What digit does the counter show after 60 seconds? — Michael

The problem set-up, which gives the axioms of the system we are working with, does not provide enough information to decide.
Hence the statement, for any numeral n, that:
"The counter shows digit n at 60 seconds"
has the same status in this logical system as the Continuum Hypothesis has in ZFC set theory. That is, we can adopt the statement as an axiom, and the system remains consistent (ie no contradictions arise). And we can assert its opposite ("the numeral showing at 60 seconds is not n") and the system remains consistent.

I think where people tie themselves in knots on this is that they feel they should be able to use things we know about our world to reason their way to an answer. But they can't, because we threw away that possibility when we postulated the existence of a finite-sized mechanism that can switch state in an infinitesimally small time, which contradicts the laws of our world. So, having thrown away everything we know about our world, all we have available to use for our deductions are the axioms given in the set-up, and those axioms are consistent with the answer being any one of 0, 1, 2, ... or 9.

So I assert the answer is 2, without proof (because proof is impossible), with complete confidence that nobody can prove the assertion wrong.

Your point is valid, for brevity I didn't explicitly state that the first instant he passes the stairs he arrives on the ground. — keystone

Before making such a statement, we'd need to define what we mean by "the ground". Very difficult, because it needs to be a specific point that is infinitely far below the top of the stairs.

I think we could construct an imagined world where we could make such a definition, using a concept like the first infinite ordinal ω, as described here.
The ordinals deal only with whole numbers, whereas we want fractions too, as we're measuring distance. I expect we could extend the ordinals to include fractions, simply by interpolating between successive ordinals. But there may be an obstacle I'm missing.

The "ground", thus defined, is a point that cannot be reached from the stairs, being infinitely far below it. Similarly, you cannot reach the stairs from that point, as every stair is infinitely far above it. That's why the man on the "ground" can't see any stairs as described in the OP story. They are all too far away above him.

By making such a definition, we are essentially dividing our thought-experiment-world into two parts, neither of which can reach the other.

Thanks MU. yes, all well here. I rarely post now, leaning towards expressing my musings about the world through music rather than words. But I periodically lurk, and I couldn't resist the temptation of a juicy infinitish thought experiment.

Nice thought experiment!

There's no paradox in the sense of a contradiction. It just seems weird.

When we analyse it closely, we see that all the set-up does is establish the existence of an infinite descending staircase, and a location of Icarus on the staircase at every point in the time interval [0,60). The curved closing parenthesis there means that that does NOT include time 60 seconds. That is crucial!

So the set-up says nothing about where Icarus is at 60 seconds, or any time after that. We need to add additional assumptions/axioms/specifications in order to say anything about that. Those won't be able to meaningfully say "at the bottom of the staircase", as the above story does, because there's no such place.

If it were up to me to specify, then I'd choose to say that at 60 seconds and later Icarus is back at the top. That's a purely aesthetic choice based on it being the least arbitrary place out of those mentioned, and I like to avoid arbitrariness where possible. But we could just as well assume that at 60 seconds he will be on step 3. Whatever step we assume, it will not generate a contradiction.

Similarly with the Thomson's Lamp case. When we ask "is the lamp on or off at one minute" we are asking for something that the set-up doesn't give us enough information to answer. The setup tells us whether the lamp is on or off at every instant in [0,60) and tells us nothing about whether it is on or off at 60 or later. We cannot infer whether it would be on or off at 60 because we know nothing about the physics of the world in question, which must be enormously different from that of our own, in order to allow complete switching of a finite-sized lamp in infinitesimally small time periods. I expect we could invent some physical rules to support either an on or an off assumption.

Issue 1: What do you make of this thought experiment? Does it disprove determinism? — NotAristotle

As formulated, I don't think it proves anything, because it doesn't tell us WHY Ned decided to not go for a walk. Typically, interest zeroes in on the case where Ned makes that choice specifically in order to contradict the machine's prediction. Assuming that to be the case, the thought experiment only demonstrates that, while determinism might still be true, a Laplacian daemon that can predict the future of our universe must be causally isolated from it. That is, the daemon cannot do anything that affects the universe - she can look but not touch.

An intuitive but non-rigorous demonstration of this is that, for the daemon to predict the future, it must have complete detail about the initial state of everything causally related to the future of the universe. If not causally isolated, that includes information about the state of the daemon itself, which includes all the information about the universe. So the daemon must have more information than it has, since it needs to have information about the information it has (like a description of contents of its RAM, hard drive), plus information about things outside itself. No information store can hold more information than it holds, so such a store must be impossible. Hence it must be causally isolated.

That's a bit hand-wavy because it doesn't define information, amongst other limitations. But hopefully it gives the general idea.

On the other hand, if we assume that Ned wasn't influenced by the readout at all (impossible in practice, as he touched it, even if he didn't read it - butterfly effect etc), then all the experiment demonstrates is that the prediction machine must have been faulty.

Having been strongly influenced by Korzybski and by e-prime - the work of his disciple David Bourland - I sympathise strongly with your post.
As a mathematician I must object to your example though. Saying 'two plus two is four' rather than the more formal 'two plus two equals four' will often lead to confusion. We just don't need 'is' in that context and it causes trouble if we do use it. The word 'equals' in mathematics conveys a relationship with a precise meaning that differs from that usually attributed to the dreaded verb 'is'.
I have worked on minimising my use of the the verb 'to be' over the past few years and find it a really helpful discipline, with profound benefits. It keeps you humble because you have to speak in terms of how things look to you, rather than making godlike pronouncements about the nature of the world.
It also encourages the use of active voice over passive, a very popular theme in the plain english movement that I really like.
Some uses do no harm, such as a prefix to the present participle - "I am thinking" - and even allow nuances not achievable in strict e-prime. Using it to express category membership (attributing properties) also seems harmless to me, and shorter than the e-prime alternative. Only the 'identity' and 'existence' uses cause serious trouble. I have seen and participated in several different lively debates on here over whether saying 'the cup is in the cupboard' means anything more than that if I look in the cupboard I'll probably see a cup.
And while I use the active voice, e-prime version in most cases, sometimes it seems wiser to use the passive. Unless one especially wants to chastise Niruba, one can get a better outcome from the diplomatic "Oh dear the door was left open and a cold draft is coming in" than "Niruba why did you leave the door open?" [again! you dolt!]
Some ontologists won't like you if you spruik e-prime, since it presents a direct threat to their favourite activity.
I find some parallels between an e-prime way of thinking and American Pragmatism - a philosophy that I also like.

Australia does not have compulsory voting. The law only compels you to attend a polling place of your convenience (and unlike in the US, they are very convenient, both as to location and as to opening hours) and get your name signed off by the attendant. Whether you subsequently put a ballot in the box, and whether and what you write on it, is entirely up to you.
People call it 'compulsory voting' as a shorthand. But, like many shorthands, the label misleads significantly.

The OP relates to a point that is important in mathematics, yet rarely taught.

In short: an equation, by which I mean two sets of symbols connected by an '=' sign, constitutes only part of a complete logical sentence, not a complete sentence in itself.

The equation needs to be included in a sentence in order to be meaningful. Consider the following:

(1) sin x = tan x cos x
(2) sin x = 0.5

Item (1) is an 'identity', and is true for all x except odd multiples of 90 degrees. So we need a sentence to give it meaning, such as:

"For all real x except odd multiples of pi/2 we have sin x = tan x cos x"

Identities like this allow us to simplify and sometimes solve algebraic problems by substituting the expression on one side for the expression on the other. They do not say the expressions are the same. They are not, as they use different symbols and require different steps to evaluate them. But the identity says that, subject to any constraints imposed by the enclosing sentence, both sides will deliver the same value when evaluated, regardless of the values given to any pronumerals ('variables').

Things like Item (2) are typically just referred to in practice as an 'equation' (a more constrained meaning than I gave that term above) and is used to find allowable values of x. An example might be:

"Indiana Jones worked out that the sun would shine onto the crypt only when the angle of the sun from the vertical was 60 degrees, where sin x = 0.5."

Note that here the equation does NOT say that sin x is always equal to 0.5 but rather, that the thing we are interested in (illumination of the crypt) occurs when sin x has that value.

Conclusion: we can't identify a meaning for '=' without further context, including at least the full sentence in which the 'equation' occurs. That meaning will vary depending on the context.

I presume Deutsch means to restrict 'every physical process' to only processes for which the initial conditions can be encoded in a finite sequence of characters from a finite alphabet. Otherwise the computation cannot ever finish because there will always remain some inputs that the machine has not yet read.

That rules out simulation of the universe if the universe is infinite, as many cosmologists suspect.

I also think complications could arise if the Turing machine lay in the universe, as self-simulation, or self-reference more generally, often leads to problems. So I would require the Turing machine to be outside the universe in the sense of being unable to affect the universe in any way.

Subject to those two restrictions, the principle sounds plausible to me.

EDIT: I just realised the first restriction implies the second, since a Turing machine has an infinite tape and hence cannot lie in a finite universe.

The concept of Turing Computability applies to functions between sets of words in a formal language. We cannot apply that concept to the physical universe, without first defining such a function. I cannot think of any natural candidate for such a function in relation to the physical universe.

I also note that, if we want the inputs to our function to include statements about the locations of objects in spacetime, and we assume spacetime to be a continuum, we cannot represent the position of most objects by a word in a formal language, which is a finite set of symbols from a countable alphabet. Why? Because almost all possible location coordinates will have non-repeating decimal expansions, requiring an infinite number of characters to represent them.

To move infinite amount of spaces, infinite amount of time is required. — elucid

Under Newtonian mechanics, perhaps. But not in other imaginable, mathematically consistent universes.

I will describe a trajectory with a definite start and end point, incorporating a double jump, that traverses an infinite distance.

The particle traversing the trajectory, which lies in the first quadrant of the two-dimensional, Euclidean, number plane, has position at time t with x coordinate t and y coordinate 1/|t - 0.5|, except at time 0.5 when it has position (0.5, 0).

For time 0 to 1, the particle starts at position (0, 2), at time 0, finishes at position (1, 2) at time 1 - a distance of only 1 unit from the start point, and in between, traverses the infinite lengths of the two hyperbolic arms of the function f(x) = 1/|x - 0.5|, with a zero-duration, cameo visit to the point (0.5, 0) in the middle.

If you fill the horn, have you not essentially painted the surface with a finite amount of paint? So it would seem that the surface cannot be painted, yet in fact is paintable. — tim wood

The solution lies in the meaning that we silently assume for the word 'paint', which is to cover an area with a layer of liquid paint with a constant, nonzero thickness. We cannot 'paint' the horn in that sense because the volume required would be the area (infinite) multiplied by the thickness (nonzero), which means an infinite volume.

In the filled horn, the internal surface is indeed covered by paint. The thickness of the covering layer at a particular place equals the radius of the horn at that place. Since the radius decreases towards zero, the thickness of the layer just keeps getting thinner. There is no nonzero thickness of layer with which we can say that filling the horn has 'painted' it in the above-defined sense.

This solution does not rely on any physical limits such as Planck lengths or diameters of paint molecules. It simply lies in the definition of 'paint' requiring a constant, nonzero thickness of layer. If we remove that requirement then we can 'paint' any infinite two-dimensional surface (including painting the horn externally, by the way*) with any nonzero volume of paint, however small. We might have to make some technical restrictions such as only allowing surfaces that can be smoothly embedded in 3D Euclidean space. But those restrictions would only interest mathematicians as they would not exclude any surfaces non-mathematicians might imagine.

The mathematical principle behind this is that the function f(x) = 1/x has no convergent integral from 0 to infinity whereas the function g(x) = 1/x^2 does.

Or, avoiding calculus, the sum 1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... diverges to infinity whereas the sum 1/1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/16 + 1/25 + 1/ 36 + ....converges to a value around 1.645.

* As fishfry points out, the horn has no distinction between its 'internal' and 'external' surface. But we can meaningfully define 'painting the horn internally (externally)' as follows. First define the inside I of the horn as the set of points x such that the shortest line segment connecting x to the horn's axis does not intersect the horn's surface S. The outside O of the horn is all of 3-space excluding the inside and the surface.
Then an internal (external) painting of S is a subset A of Euclidean 3-space (which we think of as being 'full of paint'), such that, for every point P on S, there exists an open neighbourhood N(P) whose intersection with I (O) lies entirely within A.
Under this definition, which we note specifies no minimum thickness of paint, we can make both an internal and an external 'painting' of S using a finite volume of paint.

For any given initial location X of the ball in a Galton box, there will be some positive number delta(X) such that a measurement of initial conditions with error less than delta(X) can predict the outcome with certainty. That is provided the position X is not such that the lowest point of the ball is **exactly** above the highest point of the first pin (an 'unstable equilibrium position') and that no other unstable equilibria arise in the journey through to the final resting place of the ball. Since the probability of an item occupying a pre-specified exact position is zero, we can dismiss those cases.

However there is **no** positive number delta such that, for **any** initial location X of the ball, a measurement of initial conditions to accuracy delta allows certain prediction of the outcome.

For the mathematically inclined, that's because the function f that maps the initial position of the ball to its final location is continuous on the domain D that excludes only the set of measure zero comprising positions that lead to unstable equilibria. But f is not **uniformly continuous** on D.

Although I am not a hard determinist, I don't see anything in the notion of a Galton box in a context of classical physics, that defeats a belief in hard determinism. The unpredictability of the Galton box is just an instance of chaos theory, and chaos theory focuses on the consequences of practical limits in measurement accuracy, not on the theoretical impossibility of making a measurement with zero error. There will be some ridiculously small but nonzero error limit such that, if we could measure everything to within that limit, we could predict a Hurricane in Haiti from the flap of a butterfly's wing in Mongolia.
.
A thought experiment that generates similar questions about determinism is Norton's Dome, which is also based on an unstable equilibrium. While it is an interesting case to think about, it can't tell us anything about our world for the same reason as the Galton box, viz, the probability is zero of the ball being over the exact single point where the paradox arises.

Even if we were to conclude that predictability dissolves when objects are in an unstable equilibrium, I doubt it would discourage hard determinists. To go from 'hard determinism always holds' to 'hard determinism holds everywhere except in a special set of circumstances that has probability zero of ever arising' doesn't sound like much of a concession.

Is that a coherent explanation for why we still go on or should we stop at some point and realize some deeper truth? — Wallows

Yes, that seems to me to be a fair characterisation of why Godel's incompleteness theorem is no barrier to progress in mathematics in most areas of interest and use. The only maths I know of it having killed was Hilbert's project to try to prove maths to be complete and consistent.

I think the most plausible theology is Lovecraft's. — Theologian

I don't know that I see Cthulhu as a potential deity. But if you want to start a thread to discuss it, that should be great fun!

indeed. It seems to me that the people who worry over trying to prove the existence of their particular conception of God are just demonstrating their lack of faith - a lack that the Christian God does not look too kindly on!

I think the same goes for people who try to disprove God. I think it stems from a fear that there may really be a God that punishes those who do not believe in It, so they attempt to keep the fear at bay by proofs.

Personally I just rely on faith. My faith is that
(1) most of us (including me) will be unable to ever know whether there is a God - at least in this life;
(2) most of us (including me) will be unable to know what God is like if She is there; and
(3) if there is a God, and She has anything remotely like personal characteristics, She is wise and kind, and nothing at all like the cruel, vain, childish, violent personality described in the holy books of the three Abrahamic religions. Like all good friends, She is not to be feared, obeyed or worshipped. But She may be loved.

I don't accept premises 3, 4 or 5.

3 is contrary to what most cosmologists believe, which is that the universe is infinite.

4 and 5 are assertions of the existence of explanations, for which there is no logical need. The universe doesn't need an explanation.

Further, I find the insistence that God must be omnipotent unnecessarily limiting, given the well-trodden logical problems with the notion of omnipotence. In my view, no god worth believing in is omnipotent (problem of evil, logical paradoxes regarding heavy stones and so forth) and, if there were such a god, humans would certainly not be in any sense in Her image.

Advaita Vedanta has a pretty mind-blowing conception of God as a sort of cosmic consciousness (the 'We are God' path), but it doesn't need any gimmick as trite and MarvelUniverse-ish as Omnipotence to impress people.

Nor is the attempt to rule out the universe as being God (pantheism), because of the 'laws of nature' convincing. The 'laws of nature' are regularities we have discovered that explain to a pretty good degree of accuracy what we see happening in our part of the universe, in the time periods we can observe. They say nothing about what might be happening elsewhere, or what might happen later. Since the universe is likely infinite, regularities discovered in this tiny finite part of it say nothing about what its nature and capabilities might be. It's quite possible that there are no universal laws of nature, and that everything that can be imagined (plus even more that can't) is happening somewhere (Tegmark's hypothesis)

Then why, Captain Obvious, would it be redundant and unnecessary to tell me, "It is raining", when I'm looking outside at it raining? — Harry Hindu

I am not aware that Banno or anybody else said it would be redundant. It is logically redundant, and hence redundant if one believes the only use of words is to convey information embedded in the words. But the OP suggested that that is not the only use of words.

For instance, the thing that the speaker might be doing is letting their partner, to whom the sentence is addressed, and with whom they have been in a furious, frigid, non-speaking standoff for two days, that they want to find a way to heal the breach.

There is indeed a message in the speech act, something like "I am sorry this has happened to us, and I would like to fix it. I am also sorry for my part in it, even though I don't think it was all me. Can we try to put it behind us and start again?".

But that message has nothing to do with rain.

So I would say that when we use words we are nearly always conveying some sort of message (even "Hello" usually signals friendly intent and that I consider the other person worthy of my acknowledgement), but the message often has nothing to do with the words used.

I suppose an instance where there is no information transmitted from one to another would be "I'm not afraid of you!", spoken to somebody I am afraid of, and who knows that. I say it to try and build up my own courage. Whether it has any impact on them is not the point.

I don't know that many people hate her. 'Pity' is perhaps a more apt word. She was a very troubled woman and seemed to have a lot of unhappiness in her life - mostly self-inflicted.

Lots of people regard her political writing with disdain, because (1) it is shallow and poorly argued, consisting mostly of bald assertions, and (2) it encourages, even eulogises, selfishness, which is not only a recipe for social misery, but also a recipe for misery, or at the very least loneliness, of the person that follows that path.

Kant scholars tend to particularly dislike her nonfiction writing because apparently she completely misinterprets Kant and criticises him for holding opinions that he never held.

Opinions vary as to whether she is any good as a fiction writer. Some say she's turgid, preachy and boring. Others find her style lively and engaging. It seems to be a personal thing. The only fiction of hers that I read was the short story Anthem, which I quite enjoyed - although I could certainly sense the preachiness that some say infects her work.

For centuries America has stood as a shining beacon of greatness that people can accomplish — Ilya B Shambat

To whom does it appear as a shining beacon of greatness? To some people in poor countries that would like to be as wealthy as the average American, sure. To people in other developed countries that have different ideas about what makes a nation great - such as being able to send their kids to school without worrying about them getting shot, or being able to go to hospital if they have a serious injury without fearing they will be financially ruined - not so much.

The Consolations of Philosophy, by Alain de Botton.

Not to be confused with The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, written about 1500 years earlier.

I agree too.

Sadly, it looks like you may not be able to get a debate on this point.

Cultural appropriation lies on a spectrum. Most people, regardless of their politics, would find acts at one end of the spectrum reprehensible, and would find acts at the other end harmless, and consider criticism of them as over the top. For each person, the question becomes where on the spectrum they draw the line.

Take the case of dot paintings by indigenous Australians. These are culturally unique and come from a rich, millennia-old, tradition of producing these paintings on bark using ochres made from clay and other natural ingredients. The pictures have special meanings and even the tiniest detail of a pattern can have a significance. The style is popular and affluent non-indigenous people buy paintings from aboriginal workshops to display in their homes. The sale of such paintings by indigenous people is a rare source of income for a people that suffer enormous socioeconomic disadvantage.

Sometimes non-indigenous businesses start making and selling their own paintings, that are either direct copies of aboriginal designs, or made up using the same general style, intended to look as though it was done in the indigenous tradition, but lacking any of the meaning that the original works had. Such businesses can get the paintings made in some low-wage country, without involving any indigenous people, and they undercut the authentic market, thereby taking income away from the indigenous people.

Would you agree that in that case, the activity of the non-indigenous business is harmful?

If so, it is then worth exploring less extreme cases. Perhaps the incident of the fashion designer Carolina Herrera launching a line using indigenous Mexican patterns, without using any indigenous Mexican people or allowing any profits to flow to the indigenous Mexican community, is what piqued your interest. It sounds bad to me, but I am not across the full details of the case, so I would be interested to see a discussion of that.

Observation is a noting of information. Interaction is a reciprocal action. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think Terra is referring to the very specific and unusual use of the word 'observation' that is employed in quantum mechanics to refer to what is sometimes called 'collapse of the wave function'. Under the 'decoherence' view, which I think is accepted by a majority of physicists, that refers to an extremely rapid interaction between the microscopic quantum system that is the subject of attention and the relatively enormous, macro system that is the scientific equipment used to record information about the micro system. The macro system usually includes a person looking at what is recorded by the equipment, but it doesn't have to.

You are right that that has very little commonality with the everyday use of the word 'observation'. It's a common practice in science, for better or for worse, to take everyday words and assign a special meaning to them in the context of a very specific scientific context.

I should add that not all physicists believe that decoherence fully explains 'wavefunction collapse', and some of those physicists believe that consciousness is involved, which gives an interpretation more similar to the everyday one.

Physics itself is silent on which interpretation is correct, or even preferable.

But the article is explicitly aimed at physicalism and objectivism. Do you think these are essential to science? — Wayfarer

I do not regard them as being essential to science, and they are not part of the way I look at science. I am pretty confident the many religious, spiritual, idealist or other non-materialist, non-physicalist scientists feel the same way.

The article in question is not about science, — Wayfarer

Really? Then why is it entitled:

"The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience"

rather than, for instance "The blind spot of reductive materialism..." or "The blind spot of Scientism....".

The answer of course, is that they would get nowhere near as many clicks with either of those honest titles, so they went for the dishonest one.

if we discuss the subject on philosophy forums we are met with people who don't see the problem because they are mostly scientifically illiterate — leo

You are assuming without evidence that those who reject the OP are scientifically illiterate.

I very much doubt that to be the case. I am scientifically literate, having grown up in a a family where both my parents where scientists (and both Christian by the way - somehow defying this dogma that scientists must be reductive materialists), I have a number of friends and relatives that are professional scientists (some of them reductive materialists, some of them not), I solve theoretical physics problems for fun in my spare time and I'm a Science Advisor on physicsforums. I am also philosophically literate, and am not a reductive materialist. It's perfectly possible that plenty of others that point out how the OP is an attention-seeking straw man are similarly literate in both science and philosophy. Simply assuming that anybody that doesn't agree must be scientifically illiterate is nonsense.

Then why bother responding with an irrelevancy?

Forgive me for being blunt, but it seems necessary. That magazine article makes claims about science that would be true if you replaced the word 'science' by 'scientism' but, as the authors did not do that, the claims are patently false. It seeks to imply that a metaphysical worldview of scientism - aka reductive materialism - is built into science, an integral part of it. That claim that is palpable nonsense. A disproof of the claim lies in every one of the hundreds of thousands of scientists that are religious, spiritual or just not reductive materialists - scientists whose existence you choose to ignore.

This has been pointed out by numerous people, and you have just ignored it, instead responding with irrelevant inanities like 'these authors are serious academics that have published peer-reviewed papers' - as if that had any relevance to what they have written in this non-peer-reviewed, non-academic context.

If you want to make a thread about why you dislike reductive materialism, go ahead. I'd agree with its sentiments but it'll probably be a little dull, because it's been discussed many times before. But if you make a thread that accuses science of being the same as reductive materialism, it's just dishonest and plays directly into the hands of the Trumps and Tea Parties of the world that would like us to distrust science because it implies that there may be a need to place some constraints around what capitalism can do.

They are credible authors. They’re not hacks or charlatans turning out click bait. — Wayfarer

Did you not read my response? What you wrote has nothing to do with what I wrote. You seem to just dodge or ignore the points made against you and then rebut some argument that nobody made.

As regards 'credible authors', Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss have all published serious, academic, peer-reviewed scientific papers that are widely respected. Are you suggesting we should therefore give the same deferential respect to 'The God Delusion', 'A universe from nothing' and 'Brief answers to big questions' - all reductive materialist polemic works - as is given to their peer-reviewed papers?

Or does your preference for treating academics as unimpeachable founts of wisdom on everything only apply to those that are theists or at least are making arguments favourable to theists?

On the contrary, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson, and Michel Bitbol, are dedicated academics, writers, philosophers and scientists, They have many peer-reviewed articles and books to their names, and they are neither hacks nor charlatans. — Wayfarer

'On the contrary'?

What does your comment about peer-reviewed journal papers they have written on different subjects have to do with this non-peer-reviewed magazine piece on this subject? Are you seriously suggesting that nobody that ever did diligent, clever work in one part of their life was ever sloppy and lazy in another part of their life?

It is clear that he considered reductive materialism a widespread view among scientists, and that he too saw it as a problem. — leo

I agree with Bohm on that, and note that widespread could mean as little as 10%. The gulf between a belief being widespread and being universal and a necessary part of engaging in science as claimed by the article in the OP is unfathomably wide.

There is nothing wrong with complaining about reductive materialism, or about any other metaphysical belief. There is everything wrong with claiming that it is an integral part of science. That sort of nonsense leads to the cancerous anti-science mantra that has taken over politics in the USA and is gradually destroying it.

Science has no metaphysical dogmas. Plenty of scientists do, but for almost any metaphysical position you can think of, you'll be able to find good scientists that hold it. Even if 95% of scientists were reductive materialists - which I very much doubt to be the case - it would say nothing at all about whether reductive materialism was an integral part of science.

But, hey, what do they know? — Wayfarer

Regarding the claims they make in their article - that scientists (without restriction or qualification) believe such and such - they know as close to nothing as makes no odds, since between the three of them they probably have interacted with fewer than 0.1% of the world's scientists, and discussed metaphysics or phenomenology with less than a tenth of those. Being an astrophysicist, a theoretical physicist or a philosopher doesn't give you any special insight into what a million plus people you have never met believe.

The article is lazy, arrogant click-bait. Their real target appears to be reductive materialists like Dawkins, Hawking or Krauss, but that wouldn't generate enough interest, so they big up their target by implying that all scientists are like those three.

There are not many people that can be more annoying than proselytising reductive materialists, but attention-seeking clowns that can't tell the difference between science and scientism manage to achieve it. I shudder to think what devoutly religious scientists like Francis Collins, or deeply philosophical ones like David Bohm would make of such tripe.

It is a blind spot of science in the same way that the inability to provide a good observation of Jupiter is a blind spot of a microscope.

What do Gleiser, Thompson and Frank think gives them the right to tell the world's millions of scientists, plenty of whom hold worldviews that encompass things not covered by science, what they believe?

The game of 'I'm more open-minded and spiritual than you' is as dull, puerile and pointless as the more traditional pastime of competing over the size of reproductive appendages.

volts divided by ohms do not mean pretty much anything — Alan

They do. The usual way to ground electrical concepts in intuition is to treat potential difference - (PD) measured in volts - and current, measured in amps, as the fundamental quantities. Current can be thought of as number of electrons passing through a surface per second. PD can be thought of as an indication of the strength of electric field.

Resistance, measured in Ohms, is a derived concept, expressed as volts per amp. It tells you how much PD you have to apply between the ends of the resistor in order to pass a current of one amp through it.

Given that, PD divided by resistance has units that are volts divided by (volts per amp), which is just amps, measuring the intuitive notion of current.

In Physics problems, intuition about units is aided by carefully choosing which quantities to take as fundamental and which to treat as derived.

Are you under the impression that there is no such thing as base values - that every value can be deduced from some lower-level value? If that process never grounds in base values, you can never make an argument for any of your values.

If you believe that your value that death is the worst possible harm can be deduced from other, lower-level values then show your reasoning and we can discuss it.

It looks like where we differ is about whether death is the ultimate harm. I do not believe it is. I think enforced suffering and trauma can be worse than death, and very likely would be for this particular victim. That is a value judgement.

Perhaps the question about the relative severity of such harms is so fundamental that it cannot be reasoned out. One takes as axiomatic either the one or the other view.

Are you actually going to put forward an argument to support your claim that we should force feed people, or are you going to content yourself with one-line jibes?

There is nothing to argue against. You have only made a claim, and your only support for it is the word 'clearly'.

If the choice is force feeding or death, clearly force-feeding is the better alternative. — NKBJ

I very strongly disagree with this, and it seems many others on here do too, so at least you should concede that the 'clearly' in your claim is inappropriate.

For anybody favouring the forceful intervention route, I suggest you watch the scene in the recent movie Suffragette where a hunger-striking suffragette is force-fed in prison.

The rape analogy is neither accidental, nor imaginary.