"epistemic" implies a viewer. More generally, there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. — Olivier5

There are two choices here 1) I know that x, 2) We know that x. Belief and justification are quite different for the two, so they're not the same. In the first person, belief is subjective and private, justification can be deduction or personal experiential or a reference to a public or conventional fact. We know that or it is known that is a publicly conventional belief justified by expert evidence.

The number of dots on the face of a die has two answers, It's either the side facing me or what is publicly known of all six sides. Neither of these is from nowhere.

How do y'all think Bernie would have done? Would it have been this close? — bert1

I always assumed that Bernie was a Russian plant in the classic communist tradition.We have seen way too many like him for the last hundred years. We get lots of loose talk of 'class' struggles reminiscent of nineteenth century England or Germany, but no admitted specific plans for what to do after the despised capitalists and their bourgeois lackeys are eliminated. Nevertheless, as per either communist or fascist strategy, Bernie fragments and polarizes liberal political opinion and mobilizes his small but growing extreme.

In 2016, Bernie (with a big assist from Comey) just about guaranteed a Trump victory by disenchanting would be democratic voters.

all that exists is I or a content of my mind — Tristan L

Language from other incompatible theories imports implicit assumptions which could make this solipsism self-contradictory. For example, 'exists' is explicitly Parmenidean for the one or Aristotelian for the many. In common parlance this need not be recognized, but philosophically it can become crucial. That's why only the vague 'is' is acceptable. This goes for Descartes as well, where only 'I am' is correct.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a Trump ally who usually avoids criticizing the president in public, told reporters Wednesday that "claiming you've won the election is different from finishing the counting."

The big rat is preparing to jump ship. :smile:

A possible scenario could be tRump loses, sues in swing states, drags suits out till January, then leaves quietly in exchange for not getting prosecuted for high treason and other federal crimes.

Just in case, I want to be the first to celebrate.
:party: ♫♫

Once there was a wicked witch in the lovely land of Oz
And a wickeder, wickeder, wickeder witch there never, never was
He filled the folks in Munchkin land with terror and with dread
'Till one fine day from Kansas way a cyclone caught a house
That brought the wicked, wicked witch his doom
As he was flying on his broom
For the house fell on his head and the coroner pronounced him dead
And thru the town the joyous news was spread
Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch? The wicked witch
Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead

Like with natural selection, every critter is reaching for something, food or sex or security. The engine of life is this ever present absence. — frank

But natural selection is based on natural profligacy of species, environmental chaos, and shear dumb luck of being in the right place just at the right time. Natural selection is not directional nor emergent.

There are plenty of counter-examples though which remain baffling mysteries, like the early development/emergence of feathers and light air-filled bone structure for dinosaurian birds which are necessary for a much later emergence of flight.

I'm not sure what is meant by something moving from one level to another. but I think I agree that emergence implies a viewer, because it seems like it's a consequence of limits of our cognition. — ChatteringMonkey

No. Our limits of cognition are irrelevant to the world of emergence.
Levels are there whether we exist or not. There were no atoms before we discovered them? Before Kant there was no universe outside the Milky Way?

@schopenhauer1
... and why would levels necessitate a viewer?

I think the problem with knowing that is the narrow range of what can be known due to the wide range of possible objections that can be raised. Knowing how on the other hand needs demonstration rather than a logos. I can walk, bicycle, drive without being able to adequately explain. I know chess, a little. I know every tune I have ever heard in my life. We know how to fly to the Moon. We know we have the capacity to save humanity.

Materialistic Science — Gnomon

You're awfully certain that there is such a thing. I always thought materialism is something practiced with balls and sticks or by kicking big rocks. Or by babies gnawing on their big toes. It's the science part that I don't get.
Physicists are physicalists which is quite different than materialism in spite of what people pretend to. Physics is a mathematical symbolic science. What's the symbol for a material?

what do you think Freud had to say that is worth our consideration today? — Athena

Freud's popularized emphasis on the subconscious arising from demonstrations of hypnosis is lastingly significant.

Metaphysical issues move unavoidably in both directions between philosophy and scientific theorizing and explication. In philosophy, scientific facts are fundamental in keeping things grounded, and scientific theorizing is focused philosophical inquiry with hopes of empirical support. The math may be different but that's to be expected, as scientific logic is much broader than the philosophical classicism still in practice.

"Classical" model of physics ... a reliable reflection of "Activity" within the larger "Reality" we all inhabit AND a faithful guide to understanding and problem solving "change" in the "real" world.

Classical physics works well to solve problems in the world of physical reality of space and motion created just for that purpose. But how can that be extended into our daily lives?

does that call for another assumption? — Paul Edwards

Precisely. You can eliminate many objections by defining your terms and making more assumptions explicit. For example, you would want to rule out Russia, with elected leadership, making war against Australia on ideological grounds.

Thanks for that, I don't think you're far off at all. From where I'm sitting, watching the rain fall on streets with much reduced traffic, the economy seems to have tanked.

Stagflation, noun (economics), persistent high inflation combined with high unemployment and stagnant demand in a country's economy.

The corporations live to serve their masters, the shareholders. To maintain rosy appearances in the markets, they are cutting expenses to the bone, which immediately impacts their suppliers of services. The suppliers cut working hours or just lay off workers and go out of business. Shops are closing, stores have limited inventories with rising prices, and many people just stay home watching the rain fall. But thank God, the stocks are doing so well.

let the winners of democratic elections kill people who take up arms against the democratic government

Isn't this the policy of all countries already?

any acceptable version would have to be so radically unlike the ill-formed notions that are commonly appealed to that it would be tactically obtuse--not to say Pickwickian — Dennett

So, Dennett is not saying that metaphysical objects somewhat like qualia are impossible, but that the terminology used would need to be something unfamiliar. Not even necessarily novel, just unusual.

The cauliflower case is directly out of Heraclitus, label it 'relational' if you like. The problem is old, the solution is nowhere in sight.

Qualia are a valiant attempt to bridge the gap between subjective phenomenal experience and objective philosophy. If qualia cannot be fixed objects, then how can we communicate thought, feelings, and sensations in the language of philosophy?

To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant

But to deny the existence of qualia wouldn't there first have to be someone foolish enough to insist that qualia as mental processes actually 'exist' in a philosophical sense of having identity?

I take Quining to be the gross error that subjective processes can somehow be made objective and distinct for the purpose of quantization?

Qualia are bundles of properties without a distinct object.
The issue is that since the PNC is inapplicable saying things about qualia becomes difficult but not impossible.

I am missing something.
Are we talking about my own personal belief or something that is believed by everyone because all humans by necessity believe or perhaps because science believes ? Inductive belief can be either one and personal justification is quite different from what is innate or a law of physics.

My own thinking has evolved, ... due to learning and a willingness to learn, and humility got the hard way. That is, school, experience, hard knocks, time. Wisdom, imo, something else and also not the subject of this thread, ... does our several thinking evolve, and more-or-less in the same way? Is any of it a function of age and appreciation of mortality, of what is important in the face of no-longer-being? — tim wood

Let's think about death later, much later.
According to people in the know the brain evolves from infancy to old age in quantity and quality. Others say that the mind also evolves in style in stages suggesting periodic reorganization of whatever resources it has to work with. Most of this reorganization goes on unnoticed except that others can see it. For example, some topics, like philosophy and physics need to be taught in gradually more sophisticated versions several times years apart because most abstract conceptual and logical facilities require an adult mind. The historically annoyingly noticeable distinction between knowledge and wisdom breaks down to a gradual decline in ability to learn and know and to a corresponding increasing ability to judge. But not always.

Philosophy needs to be logical but it need not be a single logical system. Quite likely, anything classified as philosophy will not match other, or even any other philosophy. Chances are that even the terminology employed is inconsistent.

Like many other games and puzzles, jigsaw puzzles have the peculiarity that a unique solution only comes easily when the pieces are few and large with obvious clues of fit neighboring pieces and the overall structure of the completed image.

Growing complexity requires a second, higher type of meta-reasoning called strategy. Developing a strategy in solving puzzles becomes gradually more and more salient as complexity grows. As noted in a previous topic, chess is one of the best examples of this characteristic of puzzles.

consciousness cannot be understood except by studying it, and this is not what Penrose does. He just thinks about it. . . . — FrancisRay

Can't do one without the other. To study the unknown, some bounds and rules, definitions for discourse, must be hypothesized first then see how it goes. Usually it won't.

If Penrose thinks consciousness is emergent from the physical that isn't saying much. Even if quantum mechanisms and logic are invoked. It's only a fancier version of older suggestions. But he wants say it now to be ahead of the wave, just in case it turns out to be correct.

Garber said --

Descartes’ thought must be understood in the context of the attempt to reject Aristotelian physics, and replace it with a different kind of physics, one grounded in a mechanistic conception of nature.
For an Aristotelian physicist, ... bodies have to behave one way or another, as embodied in their substantial forms. Some bodies naturally fall, and others naturally rise; some are naturally cold, and others are naturally hot; some are naturally dry, and others are naturally wet.
For the mechanist ... the world is a machine, all the way down.

But the foundations of Aristotelian philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and theology are another matter.

Thank you for raising facts for attention. Are facts rational? Do we use facts to rationalize or are we better off appealing to emotional leanings? What facts could possibly have lead people to decide to buy the endless variety of models and colors of automobiles that we see on the roads, why not just a few well chosen models in practical brownish shades of grey?

Although most people think of facts as certain or true statements, I prefer to limit fact to established past events and to scientific propositions as reported by reputable sources. Perhaps simply just scientifically objective facts as opposed to subjective personal opinions.

What is clear is that although price, safety, and maintenance history may have had a role in deciding which automobile people buy, personal preferences are likely to have weighed more. How much more? I suppose that depends on the buyer. I know I have been looking for something to buy in just the right shade of green for a few years now without success.

if we have, let's say 70% of the right information decision making becomes easier. — Konkai

Perhaps. But most decisions are based on gut feelings, necessity, sentiment, or habit, and then the facts are carefully marshaled afterwards to rationalize the decision to ourselves and for others.

Hume himself admits that his theory would be as sceptical as Pyrrho of Elis, the model of all scepticism, if it were not for the fact that nature comes to the rescue of knowledge. How?
Because when you have a rational and universally shared belief it would be absurd to do without it. This is a very simple principle, but it seems to be quite solid. At heart, all science is based on it. — David Mo

But not Hume. Hume's philosophy is an understanding and lack of appreciation for Galilean-Newtonian science. Instead, he starts with modern Aristotle and winds up with Platonic skepticism even of well-justified opinion.

if a predator is so strong a hunter it proliferates and the prey population declines — kudos

As @Olivier5 pointed out, strong hunters do not proliferate at the expense of their prey in nature, rather, there is a dynamic balance between the two groups that ebbs and flows. Where strength does become important is on a Darwinian stage of eliminating weaker rivals that would otherwise claim the same territory in the food chain. I am thinking of foxes, coyotes, and wolves that cannot survive in the same terrain and territory together. But this competition among peers is just as intense and at times just as deadly in human affairs, especially at the international level of the hierarchy.

If we were to formalize this relationship by setting up a dichotomy of strong/weak predator/prey, we would need to look at something that takes the dynamical aspects of either experiential or real-world relationships into account. Which is why I attempted a Heraclitean peer-to-peer and another one-to-many parent-to-children model for your first phrase. I think these relationships would stay static for a time but not forever, not as would be expected for any dialectic originating with Plato.

natural predator-prey relationships — kudos

In nature, the predator is also prey, and the prey predator. And if nature sneezes they're all dead.

5. You can't get knowledge of things that are empirical unobserved — Humelover

I wonder how much Plato's Theaetetus had to do with this powerful argument. The key to understanding seems to be recognize equivocation in both arguments on which kind of knowledge we are talking about.

deterministic machines without human free will cannot cope with semantic indeterminism. — RussellA

Human free will is from a different unrelated language. In theory, machines can be made at least as semantically intelligent as a standard dumb human. Semantic indeterminacy, as vagueness and ambiguity unresolved, is a necessary feature of natural languages to allow specific in-context applicability of a limited formal vocabulary to a boundlessly unpredictable real world.

I recommend that you take a look at the entry on "Relativism" at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) and especially at the three related articles by Westacott,
Moral, Cognitive, and Aesthetic relativism.

Edit - You're in a foreign land, the sights and sounds are bewildering. Learn the language of the natives.

Probability arose from gambling — ReluctantMathematician

So probabilities would be meaningful as applied to gambling, for example, or are they meaningful just as numbers?

there should be a boundary probability number that is " meaningfulness " just for that specified case and out of that boundary is not meaningful — boby

I'm not sure what meaningful means in a probabilities context. I think of probabilities as arising from the analysis of purely hypothetical mathematical possibilities.

When I think of meaningfulness I look at the application of the numbers to experience in an ordinarily setting. Perhaps a personal or social phenomenon is looked at to see if numbers can be fitted to repeated occurrences or chain of events. Then meaningfulness can be thought of as a measurable degree of fitness of the two models, one for the world and one from math.

I could come up with a strong argument that the greatest problems in the world are a consequence of having sex and children. The entire environmental crisis and the dying of Earth's ecosystems can be strongly attributed to unregulated human over-population.

I don't believe that old age is the age of wisdom, but a progressive advance towards stupidity. This is was Socrates' feeling -despite Plato's version- according Xenophon. This is why he provoked is own death in his famous trial. It is an heterodox consistent version. — David Mo

On what basis can you accept Xenophon's word over Plato's? Most likely they were both just stories to create opposing Socrates portraits that suited each writer, pro and ad hominem. Think a bit, if Soc was a decrepit old buzzard, then what was the attraction that he had for the majority of philosophers of his time and at least for some of the common citizens of Athens? He was convicted for crimes against the state not for being old.

Oh, I think the Russians or the Chinese will have a say about that. It's only reasonable that they should hop aboard that train.