No two electrons in the universe can be in the same quantum state - they are fermions, remember. — tom

If they are entangled, do you think you can say which one is which? Is that A over there, and B over here, or vice versa?

Of course MWI "solves the problem" as ever. :-}

Second, not only are there beliefs that arise non-linguistically, but our thoughts are also not dependent upon linguistics. This it seems, has to be case if one is to make sense of the development of linguistics. For if there are no beliefs and no thoughts prior to the formation of linguistics (language), what would be the springboard of language? How does one get from a mind of no thoughts and no beliefs, to a mind that is able to express one's thoughts linguistically? It also seems to be the case that language is simply a tool to communicate our thoughts to one another, which also seems to lend support for the idea that thinking is prior to language. — Sam26

I pretty much agree with the rest of your post, but this step is suspect I would say.

Of course it all depends on how you define thinking. As you say, animals can reason in a causal fashion. Brains are evolved for that kind of Bayesian inference. Certain bodily actions will predict certain experienced outcomes.

But language is the enabler of what we really mean by thinking - cultural ideas giving a symbolic meta-structure to individual psychology. I can see a tree as a "tree", together with all that flows from that given a structure of cultural belief. And paying attention to a particular tree will result in at least the urge for some comment - a speech act that expresses that cultural belief as some syntactically organised proposition.

So an animal will see the same tree and - in attending to it - will start "thinking" in terms of relevant acts of orientation and motor response. That is just the way the brain is wired. Attention "loads up" the "output" side of the brain. It causes thoughts about what to do next, or what might come next. So the animal might start scanning the tree for ripe fruit, as it recognises the sight of a fig tree. It might start to cringe and be ready to run, recognising the tree to be the one likely to conceal a leopard sitting up on a branch.

This is the kind of bedrock epistemology you are talking about - inference based on embodied experience in a world.

But humans have added a third kind of automatic reaction to whatever falls into the spotlight of attention. We start to form some sentence. We get ready to speak about the thing. Focusing on the tree, we will already be having the same orientation and motor preparation thoughts - hmm, figs, whoah, leopards. But we then have the third unique motor act which is also now an informational or symbolic act. We get ready to make an utterance. And utterances have a grammatical or logical structure.

Of course, early human responses probably wouldn't have seemed particular rational or philosophical. The utterances that would have sprung their minds, or even been verbalised, would be judged rather matter of a fact, or perhaps a little mystical or customary. That just argues that modern human civilisation has developed a much more overtly logical and rationalising frame of mind. Speech acts are constrained by more careful rules - on the whole, depending on the company we keep.

So the point is that speech acts did from the start mark a departure point for Homo sap. On one level, it was just the addition of another kind of motor response. See tree, make a noise. Or even if you don't make that noise, automatically you start to think it - feel the urge tickling your throat - just as much as you feel your hands starting to shape so as potentially to climb it, or your taste buds start tingling in preparation for sweet figs.

But that nascent motor act is also a nascent symbolic act. The syntactical utterance could start to have a semantic meaning. In epistemically dual fashion, the mind of Homo sap was both a biological inference machine, living in a bedrock causal flow of embodied action, and also dwelling in this new realm of cultural belief. Social information was structuring the Homo sap mind. And that has now a different epistemic basis.

It depends on the bedrock of embodied causal being, but it is also - by design - increasingly detached from it. It wants to be separate, so as to now make possible a human realm of narrative, of fiction, of science, of art, of religion, etc. It wants to forget the bedrock roots of all thought and awareness - the embodied animal condition - so as to be free to invent whatever it finds useful at a cultural level of semiotics.

I think this makes a big problem for your desire to secure epistemology in bedrock causal knowledge. Yes, that is the bedrock of our mental being. But also, the other aspect of our nature is now the linguistic and informational one that has the aim of transcending this very groundedness. Cultural belief is always demanding to be cut free of what it sees as mundane reality, allowed to go wherever it likes.

Of course, this assertion of symbolic freedom is problematic. It does in fact still need an epistemology. There are reasons for rules of grammar, rules of thought, rules of reasoned inquiry. There is a best way to use our linguistic freedom - arguably. So we can't just use the epistemology of the bedrock causal view as the guide to how language should "rightfully" operate. There is a reason why "theories of truth" are of such philosophical concern.

Biology and evolution sorted out the epistemic rules for an animal level of cognition. The epistemic rules for linguistically-structured thought could be another whole ball-game. I would certainly argue that their bedrock seems "mathematico-logical" for a good reason.

It feels like that instead of looking downwards to our totally subjective biological embeddedness - holding up one hand, then another; or kicking at stones - we should be looking upwards to what it means that we could also be "completely free" within the bounds of some "objective rational attitude" to existence. Where does language - syntactically-encoded semantics - have its real ontic home?

Even so, we can be conscious of a decision. We can attend to a choice presented to us. The choice could be whether or not to hit a button. The choice could consist of a whole panel of buttons, as in a vending machine.

So yes, attention is a thing. It narrows our focus on the world, or even out thoughts, by suppressing whatever seems extraneous. So attention itself involves a decision. It is the choice not to be focused on anything else at some moment. And that choice could exclude a vast range of other possibilities already.

Then conscious of some particular area of action or choice, like the bounteous variety of a vending machine, we might narrow our attention still further to the Mars bar. And even then, there is the choice to buy it, or not.

If buying the bar is our daily habit, then we could just hit the right button with little attention. There is also habit or automaticism. As much as possible, we want to make our choices in a learnt and routine fashion. Attention is there to deal with choices and decisions that are surprising, novel or significant.

The fact that attention is a narrowing of awareness - an active exclusion of many alternatives - is the feature, not the bug. It is how we avoid just acting out of unthinking habit, even if mostly we want to learn to act out of unthinking habit.

Everybody can only focally be conscious of one thing at a time. — bahman

So we could decide on whether or not to do it? We have two choices at least?

If you are going to blather on about folk, you ought to at least spell their names right.

And this Osho ... have you been a fan of him long? Doesn’t really seem to be your usual sort. You think his life was some kind of shining example, eh? Tell us more. :D

Philosophy tolerates a remarkable amount of bullshit rationalisation. Science tolerates a remarkable amount of bullshit measurement.

Put the two together and it still works.

I'm concerned to hear about your eyesight, but you seem to be able to read your screen somehow, so as a reminder....

Ramsey’s criticisms of Wittgenstein, I shall suggest, had an impact, as did his alternative. That alternative was a kind of pragmatism. By 1926 Ramsey was a full-on Peircean pragmatist. In the crucial time 1929–30, the last year of Ramsey’s life, when he and Wittgenstein were together in Cambridge and before Wittgenstein turned his back with finality on the Circle, Ramsey transmitted that Peircean pragmatism to Wittgenstein.

Moreover, I shall argue that Wittgenstein adopted, circa 1929, Ramsey’s pragmatist position on generalizations and hypotheticals, and then went on to extend Ramsey’s pragmatism to everyday
beliefs. But while Ramsey also extended pragmatism to all beliefs, he would have objected to the particular direction Wittgenstein took pragmatism, had he lived to see it.

My final suggestion will be that Wittgenstein in turn planted the seeds of pragmatism in the Vienna Circle, preparing at least some of them to explicitly turn to pragmatism.

https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/2946/2607

Who said you were old and set in your ways? :)

What? This time you plan to read it?

Nice. — Banno

Haven't you read Cheryl Misak yet? Peirce (via Ramsey) was the one who showed Witti the way out of the bottle of logical atomism.

Really, you guys just keep cracking me up! :)

Regardless, this is precisely the kind of Scholastic quibbles that are actually irrelevant to value. All you see is empirical and conceptual things, and you call that truth. You even try to subjugate value to empirical concerns — Agustino

I realise you need to make this come out right for transcendent Christian metaphysics. But that's your loss. Wake me up when you are tired of being a historical curiosity.

I was only correcting your poor understanding of Peirce anyway.

Well, you could... I don't know - maybe explain better. — T Clark

The argument is over what kind of mathematical relation defines a logical dichotomy - a dichotomy being a relation that is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

MU wants to treat is as simple negation. A and not-A. The presence of some thing, and then its absence or its erasure. But that is question-begging as it doesn't go to any mutuality that could form the two poles of being, nor to the way the two poles then demonstrably exhaust all other possibilities.

So a dichotomy is about taking a difference - an asymmetry or symmetry-breaking - to an extreme. It must begin in sameness and wind up looking orthogonally opposed. You don't just have chance and its absence, you have chance and necessity - an opposition of two poles of being that then encompass everything else that could be "somewhere in-between" these complementary extremes.

So likewise every metaphysical-strength category. You don't just imagine discreteness and its absence. You can only imagine discreteness in terms of the absence of something else, its exact opposite of continuity. Stasis makes no sense unless understood in terms of being antithetical to flux. Oneness is not a meaningful concept except to the degree it contradicts multiplicity.

Then seeking a mathematical model of this relation, the best understanding is an inverse or reciprocal one.

MU's weak-arse negation is like addition and subtraction. Count up three places, then erase those three places to end up back where you started. It is like a mirror symmetry. Flip the image over to break the symmetry. Then flip it again and you are back where you started. It is a symmetry-breaking, but nothing much has really changed as it is so easy to return to unbrokenness by a single step reversal of your path. An A-sized step gets negated by a second A-sized step - just now in the other direction.

Mathematically, it is the symmetry-breaking of a zero. 1 + -1 = 0. It is about the least amount of symmetry-breaking you can get away with. It is the symmetry breaking that remains as close to nothing actually happening as possible.

A dichotomy then represents the opposite end of the symmetry-breaking scale - one that is as extreme or asymmetric as possible. And a reciprocal relation models this well as each move in one direction causes a matching move in the other. If one end of the relation grows, the other actually shrinks to the same degree. Two poles of being are in play, each acting on the other in mutual and exhaustive fashion.

Now the mathematics is a yo-yo around 1, not 0. It is a relation anchored on an actual unity - a foundational sameness - that then gets broken in two complementary directions. Hence it is a triadic or developmental relation being modelled.

So consider the development of a reciprocal in the form of a fraction - a numerical inverse.

We start with 1. This 1 is 1/1 (Aha, the latent symmetry breaking which so far has changed nothing!) Then we get 2, and so 1/2. Then keep counting. We get 3, and thus 1/3 as its reciprocal. Guess where this is going next. We get 3 and its formal inverse, 1/3. Every time one number gets bigger, it forces its partner number - anchored by this particular form of opposition - to get smaller. The values are being driven apart.

Extremetise the relation and we get infiinities and infinitesimals. The infinitesimal is 1/infiinity. The infinite is 1/infinitesimal. Every actual number - fractional or whole - is then contained within the limits of this canonical relation. The infinite and the infinitesimal emerge as the limits on the breaking of the symmetry represented by the ur-somethingness of the 1.

A relation has to relate things. A self-relation is tautologous. Just counting up or down is simply to add the minimal claim that "a something" exists to break the ultimate symmetry of a zero-ness. There is at least 1 thing now, and you can then imagine 1-1 to recover the initial symmetry from which this one-ness must have mysteriously arisen, or 1+1+1+1... as the operation to keep breaking this zero-ness in the vain hope of finding its other limit.

You can see all the usual metaphysical dilemmas that flow from this sound of one hand clapping. How did something arise from nothing? How could we have creatio ex nihilo?

But a reciprocal/dichotomistic logic derives complementary limits of difference from an initial absolute sameness. Now we do start with something - but it an undefined oneness, a vagueness, a firstness. It is as much everything as it is nothing. It needs no stronger definition than the claim that it is a unity, an unbroken symmetry.

And then we can imagine a fundamental division in mutually definitional directions. If this symmetry starts to show some discreteness, some discontinuity, then matchingly, there is the new-found definiteness in the continuity that it claims to be moving away from. If the action reverses its course, it will be heading back towards its actual opposite, not simply negating its existence.

If we say something is becoming more fractional - 1/3 is now 1/333 - then it is not just shrinking towards nothingness as one of the limits on oneness. It is moving ever further away from its own inverse, 333/1. It is expressing its tendency towards infinitesimality in terms of the countering possibility of the infinite.

So it boils down to monism vs triadicism.

Monism claims there is either nothing or, instead, the one thing. (So it is in fact reliant on a metaphysical dichotomy, but understands it as a dualism - a simple presence vs absence distinction).

Triadicism fixes this by seeing presence and absence as relative to the third thing of a vagueness or apeiron. There is the unity of an unbroken symmetry which is neither A nor not-A. The principle of contradiction does not yet apply. 1 = 1/1. And turn 1/1 upside down, multiply it how you like, and you see no difference.

But as soon as you allow the possibility of a difference, a symmetry-breaking, then you get a separation to opposing poles of being. If you can have 2/1, then you can have 1/2. A single step now causes a break in the actual scale of being. Growth is matched by shrinking, not merely by not-growth. The difference is a real one, not merely the unplaced notion of one hand clapping - an event with no context by which to measure itself against.

Sigh. What can you say when folk can't get the difference between a mirror symmetry and an actual symmetry breaking?

His picture-theory is a 'correspondence' and while he doesn't really offer a solution, I like this: — TimeLine

I think Wittgenstein proved quite definitely that the idea of an isomorphism between language and reality, or that language can act as a picture for reality is nonsensical.....

Pierce... the fly trapped in the bottle — Agustino

You folk must be thinking of the dyadic semiosis of Saussure and not the triadic relation of Peirce. Big difference.

Value would be instantiated in the Peircean sign relation as the very purpose embodied by a relation. It would be the reason for the relation to even be. Hence ... pragmatism.

For example, seeing red - the ability to make a sharp discrimination of hue in this particular part of the visible light spectrum - is of ecological value to a primate. Clearly so, as colour vision was first lost (in a nocturnal ancestor) and then re-evolved (as later primates became diurnal foragers again).

For linguistic humans, red can come to be a higher level cultural symbol of something. It can come to stand for blood, or danger, or arousal. So the sight of redness then mediates for a cultural value. We see something further in the presence of a daub of red lipstick or a red warning light.

The dichotomy of factual vs conceptual, or empirical vs grammatical, is about "cold rationality". So it is about the learnt human habit of excluding subjective feeling so as to maximise the advantage of objective, disembodied, reasoning.

There is pragmatic value in going up another level in terms of semiosis, leaving biology and individual psychology behind and becoming more purely the creatures of a rationalising or scientific culture.

So value is still embodied in the relation. It is the whole point of the deal. It is the taking of a view which yields some advantage. But the rational ideal is one that is "dispassionate" in leaving behind the subjectiveness of our biological selves, and even our traditional social selves, so as to rise to become this "totally objective" self who now values some new set of ideal things .... like beauty, good and truth. :)

Value never disappeared from the equation. It was just culturally reimagined in a way that feels pretty damn elusive to us biological creatures.

Heh, heh. If it wasn't obvious already, some methods of thought are better than others.

Maybe a diagram would be easier....

+ | -

vs

+| ------------------------------------------------------------------

Orthogonal is a completely different concept from opposition. — Metaphysician Undercover

LOL. You don't say. You mean like ... an opposition so complete it is a total and complete asymmetry, not merely a weak-ass negation? >:O

So if minds have purpose, and physics has tendencies, how do you get to your principle, that purpose regulates dynamism? — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmm. I dunno. [Scratches head.] Grades of purpose?

For instance a monist would say that the two elements of the dichotomy are fundamentally the same, swhile a dualist would say that they are fundamentally different. — Metaphysician Undercover

And nicely, a triadicist would say a dichotomy is how the same becomes the different. That is why the relation can be described in terms of a reciprocal action.

The discrete becomes different from the continuous by breaking it. The continuous becomes different from the discrete by connecting it. So a differencing that begins in the sameness of an indeterminancy - a vague potential which is neither the one nor the other - proceeds in mutual fashion towards its naturally opposed extremes.

You'll see this with any opposing terms negative/positive, hot/cold, large/small, etc. — Metaphysician Undercover

These examples you've chosen are weak and easily reversed differences. They are symmetry-breakings of the same scale - anti-symmetries - and so can quickly erase each other. A metaphysical dichotomy is a full-blown asymmetry. The outcomes look to be orthogonal and as unrelated as possible. The relationship is reciprocal or inverse, not merely additive/subtractive.

So to move from hot to cold, you just have to subtract some heat. But to get from the continuous to the discrete, you must understand the continuous as "absolutely broken". It is the antithesis which is the least possible amount of continuity, or 1/continuity.

A categorical separation is a separation between types of thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It is the separation that produces the familiar list of metaphysically opposed types.

Aristotle's categories were a bunch of dichotomies - quality~quantity, active~passive, time~space, symmetry~symmetry-breaking, particular~universal.

So "constraint" appears to be something you just made up, a word which has nothing underneath it, no substance, just mystery. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's just a normal, well understood, word in science.

And, I see a categorical separation between living and inanimate such that the inanimate is excluded from acting with purpose. — Metaphysician Undercover

Another thing I've explained so many times now. There are semiotic grades of telos. Minds have purposes, life has functions, and physics has tendencies.

The problem being that Peirce's "eternal becoming" as you describe, renders definiteness incomplete. Therefore things cannot be properly fixed, and the claim that the Peircean view "fixes things" must be contradictory. This is the problem with vagueness as a first principle, it is intelligibility compromised. — Metaphysician Undercover

Rest easy, MU. As usual, dichotomies rule. Stability is relative to plasticity. So we are talking here about the approach to a limit. If there is vagueness, then already there is also its "other" of the crisp.

What I would say is that the nature of this relationship is not well known. It is a deficiency in our knowledge, just like the relationship between the past and future is not well known, it is a deficiency. Still, we know enough to say that the past is categorically different from the future, like we know that being is categorically different from becoming. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well we do know the nature of the relationship. It is a dichotomy. We arrive at it via dialectical reasoning. Metaphysics has been operating this way since it began.

A categorical difference is one in which two categories stand absolutely opposed. To each other. And so therefore they are also absolutely related.

In reality, when we talk about a thing staying the same thing, it does so despite changing. So I stay the same person despite undergoing changes. It might be that some aspects of me stay the same while others change. This brings us back to the issue of unity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, already accounted for. Constraints regulate dynamism. The purpose of a thing maintains its identity despite all material changes it might undergo. You can't pretend this is a great mystery.

That would be more convincing if the OP hadn't by then made it plain it was the MWI multiverse interpretation that motivated the thread.

So don't blame me for your poor reading skills.

The efforts of Rich and @apokrisis to make a federal case out of this are way off target. — fishfry

"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again." :)

What is not, is anti-what is (being), but this is categorically different from becoming, which is activity. So being is not anti-becoming, it is anti-not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Being and becoming must have some relationship. You can't have it both ways - that as "different categories" they are related and they are not related.

It is pretty clear that if something can change to become something else, then something can stay the same by not becoming that something else.

The real problem is that being and becoming are so fundamentally incompatible, that it was a mistake to attempt to put them in the same category under the name existence, in the first place. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hence the Peircean process view. Now being is emergent and so an eternal state of becoming. You only have degrees of definiteness.

Matter and form now become the hylomorphic triadic relation in which chance is opposed to necessity (Peircean firstness and thirdness, or tychism and synechism), and then their interaction results in substance or actuality (Peircean secondness).

So the Peircean view fixes things with a hierarchical structure. You have two opposed limits on being - material spontaneity or local degrees of freedom and formal necessity, or global constraints. Then definite being emerges as the concrete action that arises between these two bounds.

Again, what determines the sequence of a set of traffic lights. Is it a physical determinism or an informational one? Or do you think causally the two are the same?

It becomes a local observer illusion. Although you could salvage a global story in that the branching at least always increases in the future direction. But even that ain’t much given that unlimited branches can be conjured up at zero entropic cost ... apparently ... if you drink the MWI Kool-Aid.

But then even mechanical determinism doesn’t make metaphysical sense if it doesn’t admit to some kind of chance or spontaneity. That view over-determines causality as much as allowing MWI to run rampant with causal histories under-determines it.

What? — fishfry

Unless you want to claim nature is literally a finite state machine, then what you’re missing is that is what you appear to be claiming.

Can you explain what I'm missing about the basic operation of a traffic light? — fishfry

Does the fact we can make machines mean that nature is mechanical?

Hah! Quantum mechanics still presumes Newtonian backdrop time. That's the problem. The apparent reversibility of the wavefunction physics is the reason why the irreversibility of an event, a collapse of the wavefunction, doesn't compute.

So QM imports the determinism of mechanics because it imports time as a global backdrop dimension with a basic symmetry of direction. If things look the same going forwards or backwards, then the theory can't say anything else than the future was always completely determined.

MWI tries to fix this by grafting on statistical mechanics to the QM formalism. But this only buries the issue even deeper under the reversible mechanics of thermodynamics. You still need an "observer" to break the symmetry of the maths being used.

MWI is a modern mysticism. It avoids the fundamental issue that a mechanical notion of time creates. When QM gets replaced by a fuller theory of quantum gravity, time is going to have to be a properly emergent feature like space. Instead of time and energy being connected by the uncertainty principle in the current kluge fashion, it will have to be cashed out properly like location and momentum uncertainty.

The mirror test tests self-recognition, not consciousness, and even that based solely on the visuality. — BlueBanana

It is correct to make the distinction between self-recognition and what we really mean by self-conscious.

It is quite natural for big brained social animals - like chimps, elephants and dolphins - to have a sense of self that goes beyond just a perception of their bodies and intentionality in contrast to the world about them. They are also aware of this difference in terms of their social world too. They are aware of being surrounded by individuals who are also loci of intentionality that must be factored into the equation.

Indeed, the primary reason for having metabolically-costly big brains is to underwrite these kinds of complex social computations.

So the mirror test is a test of an animal's ability to see the world in terms of the presence of other minds - other social actors. And then to recognise an image in the mirror is that of themselves - their own embodied presence.

But self-consciousness goes way beyond this in being a linguistic structuring of the whole of the mind. Language use underwrites a narrative or autobiographical approach to memory. It allows "voluntary recall" of our past history as a self. The animal brain can only apply past experience to the present moment. So recognising - making sense of the flow of the present - is the biological-level ability. Recollection is the learnt language-based skill that only humans properly have, and the one that culture cultivates so as to ensure we "never forget ourselves" in polite company. :)

What Aristotle demonstrated is that "continuous change" is incompatible with the logical principles of what is and what is not, being and not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

I like that you cash out the formal half of the story in terms of "what is and what is not". But that itself then says that becoming has to apply to the becoming of what is not, as well as the what is. So when we are considering "states of existence", we have to explain why they are failing to change and so partake in the "what is not". So that anti-becoming is happening continuously while actual change is failing to take place.

While things are changing, the mystery would seem to be how one state of non-change becomes the next state of non-change. But a non-changing state then has a matching (ie: dichotomous) mystery on this score. There is the puzzle of how it is continually expressing its "what is" by preventing the actualisation, or maintaining as potentia, its "what is not".

That was a nice summary.

However notice also your triadic resolution of the dichotomistic categories...

So I think that in its early development the category of "existing" was produced as a wider category which could include both the categories of "being/not-being" and "becoming". Both of these categories, which are inherently inconsistent, are allowed to be real under the category of existing, which is therefore the more general category. — Metaphysician Undercover

So existence was the more generic category that could subsume being~becoming as a dialectical possibility. You had two contradicting extremes of metaphysical possibility. And they could be resolved by the unity of becoming one within a higher order abstraction. Being and becoming became merely two forms of the same basic thing - existing.

The scholastics though, then produced a dichotomy between existence and essence, and in this way they re-introduce the incompatibility. "Essence", is now the category of what is, and what is not (1), while "existence" is relegated to the material realm of becoming (2). — Metaphysician Undercover

But then scholasticism buggered this up because of the need to bolster Christian dualism. Existence became about material/effective cause alone - the world experienced through the senses. The world of material accidents. And essence - the formal/final cause of being - became split off and associated with the separate realm of mind, spirit, nous, the ideal. The world known through the human intellect. And then ultimately through beatific vision. Men could know God just as directly and surely as they knew the world.

So an actually logical metaphysics - one that treated reality as individuated being - became one based on the acceptance of an actualised contradiction. A dualised or disconnected ontology of matter and mind.

A philosophy of the supernatural replaced a philosophy of nature.

MWI would be a trade-off. You get to save wavefunction determinism at the expense of causal localism. So every possibility gets actualised. But in a way that then makes no difference as there is no interaction between these outcomes. They all happen. And none of them make a difference to each other.

The phrase, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, comes to mind.

On the whole, the principle of locality seems more important to metaphysics than the preservation of determinism. The reality of chance - as in wavefunction collapse - is after all the world as we experience it. And it would be nice to keep all the causes of the world within the one world, not just abandon causality because we haven't yet got a final theory of the quantum.

This is dualist picture when there is a separate substance--"I"--which is experiencer. In another picture, experience create by the brain activity is the only thing which is real. Experience is the first thing which attaches us to the reality. I can doubt "I" and say that it is byproduct of brain activity. But I cannot doubt experience. — bahman

Experience requires a division between what is self and what is world. To know where the world and its recalcitrant nature starts, the brain has to know where the body and its intentionality leaves off. So to experience the world requires the equally primary experience of the self.

My favourite example is chewing your dinner. Somehow you have to be very sure which bit is your tongue, lips and cheek, which bit is the grisly steak, as your teeth chomp away with savage abandon.

But as has been said, you seem to be talking more about self-consciousness rather than just conscious awareness.

All animals have a sense of self as part of their states of experience. In seeing the world, they see it from their own point of view - the view that includes themselves in the sense of an embodied intentionality that contrast with a world of external material possibilities.

But self-consciousness is a linguistically-structured and culturally-evolved learnt skill. It is not biological but social. We humans learn to objectify our being so as to be psychologically self-regulating. So the reason we are self-conscious is that society needs us to have that habit of attending introspectively - to be policing our own behaviour as socially-constrained creatures.

Biologically there is every reason to make a psychological self~world experiential distinction, but no particular way that this experiencing could be experienced as experiencing. Animals lack the meta-structure that language can provide.

Socially, you can't be a proper human unless you have mastered self-regulation through language. Objectifying your own psychological being is the central skill required to be part of a social order.

Thanks for your opinion.

Yep. Either that or your syllogism failed to capture the sense of Wayfarer’s position. The latter I believe.

I draw a complete blank as to what you could possibly mean by that. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well obviously God has his reason for at every instant forming the idea of all the individual avians in the world in his Almighty mind and so giving shape to their existence. But he does move in mysterious ways I hear.

Being A is essential to being B.
Not all B's are A. — creativesoul

Being a bird is essential to being a duck, but not all ducks are birds? Sounds legit.

I would really like to know how earthlings would respond psychologically to an alien visitation. — Bitter Crank

We already had such a moment when we went into space and looked back at the Earth. Suddenly we realised it was a tiny and delicately balanced "spaceship". We immediately resolved to look after its ecology, change our wicked ways.

So evidence of aliens would produce an existential shock that would turn into a psychological shrug as we turned back to business as usual.

It was mentioned in Fred Hoyle and Chandrawickramasingha's book The Intelligent Universe, — Wayfarer

Paul Davies was Fred Hoyle's student by the way. Davies (and Lineweaver) have done the maths to convince that interstellar panspermia couldn't feasibly be the case - not enough time to cover the distances involved. So it could only be Mars impregnating the Earth now.

(And hey - science politics at work - a space agency has good reason to drum up interest in spending a trillion getting there. Trump thinks its a noble idea. By now every bullshit detector should be flashing red alert.)

The OP was about the supposition that if we as humans travelled to another planet with the same atmospheric composition would we survive, and this together with the title about aliens arriving on earth can cause - by extension - the octopus result. — TimeLine

So the very mention of "aliens" opens the Pandora's Box of crackpottery, hey?

My argument was that only the most tenuous "extension" let Wayfarer introduce his personal hobbyhorse of panspermia. His barely acceptable justification (implied if not stated) was, hey look, we've already been exposed to possible alien biology - who hasn't eaten an octopus?

So sure, you might have grounds to clamp down on derailing a thread. But Wayfarer would still have been able to legitimate his extension - if only just.

And again, any comments about the merit of the OP should focus on the OP's actual content. As what is reasonable about expecting it to explicitly add "...and don't go running off and talking about panspermia, anyone".

The onus was never on the OP to rule out every possible derailment of its stated focus.

I am doing a subject on astrobiology next year so I would be interested to read more about the subject as a whole, despite my concessions. A close friend is studying her PhD in astrogeology and knows him pretty well. — TimeLine

Well then, why not just rebut Wayfarer in the first place? Use your more serious interest in the subject to say something worthwhile.

It just increases my confusion here that you say you are about to study the very subject that you seem to want to rule fringe science at best. What are you going to write in the exam when its says discuss the evidence from extremophiles like tardigrades?