" are uttered, then the self-reflection on thought is already present. And so it seems that the "notation" cannot be first-personal if it is to properly prescind from this self-reflection. — Leontiskos

Interesting. I would say this is usually, but not necessarily the case, that uttering "I think p" entails thinking about thinking p. In the same way, uttering "p" usually, but not always, entails thinking p. But this does not change the meaning of the utterances. "p" means "p", not "I think p", even if uttering "p" usually entails thinking p. We need to keep the meaning of utterances and their side-effects distinct.

My response to the op, without reading though the whole thread:

Rodl is correct (leaving aside whether Kant supports him). I would answer Pat with something like 3.

To translate the mental event thinking-p into propositional form, you must include "I think". Because, the declaration "p" alone does not do this job. You can claim p without understanding it. You can mouth the words, with no internal representation accompanying your recitation. You can say p without believing it, by lying about it, or merely disagreeing internally.

The claim p alone is not the same as the event thinking-p, and so to convey this event accurately, "I think" must be included. But this is not at all the same as actually thinking, or experiencing, "I think p". This is reflecting on your own thought, which you do sometimes, but certainly not always, as Pat points out.

And so, there is a confusion caused by language: accurately notating that you are indeed thinking-p, and reflecting on your own thought, can both be represented as "I think p" in English.

I'm surprised such an argument would look convincing to modern eyes.

For one, there are just too many steps for them all to have any hope of withstanding scrutiny.

To me the first really objectionable one is:

9. Two beings can only exist separately if they are distinguishable in their parts. — Bob Ross

Two things might be indistinguishable in their parts, and yet be numerically distinct. We don't distinguish two identical marbles by their parts, but by their distinct bodies occupying distinct spatial locations.

When we say we've experienced X, we're saying that the world would have to be in state X in order for our perceptual systems to be functioning properly. This is what language use about experience means. — frank

I've experienced joy and pain.

Oh cool, I didn't notice accepted answers were a thing now.

But what on earth is constituting extension from unextended elements with respect to geneticists in 1940's-ish France? — Moliere

I think the link you found is a good clue. Sartre no doubt inherited the French anti-Mendelian sentiment of the time. One strain of that argument may have been: how can you get from the mere notion of genes, which had no known, and perhaps no conceivable, physical mechanism, to the concrete, physical features the traits supposedly correspond to? There was a gap, perhaps a reversal of today's gap in the hard problem: instead of an impossible leap from physical neurons to non-physical qualia, we have a leap from non-physical genes to physical traits.

Similarly, Sartre seems to say, how can we bridge the gap between present elements, such as artifacts, or memories encoded in neurons, to the past as such? We can no more arrive at the past by accumulating present artifacts than we can arrive at physical traits by accumulating or manipulating non-physical genes.

I believe this is also how we should see some mathematical truths, e.g. 2+2=4 is true. — Sam26

The rules of chess do not describe the truths of reality in the same way that "water freezes at 32 degrees F" does. Instead, they constitute the very framework within which true and false (correct and incorrect) can be assessed. — Sam26

But 2+2=4 is not arbitrary in the way that "bishops move diagonally" is.

Or rather, 2+2=4 follows the rules of adding in the same way that a diagonal bishop move follows the rules of chess. But the rules of adding are not mere convention, they capture some sort of truth that has not been stipulated into being, like the rules of chess were.

Now that the fever dream of fiction has broken, I'm getting into the idea. I think I have a topic picked out already.

But individual animals, planets, etc. make good examples of multitudes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But even these examples are not clean.

When counting cats in the room, are you counting that wildcat? This cat is pregnant, are you counting its unborn fetuses?

When you are counting animals in the room, are you counting the insects? The gut bacteria? The mitochondria? Yourself?

When you are counting planets, are you counting moons? Planetoids? Asteroids?

The reason these are not clean is that categories like "cat", "animal", "planet" are not found in nature. They are invented, not discovered. Which is not to say they are not meaningful. Because categories are subjective creations does not mean they are whimsically chosen. They sometimes have deep ontological bases (i.e. life vs. non-life), and they sometimes do not (i.e. racial categories).

The whole crux of the problem as I see it is that while numbering entails categorization which is a subjective act, numbers nonetheless have very objective properties.

One can account for this by understanding commissive speech acts. — Banno

You probably mean declarative speech acts. Commissive acts commit the speaker, declarative acts declare things to be so. But this seems to overemphasize speech. Everyone alive was born into a world where the rules of chess and counting were already well established. They are social practices that don't require speech acts to bring them into being.

But suppose they did. Suppose you were defining chess for the first time. The speech acts would specify how the game works. But it seems odd to say that the logic of the game, and all its implications (i.e. the value of the pieces) was somehow contained in the speech. The speech specifies the rules. But the rules are not themselves speech, or language in general.

IDK, something about a cat or a dog seems to strongly suggest that it is a single cat or dog; I am not sure how much "choice" we have in the matter. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course, there is ample choice. You can count dogs, mammals, retrievers, brown animals, sick animals, etc. The choice of what counts as a numeric unit is fairly arbitrary.

The "All in one's head" model is a thing known to physically exist. — Mark Nyquist

I'm afraid this does not do the work you need it to do, nor can you bat the ball back to my court so easily. How do you respond to my reasons that numbers can't just be "all in one's head"?

And numbers just as non-physical abstractions doesn't have an explanation.
Give it a try if that's your position. — Mark Nyquist

Think of chess. This is an arbitrary game, with arbitrary rules that exist in our collective heads. It is well known in chess that a bishop is worth 3x a pawn and 1/3 a queen. Impressively, this was known well before computers made it conclusive. Yet, you will never find this in the rules of chess, it was never in anyone's head before it was discovered. How can this be? I think of the rules of chess as creating a "logical landscape", and facts can be discovered in such a landscape that were never in anyone's head. This, despite the rules of chess being 100% arbitrary, having no connection to the actual universe.

Numbers are such a thing. They also have rules which create a logical landscape, about which things can be discovered which were never in anyone's head. But unlike chess, the rules of numbers are intimately tied to the way things actually work in the universe. If you have one unit, and combine it with another unit, you get two units, no matter how you define what a unit consists of. So long as the definition of unit is consistent, this works for anything across space and time.

I don't think this is an answer in itself, and I'm no mathematician. I'm just trying to convey my intuition on how the problem can be thought about, without resorting to "all in the head", and without resorting to mystical Platonic essences...

Beware of serious babble on this thread. :roll: — jgill

:grimace:

So platonism is the idea abstractions exist.
I don't see how abstractions as non-physicals can exist. If they are non-physical they don't exist. What is the alternative? — Mark Nyquist

It seems the thread has drifted well away from the main topic. I'm more interested in that.

This approach doesn't work, I think for at least two reasons.

If numbers are just abstractions, how do you distinguish "3" from "The second even prime". The first "exists", the second doesn't. What distinguishes these two abstractions?

Second, how do you account for numeric laws? If numbers were all in the head, how are laws discovered that were most certainly not in anyone's head until they were discovered?

This doesn't seem to accord with typical uses of 'cause'. Without oxygen in my room, I couldn't write this reply. But oxygen did not cause me to write it.

To me, this becomes more interesting with a single topic everyone writes about, i.e. "Imagination". That would differentiate it from the everyday TPF activities: every writer deeply engages with the same topic, and only after everyone has written do they come together and discuss each other's take. It would be interesting to see how varied everyone's approach is, and how much richness there really is in the topic.

Otherwise, my worry is that the outcome would effectively be a bunch of long TPF posts, without much mutual interest and engagement.

We could propose different topics, and then have a vote.

The distinction "exists" picks out is that between things that are more than just ideas, vs. ideas. Things that are only ideas do not exist, that is the meaning of "exists". Numbers exist, because they are more than the idea of them. Or subsist, if you like.

My take on this is that chess and math are performed by the part of the brain that does the generic computation. The slow part, the part you are keenly aware of as you laboriously work through a problem.

Chess and math are indeed far less complex than say motion and perception and language. Those things would be totally overwhelming to us if we had to consciously think them through. The brain is furnished with special purpose machinery that handles those things, and we have no conscious access to the workings of those parts of the brain, only to their results.

When a computer performs a task done by our slow brains, it can excel. Taking on a task done by our fast brains is far more formidable, and the breakthroughs for those things happened only recently.

Even now, nearly 40 years after Moravec’s observation, robots tend to look like bumbling fools wherever they mimic other behaviors, even if they could still school the best of us at chess and math. — NOS4A2

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zS6vNNW5bEo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAG_FBZJVJ8&pp=ygUHI2JvdGRvZw%3D%3D
https://chatgpt.com/

I have an instinctual aversion to analytic philosophy and the general notion that a man who stares at words and symbols all day can afford me a higher value to my education or the pursuit of wisdom than, say, an athlete or shop teacher, or anyone else who prefers to deal with things outside of themselves. — NOS4A2

And yet, 9.3k and counting.

Suicide is wrong because it destroys something that has value. Things have value because they are valued. When something valued is destroyed, the valuer is harmed. Suicide is therefore wrong because it harms the beings that value the suicidal.

The beings that value the suicidal may include friends, relatives, loved ones, and they may also include the future selves of the suicidal. Perspectives change, even if the present suicidal doesn't value their life, their future selves might. If you ever enjoyed your life, you owe that enjoyment to the fact that all of your past selves chose not to kill themselves. Had just one of them done so, they would have stolen that enjoyment from you.

Future selves are just as worthy of protection as present selves. Giving someone poison that kills them in a month is just as wrong as poison that kills immediately, even though the time delayed poison only kills a future self.

Desire for pleasures only applies if you are alive, if you die there is no need for any of that. Same with love, friendship, food, money, etc. — Darkneos

But you are alive, not dead, so you desire at least one of these. Killing yourself permanently frustrates all of the desires you had at the moment you died, and all the desires you would have had in the future.

I would move it. The thread seems more significant than the vast majority of mainline threads here; it reveals a huge landmine in propositional logic that I'm sure most aren't aware of (I sure wasn't), and is relevant to lots of other threads.