Any given event has a probability of happening over any fixed time period. If it's a 'natural' event then that probability is non-zero. With infinite time, as soon as the probability is non-zero, the event will/has happened infinite times. — Devans99

There's a serious problem with that theory, then, because an event can happen just once given an infinite amount of time.

If you want to argue that any event that happens must happen more than once given an infinite amount of time, you'd need an argument as to why that's impossible (why it's impossible to only happen once), and your argument as to why it's impossible can't be because your theory stipulates otherwise.

Why don't you put all Christian questions on the same subforum? — pbxman

Yeah, that's ficction/fantasy as well, though "religion" is a more descriptive tag for it because of its cultural history.

Assign a tiny probability that an event will happen each time period and then multiply that by infinite time: — Devans99

That certainly makes sense, but if we're forwarding a logical argument what is the ground for assigning any probability for any arbitrary time period? If it's just an arbitrary assumption why would we expect anyone to give it any weight as something true?

If time has a start, it must of been caused by something. — Devans99

You have any to assume that nothing can happen acausally. But that's just an arbitrary assumption. There's no argument for it.

I'd just say it's something of an outdated model to call the world external, and the mind internal. — Moliere

Would it be outdated to talk about internal and external to something like a refrigerator? Because that's more or less similar to the distinction. It's a locational distinction primarily.

Isn't processing external information a mental activity, on your view? — Moliere

Mentally processing it, you mean? Obviously that's a mental activity.

I mean, even by your own notions of subjectivity, it's not like I can observe your perception. — Moliere

Sure, and the relevance of that is?

And so, given that meaning happens in the brain, and perception happens in the brain, and meaning does not require language, it would seem -- at first blush, though I am open to being corrected by you in understanding your position -- that dog perception has meaning. — Moliere

Dogs and many other animals may have very similar mental phenomena to us, and there's no reason to believe that we're the only animals with language.

The closer other animals' brains are to our own the more reason we have to believe they experience similar mental phenomena.

I wasn't making a claim about what's really the case either way. I was critiquing the logic of his argument as he presented it. "[3] We would of reached infinite matter/energy density by now" doesn't logically follow from anything in the argument.

So the overwhelming scientific support for his position over yours — Rank Amateur

Again, I was making no claim about anything except for whether the argument works as a matter of logic. Logic has nothing to do with "scientific support." It has to do with what follows given some set of assumptions.

Yes, so we have two different models for using moral terms. On my model, whether or not Bob's action is moral is independent of whether anyone approves of it or thinks it is moral - which is what makes it a realist model. — Andrew M

I'm not presenting a model per se. I'm describing what's really going on ontologically. Are you simply avoiding claims about what's really going on ontologically?

Part of the reason I'm focusing on what's really going on ontologically is that it's necessary for epistemological purposes here, especially when there's a disagreement and anyone is claiming that someone else is simply wrong a la getting something incorrect/inaccurate.

If the event occurred once only in infinite time it must be unnatural. The rule is with infinite time, if an event is possible it happens an infinite number of times. So any natural event would happen an infinite number of times. A singular event is a non-natural event in infinite time. — Devans99

That's a longer, more detailed version of the claim. It's not an argument for any of it.

Same with the responses afterwards that I'm not quoting.

Creation of time naturally requires some natural causation mechanism to exist. — Devans99

It requires some natural causation mechanism per what?

File in the SciFi/fantasy subforum.

One problem with the SciFi scenario is that we'd need a fictional account of what energy is (a fictional account that we make explicit) if we're to make sense of the idea that the alien culture can't produce energy on their own.

so that would be an unnatural event caused by God. — Devans99

It would be unnatural and caused by God per what? Those claims don't follow from anything.

So what. Matter/energy density would still reach infinite levels with infinite time. — Devans99

Again, this is a complete non-sequitur. You're assuming something that you're not stating. Imagine that we have a universe with infinite time and space and re matter/energy, we have a single gym sock and that's it. You'd have to argue why that's not possible. You can't just assume whatever you're assuming.

As long as matter/energy increases on average my premise holds — Devans99

You'd need to present an argument that matter/energy increases on average.

If the creation of time was a natural event, there would be many instances of time — Devans99

What does that follow from?

If you want to present a logical argument for something, you need to make sure that your conclusions actually follow from your premises. Otherwise you're not actually presenting an argument (which is fine--there's no requirement that you present anything like a formal argument, but you claimed to be presenting one).

You also need to be careful with your premises. If you want to persuade people rather than simply preach to the choir, you need to start with premises that are pretty easy to accept as true (for persuasive purposes, you want the premises to be easily acceptable to people who don't already accept your conclusion). And then the conclusions need to logically follow from the premises.

my only point was, you seemed willing to leave scientific consensus to argue against his point. — Rank Amateur

Yes, because it's a logical argument, and those don't rely on scientific consensus in any significant way (it would be to their fault if they were to; a premise could be a statement of a common scientific view, but there's no requirement for it to be, and the argument--that is, the connections/implications of one statement in the argument--can't assume scientific consensus without committing a fallacy).

It needs to be critiqued purely on logical grounds.

His point that the universe is finite seems a valid assumption for his argument, — Rank Amateur

Validity, especially in a logical context, has to do with the connection between premises and the conclusion. The only way a premise can itself be valid is if it has premises and a conclusion packed into it and it meets the definition of validity (which is that it's impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false, where "and" is traditionally parsed as the inclusive "or"). Truth in logic isn't at all the same thing as validity. Whether any premises are true isn't for logic itself to decide (again unless a statement or formula has a logical argument packed into it).

He's presenting a logical argument. He wasn't presenting an argument a la "This is the current scientific consensus, and the current scientific consensus must be right" was he? (That would clearly be a fallacious argument after all, in logical terms, which is what an argument needs to be assessed on.)

That Bob's action is moral if he approves of it. Or have I misunderstood your view? — Andrew M

Bob's action is moral to Bob if he approves of it. X is always moral or immoral (or whatever else on the spectrum, including morally neutral) to someone, to some individual.

I'm describing a conventional use which is based in observation. What work are you looking for? — Andrew M

What I had said was "if you have a suggestion about how how we could have a 'realist' ethics, I'll take a critical look at it and comment." In other words, some sort of support for how a realist ethics could be possible, ontologically. I was looking for what you took to be a support, and then I would critically assess it. That people think of ethics as something real ontologically (and it's a dubious claim that most people think of it that way) isn't a support for it being real. People can have misconceptions, false beliefs, etc.

Bob's opinion or approval of it isn't relevant. — Andrew M

How did you get to this claim. It's coming out of nowhere.

If you're not using "real" in an unusual way, you did zero work above to support the idea.

[3] We would of reached infinite matter/energy density by now.
[4] So time finite; IE created by God, — Devans99

There's no reason at all to believe either one of these premises.

Re (3), time could be infinite with matter/energy creation occurring at just one point in time and that's it. Or space could be infinite, too. Or matter/energy could disappear, too. There are any number of possibilities that would make (3) false.

As for (4), the notion that finite time requires a God is completely arbitrary.

What's recoverable is that nature is processual. And you could add "organic" as long as we're talking about living things or carbon. ;-)

I am classifying perception as a mental association -- that is, the sort of thing that has meaning. I am not saying the world makes associations. — Moliere

Okay. Normally "perception" is reserved for (the notion of (ideally) accurately) processing external information.

According to Patricia Churchland (see this review of her book Touching a Nerve), a mammal's care for its young is the biological root of morality. And over time that has evolved into more universal principles.

Conceptually, we make the distinction between morally good and bad actions in observation. Compare, for example, Alice saving a person from falling off a cliff versus Bob pushing a person over a cliff. We might want to avoid being around Bob (at least near cliffs). That's the kind of pragmatic distinction that creates the use for realist moral language. — Andrew M

So I'm confused how you're using "realist" and "real" then.

An apple is considered to be made up of atoms but an atom is not identical to an apple. — Andrew4Handel

Is an atom "the same thing" as an apple?

However my original point was that people do not accept your physicalist premise which seems to underlie your belief that morality isn't objective. — Andrew4Handel

The two actually have no correlation to each other.

. It can be a fact that I believe the earth is flat. — Andrew4Handel

Apparently you don't really understand the distinction between things we believe that "parallel" facts that are external to us and things we think that aren't "parallel" with anything external to us.

If someone is psychologically harmed because they are prevented from beating their girlfriend — Andrew4Handel

And you don't care what the girlfriend desires, how she feels about it, etc. either? You only care about her getting hit, regardless of how she feels about that?

a valid appeal to authority, — S

No such thing in my view. The fact that any person(s) is considered an authority in x never makes it the case that what they say about x is correct, or "more likely to be correct," simply because they're considered an authority. They always have to be correct on the merit of what they're claiming, not their social status or status in the judgment of others. And then their status should ride on the fact that they've said (past tense) things that are correct, with that never serving as a guarantee (or anything like it) that what they'll say next isn't nonsense.

And the whole idea of this is the whole idea of peer reviewed journals for example. Your paper always has to pass the review process as if you were a nobody. Of course, the flaw in that system is that the experts doing the reviews can give the stamp of approval to crappy, poorly-conceived, etc. work, but there's no way around needing people to make evaluations in that situation.

How's that? — Banno

You have the idealism disease, too? Or are you just pretending to for "fun"?

So, alright. Meaning occurs within the brain, and does not require language. Any old mental association will do -- and, as I understand perception at least, that would include perception. — Moliere

Again, the world itself, outside of minds, doesn't make associations. That's an activity that brains perform. So you can't perceive an association.

Your obsession with objective and subjective. I don't think these terms work as well as you suggest. — Banno

Not everything in the world is something functioning in a mental way. As far as we know so far, only brains do that. Brains functioning in a mental way are obviously important to us, so it's worth being able to refer to that with a succinct term. But it's important to be able to refer to the other stuff, too. And making this distinction is especially important when people get so often and so easily confused about the distinction and the implications of it, for example, via projection, where they believe that the world at large has features that are exclusively specific to their brain functioning in a mental way, in what essentially amounts to self-centeredness gone wild.

So it's like "The cat is on the mat". I show Fred the cat on the mat, and he yet insists that the cat is not on the mat. I bring in a panel of experts, and do various tests to check his language use, things like washing the mat, patting the cat, and so on, and find no obvious difference. I put the cat back on the mat, and yet Fred still insists that it is not the case that the cat is on the mat. I conclude that there is something wrong with Fred. — Banno

You can't just go by other people's views. That would be an argumentum ad populum. What matters is if it's a phenomenon that occurs outside of our minds.

Or the paradox shows that reality isn't as we think it is, e.g. space isn't infinitely divisible — Michael

"Space is infinitely divisible" is theory. So, right, when that theory leads you to conclude something obviously absurd, you don't go with the absurdity. You realize you screwed up somewhere.

Zeno's paradoxes are a good example of theory-worship--you take the theory to trump reality, and when the theory results in something absurd, you conclude that we must have reality wrong rather than realizing that we're f---ing up theoretically somehow.

So, on your view, can meaning occur without language? — Moliere

Yes, definitely. I do this as a musician all the time, for example.

"When I associate a spout with its vase and see a teapot, is that perception"--that's not a perception, by the way. Perception refers to you taking in data about things external to you. Your association isn't that. It's an activity your brain is performing, and activity that isn't performed by the outside world. So you're conceiving it, not perceiving it.

Anyway, sure, you could do this without any linguistic capabilities.

If it is not objectively wrong to kick the puppy I don't see why it wold be subjectively wrong either. — Andrew4Handel

The world outside of minds isn't the sort of thing that feels that it's okay or not to kick puppies. Creatures with minds are the sorts of things that have feelings about this.

I would rather base a moral system around objective facts about harm then peoples feelings. — Andrew4Handel

You don't want an ethical system that is concerned with people and what they like or dislike, enjoy or not enjoy, desire or don't desire? You just want to base it on facts, where you pretend that you're not making personal evaluative judgments about whether one fact or the other should be the goal, and where you couldn't care less about anyone else's evaluative judgments about that?

That would be a weird ethics.

Whether the ingredients are going to make us sick or not is not a matter of personal preference. It's a real state of affairs. — Andrew M

Correct. What's not an objective state of affairs is if it's better or worse, proper or improper, etc. to use ingredients that will make us sick, or kill us or whatever.

But what you said above would seem to apply here as well. The world outside minds couldn't care less how you perceive color. Yet the way in which you perceive an object is nonetheless real, and not a matter of personal preference. — Andrew M

It doesn't care how you perceive color, correct. Good/bad, proper/improper etc. have nothing whatsoever to do with perception. That's just the point.

A property (whether color or toxicity) need not be universal to be real. — Andrew M

I'm not sure how you're using "universal" there, and I haven't at all been saying anything about that. I wasn't making a point about whether anything is "universal" or not.

Re the rest of the post, if you have a suggestion about how how we could have a "realist" ethics, I'll take a critical look at it and comment.

I don't know what mental things are made of but I have compared them with things that are spatial temporal and have energy. — Andrew4Handel

When I say, "You'd need to try to make any sense whatsoever of what nonphysical things are supposed to be ontologically, what their properties are in general, etc." I'm not referring specifically to mental phenomena, unless you think that's the only thing that's nonphysical.

"Spatio-temporal" and "energy" are physical properties/phenomena, by the way. So that wouldn't do anything to make sense of the idea of nonphysical entities or phenomena.

You could also say things that are measurable directly. Just because someone cannot explain an experience to someone else does not mean it doesn't exist. The problem with the mental is that it defies our current methodologies of explanation and causality.

I wasn't doing the old "this is unexplainable" argument. I'm saying that the idea, the concept of nonphysical things is literally incoherent. So if we're going to posit them and take the notion seriously, we need to be able to characterize what nonphysical things would even be, in terms of any positive properties, so that we could make some sense out of them, in general ontological terms.

But indeterminism does not imply free will. — Andrew4Handel

I don't want to get into a big free will tangent, too, but indeterminism in conjunction with will phenomena, at least where the indeterminism can be biased by will, is sufficient for free will in the sense that I use the term. At any rate, that's irrelevant to the fact that physics hasn't forwarded determinism for over 100 years.

I don't now what you mean then, because I have offered a framework for the explanation which is that if mental states are physical brain states then brain states explanations usurp subjective ones. — Andrew4Handel

Demarcation criteria for explanations in general, not just about one topic. I gave the basic requirements for setting out such demarcation criteria.

This just means correlated with the brain because they are clearly not identical. — Andrew4Handel

In my view they clearly are identical.

There are grounds for believing there is more than a map: the independent of thing from experience of a thing. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It's not clear to me what that is supposed to read that would make sense.

When we consider some sort truth or fact we know, our interest isn't in how we have a map which shows us it. We are curious about what is beyond the map. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Unfortunately, per your views, you have no grounds for believing there's anything but a map.

Our object of knowledge is not our experience, the map, by the underlying territory on its own terms.

Completely inconsistent with things you said earlier.

How about we try one thing at a time and try to be consistent, try to make sense, etc.?

Free will is a problem for any moral theory and a physicalist theory is far less likely to allow for freewill. — Andrew4Handel

Physics hasn't been determinist in over 100 years.

The idea that brain states are determined is a common belief. If the mind is the brain then brain events are determined by other physical events. This explanation would usurp the subjective as an explanation. — Andrew4Handel

Earth to Andrew4Handel. You'd have to set out demarcation criteria as I outlined above if you want me to have an explanation discussion.

If the mind was physical then everything I imagine, however silly, would be physical — Andrew4Handel

Yes, and that's indeed the case. Everything you imagine is a state of your brain.

Saying that the nonphysical is the "reality of our mental life" is just completely empty. You'd need to try to make any sense whatsoever of what nonphysical things are supposed to be ontologically, what their properties are in general, etc.

I don't know what identity you are positing? — Andrew4Handel

Should be clear from the context of the discussion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/

if that is what it means then you are making our mental realm objective — Andrew4Handel

The definition I use of subjective/objective is that subjective refers to mental phenomena. That definition in no way hinges on what mental phenomena really are. If mental phenomena are brain phenomena (as I believe), then the subjective is brain phenomena (or rather, the subset that amounts to mental phenomena). That's by definition of subjective referring to mental phenomena.

You could give an explanation of why someone held a certain opinion by explain how it was determined by her brain states — Andrew4Handel

Again, I wouldn't get into an "explanation" discussion without the demarcation criteria discussion (re what counts as explanations) as I outlined above. That's just not a game I'd play until we set out the rules for the game first.

i think what ever goodness is it does not seem to be physical. — Andrew4Handel

Again, the very idea of nonphysical anythings is incoherent. You could try to make it coherent, but that would require a lot of work.

I wasn't saying anything unique about moral utterances re meaning. My comments about meaning applied to all meaning, in general.

Meaning is subjective. It's something that occurs in individuals' heads. It's the inherently mental act of making associations. It can't be literally shared, but we can tell others what we're associating in many cases. You can't know how an individual is doing this without asking them.

Also, I also think "the ontology of utterances" is a bit funny. What I had said is "what's going on ontologically with utterances (such as 'x is good (morally).')" In other words, what's "functionally" going on, or what's going on in terms of real, or practical, or observable things, which can be quite different than beliefs that people have about what they're saying, what they're doing, etc.

There might be something that fits better, but it's basically a variation on the gambler's fallacy--using irrelevant factors to determine the likelihood of something.

How does the mind fit into the natural realm since we do not have an explanation for it and mental phenomena? — Andrew4Handel

I'm a physicalist/identity theorist. One of the things that's incoherent about a lot of supernatural stuff is that it posits nonphysical existents. The idea of a nonphysical existent is incoherent.

Re explanations, I just wrote this in another thread yesterday:

"The first step in tackling 'the hard problem' is setting out our criteria for explanations in a way that (a) the things we consider explained fit our criteria, (b) the things we consider not explained are not explained because they don't fit our criteria, and (c) our criteria are fashioned in a manner where anyone (reasonably educated/competent), or even perhaps a well-programmed computer, could check whether a putative explanation counts as a legitimate explanation under our criteria, so that we can't just willy-nilly declare things to be explained or not."

Whether you desire anarchy or not, you can't have it anyway, so you may as well settle on something you could have.

Teleology is very useful if you want to learn how to drive a car. — Andrew4Handel

Since only people have purposes, per however they think about the same, teleology, the belief in purpose in a much broader, objective sense, is useless for driving cars.

What is your argument against a non natural realm? — Andrew4Handel

Complete absence of evidence for anything supernatural. Also, some of the things posited are incoherent.

Physically, there can never be an infinity of anything, because observing an infinity is impossible — Echarmion

Not that I'm arguing for extant infinities, but why would whether there's an infinity of anything hinge on observation?