You don't understand how language works. Numbers don't have colors, but to say that numbers are colorless would not make any sense.

2+2=4 is unfalsifiable and true, this refutes the statement "If it is unfalsifiable, it cannot have evidential warrant for its belief." — Hallucinogen

Come on, Hallucinogen, pay attention. 2+2=4 does not have evidential warrant for belief. Read every word in the preceding sentence before responding.

The student tried to apply Ohm's law, voltage = current x resistance. So the voltage would be zero (the current) times infinity (the resistance). Except, looking again, that would mean that the voltage divided by zero = infinity. Which makes no sense. — frank

Yeah, because the student doesn't understand basic math. If resistance is infinite then you can't tell what voltage is being applied - unless, of course, you have another piece of information available, such as a place on the diagram where it clearly tells you what it is!

Anyway, I don't know what point this wooly analogy is supposed to illustrate, other than wooly thinking. Which, I suppose, is appropriate when it follows this:

Prior to the 19th Century, a convergent series would have been treated as if it reaches the limit, though it would have been ok to say it's actually just approaching it. In the 19th Century, they decided that it doesn't just approach it, it actually gets there because the function is continuous. — frank

This is all from proofs by Cauchy that I don't understand. Do you understand it? — frank

You are making this sound more esoteric than it is. This is freshman calculus that has been studied by generations upon generations of students. In our class you were expected to understand the theorems and their proofs and to be able to sketch some of them from memory. (Of course, most of this has been thoroughly forgotten decades ago...)

Mathematics as an academic discipline is more like science and less like philosophy, in that the focus is not so much on authors and their original texts. The formulations and proofs that you find in modern textbooks are often not the same as those given by their original discoverers, even when they bear the names of Cauchy, d'Alembert, Weierstrass, etc., because clearer, simpler, more robust or more general versions have been developed. The history of mathematics is a worthy subject in itself, but that is not the topic here.

↪SophistiCat
Apparently you misread what I wrote. I had in mind the commonly imagined scifi scenario, where you are traveling at close to the speed of light and all processes. including bodily processes, are slowed down such that you are aging much more slowly than those who remain on Earth.

I was attempting to point to the absurdity of thinking that the bodily processes could be slowed down while the mental processes continued at the "normal" speed, which is also to point to the absurdity of thinking that the mental processes could be independence of the bodily. It would save wasted time if people read more carefully. — Janus

I think you are still confused about reference frames. Time dilation is an observer effect. If you are traveling at a constant speed of 0.99c relative to Earth, nothing interesting is happening to your body or your mind, as far as you are concerned. Your body and your mind cannot possibly get out of sync, unless your mind was somehow left behind on Earth when your body took off on a rocket ship. But as long as you are staring at the world through your eyes, you will observe everything as the theory of relativity describes. Metaphysics of mind is a red herring here. You can assume reductive physicalism or Cartesian dualism - and it won't make a wit of difference.

Yes, I agree that dualism is unsupportable. If we were traveling at speed close to c, aging of our bodies and all its physical processes would, according to the theory, greatly slow down. If our minds were independent of, and unaffected by, physical processes, and proceeding at their "normal" rate, then our subjective experience of mental processes would, presumably, seem vastly speeded up, which seems absurd. — Janus

This only invites confusion, I am afraid. At any given time, we are moving at a speed close to c in some reference frame. And, at that same time, we are not moving at all in some other reference frame. A key aspect of the subjective experience that no one would deny is that it has a point of view that is collocated with the body. That gives it a reference frame - specifically, the comoving reference frame (aka the proper frame), in which there cannot be any time dilation effects on our own body (unless said body is being violently torn apart!)

Evidence just means "reasons to believe a proposition is true". — Hallucinogen

Evidence in this context is not just any reasons. 2+2=4 is true within its "language game," and no evidence can change that - only changing the rules of the game can. That doesn't make 2+2=4 unfalsifiable - falsification is simply inapplicable to such statements, because evidence is not an appropriate test of their truth or falsity. But where the test is appropriate, it must be able to rule both ways. This is what this statement says: "If it is unfalsifiable, it cannot have evidential warrant for its belief."

(The term "falsifiability" is often associated with Popper, as pointed out, but I was using it in a looser sense of being vulnerable to contrary evidence. Popper has a mixed legacy. His logical analysis of evidence and the scientific process was largely unsuccessful. He is better remembered for his looser prescriptive principles.)

There's a claim I've come across numerous times, to the effect of "If P is unfalsifiable, then it cannot be known to be true or false".
There's been a few ways I've heard/seen it worded:
"If it is unfalsifiable, it cannot have evidential warrant for its belief",
"If it’s unfalsifiable, there’s no reason to believe it."
"Something that is unfalsifiable could be true, but there's no way for us to be able to conclusively determine that",
"If it’s unfalsifiable you don’t know if it is true or false." — Hallucinogen

These are not all equivalent. The statement that I bolded above is correct: "If it is unfalsifiable, it cannot have evidential warrant for its belief." The operative words here are evidential warrant. Here are some examples of beliefs that do not derive their warrant from evidential support, but may still be truth-apt (there is controversy about the last one):

• Bachelors are unmarried
• 2 + 2 = 4
• The bishop moves along diagonals
• I am cold
• Stealing is wrong

Now, what about falsifiability and evidential warrant? This is a narrower question about whether there can be a proposition that can be confirmed by evidence but not disproved by it. The general agreement, expressed by the statement cited above, is that that should not be possible. If evidence cannot move your belief in one direction, it should not be able to move it in the opposite direction either. Contrary cases are indicative of confirmation bias.

1) To say that S is larger than S' means that S' is a proper subset of S.
( A definition that applies to all sets, regardless of their size. ) — Magnus Anderson

This is false, since that definition applies only to finite sets. — Banno

It doesn't even work for finite sets. Think what it would mean if you could only compare the sizes of sets and their subsets. You couldn't say, for example, that there are more apples than oranges on the table, because neither is a subset of the other.

The cost here is the rejection of succession (roughly, that for every number there is another number that is one more than it; or more accurately, that we can talk about such an infinite sequence); and consequently the rejection of the whole of Peano mathematics. No small thing. — Banno

Strange as it may sound, Peano arithmetic does not require you to accept natural numbers as a "completed" set. You can have your successor function, you can show that, given the axioms, there are "as many as you want" distinct numerals, and still that does not compel you to accept the totality of all such numerals, N.

Explicitly specifying a function is acceptable as a constructive proof. Constructivism shares some concerns with finitism, but it is not as bonkers stringent.

I see what you’re getting at, and I agree that bijection strictly extends our ability to reason about size — especially once infinities are in play. In that sense it’s an enrichment, not a rival notion. — Esse Quam Videri

This is not even an extension or enrichment of finite counting: all counting is based on bijection. In the finite case, whether you use your fingers, notches on a stick or a number system, it all boils down to the same procedure:

1. There is a physical or mental counting device that can represent various sets of known size (fingers, notches, numbers)
2. In order to find the size of any other set, you put it into a one-to-one correspondence with one of those reference sets.

(Physical measurements of size and weight are also based on the same principle.)

So, to count sheep in the pen you can bend your fingers left to right, one for every sheep. Once you run out of sheep (or fingers), you can hold up your hands and say: I have that many (or at least that many). Works even if you have no notion of numbers.

Using numbers, you follow the same procedure, only you use counting numbers 1 through N instead of fingers, plus the convenient fact that the last member of your reference set is equal to its size. The size of a set is then the last member of a set of counting numbers that are in a one-to-one correspondence with that set.

Counting infinite sets works the same way, except that you have to set aside certain other assumptions that hold for finite sets but not for infinite sets. For example, you can no longer use finite subsets of natural numbers as described above. But you can use other reference sets. You can use the entire set of natural numbers as your measuring stick, or its power set if that that's not enough, or the power set of the power set, and so on.

Venezuela was already a failed state. How much worse could it get? — frank

A lot more worse.

Civil war. Hundreds of thousands of dead. Widespread famine. Failed state with competing regime that have divided the country. Or become like Haiti with criminal gangs running the country without any much if any operating government. — ssu

Criminal gangs and armed groups already control large swathes of Venezuela, and they actually seem to do a better job of it than the central government.

But yeah, it could get a lot worse.

It looks like "adults in the room" are betting on VP Rodriguez being more pliant and reasonable than her (former) boss. So, to them, "running the country" is basically keeping Rodriguez as a technical president and trying to work with (strong-arm) her. From what I have picked up about Rodriguez, she seems like a competent technocrat. But how secure her position in the hierarchy is an open question.

Glad you liked it. I thought that Chirimuuta's account handles the problem of divergent perceptions well - dependence on viewing conditions, interspecies differences, errors and abnormalities. My concern with her naturalizing approach is that it may be answering the wrong question. It is like explaining love by appealing to its biological procreative function. The answer could be perfectly valid in its way, but is this what we wanted to know? Perhaps the thrust of the original question was misguided, but that needs to be argued (and perhaps it is - I haven't read the book).

Sorry, I probably won't wade into this discussion, but I just so happened to have been listening to a New Books in Philosophy podcast on a related topic and thought that you and others might want to check it out (and/or the book itself):

M. Chirimuuta, Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy

What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects - roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don't have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2015), M. Chirimuuta defends an ontology of color that aims to capture the ontology implicit in contemporary perceptual science. Chirimuuta, an assistant professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, argues for color adverbialism, in which color is a property of an action-guiding interaction between an organism with the appropriate visual system and the environment. On her view, color vision is not for perceiving colors; it provides chromatic information that helps us perceive things.

The question of the OP invites a kind of view from nowhere, unconditioned by any framing or assumptions. Is there anything necessary tout court?

My contention is that such a question is meaningless. There is no view from nowhere. All meaningful questions about possibility and necessity are "small" questions, as puts it. In other words, they are asked within the context of a particular framing and grounding assumptions. A first-person account implies the existence of the first person. Newtonian physics unfolds against the background of an immutable Euclidean space and an independent time dimension. In these examples, as in all meaningful examples, necessity is contingent, as it were, on how the question is framed.

Is there one ultimate, unconditional, necessary frame that would ground all inquiry? Only in the most general, Kantian sense in which our cognitive faculties are constituted in a certain way, and the way they are constituted conditions how we see and reason about the world. But there is a curious circularity here: we are embedded in and are shaped by that same world, which in turn conditions how we see and reason about it. We are not entirely free to choose our frame of reasoning, because we have always already been framed by the very subject of our inquiry.

I would tentatively answer "yes", and argue that contingency means dependency on conditions. Dependency implies ordered explanatory relations. A structure of ordered explanatory relations ultimately requires an unconditioned (ungrounded) ground. — Esse Quam Videri

I agree with this, with the proviso that the ground is implicit in and contingent on the explanatory structure.

But I think the subsequent discussion of "intelligibility" goes astray, perhaps confusing the map with the territory. I don't know what it would mean for the reality to be intelligible (or necessary, or contingent, for that matter), except in the obvious sense that making the reality intelligible to us is what we as intelligent creatures do. This framing already implies that a world in which intelligent creatures thrive exists, and is perforce intelligible to those creatures. Fair enough. But if we go on to ask whether it is necessary that such a world exists, the question loses its meaning. Necessary in relation to what? What is the framing theory and whence it came from?

I did not love Jane Eyre, but I liked it well enough. I suppose that when it comes to this sort of literature, you need to calibrate your expectations and approach it with a bit of an anthropological spirit in order to appreciate it.

I liked her sister's signature work a lot more, for all that it is more than a little unhinged.

The Great Gatsby

I first read this book a long time ago, when I was just coming to grips with the English language. I had only a vague recollection of the plot, but when I started reading Gatsby again all these years later, I immediately recognized Fitzgerald's cadences, as if I read it only yesterday.

Though I suppose on some exceedingly remote metaphysical and unreal "ultimate" level we still are observing objects seemingly regularly repeating things, but is it really very insightful to say that as long as we will remain human that there will be room for doubt? — hwyl

Hume was an austere kind of empiricist (not unlike Logical Positivists in the 20th century, who valorized him). He accepted that we could, albeit fallibly, discover laws of nature through observation, but he rejected theorizing about ultimate natures ("hypotheses non fingo," as Newton put it and Hume agreed). Along the same lines, he was an anti-realist about unobservable theoretical entities like force and energy, accepting them only as a theoretical convenience.

None of this is in serious tension with modern science - indeed, there are contemporary philosophers who are Humean to some extent. And besides, Hume lived right smack in the middle of the Newtonian revolution. I can think of few examples from the history of science that had as much intellectual impact as that. Darwin comes to mind; Einstein and quantum mechanics - probably not as much.

Yeah, I agree, bitmasks are a holdover from the early days of computing. Nowadays, you probably won't see them much outside of C. But C is so deeply ingrained in IT infrastructure that it's not going away any time soon, and even modern languages like Rust have to at least accommodate bit flags, if nothing else then to be able to interface with C APIs.

Most thinking has been at least partially about math, long before numbers were discovered. Consider the calculus needed to throw a spear accurately. — noAxioms

That's not thinking about math. Nobody does calculus when throwing a spear, any more than the spear itself does calculus when it flies through the air, even though one could use calculus to model both (in many different ways).

Pretty much nobody uses binary directly. — Mijin

You would be surprised

H'm. Did he, by any chance, suggest a better term? — Ludwig V

Yes, Kripke suggested "possible states (or histories) of the world" or "possible situations." The latter may seem most vague, but that's for the better, in my opinion. In a model, we consider only relevant possibilities, whereas a metaphysical world is intractably rich in possibilities. A model does not aspire to completeness - only to pragmatic relevance. We stipulate what the model-theoretical "worlds" should be, based on what we expect from the model.

Consider dice, for example. In a 2d6 dice game, there are 11 possible scores in any round (2 - 12). So, if we only care about the score, then there are 11 possible worlds to consider. (Of course, these scores are not all equally likely. One shortcoming of modal logic is that it has nothing to say about probabilities.) If, in addition, we care about combinations, but consider individual dies to be indistinguishable for practical purposes, then the number of possible worlds increases to 18 (36 / 2). If we want to know the outcome on each individual die, then we are stipulating 36 distinct worlds.

But what if the die throw never occurs? Or a die is lost? Or it balances on its corner instead of landing on a side? And what of all the "extraneous" possibilities - the weather conditions, the configurations of air molecules in the room, the possible ways the Battle of Waterloo could have played out, the possible alternative endings to the Game of Thrones series? None of these real (or imaginary) world possibilities need be taken into account. We stipulate what goes into the model and what stays out. And although we cannot effectively control the outcome of a die throw, it will be up to us to translate it into the "actual world" in our model - and that is not always as straightforward as in this toy example.

@Ludwig V

In modal logic, “the actual world” is a designated element of a model, usually called w₀. It is not the metaphysical world, not the planet, not the territory. — Banno

Kripke himself regretted his choice of "worlds" terminology for that very reason: he acknowledged that it invited a conflation of metaphysical worlds with model-theoretical worlds. He blamed this misleading terminology for inspiring modal realism, i.e., thinking of possible worlds as "foreign countries" or "distant planets," which he rejected.

Just finished Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels (My Brilliant Friend, etc.)
Fantastic.

If it is possible that p is true, then this means that either p is true or p is false. So this gives us (p or ~p). But we have asserted that p is true. Therefore (p or ~p) is also true. — EricH

If this is supposed to be an argument for p -> ◇p (if p then possibly p), then it does not work.

Notice that (p or ~p) is a tautology: it is true regardless of the value of p. So, you might think that you could make a parallel argument for ~p -> ◇p (if p is false, then it is possible that p is true). But that is, obviously, not the case, since p could be necessarily false, and therefore not possibly true.

You can't reduce modality to classical non-modal logic. If you want a formal proof of p -> ◇p - well, this is considered to be such a basic modal intuition that it (or an equivalent principle □p -> p) is usually taken as an axiom.

I agree with most of that. I can see that we need to say that the actual is possible - even if that is a bit awkward in some ways. — Ludwig V

Well, I did select a rather awkward quotation for my example - this is Kant, after all, so of course, of all the ways he could have expressed his thought, he did it in the awkwardest way possible (see what I did here?)

There's something wrong with saying that the actual world is possible and something wrong with saying that it is not possible. I am trying to express that by saying that the actual world is not merely possible and that it is different from all the other possible worlds in that respect — Ludwig V

I think that the difficulty here is that in ordinary speech, we are expected to make the strongest warranted assertions. There is even a word in English for failing to do that: understatement. Sometimes, understatement is used intentionally to convey more than what is being literally said, such as sarcasm or playfulness. But when an understatement is unwarranted, it can lead to misunderstanding and even offense. If, when asked what I thought about Ludwig V, I said: "well, he is not a hopeless fool," that would surely be rude and unfair, even if true in a literal sense. But if in a different context I said "Ludwig V is no fool," such an understatement would carry the opposite meaning. Ah, the vicissitudes of language!

All that is to say that the reason we don't usually say that the actual is possible (except as in my examples above) is that it goes without saying - and so it goes unsaid.

That seems to me a bit confusing, because it suggests that the actual world is merely a possible world. Surely one needs to say something to the effect that the actual world is different from all the possible worlds. — Ludwig V

Well, the actual world is either possible or impossible (necessarily not actual) - this is the equivalent of the law of excluded middle in standard modal logic. It would be absurd to maintain that the actual world is impossible, so you are left with the actual world being possible (indeed, this is a theorem in all but the weakest modal logics). And yes, the actual world is different from all the other possible worlds - it is actual!

In informal speech, we sometimes want to put possibility on one side and actuality on the other, as you suggest, but not always. For example: "things, as phenomena, determine space; that is to say, they render it possible that, of all the possible predicates of space (size and relation), certain may belong to reality" (CPR).

Do you think we'll see a true survival show by 2035? Like deathmatches or frantic races?
The participants could be death row inmates, debtors, or the terminally ill, and the action could take place in third-world countries. The technical details aren't so important; what matters is whether modern society is ready for such a show. — Astorre

We already have motorsport, don't we? The incidence of fatal crashes actually used to be much higher than it is now, after safety improvements were implemented (in contradiction to the usual world going to hell in a handbasket sentiment).

There's a fine line here. Rogues are people who break the rules and thus evoke sympathy (something like Jack Sparrow). They remain within the rules themselves. The current conversation isn't about morally black (bad) people, but about morally gray people. That is, those who live entirely outside the good/bad paradigm. The phenomenon I'm talking about has a somewhat different nature. These heroes seem bad, but they are a reflection of us—they're just like us, with everyday problems. And we no longer know whether they're bad or not, or whether we can justify them (because we're all a bit like Walter White). — Astorre

I wasn't talking about black and white characters, either. "Morally gray" characters are nothing new, nor is the critics' hand-wringing over the "moral decline". Again, classic epics are a prime example, but if you want something more recognizable and relatable, look no further than nineteenth century literature - plenty of examples there: Thackeray, Maupassant, etc.

Well, the issue is not new. Homer's heros are no angels, by anyone's measure. Even the otherwise rather prissy Aeneas did a bad thing with Dido, and didn't even get the obligatory Hollywood reckoning for it. Milton could be (and has been!) faulted for the aestheticization of Satan, no less, in his Paradise Lost. On a lighter side, the picaresque genre, which has us delight at roguery, has always been among the most popular, going all the way back to The Golden Ass or Odysseus even. Even the word rogue ("a dishonest, untrustworthy person; scoundrel") has long since acquired the connotation of irresistible attraction.

"Free will" as such doesn't have much of an ordinary use, though, outside of legal contexts. — Pierre-Normand

These exact words may not be used all that commonly in ordinary language, but I think that cognate concepts of freedom and responsibility pervade all our interactions. After all, what does freedom imply? Freedom to act as you will. And how can there be responsibility without freedom?

Anthony Kenny does a very good job in his little book "Freewill and Responsibility" of clarifying the concept in its relations to various categories of mens rea (from strict liabilities, through negligence or recklessness, to specific intent.) This yields a sort of thick compatibilist notion that goes beyond mere freedom from "external" circumstances and extends outside of legal contexts to those of warranted reactive attitudes like praise and blame. In those more ordinary contexts, the question seldom arise of one having acted "of their own free will." We rather ask more ordinary questions like, "could they have done better?" or "is their action excusable?" Something like the Kantian dictum "must implies can" finds its ordinary applications. — Pierre-Normand

Interesting, thanks.

Let me be clear: there are plenty of things we don't understand, or even are entirely speculative, but are perfectly valid concepts.
Free will has not even attained that level yet though. It's self inconsistent, at least in the formulations that I've seen. A reasoned choice that can't be traced to reasons. — Mijin

I don't really understand why you think that. Let me be clear in turn that I think that this is a tenable position (that free will may not be a valid concept, or at least that it has serious problems), but it needs to be supported with honest work. You cannot come to this conclusion simply by picking on some clearly untenable conceptualizations (see, for instance, post above). "Free will" is a thing, so to say - the concept has been in use for a long time, not only in exalted domains of philosophy and theology, but also in common parlance and in specialized secular domains, such as law. Do philosophical accounts of free will that you criticize accurately capture the concept of free will? This question needs to be answered before making sweeping conclusions.

Is that at me? WTH? — Mijin

Sorry, my reference to derailment was, of course, with respect to the OP. You are as guilty of it as I am, but I am not blaming you in this case (just don't do that to my topics :joke:)

In time for COP30, New York Times published some nice charts that show 10 big things that have happened on the climate front in the last decade:

10 Years After a Breakthrough Climate Pact, Here’s Where We Are

1. Emissions are still rising, but not as fast as they were.
2. The last 10 years were the hottest on record.
3. Solar is spreading faster than we thought it would.
4. Electric vehicles are now normal.
5. Rich countries have put relatively little money on the table. (@unenlightened Meanwhile, some of the poorest countries are getting clobbered by extreme weather. They’re falling deeper into debt as they try to recover.)
6. Coal is in a weird place.
7. Natural gas, a planet-warming fossil fuel, is ascendant thanks to America.
8. Forests are losing their climate superpower.
9. Corals are bleaching more often.
10. U.S. electricity demand is soaring, in part because of A.I.

#7 is somewhat misleading. The chart shows LNG production, with USA leading the pack. LNG currently accounts for about 11% of gas production worldwide, although its share is projected to increase to 18% by 2030, mainly thanks to the US.

The core of the disagreement seems to be whether straightening up the popular and intuitive concept of free will amounts to a minor revision (which I think it does, like Dennett,) or to a wholesale replacement (like Harris thinks it does). — Pierre-Normand

I am not even certain that we should be talking about revision here. That Harris's concept of free will is out of touch with its common meaning is obvious. It is less obvious in the case of Dennett. The trouble is that when people are confronted head-on with the question of what free will is, their conceptualizations may not align with how they actually understand and use the concept. I think the project should begin with the study of the meaning or meanings (qua use), and only then can we proceed to critique and revision.

1. The concept usually gets framed first around Determinism. The reasoning is that, if the universe is Deterministic I might think I chose coffee or tea, but actually that choice was predictable from the big bang. I only had the illusion of choice.
Fine.

2. Then, when it's pointed out that the universe may well not be determinstic, thanks to quantum indeterminancy, this is usually handwaved away. How can randomness be called choice?

3. But to me, (1) and (2) combined leave a bad smell. In (1) it seemed that the issue was with our decisions being predictable, being integrated in the causal chain of events. When the suggestion (2) arrives that this may not be the case, apparently it's still insufficient to have free will.
So, to me, at this point we should be asking What exactly do we mean by free will, and is it something which could even potentially exist? — Mijin

I rather think you should begin by asking the bolded question. You may even find that the question of determinism vs indeterminism isn't as relevant to free will as all that, belying your first and second points. In any case, these first two points prompt the conclusion that free will is impossible, not that it is meaningless.

The popular "Could have chosen differently" is quite a woolly definition. Every reasoned action I've made in my life I did for reasons, that I could have told you at the time. And some of those reasons were more important to me than others. When we talk about "could have chosen differently" what do we mean in this picture -- that I could have been aware of different things, or would value different things more highly? But these things can also be traced to events / properties external to me. — Mijin

You seem to be conflating the two main criteria of free will: alternative possibilities and agency (ownership of decisions). In any case, I think you are right to question the meaning of at least the first of these (you should also question the second). They aren't necessarily as straightforward and literal as they may first appear.


NB: I wouldn't normally derail a thread like this, but seeing that this is yet another pathetic attempt at self-promotion by one of our resident crackpots, I have no regrets.

A reasoned choice is the product of reasoning: the product of (knowledge of) past events and individual predilections: both of which can be traced to causes outside of the self. — Mijin

Is this why you think that the concept of free will is incoherent? Why?

I noticed that the term "Law (of Nature)" is misleading in your otherwise logically sound post. The term itself comes from 17th-century theology and jurisprudence (Descartes, Newton), when the world was seen as a divine code. But nature doesn't prescribe—it occurs. The term "Law (of Nature)" seems like a linguistic artifact. A more accurate expression would be "stable regularities of the physical world" or simply "physical invariants." — Astorre

The OP is not worth commenting on, but I just want to note that to this day, the existence and the nature, as it were, of the laws of nature are debated. Humean regularity view is not universally accepted; there are also essentialist and dispositional views. Metaphysics aside, even more basic questions, such as what is lawful vs. accidental, are frustratingly hard to settle.

Do we need to analyze thoughts in terms of causation? — SophistiCat


To this, I'd say no, we don't. I'm quite open to other hypotheses about the "relations," "affinities," "influences," "associations," et al. among thoughts. The only line I'd draw in the sand would be: We mustn't talk as if we already understand this issue, or as if there is no issue. — J

To clarify, my question was not rhetorical. Where I was going with this is that causal analysis is a choice that we make, and so is the form that it takes. We shouldn't presuppose that causation is there, and we just need to elucidate it, or if it turns out that causation is absent, then we are in trouble (epiphenomenalism!)

That said, we need a proper motivation to look for causation. The place to start would probably be the field of psychology (less so philosophy of mind, for that is where idle and wrongheaded questions often originate...) Does mental-to-mental causation figure in psychology - as distinct from reason or explanation (informally, those words are often used interchangeably)?

As for the type of causation, perhaps inferential causation would be more promising in this context, since it is quite loose (being a spiritual descendant of Humean regularity theory) and does not rely on any physicalist ontology, such as energy.

I think the topic should be:
How Does a Thought Cause Another Thought? — Patterner

Before asking this question, or @J's original question (Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?), I think we should ask ourselves: Do we need to analyze thoughts in terms of causation? Because so far, this discussion looks to me like a solution in search of a problem.

Ned Rorem's violin concerto is a recent discovery for me. It is featured on this recording with Gidon Kremer and Leonard Bernstein, together with Philip Glass violin concerto and Bernstein's Symposium:



Rorem is better known for his songs. Here is a beautiful selection sung by Susan Graham: