Boring Archive of Notes on Philosophy Podcasts

This is strictly a memory aid for me.  I'm going to write these up after listening to philosophy podcasts. So, for those few of you paying attention to this blog, it's probably best to go away & wait for the next post. This one's mostly just for me.

What Mary knew is a famous thought experiment.  Australian Frank Jackson invented this to defend against materialists. (...who believe that only things that exist are physical.)  Someone (Mary) who knew everything, but never had an experience of a fat red tomato, or perhaps a black & white limitation in their vision. However smart she is, analytically maybe knowing everything, won't she, upon being cured, suddenly feel she's learned something special and different? The word "qualia" describes the "feely side" of red that she would be now more vividly experiencing.  I felt this was basically empty of meaning, and maybe so does Jackson, because sometime after making this famous argument, he changed his mind and became a materialist after all.

Consequentialism:  This theorizes we should act to produce the best consequences, ie the end justifies the means. Seems like utilitarianism, but Pettit says it's different only in the definition of utility: what yardstick is used to measure the good.  There's a broad and meaningless argument about what "the goods" are.  Non-consequentialism has more inflexible moral absolutes: "no kicking of puppies," for instance.  What if the best outcome requires you to do that? Could you lose your integrity thereby?  Famous example by Williams, sets us up with a scenario about to execute natives: but we could kill one to save 10, should you do it? Consequentialism says of course, shoot the one.  Another objection is that maybe you as an agent should Never be required to treat other people "as means."  Wild west example: sheriff stops the riot by scapegoat someone, hang the innocent, quell the population & save lives.  These objections suggest there is value in living a life of character, even at some cost.  Maybe the greater integrity has value exceeding even the very lives that would be saved by unfeeling consequentialist acts in those scenarios. So say absolutists.  Another approach might ask, would not morality and honesty, ubiquitously applied by all, yield good?  Perhaps, but that tack, if you take it, would be consequentialism! (choosing for the good.) A great example is Kant's case of the wild eyed axeman at your door, asking after your friend Flynn, who's lolling right over there in a hammock. Do you tell the truth because you're fundamentally in favor of doing so? "Flynn's right over there," may well get him killed!  Red lights go on... (that's still consequentialism) Kant would have answered effectively, "Fiat justitia ruat caelum"  This is just a counterexample where consequentialism makes sense. What about the other heartless ones?  He's for them.  How about torturing someone to find where the bomb's buried?  That's ok, but you should have to be tried for it afterwards.  After that he gets fuzzy.

Unity of Value is Ronald Dworkin's thesis that pluralism is wrong. Pluralism posits that different values are necessarily in tension, eg freedom vs respect (Consider, "freedom for the pike is death for the minnows!"). The whole thing seemed half thought. Anybody who says "the way in which" too often  is probably full of baloney.  One phrase I particularly disliked boiled down to, "If you make your argument, somebody who disagrees is of course not going to believe you."  (Isn't the point of engaging in argument to potentially change your mind: his presumption of lack of openness makes  the whole field worthwhile.)

There is no mogul: ...the ontology of Outhouse.

Outhouse

In a cherished conversation with Miles, I once claimed you could ski bumps blind just by feeling the first one. The rest follow naturally, from the rhythm of the universe, the giant fft that is us all (or wavelets, if you like!).

The best quote from the matrix  has to be the kid breaking out, "Do not try to bend the spoon — that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spoon." Once mentioning the matrix, we cannot continue without reviewing Carl Sagan's apple pie. (and of course the musical rap cover.)


This post offers some notes on Ontology.

Here, we are going deep into Meinong's Jungle, wherein prowl pegasii and unicorns, which must subsist in some sense since we can talk about them.  This is Meinong's Gegenstandstheorie. Apparently, there are many levels of "real," if you think about it hard enough.

Oh my God, WTF is happening here? This blog has gone crazy!  Well, yes, sort of, but there is some scrap of coherence here, I think...  It all started when a student asked, "what is i, anyway?"  I was stumped, and I pretty much still am, but here is my answer anyway.  Obviously it's a complicated one, but, here goes!

First, let's get rid of the obvious canonical answer: i = sqrt(-1), but you knew that.

Now, what do we make of this?  Well, there is at least some major utility to it, eh?  Never minding whether or not i is an actual part of reality, I mean.  It's a nice tool, like a number line, or a bubble level: helps you figure things out. Sort of like saying "my very educated mother just served us nine *pies," it's a construct you can use whether or not it has any meaning grounded in reality.
(* Sorry, Pluto's not a planet.  Don't blame me, take it up with this guy.)

Let's look at some of the utility we get from i.  For one, consider helical antennas!  They make circularly polarized radiation and that is really neat. I once worked on a satellite that used those. That tubular structure in the picture is a multi-element quadrifilar helix.  The polar coordinate representation of exp(i*theta) is a visual model for all kinds of oscillatory phenomena, including the motion of airplanes.

Here's another example of something you can do with i. You can take the cube root of 1!  What, you're not impressed?  How many cube roots do you think there are?  (Hint:  thew sqrt of 4 = +/-2, right?  Why should it make sense to have two square roots and only one cube root?) Actually plain old +1 does have three cube roots (as it should) and they are 1 and  -1/2 +/- sqrt(3)i/2.  You don't want i just to get the root of -1, you want it even for mundane cube roots of plain old positive numbers!

Renee Descartes disagreed. He found i a lamentable necessity and saddled it with the pejorative "imaginary" label, but that, we'll see isn't really fair.

** ToDo: Put something intelligent here in the middle... ***

So the answer takes us full circle, back to the spoon only rephrased like this:  "Do not ask if there really are imaginary numbers. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: the real numbers are all imaginary."

stuff to read someday

Stiglitz on economy

Internet Manifesto

Some of my online goals are broad and socially oriented. That means I like to "discuss" things forcefully. By way of introduction, and admonition to myself, here are the principles behind all this arguing. there’s some righteously impossible stuff in here but hey, it’s a mission statement: you gotta aim high.

Mission: Change things for the better by winning people over to and through reason and empathy, and make life fun and interesting doing it.

Themes:

• Improve the quality of discourse here and in RL. Be sure to listen. Be welcoming to all but pay more attention to my friends. 
• Try to address issues as they deserve, atomically vs as an indivisible federated system. (Plank by plank, not monolithic political platform.) A favorite tack is to introduce the schism between a Christian (or secular humanist, take your pick) approach to people, and Darwinistic economics.
• Language is a tricky sword. We have to communicate in meaning, but we use words. Words carry context, deep and precise, but not the same ones for everyone. Further, you can assert one meaning and access another, sometimes invidiously. I aim to clarify these mistakes of argument, flush them out.
• Understand confirmation bias and media and social “tribe” participation in that phenomenon. Watch for it in myself and proselytize against it.
• Attempt to discover “righteous” economic policies, those being ones that are generally good for everyone, long term, and abusive to none.
• Brew fine quality beers with minimal investment in ingredients, obscene devotion to equipment, slavish investment of time, and barely sufficient patience.
• Productionize disruptive argumentative technique to improve the reasoning and decisionmaking of all my customers, with the effect of multiplying stockholder equity with justice and improved gas mileage for all.
• Continually improve this mission statement until it stands as a shining paragon of truth and beauty, with rhetoric surpassing Newt Gingrich, poetry to shame Johnnie Cochran, principle outshining the Constitution, permanance outlasting the Hyundai warranty, moves like Jagger and acumen that breaks the very Speed of Light. Amen.

Favorite Quotes

These are fun.

"They never 'go bad.' They start that way." -Mom, talking about springerle cookies.

"Life's about doing things both unwise and exciting ... making a child just to watch it run."  - Gina

"Yes, Fiats are just like women. They look great from a distance, but just wait until you are married to one..." - Marc

“Remember to look up at the stars not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and what makes the universe exist. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you just don’t give up.” Stephen Hawking. RIP 3/14/18
"Tide comes in, tide goes out: I can explain that."  -Neil deGrasse Tyson, smirking.

"You dance in my heart where noone sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art." ~Rumi (music)

"'Quaternion' was, I think, defined by an American schoolgirl to be 'an ancient religious ceremony.' This was, however, a complete mistake. The ancients - unlike Professor Tait - knew not , and did not worship, quaternions. The quaternion and its laws were discovered by that extraordinary genius Sir William Rowan Hamilton. A quaternion is neither a scalar, nor a vector, but a sort of combination of both. It has no physical representatives, but is a highly abstract mathematical concept..."  - English physicist Sir Oliver Heaviside

"Things came to a head - shoes were thrown.  I had to move." - g

"Horn broken: please watch for finger."  - awesome bumper sticker.

"Don't ask whether there really are "imaginary" numbers, but instead, consider whether real numbers may actaully be, ...imaginary."  ~ that's me, channeling the spoon boy.  Also, "There is no mogul."

"If the glove does not fit, you must acquit." Wizard Johnnie Cochran, demonstrating that we are automata, manipulable through namb-shub.

"7:00's not a Time. Just say that out loud. See how crazy?" - Miles

"Ranchers clear up the Amazon Rain forests trees to have enough space to race there cattle." -Anon.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap. -Eric Hoffer.

"Or Kevin's proof of (the) perfect girlfriend. She must exist, otherwise she wouldn't perfect. Also, she must be my girlfriend, otherwise she wouldn't be perfect. Oddly enough, I'm married to my perfect girlfriend, so clearly the logic works." -Kevin

"if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe!" - Carl Sagan

"Obnoxious in victory, bitter in defeat!"  ...Pete Mohler (humorously)

"Ready, shoot....  aim!"  ...me

Betting against Stephen Hawking "...is like criticizing the Princess Diana" - Peter Higgs, lamenting the lose lose proposition of standing up to Hawking's prediction that the Higgs boson would not be found. (The Higgs has been found.)

"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it." -Anon? 
"First Turtle"  Short abbreviation for the God as first mover argument. - by me!

 "Well, then why can't HE talk?" -John Sabol with the ultimate comeback to the ultimate stupidity on my part.

"You just have to dig through the topsoil to get to anything worthwhile, your brain doesn't keep the good stuff on top." -Emilie


Here below is a lesser category: from literature, movies, what have you.  Since these quotes are fabricated,  they are calculated instead of extemporaneous, but still excellent.  Here are some more book quotes from my friends.

" Now and then goldfish splish and gleam, like new pennies dropped in water."  David Mitchell

"A rocker rose like Poseidon and flexed his knuckles." -Cloud Atlas  I laughed for hours, till I cried.  The quote can't stand on its own, obviously, but this will serve as a happy reminder to those who've read it.

From the Baroque Cycle...
"He's rich," Jack muttered to Eliza...."
    "Yes—the clothes, the coins ..."
"All fakeable."
    "How do you know him to be rich, then?"
"In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games." - 'Halfcocked' Jack Shaftoe

Italo Calvino's From  If on a Winter's Night, a Traveler... “He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi's orgasm reflected in her daughter's gaze.”
 (Now, gentle reader, you must understand that this is equal parts erotica and joke. Maybe more joke: picture the impossible billiards shot that's going on here, how tiny the reflections would be (which he means literally to be implying, trust me).  This is the solitary moment of brilliance in an acclaimed but IMO only cute/tricky, not actually good, book.

[To all of them, (our competitors)] we're either nonsense or doom.  -Elon Musk

The Lausanne conference, in view of its origins, was
bound, to turn into a kind of contest between the great
powers as to which could be sweetest to the once unspeak-
able Turk. Naturally this had to be so, since Kemal was
ready to fight and nobody else was. The British and
French, those loyal allies, lost no opportunity of intriguing
against each other for Turkish favour, and it amused all
beholders to see how, week after week, the British man-
oeuvred the French out of their initial position of advan-
tage, cozened and flattered and edulcorated the Turks, so
that when the conference ended Britain was Turkey’s friend
and France was only a grudging, half-hearted acquaintance. 

- In search of History, Vincent Sheean

Philosophy

You (and I mean our whole society) are either doomed, jaded, or simulated. So goes the following argument...

Today on the philosophy bites podcast, they discussed the "Simulation Hypothesis." It proposes that if we don't wipe ourselves out, and don't get bored of video games, then we'll eventually start simulating our ancestors with fidelity sufficient to prevent their apprehending the matrix is there at all. Their world (ours?) will be seamlessly believable, with perfect CGI & so forth.

I'm perpetually intrigued by consciousness. While they were discussing the simulation hypothesis, I was in the car yelling, "but what if simulation can't create consciousness?" To my pleased surprise, they did raise that point, dismissing it almost immediately: "pretty much everyone agrees consciousness is an emergent side effect of the neural activity, substrate independent."

I'm not sure *I* agree with that but it's a cool thought. Do I HAVE to agree, else believe in my soul? I do want to think there's something special about me. I DON'T want to believe I'm a simulaion, but rather want to believe that's impossible!

Do you like it?
...one more post to follow.

---------------------------------------
Ok, here's the end of it.

If you buy into the arguments, then, since simulations will outnumber reality, the probability that you're a simulation is overwhelming, and thus there's a bored guy somewhere watching our Sim with ctl-alt-del power over your life and in fact our whole universe. So behave, and maybe you'll get invisibility or wings or something.

Gina offered a solution to this, saying it's all just as unfalsifiable as any number of other fantastic hypotheses, so why bother, when there's nothing to choose between them. The unsatisfying part of that, for me, is that philosophy gets again reduced to irrelevancy. That's happening to me more and more.

Optimists have to be...

If you'll indulge me today, I have a fun post, in about three parts, that should be fun for you to read and think about.

It all begins with WoW, as in "World of Warcraft." That's the videogame where you operate a magical warrior in the colorful alternate past, either first person or more typically from a position of close "chase." I eventually got bored which, combined with the collosal waste of time and monthly $15, helped me wean myself, but I do still miss the world of Azeroth.

My toon was "Yobiche" an industrious elf priest (druid, actually) who worked her way into a pretty high position in society. I attribute her/my success to selfless courage, skill, my friends of course, and countless hours of mind numbing murder, often of dumb creatures. (That's how you get ahead in the (alternate) world.) Anyway, thanks to all that, Yobiche is "up there" in society. She/I can do the usual things powerful people can do: fly, turn invisible, breathe underwater, have somebody hit by a meteorite, bring loved ones back to life, or in an extremity, buy her way out of a sticky situation. Not so different from here.

So howcome I'm bored? Well, with all that power, what's left to do, frankly? Sometimes She/I (maybe henceforth I'll just call us shi?) would go back to shmy hometown and impress the natives. The same people work in the same stores, and there are new kids everywhere, who are impressed with my prowess at everything. Somehow though I think the old folks don't really care and the kids are just sucking up to get help with their homework: "Thou must bring the scalps of 10 timberwolves." ...shi can do that as easy as pointing hermy finger 10 times, so it's a quick way to superficial stardom. You can imagine it didn't last and so I quit, & my RL mile times are better for it.

Now though, I have for Blizzard a suggestion that ought to reinvigorate the game. The problem is that one-ness, the merging of our characters. My toon should show some initiative! You know: spunk. Proof that she's not just a computer robot or empty automaton. it wouldn't be too hard to program up an occasional surprise crazy action, like picking an ill advised fight, or getting drunk and clumsy just when I need her to be on her game, or falling for the wrong guy against My Will. Things like that would enliven the feel.

Oh, and while we're at it, how about some respect? I CREATED Yobiche, she could occasionally turn to the screen, make eye contact and say "thank you." Or even, "Thank you, lord, forever and ever. Amen." I might like that, especially if she was kneeling when she did it. So, off you go Blizzard: for your next upgrade, make me a God.

...more to follow.