This bachelor is married' would not be self-contradictory, even though the statement 'No bachelor is married' is used as a canonical example of an analytic truth. — andrewk

I don't understand this. Saying the bachelor is married contradicts the definition. I took the point of contradiction to mean analytical statements have their truth contained in the definition or rules of the respective concept or statement. So we can derive all sorts of mathematical or logical truths that don't rely on facts about the world being added to the mix.

Such doubt is belief based. All belief consists of meaningful correlations drawn between different things. — creativesoul

Right, and there's your argument in the other thread which I said I agreed with. But, what the dream argument shows is that it's possible to have an experience of my hands without them being external. We can differentiate between dreaming and being awake, but that possibility of having non-external hand experience still remains. Which means there could be radical scenarios in which it's actually the case.

As such, Moore waving his hands about doesn't defeat the skeptic, it just reinforces that such doubt is radical. But the skeptic can just reply, "Yeah and so what? I already knew that skepticism was radical to common, everyday sense."

Or I suffer an inner ear infection that makes balance impossible, and so cannot demonstrate my skill; do I still know how to ride? — Banno

Yes, if your neuromuscular system is capable of doing so. All you need to demonstrate it is to have you ear infection cured. Do you doubt it's in principle possible for a medical examination to reveal the capacity?

It must be the case that you store that capability somehow, or you would not be able to ride again, without going through a relearning process?

I think that Moore is separating the fools of the audience. Who - in that situation - would deny that Moore's hand is external to them? — creativesoul

Someone after watching the Matrix or Inception movies. We can agree that in an everyday sense it's foolish, but philosophical doubt raises the possibility that we could be wrong. Thus the simulation, BIV, demon arguments.

Also, I can dream about my hands, but those might not be my external hands. Moore's proof isn't a proof, it's an appeal to common sense.

I think it would be better to think something like, that having a hand and believing one has a hand are much the same thing - "inseparable", as you say. After all, to believe on has a hand, one has to understand ownership in some way, and what hands are in some other. — Banno

A potential problem here is that there are disorders in which people believe parts of their body don't belong to them. There are also disorders in which they completely ignore the left or right side of their body.

That means the belief is separable from the having a hand under special circumstances, and this is due to a brain injury or disorder, which places the belief in the brain.

Thoughts? — Purple Pond

Statement: A necessitates B

1. A priori analytic? No, it's not deductive according to Hume.
2. A posterori synthetic? No, experience only gives us constant conjunction.
3. A posterori analytic. No, unlike water is H20, causation is not shown to be a necessary relation by experience.

However, doesn't that mean the truth of A necessitating B being a priori synthetic is itself a posterori analytic? After finding that experience doesn't not show it to the be case, we conclude that it must be apriori.

There's nothing like what there would be if all the mathematical forms instantiated in the same way. — fdrake

So Rovelli's argument summarized in the OP is that Platonism would be full of useless math instead of just the math we're interested in.

But what is the argument justifying this claim? Are there examples of useless math of interest to no one? What makes the case that Platonism would lead to this? Because other creatures would develop maths we wouldn't care about? Is that actually true? I'm thinking human mathematicians would actually quite interested in how much farther than us the Jovians had developed their geometry, and I'm guessing Jovian mathematicians would be quite curious about arithmetic.

Which brings about a second question. Why is utility an important criterion for math? Certainly applied math is important for various fields, but mathematicians also are interested in math for it's own sake.

If the platonic realists are right, the name of that junkyard is the Platonic realm of forms. — fdrake

Right, but I'm asking if there is a human junkyard of abandoned math, whether constructed or discovered. Because the argument turns on most of math being a junkyard. I'm asking whether this is a hypothetical, or actually historical.

th. The main thrust is simply that most mathematical objects aren't worthy of study, — fdrake

But do these mathematical objects exist, or is this based on the hypothetical that they could be created if we were Jovians?

Is there a bunch of abandoned junky math that was of no value to Mathematicians but still qualifies as math? Is there a Math junkyard?

My point was there are reasons to think the structures and relations we use math to model exist in the world independent of us, since they led to us existing.

but the recognition that the world is a certain way for us to reason about — Pierre-Normand

Why would it only be a certain way for us? Do we really think that evolution or general relativity is a certain way for us, as opposed to being a certain way for the universe?

Or you could take the Aristotelian approach and say the structures and relations exist in the world. After all, neither the Jovians nor humans create the environments they find themselves in.

Arguably, we reason the way we do because the world is certain way for us to reason about it.

If you think science exhausts the claim to explanation, then this strikes me as a reductive reading, unwarranted imposed from without, of what the sciences do. — StreetlightX

So your response might be that the full explanation is both our phenomenal experience and the corresponding scientific explanations. Both of which make up the real.

I agree with your argument, but how do you justify #4? Couldn't an idealist just deny it?

he smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or—in Plato's sense—Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics. — Werner Heisenberg

That is an interesting quote. I don't know what to make of the physical some days. I'm sure it's real in that it doesn't depend on us.

But anyway, isn't that what Tegmark and Meillassoux basically claim the world is?

It is the phenomenal which is the real and if we desire to understand it we cannot subsume it under some abstract system. — StreetlightX

Oh, in context of the entire sentence I took that to mean that how the world appears to us is what's real, and not some abstraction from it. But then what is science doing when it uses mathematical language to form it's explanations of the world?

The question is about subsumption under abstraction. — StreetlightX

I have no idea what that means.

I think the existence of atoms is questionable, in the sense of them being anything like the fundamental constituents of things. And I'm in pretty good company: — Wayfarer

Well, for chemistry they are. But yeah, they're not fundamental they way they were initially thought to be.

In addition, it doesn't get much more obvious than when we learned that solid objects are made of mostly empty space despite appearance, and the light we see is but a tiny bit of the EM spectrum, some of which can travel between those empty spaces in solid things.

How do they? You made the claim. — StreetlightX

Ordinary matter is made up of atoms to small for us to see, mathematical equations are heavily used to explain physical and chemical interactions, there are aspects of QM which cannot be visualized or explained in ordinary language without invoking metaphysical interpretations, GR has counterintuitive implications for space and time, and so on.

But more than anything, our sensory modalities are left off as perceiver dependent properties. The scientific image is devoid of smell, sound, color, etc.

No, they do not. — StreetlightX

How don't they?

. It is the phenomenal which is the real and if we desire to understand it we cannot subsume it under some abstract system. — StreetlightX

Only problem with this is that the hard sciences do exactly that. One can argue that some of the ancient Greek metaphysicians were getting at the reality beyond the senses in a pre-scientific manner. Democritus (atomism), Pythagorus (geometry), and Heraclitus (logos) would be three examples. Plato's cave can be seen (from a modern POV) as an analogy for the scientist leaving the cave of the senses to appreciate the mathematical equations describing the hidden reality revealed through experimentation.

Martin Luther said that human nature is like a drunk trying to ride a horse. He falls off one side, gets back on vowing not to fall off that side, and then falls off the other side.

Which is ironic, given that the great reformer himself fell off several issues. The point is human beings have this tendency to go overcorrect in response to a previous wrong. Prohibition in the US over alcohol and drugs is one such example.

I sent this message, then typed it in. True story. Things have been happening out of order with me for a while now. — Hanover

You might have some kind of superpower. I would check into. You could be investing successfully or winning the lottery before you use your money!

That's really disrespectful. Not that it surprises me, but an elected official usually doesn't mock a citizen in public, particularly one claiming to have been the victim of a crime. Trump just doesn't care.

I don't know if there is a way to structurally protect SCOTUS from political sturm and drang. Packing, enlarging, establishing term limits for justices... replacing them with Martians... Just don't know. — Bitter Crank

I've heard that the Canadian SC is not at all politicized like SCOTUS, so it's not impossible.

The ground of being God escapes this sort of objection. But in that case, it's misleading to say that God created the universe, as if God were one more thing in existence, thus requiring an infinite regress of explanations. Some of the atheistic objections are based on less sophisticated notions of the Abrahamic deity.

I don't think God exists, but there are different versions, some of which don't have the same objections.

What we do know is that under pressure, Kavanaugh turned more than a bit vicious. Not a good thing for a potential SCOTUS justice to display. Not a good thing for an appellate judge to display, for that matter. — Bitter Crank

That's true.

but at certain periods in the past the game has been played with better acting than it is being played now. — Bitter Crank

I recall when Bill Clinton was first elected. I was taking a class. Two of the Republicans in the room refused to give him a chance. That just seemed like ugly tribalism to me, and a lack of respect for the presidency. The radio and news programs catering to the right since then has been equally tribal. It's not surprising when the left responds in kind.

Without acknowledging this basic, self-evident truth, this hinge proposition, — Banno

Oh, that was good. You've out-goated yourself.

I doubt very much that God, if such a being exists, would have much to do with human wants and reasoning. We're just apes that evolved on one little rock in a vast cosmos. Why would God be anything like us, or care whether we argued for it's existence?

No. The experiment can also be considered at a macro scale using Schrodinger's cat as Banno suggests above. — Andrew M

Wouldn't the cat be doing the equivalent of taking a measurement, creating a definite result? I never understood why the cat could be in a superposition, but the scientists conducting the experiments were not.

The experimenters send a photon through an interferometer where one path has event A followed by event B and the other path has event B followed by event A. The paths are recombined and measurements of the photon match the predictions of quantum mechanics rather than classical mechanics (where the photon travels only one of the paths). — Andrew M

Is the indefinite history only a product of thinking of a photon as a particle instead of a wave?

Only if you imagine the Great Goat to be at the top of the Great Chain of Eating. But if instead you think of the Great Goat as that which makes eating possible, you would recognize the infantility of your western presuppositions.

There is no Utopia. But there's better and worse, and tradeoffs. We might decide as a species at some point that humans just can't be trusted with power once we have another option. Current democracies are the best we can come up with so far. It's telling that we call it the least worst form of government.

Eliezer Yudkowsky calls democracies vote-maximizing systems, which isn't what was intended, but it's what ends up happening.

The problem I have with US democracy is that only two parties matter, the Electoral College is outdated but will take a constitutional amendment to remove, which senators from the lower population states will never approve, large amounts of money are spent on campaigns, both parties are heavily influenced by big business, gerrymandering is a thing, and Supreme Court nominations are hugely political because everyone is worried about how the nominee will swing the court on a few key issues.

Also, debate between the two parties that matter has turned into a feces throwing contest presented in terms of good versus evil. Granted, the Republicans are more to blame for the debate degrading so much, particularly their media apparatus. But it has proved to be a working strategy, as was obstructing the Obama administration, so we can look forward to a downward spiral of that from both parties in the future.

Can we acquire knowledge of that which is not existentially dependent upon language? — creativesoul

Animals can, we're animals, ergo obviously yes. It's just very useful for us to put that knowledge into language.

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This seems to be where much of philosophy has been hung... — creativesoul

One can see that as a symptom of philosophers being hung up over words, since disagreement so often hangs on the meaning of words.

Alas, the whole notion of justice is so far betrayed by both sides, that they might as well dissolve the committee and the supreme court both. Justice counts for nothing, and nobody believes in it. — unenlightened

Maybe in a few decades the machines will be ready for us to hand such matters over to them. I can't remember which book it was, but I'm thinking off quote about how certain decisions are too important for humans to be trusted with, like running a country or interpreting law.

Or you could be having a psychotic episode. — Purple Pond

By me you mean the human race? I guess that would be one possibility we'd be forced to consider.

It could be something that can't be explained by science but is not in conflict with laws of nature. It other words, it is complementary with nature not opposing it. — Purple Pond

Wouldn't that just depend on the situation? It's easy enough to imagine convincing scenarios. Just watch any show like Supernatural, or the movies like Dr. Strange and Harry Potter.

If the stars in the sky all of a sudden formed the words, "I Am that I Am", then we would be forced into considering non-natural explanations.

Apathy kills — Evil

And if we're going to be abusing terms, then it's not apathy that does the killing, it's ideology. Apathetic people are too apathetic to get worked up to do bad things to their neighbor. It's always some passionate desire to recreate or cleanse the world that inspires the killing.

Passion is what kills. Of course it's the wrong kind of passion, but then again, all things in context. Some philosopher wrote an article in the NY Times about how cats were selfish narcissists except when it comes to their young, but at least you don't see them committing mass murder, since cats can't be convinced to care about that sort of thing.

Apathy kills — Evil

Nah, that's just a BS mantra by society to try and shame people into doing what the collective wants them to do. So basically you should vote for the less terrible candidate instead of abstaining or voting for the desired candidate who has no chance to win, because everyone else reaches the same conclusion that voting for the lesser of two evils is the way government ought to work.

It's also an abuse of language. Killing kills, just like power is power, not knowledge.