posted
Thing is, when we say, "Babe Ruth threw a pitch," we aren't saying something we consider to be untrue. (At least, I'm not.) Shorthand is simplification, but it isn't falsehood. For example, I can say "thousands" rather than "3,629," which makes life easier, but it isn't untrue.
[ February 18, 2007, 04:54 PM: Message edited by: Will B ]
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quote:Thing is, when we say, "Babe Ruth threw a pitch," we aren't saying something we consider to be untrue.
That's part of the pervasiveness of this shorthand. We're wired to not perceive things as clumps of molecules, to perceive "individuals." It's not meaningless for us to do this; they actually "exist" as individuals within a given context, and can often be addressed more effectively for many purposes from within that context.
And for observations like "Babe Ruth threw a pitch," it's perhaps not very important to know which part of Babe Ruth threw the pitch -- or why, or how.
Where things get titchy is the discussion of intentionality. Babe Ruth meant to throw a pitch. Did he really mean to put just that much spin on it? Did he mean for it to go an inch and a half above the bottom of the strike zone, just to the left of the catcher's glove? Did he mean for his little finger to curl in just the way it did when the ball left his hand?
All these things happened. They are all components of the pitch that Ruth meant to throw, but his conscious control of them may or may not have been complete -- even within the limits of his physical ability to override his autonomous responses. He may not, for example, particularly care what his little finger does, and might well be surprised to discover that it did anything at all.
Now, we're again dealing with something that doesn't have much of a moral dimension. So consider this sentence: "Harrison got drunk, drove home, did a line of cocaine, and beat his wife." There are a number of decisions involved there. How many of those decisions were conscious ones? If Harrison hit and killed someone while driving home, would it be necessary for society to pretend that the Harrison-self who decided to drive home was the same Harrison-self who was later punished for the crime? Would it be true?Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I have a hard time getting past the things you keep saying. There is no "we" to deal with something that doesn't have much of a moral dimension; there is no "something," and there's no such thing as morals. So there's really nothing to talk about.
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posted
That certainly would be ONE way to interpret the data. Another is that we maintain these fictions because they're useful, and since it suits the collection that makes up "me" to pretend that "I" exist and "you" exist, I may as well play along for want of anything else better to do.
By the way, morals -- as things which are explicitly invented concepts -- most definitely "exist," as they exist solely in the context of invented concepts. Now, if you were to say that there are "objective" morals somehow hard-coded into the universe, I'd disagree with you -- but they clearly exist as concepts, and have exactly as much existence as all other concepts have.
Note, however, that this usage of "exist" is not the same usage I've been using elsewhere in the thread. This is why I've been pointedly suggesting that you work to refine your terms. Morals do not "exist" for a given value of "exist," but they clearly have some "existence" in a non-physical context. The problem you're having is that failing to clarify the word "exist" leads to what appears to be -- but which isn't -- contextual absurdity.
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But concepts don't exist, so how can morals exist as concepts?
Oh -- I see that you're redefining "exist" to make it easier to discuss things. So we can speak of non-physical things existing. That should make it easier to talk!
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The difficulty with "exist" is that there are clearly things that "exist" which have no physical reality, but are instead attributes of physicality. As discussed earlier on this thread, for example, all numbers fall into this class; there is no "one," but you can have "one" of something (i.e. something real can possess the conceptual property of unity). This is further complicated by the fact that some of these unique properties can be combined to produce predictable effects. For example, if I take something with a quantity of three and join it with something with a quantity of five, I can also be said to now have something with a quantity of eight. Since these effects are so predictable, it is useful shorthand to speak of the concepts of "three" and "five" as if they had reality. (Note: there are other philosophers and mathematicians who would say I have this backwards, and that information is in fact the primary building material of the universe. In this model, quantity is actually a primary element; things don't have the "quantity" of three, but the real quantity of "three" occasionally acquires the less important property of, say, "apples." They may be right, but that particular assertion's not one that I, as someone inept at math, enjoy. *grin*)
So when we say that "three" exists, we mean that it can be said to interact independently of an object to which it provides a property. We don't need to multiply three apples by three apples to get nine apples; we can multiple three by three and get nine, and don't care whether there are apples involved. But the important thing is that this is only true within a very specific context.
And I think context is probably the single most important thing that we need to learn to understand as humans struggling to comprehend the nature of our own consciousness. It's my belief that one of the things we do very, very well as a species is create -- to use a programming term -- instances of a class that we then populate with statics. We run methods within that class, sometimes to perform work and sometimes to process submitted data before returning the resulting value to the function that called it. And when we're done with that specific task, we send that class through a deconstructor method and set everything to null. When I multiple three by three, in other words, I create a mental class in which "three" can exist as an independent entity. I perform the necessary math, and pull "nine" back out of the subroutine -- perhaps to insert it into a string that indeed concatenates the result with "apples," out in Main().
But Main() -- reality, if you will -- is never aware of my unitless "three." That "three" doesn't have any real existence to Main(), and certainly doesn't intersect any other programs running on the system (which, for the purposes of this metaphor, are other people); unless I've instanced an API that permits me to hand off the results of my multiplication subroutine to them, those programs remain completely ignorant of the existence of my "three." I could hang onto that "three" all I want. I could set things equal to it. I could even make up new variables if I wanted, just to set them equal to "three." "Let there be light," I could declare, "and let it be three." And as long as I was using a forgiving compiler or remembered to cast light to something appropriate, so it would be.
But -- and this is key -- it wouldn't really exist. "Three" would exist only in my subroutine (i.e. my head). Unless I communicated it to someone else, it would never exist at all.
Now, Tres would have you believe that this concept of "three" is a qualia, something that actually has a sort of metaphysical existence. But in my example, this concept of "three" actually exists (eventually, after it compiles) as a set of binary instructions, a few flipped bits. It has physical pointers that represent and define it, but these pointers are meaningless without the context to which they're pointing. And my system state -- my constant brain activity -- maintains that context, and is itself reliant on flipped bits and electrical traffic to move data back and forth, sometimes into temporary buffers and sometimes into other physical I/O interfaces (like printers, scanners, and my tongue.)
So I hold "three" in my head, and three "exists" in my head. But it doesn't exist outside my head, which is the context about which most people speak when they're asking whether something exists.
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posted
Interesting analogy. Anybody who uses C++ to explain philosophy deserves extra points!
Thing is, 3 *does* exist outside your head: it also exists in mine! And billions of others. And it's not like that old question of whether my experience of "red" is like yours. The things that are true about your 3 (3=1+1+1; 3 = floor (pi); 3 = sqrt (9) ...) are exactly the same as the things true about mine. If in fact we find that there's a difference, we can use proof to reconcile it.
And if the human race dies out, and in a million years intelligent bread mold from Aldebaran comes and finds our records...they'll recognize the same 3. If we know things about it they don't, they'll learn something.
So it looks like 3 isn't a static local (const) variable, but a global constant or literal. (If it's local, and somebody defines it locally as 2, we've got trouble when 2 squared = 9. We'll then have a mathematical system that isn't consistent with anyone else's, and no longer works with physical reality.)
Side note: mathematics also enables us to have classifications, by mathematical description of groups of objects -- you can plot objects based on characteristics on a graph, and mathematically determine that some groupings (like "car") are better than others (like "the set of objects containing my car, your car, a half-eaten Twinkie, and men who claim to have had sex with Anna Nicole Smith"). Once we allow math, we also get classifications, w/o need for Plato. THis btw is how machine learning algorithms discover classifications of objects.
I don't know if Tresopax thinks 3 is a qualia. Since a qualia I think is some type of experience, I would disagree with that: I can experience adding, but 3 wouldn't be an experience, but a number.
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quote:Here's the thing: qualia do not exist. "Experience" as you're meaning it -- a discrete, metaphysical, non-metaphorical lump of awareness -- is bunk. There's no "hard problem," period, because it just doesn't exist.
You say this like you know it is true. Again, what is your evidence? How can you know it doesn't exist?
Note that it is considerably easier to say a certain sort of thing does exist, than to say nothing of that sort exists. My evidence for experience's existence is the fact that I have experience, something that I can introspectively observe to be true. If that is true, then experience certainly exists. What evidence do you have that would counter it? You can't look into my mind. You can't look into the minds of everyone in the world. You certainly can't look into the minds of whatever other being might possibly exist somewhere in some other part of the universe. So how could you have any evidence to support a claim to know that no such thing as "experience" can exist?
At best, all you can say is that I can't prove to you that experience exists, if you don't observe yourself to have experience. But this is certainly not proof that experience doesn't exist. "I can't prove to you that X exists" does not imply "X doesn't exist."
quote:Now, Tres would have you believe that this concept of "three" is a qualia, something that actually has a sort of metaphysical existence.
I don't think the number three is a sort of qualia, unless numbers are a sort of experience. I don't think they are. I can experience seeing or touching three things, which would be an experience, but that doesn't mean the number itself is. For that matter, threes would exist in the world even if people did not exist to experience things that come in threes.
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quote:We'll then have a mathematical system that isn't consistent with anyone else's, and no longer works with physical reality.
This is why those philosophers and mathematicians I mentioned earlier believe that the universe is numeric at root: they assert (perhaps correctly) that saying something is consistent with physical reality is essentially saying that it's consistent with mathematics, and that mathematics is therefore the root of our shared reality.
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Sorry, Tres. "What Tom feels when he looks at things that are red" is your version of qualia, I know; I was just on a numbers kick and wanted to keep the metaphor broad and all-encompassing. The same observation applies, FWIW: that it is unnecessary for things which exist in a personally-defined context and are enabled by a physically-real medium to have an independent and universal existence outside of either context.
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quote:that it is unnecessary for things which exist in a personally-defined context and are enabled by a physically-real medium to have an independent and universal existence outside of either context.
quote:It's like saying that chocolate, because of its obvious existence and importance, is not made of atoms.
Chocolate is made up of atoms. But the concept of chocolate (without which chocolate cannot be created) is not made up of atoms. Just as the universe...um, well, the universe isn't made of atoms. But it's made of something other than math. The physical elements of the universe are distinct from the theoretical elements that predict the behavior of those things. This distinction is essential to prediction, otherwise you just wait for something to happen, and when it happens it happens.
More to the point, it's essential to the idea that you can be responsible for your actions, and even your thoughts. By attacking that idea, you liberate yourself from feeling guilty about what you do. But then again, you also erase your self with that argument. It's fundamentally impossible to disbelieve in the self. Not that people don't try, given their belief that they can avoid personal responsibility that way.
You can only deny the existance of everything else, though. You do exist, and you'll still exist even when you walk out into that solipsistic darkness that is the last refuge of those who would deny ultimate reality. I have no desire that anyone should go out into that final and utter separation from truth. But I cannot stop you.
Your "friend" will not accompany you, though. If you go through that door, you must go alone.
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quote:It's fundamentally impossible to disbelieve in the self.
Why? There's nothing remotely inconsistent with believing that the self is a fiction that one chooses to use as shorthand.
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quote:It's fundamentally impossible to disbelieve in the self
It's more accurate to say that it's fundamentally impossible not to automatically act as though oneself were a self... in other words, I certainly understand that I am not a monad, that I am not a homunculus, no seed of being is who I am... I see clearly how "I" am made up of instincts and memes and experiences and knowledge and skills that have accrued to this organism.... nevertheless, despite all that knowledge, I cannot but see myself as a self. My every act is predicated on the idea that I am a contiguous whole with free will, regardless of how deeply I understand the falsehood of that belief.
And I am freaking HAPPY it's that way!
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