Swoooooooning. — AmadeusD

Good stuff. I know little of Mendelsohn's lieder.

Google translates the title as "favorite cookies" :)

Beloved Little Spot

Do you know where I like to linger
In the cool of an evening?
In the quiet valley there spins
A little mill,
And there is a little brook beside it,
With trees standing all around it.
I often sit there for hours on end,
Looking around and daydreaming.

Even the little flowers in the grass
Begin to speak,
And the little blue one says:
Look at how my little head is hanging!
The little rose with a thorny kiss
Has pricked me:
Ah, it has made me so sad
That my heart has broken.

There approaches a small white spider,
saying: Be content;
Some day you will die,
For that is the way it is here on this earth;
Better that your heart breaks
From the kiss of a rose,
Than that you never know love
And die loveless. — Friederike Robert, tr. Emily Ezust

Maya Beiser's take on Terry Riley's classic (cello with loop pedals and percussions)

Knowledge, then, is multifaceted. Since to agree, to accept and to devote have different truth conditions - or none at all, like a devotion. One can say one knows in different senses. Knowledge isn't one kind of thing, and an item of knowledge need not be a statement. And knowing as conviction may not be itemizable at all. — fdrake

I think this bears reiterating. There is no point in trying to nail down the one correct definition of knowledge, because, like many words in the ordinary language, "knowledge" is used in different ways. And since meaning is use, the meaning of "knowledge" is not univocal.

Those who insist that when we say "I know" we mean nothing other than "I am convinced" (or some such) have a point, because that is one of the common uses of the word. But that doesn't exhaust all uses. For example, when we deny someone's claim of knowledge, most of the time, what we deny is the truth of what they claim to know, not the truth of their conviction.

Of course, all of the above considerations apply only if all we care about is the ordinary language meaning, which is best left to semantics scholars, anyway. But then - and I realize that this flies in the face of the long and rich history of philosophical debates on the subject of knowledge - I am not sure what value philosophers could contribute to this discussion. (That was realization was kind of a dead end for "ordinary language philosophy".)

Yes, there are different kinds of knowing. There is 'knowing how', there is the knowing of familiarity and there is 'knowing that'. I think the salient question in this thread concerns only 'knowing that' or propositional knowing, because the other two categories do not necessarily involve belief. — Janus

Even if you want to bracket out 'knowing how' (and I agree with @Moliere and @Banno that knowing is entangled with doing), there is still more than one way in which 'knowing that' is used propositionally.

I fell in love with Scarlatti K87. I'd heard it before (it is one of his best known sonatas), but yesterday it hit me hard for some reason.

Clara Haskil :heart: (two takes)


Igor Kipnis (clavichord :heart:)


Ross's complete recording of Scarlatti I just don't love... I don't know why.

I am also skipping Horowitz (and a few others for that matter). His is the kind of Romantic (re)interpretation that is breathtaking and hard to un-hear once you have heard it. And granted, this peace positively invites it. But I would then prefer to go all the way and do something like what Vaughan Williams did with his dreamy take on Thomas Tallis:


This was the original inspiration - a severe, militant psalm, striking in its own right, with words like "Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."



You can see (as in Scarlatti) what harmonies moved Williams and why he took it to such different places (without changing a note of the original!)

It is a bit cheap to proclaim that AI will never be able to achieve something or other because it hasn't done so yet, or just because. A more substantive argument is needed for such theses to be taken seriously.

The history of game-playing AI is a case in point. It wasn't so long ago that chess experts confidently predicted that AI would never be able to beat a grandmaster. At best, they argued, extrapolating from chess computers of the day, they would hold their own against most players through sheer brute force calculation and programmed strategies, churning out dull games. Others maintained that even if AI chess mastery were achievable in principle, mastering Go would just be mathematically impossible. Well, we know how that turned out. And the point of the story is not to extrapolate further AI successes. I am not even an AI optimist - I am agnostic about its future. The point is that arguing for the impossibility of a future development in a field (especially lacking any relevant expertise) is an ungrateful endeavor. (If Agnostic Meta-Induction hasn't been coined yet, I am coining it now :smile:)

I get the impression that many of those who insist that AI will fail are rather anxious for it to fail, so this is may also be a kind of wishful thinking.

Rules are always common to many different cases. To find out, if a singular case applies to a rule, judgement is necessary. There is no way to find this out by exerting another rule, as this results in an infinite regress. So my argument to support the provocative title of this discussion is: AI is indeed intelligent in that it is able to find patterns in huge amounts of data but there is no way AI could reach to judgements like we humans can. — Pez

It is odd that you talk of rules as being contrary to common-sense judgement, because rule-based AI is currently out of fashion. So-called expert systems of the early days of AI were rule-based. They showed promise, but proved to be limited and have since been largely abandoned. But some prominent AI researchers now argue that further advances in AI will require an infusion of rule-based reasoning. And part of their argument is that common knowledge and common sense that AI often lacks is very much rule-driven (rule-of-thumb driven, one might say).

Yes, it's deeply ironic that the instincts of populist movements are invariably authoritarian, anti-democratic. They don't trust the people to govern themselves, and firmly believe themselves to be the best suited to hold all the power and the privilege - which, of course, is the very definition of elitism. They don't necessarily start out with the cynical plan to become the new elites in an authoritarian system, but that is what they end up doing anyway.

A physical entity is part of the P-Region if and only if it is essential to M. This facet is what rules out multiple realizability. If a physical entity can be removed from the system and it doesn't affect M then by definition it in not included in the P-Region. We are now in a situation where P cannot vary unless M also varies (P is in fact defined in terms of M so that this is the case). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you are mixing up counterfactual possible worlds with different partitions of the same world. All these supervenience definitions are ultimately about counterfactuals: if M supervenes on P, then in a counterfactual world where M is different, P must also be different. The counterfactual world is not different from the actual world in how we choose to draw the boundaries around P.

There is a somewhat more detailed introduction found in the IEP article on supervenience, where you can also find references to original publications where these concepts are introduced.

Ha, not to go back on my OP, but I am now thinking that B-Minimal Properties do not rule out multiple realizability in an important sense. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think any of these attempted precisions are aimed at ruling out multiple realizability. Multiple realizability is a feature, not a bug of supervenience, and I haven't seen anyone actually trying to rule it out.

If you are defining superveniance with B-minimal properties or P Regions this is not the case. Any change in P, the (relevant) brush strokes (or their properties) would, by definition, be a change in the experience/aesthetic qualities of the painting. Multiple realizability is sacrificed by using these methods to define superveniance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see how that follows. Supervenience with P-regions or B-minimal properties is still an asymmetric relation: There can be no M-differences without P-differences, but the reverse does not hold.

By limited I mean restricted in size. Think of spacetime for example. If spacetime is restricted in size then we can reach its edges by moving in straight lines (of course if spacetime is not a closed manifold). The problem is what is beyond the edges. It cannot be nothing since nothing does not have any geometry and occupies no room. So, whatever is the beyond edges of spacetime is something. Therefore, what I said follows. — MoK

OK, so you are basically reprising Lucretius' javelin argument:

For whatever bounds it, that thing must itself be bounded likewise; and to this bounding thing there must be a bound again, and so on for ever and ever throughout all immensity. Suppose, however, for a moment, all existing space to be bounded, and that a man runs forward to the uttermost borders, and stands upon the last verge of things, and then hurls forward a winged javelin,— suppose you that the dart, when hurled by the vivid force, shall take its way to the point the darter aimed at, or that something will take its stand in the path of its flight, and arrest it? For one or other of these things must happen. There is a dilemma here that you never can escape from.

To show this let's assume that the whole is limited, let's call the whole W1. This means that W1 is bounded by something else, let's call this B1. — MoK

This doesn't follow, unless by "limited" you mean just that: being limited by something else. But that would make your argument a simple and uninteresting tautology.

Although emergence is often sloganized in terms of wholes vs. parts, it doesn't necessarily boil down to mereology, nor to substances. (Also, emergence should not be identified with reduction - another notoriously muddled concept.) There have been many takes on emergence with no common agreement forthcoming: just searching publication titles, you will find several titled "What is Emergence?", "Making Sense of Emergence", and so on. That doesn't mean that the idea is hopeless though - rather the opposite I would think. And just because there are disagreements, doesn't mean that every party is equally wrong.

Sorry if you misunderstood my post, but I really meant that my definition has the same meaning as Wikipedia 's definition. — Ypan1944

It is not. Just reread the definitions and pay attention to the placing of the terms. This is essential to understand in a discussion of emergence.

Your definition:

A property A is called supervenient over a (subvenient) property B if a change in B has direct consequences for A. — Ypan1944

In slogan form, “there cannot be a B-difference without an A-difference”.

SEP/Wiki definition:

A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. — SEP

In slogan form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”.

In the case of consciousness: this is certainly emergent and my remark that some parts of the brain are crucial for consciousness indicates that there is at least some form of supervenience. — Ypan1944

This contradicts what you said earlier, which would indeed follow from your personal definition of supervenience, but not from the standard definition:

To argue that our consciousness is highly emergent you must show that the features of our consciousness are supervenient over the underlying complex structure of neurons. This would mean that any damage to the brain has consequences for consciousness. — Ypan1944

Sorry, but look at Wikipedia for this definition:
"In philosophy, supervenience refers to a relation between sets of properties or sets of facts. X is said to supervene on Y if and only if some difference in Y is necessary for any difference in X to be possible."
This has nothing to do with your "downward causation" conception — Ypan1944

Yes, this is almost identical to the definition that I quoted in my post, and it is the opposite of what you stated and then used to argue that consciousness cannot supervene on brain properties.

I said nothing about downward causation, but emergence and supervenience are closely related concepts, so it is important to get the basics right in a discussion about them.

A property A is called supervenient over a (subvenient) property B if a change in B has direct consequences for A. — Ypan1944

This is an incorrect definition of supervenience: the relationship goes in the opposite direction. And you go on to make an incorrect argument from it:

To argue that our consciousness is highly emergent you must show that the features of our consciousness are supervenient over the underlying complex structure of neurons. This would mean that any damage to the brain has consequences for consciousness. — Ypan1944

A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”. — SEP

Thus, supervenience admits underdetermination of supervenient properties by subvenient properties. If consciousness is supervenient upon the structure of neurons, what follows is that any difference in conscious states must be accompanied (not to say "caused") by a difference in the brain structure. Conversely, a difference in the brain structure, such as minor brain damage, but also any number of harmless variations, does not necessarily bear consequences for consciousness.

Not a web developer (or a pro developer) here, so don't have anything to contribute. I have a slightly off topic question though if you don't mind. I've been doing a bit of coding for study, work, or small personal projects for about as long as Python has been around, but I've always been prejudiced against it. Its use of indentation for syntax seems like a monumentally bad idea. What do you have to say for that? And are there advantages to Python beyond its use in server scripting? (I also dislike JavaScript, but in that at least I don't seem to be alone.)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supervenience/
This is the source of the quotation and a good intro to the subject.

Sorry for the late response. I've been traveling and otherwise preoccupied.

Yes, but this is the man-made (artificial) case that I excluded. The determinist's claim is not a claim which limits itself to artificial realities. There is no formal model to justify the determinist's claim, which is a claim about all of reality. — Leontiskos

On the contrary, I wouldn't even know how to understand determinism other than in the context of a model (formal or informal, complete or partial). Even if we take your favored criterion of predictability, what would you make predictions from if not from a model? It's models all the way down when we talk about determinism or indeterminism.

Okay, fair enough. Since our approach to the act of understanding may be different, I may be begging the question here. I would want to say that an intellect which understands something transcends that thing through its act of understanding. So if I understand a Roomba vacuum in its entirety then I have, at least in some way, transcended it. I have contained it in a way that it has not contained me. A concrete example of this would be the case where I am able to predict its movements whereas it is not able to predict my movements.

From there I want to say that 1) to assert that something is deterministic is to imply exhaustive (in-principle) comprehension or standing-over or encompassment; 2) to assert that all existing things are deterministic entails asserting that I myself am deterministic; 3) to assert that I am deterministic involves applying (1) to myself; but 4) I cannot pretend to comprehend or stand over or encompass myself, for it is impossible for something to stand over itself or encompass itself.

The weak premise here is surely (1). Someone will say, "I am not claiming exhaustive comprehension, but only a probabilistic opinion." To be naively concise, my point is not that the act itself is an act of comprehensive understanding, but rather that the supposition or hunch or opinion contains within itself a failure to recognize the boundary of (4). "I have a hunch that I myself am fully explainable in terms of deterministic principles," involves the idea that a theory which came from minds itself fully explains minds. But that can't be. Just as a mind cannot comprehend itself, neither can a theory produced by a mind comprehensively explain minds. Whatever else we want to say determinism is, it is surely also a theory.

So feel free to have a go at (1), but do give me some insight into your own views in the process. — Leontiskos

The weak premise here is indeed (1), but not for the reason you give. As I already explained, "exhaustive (in-principle) comprehension" is not how I understand determinism, and I don't think this tracks with the general usage either.

This is a different argument. I don't want to stretch this post too long, but I want to say something about it. Would you be willing to grant that it appears that the act of understanding is neither necessitated nor inevitable? Or does it simply appear to you that an act which is accepted to be necessitated, like two billiard balls colliding, and an act of understanding, like Pythagoras' act of understanding the Pythagorean theorem, equally possess the quality of "necessitated"? It seems that we usually take necessitation to preclude knowledge, e.g., "He's just parroting the definition of the Pythagorean theorem to pass the quiz. He doesn't really understand it." (Although this example doesn't utilize strict causal necessitation, it does utilize instrumental or consequence necessitation, i.e. <It is necessary to recite this theorem in order to pass the quiz, therefore I will recite the theorem>.) — Leontiskos

Would it be preferable to acquire beliefs as a result of a deterministic or a chancy process? I don't have an intuition one way or another, and I wouldn't trust intuitions anyway - I don't think they are informative in this instance. As for the example that you give, it doesn't seem apt: it is more about demonstrating the depth of knowledge or believing things for the right reasons than about causal necessitation.

I suspect that your real concern here is not with necessitation in the sense of causal determination, but with sourcehood: being an autonomous and responsible agent, the true "owner" and originator of thought and action. Whether or not this is compatible with determinism is a matter of philosophical debate best known from the related subject of free will. It is probably best to leave that for another conversation, but I will only say that the contrary position - that the world is indeterministic - may not be of much help to you if what you really care about is sourcehood. This is something that gives incompatibilists the most difficulty.

A scientist who calls an arbitrary system deterministic—such as a Roomba vacuum—is not thereby a determinist. Determinism is a philosophical theory about the entirety of existence, not some subset of it — Leontiskos

So apparently determinism is an absolute truth about the world and not a limited truth about certain parts of the world. — Leontiskos

True, which is why I think that to be a determinist or indeterminist in the above sense you need to hold to a kind of totalizing reductionist view in which there is (in principle) one true theory that describes the world in its totality. That theory can then be either deterministic or indeterministic. If you don't hold to that view, then I don't see what the terms determinism and indeterminism could even mean to you.

Echoing my elaboration post, what justification is required to claim that a system is deterministic? Exhaustive predictability is the strongest form of justification, is it not? At least when it comes to systems which are not man-made (artificial)? And at the very least, everything in the system must at least plausibly be in-principle predictable. It's not at all clear to me that the thesis of determinism can be separated from a claim of in-principle predictability, and if this is correct then where in-principle predictability is incoherent, determinism fails. — Leontiskos

Predictability is the most straightforward and intuitive path towards inductive (or abductive, if you prefer) inference of determinism. But induction (abduction) is not exhaustive by its very nature. On the other hand, if you are looking at a formal model, you may be able conclude whether or not it is deterministic without demonstrating predictability, simply by analyzing its structure.

Quantum mechanics is an instructive case in point. It is often thought of as a paradigmatically indeterministic theory. Indeed, as far as its observable predictions go, it is most definitely indeterministic. And yet, there are competing indeterministic and deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, none of which are obviously true or false (or there would not be a competition).

In practice, we are always looking at the world through a veil of epistemic underdetermination: unknown, uncertain and/or uncontrollable factors are always in play to a greater or lesser extent. But our mental models can be either deterministic or indeterministic, as suites the occasion, or as suites your taste, if the choice is not obvious. Those models that work best (or that we like best) we hold as saying something true about the world, however provisionally.

I would want to say that no intellect which understands determinism could be deterministic. If such an intellect claims that it itself is deterministic, then either it does not understand what determinism means (and is therefore equivocating), or else it does understand what determinism means and is drawing a non-sequitur. To understand what determinism means is at the same time to place oneself outside of the deterministic paradigm. As I said in my follow-up, the theorizer can never be accounted for by his theory (at least in the way the determinist supposes he could be). — Leontiskos

Yeah, I didn't get that bit. I don't need to know everything in order to know (or have an opinion about) something. Perhaps it all just comes down to what you said later:

My guess is that this rests on my conviction that true knowledge—which is different than Plato's "true opinion"—cannot be necessitated. — Leontiskos

Well, I don't share that conviction, and neither would any determinist, obviously.

But determinism is a "final and absolute truth about the world," and even the minimal definition, provided in your very first post, is committed to in-principle predictability. — Leontiskos

No, it's really not.

The distinction does save the logical coherence of determinism in the short term, but at what price? Does it rise above the level of an ad hoc response to the paradox of predictability? Is the determinist doing more than merely defending their theory by saying, "Oh, well in that case we stipulate that our observer is not part of the universe"? — Leontiskos

Depends on what sort of determinism is at stake. The definition that I quoted from one of the papers commits only to the existence of a one-to-one mapping between states of the universe at different times. This says nothing about observers and predictability, so determinists do not need ad hoc assumptions to defend against the paradox of predictability, as long as they are willing to concede that some types of predictability are not realizable in principle in a deterministic universe. Though I am not a committed determinist myself, to me that does not seem like a high price to pay. Limited predictability certainly does not go against our experience.

↪andrewk rightly makes the claim that the demon must be "causally isolated from [our universe]." But is it really coherent to envisage a being who is outside of the causal universe in this manner? — Leontiskos

Depends on who you ask. To Laplace the demon is just a thought experiment illustrating the concept. Laplace's determinism commits to causality and computability, so it is a little stronger than the minimal determinism discussed above, but it does not depend on the existence of an omniscient observer. If instead we are talking theology - that's different, but then our starting positions going in are different as well: we are no longer bound by the assumptions of naturalism and causal closure.

↪T Clark suggests that determinism without in-principle predictability is a meaningless idea. Whether or not that is right, such a form of determinism is a great deal more meaningless and toothless than the sort of determinism which brings along with it the intuitive consequence of in-principle predictability. — Leontiskos

@T Clark throws around accusations of meaninglessness rather freely, but that's on him. I rather think that a determinism that is demonstrably incoherent is a lot less meaningful than one that does not suffer from such a defect.

I originally said that the minimal definition of determinism that does not commit to predictability of any sort is the more conventional one. That can be debated, but I would maintain that it is close to what is usually meant by determinism in the sciences, which are concerned with specific laws and theories, rather than final and absolute truths about the world. In such contexts distinguishing deterministic and indeterministic systems is meaningful and useful.


I find that people's idea of "determinism worth having" or determinism to be avoided at all costs is strongly influenced by their underlying worries going into the debate: worries about human freedom, worth and responsibility on one side, and worries about order, predictability and intelligibility on the other side. I think it is worth making explicit your stakes if you are going to argue for a particular demarcation. Why is unrestricted in-principle predictability important to you?

If Bach Kept Bees...



Music from the young Arvo Pärt, from around the time when he got into early music.

The buzzing tune heard at the beginning and throughout the piece is a slightly obfuscated B-A-C-H sequence (spelled out in German musical notation). The ending quotes a prelude from WTC 1.

And if Russia succeeded in absorbing/subjugating Ukraine, it would then have four more NATO countries at its borders!

Why would there be troops defending a city deep in Russia when Ukrainians are nowhere near Rostov? — ssu

Because it's a critical command-and-control center? And yet it was taken with hardly a shot fired, and two generals, including a deputy Minister of Defense, apparently taken hostage. More to the point, the Russians supposedly had advance warning about the mutiny. How could they be caught with their pants down like that?

Compare and contrast with the successful defense of Mykolaev in the first days of the invasion. It was organized with very little advance warning and mostly local defenders.

Clearly, there was a lack of will here, if not outright collusion with the mutineers.

So why on Earth the weak timid response then from Putin and the references to 1917 and civil war? — ssu

And if the objective of Prigozhin was to capture the military leadeship (as WSJ writes), it is absolutely hilarious to deny that this wasn’t a coup attempt, because they weren’t going for Putin. — ssu

Particularly puzzling is how it happened that Wagner was allowed to cross the border and capture a million+ city hosting Southern Military District headquarters (by far the biggest prize in the entire campaign :rofl:) when Russian security agencies were aware of their plans (as both Western and Russian sources claim)?

Prigozhin originally intended to capture Defense Minister Sergei
Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general
staff, during a visit to a southern region that borders Ukraine that
the two were planning. But the Federal Security Service, or FSB, found
out about the plan two days before it was to be executed, according to
Western officials.

Gen. Viktor Zolotov, commander of the National Guard of Russia, a
domestic military force that reports directly to President Vladimir
Putin, also said authorities knew about Prigozhin’s intentions
before he launched his attempt.

“Specific leaks about preparations for a rebellion that would begin
between June 22-25 were leaked from Prigozhin’s camp,” Zolotov
told state media on Tuesday. — WSJ

I don't understand why their military was pitted against itself to begin with. Was that on purpose to keep the military from taking over? Or what? — frank

Wagner wasn't military. They weren't even legal (an "illegal armed group" is how Russian law qualifies such formations). As for what purpose they served, originally they were a semi-secret pro-government mercenary group that functioned somewhat like old-time privateers. They operated mostly in Africa, enriching themselves with deniable help and blessing of the Kremlin. They saw action in Ukraine in 2014 and later in Syria.

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Wagner was not there originally; Prigozhin's relationship with the military top brass was already poor at that time. But, shrewd businessman that he was, he quickly got on the action, and following the failure of blyatzkrieg, Putin must have appreciated any help he could get. Wagner's mercenaries, boosted by tens of thousands of expendable convicts recruited directly from prison camps, proved to be the most effective assault troops (which says much about the state of the Russian military).

For all that's already been known, the degree of dysfunction in the power structure and the society that this episode has brought to the surface is pretty amazing.

How do commentators here compare the January 6 insurrection in the US capitol building with Prigozhin's coup attempt (if that's what it was)? — BC

I'd say you're comparing kids playing cowboys and Indians with a proper re-enactment of the October revolution. — unenlightened

Things are still in motion, and of what has happened so far a lot remains unclear, and a lot will probably remain hidden from view in the foreseeable future. But from what I can see, it was neither of these extremes. Comparison with the January 6 riots in Washington is inapt, but if there is anything in common between these events, it is that neither of them was an attempted coup, strictly speaking. Trump's rioters hardly had any definite plan, but their actions amounted to trying to force the hand of Congress, rather than to literally overthrow the government and install Trump.

Prigozhin's mutiny was clearly well planned (US intelligence now say that they saw Wagner's preparations days in advance, and that is believable). But it seems that he was also aiming to force change within the system, rather than to overthrow Putin. Prigozhin may be a loose cannon, but he is not insane. Most likely, he sought to renegotiate the terms of whatever informal agreement he had with Putin, improve his standing, replace military leadership with whom he had been feuding. Such a feudalistic power play on the part of a warlord is not that out of place in today's Russia.

My guess would be that Prigozhin hoped more people would bandwagon aboard, since dissatisfaction with Shoigu is apparently widespread in the military. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah, that's my take too. Prigozhin was probably gambling on receiving support from parts of the military, but he miscalculated.

Isn't arresting anti-war and dissident activists/protestors and then sending them to the front to gain leadership experience and a chance to b radicalize your army almost always a bad idea? — Count Timothy von Icarus

That was one mistake they did not repeat this time around. Reportedly, when Wagner and then MoD were recruiting fighters from prisons, political prisoners were strictly excluded.

Gee I bet the CIA and State Dept are breaking out popcorn. — Wayfarer

Don't you know? It's a CIA/State Dept/NATO coup! They are omnipresent and all-powerful. Nothing in the world happens but through their agency and intent. Nothing important, anyway.

Actually Putin referred to 1917 in his speech, so he is already using the dolchstoss argument. — ssu

He literally used the words "stab in the back" in his televised speech (and following him - a lineup of loyal politicians, including Chechen strongman Kadyrov, who had allied with Prigozhine on occasion).

To take a step back, I see the whole issue of determinism as a metaphysical one, not subject to empirical verification or falsification. It's a matter of point of view, not fact. I don't see it as a very useful way of thinking - it's misleading. — T Clark

I rather see it instrumentally, as a characteristic of specific theories or models that we adopt. And I mean not just scientific theories, but also our informal folk theories, including theories of mind. At the same time, I am not convinced that there is one true theory to rule them all at the bottom of creation. Which in turn makes it meaningless to ask whether the world is really deterministic or indeterministic.

The Paradox of Predictability concerns determinism. In particular, it concerns the idea that if determinism is true, then true predictions should be possible about the future state of the world (or people or subsystems therein). — NotAristotle

Predictability, in the sense that you employ in your thought experiment, is not usually part of the definition of determinism, nor does it follow as a necessary implication. The first paper that you cite gives a more conventional definition:

a universe U is deterministic when, for any arbitrarily chosen time t₀, there exists a law-like function f_L which maps the initial state of the universe U₀ at time t₀ in a unique manner onto the state of the universe U_t at any arbitrarily chosen later time t:

U_t = f_L(U₀) — Determinism and the Paradox of Predictability

Therefore, even if we accept the reasoning in your example, it does not logically follow that determinism is false. All that we can conclude is that not all of the assumptions can be true at the same time. Rather than determinism being false, it could be that predictability is not achievable under the specified conditions.

The first paper that you cited makes an important point about predictability right in the abstract, by drawing a distinction between external predictability and embedded predictability:

The inference from determinism to predictability, though intuitively plausible, needs to be qualified in an important respect. We need to distinguish between two different kinds of predictability. On the one hand, determinism implies external predictability, that is, the possibility for an external observer, not part of the universe, to predict, in principle, all future states of the universe. Yet, on the other hand, embedded predictability as the possibility for an embedded subsystem in the universe to make such predictions, does not obtain in a deterministic universe. — Determinism and the Paradox of Predictability

also made this point: a Laplacian demon might have the knowledge of the state of the world at a different time, but the demon, being external to the world, does not have to know its own state.

Another point concerns the possibility of prediction qua computation. It is one thing for the function f_L to exist in the abstract (and even for some hypothetical entity to have the knowledge of this function), but this is not the same as being able to compute this function given finite computational resources. Determinism, in its most general formulation, does not commit to computability. This, I think, is similar to the point made by

Socialists sort of promoting nationalist authoritatian oppressive degenerative capitalist Kremlin...? — jorndoe

They publish articles about the Ukraine war under the heading "US-NATO Conflict with Russia over Ukraine" That's quality journalism for you :roll: Their parroting of Russian official narrative is tactical, sort of like the Iran-Russia alliance in this war. Anything that can be used to poke the Big Satan in the eye will do.

These socialists' only concern is "the struggle," and they are indiscriminate about methods. Being truthful is not the objective; being correct - politically correct, in the older, unironic sense - is what it's all about.

The most likely culprit is of course Russia as it's totally logical for them to a) make the end of the Dnipro unpassable and b) then withdraw forces from there to plug the Ukrainian counterattack. The only thing now is that after WW2 blowing up dams has been a war crime. But obviously Russia doesn't give a damn. Or a dam. — ssu

Russian propaganda is also trying to play the cui bono card. Their western proxies amplify that narrative:

Although it is unclear who was responsible for the attack, last year, Ukrainian troops fired on the dam in an attempt to raise water levels downstream, and the military leadership had publicly contemplated destroying it altogether. — World Socialist Website

Militarily, it's not actually clear which side this benefits or hurts more. Ukrainian army wasn't likely to attempt crossing the Dnipro river there, except for amphibious incursions, which the flooding does not affect. For that reason, the Russians didn't have many forces defending the left bank. The flooding destroyed their first lines of defense, which, in theory, would make the crossing easier for the Ukrainians after the waters recede. But the Russians still hold positions on higher ground, which would make a full-scale assault across a half-kilometer wide river very problematic.

Naturally, the Ukrainians had even less cause to fear Russian attacks in this area. Ever since their retreat from the right bank, all that the Russians could do - and continue doing - is conduct chaotic shelling of Kherson and other settlements in the area to terrorize and punish the remaining civilian population. They have no force left to conduct a large-scale assault anywhere, let alone in such a difficult place. Hell, it took them nine months, tons of ammunition and suicidal human wave assaults just to grind down one town of little strategic significance - and that was their only "success story" in half a year of war.

In my opinion, Pattee makes the mistake of assigning human concepts to nature. — Wolfgang

This is precisely the issue that I have with this paragraph in your opening post:

A functioning organization is something that works according to certain rules, and those rules are made by someone in, say, a social organization. If we assume that there is nothing and no one who has developed rules for life, then it must be life itself that has developed these rules.
In addition to these rules, there must of course be an authority that monitors compliance with the rules and corrects them if necessary. — Wolfgang

Quite apart from the merits of the theory that you sketch further on, the problem here is that you run with the anthropomorphic metaphor without pausing to question its applicability out of its social context.

Must there be "an authority that monitors compliance"? That's not quite true even in human societies, where social rules, most of which are informal, are largely heeded out of habit and good will stemming from mutual interest, without needing any active control and enforcement. In any case, there is no prima facie reason to extend the metaphor of social organization to systems other than human societies. In the end, you may even be right to do so, but to get to that point requires a good deal of reflection. You cannot just assume that the metaphor applies based on suggestive language alone.

Cheers. Good stuff. I didn't realize there was a song to go with the instrumentals. That guitar dude's arrangement of the accompaniment is impressive as a technical and musical achievement, but without the song the overall effect is merely... nice.

Speaking of Baroque... Many years ago I heard this tune in a garish synth arrangement, in some indie sci-fi flick:



I had forgotten the movie, but somehow the tune impressed itself upon me. I had no idea what it was, and hadn't heard it since (except in my head once in a while). Until a couple of days ago, when I heard it on classical radio - this time with the title and composer's name attached.

And here it is, in all its Baroque ostinato glory:
Marin Marais - Sonnerie de Sainte-Geneviève (The Bells of St. Genevieve)


(Curiously, this recording is also from a movie soundtrack. I'm going to watch the movie when I get a chance.)

And a couple more affecting pieces by Marais, performed by the same stellar ensemble:

I am not a connoisseur or anything (I don't even know who Steely Dan is), but wow!

You can recognize Glass right from the first measure from his trademark arpeggios, but you need to keep in mind that this work was composed before he settled into his neo-Romantic groove. And indeed, while instantly recognizable, it doesn't sound stale to my ear.

A combination of “nu jazz” and “acid jazz” — javi2541997

I don't know much about “nu jazz” and “acid jazz”, but I like this. Will listen more!

https://xkcd.com/1732/ — Benkei

This is excellent.

We need the technology of 2065: fusion. — frank

I see what you did there :D

"Breaching 1.5C threshold" in a single year is meaningless, because there is no such threshold. — SophistiCat

Not meaningless, it signals that we are going above predicted deviations. — Manuel

What predictions are you talking about? Climatologists don't make predictions for individual years.

Eight of the past ten years were the warmest on record, and a similar trend held in preceding decades. That is meaningful. But a single-year record does not mean much on its own, and comparing it with a long-term average prediction is just ignorant.