So you mean the entrepreneur providing a service or a utility doesn't benefit anybody? — ssu

neither a service nor a utility are wealth.

Kaarlo Tuomi

Brett,

you seem to be getting farther and farther from the point you said you were trying to make.

let's just refresh ourselves what this is about.

1. I claimed that the wealth entrepreneurs create benefits no one but themselves.

2. you disagreed.

specifically, I said:

which benefits them and, no one else. — Kaarlo Tuomi

and you replied,

The above is what I disagreed with... — Brett

so, focusing the conversation specifically on wealth creation rather than the other claims previously made for entrepreneurs...

3. I gave a long list of reasons to believe that wealth does not trickle down and benefit anyone other than its creator or owner, and I asked you to provide examples of this in action to prove your point, which you declined to do. I also gave you a selection of rhetorical questions for you to consider, and you have responded to none of this...

4. instead, you describe a mom and pop cafe who generate no wealth at all.

how, exactly, is that making your point?

if the point you wanted to make was that not all entrepreneurs are immoral parasites, then mom and pop might make your point, but no one in this thread has ever made that claim and it has nothing to do with the point you said you were interested in, which was that the wealth entrepreneurs create is a net benefit to society. mom and pop don't do that, and actually make my point rather than yours. mom and pop is a clear demonstration that wealth does not trickle down.


Kaarlo Tuomi

I want to apologise for making assumptions about you. and to thank you for pointing out that I was doing that. you have in fact told me nothing and actually made no substantive point of any kind. all you have done is ask questions, and then played the, "I never said that" game. the sum total of everything you have said in this thread (apart from a minor debate with another poster on the definition of entrepreneur) is to first claim that I have no idea what I 'm talking about, than list some consumer goods you think I might have purchased.

I therefore have no idea what point you are trying to make, or which claim I made that you disagree with, or why you are even engaging here. maybe this is just sport for you, I can't tell.

you did however, disagree with my claim that wealth creation is only of benefit to entrepreneurs. I think I have already presented sufficient evidence for my claim, or at least sufficient evidence for why I believe that, and your refutation appears to consist entirely of the fact that I can buy shoes in a shop. you choose to ignore all the negative effects, including that every single person involved in the production, distribution, marketing and sale of those shoes is being exploited by the entrepreneur, and you reply that the only reason I disagree with you is my ideology. which I consider to be potentially true but irrelevant.

What does that have to do with your denial of any benefits from entrepreneurs? — Brett

I didn't say that. (see, two can play that game). I did not claim that there were no benefits from entrepreneurs. I said their wealth benefits only them.

How do you know this? — Brett

I didn't claim to "know" it. I said that it seemed, on the face of it, to be that way. entrepreneurs have to first have an idea, then persuade other folk to believe in them and invest in them, and persuade other folk to come and work for them, planning, organising, number crunching and all this requires a lot of social and inter-personal skill and an outgoing personality with a persuasive mentality and demeanour to get people on their side. philosophy does not require any of those skills or manifest any of those qualities, beyond having an idea. but what happens after they have had the idea would be quite different. divergent, even.

consider that you were the first person to discover that you can do GPS tracking through a mobile phone so that your position at any time over the last ten days could be plotted on a map.

an entrepreneur would go to find a coder who could produce an app so that parents can keep track of where their kids are and the police can locate missing persons and the fact that ads can be displayed to produce some income from this is obviously not a bad idea, too. can we licence this to the coastguard for locating surfers?

a philosopher would write a paper on whether or not this constitutes knowing.


Kaarlo Tuomi

the thing I've really enjoyed about the comments in this thread is how many folk have considered the idea of a simulated universe in ways I would not have thought of. this has caused me to step back a bit and reconsider the whole project because I have had to allow for new ideas being incorporated later.

my question arose from a story I'm writing in which a character, Alan, sees something that he knows is impossible. this presents an internal conflict, his sensory perception organ saw something his consciousness says is impossible, and the story is about how he resolves this conflict. humans as a species don't like these conflicts and so we tell ourselves stories to resolve them which is where conspiracy stories, flat earth society, UFO's and ghost stories come from, these are attempts to reconcile events we cannot properly account for. at least some of them are, some of these folk are just attention seeking liars and some of them need medical help, but a lot of them are just confused by and unable to reconcile different things they think they know.

one of the options I want the reader to consider is that Alan is living in a simulated universe. so naturally I was thinking about who created the simulation, and why, and why it would matter to them that Alan didn't know he was in a simulated universe, and what they hoped to get out of simulating a universe and what the fact that they had simulated a universe could tell us about them.

but you guys took that simple question and ran with it in lots of very interesting directions so I want to say thank you for that. some examples that stand out are...

Simulation might be a part of nature. Perhaps folk who think on it should look to ways it might be happening in nature, rather than via computation. — Punshhh

many years ago when I was a small boy who had first heard about molecules I had this idea that our universe could be a molecule in the toenail of a giant. I don't know why it had to be his toenail, but there you go, and it fascinated me for a while. I'm not sure that a naturally occurring phenomenon can strictly speaking be called a simulation, unless you want to think of a polar bear as a particularly inept simulation of a pussy cat, but this is a stunningly original idea that I will have to spend a lot of time thinking about and will probably return to again and again. thank you very much.

The ones inside it are presumably the ones who made it. — Nils Loc

this suggested to me that Nils was thinking of something completely different, but I was not able to figure out what he was imagining, and that, on its own blew my mind. what was he thinking about, how could a civilisation construct their own universe? this was a very difficult problem for me and I spent a long time thinking he meant that they had copied their own universe so that the people inside the simulation were simulations of themselves rather than their actual selves.

within my story this would not seem to work because the simulated people would know whatever the real people knew, so they would know that they were simulations and hence Alan would not be conflicted. "oh, that weird thing I saw, that's okay, it was just the simulation raster being out of step." end of story.

but that helped me focus on what was important and necessary for my story. thank you.

It reflects progress and expectation. To simulate a universe in which the civilization is reflected implies uncertainty on the part of the creators. Man is looking for ways to survive, so then the simulation will reflect overlooked damaging properties. If these are identified (due to the revealing nature of complexity), updates become eventually applied, ending in absolute resolution. — Francesco

this really helped me to focus on the civilisation doing the simulating, who they were and why they were doing this and why there needs to be urgency to their work and what motivates them and drives them. before this post they were just cookie-cutter characters that were in my story because I needed a villain, but after this post they became people with hopes and dreams the reader can sympathise with so that you might in some sense want them to succeed. the reader is now conflicted because she can no longer be certain, is Alan a victim, or is his suffering necessary for the survival of a whole civilisation?

when a quantum leap breaks the symmetry of progress, it would be like discovering prime numbers in nature. Usually this implodes the symmetrical decimation into natural standards which is of course impossible as we do not understand the nature of time fully. — Francesco

this interesting insight created a new strand to my story where the simulators no longer agree on why they are doing the simulation in the first place. some of them think of it as a survival strategy, while others see it as pure science. this is like Elon Musk's Mars mission, he thinks he is building a rocket for going to Mars but I doubt there is a single human prepared to get in it and actually go there but the science aspects of it with reusable rockets and landing stage one boosters vertically on a floating barge 200 miles out to sea are utterly fascinating.

Its easy to model singularity, but nobody in the simulation has ever actually seen it, let alone construct it in the beginning with a beginning. — Francesco

this is a very interesting point because as far as I am aware, singularity has three or four different definitions, and Francesco could be referring to more than one of them. singularity is the point at the centre of a black hole to which everything inside the event horizon is attracted. and singularity is also the (fictional) point at which a human consciousness merges with a computer. and singularity is also a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. and there was this one time at band camp... maybe later.

How much experience of this universe led you to consider this universe to be a universe? — Key

this is an extremely interesting question and is at the heart of Alan's problem. how much information is required to make something true. I've never been to New Zealand but I am reasonably sure it is there, to the extent that I would be prepared to say that Wellington is the capital of New Zealand, and I would even say that it is a fact. but I can't prove it beyond the intellectually challenged process of "appeal to authority." so if my knowledge of the universe is merely stuff I read in books why don't Never Never Land, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy also exist? the characters in my story will have to wrestle with these questions once Alan reveals to them his suspicions.

If you allow for the possibility of beings being able to traverse dimensions then you have a means to solve the conundrum of how the creator of a universe can inhabit that universe. A being creates a three dimensional universe while inhabiting a fourth, or fifth dimensional universe. Then steps down to become present in the three dimensional universe via some appropriate vehicle (a human body).

I cannot begin to express how grateful I am for this. it isn't relevant to my story because the creators are not fifth-dimensional beings, but it helped me see how other posters were approaching the question and what other possibilities there are I had not previously considered. really helpful, thank you.

What do you mean by "those"? Is my World of Warcraft character it's own person now for some reason? — Outlander

in my naivete I thought that "those" were quite obviously the inhabitants of the simulation. without getting bogged down in a philosophical quagmire they think they are real but are not. I don't play World of Warcraft but I would hazard a guess the characters in it don't think of themselves as being real. but the question is not silly or trivial because once again it revealed to me that there are other ways of looking at this, and that diversity of view points has been, far and away, the most valuable contribution so far. thank you, all of you.


Kaarlo Tuomi

The above is what I disagreed with, not your refutation of this; — Brett

okay we're getting down to the fine detail now and Brett wants to concentrate on wealth formation. Brett thinks that entrepreneurs create wealth and that this is somehow a net benefit to society. I guess if you grew up on the economics of Paul Krugman and Alan Greenspan that might not be a sloppy assumption to make but there is very little evidence that it works. it used to be called "trickle-down economics" but today books on it are found in the section devoted to Fairy Stories.

I'm going to start by pointing out that Brett has not yet answered the question I asked yesterday:

how do you benefit from the wealth of Jeff Bezos? — Kaarlo Tuomi

not only has he not answered this, he has also not provided any evidence that "wealth" is a thing that can benefit folk who do not possess it, or that the benefits of "wealth" can somehow filter down to the folk at the bottom of the poverty ladder.

that there is a poverty gap is not contestable. that this poverty gap is getting wider is not contestable. that the rich now own a greater percentage of the wealth than they did a mere twenty years ago, is not contestable. all of these facts suggest to me that wealth does not trickle down. and if you read that article I linked to you will already know that the rich get more of their income from investments and securities than they do from salary and wages or business. which means that the rich acummulate wealth and invest it in themselves. the only folk who benefit from this, other than themselves, are investment brokers and life insurance salesmen.

please prove me wrong. don't just say I'm wrong. don't just accuse me of not knowing what I'm talking about. say something that demonstrates why you believe the things you believe and make a point you can back up with data or examples.

I am, for the purposes of this discussion, going to temporarily accept the possibility that wealth can somehow benefit folk who do not possess it. which would require someone to provide some evidence of an actual process by which I, and millions of folk just like me, benefit from facts such as Elon Musk owns a town in Texas, or Jeff Bezos earns more money per day than I earned in my entire professional life.

whilst figuring out how to demonstrate any of those things you might also like to consider the following questions. all of these start: if entrepreneurs are a net benefit to society, and they are actually interested in the greater good of everyone, and wealth does actually trickle down, then how come...

1. ...the entire tobacco industry lied to us for decades about the benefits of their products?
2. ...the entire oil and gas industry has destroyed billions of acres of irreplaceable environment in a quest for more profits?
3. ...class action lawsuits exist? these are necessary so that small folk like me can join together to fight the illegal oppression of massive companies that care not one jot for the little people who buy their products.
4. ...the entire hospitality industry has to rely on tips to make a living wage?
5. ...folk with full time jobs have to rely on food banks to feed their families?
6. ...minimum wage laws exist? these are only necessary because entrepreneurs refuse to pay folk a proper wage for their work.
7. ...Uber were refused a licence to operate their service in many cities around the world? this happened precisely because they refused to give their drivers the benefits that employees are legally entitled to.
8. ...the oceans are full of micro plastics generated by the products entrepreneurs who "put ideas into action" put there but refuse to do anything about?

folk like Brett point to a company like Amazon and marvel at the utility of being able to order a replacement light bulb and have it delivered the next day, and they see this as a marvelous and wonderful thing that helps millions of families shop for essentials without wasting time driving to the shops and carting bags of essentials home again. instead, they get to spend more time with their kids, doing gardening, or playing online strip poker.

whereas when I look at Amazon what I see is a great long line of delivery trucks poisoning everyone's environment for the benefit of a few folk too lazy to do their own shopping. to me, Amazon is the definition of selfish consumerism. it ruins it for everyone for the benefit of a few.


Kaarlo Tuomi

Who built the house you live in, who made the coffee you drink in the morning after you put on your pants that someone made, who opened the cafe where you had your breakfast, who transported the food across country, who produced the food, who made the bed you slept in, the table you sat at, the shoes you walked? — Brett

I think the point Brett is making is that I have purchased stuff, and since this is made by companies that were started by entrepreneurs then I have personally benefitted from what entrepreneurs do.

this is not on the face of it an unreasonable point. except that me owning a pair of shoes and a bed isn't really illustrative of the claims made for entrepreneurs that I was refuting. the claim was, "Entrepreneurs create wealth, they put ideas into practice, They make the world a better place for everyone."

me owning a bed isn't an example of wealth being created for anyone other than the entrepreneur. capitalism is a system designed to specifically make money for the folk who put money into a business to get it going. these investors are called capitalists and the money they invest is called capital, which is why the system is called capitalism. the system is designed to benefit them. if anyone else benefits at all that is a coincidence not the purpose. take, for example, the system of buying cheap electronics from China so that more profits can be made for the entrepreneurs, but this also destroyed the manufacturing industries in the West which has cost millions of folk their jobs. and it abuses the human rights of the folk working in those electronics factories so your cheap computer benefits one consumer and a bunch of entrepreneurs, but destroyed many jobs and ignored the human rights of many. if that's what you call making the world a better place for everyone then I can't help you.

me owning a bed also ignores the millions of folk who live on less than three dollars per day.

me owning a bed doesn't offset the fact that we had to make laws to force websites operated by entrepreneurs be available to handicapped people. if entrepreneurs benefit everyone, why did they have to be forced to do this, with threats of fines.

me owning a bed does not offset the millions of folk who have no indoor plumbing, or affordable health care, or the huge wealth gap that entrepreneurs have created, and folk who sit in their ivory towers clapping their hands with glee because they're all right Jack because they can buy books from Amazon, are the problem, not the solution.


Kaarlo Tuomi

You have no idea what you're talking about. — Brett

one way to think about it is to consider the following:

if entrepreneurship is good for everyone, and entrepreneurs have increased since the invention of the internet with dotcom millionaires and online trading and ad revenue for clicking on websites and hundreds of new opportunities that never existed before so that we now have more billionaires than have ever previously existed, then how come wealth inequality has increased during the same period of time?


Kaarlo Tuomi

I am not able to understand how anyone would be able to approach this question, from any direction or in any way. I voted bewilderment.

by analogy:
a boy asks his mother: why is the sky blue?
mother gives long discourse on the properties of light, cones, optic nerve, frequency of electro-magnetic blah blah blah.
the boy says: but that only explains how the sky is blue, it doesn't say why the sky is blue.

does the form of the question, "why x" imply that the answer has to be a logical or rational reason, and if so what would count as logic or rational in this context, which type of logic would need to be satisfied, is rational just a fancy word for "the answer I prefer"? I refer to these as exposed questions, and they are generally of more interest to me than the question that exposed them.


Kaarlo Tuomi

People have been speaking about, writing about, and have been warning us about political correctness for decades. Quibble all you need, but I wager most people understand the general sense of the term by now. — NOS4A2

except that the discussion in this one thread alone makes it abundantly clear that folk have different ideas of what political correctness is. so folk might have "a general sense," of what it means, but they sure seem to have a diversity of general senses.

Hate speech is a problem. But political correctness was never about hate speech. — NOS4A2

I agree with this.

Not everyone has categorically drawn lines between speech that is considered hateful or offensive or just unpleasant and rude, and where political correctness intersects between this and other types insults and expressions... — Maw

but in a pragmatic sense, I also agree with this. which is just my charitable view that you don't have to agree with me.

Political correctness is, in both definition and in practice, almost entirely about condemning and avoiding derogatory/hateful language and rhetoric towards particular (religious, ethnic, etc) groups. — Enai De A Lukal

this is not a view I have seen expressed anywhere else, so my tendency would be to think this is not common. I'm not saying you're wrong, but this probably not the majority view.

in my experience, political correctness is used as a derogatory term. when someone says, "that is just political correctness," this is an insult. political correctness is the tendency to outlaw or ban the saying of things that meet both of the following: a) are perceived by the speaker to be offensive to or discriminatory of a particular group. b) would not be considered by that group to be offensive or discriminatory.

examples would include: telling schools they are not allowed to call a blackboard a blackboard anymore because black is discriminatory and offensive to people of colour. or labeling a field on a form "gender" when the distinction being made is between male and female. these types of criticisms have a tendency to trivialise genuine discrimination in a way that convinces other folk that discrimination is not real.

but that is just my experience, I'm not claiming to be an authority on the topic.

as for the survey, surveys should make their questions clear and unambiguous and explicitly explain any terms with the potential to be interpreted in more than one way so that all respondents are answering the exact same question. surveys that do not do that can be ignored.

or do we need to take a survey on that?



Kaarlo Tuomi

What a narrow minded assertion! Entrepreneurs create wealth, they put ideas into practice, They make the world a better place for everyone. — A Seagull

I think that what you are doing is conflating your opinion of what some entrepreneurs have done, with the motivation of entrepreneurs generally to be entrepreneurial.

some entrepreneurs have done things that some members of society views as progressive or beneficial. sure. my local library was started by Andrew Carnegie who not only paid for it to be built but stuffed it full of books, and this is in a town he never visited in a country he was neither born in nor lived in. some folk would call this philanthropy rather than entrepreneurial and the difference is probably relevant. entrepreneur means person who sets up a business, taking a financial risk that they will return a profit. which quite clearly says that entrepreneurs are motivated by the desire to make money. that some folk think their companies are progressive and beneficial to society is not the point of what they do, but a coincidence.

Entrepreneurs create wealth... — A Seagull

which benefits them and, no one else. how do you benefit from the wealth of Jeff Bezos?

they put ideas into practice — A Seagull

robbing a bank is putting an idea into practice. are you able to explain how this is of benefit to society?

They make the world a better place for everyone. — A Seagull

some entrepreneurs make the world a better place for some of the very small minority of the world population that have access to whatever their business does. Elizabeth Holmes was an entrepreneur. are you able to cite a single person for whom the world was a better place as a result of her actions?


Kaarlo Tuomi.

Thinking something, even assuming something, doesn't make that thing subjective, — Pfhorrest

have a nice life.

Objectivity means always proceeding on the assumption that things can be solved. It doesn't mean that you already know how to solve it. I don't know how many times I have to repeat that. — Pfhorrest

I think you have to keep repeating it because folk cannot understand what it says, because it is itself a contradiction.

if you have to assume it, then it isn't objective.

in philosophy, for most folk, objective literally means not inside your head.

your assumption cannot be objectively true precisely because it only exists inside your head. any thing that exists only inside your head is subjective. any statement you make about a thing that exists only inside your head, is subjective.

any assumptions you make, are, by definition, subjective.

which means that your whole philosophy appears to be based on the precarious notion that objectivity means be subjective. and I think that's why folk are having some difficulty understanding you.


Kaarlo Tuomi

there are, as far as I can tell, three main reasons:

1. philosophers are by their very nature, thinkers. which means that "doing philosophy" consists of sitting in a room with the curtains drawn, thinking, very hard, for long periods of time. this does not, on the face of it, seem to be the sort of thing that get up and go entrepreneurs do. so, at a basic level, philosopher = introvert, entrepreneur = extrovert.

2. there is no money in philosophy, so none of the philosophers you've ever met have a spare half a million lying around in spare cash to set up a think tank or donate to some university science program.

3. entrepreneurs don't tend to do things that are good for society, they tend to do things that are going to work out well for them. hands up anyone who thinks that Elon Musk's spaceship to Mars is helping anyone on Earth right now? Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk et al don't particularly care about homeless people or third world plumbing or affordable health care or overcrowded prisons, all they really care about are their pet projects and how many shiny tokens they own. there will be exceptions to this, of course, like Bill Gates for example, but without spending three years studying the entire corpus of world entrepreneurs and their philanthropic habits I think we can safely generalise that, as a species, they do not think about the rest of us at all. which is how they got to be like that in the first place.


Kaarlo Tuomi

You might be interested to know that there is a history of 'undetermined questions' in Buddhism. These mainly concern what we could translate as metaphysical questions. — Wayfarer

thank you for engaging, I appreciate it, and can't help thinking that the poison could not have been very potent if he managed to ask all those questions before he died.

you may not have read the rest of the thread so it is possibly worth pointing out that when I started it I was under the impression that Bill was rejecting individual questions if they proved unanswerable. but it turns out he was actually rejecting the notion that a question could be unanswerable.

later in the thread someone else pointed out that, according them, there were three types of questions, which caused me to consider that, and my own list currently has seven types of questions and I am not yet finished.

I currently have two types of unanswerable questions. there are those where the answer theoretically exists, but is not knowable. an example of this would be: "how many molecules are there in Japan?" we know what molecules are, we even have a way of counting them, and we know (in a merely 2-dimensional sense) what Japan is, so the number of molecules in Japan theoretically exists but we don't have any way of combining those knowns to answer the question. the other type are where the answer is not knowable by any means. an example of this would be: "what did Edgar Davis have for breakfast on his tenth birthday."

I think of philosophy as a way of answering questions, in the same way that I think of science as a way to answer questions. so that there are questions we cannot answer with this method is obviously of some relevance, and I think categorising them helps us understand why we cannot answer them which helps us understand the limits of our method. so I currently think that unanswerable questions have value as research material and tool sharpeners even if the specific answers are not of any value.

whereas religion is not a way to answer questions, it is a guide to how to live your life, so religious advice to stop wasting time with such questions makes sense if you should be growing rice or pruning cherry trees or combing your daughter's hair or something but I don't think it really applies to philosophy which is specifically about answering questions.

however, questions about supernatural entities present me with problems I don't feel qualified to solve. I don't personally believe in god so a question like: "who was the first angel to reach Earth," is incomprehensible to me but many other folk will be certain they know the definitive answer. so the question here is: how should a philosophy deal with matters that some consider to be fairy stories, some think of as a matter of belief, and some think of as a matter of recorded history?

I guess this boils down to: what does "know" mean?


Kaarlo Tuomi

A being creates a three dimensional universe while inhabiting a fourth, or fifth dimensional universe. Then steps down to become present in the three dimensional universe via some appropriate vehicle (a human body).

thank you very much for engaging.

I have to admit that I found your description quite compelling, and surprisingly understandable, for which I thank you. but I could not at first understand why a being who inhabits a four or 5-dimensional universe would want to limit themselves to the boring old 3-dimensional space we inhabit. but then I thought of hermits and folk who live off-grid for various reasons. these people consciously restrict their interaction with the world in various ways to arrive at their particular version of peace and harmony. I'm not suggesting that anyone who lives alone in the woods is from a 5-dimensional universe, but the most compelling myths and legends often contain some element of the truth. there is a reason, for example, why the Amazonian indians thought god had red hair.


Kaarlo Tuomi

So you can assume ten flavour timmy and a potentially infinite number of multiverses, but you can't figure out where the waiters fit in?! Interesting... — Key

that's because my wavefunction collapsed when I counted out the tip.

Kaarlo Tuomi

thank you for that link. actually I've just been reading about the Copenhagen interpretation on Wikipedia, and it seems that if I know where the waiter is I can't tip him anyway!

Kaarlo Tuomi

the wavefunction that Schrodinger sees is basically a combination of two "worlds", and when Schrodinger observes this, he just entangles with this wavefunction, after which, there's a Schrodinger that sees the dead cat, and a Schrodinger that sees the live cat; both Schrodingers are part of the universal wavefunction. — InPitzotl

so when I'm sat in the ice cream parlour there is a single wavefunction, but there are ten "worlds", and when I make a choice from the menu I entangle with the wavefunction and there are then ten of me, each of whom made a different selection from the menu, but there is still only a single wavefunction.

so which one of me tips the waiter?

Kaarlo Tuomi

There is no way a simulation could duplicate the complexity of the actual universe. — Nils Loc

I don't play computer games but I have been reading about advances in the way these games are programmed so that the world within the game has become richer and more textured and nuanced with much greater detail than was previously thought possible.

one of the techniques they use is that the world is created only in the immediate vicinity of the character. if the same idea were applied to a simulated universe then it would only be necessary to simulate those parts of it in the immediate vicinity of, or accessible to, the subject. when I am in my living room there is no need to simulate the entire vast expanse of the Mongolian steppe and the waves rolling across the Pacific ocean and the dust clouds circling the Orion nebula, because these things are outside of my experience and from the context of my consciousness they do not "exist". if I go to my window and look through my telescope it would be necessary to simulate not the vast immensity of the cosmos but only that tiny portion of it visible through my telescope. in this way I think it entirely possible that a simulated universe could recreate the illusion of being as vast and complex as an existent universe, without actually being so.

a simulation need not be an exact copy, but merely smoke and mirrors.

Kaarlo Tuomi

It reflects progress and expectation. To simulate a universe in which the civilization is reflected implies uncertainty on the part of the creators. Man is looking for ways to survive, so then the simulation will reflect overlooked damaging properties. — Francesco

thank you for engaging on this.

I like your idea that the simulation has a dual nature, reflecting both progress and expectation, which are hopeful properties, but also the uncertainty about their own future. I think the philosophical question whether humans are inherently good or bad is unanswerable because we are both, and the duality in your reply reflects this. I agree with you that the creators of the simulation can be both proud of their achievement and yet fearful of the consequences of previous mistakes.

however, these things, these properties and qualities, are being communicated. we use expressions like "the simulation says," but it is not clear who is supposed to be the recipient of this message. who are they saying these things to? if all they are doing is communicating it to themselves then why do they need to go to the huge cost and trouble of constructing something as massively complicated as a simulated universe. surely, a front page ad in the New York Times would do the same thing.

okay, the ad in the New York Times would not permit them to explore alternatives, to literally see the consequences of their choices and to experiment with the starting conditions of universes to see which initial conditions lead to life and which do not. they could experiment with different initial processes by which life is formed to see which ones lead most efficiently to intelligent life, they could practice tweaking evolution to get a more perfect them, they could achieve so much. which suggests that whatever they tell their fellow citizens, the real purpose of the simulation is to conduct these experiments. it is not a vastly expensive tweet on social media, it is a laboratory.

what can they then do with the knowledge they have acquired?

they cannot wind back the clock on their own civilisation to start again from the beginning, they cannot recreate themselves anew in their own universe so that they can experience first hand this new and hopeful future. they cannot, as far as I can see, use this knowledge in any way that benefits them at all. this knowledge can only be used to benefit some other civilisation that exists in a simulation created by them.

it is therefore the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake. and therefore, what the creation of a simulated universe says about the civilisation that created it is, that they are curious.


Kaarlo Tuomi

In that case, every statement that something is your favorite flavor of ice cream is objectively false. — Pfhorrest

demonstrating quite clearly that you still do not appreciate the difference between subjective and objective. it is literally impossible for any statement I make about my preference to be "objectively false".

Kaarlo Tuomi

No, but you do. — Pfhorrest

well, actually, I don't. and the reason is to be found in an earlier post in this thread but you dismissed it in a very superficial way so I'm not sure you even really took it in or thought about it.

suppose, for example, I do not believe there is such a thing as objective reality. in that case EVERYTHING would be conditional and subjective. — Kaarlo Tuomi

which you dismissed with this...

But I think that that antecedent belief is false, and so the consequent is not entailed. — Pfhorrest

since we are no longer discussing your philosophy, but mine, I think I should declare that I don't actually have a favourite flavour of ice cream. I don't understand what folk mean when they say, "my favourite [insert appropriate noun]." the expression is essentially gibberish to me, and when I say those words it is as though I were reading a story written in a foreign language, I suspect my audience might understand but I do not personally have a clue what it means.

having got that out of the way, since I do not believe in an objective reality, everything really is conditional on some prior assumption or other, and usually on a whole pile of them that, for the most part, folk don't even realise they are making. and before you are tempted to dismiss this as glibly as you did last time I will just point out that you cannot even prove something as basic and fundamental as your own date of birth so ideas of "objectivity" are tenuous at best.


Kaarlo Tuomi

I guess it depends on what you mean by meaning, and whether you require your particular life to have meaning, or do you mean the existence of the human species, or do you mean that life itself should continue to exist?

at any of those levels it is possible to find a way for you to give yourself some purpose and I present some examples which I recommend you to consider as ways to approach the subject rather than as specific suggestions.

1. at the level of the whole planet, you could think about promoting green ideals such as reducing pollution, CO2 emissions, mineral extraction, and similar environmental ideas so that you are focusing on the very idea of life itself in its broadest possible sense rather than on one rather insignificant organism in a more complex whole.

2. at the level of the human species you could think about conflict resolution or fighting famine, or third world plumbing, or any one of a number of programs to improve the rights and freedoms of indigenous populations throughout the world who are oppressed and marginalised by almost everybody else. in other words, think about lives other than your own. you might not think your life has a purpose but their lives might.

3. at a rather basic level of the single organism life is simply about participating in the process of evolution. participating in the process does not mean you HAVE to reproduce, but merely playing the game is enough. if a guy walks up to a girl he does not know and asks her if she would like to go for dinner, and she says, "no thanks," that is evolution in action. being rejected, believe it or not, is part of the process of evolution. you owe it to the rest of us to at least try.

Kaarlo Tuomi

If I told you that your favorite flavor of ice cream was pistachio, would I not be wrong? — Pfhorrest

if I told you that my favourite flavour of ice cream was strawberry, would you have any means by which you could determine, independently of me, whether or not the statement is true?

the answer is no, you could not.

you have no way of knowing whether I have ever eaten ice cream, or whether I am in fact a being that is able to eat ice cream. the list of things you know, with any certainty, is extremely short. it consists of the single subjective statement by me that my favourite flavour of ice cream is strawberry. this statement is neither true nor false, it just is. but that's all you have.

therefore, the only option available to you is to believe what I said. or not.

when you respond that my favourite flavour is actually pistachio, even if you are trying to deliberately contradict what I said, even you have no way of knowing whether what you said is true. you do not know the truth value of your own statement. you are operating in an information void. therefore, your statement that my favourite flavour is pistachio is neither right nor wrong. it just is.


Kaarlo Tuomi

so I would advise proceeding with caution — InPitzotl

perhaps not go for the Mint, then.

Kaarlo Tuomi

That there's an illusion means there's something, the mind, that perceives this illusion. — TheMadFool

thank you.

Kaarlo Tuomi

In other words, there is no object that corresponds with the first person. — Wayfarer

I don't think I could have put quite as well as you did but I do both agree and thank you. it is reassuring to know that I was not just being obtuse.

as far as I know, object has a number of different definitions according to the arena of thought (trying to avoid using the word subject) in which the discussion takes place. in philosophy it generally means: a thing external to the thinking mind, which equates to third person view, whereas the thinking mind itself, first person view, is the subject. and for anyone not overly familiar with the rule, it goes: I am first person, you are second person, and everyone else is third person.


Kaarlo Tuomi

That Paris is the capital of France, and that chocolate is my favorite flavor of ice cream, are both states of France and of me, respectively, and are both objectively true. — Pfhorrest

if you genuinely believe this and are not just jesting with me, then I'm afraid I'm going to have to bow out of this conversation because I am not clever enough, wise enough or sufficiently well-read or intellectually gymnastic to accommodate the idea that a subjective statement can be objectively true.

it is literally impossible for me to imagine what such a statement might mean. to the extent that I struggle to understand how a person capable of saying such a thing could have gone to a university and got a degree in any topic at all. that this is your core topic, that you have a degree in this subject is just utterly mind-expanding.

in the world I inhabit, my favourite flavour of ice cream is strawberry, and that is my subjective opinion, and it can only ever be subjectively true. it is neither right nor wrong, neither true nor false, it is just my opinion. you could, if you really want to stretch things, say that it is objectively true that I said it, because my words are objectively there for anyone to read. but the statement that my favourite flavour of ice cream is strawberry can only ever be subjectively true.


Kaarlo Tuomi

Preferences are subjective inasmuch as they are states of subjects. — Pfhorrest

it seems to me that if subjective really is "the state of a subject," then "Paris is the capital of France" is the state of a subject and therefore subjective. but you also said that "Paris is the capital of France" is objectively true. which suggests to me that there is no discernible distinction between subjective and objective.

so if subjective is simply the state of a subject, what does objective mean?




Kaarlo Tuomi

No, because it's still objectively true that I prefer this and you prefer that... — Pfhorrest

I'm afraid this directly contradicts what you said earlier.

Preferences, being explicitly subjective... — Pfhorrest

which means that you consider your subjective preference to be objectively true.

please forgive me if I find that a little hard to digest.


Kaarlo Tuomi

amino acids come in complementary pairs, with a left hand and a right hand version. these are mirror images of each other but not interchangeable (in the way that you cannot put your left hand in a right hand glove).

this property is called chirality.

thing is, all life forms that we know of have the left hand version of the amino acid. right hand versions of these compounds exist, but no life forms utilise them.

no one knows why this happens, or whether it is a pre-condition for life to exist, or whether life is possible with right hand amino acids. it just is the way it is and no one knows why.

so within the context of the OP's question, is this a law of the universe, or is it merely a spooky coincidence? who or what decides what is or is not a law of the universe?


Kaarlo Tuomi

Most if not all of those are examples of opinions that are not contradictory. Many of them are mere preferences... — Pfhorrest

so how do you discriminate between an opinion and a preference?

if I understand you correctly, you are just using "preference" to mean the answer to a question that does not have an objectively true answer.

that would seem to require that you first consider whether or not the question has an objectively true answer. those questions that have objectively true answers go in one box where your philosophy deals with them, and answers that do not have objectively true answers go in the discard pile. correct me if I'm wrong.

however, what happens if I disagree with you on that single point, that the question has an objectively true answer. is my answer an opinion or a preference?

suppose, for example, I do not believe there is such a thing as objective reality. in that case EVERYTHING would be conditional and subjective. in this case it would not be objectively true that Paris is the capital of France because it isn't even objectively true that France exists.

and, bear in mind, that at the end of your post you contradict yourself...

...in saying that no question is unanswerable, I just mean that there's always some possible answer that would be the right one... — Pfhorrest

this claims that there is ALWAYS a right answer. and that cannot be true if some answers are only preferences.

truth, as a previous poster pointed out, is a very slippery concept.


Kaarlo Tuomi

But I didn't understand your point. — fishfry

I said: If A then B

you said: not B

conclusion: not A


Kaarlo Tuomi

It isn't that you can't imagine it as much as you don't wish to consider such a scenario in this discussion. — Nils Loc

no, that isn't it at all. I genuinely cannot imagine how anyone can physically construct the universe in which they live.

this is largely because I think of a person as inhabiting a universe. then anything that person constructs must be inside the universe they inhabit. I cannot envisage how they would then get inside the universe they just constructed.

but, like I said, that is probably more to do with the limits of my imagination than anything else.

If you are meeting Bill Gates via Skype, are you really meeting Bill Gates? — Nils Loc

this just seems to be making my point for me. the real Bill Gates cannot get inside Skype, all I can see there is an image of him, a projection of him, but not the actual Bill Gates.


Kaarlo Tuomi

But it nevertheless can’t be the case that they are both right, if they disagree. — Pfhorrest

I disagree with this. why does either one of them necessarily have to be "right" ?

And of course each of them thinks themes right and those who disagree consequently wrong: — Pfhorrest

I also disagree with this. you are not wrong just because I disagree with you.

To be of some opinion just is to think that something or other is right (and the negation of it thus wrong). — Pfhorrest

and I also disagree with this.

I believe that it should be entirely possible to notice that there is a difference between two things without having to make a judgement about that difference. and I apply this in all aspects of my life, not just philosophy. there is, for example, a difference between the novels of Stephen King and Charles Dickens, but I don't feel compelled to say that one is "better" than the other, they are just different, that's all.

but you seem to think that any difference needs to be resolved in some way. which means that every single person who does not subscribe to your philosophy is wrong in your eyes, and I'm afraid I just could not go through life thinking that everybody else was wrong just because they are different from me.

is a man wrong if he has a different job from you, or drives a different car from you, or goes on holiday to France instead of Mexico? what about the people who choose to live in a house that's not yours, are they wrong because their opinion is different to yours? is a man wrong if you don't think his wife is attractive, where exactly does this all end?


Kaarlo Tuomi

I wonder if perhaps you mean something different by “opinion” than I do. — Pfhorrest

I tend to do folk the courtesy of believing what they say, and you'd be surprised how often that backfires. if you say "correct opinion" then I take you to have the regular everyday definition of opinion in mind, unless you specifically say otherwise, as you did with "liberalism" and various other words. the definition of opinion I tend to use is: a view or judgement not based on fact or knowledge.

in one of my dictionaries there is a sample phrase: "a matter of opinion," something not capable of being proven either way.


Kaarlo Tuomi

it was Aristotle who said the greatest gift that we can give to ourselves (and each other) is to 'know thyself'. — 3017amen

I believe that I do know myself, or at least that I am getting better at it, I just don't know how philosophy would categorize that.

Kaarlo Tuomi

Let me know what you think! — Have some tea

I don't know enough about philosophy generally to know which particular school of thought Bill belongs to; I couldn't even tell you where I fit much less anyone else. but having read considerably more of Bill's philosophy than the excerpt given in this thread I think that he has probably not thought very long or hard about why anyone might disagree with him.

I tend to the view that we are each entitled to our own opinion but that opinions are not either right or wrong, they are just opinions. just because we disagree about something doesn't mean that either one of us has to necessarily be wrong. but Bill's philosophy doesn't seem to be able to accommodate this view and to him each opinion has to be either the correct one or else it's wrong. and he obviously holds all the correct opinions.

but he has at least got a degree in this, which means he has read a lot more philosophy than I have so I persevere in the hope that I might learn something.


Kaarlo Tuomi

So it's not difficult to see issues with confirmation bias and the like in this kind of scenario. See: Do you believe in God, or is that a software glitch? — Wayfarer

that was an extremely interesting read. the dead salmon is both very funny and extremely frightening at the same time.

thank you

Kaarlo Tuomi

You can't imagine aliens in VR — Nils Loc

I can't imagine aliens inside the VR they had created. by analogy, I don't expect to meet Bill Gates inside the Microsoft Flight Simulator. there might be a virtual Bill Gates, or a hologram of Bill Gates, but not the actual Bill Gates.

Kaarlo Tuomi