We have no reason to think that they don't compute when we close our eyes, but we have no reason to think that they do either, without some sort of inferential argument. Having no reason to think that it is false that X is not a reason to think that it is true that X. — PossibleAaran

But we do have cases where we open our eyes and see that the laptop is frozen up instead of delivering a result. So we have different possible scenarios upon opening our eyes:

The laptop displays a finished computation.

The laptop is frozen up.

The laptop is out of power.

The laptop has overheated.

The laptop is gone!

And so on. Brutely speaking, we can't say why any of the above happened. We open our eyes, and there's a new experience to be had. But we can provide realist explanations. The laptop is gone because someone else took advantage while our eyes were closed. Perhaps philosophical skepticism at a busy bus stop is a bad idea.

Now I don't deny that many people have things to do of a more consequential nature. If you are concerned with getting food for the starving, protecting the rainforest, saving endangered species or lessening terrorism then this kind of scepticism might seem abstract and useless. But I think if this sort of scepticism is right it teaches something very important. — PossibleAaran

If I took the skepticism about the unperceived world seriously, then wouldn't I doubt whether those issues even exist when I'm not perceiving them? As long as I'm not perceiving starving kids in Africa, terrorist cells, or the rainforest being cut down, then why should they be of any consequence? For all I know, they only exist when they come into view.

Maybe the better approach would be just to avoid seeing those issues so as to keep them nonexistent, if esse is percipi.

Heisenberg has holed that idea beneath the waterline, but most people seem to believe that it's still true. It's just that hardly anyone has caught up yet. — Wayfarer

Even if Laplace had been right, wouldn't Wolfram have dragged the idea underwater? What good is a single equation unless you can compute the result? And when it comes to the universe, you have to run the entire thing to see what happens.

Why do you think the Modern World is so weird? — Wayfarer

Because people think a reality tv show host would make for a good president?

But really, where the white coats saying the ultimate truth was only atoms in the void before the bubble chambers? You still have to deal with all those composite objects and events.

There is still a possible/impossible distinction though. But is there, really? If "an event A is impossible" means for you that you should live your life as though A will never happen, then events with an extremely low probability are as good as impossible. You live your life assuming that the air will not suddenly evacuate the room through the window, leaving you choking on the floor, even though science says that such an event is possible (and even has a well-defined, finite probability!) — SophistiCat

Right, but if we're thinking about the universe at large, then all these low probability events could be happening elsewhere, assuming a large enough universe. There would even be worlds where the low probability events are common, and assuming anything intelligent can manage to survive long enough there, it might come to a different conclusion about how low those probabilities are.

In an infinite universe, aren't we almost surely guaranteed a world where our doppelgangers walk through walls (the molecules align just right) after saying an incantation? Maybe doppleganger Jesus really did take a stroll on the water.

But all that fundamental physics stuff still turns into a mostly classical world at our size.

So I really don't buy this 'deflationary' account of mathematical ability, nor do I think it is something that can be profitably analysed through the lense of evolutionary biology or cultural history. — Wayfarer

I really do wonder about math. Tegmark has said that all physical properties are mathematical. Leaving aside consciousness and how we experience the world, it is a very deep question as to what isn't mathematical about the fundamental stuff that makes up everything else, like electrons and quantum fields. The fact that they exist? That they have spatial & temporal extension of some sort?

The poor whites & blacks have common cause, but they haven't worked together to better themselves because the rich white dudes who started modern racism didn't want to have to pay the poor white folk to work their land. But they convinced the poor whites it was the black man they should be afraid of.

It's not complicated: The United States has a long history of a very conservative politics based on protecting and promoting the prerogatives of private wealth, private enterprise, suppression of social dissent, anti-black, — Bitter Crank

The interesting thing is that black churches in the US tend to hold conservative religious views similar to those of white evangelicals, outside of racial issues.

It seems to me that the evil demon hypothesis or one where reality is just a program running on a computer are metaphysically equivalent to realism as long as we can never step outside the universe/program/demon's imagination to see what is really going on. — T Clark

Since we can't step outside, there's no reason to suppose we're inside a simulation. It's merely a philosophical exercise in what sort of wild scenarios we can imagine which aren't incompatible with our experiences. Brains in vats, evil demons, computer simulations, God's dreaming are flights of fancy. Something being merely possible isn't saying much. Maybe a cosmic unicorn farted and started the Big Bang.

If Morpheus, Neo, and the crew had never escaped the Matrix, could never escape it, what difference would it have made that it existed? — T Clark

You're asking this question by starting out saying the Matrix exists. We're not in a situation were we can do that. We can only imagine the possibility.

But to answer your question, it would matter when the machines decided to shut down the Matrix, or something happened to them such that the power could no longer be maintained, or a meteor struck the heart of Machine Ciy.

Anyway, the point is that realism doesn't require stretching the imagination like that. It can just borrow from science and experience.

Plainly, as you and I have been debating basically the same question for about 6 years. — Wayfarer

Yeah, but you're not nearly as frustrating as Landru, no offense.

Sure, but I consider that a good reason.

My eyes are open at time T1 and I see that a laptop is in state X. I close my eyes and reopen them at T2 and I see that a laptop is in state Y. It is a Realistic bias to interpret this by saying that 'it looks like something happened when I wasn't looking'. Neither what I see at T1, nor what I see at T2, yields this information. So what explains the fact that I see something different each time? It could be that there is no explanation. — PossibleAaran

The problem with this is that we understand computation to be a process. The laptop at T2 can't complete a computation without having undergone the process of computing starting at T1.

You're right that it is an inference, when we bother to philosophize about it, but it's also the common sense view we all have on a daily basis. We don't really think there are different objects every time we close and open our eyes. We just think it's one object that we don't see when our eyes are closed.

But given that we're doing philosophy, a strong reason to trust the realist inference is because when we do watch our laptops, they undergo a process of computation from one state to the next. So we have no reason to think they don't just because we've closed our eyes.

If we adopt that form of skepticism, we might as well say the entire universe and everyone else disappears the moment we shut our eyes. That it only appears things continued on without us when we open our eyes back up.

didn’t all philosophy start off as direct realism? — Wayfarer

I don't know, but it's the default naive view people have. It would seem as if we're looking out at the world through the windows of our eyes. Of course it's not that kind of direct.

But then again, philosophers tend to get rather hung up on vision, which might be a tad misleading. We do have other senses and ways of interacting with the world. Not everything is a visual metaphor.

I don't like the term "naive realism" when applied to philosophical direct realism, because of course philosophers defending direct realism are aware of the criticisms and the biological underpinning for how our senses actually work.

It seems to be, then, that we can't have particles without fields, but that we also can't have fields without particles. To that extent, it wouldn't make sense to say that either is primary. — Blurred

Sure, whatever happens to be the case.

But what makes it more likely? There are many alternative hypotheses which explain the observable data, and I'm sure you are familiar with them. The dream hypothesis. The evil demon hypothesis. Etc. What makes these worse off than Realism? — PossibleAaran

The dream hypothesis fails because dreams are not like waking experience. The evil demon hypothesis has nothing empirical in its favor, unlike laptops and trees and what not. We can't infer an evil demon, a simulation, or being a brain in a vat from what is perceived. But we can infer a physical world. The laptop performs the computation when you close it's eyes because it's still there. Simple as that.

Let's say your laptop is performing some computation that you can't carry out in your mind. You close your eyes and when you open them, the laptop has an answer for you. How did it compute that answer while it no longer existed?

We can make the thought experiment more involved. Let's say your survival depends on the laptop performing some computation. If it fails to when you close your eyes, then a bomb goes off, killing you. You close your eyes. No laptop, no bomb, except for that ticking sound.

That's why idealism is silly. You either end up with an extremely gappy world in between perception where events somehow still appeared to have happened, or you have to invoke something like God to keep the laptop and everything else in existence. We know what Berkeley opted for.

ut now suppose I close my eyes. I am in this room alone at present. Is there still a laptop there even though no one is perceiving it any longer? If I am a Realist, I want to say 'obviously yes', but by what reliable method can I sensibly believe that? — PossibleAaran

When you close your eyes, is the room still there? The floor beneath your feet? The Earth hurtling around the Sun? Radiation from the sun keeping the atmosphere warm? Is anyone or anything there? Or just what you feel or hear or smell when you close your eyes? Does the back of your head even exist when you're not seeing it in a mirror?

Does it all come back just because you opened your eyes? Do things only exist for you as you perceive them? Does the starlight and dinosaur bones and tombstones and picture of your birth only exist when you look at them? Does whatever is causing that smell only exist when you finally see or touch it?

You can adopt that form of skepticism just like you could argue that we can't know everything popped into existence five minutes ago with the appearance of age and memories intact. And to use Russell, you could also say there is a giant orbiting teapot. But what's the point of that sort of skepticism? To demonstrate that you can be a doubting Descartes?

The much more likely answer is that our perceptions are possible because there exists an entire world full of people, objects and events to perceive that persists over time. That world is primary, not our perceptions of it.

According to an early Bertrand Russell, Scepticism arises because of the veil of perception. What we are aware of in sense perception is an image or 'sense datum', which only exists whilst we are aware of it. If this is so, we are never aware of physical objects - since these are supposed to exist independently of us. Since no one has ever seen a physical object before, but only an image of one in the mind, how does anyone know that there is a physical object which is like the image? On the empiricist assumption that our basic reliable belief forming methods are sense perception and inference, if we cannot infer physical objects from sense data, we cannot establish their existence by any reliable means. (Notice that I put this point in terms of reliability and not knowledge. This is to illustrate that you cannot escape the sort of scepticism Russell faced just by defining 'knowledge' as 'reliably produced true belief', as some philosophers have done. — PossibleAaran

Or one could attack the veil of perception and the notion that we perceive sense datum instead of the objects themselves. Direct realism has an easy answer to external world skepticism. It denies the starting point for getting skepticism off the ground. And you don't need idealism as an answer to skepticism if we're already perceiving physical objects, obviously.

The difficulty for direct realism is accounting for various aspects of perception and experience that led to skepticism in the first place. But this effort has continued to the present day. Direct realism is defended by some modern philosophers. It was never actually defeated, just called into serious question.

Do I know what quantum fields mean as a physicist? No. I don't understand the math at all, nor the experiments. Just some of the lay explanations.

But I mean ontologically the way the Greek atomists thought it was atoms and the void.

I wonder if that's what charleton means, then. Data streams are ontologically primary, and all other things (brains, hands, trees, etc.) are emergent phenomena. — Michael

Possibly. I don't know what it would mean for data streams to be primary. Streams of data according to whom?

I don't think it makes sense to say it's anything all the way down.

But something is ontologically primary. Maybe quantum fields is a good guess or approximation?

Anyway, whatever else exists is made up of the primary stuff, be it quantum fields or what have you. So it would be society then brains/biology, then chemistry, then physics, or however one wishes to do the reduction.

It's data streams all the way down, dreaming of being turtles.

Saying that we were "designed" like a car or an alarm clock sounds strange. Yet, apparently it is a joy for some people to say that about themselves. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

What about designed like a replicant in the Blade Runner movies, or Data on Star Trek?

Why should feet or breath stink? Why does male pattern baldness exist? What about anti-aging and anti-cancer genes?

I'd like to be more naturally athletic. Like a tiger, or at least, Lebron James. Why can't I just turn pain off? Or desire, when it's inconvenient or inappropriate? Or for that matter, emotion. Why must I be subject to them?

And so on.

. Neither participant was a victim. If no others had been present it would be hard to find anything to complain about. But others were present, so there were other potential victims. — andrewk

I understand the point you're making with the rest of your post, but calling someone a victim because they might have heard a disagreeable joke is taking the victim card way, way too far. We run the risk of making victim a meaningless term if we stretch it to include hearing anything possibly offensive.

I've heard tons of offensive things over my life, as has everyone, and I'm not a victim for it. But of course it all depends on context in the workplace. The OP's first example was not a case where hearing a joke would be victimizing anyone.

I find women's tennis enjoyable, but basketball never appealed to me. It's just too different from the men's play (which is super skilled and athletic in comparison). But I can watch women run track, even though their times are slower.

This isn't to say that WNBA or female college basketball players aren't skilled. They are. But the men at that level are something else. Not all of them. Some are there for size or as specialists. But enough of the men are huge outliers compared to the general population.

The question to be asked is whether using certain terms are useful. Is it useful to refer to human manufactured products as artificial? If we call plastics natural, does that help with noting that plastics are source of major pollution in the oceans?

Of course ontologically speaking, everything humans make is natural, as in it's all part of the universe. But we use artificial to distinguish stuff we make from stuff that nature produces for a lot of reasons. And we do the same for hypothetical alien civilizations. SETI is searching for artificial signals. Calling them natural won't help with distinguishing radio signals or heat signatures produced by alien technologies.

Or take archaeology. How do we know some artifact was human produced? Does calling that natural help with making distinctions between clothing and animal hide?

And if we wanted to, we could call spider webs or beaver/bird nests artificial. They don't undergo biological evolution, and are the products of organisms that do, like us. And those sorts of things wouldn't spontaneously emerge without spiders, beavers or birds to build them.

It seems to me that for there to be no change the universe would have to be completely empty - always and everywhere, so no quantum particles popping in and out of existence. If it contains even one photon or particle then there is change, since matter is energy is waves, and waves involve vibration, which is change. — andrewk

I thought it had more to do with entropy? Our universe starts out in an extremely low entropy state for some reason, and is headed toward maximum entropy a long time from now. Once it reaches the maximum, the system can't be said to be changing in any meaningful way. The laws of physics are time-reversal, so anything popping in and out or waving has no direction.

That's my limited understanding of the directionality of time.

. What would Jesus do? — Sapientia

Hopefully we aren't looking to Jesus to provide economic models.

I don't care whether you think it ridiculous. It's called justice. — Sapientia

The concern is that redistributing the wealth of successful businesses is going to screw up the market's valuation. We can say that Lebron James (famous basketball player) shouldn't make more than X amount that a school teacher does. Alright, but then what happens to the market as a result of setting that proportional value which has nothing to do with what value the market would set? You're going to be sending weird pricing signals to consumers and producers.

I don't think justice applies here. It's a balancing act of wanting a fair society where a small number can't dominate politics and marketing, while still wanting the economy to work well enough.

In the world we live in, nobody will arrest you for making a million bucks when you sell your start up brownie making operation. That doesn't make your brownies as worth while as saved lives — Bitter Crank

Agreed, but can you and Sapientia guarantee that your wealth distribution doesn't lower the standard of living for everyone? Because although fairness is a good principle, I would rather live in an unequal world where most people have a higher standard of living, than one where most people struggle to make ends meet.

In other words, I would worry that in attempt to be fair, you would ruin the economy by ignoring sound economic principles.

Now maybe there is a middle ground between excessive wealth imbalance and equal but poor for everyone. One thing you don't want to do is cripple economic output by disentivizing people. You also don't want to the government to play the role of the market. That's been tried, and it doesn't work well.

It's a problem if it's excessive. That would be a problem because it's unfair and creates an imbalance. And an imbalance impacts people like me. That would be money in excess of what you've earned, which you do not deserve, could go to those who need it more than you do, and therefore ought to be redistributed. — Sapientia

But at what point do you set this limit? If someone starts a software business today that becomes very successful and is used by millions of people, then they might become a billionaire at a fairly young age. Some of that will also be the result of investing their money, or funding other startups that turn out to be successful.

Do you penalize them for their company's success and returns on investment because it's excessive?

What if it's an entertainer or athlete who becomes widely popular and makes a similar amount of money, partly by starting another business and investing. Do you redistribute some of their wealth as well?

I understand that extreme wealth imbalance is a problem, but then again, are not the self-made billionaires generating wealth and jobs as well? Aren't they growing the economic pie? Should we penalize them for being more successful than most?

So this has turned into a debate on lying? These metaphysical disputes take the most curious twists and turns during the longer running threads.

Edit: or even better, read Hume. — Πετροκότσυφας

And even better yet, you read Kant. This is a discussion, not a book reading club.

No, but I've heard and read people discussing Hume and Kant, and there are SEP articles on this issue. In the OP, I mentioned the Partially Examined Life podcast. They discussed Hume, then Plato, then Kant, and then James & Pierce for the pragmatic response. The issue of knowledge, causality and particulars were prominent themes.

His argument is more subtle, suggesting that a priori reasoning does not predict the outcomes of causal interactions and that as humans we have since time immemorial simply had to OBSERVE and conclude from observations causality. — charleton

And Kant's argument was that we couldn't have come up with causality by just past observation. It wouldn't be something that could occur to us as a concept.

If Hume had come up with a skeptical argument for space or time, the same Kantian critique would apply. Habit or custom cannot create a fundamental concept.

Now, I am curious: how would you distinguish such a "Humean" universe from one that is "enriched" with your favored metaphysics? — SophistiCat

I think science is implicitly realistic, even though people figure out ways to talk about in non-realist terms. The Newton example wasn't meant to say that Newton was Humean in his account. He was not. It was just an example of going from particulars to general law. The problem with Newton's realist account of causality is that he couldn't explain gravity as a force acting at a distance, but Einstein could.

The reason for thinking science implies or assumes realism is because unobservables and general laws are posited as part of the theories.

This is baloney, of course, as it has been pointed out before. It pretents that Hume can't recognise that these events are in relations of precedency, contiguity and constant conjunction. — Πετροκότσυφας

But Hume also says we have no logical reason to suppose the constant conjunction will continue. He presents a skeptical view of the future, and thus undermines prediction.

Also, as for the problem of induction, where Hume points out that tomorrow could be Thanksgiving for us turkeys, the problem isn't that we have no justification for causality, only that we don't always know when we're observing correlation or causation.

I'm not ignoring it, but you are misunderstanding it. — charleton

Let's set aside the rationalism/empiricism debate, since this thread is about whether Hume/Witty's version of causality is adequate.

Resetting the issue: according to Hume, the only reason we think that B will continue to follow A is that it has so far in the past. Thus, our expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow is based on nothing more than it having risen before.

However, science says we have confidence the sun will rise tomorrow because it still has matter it can fuse due to it's relatively intense gravity. And furthermore, this will continue for a few more billion years until it can't fuse any more elements, and then it starts expanding and turns into a red giant. There is a reason the sun has been shining for billions of years.

As such, science isn't just cataloging Bs following As, it's looking to provide explanations for B following A. That's what Hume's account leaves out.

IOW, science operates under the assumption that there are causal explanations to be had. It's possible this doesn't always turn out to be the case, depending on how one interprets QM, but for a wide variety of phenomena, it has so far.

You are making my case for me, if you would but know it. — charleton

Not really, because you need the rational faculties to make sense of the empirical data. How we obtained or develop our ability to reason is a separate matter.