Ducking the issue as usual then.

How can you say the stationary ball is stationary when, to quote Monty Python...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

The naive realist is always telling us how things are for them. Solipsistically, they are the centres of their own universes I guess.

As if a stationary ball were nothing? — Banno

A stationary ball is definitely something as it is a state of least motion as fixed by the constraints of the rather particular thing of an inertial reference frame.

That is, to call it stationary is relative to the claim it is lacking motion. You are already metaphysically presuming a world that you can measure with some suitable yardstick like a ruler or stopwatch.

I think the question pointless. Language disengaged from our regular language games, disengaged gears spinning to no effect. — Banno

Your language is plugged into Euclidean geometry, Cartesian coordinates and Newtonian mechanics. But as naive realism, it then doesn't even want to mention this particular metaphysical grounding.

By variance I mean the quality of being different. Thus, a state of no variance would be a state where there is no difference/dissimilarity. Qualities such as unchanging and static presuppose a subject* whereas the quality of no-difference implies the impossibility of any subject. This way, nothingness equals no-difference. — Daniel

You are in a bit of a linguistic trap because this invariance is being related to a “state”. Invariance is the property. And so that seems to imply the existence of the subject or substrate being describe in those terms.

Nothingness is taken as the absence of properties because of an absence even of any substrate. Now that may also be an impossible conception, but it is what the language sets people up for.

Where you may be trying to head is towards an inversion where difference is itself the subject of the property of invariance, so to speak. So now you are imagining unlimited and unbridled difference - an everythingness of distinctions as a "substrate". And now an invariance or nothingness becomes the property or generalised quality of this chaos of distinctions.

If absolutely everything is happening all at once in every possible way, then nothing is actually happening as it is in the emergent state of a featureless confusion. There are no differences making a difference. There is the something else of a vagueness. A state of being neither here nor there due to a lack of any distinctive variance.

The carbs and cheap oils will kill you first.

I thought that was just you agreeing with my general thesis here, that rhetoric and the arts more generally both trade in the appeal to those kinds of things. — Pfhorrest

OK, we look to agree there.

I would frame it more as "evoking feelings" than "plugging into biases" — Pfhorrest

Yep, this in turn gets tricky as the biases are both biological and cultural - hardware and software - once you dig into them.

In a preliterate society - not to be confused with an illiterate society - spoken language was the repository of all knowledge. Rhetoric, then, no mere social art. It's been said that the state of the state then could be assessed by the state of the official language. — tim wood

Sure. Oral traditions are thus dependent on the kind of narrative structure that human brains are adept at remembering. Reality has to get turned into a story handed down over the generations by this kind of fragile link - one where every speaker can rewrite the facts to suit the audience.

Modern rhetoric as sophistry? All that says is that you have not grasped that some - many, most - issues are not soluble in logic. — tim wood

All that says? Did I even say that? Or is this your creative approach to the facts in pursuance of a crowd-pleasing rhetorical performance?

Rhetoric can only be understood by first recognizing that it does not reduce to anything else but itself. Not logic, not psychology, but itself.

"Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." Rhetoric 1355b25 — tim wood

So why does Aristotle list the three things it reduces to as (1) perceptions of the personal character of the speaker, (2) the ability to excite emotions that are pleased and friendly, not pained and hostile, in the the audience, and (3) the proving of a truth - or at least an appearance of having done so - in the structure of the speech act?

It sounds like you are confused about the way in which I'm contrasting logic and rhetoric. — Pfhorrest

Nope. I covered that.

Sure. The traditional meaning of rhetoric was about oratorical skill - persuasive public speaking. So it was about pragmatics - presentation - rather than syntax/semantics, the actual grammatically-structured and meaningful part of what was said.

We can do one without the other, but most often we are doing both simultaneously. — Pfhorrest

Speech acts are always performative - they involve pragmatics. But speech acts also need semantic intent constrained by grammatical structure. So they always go together. Otherwise there is just a nonsense noise or empty theatrics.

We can do pure applied logic, and just be doing abstract mathematics. (Empirical science is something else beyond mere logic and math). — Pfhorrest

Abstract maths often does seem like nonsense - all syntactical pattern and no semantic meat. :razz:

Empirical science is logical structure meaningfully applied to the world via quantification or measurement. It is speech about something and so is demonstrably useful.

So I don't find your logic vs rhetoric dichotomy accurate as it leaves out the third thing of semantics.

But at the same time, it seems like a good departure point for asking the question of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. What is it about the way we say something that acts as a constraint on semantic interpretation?

What strikes me now is that logic as syntactic structure is a constraint that the audience - a community of thinkers - would want to impose on the speaker. A discipline to ensure something concrete and measurable, so potentially meaningful, just got claimed.

Rhetoric - as pragmatics - is the attempt by a speaker to constrain the audience in an inverse fashion. It boils down to loosening their determination to doubt by signalling all the ways they must be really already on the same page. A context that grounds the semantics is shared. This being so, there is no need to speak of x, y and z.

So that is how the game of communication gets played generally. The speaker is constrained by a set of grammatical habits. But an audience also needs to be on the same page in terms a semantic common ground. Otherwise a speech act can never touch bottom in terms of an endless capacity to doubt the semantic validity of everything that we hear said.

(Sound like a discussion board?)

Anyway, a speaker has to provide both those things to communicate an idea. Both a logically structured speech act and also some kind of "impression management" via rhetoric/linguistic pragmatics that brings an audience into the necessary state of receptivity which would ground the interaction.

From there, we can branch off into the uses and abuses of rhetoric/linguistic pragmatics as they are appropriate to the sciences or the arts. Even abstract maths (or abstract art).

That relationship between rhetoric and art was the main point of this thread. — Pfhorrest

Have you said anything so far in response to my point that art relies on plugging into the inherent cognitive biases of humans? That is what sets up a dichotomy between two kinds of currently socially-valued communication methodologies that we might get educated in - the rational and the social, the scientific and the poetic, the thoughtful and the rousing.

If you think that's bleeding obvious then I don't know why it seemed like you disagreed with that until now. — Pfhorrest

If you want to sharpen the definition of how something might be good, it helps to be clear in what sense or context it is bad.

The general modern connotation of rhetoric is that it is sophistry. So there is even more reason to dig into a neutral definition.

Then my actual argument - the bit I found interesting - was how rhetoric would count as not logical in its dependence on psychological appeals rather than quantified facts. That is where art would come in. The ability to plug into the cognitive biases that rational discourse is instead designed to overcome.

If there was anything useful to say here, that was it as far as I was concerned.

But if you're trying to convince the general populace of that same theory of reality -- same content, different audience -- you need to be aware that often they're not just going to zero in on your logic and facts and brush any rhetorical flourishes away as distractions. — Pfhorrest

Again you dwell on the bleeding obvious. My focus was on the fact that “success” in that fashion hinges on a skill at connecting with human cognitive biases.

Note how your whole post manages to avoid the point I raised. I say science and art are distinctive in that one relies on “psychological facts” and the other on “objective facts”. Each thus ought to have their own rhetorical style - if we are using rhetoric as some general neutral definition of persuasive communication.

But you were trying to contrast logic and rhetoric. And that then doesn’t work if you also want rhetoric to bridge the division of rational or scientific exposition and artistic or social audience connection.

Your OP had this central confusion running through it. If everyone seems to be going off at tangents, perhaps that would be why?

In the ancient Aristotlean sense - where all information is oratory - rhetoric can be seen to render quantitative facts or logic as secondary. — Possibility

I think that rhetoric does just boil down to that ancient emphasis on oratory as a practical life skill - the social art of speaking persuasively.

The modern rational mindset then arises via a shift from qualitative to quantitative argument. The shift from ordinary social language to a mathematical mindset based on logical rules and measurements.

That shifts the “persuasion” out of the subjective or social realm and into a formal scientific or rationalist one.

An excavation of metaphysical truth - in the age of quantum mechanics - necessarily involves rhetoric, not as an ‘art of persuasion’, but as a recognition of relativity or uncertainty in interpreting undeniable quantitative information as a statement of relevant philosophical truth. — Possibility

Metaphysics is on the qualitatiive end of the spectrum in its discussions. But science has been generating the new qualities to be discussed. Dialectically paired qualities like information and entropy have emerged as the most essential measures or quantifications of reality. Metaphysics can now ask, so what are those really? :grin:

I have no idea — TheMadFool

So you have no idea if you would classify cities or the weather as physical phenomena?

Sounds legit.

Logic is about demonstrating truths that are universally and necessarily so and cannot be otherwise. Rhetoric the contingent, that could either be or not be. — tim wood

I don't think much hinges on the distinction if rhetoric is a social art of persuading an audience towards an already held opinion rather than a Socratic dialogue where the goal was to reveal what had to be the case logically.

So the big flip in Ancient Greece was in accepting the principle of a dialectical inquiry as the royal road to arriving at truth. That is what you really get from Plato as the reason to engage in something more ambitious than sophistry.

The irony is that really strong dialectical arguments produce equally convincing alternatives. Heraclitus says all is flux? Well, my boy Parmenides says all is stasis. The Many is the One.

And so metaphysics oscillates even until this day. Another story of course.

I’m only saying it can also be used for good. — Pfhorrest

If that were all that you claimed, there would be far less to discuss. That counts as the bleeding obvious.

Just dryly hitting someone with a book of hard logic isn't going to effectively communicate anything to them. It has to be delivered in a way that will actually get through to them. — Pfhorrest

OK, you make it clear your concern is limited to the use of the "fit to" concept of interactions.

I think I was ending up talking about that fit as well. Scientific ideas need to be communicated in their certain way - explicit logical theory, concrete objective measurements - to persuade their audience. That defines a good fit.

But rhetoric - in its ancient Aristotelean sense - is about powerful oratory. And to move crowds, you have to plug into ordinary human psychology. That would define its good fit.

The problems of mixing the two were already known in Aristotle's day. Hence Plato's scorn for sophists who taught rhetoric as a game of social winning rather than an excavation of metaphysical truth.

And today, having been through the Scientific revolution, and even the Romantic revolution, the problems of mixing the two modes of "fit" are even more apparent.

The problems seem the more interesting story here. But obviously that's just me. I haven't persuaded you. :grin:

Ergo, there must be a common thread that runs through all five of them that justifies them being listed under the same category, the physical. — TheMadFool

Do you accept them all as physical? Or even just the four listed after cognition?

His student Aristotle ... holding that because many people sadly do not think in perfectly rational ways, rhetorical appeals to emotion and character and such are often necessary to get such people to accept truths that they might otherwise irrationally reject. — Pfhorrest

So if you are the smart rational one with the correct opinion, it is fine to use any means necessary to carry the less clever crowd?

Do you really want to argue that?

In this analogy, the medicinal content of the pill is the logical, rational content of a speech-act, while the size, texture, and flavor of the pill is the rhetorical packaging and delivery of the speech-act. — Pfhorrest

Yikes. You do know that Big Pharma indeed relies on the placebo effect in designing its pills and potions? If they look like magic beans or secret elixirs, this has a measurable effect on their perceived benefits.

Likewise the doctor in a white coat and a stethoscope draped around the neck. A rational content is being promised by the medical packaging. But sometimes all you are getting is the packaging.

I'm not sure if you took me to be saying that rhetoric is a kind of logic. I wasn't; I was separating them as different aspects of communication, "structure" and "presentation" basically....

...]I have some other stuff to say in response to the negative view of rhetoric you go on to state — Pfhorrest

Sure. The traditional meaning of rhetoric was about oratorical skill - persuasive public speaking. So it was about pragmatics - presentation - rather than syntax/semantics, the actual grammatically-structured and meaningful part of what was said.

But "rhetorical" has come to have the negative connotation of the merely crowd-pleasing for good reason. And your effort to connect rhetoric to the arts is something I then tried to account for in as neutral a fashion as possible.

Again, if we say someone is making a logical or rational argument, we mean it is essentially scientific and objective. There is some theory expressed as a logically consistent assertion. And there is good reason for us to agree with it because it appeals to "objective evidence" - both the internal logical validity of the argument that we can all check as we all follow the same rules, and by empirical support in that we make the same measurements to check the world actually is as proposed.

Art is different from science. It's target is the social world rather than the real world. That is what it wants to tell "the truth of". It ends up speaking to the constructed reality of being an individual in a culture - even if it is a painting of mountains.

So rhetoric becomes persuasive narrative in that context. And it is not surprising that "good rhetoric" in that context plays to the inherent cognitive biases of humans. It hits its audience on the target. Otherwise it would be just a lecture with examples.

The bad thing is when rhetoric of this "artful" kind then gets applied back where it shouldn't be - where we are supposed to be rational thinkers making evidence-based claims.

Another thread about the merits or faults of rhetoric, rather than this thread which is just supposed to be about the relationship of rhetoric to art. — Pfhorrest

You are so controlling. But it should be clear that my point was that rhetoric is not merely "presentation style" or "holding a crowd technique". There is good reason why we now see it as distinguishing between scientifically rational discourse and creatively social discourse.

Rhetoric is called rhetoric to point to argumentation that pretends to objective standards but is designed to tap into psychological biases.

When rhetoric is actually art - a subjective narrative that is also designed to tap into how people "naturally are" - then it gets called art. No one calls Picasso or whoever great rhetoricians, even if being fluent in earnest bullshitting may be a career requirement of the budding artist.

I hold rhetoric, thus characterized, to be a sort of foundational branch of the arts more generally, much as logic is a foundational branch of mathematics. — Pfhorrest

Rhetoric would be logic misapplied in the sense that it is argumentation intended to bypass objective empirical validation and instead plug directly into the various cognitive biases of humans. That is, all the standard kinds of "irrationalities", such as the recency effect or groupthink.

Trump is a master of rhetoric in that any statement he makes is true because - evidence - "everyone says that", or "only nasty and unpopular people would contradict it".

This site lists over 80 such appeals to bias. Trump probably can hit all of them.

But Trump is of course also the most challenged in actually constructing a logical argument, so that demonstrates how little rhetoric in fact relies on actual logic.

And indeed, it highlights the further point that even actual logic depends on a notion of empirical confirmation - validation by the evidence as well as by its internal syntactic consistency - to enjoy the prestige it has.

So it is foundational to pragmatism and science really. Or at least it makes more sense to oppose the rhetorical arts to the pragmatic sciences if both are about discovering "real world truths" in some fashion.

Art is social realism. It is subjective rather than objective in being tailored to the cognitive biases that evolution built into the pre-rational, pre-linguistic, vertebrate brain. Or at least that brain as used by humans still stuck in a narrative era of social discourse. Before they got all rationally educated in a modern logically-structured way that valued objectivity as a stance on nature.

I only asked you to provide 4 physical items that includes thoughts as one. :chin: — TheMadFool

I’ve explained why it is a poor question. But....

1) cognition
2) traffic
3) cities
4) weather
5) ecosystems

Hah. It would look like a pattern - a pattern of entropy dissipation - of course. Everything physical looks more like a process, a "mindful" flow, if viewed on the right scale to reveal its causal structure.

Those are physical correlates of thinking and not thoughts themselves. — TheMadFool

The thoughts are causal. The productive interaction is what physically exists as "a self".

I ask tne two of you again the simple question: what are the physical properties of thoughts? — TheMadFool

You simply ask an incoherent question if your notion of physics is as limited as your notion of mind.

Do you think "physics" is the easy part of the problem here? There is a lot to unlearn on that score as well then.

Let's suppose the mind = brain and that physicalism is true. — TheMadFool

But that is not what I said. I said the mind is an informational model of the entropic world. It is a pattern that exists to the degree it can regulate that world as something "external" to it.

But by the same token, it only exists to the degree the world is actually being regulated. So without a physically effective impact, there is no consciousness happening.

What are the physical properties of thoughts? — TheMadFool

They would be the physical results of those thoughts (plus the general but small constant cost of keeping the brain running as the pattern generator).

So did a skyscraper get built on the corner lot? Some architect's vision had a physical impact on the world then.

At the very least, something - thoughts - aren't physical at all. — TheMadFool

The thought results are their physical consequences. The thought process has its standard brain metabolic cost.

The only reason you see no physics here is because you refuse to look. Where is the evidence that thoughts aren't physical "at all" when they are "all about" information patterns that need to be able to manage the physics of the world in real-time?

So yes, there is a division. There is this biological thing of information regulating physical entropy flows.

But you are just re-running the old vitalist argument about living organisms being some great unphysical mystery.

Life and mind are the same kind of deal. One models the world it wants - the metabolic flows that constitute living - using the information held by genes. The other also models the world it wants - the thoughts that regulate the wider environment - using the information held by neurons.

I'm mainly concerned about the brain activity being the same between awake and REM sleep states. If the mind is the brain, we should be conscious on both occasions but we're not. — TheMadFool

If the engine is running, but the gearstick is in neutral, is it a puzzle the car is not going anywhere?

Consciousness isn't something separate from the physical fact of being in the world. It is all about that way of being in the world. It is controlling a car in motion that makes one a driver, not merely sitting in the driver's seat.

When we are awake, the difference is that the brain has physical stimulation that it is responding to in terms of its "pattern fitting". There is a real world problem getting constantly solved.

Your Matrix simulation could only work as it mimics some kind of real physical stimulation, even if you have reduced that to winking LED lights in a set of VR googles, or whatever. And in a VR simulation, you change the view "realistically" by physically moving your head in space. A Matrix world is only convincing to the degree it provides this normal seeming level of interaction with its "physics".

So your arguments rely on your failure to be realistic about what is actually involved in a brain forming a working relationship with the world.

The whole point of the mind is to provide a way of regulating the physics of the world. And it does this by implementing a modelling interaction. Remove the physical half of the equation - as happens when the brain shuts off the normal flow of sensation from the senses at the brainstem level - and we get the confused states of sleep where the brain is just riffing off its own memory patterns.

It is revving the engine, stomping on the accelerator, for sure. But there is no physical response - no challenge of actually having to drive. And hence no feedback to structure the resulting states of experience.

I half-think you do think that's all I've said. — csalisbury

And yet this is the kind of confused nonsense you feel is some kind of sharp reply.

In a sordid hour, I went and got drinks with a subjectivist and, as you'd expect from a subjectivist, he wanted to talk about literature. After saying 'fuck science' and showing me his grateful dead tattoo, he told me the story of Henry James' Beast in the Jungle. The protagonist, the subjectivist told me, spent his whole life waiting for his apotheosis - for the 'beast' to pop out in a single epic moment. The beast does pop up, toward the end, when the protagonist realizes that in focusing all his energy on this apotheosis, organzing his life around this moment, he's become absent to his actual life. This recognition is the beast, of course, what can you expect? 'Away with you, subjectivist' I yelled, 'this oatmeal-mush displays only your watery will!' — csalisbury

How could this caricature apply to a totalising that is all about living life as it happens and building an ever heightened state of sensitivity and awareness as a result?

I never found life dull. But now I'm old it is ridiculous how many different things I find fascinating.

If your mind is confused, then confusion is all it can discover in life. Beating about the bush and never coming to a point becomes the anti-totalising habit.

Again, if you can make a sharp case against my "way of life", go ahead. In what way is it "wrong"?

You seem angry enough about it. Always bitching. But isn't that all about you in the end?

I'm saying there is a particular kind of total-surprise-avoidance that I think it best to avoid. — csalisbury

Sure. But here you need to show how that applies to what I actually do, not some mechanical caricature of that.

In all seriousness, though, I've met you in every way, while you've failed to meet me. — csalisbury

You really believe your own bullshit don't you. You haven't produced a coherent argument as yet. But you want to make that problem mine.

To reiterate, the 'success' of such an approach appears to me be a 'success' at avoiding any kind of surprise or any encounter with something outside one's grasp. — csalisbury

You don’t get it then. I will repeat. It is by “avoiding surprise” that one is sharpened to discover the greatest surprise.

If your complaint about totalising is that it is rigid and blinkered, then I have explained why that is a false characterisation.

My approach is organic and not mechanical. The integration is what supports the differentiation.

I guess I'm supposed to be a 'subjectivist' who refuses to 'escape the cartesian dialectic' — csalisbury

Note how you then launch into a long defence of the subjectivist life as the unalienated and colourful alternative. Who would not choose that over the alienated, monochrome, etc, objectivist you ask?

And as I said...

It's funny. Proper metaphysical strength Peircean pragmatism offends the objectivist and the subjectivist alike. — apokrisis

I don’t have to reject one pole to have the other. My way of life is able to incorporate both poles more fully.

For example, the more the world is understood and made predictable, the more surprising and delightful it feels. High contrast between figure and ground equals heightened sensation.

Still, I'm deeply skeptical of the thermodynamics-explain-everything approach — csalisbury

It grounds explanation. It doesn’t explain away. It starts explanation from a deeper level. It is the fertile soil that grows more.

What is in question is whether we should count the dog's intuition as a kind of logic, or as logical in a kind of basic sense. — Janus

It seems easy to credit animals with inductive reason and hard to credit them with deductive reason.

The brain is set up to form general rules from particular experiences. These are what habits of though are. They create natural states of expectation based on prior experience. So all animals would be as good at this kind of inductive reason in proportion to their brain size. Humans included.

Deductive reasoning is then the opposite. The ability to derive consequences from general rules. Thus it is the ability to generate non-habitual responses to the problems of life.

That requires the further step of forming that rule as its own notion in the mind and not some unconscious habit of generalisation. You have to know the rule as something "objectively stated" and not just "subjectively acted out", as in applying a inductive habit that generates an expectation.

So - as in pragmatic reason - the full story of the rational mind involves the three steps of abduction or hypothesis forming, deduction or consequence forming, and inductive confirmation or the rule checking that can add it safely to our store of habits.

The fox story doesn't seem a clear enough test of the two alternatives - mere animal induction vs full human reasoning - to answer the question even if it truly happened.

Is seems quite plausible that a fox could be trained to develop this inductive habit. If the same thing happened often enough, the rule would form as an implicit habit. Once you have exhausted other paths, the remaining path has to be the path.

It would seem obvious from accumulated experience rather than because the fox stopped, thought, reasoned it out as a first time exercise in forming a hypothesis, deducting the expected consequence, trotting off and discovering inductively if the expectation matched the new rule just posed.

So the distinction between induction from experience and deduction from hypothesis ought to be a sensitive test of where the line gets drawn in terms of whether a grammar of language is in play.

The situation has to be objectified to be made subject to the empiricism of a rational mindset. That requires a new kind of tool - grammatical speech - to do the job.

But an animal - put into an experimental apparatus like you describe - will also learn to decode the rationality implicit in the situation with enough inductive experience. It will implicitly get the explicit logic that went into the design of an arrangement of three forks and one that is correct.

This is why experiments in animal cognition can seem to show that animals are more capable of deduction than they naturally are. An artificial environment can be used to force the desired outcome.

I think it's very clearly epistemic... — Metaphysician Undercover

But hidden variables have been experimentally ruled out. If it is epistemic, you are left with a truly pathological metaphysics like MWI as your only refuge.

I'm sticking to the science here. The PNC fails to apply to the internals of the wavefunction. The PNC is an emergent feature of the classical scale where the wavefunction collapse has actualised some concrete possibility and so any remaining indeterminacy certainly is epistemic.

the physicist might not be willing to accept the fact that the apparent vagueness is due to deficiency in the principles. — Metaphysician Undercover

Physicists in fact tried their hardest to avoid ontic vagueness. They invented the MWI as one way not to have to admit defeat.

In the end, the "deficiency" is in the metaphysical reductionism that frames the problem - the framework both you and the MWIers share by insisting ontic vagueness is impossible from a classical viewpoint where everything has counterfactual definiteness from the get-go.

I remember hearing about the study that showed that the US is an oligarchy. Despite this, I think we can still salvage our country however through the existing, but nearly broken, democratic mechanisms in place. — Aleph Numbers

The problem for the US is that it starts with so many embedded geopolitical advantages that it is almost impossible to sink. It thus lacks the incentives to get its act together.

It has secure borders, the world's best food basket, a balanced demography, abundant energy and other resources, control of the world economy with the dollar as the reserve currency.

So it can run itself badly and still get by in a way most other nations can't.

What is a person to do when the social contract has been broken? Are they justified in tearing down the system? And if they are, are they justified in doing it violently? — Aleph Numbers

The US is insulated against external shocks to its system by all its embedded advantages. So reform would have to come from within.

As you rightly say, the question is why civil disobedience might indeed work better than violent overthrow. Is Chenoweth correct?

It seems commonsensical that tearing things down is easy. Building things up is the hard part.

So forming a steadfast block of citizens with a common clear objective is what has impact in human affairs - if there is any kind of democratic system in place. An angry mob with no such cohesion can be as violent as it likes to little effect. That just justifies an authoritarian crack down.

The problem for the US circles back to the fact that its own citizens know that irresponsibility has low immediate risk because the US system sits on so much geopolitical advantage. They don't need to be disciplined in their complaints in a way that forges that resolute state of civil disobedience.

So change could come if the US were at a tipping point where maybe even a small amount of resolute citizen action might be enough to trigger a shift in desired directions. But it hardly feels like the US is anywhere near that tipping point internally.

It's geopolitical advantages are a huge buffer against a system reform that would confront "the new truths" we might like it to see.

The "vague potential" we are talking about is ontological indeterminacy, — Metaphysician Undercover

So is the vagueness of a quantum potential ontological or epistemic? Do you believe nature is counterfactual all the way down despite the evidence?

I realize this is not the topic of the thread, so I apologize for deviating — jgill

That’s OK. I was just confused trying to figure the relevance.

Is not learning a type of thinking? — Harry Hindu

Animals can think in the sense they are conscious and can respond intelligently to situations. But the OP was about the evolution of logic. And my point is that it piggybacks on the new semiotic machinery that is grammatically structured speech.

What makes humans different is all the differences that this new habit of structured thought can make.

Pragmatism simply bypasses Descartes with a wry smile and no backward glance. The ability to doubt is what it uses to justify belief.

For all practical purposes is a pragmatic approach towards the problem of incompleteness of every scientific theory and the usage of asymptotical approximations - Wiki

That’s pragmatism for you. If your thought experiment specifies that there is no possible evidence that could make a difference then that is what you have specified.

But now you have to do your bit and prove that such a simulation is a realistic exercise. Build the kit that you claim could do this job. Seems like an idle fantasy of someone with minimal scientific understanding to me. A lame plot for a lamer movie. :wink:

For all practical purposes.

If you agree with me then, I agree with you I guess. — TheMadFool

Why guess. Parse what I wrote and find out.

Can Neil Armstrong tell the difference between a mind simulation of the moon and actually being there on the moon? He can't, can he? Doesn't that imply the sameness of the two? — TheMadFool

I thought I said it didn’t imply that. Are you now claiming the physical consequences are identical?

The more interesting question seems to be this: did Neil Armstrong actually go to the moon? — TheMadFool

Maybe the interesting question is why the US didn’t simply stage it all on a Hollywood backlog and save the dough.

I've been reading William James all week. — csalisbury

William James is a dirty word to the true pragmatist. Peirce was so offended by his disciple that he had to relabel the original as pragmaticism. :rofl:

like you think poems are people saying 'nature' in front of a bulldozer that says 'science — csalisbury

Keep inventing the straw man that is your ideal match up here. :yawn:

respond to the rest in the morning — csalisbury

Is it worth it? Only if you can focus enough to justify your gripes against a totalising discourse that actually produces results,

Are you agreeing with me?

So what was the point you hoped to make? How does it relate to the physics of a Big Bang universe? Break it down for me so that I might understand. Give us an example in a physical context.

Consider then the matter of reality simulation. — TheMadFool

Recall my previous reply which says it is correct to think that the brain's experience of reality is "just an information processing model". So sure. Matrix away.

But the brain is still a physical device that needs to be plugged into an energy supply. The cost of doing business - modelling the world - is zeroed, not actually "weightless" and zero. It just means one state of experience physically costs the same as any other state.

The actual real world cost of this experiential modelling is of course that it has to be useful. It has to stop us walking over cliffs or trying to fly off high buildings. We have to be able to sustain a life, and avoid becoming dead.

So the information cost of any brain state is reasonably minuscule - like pumping a few weights. But the consequences of wrong actions resulting from those states can be massive. Terminal. Call in the corpse recycling squad.

In dreams, the brain lives. But its states have no consequences like that. The same in your Matrix simulation. The same in a vegetative coma. The states it forms all weight the same at a neural level, but the results are weightless. They produce neither a gain nor a loss - so long as someone takes over your physical feeding and care if this disconnected state is prolonged.

Start by telling me what isn't different. I'm not sure how you think anything is the same.

Besides, the moon landing was faked. It was all shot on a Hollywood backlot and they burnt the set straight after. It's now a golf driving range.