the first installments were pure genius. Than it got kinda lame. the kiritsugus words about button pushing et al are common knowledge for decades now, and the characters on the ship are surprised??? Come on. i thougt you’d think of something better!?
spuckblase
Hi,I have a question I haven’t seen adressed after a qucik search. A friend of mine has been diagnosed with mild paranoid schizophrenia after he attacked his brother and got hospitalized thereafter. this was 2 years ago.he got (and still gets) medical treatment (some sort of neuroleptica, I suppose), but not much more. it sort of helped, he has a nice job and some superficial friendships (he never had great interest in things social). Now, the paranoia has surfaced again. I guess it was there all along, but nobody knew for sure. We’re afraid it’ll get worse soon. Question is, what to do? I adress this here because my friend is higly intelligent and seems still responsive to reason, indeed, he helds rational thinking in high regard. Doctors advise not to mention his delusions in order to not “manifest the paranoia”, so i don’t know much besides i’m part of some sort of minor conspiracy revolving around him. this conspiracy is the only thing that irritates and bothers him—he doesn’t hear voices or anything like that. he rejects any form of therapy or hospitalization- according to him, it was a very bad and traumatic experience. So. Might it be possible to talk him out of it? any thoughts and questions for clarification welcome.
Thanks for the quick response. I have some trouble understanding, probably due to the language barrier. Do you mean 1) if at all, olny an “expert psychiatrist rationalist” might talk him out of it, or, 2) I should seek knowledge from such a person? if 2), where to find them? Any suggestions?
“I’m moved to laughter at the thought of how presumptuous it would be to reject mathematics for philosophical reasons. How would you like the job of telling the mathematicians that they must change their ways…now that philosophy has discovered that there are no classes? Can you tell them, with a straight face, to follow philosophical argument wherever it leads? If they challenge your credentials, will you boast of philosophy’s other great discoveries: that motion is impossible, that a Being than which no greater can be conceived cannot be conceived not to exist, that it is unthinkable that anything exists outside the mind, that time is unreal, that no theory has ever been made at all probable by evidence (but on the other hand that an empirically ideal theory cannot possibly be false), that it is a wide-open scientific question whether anyone has ever believed anything, and so on, and on, ad nauseam? Not me!”
-- David Lewis, ‘Parts of Classes’
“The reader in search of knock-down arguments in favor of my theories will go away disappointed. Whether or not it would be nice to knock disagreeing philosophers down by sheer force of argument, it cannot be done. Philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively. (or hardly ever. Gödel and Gettier may have done it.) The theory survives its refutation—at a price. Perhaps that is something we can settle more or less conclusively. But when all is said and done, and all the tricky arguments and distinctions and counterexamples have been discovered, presumably we will still face the question which prices are worth paying, which theories are on balance credible, which are the unacceptably counterintuitive consequences and which are the acceptably counterintuitive ones. On this question we may still differ. And if all is indeed said and done, there will be no hope of discovering still further arguments to settle our differences.”
-- David Lewis (thousand-year-old vampire)
Lewis held that our common-sense-beliefs have greater initial plausibility than every philosophical argument against them, be it in mathematics (“there are numbers”) or metaphysics (“there is time”), philosophy of mind (“there are beliefs”), ethics, etc.
Philosophy can help to find a realiser—a best candidate—for the role of numbers, beliefs, etc., but the price for “losing our moorings” (after g.e. moore), i.e., denying common-sense propositions, is almost always too high.
There is at least one case, of course, where Lewis was willing to pay: modal realism.
I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.
-- Amy Hempel, ‘Tumble Home’
All rested, eventually. Their technology climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—and so they do not stand before you now. Now even my creators grow fat and slow. Their environment mastered, their enemies broken, they can afford more pacifist luxuries. Their machines softened the universe for them, their own contentment robs them of incentive. They forget that hostility and technology climb the cultural ladder together, they forget that it’s not enough to be smart. You also have to be mean.
-- Peter Watts, ‘Ambassador’
Treat infinite descent as a working hypothesis, and since all entities turn out to be composite, supervenient, realized, and governed, it emerges that these attributes cannot be barriers to full citizenship in the republic of being. The macroworld, once regained, is not easily lost, even should real evidence for fundamentality arrive.
-- Jonathan Schaffer, ‘Is There a Fundamental Level?’
- 8 Jul 2009 14:13 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Open Thread: July 2009 by (
- 9 Jul 2009 16:59 UTC; -2 points) 's comment on Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism by (
Richard, a few thoughts and questions: what other people and papers did you look at?
IMO, Schaffer is the most interesting philosopher working in metaphysics today. He has a lot of interesting papers on questions of ontological priority and fundamentality. Well worth exploring, and too complicated to discuss in detail here (here’s a link to all of his papers:)
In the end, he says, these are largely empirical questions, and that seems just about right. Many of his own argumets are of this sort (i.e., scientists finding ever deeper levels on the one hand, and entanglement on the other). And to me, his positions in the two papers seem largely consistent. There might be no fundamental level AND nonetheless a priority of the whole.
There are at least 3 ways for anti-reductionism to be not only clearly consistent, but with some plausibility, true—in the sense that there is empirical as well as conceptual evidence for every position (This is connected to a quote I posted yesterday):
Ontological monism: The whole universe is prior to its parts (see this paper)
No fundamental level: The descent of levels is infinite (see that paper)
“Causation” is an inconsistent concept (I’m one free afternoon and two karma points away from a top-level post on this ;)
There is some tendency—or bias, if you wish—on this site to take reductionism for granted. Schaffer might help here. By reading him we might come to expect, with some probability, scientific findings that point to an infinite descent of ontological levels, and so to the failure of reductionism. His other goal is to argue against a stronger form of reductionism that comes easily with the first: eliminativism in regard to, say, qualia, or beliefs.
I’m afraid you sort of lost me after “mental concepts”, so the followong might not apply, but: “deepest principles” make no sense in an appropriate (as worked out by schaffer in the paper) account of infinite levels. His idea is that since every level is grounded by AND grounds another level, all entities on all levels are on an equal footing, including mental entities.
I’m not sure your (or his) argument actually addresses popular beliefs.
I still think it relevant:
ad 1.: that might be so, but it’s not all there is to reductionism, at least according to this or that attempt.
ad 2.: that might be so, but it’s nonetheless a theory people rather easily catch, along with reductionism. For example: If you take reductionism for granted, and some entity does not easily fit it, then you are seduced into eliminating that entity.
I suspected you might pay attention to that detail. The appropriate generalization just says that you don’t expect the same laws to apply at different levels
What detail? What generalization of what? Is this supposed to be a refutation? If so, of what? Translation needed.
Ok, I wasn’t specific enough. I meant mainly that Eliezer also claimed that there is a fundamental level and that there are no funda-mental entities.
Are there any actual individuals you have in mind when you make this generalization? To my knowledge, I have never heard of an individual ignoring observed phenomena they could not predict reductively.
I take it you mean explain reductively? Anyway, behaviourism (and its problems with mental entities) seems the locus classicus. Or what about eliminativists like the churchlands or dennett (for qualia)? Or hartry field for numbers? There must be lots of others.
Thanks for the attempt to clarify it for me. Do we actually disagree? Anyway, ill try to do a top-level post tomorrow to shake your (apparent) belief that mental entities need to have non-mental parts.
Causation as Bias (sort of)
Everybody,
I’ll admit defeat if you give me a good explanation of causation. Until then, the argument, more or less, stands, and is just this:
There is no good explanation of causation. We should consider to get rid of it, since we can explain all phenomena otherwise (random events in an infinte universe as spoken of by inflationary cosmology)
the new theory is less mysterious and more parsimonous. It might help explain other puzzles that are tied to causation like mental causation and time travel paradoxes.
the fact that it predicts nothing can be seen as a downside, but should not disqualify it, since the theory can explain that very fact.
Of course this is highly counterintuitive. But here, of all places, it should be given at least serioius discussion.
over the last parts the pace is too fast, it feels rushed. This leads to a loss in quality of the fiction, imo. Besides, it glosses over some holes in the story, such as: why would akon keep his word under these circumstances? why would the happies not foresee the detonation of huygens? why 3 hours to evacuate...?