woman...that is some advanced scientific lexicon — Merkwurdichliebe

You're lucky to have me here to keep you up to date on all the most advanced medical findings.

Some of the points that I have listed go beyond the issue of whether people should be allowed to have control over their own bodies. They show what the possible consequences are of preventing women from getting abortions. Does "society" want to pay that price? — Agree-to-Disagree

You're right, I oversimplified.

abortion campaigners were primarily successful because they tapped into public fears (and therefore politicians’ concerns) that women were dying from backstreet abortions. — care.org.uk

I don't find this a particularly compelling argument. If we agree that it's morally correct to prevent women from having abortions, which of course I don't, then the fact that they're putting themselves at risk is their responsibility, not ours.

medical science is trying to reduce discrimination against men by allowing them to have a womb transplant. — Agree-to-Disagree

There's a technical term for men who can give birth. They call them "women."

There are a number of other issues which also complicate abortion: — Agree-to-Disagree

Sure, but I think those can be boiled down to two major issues 1) People should be allowed to have control over their own bodies 2) Based on @Bob Ross's judgment, which I don't share, the life and well-being of the fetus are more important than the pregnant woman's.

I seem to recall reading a biological snippet about C S Peirce who was very much a working scientist - spent years doing hydrological measurement. He said something similar. Very disdainful of armchair experts. — Wayfarer

If you read "Origin of Species," you see that Darwin starts out with building blocks - daily observations over many years - and then builds the wall of natural selection from that. Focus on the details before you try to systematize. That's the major thing I learned from reading Stephen Jay Gould. He took that up in his work both implicitly and explicitly. Implicitly, that's how he wrote. Explicitly, he talked about writing always from the specific to the general.

What are your thoughts? — elucid

Objects that touch don't occupy the same space, they occupy spaces immediately next to each other with no space between them. If you want to go on from there and talk about how the atoms in one object interact with those in the other you can, but you don't have to.

Beware of unearned wisdom — Bret Bernhoft

You haven't really defined what you mean by wisdom. That's fine, then I won't have to either.

Wisdom takes time. You have to marinate in the world, bash your head into walls until you finally realize how to stop. Unearned wisdom isn't wisdom at all.

Wisdom is not the same as knowledge. As an engineer I am willing to go so far as to say beware of unearned knowledge. Data becomes information becomes knowledge. The only way for that to happen is through manipulation - tabulation, statistics, visualization, modeling, fiddling, analyzing, running sensitivity analyses. Doing it once, doing twice, and then doing it again. Developing a conceptual model. Whether or not you can afford to do all that depends on what you're doing, what your budget is. Likely you'll have to cut corners. That's where experience comes in - learning where you can cut corners and where you need to focus you attention. Quality assurance.

What are your guys’ thoughts? — Bob Ross

I'm not convinced by your arguments, but for me that's beside the point. Do you think your moral judgments should be used as the basis for laws restricting access to abortion? If not, no need to argue further. If so, then we are in strong disagreement.

Some additional thoughts. I think abortion is really terrible method of birth control and should be avoided if possible. It's a bad thing. Good access to sex education, birth control, and support for pregnant mothers and families should be the first line of action. Anyone who wants to restrict abortion and birth control should be sent to live in Alabama.

"More and Different" by P.W. Anderson. This is a book by the guy who wrote the article "More is Different," which I've talked about many times here on the forum. That was written in 1972 and the book was written about 10 years ago, so I was hoping to see how his thinking has developed since the 70s. Unfortunately, there is very little about reductionism and emergence and much more about his life's work in condensed matter physics, i.e. superconductivity.

Those sections of the book are mostly history - "I remember this guy doing this while I was a Bell Labs. I didn't like this guy because he was a jerk." I'm reading a very similar book right now too - "What is Real" by Adam Becker. Most of the writing is about how Bohr and his Copenhagen squeezed out Bohm and Everett and their non-standard views on quantum mechanics. It's also similar to Heisenberg's autobiography "Physics and Beyond." Again, lots of he said this, he did that. Some getting the last word in old grudges.

I guess I'm tired of it. I want to hear about the science, not the personalities. To be fair, all the books are well written and interesting, just not enough science. I'll put in a plug for my favorite scientific biography - "Subtle is the Lord" by Pais about Einstein. It has a lot of the personal and social history too, but it's kept in separate sections. The technical sections are all science and they are hard. You have to work at them. Very well written by someone who knew Einstein in the early 50s at Princeton when he, Pais, was a young man.

In a society where govenments try to tell you what is true and raise you into believing what you believe — Hailey

I don't think it's the government. We are much more socialized by our families, communities, schools, jobs, TV, the internet. Socialization is not a bad thing in and of itself. We're social beings and we have to learn how to live with others in the society we grow up in. These days, if I had to point to a villain it would be to the corporatization and financialization of our economy.

That being said, there is a voice inside you, all of us, that tells us what to do, how to live. This is nothing mystical or magical, it's just you. I could give a philosophical or psychological name to that, but it's called different things by different traditions. It takes practice to learn how to hear that voice. It's true, as you note, that it can be drowned out by the noise from outside influences.

Welcome to the forum.

Hey Tim. It's good to hear from you. I've tried to figure out Bell's Theorem before with little success. I read your post and was still lost. I downloaded the Scientific American article to read.

The one thing that is really shocking is remembering that SA used to be a serious science magazine before it tried to make itself into another Discover or Popular Science. Not that that there's anything wrong with them, but SA used to be hard to read.

1) the expertise, the craft that goes into the artwork is lost in the AI generation. — NotAristotle

That was one of the things I was thinking about. We've had discussions on the forum before about whether or not technique and skill are necessary for something to be art, or at least good art. Is what Midjourney is doing any different than paint-by-numbers?

2) relatedly, the production of the art is devalued; the AI creates the illusion of creativity, when really it's just outputting pre-programmed inputs, but it's not really producing anything, it's dead; the producers of the art are taken for granted in the AI "generation" of the art; if there is no Van Gogh, there simply is no art. — NotAristotle

Yes. As I noted, the thing that bothers me most is that the users somehow feel like they've accomplished something. Like they should get credit for what's been produced, even though there's nothing of them in it.

This seems like a good place to mention this. In addition to what I've seen of Chat GPT, I've also been paying attention to Midjourney, which is a graphic generation AI site. It lets you describe a graphic - content, style, mood, and other specific characteristics, e.g. Sailor Moon riding on a surfboard on the moon as painted by Van Gogh. It then generates an illustration. It's pretty impressive. Here's a link to the gallery page:

https://www.midjourney.com/showcase/recent/

I haven't used it, just looked at what others have generated. It's funny, if your input is vague, the AI might fill in the blanks in surprising ways. [irony] I was surprised to see [/irony] there are a lot of images of attractive women dressed provocatively, but tastefully. No porn, although what other purpose could there really be for a program like that? Note that if you run your cursor over a drawing, it will show you the directions input by the user to generate it.

The one thing I noticed from both Chat GPT and Midjourney is the hollowness of what is produced. Actually, maybe that's not fair. It's not that the drawings are hollow necessarily but more that the pride the users seem to take in their productions feels hollow. You see that even more on the Midjourney page on Reddit (r/midjourney). There's a lot of "Look what I made!" where they didn't really make anything at all. There's a lot of Batman as a caveman, cute alien cats, and cars made out of pasta.

It makes me think about what we've actually gotten with these technologies. Will they devalue all human artistic effort? I guess there are a lot of writers, artists, and graphic designers worrying about that right now. If you see art, as I do, as a way of presenting a personal experience so that other people can share in it with you, what do you get when there is no personal experience involved with what is produced? I see this question as being even more pertinent as the technology matures and the productions get better.

Here is an excerpt on dependence: — Leontiskos

Yes, I see your point.

As with a lot of jargon, philosophical or otherwise, is "supervenience" really needed? What's wrong with "dependence?" I'm not saying there's no need for technical language at all, but when I was an engineer, I had to write for a technical audience but also be understandable by non-technical readers.

problem of consciousness' relation to QM — Moliere

I don't think quantum mechanics has any special understanding to add to the study of consciousness beyond it's role as the substrate for all physical phenomena.

That's a great mugshot. I'm going to remember it in case I'm arrested.

I'm reading "What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics." Don't blame me, @Count Timothy von Icarus is making me read it.

Further -- the big conflict here, with respect to interpreting the sciences in a philosophical manner, is on different notions of causation. The SEP has a lovely page on Teleological Notions in Biology, which you won't find in chemistry except as metaphor. The intersection between physics and biology is interesting specifically because it's where we might be able to understand the relationship between our traditional notion of causation in science (not quite billiard-ball, anymore, but still), and the frequent use of teleology in understanding living systems. That is -- putting biology first isn't so crazy as it sounds because we're not modeling the world off of natural selection, but instead questioning what sort of causation is truly fundamental. — Moliere

A couple of thoughts.

I read a book a while ago "What is life? : how chemistry becomes biology" by Addy Pross. It's about abiogenesis and Pross writes, somewhat convincingly, that it would make sense to think of everything, including non-living matter, as subject to natural selection. That could be seen as evidence for your position, although I don't think it is. Cross-fertilization between disciplines is useful, necessary. That's different from understanding science, all human understanding, as a system of hierarchical levels. Perhaps you don't see that as a useful way of seeing things, but I do.

As for causation, it is mainstream philosophy, not to say everyone agrees, that causation is not a useful way of looking at the way the world works. As you suggest:

Or, if we are dedicated Humeans, we'll note that neither is fundamental at all, that there is no most basic kind of causation that everything can be reduced to, that it's a mere habit of the mind. — Moliere

That's nothing new. Bertrand Russell wrote a paper on it in 1912. That makes sense to me. This is not the place for us to get deeply into it.

To understand biology you need to study biology. To understand chemistry you need study chemistry, and all the same for the other subjects. The intersection between these fields isn't so clean as you present. — Moliere

It's about scale. You need to understand chemistry to understand biology at it's most basic level. Biological systems have to behave consistent with the rules of chemistry. The reverse is not true.

why not biology as a first science rather than physics? Maybe the results in physics, at certain times at least, aren't fundamental but specific to the system they're studying, and the aggregates of the physical world don't follow the same rules. — Moliere

It's about scale. Particle physics deals with the world at the smallest possible scale. To understand biology you need to understand chemistry and physics, but not the other way around.

Interesting. I wasn’t aware of this. Do you happen to know which towns? — Mikie

I'm guessing Newton and Brookline do. I was just checking and it says that town meeting members in those cases are elected, not chosen by lottery, so I was wrong.

T Clark, have you ever in the past, do you now, and might you in the future think of yourself as a "masshole"? — BC

No one in Massachusetts calls themselves a Masshole. Similarly, no one here ever eats baked beans. Also - you can't park your car in Harvard Yard, there are no parking spaces.

Right, in MA towns below a certain size have to do the town meeting. It works better than you might expect but not great. I was almost the town administrator for a town that had an open meeting and select board. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have affection for the town meeting in my town, but it can definitely be clunky.

I have no illusions this is possible on the federal level, but at the local (and perhaps state) level, it would be an interesting experiment. — Mikie

Massachusetts and some of the other New England states have something similar. Towns are governed by a Board of Selectmen and a Town Meeting. The selectmen are elected and the town meeting is open to all registered voters. In some larger towns that becomes unwieldy so they started using representative town meetings with members selected by lottery from a pool of applicants.

Thanks for the education. I'll take a look at "What is Real."

It was by no means an abuse of authority. I admit it might have been an error of judgement but it's been reversed. — Wayfarer

I appreciate it. I should not have been so combative.

The OP said nothing about 'the hard problem', that was introduced by you. — Wayfarer

That is such baloney:

And this then also neatly describes why consciousness is so impossible to find in all our myriad brain scans. This is puzzling because we think we should have the resolution of scans we need to be able to identify what it is that "causes," consciousness. But instead the brain is like an expert magician, who pulls a rabbit out of a hat even when he's inside an MRI. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And finally, the posts were not deleted, they were moved to more relevant thread, so as to keep this thread more on topic, which is already a complex and contentius topic in its own right. — Wayfarer

That also is baloney. I'm going to leave it there as long as you do.

Moderator note: the comments specifically about the hard problem of consciousness have been moved to the most recent thread on that topic, so as to maintain the focus of this thread on the OP. Please feel free to carry on with that conversation in the other thread. — Wayfarer

This is not reasonable unless the original poster specifically asked you to do it. The hard problem was an important aspect of the original post. My response questioning it's relevance was a reasonable and relevant response. That was as far as I intended to take it, but then @Count Timothy von Icarus responded to me. Unless you were specifically asked by them, your decision was an unreasonable use of your moderator's authority. And it's not the first time.

The first presents a functional analysis of the target phenomenon, which fully characterizes the target in terms of its functional role. The second presents an empirically-discovered realizer of the functionally characterized target, one playing that very functional role. Then, by transitivity of identity, the target and realizer are deduced to be identical. — Hard Problem of Consciousness - IEP

I don't think this accurately represents the understanding of those who believe that phenomenal consciousness can be studied effectively using scientific methods. It certainly doesn't represent my understanding. We've had that discussion many times before. Neurological processes are not identical to mental processes. I've never said they were and, in fact, have argued strongly they are not. We just finished this same argument a few days ago and I'm not ready to start up again.

True, but this is true for almost every interpretation of quantum mechanics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As far as we know, none of the various interpretations of quantum mechanics can be verified even in principle. They are all equivalent. There is no difference except, perhaps, a metaphysical one.

Right, but this is true of virtually all of quantum foundations. Mach famously held that atoms were unfalsifiable and unscientific. Quarks were held to be unfalsifiable pseudoscience until just a few years before they were "verified." Lots of elements of string theories are unfalsifiable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Unverified is not the same thing as unverifiable. If I'm wrong and one interpretation of QM can be verified, then your argument will mean something. Modeling the behavior of matter at the smallest scales as atoms and quarks allows generation of predictions of behavior that can be tested. QM interpretations do not.

My counterargument would be that if you bracket off these issues as non-scientific it puts a stigma on them (and indeed a prohibition on research in quantum foundations was dogmatically enforced from on high until the late-90s). Philosophers in general lack the skills and resources to pursue these ideas; they have to be done by physicists. In many cases, we see theories that are initially attacked as unscientific coming to mature and eventually develop means of testing the theory against others. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I noted, if I'm wrong and the various QM interpretations can be tested, then we can have this discussion. I'm not the only one who thinks that is unlikely. I acknowledge I am far from qualified to render an opinion on this. I'm not a physicist. I'm basing my understanding on reading what other more qualified people have written.

Per Poppers evolutionary view of science, we need such suppositions because they are the "mutations," that allow science to keep "evolving." Of course, most mutations result in the death of the organism (or the scientific career), but occasionally they are hugely successful. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem with that analogy is that evolutionary ideas in science have to make testable predictions in order to be useful. None of the QM interpretations do that.

In any event, we currently have a number of theories about what causes quantum phenomena that are empirically indiscernible given our current technology and knowledge. By what rights should we select any of them as canonical? The idea behind enforcing the Copenhagen Interpretation as orthodoxy was that this secured science against metaphysics, but this is not what it did. Instead, it enshrined a specific type of metaphysics and epistemology as dogmatism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

They are not "a number of theories" they are a number of interpretations of one theory. The reason the Copenhagen Interpretation is in any way canonical is that it's really not an interpretation at all. It just describes how quantum level phenomena behave. Shut up and calculate is not metaphysics. It's anti-metaphysics.

How so? Certainly it's a problem that is taken seriously. The rapid coalescence of support for the Many Worlds Interpretation over that past decade is often based around the conception that the interpretation is "more likely," because it answers the Fine Tuning Problem. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There have been plenty of discussions of the fine-tuning problem here on the forum before that never got anywhere, just like all the hard problem and QM interpretation discussions. I'll just stand by my statement that it misrepresents the meaning of probability. It explains nothing. It will be fruitless to go any further here.

But the question remains, "why do the origins of consciousness yield so slowly to the same methods that have allowed us to understand so many other phenomena with a great level of depth." — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a straw dog or straw man or straw something argument. The social and psychological mechanisms of consciousness have been studied for decades, centuries, millennia, with some success. The neurological mechanisms of consciousness have not been because the technology has not been available. Over the past few decades, those technologies have been evolving rapidly. Again, this is an argument that has been gone through many times on the forum without resolution.

In summary - I've identified three elements of you thesis about which I am skeptical - the fine-tuning problem, the hard problem, and the interpretations of QM. Clearly I have not resolved those issues and I'm sure I won't. I don't think I'll live long enough. My purpose here is just to let people who haven't run through this mill as many times as we have know that your argument is built on an unsteady foundation.

It is very frustrating to the point of willed ignorance that you keep misinterpreting/misrepresenting the hard problem of consciousness. In your own words, can you even summarize it correctly?? — schopenhauer1

The hard problem of consciousness is a philosophical problem concerning why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences.[1][2] This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give humans and other animals the ability to discriminate, integrate information, perform behavioural functions, or provide behavioural reports, and so forth.[1]

The easy problems are considered "easy" not because they are literally easy, but because they are problems that are in principle amenable to functional explanations: that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioural, as they can be explained (at least in principle) purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon in question.[3][4][1] Proponents of the hard problem argue that conscious experience is categorically different in this respect since no mechanistic or behavioural explanation could explain the character of an experience, even in principle. — Wikipedia - Hard Problem of Conscioiusness

That.

It occured to me the other night that the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics, that consciousness is what causes wave collapse (or decoherence), solves the Fine Tuning Problem quite nicely. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And this then also neatly describes why consciousness is so impossible to find in all our myriad brain scans. This is puzzling because we think we should have the resolution of scans we need to be able to identify what it is that "causes," consciousness. But instead the brain is like an expert magician, who pulls a rabbit out of a hat even when he's inside an MRI. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Some thoughts:

• Consciousness causes wave collapse - It is not currently possible to empirically differentiate between interpretations of quantum mechanics. It seems likely, to me at least but also to many others, that there never will be. That means it's metaphysics, not science, at least until the issue is resolved.
  
• Fine Tuning Problem - There is no fine tuning problem. It's just an expression of a fundamental misunderstanding of what probability means and how it works.
  
• The hard problem of Consciousness - We have this argument over and over here on the forum. Many of us shake our heads when others tell us they can't conceive that consciousness and human experience can be understood scientifically.

I won't clutter your thread any more with my skepticism. I don't mean to be disruptive.

This is a good post. You make your case clearly and your argument is a good one. Purely coincidently, I agree with you.

Your challenges still helped me flesh it out, so thank you. — frank

Anytime you need somebody to be confused, I'll be happy to help.

It's specifically about your assessments of past behavior. You assume you know the rules you were following. Kripke's skeptic suggests that there is no fact of the matter. The fiction of "quadding" is just meant to illustrate this. — frank

Rats. Now I'm back to not getting it again.

On the web, I found a discussion of this issue. Here's a link:

https://iep.utm.edu/kripkes-wittgenstein/#H1

It doesn't make things any clearer to me. I give up.

I think the problem is that following the rules of addition are exactly the same as following the rules of quaddition up to the number 57. What in your mental processes would have been different so as to prove that you weren't quadding rather than adding? — frank

Ah... Now, maybe, I understand your point. I'd forgotten that I'd never encountered 57 before. Let me think... Ok, for natural numbers, the definition of "addition" can be traced back to counting. Are you saying that I can count to 56, but for any larger number I'm doing something different?

Then I ask you for a fact about your previous behavior that shows that the rule you were following was addition rather than quaddition. — frank

Does my behavior include my invisible, to you (and perhaps to me), mental processes? If it does, I say "I already have given you that fact."

You haven't been doing addition. It was quaddition. — frank

I think this is where I'm supposed to berate you.

I ask you to add 68+57.

You confidently say "125."

The skeptic asks, "How did you get that answer?"

You say "I used the rules of addition as I have so often before, and I am consistent in my rule following."

The skeptic says, "But wait. You haven't been doing addition. It was quaddition. When you said plus, you meant quus, and: x quus y = x+y for sums less than 57, but over that, the answer is always 5. So you haven't been consistent. If you were consistent, you would have said "5."" — frank

Sorry. There's something I'm missing. If I apply the definition of addition to 68 and 57, I get 125, not 5. What you are describing, "quus," is a different operation which is not consistent with that definition.