"I neither know nor think I know" — Gnomon

:up:



If determinism is incompatible with free will, it seems impossible that any AI, no matter how advanced, will ever possess free will. I'm assuming AI is going to be deterministic systems. Can they be anything else?

Side note: Free will and randomness, can they be distinguished in any real sense?

Pascal's wager, RIP Pascal, is more of an explanation than an advice!

RIP Blaise Pascal :flower: :death:

Yes, going by how obsessed we are of Him, Sky Father, Old Bearded Guy in the Sky, could any other species rightfully claim to be His favorites?

Lucky us! — Sam Harris

:grin:

Random!? The answer to your question, dear OP, would depend on whether the world makes sense to (us/someone other than us, perhaps a higher intelligence)?

Yet, a case can be made that randomness (mutations with no rhyme or reason in them) is life's best game plan/strategy against an enemy (Thanatos) well-known for dropping by at unexpected, odd, ungodly hours and venues (planet-killer asteroids are stray bullets, oui?)

Quite intriguingly this: If a person is firing his gun randomly at points A, B, and C. It makes no sense to randomly switch one's position among the positions A, B, C. The chances of getting struck by a bullet is the same as just staying put, quietly now, reading a book perhaps, in any one of these locations. Am I right? :chin:

Those were my opinions — Metaphysician Undercover

Same here.

Got any suggestions? — Metaphysician Undercover

None whatsoever. I thought you would know (better). It's your theory.

I don't recall ever coming across, in Plato's writings, a place where he makes explicit claims concerning what he is teaching. — Metaphysician Undercover

Then how do you know what he didn't teach?

persuaded by sophistry — Metaphysician Undercover

How do you know this?

The object of knowledge, what is known, is not the subject of knowledge (the thing as it is represented within the knowledge itself). — Metaphysician Undercover

I'll give you an example of something that's not knowledge, the string of symbols: )^a. This is not a proposition, hence can't be knowledge. How can we know )^a?

We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. — 180 Proof

Like what what happens in school and college: Teachers/Professors vs. students! There's a small chance that there's a tertium quid in our midst! Nevertheless, Einstein has a point. That quote goes into my quotes anthology. :up:

I would say 'no', — Cuthbert

No — universeness

:ok:

Keep trying — universeness

Mulgere hircum?

Non sono mica Mandrake!

I wish I knew how to end suffering. — Andrew4Handel

Garden of Eden. Meno's slave, Socrates?

Richard Dawkins — Andrew4Handel

A man who calls it as he sees it. Altruism is idiotic, some might even say it's insanity; psychiatrists/psychologists should categorize it as a mental disorder that makes people (altruists) do patently dumb stuff e.g. sacrificing themselves for people who don't give a rat's ass about them (that's suicide, just dressed to look like something less moronic, less dangerous).

However...

Merci beaucoup!

truth is always the first casualty of every conflict. — unenlightened

:fire: Lovely!

hrrmpf, all propaganda — L'éléphant

:lol: I hope some of your late grandma's wisdom rubbed off on you. RIP grandma :flower:

Beats me! I thought you'd have some idea. Signing off...

What I find interesting is how the logic of (some kinds of) misogyny work(s).

---

Ms. Penny (a woman), Mrs. Carr (a woman), Dame Lena (another woman) treat me badly. I hurt, it's not justified, in fact it's completely gratuitous - the insults, the beatings, etc. :smile:

THEREFORE

All women are bad.

I hate ALL women i.e. I'm now a misogynist.

---

Is this a statistical argument, with Ms. Penny, Mrs. Carr, and Dame Lena being my sample?

What would the reverse of modus ponens look like?

1. If p then q
2. p
Ergo,
3. q

?

Eurt si B neht A fo trap si B dna eurt si A fi — EugeneW

On a serious note, that $\uparrow$ is a kinda sorta mirror image of if A is true and B is a part of A then B is truE.

Eurt si B neht A fo trap si B dna eurt si A fi — EugeneW

KO :down:

i have to beat them off with a stick — unenlightened

:lol: Lucky you!

reverse thinking — EugeneW

:chin: Does logic have a direction?

Nobody took this bait.
I cannot find a difference between B and C. B-theorists define directionality based on entropy levels. If the C-theorist denies this, it seems they are in denial of thermodynamic law.

Most of the literature I saw concerning C-theory mistakenly uses A-references in describing B-theory, which is a straw man.

As for the title of this topic "Why does time move forward?", I can only say that it is a problem only for those that posit that time is something that moves, forward or otherwise — noAxioms

:up:

What are A, B, C theories of time? Be as concise as possible.

Thanks in advance.

The ability to create oneself out of nothing — charles ferraro

:chin: Relevance, if any?

Perhaps, death provides one with another opportunity to choose correctly. — charles ferraro

A second chance! One would have to remember (one's past mistakes and what one got right the last time around). Luckily, unluckily, can't tell, our memory isn't up to the task.

Another thing, euthanasia. Some countries permit doctor-assisted suicide in case of intractable pain (suffering) as happens with certain malignancies. Is God punishing us or is it mercy killing (old age ain't fun, why stick around?)

Plato did not claim to teach virtue, the sophists did, and they charged a lot of money for it. — Metaphysician Undercover

What did Plato claim to teach with respect to morality?

Socrates argued that a person could know what is right, but still act contrary to this, and do what is wrong. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you sure? How do you explain Socrates' statement that no one knowingly is evil?

Look at the difference between your two statements above, "virtue is not knowledge", and "virtue isn't something knowable". The first can be true while the second is false. — Metaphysician Undercover

How can we know something that isn't knowledge?

Good questions. My instinctive response would be the fall (of man & lucifer and his gang of wayward angels) has something to do with free will. That's the easy target, the proverbial low hanging fruit.

Do you have answers of your own to the questions you posed?

For me this kind of thinking is an unnecessary complication. I've often thought morality is fairly simple. Morality is created by humans to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve our preferred forms of social order. This is why morality varies across times and cultures - there are variations in what order looks like. — Tom Storm

:up:

I have no interest in what a god's silly plans and egomaniacal thinking might be. The taboos around 'good' and 'evil' are simply ways to control people's behaviour by appealing to some kind of transcendent foundation which can't be argued with or even understood. Good and evil are poetic terms which have no specific meaning and are generally applied according to an individual's or a culture's value system. — Tom Storm

:up:

I dunno how far Franz Kafka's novel The Trial was inspired by the story of original sin and the fall of man, but even from a secular angle, our death feels like a penalty for some forgotten/unknown wrong we've done.

This is another issue, and it really strikes at the heart of Plato's attack on sophistry. Socrates actually demonstrates that people are knowingly evil. We often do what we know is wrong. Augustine discussed this issue, as derived from Plato, at great length. Through this principle Plato demonstrates that virtue is not a form of knowledge. Since the sophists claim to teach virtue as a form of knowledge, and virtue is argued to be distinct from knowledge, sophistry is refuted in this way. — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting. Virtue is not knowledge. Could you expand and elaborate on that?

This is consistent with what I posted above. The sophists' claim to be able to teach virtue is based in the assumption that they knew virtue, in order to be able to teach it. Socrates demonstrated that they really did not know virtue. So what they taught was really a form of deception, even though they truly believed that they knew virtue, and that they could teach it. — Metaphysician Undercover

How was Plato going to teach people virtue, if virtue isn't something knowable?

What I wrote is Plato's and other philosopher's take on sophists and sophistry. If Plato did excuse sophists and their method as simply misguided or self-delusional, great! It jibes with Socrates' pronouncement that no one is knowingly evil.

Hey don’t sweat it. It’s an interesting take on the kinds of things he said, but didn’t ring quite true. Never mind this is not a test. — Wayfarer

:ok: :up:

:ok: Truth be told, it was a certain philosopher's personal take on Kant. I don't have a name, so apologies.

cosmic story — Wayfarer

Fascinating!

Got a reference for that? — Wayfarer

No, I overheard someone saying it. Does that damage my credibility? :sad:

As for me, sophistry has to be differentiated from rhetoric. The former is deception - a Pandora's box - the latter is beautification - beauty/aesthetics is legit, philosophically speaking.

For sophists, rhetoric is primary, but for philosophers it's an adjunct, accessory, secondary. Sophists want to fool you with flowery language, philosophers want only to make the truth pleasing to behold.

1. Verum (truth)
2. Bonum (good)
3. Pulchrum (beauty)

Philosophers seek the truth, the goodness in truth, and the beauty in truth. Sophists are interested in beauty alone, neither truth nor benevolence feature among their desiderata/objectives.

I don't think Plato "rejected infinity". As you noted, his concept of a realm of Forms is functionally infinite in a Potential sense. However, Aristotle, as a realist, may have rejected the notion of "actual Infinity" as impossible in the real world of constant beginnings & endings. However. mathematics is not inherently realistic, so it can accommodate Ideal concepts. — Gnomon

That's like summarizing the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one paragraph! The Gateway to Marvels, you are, kind sir/madam as the case may be.

into Metaphysical Infinity, the realm of Possibility. :nerd: — Gnomon

You're on a roll, sir/madam!


Have you tried paraconsistent logic? I know this place...

:grin:

"At or in?" I give not a fig. "on", why not? — unenlightened

Magnifique monsieur/mademoiselle, magnifique! :up:

I just realized - you're telling me to eff off! :grin:

Yes, my beloved! — EugeneW

:brow:

Intriguing questions. If you want to prove that such events couldn't have/can't occur, you might wanna check whether it makes for a side-splitting joke (reductio ad absurdum).

Good luck!

A tad defeatist. Immanuel Kant, who once said that science isn't your run-of-the-mill question & answer session, but actually an interrogation of nature conducted by humans, would've probably disapproved.

But hey, who the hell is Immanuel Kant that we should kowtow to him, oui?

What's the alternative though? Become an obnoxious, persnickety, control freak? 'Twixt the Devil and deep blue sea, 'twixt the Devil and the deep blue sea!

Calm down, take a deep breath Agent Smith, there's always aurea mediocritas, we can have the best of both worlds. Eclecticism at its apogee.

See ya around, mate!

What (I think) I know: Entropy gives time direction. The rule looks to be rather simple: If you're told the entropy is x at time T1, y at time T2 and y > x, then T2 is the future and T1 is the past.

Entropy increasing (2^nd law of thermodynamics) is a statistical law i.e. not true that entropy ALWAYS increases. SOMETIMES it can decrease, when it does, time flows backwards. It's not a question of if, but when (the entropy of the universe will fall and time flows backwards). Hindus, with their cyclical cosmology, seems to have intuited this 5k years ago (vide the vedas). The Phoenix is reborn from its ashes. :smile:

A little to nascent to be interesting to me. — Wayfarer

:sad: Too bad, I thought you might wanna sink your teeth into it. I miscalculated. Sorry.



THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH!

Have you come across Ietsism/Somethingism - it's just acknowledging one's vague feelings that this (the world as physical) can't be it, there's gotta be more, there hasta be something.

Preliminary analysis suggests that ietsism/somethingism is proto-religion, it is how all religions began (that feeling/intuition that reality is far richer than she lets on). Some have come to definitive conclusions (gods, souls, spirits, and so on), others tend to stick around in ietsism, unperturbed by the absence of clear-cut answers to their deepest questions.

Eyes in the back of your head is it? — unenlightened

:up: Eyes "at" or "in"?

Gas molecules are bound together much more weakly than solid molecules. They bounce quickly around inside any container - off the walls and each other. Temperature is a measure of the molecules' average kinetic energy. The warmer it is, the faster they move. Molecules are also affected by the force of gravity, but I guess the energy associated with gravity is much smaller than the heat energy. — T Clark

Bravo! Muchas gracias señor!

Can anyone link me to a site/book on paraconsistent logic? I want to learn it.

We put chips in monkeys' brains and they died. That's how far along neuroscience is. Barbarism. — theRiddler

:lol: :up:

You might know they hold them as true, but how do you know they are logical? — Janus

There are arguments whose conclusions are paradoxes. Check out Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc.

What logical thinker holds onto something that leads into a paradox, agrees that the paradox is sound, but still insists on holding onto logic that leads to that specific paradox? — Philosophim

That's all of us Philosophim. The Wikipedia list (of paradoxes) I linked to applies to every person, assuming they're genuine paradoxes (no one, as of yet, has attempted to resolve all them; from the multiple disciplines involved, it'll require a team).

Since everyone knows there are paradoxes in classical
logic, we have to stop explosion (ex falso quodlibet) and one way of doing that is doing away with the disjunction introduction/addition rule in natural deduction. That's paraconsitent logic! We're supposed to use it, not the old classical logic systems of Aristotle, Chrysippus, and Frege.

1. P
2. P v Q [disjunction introduction/addition]

Line 2 should not be allowed.