Good idea and a very natural attempt; but arithmetic properties aren't sufficient. Weirder still, there are numbers that lose associativity as well, such as the octonions. — fishfry

Wasn't that my point. You can still be a numerical object even if you don't qualify for the full checklist of arithmetic properties. So the octonions lack a particular property. But they still count as part of the algebra family which takes numbers as their relational objects.

It probably helps that we can see why octonions lack this further constraint. We get the feeling they would express this property if only they could, as that is the general direction they are headed. But their own nature prevents fulfilling that goal. Therefore they qualify to be part of the family even if they can't tick every last box of some ideal definition.

Do you know much about Bourbaki structuralism - the three mother structures of algebra, topology and order - or category theory structuralism?

As I've been saying, you seem to want a definition founded on the mathematical objects rather than the mathematical relations or structures. But that just seems an antiquated notion.

And what is true in philosophy of maths is true of metaphysics generally. Nature is becoming understood in terms of its global structure rather than its local atoms.

That has been the recurring sticking point in any discussion we've had. You just presume the correctness of a reductionist or atomistic metaphysics. You then seem to have no understanding of the alternative view that is that of the structuralist, process philosopher or systems scientist.

In short though, mathematical structuralism is more subtle than just listing arithmetic properties like associativity.The kinds of properties that they use in category theory are ... well, they're kind of weird and nonintuitive when you first see them. The structural relations they have in mind are various types of universal mapping properties. It's hard to do justice to what this means in a simplified format but I might take a run at it once I get into responding in detail to your earlier post on structuralism. — fishfry

Maybe just focus on that. Structures are the objects now. Then morphism is how structures have a relational structure that allows acts of mapping.

So the essential property that founds the whole business is closure or symmetry. Hey, just like physics!

(And then I should add that the fundamental question becomes how could closure emerge? What constrains the openness that seems the alternative?)

I'm not sure what you mean by "next physical state", but the "program" in my example would clearly be the software in yours. — JustSomeGuy

Well you were replying to the point that I made about freewill being problematic because of the LaPlacean implications of Newtonian determinism.

So if physicalism is just about "hardware", then there is a problem. And the computational analogy is a way to show that the physics of matter doesn't get to control everything. There is also the physics of information.

So yes. The program determines its own next physical state. The hardware doesn't. Unless the circuits start misbehaving due to stray cosmic rays or something.

It's not a "folk psychology misconception", it's just how we talk about these things. It has to do with language, that's all. I think you're the one getting dogged by being nit-picky about language. — JustSomeGuy

So now you want to complain about introducing the philosophy that motivates the common conceptions? Are you in the right place?

Using the computer analogy, if you're running a program on some hardware, that program has to be pre-written to follow certain parameters and do certain things, and everything it does is a result of the program's code. Even if you bring artificial intelligence into it, a program that can learn, it still does everything it does based on the initial code you wrote. Every "decision" it makes is a direct result of following this code. It is all determined by the code (as well as other environmental/outside factors). — JustSomeGuy

Yeah. So now let's again talk about this mysterious "you" you keep wanting to introduce into the scientific or natural philosophy account.

Sure, the formal and final cause of a "program" do come from outside it. It has to be written with a certain design that serves a certain purpose.

The program itself is simply a pattern of material/effective causal entailment. A set of instructions that maps one physical machine state to its next. So that is why computers are only a weak analogy for the neuroscience. It is information processing without the designer or intender.

Actual neuroscience needs to account for that other bit of the puzzle. How and why does the nervous system "write its own meaningful programs"?

To cut to the chase, that is where I would bring up Peircean semiotics and other current neurobiological conceptions of what is really going on with a mind that has "a self that can form plans to meet goals".

To use the computer analogy, does the hardware determine its own next physical state or is it the software that determines that?

Point being, if your brain's processing and decision making are a product of this program, they do what they do automatically, meaning none of your decisions are true decisions because you could not possibly make a different decision than the one you make. — JustSomeGuy

Yep. So now we have to understand information processing as something more interesting than Turing universal computation.

Also note that you insert this "you" into your questioning as if there really is some dualistic mind-stuff or spiritual element - a res cogitans. So already your metaphysics is presuming a supernatural ontology and abandoning any hope of a properly naturalistic one.

Is this "you" you want to claim the whole of me? A part of me? Do you want to identify your essential being with your attentional-level processes and so exclude your habit-level organisation - all the accumulated wisdom of past attention-driven learning? Is that other half of you some robotic, unthinking, not-you that somehow shares "your" body?

Philosophy of mind is dogged by these kinds of basic folk psychology misconceptions. They are grounded in theology rather than science.

You are talking rubbish and I am probably one of the few people here who can see straight through you. — TimeLine

If you think so, then make your case properly. Don't waste my time with ill-written rambles.

This is the third time I am going to ask you:

What is this "humongously" large you are speaking of? What are you comparing it to, exactly? — TimeLine

Well in comparison to the light cone of our visible universe obviously. It has to be at least several times bigger for our own light cone to look equally thermalised in all directions. The famous cosmic background radiation.

And the original inflation story - not the one Linde is pushing that is the subject of the OP - speculated the extent of the scalar field would double every 10^-37 seconds or so. That was its exponential rate of growth. So presuming the decay of the grand unified field into the strong and electroweak fields happened at 10^-35 seconds after the birth of the universe, thus triggering the onset of inflation, followed by the further decay of the inflaton field by about 10^-32 second, then you could easily get 50 to 60 doublings into that fractional period.

So old school inflation says the visible universe is just 10^-55ish of the whole shebang. Hence the whole is "humongously larger", but not infinite, to use the technical description for that cosmic scenario.

The idea in inflationary terms is that the total energy at the beginning was 0 where the negative contribution to the energy of the cosmic gravitational field - as in gravitational repulsion where the energy density produces these gravitational fields - cancels the energy of matter or the positive energy. Inflation thus becomes eternal because as mentioned earlier the matter is being created by the inflation but controlled by the non-uniformity. — TimeLine

You see how right from the beginning you were mangling the science. The free lunch story is that the kinetic mass of the universe nicely balances its gravitational potential. So the energy to drive expansion is matched by the energy wanting to re-collapse that expansion. However, gravity is held in suspension until the electroweak symmetry breaking releases a flood of gravitating particles via the Higgs mechanism. It is only then that the potential is actualised and collapse becomes a real issue. Mass can start to clump and unbalance the expansion.

So story one is inflation-less. You have a positive inertial expansion due to an initial energy density vs a countering negative gravitational contraction. To have then a flat outcome - a universe cruising towards the halt of a heat death at the end of time - these two tendencies have to be miraculously balanced from the first Planckian moment. And astronomical observation then found a lack of the necessary mass vs gravity balance. There wasn't enough mass to achieve the necessary amount of gravitational braking we could observe in a universe that looks as flat as it does. So Houston, we had a problem.

Then came inflation theory. Even with a perfect initial balance, there would still be the inevitable inhomogeneities of mass density due to quantum fluctuation. Something further had to kick in soon after the Planck scale birth to stretch the universe so big and flat it couldn't immediately collapse due to that.

On top of all that, dark energy was then discovered. That looks like a remnant inflation field - a faint continuing extra acceleration laid over the top of an under-weighted inertial expansion due to a "too thin" initial mass density. So some kind of inflation still rescues the general "Omega" picture of a perfect balance between the positive energy of inertial expansion and the negative energy of gravitational collapse. Counter-intuitively perhaps, the faint dark energy repulsion counts as a pervasive presence of an energy of pressure. And as energy has gravity, the missing gravitational braking could now be supplied to achieve a flat balance and arrive back at where we need things to be.

So you have managed to smoosh at least three separate cosmological stories into one garbled paragraph.

And luckily I'm one of the few people here who can see straight through that. :)

If inflation is pushing omega to 1 with omega being the mass density divided by critical mass density, it means a universe with 0 matter density and critical mass density in the cosmological constant; the expansion of the universe is accelerating and the vacuum energy of this empty space has a mass density (which would mean that it is not actually empty). So Omega is relevant. — TimeLine

Inflation doesn't push omega anywhere. It washes out the early fluctuations that would have destabilised the show. So the problem is that overall, on average, the Big Bang could have had a perfect flat balance of omega = 1, but quantum fluctuations would have made it grainy. So it would have been unstable due to inhomogeneity. You need inflation just to deal with that separate problem.

Your own citation says this - carefully distinguishing between omega(m) and omega(lambda), or the critical density of the mass contents and the critical density of the dark energy:

Clicking on the graph shows that (nearly) all universes start at the Einstein-de Sitter point with Omega(m) = 1 and Omega(Lambda)=0. This is because if there is a Big Bang (R goes to zero) the density, hence H, hence the critical density, all tend to infinity at R = 0. So Omega(Lambda) tends to zero, while the matter density tends to the critical density.

Whoah, you are a cranky one. But really, your posts on cosmology are a garbled mess. And being polite to you was clearly wasted breath.

But the freewill deal is the fear that our decisions might be physically deterministic. So as soon as you view the brain in information processing terms, that issue is already dead.

The issue after that concerns people’s dualistic take on conciousness. So they want awareness to be something above and beyond the meat machinery of habit and attention.

Yet that again is to fail to understand an information processing functionalism.

So it is just science vs folk confusion. And the experiments aren’t great as they buy into the confusion.

If you just want to study the neurobiology of voluntary control, that’s what you should do as a scientist. And that’s what the mainstream does.

Sorry. Your post is a torrent of incoherence. I can’t be arsed untangling it for you.

I’ve not heard of sleepwalkers doing anything novel or useful. So no. It is just being awake enough to react automatically to familiar cues.

And to sleepwalk more than a few moments would only happen in adults with a neurological condition or in kids with, presumably, less developed habits of conscious self regulation.

As far as these experiments tell us anything about free will, they really should be seen as part of a continuum of study on the neurological markers of decision making processes, rather then in isolation. — Pseudonym

Yes. I’ve been following this story since the 1980s. The important thing is that the subjects are always fully conscious of the experiment’s demand to “let an impulsive choice surface”. And surprise, surprise, we can choose to do just that. We can disengage a sense of oversight.

Readiness potentials were uncontroversial when Kornhuber and Grey Walter reported them. They slotted nicely into the dominant behaviourism of the time. But then Libet came along with his dualistic agenda and managed to create a little sensation in philosophy of mind circles.

So it’s all social history as much as science. ;)

I think you just want all the glory or something, hence why you are trying to answer questions directed to me. — TimeLine

My goodness. Is that what it is about? Hilarious.

Your shape and size of the universe is the observable universe of 46gly from earth and just to help ameliorate your understanding, the singularity - whilst it does not reference a single planck point - is a physically impossible point that we use to explain how the universe came to be. So the assumption is that the early conditions were infinitely dense at the size of 10^-28cm (with energies at 10^16 GeV) and that would mean that anything larger or smaller would blow the universe apart or suck it away — TimeLine

Who mentioned singularities? I didn’t. And what is the relevance of a length scale 100,000x the Planck length? I’m not following you at all. This is another series of irrelevancies.

What? First of all, inflation is pushing omega to 1 and the asymptotic curvature would therefore be flattened by the expansion, thus the curvature would equal 0 or at least be very close to 0 and this would cause infinite expansion. The symmetry between these points is explained by fluctuations in the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background and so the universe is isotropic and homogenous; the best way to explain thermal equilibrium (actually the only as far as I know) is inflation. — TimeLine

Inflation doesn’t have to balance the kinetics of its expansion with its gravitational attraction. So an Omega balance is irrelevant. Inflation is about a scalar field that stays the same energy density while expanding exponentially. Repulsion dominates and gravity is simply impotent.

You are mixing up quite different things.

In sleep, you don’t form long term memories. And also there is a dissociation, or lack of integration, more generally. That is why in dreaming sleep, what you are thinking about your dream imagery has only a loose connection to that imagery. You are making up some kind of story, but it doesn’t closely follow “the facts”.

Thus in sleepwalking, you can be semi awake with some confused intentionality that has some very loose connection with the facts, and yet quite capable of acting with awake levels of habit. Some sleepwalkers have got in cars and driven miles.

So the attentional level of forming intentions and remembering consequences might be dazed and confused. But habits just need the eyes open and the body awake enough to respond automatically to a world of familiar clues.

There is this great tale of A.A. Gill cooking elaborate meals during alcoholic blackouts. A similar story... http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a46904/a-a-gill-memoir/

Huh? You do write weird. I asked what difference did your comment make. I did not say your comment was no different. So I was saying your comment was a non sequitur as far as I could see as it did not follow from mine in any useful or relevant fashion.

But if you think it did qualify my remarks in some meaningful fashion, could you explain in what way.

You will have to explain why your comment makes any difference to my comment.

Observation says the geometry is almost perfectly flat with just enough hyperbolic curvature to count against any gravitational collapse (and so any reheating of the universe and its contents).

Thus I don’t understand what you are getting at here.

It seems that, by current findings, big bang inflation + expansion does not account for the spatial extent of the universe. — jorndoe

Inflation definitely does. But then inflation is hardly a proven story. And also inflation can produce as big a common starting point as you like. Just leave inflation running a few more ticks of the clock and you get exponentially more growth.

So inflation is a free parameter. You can just dial it up as much as you need.

Then the eternal inflation article you referenced is another story again. It presumes inflation keeps happening forever and keeps spawning an unlimited number of big bangs. Ours is just one infitesimal region of the inflation that has cooled and slowed enough to bud off. There would be an unlimited number of other similar universes being created.

So the eternal and infinite version of inflation depends on an inflation event that spawns an unlimited number of big bangs. Ordinary inflation says our Big Bang suddenly took off and inflated a split second after it was first born. It wasn’t born inflating, but then inflation came along to make the universe sufficiently big and ensure that any local wrinkles were smoothed out and make the whole thing look as if it started off as perfectly flat and thermalised as possible.

So either inflation is eternal and we are a spot that dropped out of its exponential rate expansion with no cooling, to be a Universe with a steady rate expansion and cooling. Or inflation kicked in just after the Big Bang for a split second, which would still be enough to stretch out and flatten spacetime as far as the eye could ever see.

When we say "infinite" do we mean infinite volume or infinite mass? Both? Or something else? — T Clark

It would be both. For those arguing for an actually infinite extent, it would be just as unexpanded at every point, and so just as maximally dense and hot at every point, hence just as massive or energetic in its "explosiveness".

But as I said, any such extrapolation from our rather classical view of the Universe - one in which distances and energies have some relative value - really becomes quite moot if we are talking about an initial conditions where there just is nothing for distance and energy to be relative too, as yet.

So the infinity of the initial conditions would have to be infinite in some more general sense that we aren't good at describing in classical terms. A theory of quantum gravity would probably help that ... if not rely on that kind of re-conceptualisation.

My remark is entirely agnostic of foundational approach, a point apokrisis does not sufficiently appreciate.

There is no general definition in math that tells us what a number is. — fishfry

Or maybe I'm just pointing out that the idea of "numbers" speaks to a family resemblance. No single definition could hope to pin down "numbers" in some exact sense. But there is a constraints-based definition, or a structuralist definition, in that numbers are whatever it takes to get certain number-like operations - like those that preserve certain global symmetries, such as commutativity or associativity.

So you wouldn't expect a hard and fast definition of something general. As a foundational fact, all we can talk about is a family resemblance which emerges as we enforce greater and greater constraint in terms of bounding symmetries. Then in the limit, we arrive at associative division algebras.

So the octonions are not associative but they answer to the weaker constraint of being alternate. They still deal in numbers, but a slightly less constrained version.

The general definition is thus inherently fuzzy. The most highly constrained or specified kind of number system isn't broad enough to capture the weaker kinds that are possible with some of the constraints relaxed or even absent. And yet at some point the "general definition" is so weak that it doesn't then capture the essential operations that do define being part of that general family.

This is a familiar issue when framing scientific law. Philosophy of science says exactly the same thing.

So you may be agnostic about foundational approaches. But philosophy of maths can't afford to be. And I think the same understanding of the trade-off between the general and the particular applies across all the rational disciplines.

You are simply looking for the wrong kind of "general definition". Structualism is needed because that focuses on generic relations of which numbers then can be the various possible kinds of object.

Whatever. If you want to be the eternal child, your choice.

You sound like the kid who doesn't believe in Santa. And maybe you will never recover from the shock.

And you know this how? — Rich

I was there. Saw it with my own eyes. Idiot.

what the heck is a volume of points? — Rich

A holographic quantum mind projection. Just without the "mind" part you like to add.

how can a universe that has expanded from a point explosion be anything other than a sphere, — T Clark

It was not from a point but a volume of points. Or rather a volume of points changed their scale. They always had a size (and an energy density) from the start. Then that size expanded (and cooled).

And while we're on the subject, how can portions of the universe which were next to each other 14 billion years ago be more than 14 billion light-years apart now? — T Clark

If two of these "points" were to either side of us back then, they are now to either side of us today. So we all swell together.

Next question is "swelled into what?". We want to imagine a collection of swelling points as swelling within some further embedding space.

Imagine instead every point was some compacted tangle of thread. Expansion of the point is the thread being stretched out so that it takes up more room. Imagine a whole volume of such points untangling together and creating an expansion that is also now very sparsely occupied by any thread.

The Big Bang can only be understood if you see the way it is both an expansion and a cooling. So if you want some intuitive mental image, you have to supply an analogy that represent both parts of that "explosion".

... which, in turn, suggests that something is missing. — jorndoe

It doesn't feel like it makes a lot of sense talking about the initial conditions of the Big Bang as being either finite or infinite. Both alternatives feel metaphysically suspect. So something "beyond" these traditional choices may be needed.

What we know for sure is that the Big Bang did not start from just a single of Planck-scale point right at the beginning. And indeed, something like inflation is needed to guarantee that the initial region that "banged" was already humongously large.

But to then jump to that extent being "infinite" is a large assumption - if also a pretty natural one.

There are alternatives. The initial conditions could have been "infinite" yet finitely closed - like the surface of a sphere.

Or they could have been the opposite - open and "infinitely" finite in being utterly disconnected and hyperbolically curved at every point. So we might imagine a dust of points which are disconnected as they all curve away from each other with maximum energetic violence. They don't glue together to form a connected volume - a single actual space with shared dimensionality. And then the Big Bang is in fact the gluing together moment when the curvature (which physically would be the violent energy of the Planck density/temperature) started to connect and create a generalised flattening out.

Using the threads analogy, threads would start to connect to other threads and the whole "infinite" fabric would start to knit together and so share a common story concerning their stretching out and flattening out.

Perhaps something an established unification of relativity and quantum mechanics could shed light on? — jorndoe

Yep. That was what loop quantum gravity approaches were looking at. An emergent spacetime knit together out of the pure potential for a cooling~expanding interaction. We start with an "infinity" of points so hot that they can't even connect. Then everywhere there is a phase transition like water crystallising to ice. The points start to align everywhere, flattening out and tying together, to form our familiar cooling~expanding spacetime metric.

To the extent that he associates race with riches, there's a racist element to his thought, but primarily he's thoughtless and speaks from his gut fear of / contempt for the dispossessed. — Baden

It’s also been tracked back to his phobia of contamination.

Donald Trump, who has on many occasions called the tradition of shaking hands “barbaric,” confessed in his 1997 book The Art of the Comeback: “One of the curses of American society is the simple act of shaking hands, and the more successful and famous one becomes the worse this terrible custom seems to get. I happen to be a clean hands freak. I feel much better after I thoroughly wash my hands, which I do as much as possible.”

But Trump’s germophobia goes beyond an unwillingness to shake hands—an aversion he has had to forgo during his run for the presidency. Trump is also reported to have a preference for drinking with straws and eating pizza with a fork, a distaste for pressing elevator buttons and a revulsion to fans and the public getting too close to him, such as for autographs.

In an op-ed for the U.K. newspaper The Independent, Gurnek Bains, author of Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization and founder of a corporate psychology consultancy, suggests that Trump’s fear of communicable diseases is the root of his anti-immigrant political stances.

His obsession with cleanliness is why he prefers mass-produced or processed food. His preferences are not complicated: KFC. McDonald’s. The occasional taco bowl.

“I like See’s Candies.” “I like hamburgers.” “I’m an ice cream fan from way back.”

“I don’t like rich sauces or fine wines,” Trump wrote in his book Surviving at the Top. “I like to eat steak rather than pheasant under glass.” So long as the steak is well-done—so well-done, according to his longtime butler, “it would rock on the plate.”

His simplistic palate is a function of his desire for cleanliness. “One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s,” he explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this year. “I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food’s coming from. It’s a certain standard.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/the-7-oddest-things-donald-trump-thinks-214354

The entire observable universe is finite. — tom

And continuous? That was the issue.

The observable universe is finite due to the constraint of there being a lightcone limited observer. So its a special kind of boundedness. And again a reminder of the lack of a definition of an observer in QM ontology of course.

A bit like the old questions, only more pressing. — tom

Maybe it will answer the question whether reality is either fundamentally continuous or discrete then? :)

Of course I argue for the third option - that it is fundamentally vague. The continuous and the discrete are then both mutually emergent.

And that is remarkably compatible with a quantum interpretation that sees indeterminism as fundamental, and a classically structured Cosmos as emergent.

I mention that just because you post as if it is already case closed when it comes to anything His Holyness, Pope Deutsch, has said on the issue.

Saying that a number is anything that's number-like is a circular definition. No better than the poster above who said that a quantity is anything that's quantitative. You are defining a thing in terms of itself. It's not a definition. — fishfry

No it's not. It's defining something in terms of its relational qualities rather than in terms of its supposed essences.

The whole point is that "number" is elusive as an "abstract object" because that is wrongly to seek some constant essential thing that is more primary than the relations that ensue. So the right way to look at it is to switch to a contextual, constraints-based, metaphysics where objects are defined in terms of structures of relations.

But if you want to complain, write a letter to the Department of Category Theory. Let them know it is from the Department of Set Theory. That will help them make a speedy decision just where to "file" your complaint. ;)

Matrices can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and sometimes divided. In fact the set of nxn matrices for fixed n forms a ring, an important algebraic structure. But matrices are not regarded as numbers. — fishfry

Not even complex ones?

I was surprised at the, let's say, passion of some of the responses to this tame and factual assertion. — fishfry

Or maybe you are wrong?

It's surprisingly tricky to give a good definition of number. I hope my examples bear that out. — fishfry

It seems curious that you can both claim numbers don't have a good definition and then so easily rule lots of things in or out as numbers.

I wonder what criteria you use?

The paper that proves that any finite physical system may be emulated... — tom

Finite might be an important qualification don't you think?

Deutsch certainly believes so....

The statement of the Church-Turing principle (1.2) is stronger than what is strictly necessitated by (1.1). Indeed it is so strong that it is not satisfied by Turing’s machine in classical physics. Owing to the continuity of classical dynamics, the possible states of a classical system necessarily form a continuum. Yet there are only countably many ways of preparing a finite input for T . Consequently T cannot perfectly simulate any classical dynamical system.

Of course I realise that you take as unarguable that the MWI interpretation (your so-called non-interpretation interpretation :) ) is proven and quantum computation tapping unlimited resources is as good as a done thing. But I wonder what Popper would have said about such unqualified conviction?

Numbers do number-like things. What are the important things left unsaid?

You can quit with the apologetics. The context was...

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, after being presented with a proposal to restore protections for immigrants from those countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal.

So it is not about whether shithole is a factual description of the countries. It is about whether they have the right kind of people to favour as immigrants.

This casual and unwitting racism just tells us so much about Trump and those who leap to his support with their bullshit rationalisations.

No time for that level of idiocy.

Ditto.

I don't deny colonialism — Thorongil

You seem to be adopting a self-servingly narrow definition of colonisation. There really isn’t much point debating further unless you can make some actual counter argument.

If a country wants to refuse you entry, they can, and it's tough luck for you. — Thorongil

Yep. Might is right. A stellar ethical argument. The winning race is the superior race. Any Darwinian analysis tells you so.

Sorry, I just don’t have time for this racist bullshit.

New Orleans was a shithole before Katrina though, and that's why Houston didn't want New Orleanese coming there. — Hanover

Wilful ignorance of your own country’s recent history too....

Early reporting during Hurricane Katrina heavily used racist tropes and stereotypical narratives that often vilified the victims of the hurricane, whose impact disproportionately affected the low-income, but vibrant Black communities of New Orleans.

During the crisis, commentators from CNN to Fox News lampooned Black and poor New Orleanians for being unable to leave the city quick enough, while others devoted special news segments highlighting the “criminal element,” which condemned the “looting” by Black residents, many of whom had just lost their homes, their possessions, and who were facing dehydration and starvation.

These early reports helped shape the narrative that some were undeserving of national assistance and help, while heavily drawing on historical fears and tropes of a scary, lazy, poor Black underclass that is deserving of oppression and neglect.

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Deserving-and-Undeserving-Victims-Reporting-Hurricane-Katrina--20150827-0041.html

A man with a guilty conscience, hey? Well, some hope for you perhaps.

You seem to be one of those people who imagines precolonial life in countries like Haiti to be paradises without problems. — Buxtebuddha

We are talking about failed states and their reasons. So only an idiot or moral simpleton would attempt to judge an indigenous culture according to the social construct of “a state”. Ie: only a racist.

Again, how did my source contradict my point?

If you need more help with your history, try this...

Before the arrival of Europeans, Arawak (also known as Taino) and Carib Indians inhabited the island of Hispaniola. Although researchers debate the total pre-Columbian population (estimates range from 60,000 to 600,000), the detrimental impact of colonization is well documented. Disease and brutal labor practices nearly annihilated the Indian population within 50 years of Columbus’s arrival.

www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/History/Haiti-history.htm

We come to know moral truths in a very similar way to how we come to know mathematical or logical truths — darthbarracuda

You need to decide if this is your story or not. If it is, then structuralism accounts for how deep “truths” are “pragmatically” emergent rather than Platonically transcendent.

To be consistent, I guess you would have to be a mathematical Platonist. Hence your notion of intuitionism is really the one relying on mystical revelationism rather than inferential abstraction.

That gets us back to my feeling that your position is not well thought out. It is pick n mix and dependent on whatever best suits your personal ethical preferences.

Checking out Audi, his epistemology in fact seems like standard pragmatism. We make abductive leaps to get our arguments going. But maybe it lacks the follow through - the inductive confirmation of the ethical theory thus produced?

Anyway, ethical intuitionism seems pretty bust on most accounts.

Ethical intuitionism suffered a dramatic fall from favor by the middle of the century, due in part to the influence of logical positivism, in part to the rising popularity of naturalism in philosophy, and in part to philosophical objections based on the phenomenon of widespread moral disagreement. C. L. Stevenson's emotivism would prove especially attractive to Moorean intuitionists seeking to avoid ethical naturalism.[11] In the later parts of the 20th century, intuitionism would have few adherents to speak of; in Bernard Williams' words: "This model of intuition in ethics has been demolished by a succession of critics, and the ruins of it that remain above ground are not impressive enough to invite much history of what happened to it."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_intuitionism

A country is a great or terrible place regardless of why. — Hanover

If you can’t see through your own shitty rationalisations then that’s on you.

The links you provide prove the opposite of your argument. — Buxtebuddha

You might have to explain why if you want to be taken seriously.

So, Mr. Politically Correct, how many Congoians would you want coming to the UK versus how many Dutch would you want? — Hanover

A sovereign nation can pick and choose who immigrates to it for a variety of reasons. The operative reason for denying Haitians, say, might be that they wouldn't contribute economically. — Thorongil

These are racist views to the extent to which they deny colonial history. Calling a country a shit-hole is implying its own people have shat in it. That nicely absolves your country of any responsibility. But the truth can be inconveniently different.

The Congo Crisis (French: Crise congolaise) was a period of political upheaval and conflict in the Republic of the Congo (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo)[c] between 1960 and 1965. It began almost immediately after the Congo became independent from Belgium and ended, unofficially, with the entire country under the rule of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Constituting a series of civil wars, the Congo Crisis was also a proxy conflict in the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union and United States supported opposing factions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis

Haitian poverty is a deep-seeded problem that started many years ago. During the 1700's Haiti was under French rule and was the wealthiest country in the New World and represented a quarter of France's economy. In 1801 a Haitian slave revolt defeated the French army and the newly independent colony became the first country in the New World to abolish slavery. France agreed to recognize Haitian independence if Haiti paid a large indemnity. This kept Haiti in a constant state of debt and put France in a position of power over Haiti's trade and finances.

The 20th century brought three decades of American occupation, multiple corrupt regimes, natural disasters, environmental devastation and HIV to Haiti. The United States gained complete control over Haitian finances, and the right to intervene in Haiti whenever the U.S. Government deemed necessary. The U.S. Government also forced the election of a new pro-American President, Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, by the Haitian legislature in August of 1915. The selection of a President that did not represent the choice of the Haitian populace increased unrest in Haiti. In 1929, a series of strikes and uprisings led the United States to begin withdrawal from Haiti. By the time U.S occupation ceased in 1934, Haiti was left with a decimated economy and facing a future full of poverty and desperation.

http://poverty-haiti.weebly.com/causes-of-poverty-in-haiti.html

It is no secret why there are so many failed states around the world. To shove blame on the victims is indeed just shameful racism.

Yet there is not one single definition of number. It's an amorphous concept. Mathematicians "know one when they see one." I don't know if this has caught the attention of philosophers. But there is no definition of number. — fishfry

Probably worth mentioning that category theory and structuralism have moved past this good old set theoretic view....

The theme of mathematical structuralism is that what matters to a mathematical theory is not the internal nature of its objects, such as its numbers, functions, sets, or points, but how those objects relate to each other. In a sense, the thesis is that mathematical objects (if there are such objects) simply have no intrinsic nature. The structuralist theme grew most notably from developments within mathematics toward the end of the nineteenth century and on through to the present, particularly, but not exclusively, in the program of providing a categorical foundation to mathematics.

Mathematical structuralism is similar, in some ways, to functionalist views in, for example, philosophy of mind. A functional definition is, in effect, a structural one, since it, too, focuses on relations that the defined items have to each other.

A structure is the abstract form of a system, which ignores or abstracts away from any features of the objects that do not bear on the relations. So, the natural number structure is the form common to all of the natural number systems. And this structure is the subject matter of arithmetic.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/m-struct/

So if it looks like algebra - it can be added, subtracted, multiplied and (perhaps) divided - then its all numbers.

OK, which of these two Wiki positions do you align with?

Intuitionism....

In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality.

Structuralism....

Structuralism is a theory in the philosophy of mathematics that holds that mathematical theories describe structures of mathematical objects. Mathematical objects are exhaustively defined by their place in such structures. Consequently, structuralism maintains that mathematical objects do not possess any intrinsic properties but are defined by their external relations in a system.

The historical motivation for the development of structuralism derives from a fundamental problem of ontology. Since Medieval times, philosophers have argued as to whether the ontology of mathematics contains abstract objects. In the philosophy of mathematics, an abstract object is traditionally defined as an entity that: (1) exists independent of the mind; (2) exists independent of the empirical world; and (3) has eternal, unchangeable properties. Traditional mathematical Platonism maintains that some set of mathematical elements–natural numbers, real numbers, functions, relations, systems–are such abstract objects. Contrarily, mathematical nominalism denies the existence of any such abstract objects in the ontology of mathematics.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, a number of anti-Platonist programs gained in popularity. These included intuitionism, formalism, and predicativism. By the mid-20th century, however, these anti-Platonist theories had a number of their own issues. This subsequently resulted in a resurgence of interest in Platonism. It was in this historic context that the motivations for structuralism developed.

So you claim to be an intuitionist, yet argue like a structuralist. Like me, you believe that existence is the product of emergent structures or constraints. These structures are selected on the basis of some deep functional principle, such as the least action principle of physics.

Plato was a sort of structuralist in fact. The mathematical forms were somehow an expression of the telos of "the Good". There was some optimisation principle going on in terms of least action, or the invariances due to symmetry.

But the Good is of course then a warm, fuzzy, human concept of essential cosmic value. So what we now look for in nature is just a straightforward optimisation principle - like least action. A structure is good (it can endure and thus exist) as it expresses an equilibrium balance.

This structuralism can then be applied to the understanding of social systems. It is how we get down to a view of society as a functional equilibrium balance of competition and co-operation - or give and take.

So if you want to appeal to some general "transcendent" moral principle that transcends particular societies, then structuralism gives you the immanent story on what is "objectively" rational or optimal. There is a deep structure that works. And this is "intuitive" only in the sense that humans can guess at the shape of deep structures by inference to the best explanation. We are pretty good at guessing general principles (as a result of that being a selection constraint on human cognition in the first place).

So between realism and idealism, social constructionism and Platonism, there is as usual pragmatism or structuralism. Reality is ruled by the deep structure that is "what works" in a developmental sense.

I remember we had this difficulty over ontic structural realism. You sort of liked it, but then backed away into some confused mix of constructionism and absolutism.

You seem to want absolute truths - where that would fit your personal beliefs about ethical matters. But then just as often you will argue against people that their ethical positions are mere social constructions.

Only structuralism can bring dualist or transcendent Platonic ontologies back down to Terra Firma. A constraints-based metaphysics can explain why there is a deep structure to reality without having to invoke anything outside of nature itself as the cause.

Acting mindfully, thoughtfully and consciously means never having to apologise. — charleton

Correct. But it also privileges the fully self actualising self over that self’s social milieu. So as a moral stance, it is tied to a modern abstract notion of society.

And it does still leave open the fact that apologies can have useful transactional values within such a “purely rational” setting. Other folk still tend to have feelings that can get hurt. It can pay to recognise that even if no moral ought is involved.

(I should add that we then ought still to apologise when we are responsible for accidental harms from negligence. If we pretend to mindful action, we have to live up to that. Obvious really.)

There's nothing "spooky" or "queer" about objective morality under an intuitionist view. I think we come to know moral truths in a similar way we come to know mathematical truths, or understand logical reasoning — darthbarracuda

So this intuitionism is really structuralism? I could agree to that.

I'm of course championing intuitionism - I think there is a clear difference in kind between facts and values, and that any sort of morality that can be recognized as morality must employ some form of rational intuition. — darthbarracuda

Oh shit. No wonder I couldn't make sense of your position if you subscribe to that.

If you were saying that the intuitions are rooted in our biology - our evolved circuitry which rules our social behaviour - then that might be something though.

Like for instance - The neurobiology of moral sense: facts or hypotheses?https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3616987/

"What works for society" is ambiguous, because it hides the fact that society only works if people do actually believe in some form of transcendent value - even the social contract theory implicitly holds that life, or something similar, is good. — darthbarracuda

Do you mean transcendent in the deflationary sense of just being hierarchically organised? Perhaps you do in stressing the general vs the particular earlier.

Its a big difference. Of course we can organise our social thinking into general rules and particular exceptions. This gives our thinking its organised complexity.

But to talk of morality transcending that socially-constructed framework is to talk about it having some human-independent, and nature or evolution independent, basis.

I'm not sure from your words whether you have clearly disentangled the two incompatible positions and chosen a side to stand on. Either our morality is the normative product of natural circumstances or it has some super-natural basis.

Our premotor cortex moves our bodies before we are even have made the decision to move. I very much think we have an illusion of free will. — FlukeKid

It is worth noting the details. First the task set-up...

From: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.520.2204&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The subjects were asked to relax while fixating on the center of the screen where a stream of letters was presented. At some point, when they felt the urge to do so, they were to freely decide between one of two buttons, operated by the left and right index fingers, and press it immediately. In parallel, they should remember the letter presented when their motor decision was consciously made

Note the demand that one or other button should be pushed "on impulse". The urge was to be "conscious" when it happened, but the choice not consciously debated or timed or justified. There was no external complexity to be handled - like make a decision if also X and not Y.

Also attention - that limited high level resource - did have a specific job to do. It needed to note the particular letter in a flow of letters that happened to coincide with the emergence of the urge. So attention was kept out of the button choice as much as possible by the experiment's design.

It was a good test of our ability to dissociate between habitual and attentional level action. But ordinarily, the two might go together in integrated fashion.

Then the more detailed results of what lit up when...

The temporal ordering of information suggests a tentative causal model of information flow, where the earliest unconscious precursors of the motor decision originated in frontopolar cortex, from where they influenced the buildup of decision-related information in the precuneus and later in SMA, where it remained unconscious for up to a few seconds.

This substantially extends previous work that has shown that BA10 is involved in storage of conscious action plans9–11 and shifts in strategy following negative feedback12. Thus, a network of high-level control areas can begin to shape an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

So the task demand was to find a way to push the button without a feeling of overtly planning and controlling the act.

And then we see BA10 kicking off a preliminary connection with the precuneus. So this is frontal working memory - a scratchpad for future intentions - talking to the bit of the brain that is concerned with a high level orientation towards locations in space. An intention to go left or right has been warmed up as a coming direction of action.

Next that fires up the SMA, the high level motor area needed to turn an intention in regards to a direction into a physical act - a motor instruction that will drive the hand.

But still no actual go signal. The SMA has to go through the premotor and the motor cortex yet, not to mention recruit all the lower brain anatomy, like the basal ganglia and cerebellum.

And the task shaping the subject's mindset demands some kind of "unconscious" or unattended delay period to ensure that the eventual go signal is not a voluntarily timed act. So the experiment is a test of just how long a future intention can be kept on the back burner using working memory scheduling. Inserting a delay was part of the task demand - of which the subject was thoroughly aware if he/she was listening to the experimenter.

Then the impulse can be held dormant no longer. Something relaxes. The balance tips. At this point, to actually release the action, the motor cortex must broadcast the feeling of what it is going to be like - warn the rest of the brain that your hand is going to suddenly reach out and hit a button.

We have to be told in advance what our body is about to do just so that we know it is "us" who are the cause of some sensation, and it is not the world causing those feelings. So consciousness of the urge is just the standard reafference messaging which must precede all motor acts. We are experiencing at a reportable attentional level the advance warning of an imminent sensation - the feeling of a hand reaching out.

And of course, given the right attentional set-up, we could be keep a close eye on such impulses. There might be - in some other experimental situation - the demand that we be ready to shut down the impulse because the moment is "not quite right" for other reasons, also stored in working memory as part of the intentional mindset.

But again, that is not the case in this experimental set-up which is designed to show how great a dissociation between habit-level and attentional-level control over "decisions" there can be. So here, there is nothing that should stand as a filter on the expression of the urge - except that it was held back without conscious deliberation as long as possible. Long enough not to seem at all controlled or planned. And then attention was kept busy to make that easier. Subjects had to fixate on a stream of letters and catch the one letter that happened to show when the urge also happened to show.

The take-home is thus that we are very clever at meeting experimental task-demands. We can take a normally integrated functionality - a seamless feeling marriage of habit and attention - and turn it into the kind of strongly dissociated outcome that makes people go "wow" in the context of the standard folk psychology notion of the freewill debate.

"Hey. We are meant to actually be the "I" who makes the decisions in here. So it is very disturbing to admit that this "I" is somewhat a fiction."

But a better response is to recognise that this "I-ness" is an integrated combination of all our learnt habits and our attentional capabilities. We are usually conscious of what we want to get out of life in terms of what may happen in the next seconds and minutes. Then we just get on doing that with as little deliberative oversight as we can get away with.

It is inefficient to over-think things. So the brain is cleverly set up to avoid that.

The decisions the skier makes are based on what his body understands, its training, its memory, the same habitual movements. I think the phenomena you are referring to is similar. It does not impinge on the notion of an existential will, in my opinion. — Cavacava

Yep. Indeed, if we didn't let habit do its thing, we would be as helpless as babies still. We completely rely on habits so that we then can do more interesting things with our limited attentional capacities.

There's nothing incoherent from what I can tell with the notion that there is an actual transcendent morality but it's muddled and "gray" in the colloquial way of looking at it. — darthbarracuda

Of course it is incoherent. Either the basis of morality is transcendent of society or it is simply whatever society does in terms of what works for it.

If there is some moral absolute, then there is no excuse for a moral agent to ignore that. Moral relativism becomes simply indefensible. One's duty is not to the whims of society but the absolutes we claim to have transcendent status.

And then vice versa. If morality is relative to the social good - what works for it - then that is the standard to which a moral agent ought to direct their strategic reasoning.

Things are then only gray or muddled to the degree that moral agents can't make up their minds which is the case.

But yes. Many really are muddled in just this fashion.

But I will say that apologizing only to get to a better standing with another person is insincere, even manipulative. — darthbarracuda

Or normal social behaviour. What you call manipulation is merely rational social strategy surely?

Again, either morality has some socially-transcendent reality or it just is simply that which enables society to exist in a functional fashion.

If you believe that morality is socially transcendent, then I can see how you would feel an individual, as a perfect moral agent, would have to be "true to themselves" by being "true to the morally absolute" ... so far as they discover that within their own (not at all socially derived) belief system. :)

But if morality is about collective social goals, then we instead hope that mature individuals are rational game players. They don't merely just follow norms blindly, nor ignore them selfishly, but play the social games creatively and strategically.