Not quite.

I assume you're talking about quantum fields or something?



The idea that most problems in philosophy come from improper use of language is against a very Wittgensteinian position to hold. In some sense, the search for first principles is a fool's errand, but we can't actually even have a concept of truth without some basic metaphysical principles that are unfoundable. Not actually unlike how we need axioms to build mathematics rigorously off of. So of course we try to pick the metaphysical stance that lets us build up what we already know must be true.

However I think some form of Kant's transcendental arguments are hard to argue against. Many of the best philosophers are like that, you can object but you can't refute, and it comes down not so much to opinion but to whichever arguments you find most convincing.



That's probably fair, because often for a philosopher's mistakes their are people who come later to repair the holes. Or, sometimes, there's near universal agreement that a philosopher was wrong on a topic. I think most people agree that Hume was wrong that all knowledge comes from experience; but, the is-ought gap that he advanced is widely agreed upon and hardly disputed, except by hacks like Sam Harris. Hume's also the go-to for scientific anti-realism, his arguments are still a position that are not majority held but have a substantial following.



I think it's a categorical mistake to equate mathematical and logical truths with any other kind of truth. I think it's actually a long-set mistake of philosophers who have attempted to equate the two things. Arguing how you can derive one equation from another, versus how well the equation corresponds to reality, are completely different in regards to their truth-value.

That said, I feel what you're saying is heuristically correct.



I don't see how mathematicians translate between languages. Can you expand on that?

As far as what philosophy is about, well, it really doesn't have a true extent, because anything that can be talked about can be talked about philosophically. Language has become a centerpiece, though, because language is extremely hard to comprehend at anything but a superficial level. In fact, much of the hamfisted attempts at AI have been predicted failures. Of course AI is improving but they're still easy to tell apart from real people.

Though, it's not just in language, where the conversation is still much newer, I still feel the people who do the most cutting edge science are philosophically aware. Just consider Einstein's view:



There are a few notable exceptions, but largely you'll be hard-struck to find top scientists who are dismissive of philosophy.


Philosophers are still talking about everything. There's just been an ideology pushed for a while now that science renders philosophy superficial. Which I think is naive.



I've never found a canonical Western philosopher to be a "waste of time", but I'm also kind of a nerd about it. I'll admit that there's a tendency in some philosophy to be wordy bull****, and well, you just have to feel out a philosopher before you read them if you want to avoid that.



Spook can be used as a racial insult for black people. Nice link though.

There are two sides of the coin: people who write wordy bull**** and call you an idiot if you dismiss it, and people who don't want to be intellectually challenged so accuse things of being wordy bull****.



What's worse, is you get philosophers who are earnest and convincing and it takes hundreds of years to undo the damage they've done intellectually, i.e. Descartes.



AFAIK this is correct, but I have minimal exposure to academic philosophy.

Yes but it's also slang for intelligence operative.

I got this nickname from neither of those.

pinteresting

Quantum fields are, themselves, human psychological abstractions for an inscrutable physical reality. There are infinitely many predictive models for any non-trivial phenomenon, and it is not necessarily possible to distinguish the useful falsehoods from objective fact. So I really don't know what I'm talking about, and neither does anybody else.



I can't speak to philosophy in general. But metaphysics? Sure.

You know, pesky questions like "should our ontologies permit impossible things", or "what are the properties that things can share". But the idea that things can be labeled and binned, compared for similarities and differences, and even the "basic metaphysical principle" of a universal, are all products of human perception, a shortcut-laden computation generated by millions of years of evolution toward the sole purpose of eating animals, not for comprehending reality as it actually is. So when we talk about "round square cupolas at Berkeley", we're really saying "my language permits contradictions #wow #whoa", and when we talk about "the universal of redness", what we're really saying is "these two objects (assuming all intelligent observers can distinguish them, which isn't guaranteed) have emergent properties that my body interprets as red, so they are similar, even if that redness arises by totally different mechanisms". Which is to say, they are linguistic and psychological concerns, not essential questions of reality.

Or how about the fission problem, from the psychological continuity view of personal identity. If you were spontaneously split into two people during a transporter accident, which one of you is the real Commander Riker?

Most of the hang-wringing around this problem is because there are human social mores about our roles in society, how we are treated, and how we are set apart from others. For humans, mating is an exclusive right, property is an exclusive right, work is an exclusive right, and authority is an exclusive right, all assigned based on your identifiable characteristics. An objectively indistinguishable copy isn't just a curiosity to us, it's a serious threat to our social standing. In such a scenario, puzzling out who is entitled to your identity, as a matter of fact, would be an enormous priority.

However, it's easy to imagine an alien psychology that does not consider those questions important, or which can't even comprehend something like personal identity at all. Consider AI, for example: which is the "real" Cortana, or the real Siri? Nobody thinks about this because nobody cares. It doesn't change how they operate. It doesn't matter. It's not necessary for intelligence or even self-awareness.

It's only a human social, legal, psychological, biological - and ultimately linguistic - concern. A valid discussion for philosophy, certainly, but not at all essential to reality.

.

This is where I start talking about that double slit experiment and how if you dont have a word for blue it totally stops existing. Also The Secret and What the bleep do we know should probably play into my post somehow

The Republicans' new healthcare plan to replace the ACA includes a tax break for insurance company executives who make over 500K a year (which has to be all insurance company executives).

Nothing about that on r/t_d, I guess it must be fake news

Of course it does. Piss can't trickle up.

I'll get back to Reid's questions about philosophy soon enough, but let me just say that this Republican health-care bill gutting of Medicaid seems like the typical middle finger from the super rich, complete with every prong of their usual triad:

• massive tax cuts for their investments
• increased market volatility and financial woes, for both state budgets and private industry
• cutting off poor people from their livelihood

I don't understand why they care so much about increasing the value of their investments, if there won't be a stable country for those investments to exist in??

I mean, in terms of questions like "is string theory correct", sure, but in terms of practical science I don't follow. We seem to have approximate methods that work out really, really conveniently. Will we ever get to the bottom of things? I doubt it.


So I actually did some rereading on metaphysics, and left a bit more baffled than I started, so.. I'm probably not qualified to talk about it at anything more than a superficial level. But I can say that the philosophers I most appreciate are staggeringly anti-metaphysics, Kant was instrumental in destroying past metaphysics, Nietzsche's Human All Too Human is a direct attack and Heidegger's basic project is to say "let's get rid of all of this abstract philosophical nonsense finally", even though he ends up becoming that. So my impression is to agree, that most of metaphysics can't really achieve what it sets out to achieve.


So, given a very classical (pre-Modern) metaphysics, this seems to be pretty much the case, that we can't really say much useful about it. But I think most philosophers agree that we simply cannot avoid some metaphysical propositions, even to begin science. A statement as simple as "causality exists" is not even justifiable outside of psychology, if you read Hume's attack on causation* and Kant's hilariously weak grounding for causation. It's completely feasible that everything arranges itself in patterns on accident, and causality is purely an imagined phenomena. We don't ever experience causality, we project it. The best argument we can have that it actually happens is, that it would be silly for us to have an understanding of causality from an early age if it was a meaningless idea. That's not much of a justification, and metaphysics proper doesn't do anything to help. But we can't actually exist in the world without still treating reality as causal, so really the justification is one by necessity. Which is sort of in agreement with what you're saying, the problem is, whatever the grounding for causality, concerns about what it is and what it means are still basic to the discussion of science, so the metaphysical aspects will still come back, no matter how you try to dismiss them.

The biggest problem with what you're saying is, what do we replace humans with if our reasoning apparatus is fundamentally flawed? Or do we? Seems pretty pessimistic to say "humans are too dumb to understand reality lol".



Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't spend very much time wringing my hands about things like personal identity, and I also don't worry too much about the truth-value of thought experiments, actually I don't believe philosophical thought experiments can tell us much about the world at all.

As far as AI, I don't think AI is even remotely human-like, and that's not because of some spooky voodoo human essence, but really all AI is just a sophisticated tool, to give any personhood to it you might as well give personhood to your ratchet because it "knows" to only torque the nut when you're twisting to the right.

*David Hume doesn't actually attack causality proper, he thinks we can't learn about it from reality directly, and attempts to argue correlation and induction are how we can learn about causation. The correct way to view his philosophy is that he is a failed extreme experimentalist, not a skeptic

In light of the recent Wikileaks release of CIA hacking tools, let's talk a bit about the CIA and why they're a terrible organization and people should be more afraid of them, and should not support them despite Trump being really awful.

The CIA is basically the worst organization in the United States. They've overthrown and assassinated and are just ****heads world round. They're shady as **** and do all sorts of seriously criminal things with no punishment. And even if you're the typical cynical American and don't care what we do to people outside of America who aren't white, remember they were the primary agency pushing pushing for the Iraq war on fabricated premises. And if you think they don't do active operations in America, well, you're wrong too. Remember when the CIA was being investigated by Congress for torturing people? And they hacked into the computers used by the committee? And that surveillance state journalist who died under completely unsuspicious circumstances in a car crash with his QNX-controlled Mercedes that we now know the CIA almost definitely has exploits for? I mean, he was only asking around to borrow cars, certain his was tampered with, certain the government was onto him, and allegedly was about to release a damning report on the CIA. Only Russia kills journalists*.

*Of course it's possible that it was an accident, but the evidence we have that he was assassinated is about as strong as we have for Putin's victims.

Yes, let's do that.

For the record, though, I only threw my support behind the CIA as a bludgeon for the preservation of civil society. (Which is a more than a little ironic, when you think about it!)

Nevertheless, in a crude way I still think it is right, especially when you consider the role of counterinelligence in staving off foreign intelligence threats (like the one in the Oval Office??).

Considering what "happened" to JFK, would it be too blatant for "them" to do it again, given all the public scrutiny?

Not implying anything (at least not super seriously), just throwing this out there for the tinfoil hatters.

I think we can all agree that having intelligence and realpoliticking is necessary, the problem is when the they get involved in proxy wars in countries that don't serve to benefit the U.S. directly at the expense of.. our pockets. In fact, even Hillary Clinton knew full well that "the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, ... are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL". And what does this benefit us in safety? It doesn't, it does the opposite, by causing the deaths of thousands of people they are making us unsafe. Virtually all Islamic terrorism in the past fifty years on western soil is the direct cause of agencies like the CIA being stupid bullies when trying to control regions for no reason that keeps us safe or really even benefits "us", assuming "us" doesn't include the interests of a select few people.

There's no conspiracy involving JFK, what happened is what happened.

I wouldn't presume to know. : tinfoil:

But pay no mind to me, I will read your posts another time, with the more serious attention to detail they deserve, when I'm in a less whimsical state of mind.

That's quite distant from what Kant actually thought about causality. I'll try to structure this is an intelligible way, but I also don't want to spend a ton of time on it.

One of those distinctions is the famous distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal. Experience and "reality" are not the same thing (but "reality" is very imprecise language to use in this context). For Kant, as with all the great early modern philosophers from Descartes onward, it's very important to distinguish between mental states (anything that exists in consciousness, whether a thought, feeling, sense-perception, imagination, etc) and whatever is other than mental states (things-in-themselves, in Kantian terminology, or res extensa, in Cartesian terminology). For post-Cartesian philosophers concerned with epistemological questions through Kant, it's very important that philosophical reflection assumes that reality is mediated to subjects through consciousness. To put that much more simply, I never experience "reality" in itself, apart from my mind. I only experience the world outside of my mind as it is represented to me -- as it appears to my mind. I can't really reflect on "reality" directly. When I perceive something through sense perception, I don't experience the thing itself; I don't perceive "reality". I only experience the representation of it, as an object of consciousness.

An additional, related thought that's slightly more opaque, is the idea that I am identical with the content of my mind. I can only think about the contents of my own mind, and everything that I think is my mind. Even when I'm thinking about ideas whose content is not my own mind (when I'm not thinking about "myself", but when I'm perceiving a sunset, or imaging a scenario), I'm still thinking about ideas that are identical with my mind, which is something separate and altogether distinct from external reality. (This is the so-called "brain in a vat" problem, or Cartesian solipsism. I am my mind, and all of its content. But since everything I think is merely the content of my own mind, how can I know that anything exists apart from my mind?).

So this is just what mind-body dualism is: the idea that mental states/consciousness/mind are something completely different and independent from what's other than mental states (presumably, some sort of material "stuff").

The point is related to the point that Jon was making earlier, but it's not the same (note, I'm not disagreeing with anything he said). Clearly, my mind represents reality to me in a certain way. But is there any correlation between how my mind represents the reality apart from my mind, and the things that my mind represents? Are the representations accurate? Do the the categories through which I make sense of reality, and interpret the content of my own mind, correspond to how things actually are? Jon was saying we should be skeptical that the way our mind renders reality is accurate.

But Kant doesn't actually care very much about the accuracy of mental states (that is, he doesn't care about the question of whether our mental states correspond to, or accurately depict, reality). That is what the distinction between phenomena and noumena is about: there's a gap between things as they appear to us, and things as they are in themselves. Reality in itself is something that, for Kant, we can't reason about validly. He's agnostic about it (with some qualification. It's still a transcendental, which means that it is an unconditional condition of consciousness). For Kant, we can only make valid judgments about things for which we first have some sort of intuition. We don't have intuitions of things-in-themselves. We only have the representations of them in our mind -- the way that they appear to us as mental states, in the form of sense perception, or sensible intuitions.

When Kant talks about causality, he doesn't describe causality as a "projection" on "reality". As I said before, he thinks that nothing valid can be asserted about things in themselves, because we don't have intuitions of them. Rather, he's concerned with the structure of rationality itself. His point is just that causality is something that structures the judgments that we make about the things we perceive through sensation, or, "empirical reality". We cannot make valid judgments not about things in themselves, but only about the empirical reality that we perceive through sense-perception. Our minds are structured such that the judgments we make about what we perceive wouldn't make sense if we didn't have causality as a category which conditioned our thought. (Causality is a transcendental category -- it's a priori, something that conditions our thoughts, our reflections on the sensible content of our minds. It has nothing to do with things in themselves).

For Kant, objectivity doesn't mean "non-mental" (or, in other words, whatever exists independently of our minds). If something is objectively true, it doesn't mean that it accurately depicts things in themselves. Rather, he means that it is universally valid for any rational subject. That is, if I reason about it, and you reason about it, what I think about when I reach a valid conclusion is the same thing that you reach when you do the same. Kant's concern, like Descartes', is to establish an epistemological foundation for science, so that we can be confident in that the conclusions of modern scientific inquiry are valid.

It got rushed at the end. But I've got to wrap it up.

Another thing: talking about "psychology" and "metaphysics" here is quite imprecise. There's something "metaphysical" about defining mental states and physical, non-mental states as two distinct kinds of 'being' (as Descartes does), and there's something "psychological" about it too, inasmuch as we're talking about the mind. But it's not metaphysical in the Kantian sense. For Kant, Metaphysics occupies a very specific purview: questions that we cannot reason about validly, because to do so would require some form of intellectual intuition (and there's no such thing as "intellectual intuition", only sensible intuition), but which are are nonetheless compelled to opine about, because of their importance (for example, the immortality of the soul) and because of our desire to know the truth. Epistemology is a better word for what we're talking about.

"The problem" is that the CIA operates without public consent or accountability. But I'm not going to take as a non-starter that everything the CIA is completely divorced from the interests of the American people at large, even if it also does things at times that are morally dubious.



Uh, k, maybe, but what does that have to do with the CIA? Nothing. The CIA isn't responsible for everything "clandestine" that happens in the world, just because it's a clandestine organization.



In the article you cite, the discrepancies between 1) what the document actually says and 2) what Bush administration officials said about the document to the public while it was still classified suggests the CIA was much more cautious about the most important points (like whether there were ties between Hussein and Al-Qaida, and whether al-Qaida had a significant presence in Iraq and Hussein knew about it), and that it was Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell et al who exaggerated/distorted the contents of the report in order to sell the war to the American public. Given your own evidence, it seems hardly justifiable to say that the CIA was "pushing" the Iraq War. It was the administration that completely overstated how conclusive the intelligence report actually was.

The CIA doesn't do "nothing" that benefits us, but neither does the despot. Russians are better off now under Putin than they were 15 years ago.



Well.. that in particular I more just wanted to comment on but it wasn't worth it's own post. But yeah that's pretty damn significant, much more so than anything related to the recent American election.


Yeah so, I got that completely wrong.. very wrong, I misremembered pretty badly something I skimmed a while back.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/10/workplace-wellness-genetic-testing/

House Republicans push genetics discrimination bill, "not literal nazis".

sign up with our voluntary gas chamber program to lower your insurance rate today

ugh, I am so tired of liberals always calling conservatives nazis and Hitlers. Trump's not Hitler, he just thinks that certain semitic people shouldn't be allowed in his country, that people who aren't genetically pure shouldn't be allowed to have certain jobs, and that people who exercise their right to free speech are the enemy. Libtards, smh.

Exploring the combinatorics of governmental vivisection: "Do We Really Need a State Department?" edition.

Trillion dollar question: will decades of anti-government rhetoric (along the lines of 'anyone who would equate the American people with their government, are against what the founding fathers stood for, and probably are out to enslave you to the bureaucracy and the IRS'), will we go deep enough into the state space of government necrosis to finally get to learn just how many body parts of the federal government were vestigial after all?

When Grover Norquist said that “the goal is reducing the size and scope of government by draining its lifeblood", I am not sure he was talking about amputation, but what difference does it make? Esp. if the "surgeon" never needed booklearning `bout vital signs nohow?

Trump's chain email presidency will hopefully help some people realize how silly the rhetoric is.

That's certainly possible. What's more pertinent in my mind is whether discovering this through experience is in any way redeeming compared to being lucky enough to never have to find out.

"If I jam a paperclip into an electrical outlet, will I get hurt?

Most people don't know what the rhetoric is about or why a large government is a problem. Like, people on ACA plans voted for Trump to repeal Obamacare. They just don't get it.

The surest sign that someone has never had a significant role in a large corporation is when they fetishize the kinds of government policies that benefit them. Large corporations are the most wasteful and incompetent organizations in the world.

The IRS, DMV et al are slow and frustrating to deal with because they are too small and not allowed to hire enough people, not because government = bad.

http://www.cbc.ca/comedy/monopoly-updates-game-for-millennials-by-dropping-thimble-concept-of-property-ownership-1.4008841

Not actual Nazis:

Recently read that the rate drone strikes have sharply increased under Trump. Drone strikes were worthy of sharp criticism under Obama, but under Trump they're becoming indefensible. Which in a sense is the entire difference between Obama and Trump: worthy of criticism and indefensible.

Why weren't Obama's use of drone strikes indefensible? And how do you know that the Trump administration's use of drone strikes aren't justifiable, given the threats posed?

Drone strikes have increased by 400% under Trump.

They increased by 900% under Obama.

*spooky language*

Mounted cavalry is down 99.99% since Washington!

Yes, I was more going for the joke. There's a side of me that just plain doubts most of the drone strikes were protecting America in any substantial way. And Obama's use of them was a mistake, but given which presidents he is sandwiched between, and the worse non-drone things they did, he's looks relatively better. Though the use of drones was basically indefensible so yeah.

And they aren't justifiable because my impression of Trump is that he's far too cavalier to not drone strike every civilian the military advises him to. /s, even though he is.

If we're going to make arguments based on the temperament of Trump, we should be able to do the same about Obama.

Obama was elected as an anti-war president. It seems that that was a reflection of his moral convictions. Why would he perform targeted killings, unless it was really necessary?

It strikes me that when Obama came into office, he thought the USG had gotten distracted from the war on terror by focusing on the Iraq War, and wasn't doing enough to preempt terrorist attacks. Doing so would require going after the leaders of terrorist organizations and taking them out, destroying the operational capacity of the groups. He saw what the threats were, and thought they were serious enough that something -- i.e., drone strikes -- had to be done.

So, boring argument: Given who Obama is, it seems we should've trusted that he had to do it, and that it's seem more reasonable if we too could see the intelligence.



Thing about that: Obama set up institutional and legal structures that required the president to sign off personally on most (but not all) targeted killings (although he was informed of the others). Trump is getting rid of the system, so his subordinates in the hierarchy will conduct drone strikes without the approval of the president. So it won't matter how cavalier he is. He won't be responsible (or accountable).

Which is useful, I guess, if you've started your reelection campaign 3 weeks into your first term.