I thought that logical positivists, as well as Karl Popper, dismissed psychology wholesale as pseudoscience, due to problems concerning verification/falsification. However, I'm now wondering whether they just dismissed psychoanalysis wholesale, and psychology partly. While searching for material that would confirm what I first thought, I found an article by someone who has a doctorate in microbiology arguing that psychology isn't a science, and I found abstracts -- here and here -- of some papers whose authors leaned in that direction, but that's, strictly speaking, a side-track. I'd like to find out whether I simply was wrong about the good, old logical positivists (and Popper)!

How common is the view that psychology is pseudoscientific today, among philosophers of science? Whether among philosophers of science or others, who have been most opposed to viewing psychology as a science between now and the time the logical positivists became less relevant?

Is this accurate? I’m arguing with someone about whether or not science existed prior to the Scientific Revolution. My position is that of course it did even if it wasn’t as refined as it would later become.

He says, speaking of Ancient Greeks:

“Scientists are then a subset of philosophers and the term cannot be retroactively applied to all philosophers. They were not scientists, they were philosophers and scientists came as the two parted from each other. The way I was taught in philosophy science was adopted as a rejection to the futility of nihilism. Philosophers went one way and scientists the other.”

What do you guys think?

Does "information" theory require subjectivity? How can "information" theory exist without subjectivity? Does a definition of "information" exist which does not assume as an axiom subjectivity? The "science" reddits won't let me ask this question of scientists. Will some one here help me w this question?

Thanks..

I have been following several youtube channels for years that cover such topics with my favorite being Kurzgesagt. I love content from this channel and every video has been a blast.

I decided that I want to immerse myself in a world of reading with books that touch similar concepts about existential questions and science.

Shoot me with your favorite books, I will research them thoroughly and if they are good I am gonna buy all of them.

Hi guys, I have this question as a sort of quiz for my philosophy class and its sort of going over my head a bit. Apparently it has 2 inferences, one of which I believe is an Inductive Generalisation, however, I'm not sure what the other inference could be. I think it might be a deductive Argument Maybe? I don't think it's a Statistical Syllogism... Any help would be appreciated as I'm not the biggest fan of this topic. [Text Below]

Fish-oil Supplements a bad idea Fish oil supplements claim to "promote heart health" and "support healthy cholesterol and blood pressure levels." If these claims were true, then it would be a good idea to take fish oil supplements. But, in 2019, a randomised, placebo-controlled trial involving 25,871 participants found that there was no significant difference in rates of major cardiovascular events between those who took fish-oil supplements and those who took a placebo. So, taking fish oil supplements is a bad idea.

So I belive this is how it would be standardised:

Premise one: Fish oil supplements claim to "promote heart health" and "support healthy cholesterol and blood pressure levels."

Premise two: in 2019, a randomised, placebo-controlled trial involving 25,871 participants found that there was no significant difference in rates of major cardiovascular events between those who took fish-oil supplements and those who took a placebo

Conclusion: taking fish oil supplements is a bad idea.

Please feel free to correct me on anything you deem necessary. Being wrong is one of the best ways to learn I've found, cheers.

The famous argument known as the "Cartesian doubt," in short, deals with the "proof" of an indubitable ontological reality. Regardless of the doubts we may have about the actual existence of things and reality, we cannot doubt that we are doubting, and therefore, ultimately, about the existence of a thinking self.

​

So, I wonder. Is it possible to apply the same structure of reasoning to epistemology ?

Indeed we can elevate not only ontological, but also epistemological doubt to its extreme.

By doubting everything, doubting the correctness of our ideas, of our concepts, of our best scientific models of reality, asking ourselves whether they are suitable for accounting for a truth, if the are adequate to represent an underlying objective reality, if there is some kind of correspondence between them and the world, whether they are just arbitrary structures of the mind", mere conventions, how are they justified, if even logic or math themselves are apt to say something true... we surely can doubt and question all of the above

But ultimately we cannot doubt "the veracity" (or at least, or the imperative necessity) of those basic concepts, those structural ideas, those essential models that allow us to conceive and express such doubts and questions.

This essay explores the nature of consciousness and its evolution, guiding the reader through the journey of early life forms and the development of human consciousness. It introduces the idea of a biological framework for a mathematical universe, suggesting that the mathematical structure of the universe is biological in nature. This theory proposes that living organisms and consciousness are a direct result of the universe's biologically-patterned processes, and that these processes can be observed and understood through physiological patterns. The hidden biological patterns in our environment drive the creation and evolution of life and consciousness.

Direct Link to PDF: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?aid=WILTOO-34

Let me explain.

Every sentient being with sensory/cognitive apparatus "comes from the world," meaning it is a product of the underlying ontological reality. We usually say "we come into the world" as if we come from some sort of external and different place, but it is a very misleading concept. In reality, we (all life) emerge, come FROM the world.

It is therefore plausible to hypothesize that at least the basic and fundamental apprehension faculties are something extremely close to an "objective reality" (basic faculties such as orienting/moving in space, reacting to certain inputs, etc.).

It would indeed be strange if these very elementary and primordial faculties did not reflect a fundamental ontology, since there is in fact no "transition," no "reflection," no "re-elaboration," no "superimposition of categories", but they are "immediately given," they "emerge" from an underlying non-thinking reality. They come from the world.

Cognitive/apprehensive faculties of reality refine and develop "evolutionarily" (ability to distinguish shapes, colors, grasp more complex concepts such as totality and partiality, cause and effect, all faculties possessed, for example, by a newly hatched chick, but not by a unicellular organism) until they reach those more abstract faculties typical of humans, who are even able to create tools and models for their purpose.

And finally to realize (paradoxically) that some of this faculties are somehow and sometimes misleading, unable to adequately grasp the essence of ontological reality. And thus to send into crisis and doubt (Cartesian etc) the faculties/cognitive apparatyus tout court.

I wonder then. Is there a way to understand which faculties of our apparatus "emerge," so to speak, from ontology itself (they are given without "mediation," as a basic tool-kit) and which instead are the result of a re-elaboration, of super-structures, altered by other faculties (and therefore less "undoubtable" in their being effectively corresponding to an underlying objective reality)?

Lee McIntyre's book "The Scientific Attitude" was my introduction to Philosophy of Science, and I quote his explanation of the concept of warrant often. I keep it handy in my phone notes. I cannot understate the positive impact learning that concept has had.

I wouldn't say I'm ready to jump into textbooks and dense academic writings (yet). I'm looking for something more in the vein of "The Scientific Attitude," something layperson-friendly, but perhaps "next-level reading." Any recommendations?

Hello,

I’m working on how verifiable statements can be circumscribed. I know the logical positivists were trying to do this but seemingly they kept failing. I know Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of meaning coming from use in social settings, I take that to mean there’s always ambiguity in communication. I know Tarski’s and Kripke’s semantic theories of truth, but I don’t think they disprove the idea of verificationism.

Is there anyone else that did studies on the semantics of verification I should read?

Hello. I am seeking recommendations for an accessible, philosophical or literary introduction to geometry. I’m less interested in learning geometry as am I’m learning about it. Any ideas are welcome. Thank you.

I hope this isn't some dumb trivial point, my area of expertise is physics and not philosophy, but one pet peeve I've always had with Popperian falsificationism (or perhaps rather how it tends to be portrayed in popular media, I'm not as familiar with Popper's original writings) is that it seems to me to suffer from the same exact problem as verificationism: the claim that a theory is unfalsifiable seems to me to be itself unfalsifiable.

To say that a theory is unfalsifiable is a much stronger claim than saying that people haven't yet produced evidence for it, which is far easier a claim to accept. One asserts that a theory will never produce evidence as it is intrinsically incapable of doing so (it's unfalsifiable, i.e., incapable of being falsified), whereas the other just acknowledges the present reality about a theory without strictly rejecting it on categorical grounds. But in accepting the latter, you lose the ability to definitively reject certain ideas as "unscientific". Maybe this is a loss, but perhaps not?

I feel like you could have told Democritus that his idea of atoms is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific. Maybe it was more philosophical than scientific at that point in time, but his idea is now the cornerstone of modern physics (the whole idea of "quanta" is that matter is composed of indivisible discrete units, i.e., what Democritus called "atoms"), so in the end Democritus was right and people who would have just dismissed his ideas as "unfalsifiable metaphysics" were just wrong. It took 2000 years to put his ideas to the test, but still, in the end he was right.

Similar cosmic ideas are being proposed now, like the existence of an infinite multiverse outside of the finite event horizon of the observable universe, and some of the more hard nosed physicists will reject it as "unfalsifiable" and hence "unscientific". But isn't every idea "unfalsifiable" for a time, until one finds out how to falsify it? How can you possibly know which ideas are truly "unfalsifiable", versus just not able to be falsified until the future? Is there any way to know a theory won't end up like Democritus's ideas about atoms? If not, isn't the whole idea of "unfalsifiability" meaningless?

The proponents of the MWI, and especially Sean Carroll, like to say that the MWI was born out of the need to "take Schroedinger's equation seriously".

Ok. But why should we take the Schroedinger Equation seriously? Asking this question seems silly and superficial, but let's think for a moment about that.

The only possibile answer is "because the Schroedinger equation accurately describes phenomena that can be observed".

There is no other reason to take the Schroedinger Equation (or any other scientific theory btw ) seriously.

Not because they are fascinating and complex mathematics. Not because a great genius wrote them. Not because they might instinctively compelling.

The only reason to take any scientific theory seriously is because it WORKS and we can - directly or at least indirectly - CHECK that it actually works. Because there are data and observations to back it up. Because there is a correspondence between observed reality and its theoretical description.

That's why I (and everybody else) take the Schroedinger Equation (and Science in general) seriously.

But the many worlds "ontological framework"m so to speak, by definition and by admissions of its proponents themselves, is unobservable, unaccessible. We will never be able to check if it is the case, not even via indirect inference.

Therefore, for the very same reason and according to very same criteria for which the Schroedinger Equation should be taken seriously, the Many Worlds Interpretation cannot be taken seriously.

It seems to me that MWI, even if mathematically correct, lives in a very serious, maybe unsolvable, systematic-conceptual paradox

Sorry dudes, I saw a post that matched my idea, and I wanted it to have diffusion and spread.

The post is related to a new idea I have related to the way authors appear in papers and publications in any scientific publications (specially in papers) regarding ethics and the way things work.

The thing is the following. Nowadays, when you publish a paper or a book, you usually see a list of authors, where there is a kind of deal that the first author is the main contributor to the publication, while the last one is the main boss or PI or supervisor of it. Then we have a series of middle authors whose role is totally unknown. (And similarly happen in books). As well as other authors that might have contributed and for some reason they are not included in the paper or they appear hidden in acknowledgement.

We have to remember that science, as well as any scientific paper or publication, is a human activity, that requires lots of hours, money and itself becomes a big project or the result of a project. Now let's compare to other human activity results of a projects: Films, series and cinema. When you go to see a film, at the very end of it, YOU ALWAYS see a list of names, refering to all the people that participated making that film, and their roles (either as director, assistant, sound technicial, special effects, coffee assistant, etc.).

The thing is that a film is also the result of a human activity that, as well as science, requires both a technical and intellectual effort and contribution by all people and sides. And while in films and series almost all people (someone working in the cinema industry would be appreciated to correct me) appear in credits, NOT IN ALL SCIENFITIC PUBLICATIONS ALL NAMES APPEAR, AND IF THEY APPEAR, THEIR ROLES ARE COMPLETELY UNKNOWNs (which would benefit to those people, specially if they want to make a career on that).

Ethics regarding authorship is usually defined by the journal and the institution you are working to, but that does not meant that ethic is correct, it is fair, as ethics in science is no regulated in law, there is no international standard regarding it, and usually authorship in publications is always connected to some power dependency or game between the IP, the institution, the journal, and the predoc, assistant, technician or researcher doing the raw and brute work to obtain the results.

IT IS NOT FAIR that only intellectual work is given recognition in authorship of papers. Manual or physical/technical work either coming from technicians or from assistants, deserve also recognitions; because although ideas can be key and are good, and many machines and tests can be performed by anyone with not a high level of expertise, it is not anyone that is performing that test or making that machine work, BUT IT IS SOMEONE PARTICULAR that is organising and doing all the hard technical work for results to appear and match and prove the intellectual work.

Because of that, I suggest to all science assistants, technicians, researchers, publishers and all people involved in science (including project adminitrative managers - that are also sometimes important for finantial contribution), to start appearing in papers and publications, not in the way of a list of names or surnames in particular order, BUT AS A CREDIT LIST, where the names and surnames of the people appear, and their role as technician, assistant, supervisor, IP, researcher, etc. appears to represent the authorship, the same way it appears in a film or a series. I believe it is much more transparent, fair and ethical as giving a reference to a general service of an institution might imply changing people constantly in it, receiving only the institution and main bosses credit for it instead of technicians, making the job that these people have made not being recognised and therefore, lying completely in the shadow.

All people contributing to a scientific publication, rather intellectually or technically, should deserve recognition for the contributions done in that job, the same way all technicians are given recognition in the credits of a film or a series, either contributing technically or intellectually.

I don't expect from this post to see in a couple of months the world in fire because of angry lab assistants and technicians (although I would really like to), BUT I INSIST that if you could please share this idea between your scienfifically colleagues, start fighting with superiors for trying this ideas to be implemented (if you consider them to be good) and try to diffuse this post to many other scientifical people (either reserchers or technicians) to start GLOBALLY organising to start defending seriously this topic, up to the point of making it be regulated by law (either through goverment approval - or in the case of EU through a citizens' initiative of law project to the European Commission) for a bigger protection of the recognition of our collective, I would really appreciate, even if I don't get credit for the idea.

Thank you very much for reading, discussing, diffusing and contributing to this post. I would really like to know how the film and series authorship war for technicians and other supporters came to appear all names in credit was, in order for science publications to start having the same amount of recognition because we are for sure years behind our cinema colleagues for sure.

“Grounding” is one of the big topics in contemporary metaphysics. Grounding is typically treated as a non-causal determination/dependence relation between facts (or entities) at different levels of fundamentality. Grounding therefore provides a kind of “vertical” priority that makes it important for metaphysical explanation: what is grounded is said to be dependent on and thereby explicable through its grounds. For example, if priority monism is true, then the whole cosmos is the only fundamental entity, and it grounds/explains all of its proper parts.

Kit Fine has claimed that “ground, if you like, stands to philosophy as cause stands to science.” This suggests something of a division of labor between philosophers and scientists and a clear distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations. However, I’ve recently been reading about mechanistic explanation in the life sciences (particularly the “New Mechanistic” literature). In this literature, there is a difference between etiological and constitutive mechanisms (and explanations). While etiological explanations explain phenomena through the chains of antecedent causes that brought them about, constitutive explanations are thought to explain by giving an account of the mechanism underlying a phenomenon. Roughly, this means explaining the activity of a system in terms of the activity of the components of a mechanism during the period when the activity occurs. One example in the literature is the explanation of spatial memory. Consider an explanation of the spatial memory of a mouse navigating a maze. Such an explanation would describe the mechanism for spatial memory that is responsible for the navigation behavior. At any given moment of time when the mouse is navigating the maze, there are parts of the mouse that are engaged in activities (e.g., the mouse’s hippocampus generating spatial maps) that are said to be constitutively relevant for the navigation behavior. Some other paradigmatic examples in the literature include the explanation of action potential, or a heart’s pumping blood.

Although these explanations involve descriptions of causal relations between the components of the mechanism, the explanatory “constitution” relation between the mechanism and the explanandum phenomenon seems like something like a “vertical” grounding relation. It’s synchronous rather than diachronic and it involves entities that are not wholly distinct – the mouse is engaged in navigating a maze at a particular time because its parts are engaged in certain goings-on at that time. However, constitutive-mechanistic explanation is very much a matter of empirical investigation rather than armchair speculation over what is ontologically prior to what – scientists conduct certain kinds of multi-level experiments to test for constitutive relevance (there is currently a lot of debate in the literature on how exactly scientists infer constitutive relevance).

I’m not an expert in this area, so I’m still unsure if I’m missing something, but the parallels seem rather strong. So, could grounding (or "vertical" determination/dependence in general) be of importance in the context of scientific explanation?

Hello, I am currently a math and physics major. I want to do theoretical physics, and I am debating whether to take extra math classes, or expose myself to more philosophy classes dealing with things like the theory of knowledge, epistemology, Plato readings, Aristotle, etc.. My question is, when weighing the pros or cons, what are other people's takes on this. I understand the decision to take more math classes now would have a deterministic outcome on my mathematical maturity, whereas philosophy might expand my perspective on what it even means to do what I am doing; the discussion of reality itself. Afterall, physics and mathematics are a subset of philosophy.

To rephrase the question, what place does philosophical thinking and material have in theoretical physics, and does the opportunity cost hold up when discussing time spent learning philosophy?

In the series and book "The Three-Body Problem," the character Will Downing has terminal cancer. In order to give meaning to his final days, he agrees to have his brain cryogenically preserved so that, in 400 years, his brain might encounter aliens who could study humanity. However, midway through the journey, the ship carrying Will's brain malfunctions, leaving him adrift in space.

That being said, I have a few questions. Is he still the same person, assuming that only his brain is the original part of his body (the Ship of Theseus paradox)? For those who are spiritual or hold other religious beliefs, has he already died and will he reincarnate, or does his brain being kept in cryogenic suspension still grant him "life"?

I would be happy to read more on the dodo bird effect (observation that different types of psychotherapy with very different underlying ontologies are similarly effective) but assuming this effect actually exist, does it make sens to talk about the scientific (such as cbt) and non-scientific types? what does it mean? some people I asked told me that the non-scientific types are working because of some kind of placebo and I really don't understand what does it mean in the context of psychotherapy

What was the point of Frege's Morning Star/Evening Star puzzle? I've tried so hard to understand it but something in my brain isn't quite making the connection. I know he was trying to show how meaning and reference were different, but how does his thought experiment show this?

Also, in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," Quine uses this example again to talk about the distinction between synthetic and analytic truths. Can someone explain how this works?

This question is specifically directed to scientific realists.

The underdetermination argument against scientific realism basically says that it is possible to have different theories whose predictions are precisely the same, and yet each theory makes different claims about how reality actually is and operates. In other words, the empirical data doesn't help us to determine which theory is correct, viz., which theory correctly represents reality.

Now, having read many books defending scientific realism, I'm aware that philosophers have proposed that a way to decide which theory is better is to employ certain a priori principles such as parsimony, fruitfulness, conservatism, etc (i.e., the Inference to the Best Explanation approach). And I totally buy that. However, this strategy is very limited. How so? Because there could be an infinite number of possible theories! There could be theories we don't even know yet! So, how are you going to apply these principles if you don't even have the theories yet to judge their simplicity and so on? Unless you know all the theories, you can't know which is the best one.

Another possible response is that, while we cannot know with absolute precision how the external world works, we can at least know how it approximately works. In other words, while our theory may be underdetermined by the data, we can at least know that it is close to the truth (like all the other infinite competing theories). However, my problem with that is that there could be another theory that also accounts for the data, and yet makes opposite claims about reality!! For example, currently it is thought that the universe is expanding. But what if it is actually contracting, and there is a theory that accounts for the empirical data? So, we wouldn't even be approximately close to the truth.

Anyway, what is the best the solution to the problem I discussed here?

Hi,

Forgive me for the elementariness of this question, but I’d like someone familiar with Physics to correct my thinking on the relationship between space and time. It seems apparent to me, that the concept of “time” is an artifact of how humans evolved to understand the world around them, and doesn’t “actually” reflect/track anything in the “real” world.

For instance, a “month” may pass by and we as humans understand that in a particular way, but it isn’t obvious to me that time “passes” in the same way without humans being there to perceive it. This is in contrast with the concept of “space”, which to me (a laymen), seems more objective (i.e., the concept of space didn’t have to evolve for adaptability through human evolution like time did—it’s not evolutionarily advantageous for humans to develop a concept of space suggesting that it’s a more objective concept than time).   So my question is why do professional physicists still pair the concept of space and time together? Couldn’t we just do away with the concept of time since it’s really just a human artifact and only use the more objective “space”? What would be lost from our understanding of the universe if we starting looking at the standard model without the concept of time?   I look forward to your kind responses.

Why is the notion of an explanation considered so important in the philosophy of science?

In the history of science, it seems that we’ve never actually gotten a complete procedural explanation of anything, and I’m not sure that this is even possible.

By this I mean that if we find out that a certain theory T explains why a certain outcome occurs, we can further ask how that theory came about or why that theory exists instead of another. We are still left with the theory T unexplained.

Now sure, knowing that theory T is true helps us. It gives us more information about the world. We learn something and we can practically use it. But only when we have evidence.

How exactly is a theory T ever a full explanation if it remains unexplained? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that we learn more information and get evidence that there is a further reason or cause for why and how something happens rather than that we get an explanation for it?

The reason I ask this is because when phrased in a way where we focus on evidence rather than explanation, it allows you to dismiss all conjectures that don’t atleast have some level of apriori evidence going for them. This is because one can come up with an infinite number of theories that can explain “why” a certain outcome occurs but no one can come up with an infinite number of theories that have the same level of evidence going for them.

And yes, the notion of evidence like anything else in philosophy is subjective but it is much more rigorously defined and more agreed upon than the notion of explanation. I am aware of the problem of the “underdetermination” of evidence but that’s no different from an ultra skeptical route. No person, much less scientist, would legitimately think that noises in their attic is just as much evidence for goblins running around than their kids running around. Yet some may even say that goblins would explain the noises even if they don’t exist!

As far as I know, there are many more people that think there is no established evidence for homeopathy providing cures than that homeopathy explains why a person got cured.

So why is there then such a focus on explanation when it seems to be much more subjective then the notion of evidence in science?

Can anyone direct me to references that discuss the philosophical foundations of continuous vs discreet mathematics and how they impact physics and our models of the universe?

My interest in this stems from having an MS in physics but never being fully comfortable with how we use continuous mathematics to model the universe. This quote sums up the reasons underlying my concern:

"It is easy to divide mathematics into ‘discrete mathematics’ and ’continuous mathematics’: discrete mathematics is about whole numbers and discrete objects, continuous mathematics is about real numbers and approximations. Continuous mathematics is about limits, while discrete mathematics is about counting and algebra."

• Building Proofs: A Practical Guide (Oliveira & Stewart, 2015)

Continuous equations result in real numbers that can never be computed exactly. Any solutions we get in practice from continuous mathematical models are inherently approximations. For example, we can find the value of Pi from the equation for a circle x^2 + y^2 = 1 expressed as an integral. But when we do this, we find we actually can’t calculate Pi exactly. It would take infinite time and infinite computing power to find an exact solution.

If the universe is, in some sense, computing its internal states, how can it arrive at exact solutions if those states are fundamentally continuous? And if it only arrives at approximate solutions, how does that make any sense? How could reality only be approximate? Approximate to what?

On the other hand, if the universe is fundamentally discrete, every state in the universe can be computed exactly. If every state is an integer relation, then all solutions are rational numbers that can be computed exactly in finite time and with finite computing power. This just makes more sense to me.

Is anyone researching these sorts of questions? Am I completely off base with this line of thinking?

Advice or anything valuable or not valuable for me?

What was the last decision you made? Why did you make that decision and how did you make that decision? What led up to you making that decision?
How much control do we have over ourselves? Did you control how and when you were born? The environment you were raised in? How about the the particular way your body is formed and how it functions? Are you your body? This stuff goes more into materialism, the way every atom of the universe as some relation to each other and our being is just a reflection of this happening and that there is not anything outside of it.
If you believe in an All knowing and all powerful god. He knows your future. It does not matter in compatibilism if you feel that you have agency, all of that agency and desire is brought out by your relation to the external world and you internal world. Your internal body and the external world are two sides of the same coin. If god is all knowing, you can not say that he just knows all possibilities, no, he has to know which choices you are going to make or else he does not know. It also does not matter if he limited his power to not see the future, because he still made the future and that does not just go away by forgetting about it to test people.
A fixed past I think guarantees a fixed future. With the aspect of cause and effect and every particle relating to one another will lead to a certain outcome because we are talking about everything in the universe at once.
We can not process this. We even battle about our differing perspectives and perceptions of the world we live in. There is no ability for us humans to objectively know everything, it is impossible for us to be objective because we are in it, not just a product of the universe we are the universe. Every choice you ever made is backed upon the billions of years of cause and effect since whatever we think started time.
This thinking is silly in many aspects to apply to human ethics because human ethics are place by our illusion of free will and our miniscule perception of reality. It is easier and more effective at least for right now to believe we have free will. It does not mean we have free will, it means we have no capacity to go beyond the illusion.
However, determinism might also mean there is no real meaning to any of this. Everything just is, and that is it.
It could also lean into the idea of universal conscious, could at a universe sense, at the Monism perceptive and scale that is a form of free will? I do not know. It does raise a point about how we identify "ourselves". Self, if self is just a bunch of chemicals directed by cause and effect in a materialist world then there is no "self" in how we normally acquaint it with. Who we think we are is just a manifestation of the entire universe. There is no individual self. We are all one thing. If you wanna go the religious route that could be Pantheism in which we are all god. Does that lead to having a universal type of free will? Or is that too still an illusion because free will requires agency and breaking it all down the universe seems to have no agency in the way humans view things.
The universe as I said before: Just is... and that is it.
There are also theories of a "block universe" where time is its own dimension in which all time exists simultaneously, and we only perceive time linearly because we can only perceive things as a process of order to disorder, or because we are in space fabric our minds can only process one coordinate at a time. But our birth is still there, our death exists right now as well.
In the end I think we need humility to say "we really do not have control over anything in the way we think" and perhaps we just do not know or have the capacity to know what we wish to know.
Hope you thought this was interesting, let me know what you think.

Suppose that you see Linda go to the bank every single day. Presumably this supports the hypothesis H = Linda is a banker. But this also supports the hypothesis H = Linda is a Banker and Linda is a librarian. By logical consequence, this also supports the hypothesis H = Linda is a librarian.

Note that by the same logic, this also supports the hypothesis H = Linda is a banker and not a librarian. Thus, this supports the hypothesis H = Linda is not a librarian since it is directly implied by the former.

But this is a contradiction. You cannot increase your credence both in a position and the consequent. How does one resolve this?

Presumably, the response would be that seeing Linda go to the bank doesn’t tell you anything about her being a librarian. That would be true but under Bayesian ways of thinking, why not? If we’re focusing on the proposition that Linda is a banker and a librarian, clearly her being a banker makes this more likely that it is true.

One could also respond by saying that her going to a bank doesn’t necessitate that she is a librarian. But neither does her going to a bank every day necessitate that she’s a banker. Perhaps she’s just a customer. (Bayesians don’t attach guaranteed probabilities to a proposition anyways)

This example was brought about by David Deutsch on Sean Carroll’s podcast here and I’m wondering as to what the answers to this are. He uses this example and other reasons to completely dismiss the notion of probabilities attached to hypotheses and proposes the idea of focusing on how explanatorily powerful hypotheses are instead

EDIT: Posting the argument form of this since people keep getting confused.

P = Linda is a Banker Q = Linda is a Librarian R = Linda is a banker and a librarian

Steps 1-3 assume the Bayesian way of thinking

1. ⁠⁠I observe Linda going to the bank. I expect Linda to go to a bank if she is a banker. I increase my credence in P
2. ⁠⁠I expect Linda to go to a bank if R is true. Therefore, I increase my credence in R.
3. ⁠⁠R implies Q. Thus, an increase in my credence of R implies an increase of my credence in Q. Therefore, I increase my credence in Q
4. ⁠⁠As a matter of reality, observing that Linda goes to the bank should not give me evidence at all towards her being a librarian. Yet steps 1-3 show, if you’re a Bayesian, that your credence in Q increases

Conclusion: Bayesianism is not a good belief updating system

EDIT 2: (Explanation of premise 3.)

R implies Q. Think of this in a possible worlds sense.

Let’s assume there are 30 possible worlds where we think Q is true. Let’s further assume there are 70 possible worlds where we think Q is false. (30% credence)

If we increase our credence in R, this means we now think there are more possible worlds out of 100 for R to be true than before. But R implies Q. In every possible world that R is true, Q must be true. Thus, we should now also think that there are more possible worlds for Q to be true. This means we should increase our credence in Q. If we don’t, then we are being inconsistent.

I may be completely confusing terminology here so please correct me if this makes no sense. but I came across these claims relating to climate models:

'there is no factor controlled experiments, so causal attribution isn't possible' and 'they are simply not useful because they can't experimentally control for factors. they are not useful in the slightest regarding what they are portrayed to be useful for.'

How would we go about assessing these claims?

I have a number of issues with the default treatment of quantum mechanics via the Copenhagen interpretation. While there are better arguments that Copenhagen is inferior to Many Worlds (such as parsimony, and the fact that collapses of the wave function don’t add any explanatory power), one of my largest bug-bears is the way the scientific community has chosen to respond to the requisite assertion about non-determinism

I’m calling it a “supernatural” or “magical” claim and I know it’s a bit provocative, but I think it’s a defensible position and it speaks to how wrongheaded the consideration has been.

##Defining Quantum indeterminism

For the sake of this discussion, we can consider a quantum event like a photon passing through a beam splitter prism. In the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, this produces one of two outcomes where a photon takes one of two paths — known as the which-way-information (WWI).

Many Worlds offers an explanation as to where this information comes from. The photon always takes both paths and decoherence produces seemingly (apparently) random outcomes in what is really a deterministic process.

Copenhagen asserts that the outcome is “random” in a way that asserts it is impossible to provide an explanation for why the photon went one way as opposed to the other.

##Defining the ‘supernatural’

The OED defines supernatural as an adjective attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. This seems straightforward enough.

When someone claims there is no explanation for which path the photon has taken, it seems to me to be straightforwardly the case that they have claimed the choice of path the photon takes is beyond scientific understanding (this despite there being a perfectly valid explanatory theory in Many Worlds). A claim that something is “random” is explicitly a claim that there is no scientific explanation.

In common parlance, when we hear claims of the supernatural, they usually come dressed up for Halloween — like attributions to spirits or witches. But dressing it up in a lab coat doesn’t make it any less spooky. And taking in this way is what invites all kinds of crackpots and bullshit artists to dress up their magical claims in a “quantum mechanics” costume and get away with it.

Hi everyone, I don't know if this is the right subreddit, but I'd like to ask a question about a formal definition of Merge, since English is not my first language: Merge(P1,…, Pm, WS)=WS’=[{ P1,…, Pm}, …]. Given that WS=Workspace, Merge is targeting the elements P1,…, Pm within the WS giving as an output WS', that contains the set { P1,…, Pm}. So, my question is: what is the meaning of Pm? Why it's not Pn instead? And why the letter P and not X is used here?

Thanks for help, I really need to understand a paper. Excuse me if it's a dumb question!