Take airplanes. If the simulation initial state was set in the 20th century, then it includes airplane technology. It is 'given' so to speak. If the initial state is started before that, then airplanes are our own invention.. Either way, we possess the technology. It isn't illusory. We actually can make airplanes that fly. If you crash in one, you really die, as opposed to say a video game where if you 'die', you simply exit the game. Getting shot in a video game is indeed an illusion. — noAxioms

If we're in a simulation, and we make airplanes within the confines of this simulation, then it seems to me that we don't actually possess the technology. We at most possess a simulation of that technology. If we're in a simulation, what does "actually" flying mean? We're merely simulating the flying experience, making it simply a hyper-advanced flight sim. Pilots in flight sims aren't actually flying, after all.

I think that's the whole point of a simulation: nothing is actual, since it's by hypothesis simulated. If we're to posit that "simulated" = "real", then what work is the "simulated" descriptor doing?

@RogueAI correctly pointed out that only somebody who knows about humans would want to simulate them, so it is presumably our decedents, be they human anymore or not. — noAxioms

Well, it's a truism that only beings who know about humans would want to simulate them, as in order to simulate something you must have knowledge of it, else how do you construct a verisimilitudinous simulation of it? However, that truism needn't limit the simulators to our descendants: perhaps they're advanced aliens which at some point in cosmic history made contact with humans, perhaps they're advanced AI like in the Matrix, and so forth.

Yeah, it definitely seems like something's missing. However, as I said I haven't read up on this in detail, so Bostrom or other proponents of the argument may well have handled this objection somehow. It seems pretty obvious, so I doubt I'm the first to bring it up.

Yes, evidently. I just wonder what he would posit as the reason for accepting such an assumption. Perhaps given that it's supposed to be an "ancestor" simulation specifically, he would say that such a simulation would by definition closely (if not necessarily exactly) resemble the ancestral state of the civilization doing the simulating.

As someone with only a passing familiarity with simulation-type arguments, and who's too lazy to read Bostrom's actual writing on it, can someone succinctly explain to me how the argument is not self-undermining? If we are living in a simulated world, how are we to reliably draw any conclusions which are based on empirical premises?

Such arguments seem to turn on our current level of computing power, and how, given some hypothetical growth rate of such powers, at some point in the future we'll be able to run ancestor simulations. But if this is indeed a simulation, then anything we purport to know about our present levels of technology (and thus any extrapolation therefrom) is illusory, because we don't actually possess that technology: such technology is simulated.

No doubt these types of questions have been answered, as Bostrom's probably a pretty smart fellow, it's just something that niggles at me when I hear discussion about simulations.

The coffers are empty — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Then seems like a bad time for Trump to be cutting taxes, wouldn't you say?

Well, pigs engage in plenty of cannibalism themselves, so what's good for the, uh, goose is good for the gander.

Even domestic pigs don't really have "naked skin," per se: though they may be less hairy than their boar progenitors, they still have plenty of hair, which is why the carcasses of domestic pigs are generally scalded before they're butchered or otherwise processed.

Has my secret love life at long last been validated by science? All of these years of shame: well, I shall be ashamed no longer!

Sure. You can start by actually reading the New Scientist article that was linked to, which addresses this very issue. New information can arise via mutation, including by means of duplication and divergence. The globin family of genes diverged in just such a way, leading to new genes which produce new proteins with new functions. Evolution tinkers with what it has to work with.

(Ah, ok, it just said "bone," not "skull." That completely changes things...)

Well, given that Point 1 is factually incorrect, that doesn't bode well for the other points, if that's to be the foundation of the argument (I'm going to just outright ignore the "spear in a dinosaur skull" thing, anyway, as it's too silly to really address, and, to be honest, may indicate that the people promulgating such an argument are not really acting in good faith).

2. When you look at the about 50 million fossils we have not one has evidence of evolution. So why should we believe that getting more fossils well prove otherwise.(this is 80% of his presentation) — hachit

The fallacy here is a bit like saying that we should doubt that the Black Death occurred because no single skeleton we ever found from 14th century Western Europe shows signs of a drastic population decline. Evolution is a phenomenon which occurs in populations, not individuals. No one fossil (whether or not from a "transitional organism") tells the full story of evolution. The picture only emerges when we put the accumulated fossils into a proper context.

Having said that, one doesn't even need fossils to establish the truth of evolution - the known fossil record was pretty scant when Darwin published The Origin. There are other lines of evidence, including comparative anatomy and morphology, vestigial traits, biogeography, genetic homologies, etc. (The latter, of course, was also unknown in Darwin's time, and yet supports his theory.)

In case you're interested and haven't seen it, the SEP has an article on this topic.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modality-epistemology/

Some states have laws mandating that their electors vote for the candidate that received the most electoral votes. I believe that electors voting for someone else is a rare occurrence, and I don't know to what extent such laws have been challenged in court. States are generally given broad latitude to run their elections as they see fit (even moreso in the light of the recent Supreme Court decision striking down provisions of the Voting Rights Act), but I don't know if such elector laws would be adjudicated to fall within the states' purview to conduct elections. If not, they could potentially be struck down.

We needn't postulate a false dilemma between "US voters are smart" and "US voters are stupid." I'd also like it if tosspots (assuming that's something bad - I don't speak UK) lost by a country mile, but it's also important to keep in mind how the electoral college system works, and how the person elected to POTUS doesn't always reflect the will of (most of) the people.

The majority of voters didn't vote for him, though. The mechanics of the electoral college allow for the minority to impose their electoral will on the majority under certain circumstances. Democratic strongholds tend to be clustered in cities (low area/high population), whereas Republican strongholds tend to be more diffuse and rural (large area/low population).

If you look at a color-coded electoral map of the U.S., it is a sea of red with a few small blue islands sprinkled in. This phenomenon, inter alia, allows Republican candidates to prevail in some national elections, even when they lose the popular vote.

The miasma theory of disease, for instance, remained stuck in the brains of medical doctors for decades after it was obvious that something other than vapors caused disease — Bitter Crank

I think it's still widely accepted, though, that the vapors are the primary cause of swooning and of female hysteria.

Genetics aren't the only determinant of an organism. Not only environment plays a factor, too, but genetics are not expressed in some exact, clockwork manner. There are countless ways in which genetic expression varies--and after all, if that weren't possible, genetic mutation wouldn't be possible, and evolution couldn't work. — Terrapin Station

Indeed. Even when examining individual cells which are genetically identical, there can be marked differences in their behaviors and fates, never mind entire multicellular organisms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcriptional_noise

The argument of science or the scientific method being Eurocentric becomes very odd. — ssu

Except that it's not as if, for instance, the Chinese do not perform science as we know it in the West. When they launch a space probe, they presumably rely upon the same equations as does NASA. There is no "Chinese physics," any more than there is a "Jewish physics," as someone once fulminated. The fact that the modern scientific method arose relatively recently in the West (let us semi-arbitrarily say in the 16th century), it doesn't follow that there's something essentially Eurocentric about the entire affair.

I believe it was Carl Sagan who wrote about modern African hunter-gatherers tracking their prey, and being able to discern the the approximate size of the animal, the direction in which it's traveling, how recently it passed by, etc by the characteristics of its footprints, and noted the similarity to the work of planetary astronomers who study impact craters on distant worlds.

Pbxman: "I'm sick and tired to this anglo-centric forums in which only this USA hero UK (its fave PET) view is allowed and it not they censure you! You talk to people from Russia and Iran and they have totally different world view. How Can I remove my account from this crap?"

If he/she is acquainted with Russian or Iranian culture, the notion of censorship should be pretty familiar. I would think this forum would feel comfortingly familiar, if he/she perceives it to be a censorious place.

This still really, really sounds like you are appealing to the results of modern science to underwrite one particular view of the world (i.e. indeterminism), though you insist otherwise.

if you were to ask me if science proves anything, I'd emphatically say "No." — Terrapin Station

Fair enough, then.

No: my position remains, as it was when we started this exchange many posts ago, that determinism is not a moribund thesis in philosophy. You essentially said that modern science has somehow disproved determinism, and I'm saying that there are some who disagree with that interpretation of the science.

This survey data. https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

I wouldn't say that "compatibilists go with the freedom side of the freedom vs determinism debate" because they don't see freedom as being opposed to determinism.

I'm not sure what this is based on. Most are compatibilists, which at least allows for determinism.

Nope. Soft determinism re: free will is one such thesis.

It is per the widespread consensus in the sciences for well over a century. — Terrapin Station

So, the rightness or wrongness does seem to be rather salient, wouldn't you say?

So, Laplacean determinism isn't wrong? Or it's just not part of your increasingly elusive point?

You said "Naturalistic views of the world haven't had the world as a place with anything like Laplacean determinism for over 100 years now," and when I pointed out that's not true, you shifted to saying something like "Naturalistic views of the world shouldn't haven't had the world as a place with anything like Laplacean determinism for over 100 years now, based on the results from modern physics."

So, you are taking a position on the question of determinism, and insisting that the results of science underwrite your views. And some very smart people just as vehemently disagree with you. So, I don't know what to tell you there, except that, unlike debates in pure science, metaphysical debates (such as the one which concerns us here) are not so readily resolved.

You could ask them. I am far from an expert, or even a particularly well-informed layman, with regards to modern physics, but I suspect, as with many things in philosophy, it hinges on philosophers' interpretations of the data from physics. Even physicists are not unified in their interpretations of what results in QM even mean. One is reminded of that quote, by Feynman, I think, that if you believe you understand QM then you don't understand QM, or something along those lines.

Assuming that you're talking about developments in quantum mechanics, of course philosophers are aware of them, and have responses to its supposed indeterminacy. Even some scenarios under Newtonian mechanics pose challenges to determinism, though, so I don't think it's simply a matter of philosophers not being up on the latest science or whatever.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/#QuaMec

Determinism is hardly a moribund view in philosophy. "Soft determinism" with regard to free will (a species of compatibilism) says that determinism is true, and that free will is compatible with it.

I've never really understood how libertarian free will could be consistent with a naturalistic view of the world. It ascribes contra causal powers to human beings (and nothing else which may populate a naturalistic ontology, as far as I can tell), powers which may as well be mystical in nature.

An intuitive belief about causation is that for every event that occurs, there is a cause for that event's existence — Walter Pound

I know that it's not the primary focus of this thread, but a consequence of this view of causation is that there could be no first cause/first event, because, by definition of "first," it could not have been preceded by any antecedent causes. And this would imply that the universe is infinitely old.

Trump has apparently thrown another Twitter hissy fit in response to an SNL impression by Alec Baldwin, asking how media outlets get away with such mockery, and implying that there should be "retribution." Other than perhaps Richard Nixon, has there in recent memory been a POTUS with such clearly anti-democratic tendencies?

It's bad enough that Trump praises dictators (or quasi-dictators) such as Putin, Erdogan, Kim Jong Un, and Duterte, but he himself has already floated the idea of using FCC powers to revoke the broadcast licenses of media outlets which displease him, even, apparently, when this displeasure results from the time-honored tradition of an SNL impersonation, the rite of passage for each and every POTUS over the past 30 years or so. He has also invoked yet again his labeling of the press as "the enemy of the people," a page from the dictator textbook. What a thin-skinned, cruel, vain man-child.

It sure is. One of the more disturbing instances of antagonistic evolution is the struggle between the mother and the offspring. The (future) offspring wants to suck in as many nutrients as it can, grow as big as it can, but the mother wants to ration her considerable investment of resources more prudently, so that she has more chances to reproduce (starting with surviving the childbirth). It's hard to wrap your mind around the fact that this struggle takes place inside one and the same organism! — SophistiCat

I still hear claims that organisms reproduce "for the good of the species" or similar utterances, which is pretty amazingly wrong. Organisms reproduce for the sake of their genes, a selection process which sometimes even bumps up against the genetic interests of of their own offspring (and siblings, to say nothing of their unrelated conspecifics).

Yes.I'm glad you agree. Not the end of the increase in knowledge, but past the peak. The internal combustion engine dates from just before 1800, 220 years later, we have improved on it a good deal; likewise the electric motor, 1830s. Jet engine and rocket engine, 1940s and since then - improvements, but no new engines. — unenlightened

Would you consider, say, quantum computing to be "new" enough to constitute a genuine novelty, and not merely a refinement of something which came before?

Are you imagining gender-neutralized football? — frank

No. I assumed that the linebacker in question was a biological male, as virtually all high school football programs are exclusively male.

Consider a high school senior who is a 300 lb linebacker. I don't think anyone wonders what this student's gender is. — frank

Why not? There are 300 lb women, are there not? Why couldn't a 300 lb linebacker suffer from gender dysmorphia?

it must of been created — Devans99

Oh, sweet baby Jesus. Please condemn this unholy abomination to the pits of Hell.

No, you didn't merely describe: your post was quite clearly laden with value judgments about "the masses," employing descriptors such as "blindly," "menial," and materiality, not to mention calling them "dull" and "anesthetized."