When we say we've experienced X, we're saying that the world would have to be in state X in order for our perceptual systems to be functioning properly. This is what language use about experience means. — frank

I've experienced joy and pain.

Oh cool, I didn't notice accepted answers were a thing now.

But what on earth is constituting extension from unextended elements with respect to geneticists in 1940's-ish France? — Moliere

I think the link you found is a good clue. Sartre no doubt inherited the French anti-Mendelian sentiment of the time. One strain of that argument may have been: how can you get from the mere notion of genes, which had no known, and perhaps no conceivable, physical mechanism, to the concrete, physical features the traits supposedly correspond to? There was a gap, perhaps a reversal of today's gap in the hard problem: instead of an impossible leap from physical neurons to non-physical qualia, we have a leap from non-physical genes to physical traits.

Similarly, Sartre seems to say, how can we bridge the gap between present elements, such as artifacts, or memories encoded in neurons, to the past as such? We can no more arrive at the past by accumulating present artifacts than we can arrive at physical traits by accumulating or manipulating non-physical genes.

I believe this is also how we should see some mathematical truths, e.g. 2+2=4 is true. — Sam26

The rules of chess do not describe the truths of reality in the same way that "water freezes at 32 degrees F" does. Instead, they constitute the very framework within which true and false (correct and incorrect) can be assessed. — Sam26

But 2+2=4 is not arbitrary in the way that "bishops move diagonally" is.

Or rather, 2+2=4 follows the rules of adding in the same way that a diagonal bishop move follows the rules of chess. But the rules of adding are not mere convention, they capture some sort of truth that has not been stipulated into being, like the rules of chess were.

Now that the fever dream of fiction has broken, I'm getting into the idea. I think I have a topic picked out already.

But individual animals, planets, etc. make good examples of multitudes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But even these examples are not clean.

When counting cats in the room, are you counting that wildcat? This cat is pregnant, are you counting its unborn fetuses?

When you are counting animals in the room, are you counting the insects? The gut bacteria? The mitochondria? Yourself?

When you are counting planets, are you counting moons? Planetoids? Asteroids?

The reason these are not clean is that categories like "cat", "animal", "planet" are not found in nature. They are invented, not discovered. Which is not to say they are not meaningful. Because categories are subjective creations does not mean they are whimsically chosen. They sometimes have deep ontological bases (i.e. life vs. non-life), and they sometimes do not (i.e. racial categories).

The whole crux of the problem as I see it is that while numbering entails categorization which is a subjective act, numbers nonetheless have very objective properties.

One can account for this by understanding commissive speech acts. — Banno

You probably mean declarative speech acts. Commissive acts commit the speaker, declarative acts declare things to be so. But this seems to overemphasize speech. Everyone alive was born into a world where the rules of chess and counting were already well established. They are social practices that don't require speech acts to bring them into being.

But suppose they did. Suppose you were defining chess for the first time. The speech acts would specify how the game works. But it seems odd to say that the logic of the game, and all its implications (i.e. the value of the pieces) was somehow contained in the speech. The speech specifies the rules. But the rules are not themselves speech, or language in general.

IDK, something about a cat or a dog seems to strongly suggest that it is a single cat or dog; I am not sure how much "choice" we have in the matter. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course, there is ample choice. You can count dogs, mammals, retrievers, brown animals, sick animals, etc. The choice of what counts as a numeric unit is fairly arbitrary.

The "All in one's head" model is a thing known to physically exist. — Mark Nyquist

I'm afraid this does not do the work you need it to do, nor can you bat the ball back to my court so easily. How do you respond to my reasons that numbers can't just be "all in one's head"?

And numbers just as non-physical abstractions doesn't have an explanation.
Give it a try if that's your position. — Mark Nyquist

Think of chess. This is an arbitrary game, with arbitrary rules that exist in our collective heads. It is well known in chess that a bishop is worth 3x a pawn and 1/3 a queen. Impressively, this was known well before computers made it conclusive. Yet, you will never find this in the rules of chess, it was never in anyone's head before it was discovered. How can this be? I think of the rules of chess as creating a "logical landscape", and facts can be discovered in such a landscape that were never in anyone's head. This, despite the rules of chess being 100% arbitrary, having no connection to the actual universe.

Numbers are such a thing. They also have rules which create a logical landscape, about which things can be discovered which were never in anyone's head. But unlike chess, the rules of numbers are intimately tied to the way things actually work in the universe. If you have one unit, and combine it with another unit, you get two units, no matter how you define what a unit consists of. So long as the definition of unit is consistent, this works for anything across space and time.

I don't think this is an answer in itself, and I'm no mathematician. I'm just trying to convey my intuition on how the problem can be thought about, without resorting to "all in the head", and without resorting to mystical Platonic essences...

Beware of serious babble on this thread. :roll: — jgill

:grimace:

So platonism is the idea abstractions exist.
I don't see how abstractions as non-physicals can exist. If they are non-physical they don't exist. What is the alternative? — Mark Nyquist

It seems the thread has drifted well away from the main topic. I'm more interested in that.

This approach doesn't work, I think for at least two reasons.

If numbers are just abstractions, how do you distinguish "3" from "The second even prime". The first "exists", the second doesn't. What distinguishes these two abstractions?

Second, how do you account for numeric laws? If numbers were all in the head, how are laws discovered that were most certainly not in anyone's head until they were discovered?

This doesn't seem to accord with typical uses of 'cause'. Without oxygen in my room, I couldn't write this reply. But oxygen did not cause me to write it.

To me, this becomes more interesting with a single topic everyone writes about, i.e. "Imagination". That would differentiate it from the everyday TPF activities: every writer deeply engages with the same topic, and only after everyone has written do they come together and discuss each other's take. It would be interesting to see how varied everyone's approach is, and how much richness there really is in the topic.

Otherwise, my worry is that the outcome would effectively be a bunch of long TPF posts, without much mutual interest and engagement.

We could propose different topics, and then have a vote.

The distinction "exists" picks out is that between things that are more than just ideas, vs. ideas. Things that are only ideas do not exist, that is the meaning of "exists". Numbers exist, because they are more than the idea of them. Or subsist, if you like.

My take on this is that chess and math are performed by the part of the brain that does the generic computation. The slow part, the part you are keenly aware of as you laboriously work through a problem.

Chess and math are indeed far less complex than say motion and perception and language. Those things would be totally overwhelming to us if we had to consciously think them through. The brain is furnished with special purpose machinery that handles those things, and we have no conscious access to the workings of those parts of the brain, only to their results.

When a computer performs a task done by our slow brains, it can excel. Taking on a task done by our fast brains is far more formidable, and the breakthroughs for those things happened only recently.

Even now, nearly 40 years after Moravec’s observation, robots tend to look like bumbling fools wherever they mimic other behaviors, even if they could still school the best of us at chess and math. — NOS4A2

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zS6vNNW5bEo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAG_FBZJVJ8&pp=ygUHI2JvdGRvZw%3D%3D
https://chatgpt.com/

I have an instinctual aversion to analytic philosophy and the general notion that a man who stares at words and symbols all day can afford me a higher value to my education or the pursuit of wisdom than, say, an athlete or shop teacher, or anyone else who prefers to deal with things outside of themselves. — NOS4A2

And yet, 9.3k and counting.

Suicide is wrong because it destroys something that has value. Things have value because they are valued. When something valued is destroyed, the valuer is harmed. Suicide is therefore wrong because it harms the beings that value the suicidal.

The beings that value the suicidal may include friends, relatives, loved ones, and they may also include the future selves of the suicidal. Perspectives change, even if the present suicidal doesn't value their life, their future selves might. If you ever enjoyed your life, you owe that enjoyment to the fact that all of your past selves chose not to kill themselves. Had just one of them done so, they would have stolen that enjoyment from you.

Future selves are just as worthy of protection as present selves. Giving someone poison that kills them in a month is just as wrong as poison that kills immediately, even though the time delayed poison only kills a future self.

Desire for pleasures only applies if you are alive, if you die there is no need for any of that. Same with love, friendship, food, money, etc. — Darkneos

But you are alive, not dead, so you desire at least one of these. Killing yourself permanently frustrates all of the desires you had at the moment you died, and all the desires you would have had in the future.

I would move it. The thread seems more significant than the vast majority of mainline threads here; it reveals a huge landmine in propositional logic that I'm sure most aren't aware of (I sure wasn't), and is relevant to lots of other threads.

This does not belong in the lounge. This is a paradox that rest on a tricky difference between conditionals in language and conditionals in logic. The takeaway is, you have to be very careful translating language to logic, and very suspicious when others do so.

"If there is no God then it is not the case that if I pray then my prayers are answered" seems true. It seems true based on an everyday sense of "if then" by which a conditional may be false when its antecedent is false.

But the inference "If there is no God then it is not the case that if I pray then my prayers are answered, and I do not pray, therefore there is a God" is valid based on a different sense of "if then" by which a conditional is false if and only if its antecedent is true and its consequent is false. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I think this gets it right. There is simply no way to express the "everyday conditional" in propositional logic. I would call it the "real conditional"; it is what we actually mean by "if A then B". We certainly never mean A -> B, which is true whenever A is false. "If I were a billionaire I would grow 3 feet taller" is true in propositional logic, and clearly false in language.

The problem with the "everyday" or "real" conditional (given here by ↠) is that it doesn't have a resolvable truth table (its truth is not determinable by the truth of its arguments alone):

A B A↠B
F F ?
F T ?
T F F
T T ?

Only in one combination does A↠B have a determinate truth value. Any logic that incorporated it would also have to incorporate indeterminate truth values. (Not a hard thing to do at all, it would probably be an interesting exercise for another post).

I think it's more addressing that these mean different things:

1. ¬(P→A)
2. P→¬A — Michael

The problem is that 2 does not express what the statement is saying either, which is that there is no relationship between praying and having the prayer answered. Note that "answering a prayer" here does not mean that God's fiery hand descends from the heavens, it means that whatever is prayed for comes to pass. If you pray for something, it might come to pass, or it might not. But if it does, the prayer would have had nothing to do with it. In terms of a truth table:

P A ¬(P↠A)
F F ?
F T ?
T F T
T T ?

But the metaphysical naturalism of the physicalist posits that as the universe must behave in a law-like manner, i.e. in a way which is replicable and predictive (in principle if not in practice), anything we encounter in the universe that does not seem to behave so, must despite appearances, ultimately do so by virtue of its very existence. — Baden

Is it not thereby falsifiable, or at least made progressively more unlikely? At some point we might encounter a phenomenon whose behavior we despair of ever fitting a law like framework around. For instance, suppose beings seen in supernatural horror movies became commonly observed. Their seeming ability to bend reality to their will would pose a stark challenge to physicalism. Of course science would attempt to meet that challenge, and some movies will introduce an ersatz set of laws into their world, explaining their ghosts in a way that is supposed to satisfy our physicalist intuitions (but seldom successfully). But, science may simply fail to do so, especially if, as a matter of fact, no such laws existed.

Physicalism is the conviction that empirical phenomenon are determined(not necessarily deterministically) by physical laws (what that means is not clear, granted). This may not be the case.

From a little bit of searching, I'm satisfied - and surprised - that the words themselves are so loosely defined and used that no argument over just the words can prosper either side — tim wood

Really all that needs be said.

What do you say an investment is, what "investment" means in a financial context, then we can consider whether gold is an investment. — tim wood

An investment is something you purchase not to make use of, but with the hope it will make you money passively, just by owning it. This can come from appreciation in price over time, or from income in the form or rent or dividends, or both.

I don't agree, I think most people consider gold to be an investment. Nor do I agree with this distinction between speculation and investment. Every investment involves a speculative calculation, which involves undertaking more or less risk.

What I think they missed is there is no there, there in any currency.

Maybe there is for national currencies. That topic is above my pay grade.

But for, say, gold? Where is the intrinsic value of gold?

They were saying that when the crypto market cap was much much smaller, and they were much less institutionally entrenched than they are now. By any measure, they were wrong, the annoying zoomer enthusiasts were right all along.

When it comes to paradigm shifts like this, the intuition of an uneducated kid might count for more than an old investing past master.

Now if your simple idea of the value coming from "scarcity" be right — ssu

Is that what you think you are arguing against? The second sentence in my op:

It is a given that scarcity alone is not value, scarcity is a necessary but insufficient condition of value. — hypericin

You say

money doesn't work that way. It's not about scarcity, it's money moving in the economy and being used to buy stuff. — ssu

And yet in the quantity theory of money graphic you posted, both scarcity (money supply) and velocity determine price. I agree with the graphic.

Now if your simple idea of the value coming from "scarcity" be right, the a tenfold increase in Fed assets and the tripling+ of the M2 monetary base would have severe inflationary effects. Well, the annual inflation rate between 2003 and 2024 has been 2,59% annually. — ssu

This increase in supply does not sit stagnant like you suggest. It is invested in the stock market, in real estate, and other assets. If you measure inflation by the cost of goods you need to survive, inflation might actually be 2.59. If you measure by your ability to buy a house, inflation is quite a bit higher.

You see, the value of the dollar only goes down if that 100 trillion enters the economic system. Only then it will drive up prices and thus lowers the value of the currency. But as you have only had the time to buy a Ferrari and fifty boxes of Champagne before forgetting just where you parked the money, your actions haven't crashed the dollar. — ssu

I don't think so. Of course in reality this loan would have been flagged instantly. If this titanic mistake was somehow made, quintupling the total money supply in an instant, the dollar would crash. All confidence in the government's competence to maintain the scarcity of the dollar would be lost. The mere threat that the 100 trillion might be discovered and enter circulation would crash the dollar. Whether or not it ever actually does.

It's not just actual circulating money that matters. Perception also matters. Just imagine that the Fed announced that they were stimulating the economy by printing 100 trillion dollars. The dollar would absolutely tank, as everyone would try to unload them all at once. But then the Fed announces it was just an April Fools joke. The dollar tanked, yet not a extra single actual additional dollar entered circulation.

Hence if there's 100 trillion in some obscure derivatives market, that amount won't wreck the price of the dollar... as long as those 100 trillion stay in the obscure derivatives market! — ssu

That is not how it works. Some obscure derivatives market might have a market cap of 100 trillion. But that money can't actually be accessed. Only a fraction of it can. For the money to be accessed, the derivative must be sold. Selling en masse would crash the market for the derivative, evaporating the 100 trillion. .

Moreover, for a derivative to be sold, it must be exchanged for dollars. If the derivative is notionally more valuable than all the dollars in existence, where would the additional dollars come from?

The means of exchange probably needs to have some kind of )inherent value, such as gold has. — Leontiskos

Gold has some "inherent value" (as problematic as that is) but that (decoration, electronics) has little relation to it's value, the bulk of which derives from it's status as a store of value. Cryptos have acquired this status (during which process it is possible to become rich), like it or not.

. But with a few pushes on a computer, they could make tomorrow 100 trillion dollars. — ssu

What matters is not "actual" scarcity but perception of scarcity. If the belief spread that they might do this, the value of the dollar would plummet to 0, due to the belief in an imminent loss of scarcity.

How could that be scarcity in the meaning that we usually understand it? — ssu

Despite that, people labor long hours performing unpleasant tasks to acquire a few dollars. No one would spend a third or more if their waking time working if dollars were not scarse: that is, if they could be gathered on trees , or printed on a printer.

The common problem money printing creates isn't necessarily a lack of scarcity, but a lack of value stability. — Tzeentch

Loss of "value stability"(that is, decline) happens in proportion to loss of scarcity and loss of confidence in future scarcity.

People's perception of the longevity and value of the currency, I suppose. — Tzeentch

Sure. It was this basic feeling that kept me and most of us from being early investors. And it is this doubt that combined with greed makes the price so volatile.

If people think something is valuable and are willing to buy it, it's valuable. — ssu

They are willing to buy to the degree it is scarce. As I said scarcity is a necessary but insufficient condition for value.

What does "trustworthy" mean here?

At first I agreed with this 100% and this is certainly the traditional view, but then I remembered the sudden rise in dogecoin's value which is the furthest thing from scarce. — BitconnectCarlos

No, even dogecoin is scarce. Unlike Bitcoin it is inflationary, there is no cap on the total supply. But dogecoin must still be "mined", it cannot be otherwise created or found. Just as there is no cap on the usd that will ultimately be created. But that creation is still tightly controlled, creating scarcity.

All cryptocurrency, at least all that is valuable, is scarce.

Language befuddles us as philosophers because we invest into language more than what language actually is, which is a tool for thinking, creating, and communicating. Language is a cultural and biological artifact. But because all of our thoughts are linguistic, to us words appear elemental. It then becomes the seemingly natural task of philosophy to decide the nature of these elementals of thought.

If you look at the epistemic JTB account for knowledge as a justified true belief, it means that the overwhelmingly vast majority of true beliefs are ineffable and cannot possibly be justified. — Tarskian

They are ineffable, so they have no opportunity to be beliefs at all, and therefore no occasion to be justified.

Ineffable truths are never believed. And I guess, numerically, most truths are ineffable. But all of these ineffable truths seem quite irrelevant too.

What is one example of a subset of the natural numbers that cannot be expressed by language?

Also note that mathematical notation is a kind of extension to the natural languages.

But I do think that at a certain point repression can become indiscriminate insofar as totalitarian regimes go, almost to the point of doing it for its own sake, i.e. I don't think every suppressive law in North Korea, for instance, is a cog in some intricate machine that operates totally efficiently and always in a directed manner to serve a greater purpose. — ToothyMaw

No, it is never that, never 4d chess. 4d chess is almost always the wrong answer.

I think the idea is always "stability", where "stability" is implicitly or explicitly the perpetuation of the ruling regime. They achieve this by repression, by squelching any possible threat. And they might do this crudely, stupidly, without regard to human cost.

Ahh, "directly". Just great. So what can your voice directly do then? — NOS4A2

Also "immediate cause" or "proximate cause".
My voice directly stimulates cochlea, or a electronic sensor.

By your "metaphysics", a twitch of an index finger never killed anyone, nor usually a gun, but only bullets. So nothing to fear from someone with a gun.

No, I don’t quibble much in everyday conversation. I would say, “yes, I turned the lights off”. — NOS4A2

But you quibble here?

Why is your metaphysics "quibbling" in one context, but in the more important context of misinformation it is somehow relevant?

If the metaphysics were sound maybe that would be one thing. But it is not. You are confusing "cause" with "direct cause". My voice cannot directly turn off the lights. But it can still turn off the lights with Alexa.

To the extent ignorance is "enslavement", it is an enslavement imposed on oneself (assuming free access to information). While deception is "enslavement" imposed by an other.

But of course the topic is not mere deception, but disinformation, which is deception on an industrial scale.

Actually all air vibrations, including non-speech, are transduced into electrical energy in modern smart-home systems. In the case of speech recognition It is the software that filters out the speech from the non-speech sounds. So the speech has no more causal power than any other sound. — NOS4A2

So the speech, which caused the electrical signal that the software passed and interpreted, did not cause the lights to turn off? The software did? Or the electrical energy did?

If you are at someone's home, and say "Alexa, lights off" or whatever, and the host asks you why you turned off the lights, you answer "I didn't turn them off. The electrical energy did!"

Can you see why this is either a joke or sophomoric nonsense?

I do have a problem with that. The consequences of speech, for instance, is air and sound coming out of the mouth. To be fair, I'm willing to subject myself to a test if you wish to promote your harm theory. Let's see which injuries you can inflict on me with your speech. — NOS4A2

That speech has casual power beyond air vibrations is trivially obvious. Smart home systems are a clear modern example. Or, train a child to believe X, and that child will likely believe X, with all the consequences belief X entails.

It is up to you to demonstrate why speech in the case of misinformation is somehow not casual. I don't like your chances.

Ownership is a triadic relationship between owner, owned, and society that ratifies the ownership.

Between owner and owned, we think and behave differently with things we own than with things we don't. We use them as we please, exploit them, care for them, discard them. They bring us pride, or shame. We attach them to our identities like medals on our breast.

Society sanctions and enforces this special relationship. Enforcement includes shame and loss of social status, financial penalty, confinement, and violence. One of the jobs of parents is to instill the concept of ownership, and mete out (hopefully far less severe) punishments for violating it.

Without this social system underwriting ownership, it would exist only in the owner's mind, and so would be unreal. Because of our training, we implicitly understand our special perquisites with our belongings, and generally have a healthy respect of other's. We attach moral significance to the concept of ownership, and violate it at our peril.

I think you are mostly right, but usually when such laws are created in repressive societies, it isn't to fight the kind of edge case I describe above, but rather to repress for repression's sake or to enable authoritarian rule. — ToothyMaw

You don't repress for repressions sake. The above is not an edge case, it is the main case. They might brand the governments collusion with the neo Nazis as misinformation, or criticism of the neo Nazis themselves. Whilst their political opponents receive no such protection from the misinformation laws, the government itself would probably be an organ for spreading Disinformation about them.

dis

Thus, I think that the intent behind the implementation of such laws is probably a somewhat decent indicator of whether or not they will be easily abused; — ToothyMaw

Intent matters only because a government with bad intent will write the law such that it can be exploited by them. While a more benevolent government would take more care to add safeguards.