Balls!

So, a second week of OPC2—last week I found Williams’ paper helpful, clarifying for me some of what Wittgenstein was up to at the beginning of Philosophical Investigations. I know too little to engage with that debate, but it strikes me prima facie that (in the builders’ language-game) builder A’s “Slab!” (spoken to builder B) must have been the expression of a thought that we might adequately describe as “Bring me a slab!” or “Make it so that B brings A a slab.” Certainly A must have wanted a slab, and must have thought that saying “Slab!” to B would help to satisfy that want—otherwise, there could hardly have been a language-game. Cf. two robots, 1 and 2, with 1 beaming a pulse of light (of some sort) towards 2 whenever 1 detects an insufficiency of slabs, and with the detected pulse causing 2 to take a slab to 1. Could such a transmission of photons be a linguistic act? Maybe, in the sense of computer languages, but how about if a billiard-ball collides with another, so that the momentum of the first is transferred to the other—is that a linguistic act? And if so, what is not? So, underlying A’s command “Slab!” there must have been (as a basic linguistic component) a thought that we might adequately describe as A entertaining the epistemic possibility that B could (actually, but in other cases fictionally, or theoretically) bring A a slab (no thoughts, no language, is how I see it—I mean, language is a medium for the communication of our thoughts), which is a relation of intentional objects (?)

Such bandwidth!

My series of posts inspired by Dawkins’ The God Delusion finally ends (I really ought to be thinking more about logic) with his rather comic view of God. Someone once said, that when people told him that they did not believe in God, he asked them which God they did not believe in, and it strikes me that I would not believe in a God described by the following two points, which Dawkins was adding to an earlier response (the possibility of hallucinations etc.) to claims that personal experiences of God cannot be scientifically refuted (Dawkins 2006: 154):

First, that if God really did communicate with humans that fact would emphatically not lie outside science. God comes bursting through from whatever other-worldly domain is his natural abode, crashing through into our world where his messages can be intercepted by human brains – and that phenomenon has nothing to do with science? Second, a God who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such bandwidth! God may not have a brain made of neurones, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know.

Dawkins’ God seems here to be like the leader of some alien invaders from a parallel universe, because surely the Creator of this world would not need to “burst” or “crash” into it—no more than a human author would have to magically appear inside her characters’ fictional world in order to influence them. Of course, fictional characters are not alive, like we are, but that was only an analogy, and the key word is ‘Creator’ (if we have one, this universe is more her/his world than it is our world).
...... Her/his messages might bypass our brains (designed as they would have been for our dealings with this material world) and be received via our consciences (in some immaterial way), or they might be relayed via angels (for whom this world might be like the seas are to us, i.e. not so much unnatural—are houses natural?—as just relatively uncomfortable), or they might indeed arise within our brains, but since those would be brains that s/he made (or is making), so such information would hardly have to travel more than the zero distance from the tip of her/his metaphorical pen (which would be quite unlike any part of Creation) to the metaphorical paper (Creation).
...... No analogy is perfect, so consider another. In Flatland, mathematical creatures of both 2 and 3 dimensions occupy the same space, the former in a plane through which the latter might move as easily as they move through any of the planes of space. E.g. a cube passing through Flatland might seem to appear from nowhere, first as a small equilateral triangle, growing and changing into a rotating hexagon before reverting to a shrinking triangle and disappearing again—or as some other sequence of 2-dimensional shapes. It might be quite mysterious, to the dimensionally challenged Flatlanders, how the different possible sequences could be the same thing, but nonetheless Flatland is just part of the natural abode of the cube.
...... Now, perhaps elves would burst into this world upon the backs of unicorns, from their natural abode (Elfland), were they not fictional, but the Creator would be more like something that was to this world (Creation) as this world is to such fictional realms, were s/he to exist. And whatever the Creator is composed of (if anything), it would hardly be like the stuff of this world, whence we can hardly conclude that s/he must have any kind of elaborately and non-randomly constructed information-processor (although of course s/he might have, e.g. a host of angels).
...... Dawkins’ second point relates to scientific refutation because his argument for the improbability of God rests on our need to explain a complex God—but why should the Creator not be simple? Cf. how an author need not contain anything like her own complicated plots (just the insight, imagination and inspiration to construct such things, with pen and paper); cf. how a sphere is not a complicated Dr. Triangle/Mr. Hexagon character (within Flatland). Anyway, the theory of evolution having shown us one way in which complex (physical) structures might arise from simple (physical) beginnings, the assumption that the Creator could not be simple is an odd one for Dawkins to make.
...... Anyway, whether the Creator is complex (in certain respects, and from our point of view) or simple, there is hardly any necessity to her/him being non-randomly constructed. If s/he had an origin (and why should s/he?), it would be quite mysterious (why should it not be?), so maybe s/he arose randomly (and if we don’t know out of what sort of stuff, how can we say if it is unlikely?) and maybe s/he was constructed (why not an infinite sequence of Creators?). (But there should be time enough for Theology later, if there is any point to doing any.)

Origins and Nature

135 years ago today, Russell made his first noise. “But here is the problem: a cry, which cannot be called a description, which is more primitive than any description, for all that serves as a description of the inner life.” (Wittgenstein 1953, IIix)

Signurture

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
... As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
... Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
... Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
... Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

That's one of Hopkins' poems (undated).

Elegant Design

I was out walking today, and I noticed how beautiful the wild flowers were. Nature has presumably selected such structures because they attract pollen-transporting insects, which were simultaneously selected because they associated the flowers’ colours, or their ultraviolet shines, with food, or something along those lines. So why, I wonder, do we find flowers attractive? A story might have been told, of how those who did not find flowers beautiful did not pick them, and so were stung less often and had more honey (etc.), had we evolved to find flowers unattractive, which we did not. Similarly, one could have told a story of how we came to find raw potatoes beautiful, were they beautiful. Now, we do find fruit attractive, and so such stories are indeed told about fruit, but therefore the beauty of the wild flowers is all the more puzzling—why do we not find, for example, dead animals attractive? (Did those who found raw flesh as attractive as the furry creatures that contain it succumb more frequently to food poisoning, while those who discovered fire and cooking survived?) So, I’m wondering (as in all my posts, what others may know) about the evolution of our appreciation of art. I guess that the natural selection of chemical structures might in all likelihood produce beautiful physical objects, but I’m puzzled by how it could produce people who find them beautiful. (E.g. rooks are clearly elegant, to pick up an example from my previous post, but why do we find elegance aesthetically attractive? We admire aerodynamic shapes in nature, and have done so in our own designs, from stylised cave-paintings to futuristic furniture, but we are not birds, so why?) The thing is, when fans of ‘Intelligent Design’ accuse materialistic scientists of giving us a bleak, soulless world-view, many of those scientists respond by pointing out that it was the majesty, the beauty of nature that attracted them to science in the first place. But it seems, prima facie, quite unlikely that evolved matter should find such things beautiful—what could the evolutionary point of aesthetic attraction have been? Beautiful clothes need not be practical, or even sexy, and there is more to art than the cuteness that we find in our young.

Furnurture

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair

That's from Sylvia Plath's Black Rook in Rainy Weather, 1956

Online Philosophy

I've just noticed OPC2, to look at later (whence this brief, memoesque post).

Faith unfit, in Fair weather

Having recently blogged about hope, I turn now to to charity and faith. I don’t yet know enough about theology to write much (or to keep my speculations nicely brief, unfortunately), but nowadays many of us begin by considering charity (e.g. donations, mercy etc.) and faith (e.g. traditions, loyalty etc.) to have evolved because social animals sharing the genes for such traits came to dominate our gene pool. If some such materialistic explanation is correct, then the sort of critical reasoning that we ought (I think) to favour over faith would presumably have evolved too, and would therefore seem to be, at heart, pragmatic, whence it might well be no more reliable, beyond our everyday uses of it, than our innate intuitions about, e.g., space-time. So I wonder about the limitations of materialistic justifications of our favouring of science over faith. Let us say that some materialistic Darwinian, D (not Dawkins, as the literalists ought to try to refute him), prefers science to faith, while some literalistic Christian, C (not me, as I’m a natural heretic), prefers faith to science. D thinks that C is wrong, but why?
...... Even D values authoritative testimony and teamwork within the sciences. Of course, C’s faith is getting in D’s way, and D does not like that. Nor does D like C’s sort of charity, which moves money that could be going to science towards religious interests. All that is quite coherent, but it might also seem a little selfish. Still, D is a scientist, pursuing collective truths, and so D does think that science is a good thing for everyone. But then, C thinks that faith is a good thing for everyone too. And C’s faith, like D’s science, is coherent on its own terms. So, is there anything more objective that D can say, against C’s faith? Paradoxically, what C and D prefer is (according to D) just a matter of how C and D evolved, so they are pretty much on a par at the base level of existence (according to D). If D fears that most people have so evolved that they are in danger of preferring faith to science, then what can D say about why they should prefer science?
...... Well, they probably already want useful truths (although they may well not want to get them for themselves), and so D could say that science is more likely to get them to useful truths. But of course C would disagree and although, for an example of the ensuing difficulties, D might mention in his defence that scientific sorts of evidence are what naturally sway juries, not protestations of faith, nonetheless whenever juries are swayed by faith D would say that they should not be, and so C could quite fairly say that in response to D’s defence. So, it begins to seem as if D is after all just grunting in disapproval at C. D can say that science is more useful than faith, that science is a better route to the objective truth than faith is, but not only can C say the same about faith, can D even explain why utility and truth are so important (let alone why a philosophically interesting truth is more important than a socially useful lie)?
...... The problem is that even if sciences are more useful than faiths, since when did a species have to do something useful when it did not want to? If humans end up being largely like C then they will value being that way; they may die out, but what species won’t. And if humans end up being largely like D then they will value being that way. And they might die out even more quickly, since the fruits of science do seem to present the immediate danger of extinction (while faith just involved millennia of tribal warfare). D could say that such things are irrelevant to whether or not materialism is true—(a species does not have to value its own long-term survival, according to D, it is just that it exists because it did survive, whence whatever it wants probably did have survival value)—but can she say any more than that about why truth is important?
...... D will probably, eventually, justify her interest in truth much as she explains it, i.e. on the grounds of its likely utility, so her problem (as I see it) is that, by the lights of her materialism, both C and D exist because their genes have competed successfully in the past. That is, D’s own theory puts D’s innate preferences on a par with those of C at the most basic level; and it even seems to imply that both of them are similarly intrinsically irrational. Since D cannot (without insincerity) appeal to anything more fundamental than shared preferences, arising through our common evolution, things look bleak for D because the evidence (that the culture war, naturally polarising between C and D, is not going her way) indicates their insufficiency.
...... Consider a lot of monkeys on typewriters, and let us suppose that one of them happens upon the printed truth. They ought to be out eating bananas of course, but there is a mechanism on each typewriter whereby they get bananas by tapping the keys. Now, each mechanism is switched off when its monkey types out a truth (of some specified sort). Consequently although our monkey has chanced upon a truth, it fails to produce viable offspring (through a too-early shortage of bananas). Many of the others will not so fail, but will rather become ancestors of the monkeys of the future. Of course, D does not say that our monkey should have produced viable offspring (or even that it should have wanted to), only that whatever it did want (i.e. bananas) would probably have been such as to lead to it having viable offspring. (Well, they did all want bananas, and eventually they all died.)
...... Now, both C and D want the truth, and both of them can justify wanting it on the grounds of expected rewards that are relatively big. They both think that they are approaching it, but what value do they put upon getting a truth, just insofar as it is a truth? They both prefer their method (faith or science) to the other, even in those cases when it is the other that chances (as they would see it) upon the truth. And they do both value the truth for its own sake, to some extent, more so than many people, e.g. those who prefer love, and faith motivated by love (and who would happily let a popularity contest decide the political issue between C and D). In particular, D values truth (since she evolved that way, in her opinion) but when she looks at things more objectively—say at that poor monkey—she can see little value in it having printed out a truth (or, indeed, in it getting bananas, or producing viable offspring).
...... D might point out that our search for the truth (via the scientific method) would bring us a high likelihood of rewards (that we are not like that poor monkey), but that is surely not quite so obvious when we are fighting and losing culture wars. While C could justify martyrdom for the cause of truth quite happily, D can only justify an extreme interest in truth on the relatively irrational grounds that that is just the way she is (a justification that would justify all other extremisms equally well, of course, for all that D could think of hers as being, since hers, special). Should D be a fair weather friend of truth? If so then perhaps she ought to be insincere about that, in order to protect her wider support.
...... Suppose (for the sake of argument) that D will not produce viable offspring, but will be killed, whereas C will produce viable offspring, since he is (let us say) going to win the culture war. Perhaps the human gene pool is just naturally moving in that direction, at this time. If D knew that, the wider public might ask her, would she still value objective truth, the way a scientist should? And if she did, could she see herself (in so doing) as objectively anything other than an evolutionary dead-end, with values that turned out to have little survival-value, in a world where life was all about survival?

Of that which we cannot speak

Ariel's ayre

Where the bee sucks, there lurk I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back do I fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

That's from Shakespeare's The Tempest, 1611.

No seas on Mars

..In the beginning darkness
......was upon the face of the
..........deep. And God said
......Let there be light
..and there was light

............And for the gate of the court
......shall be a hanging of twenty cubits, of blue,
......and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined
............linen, wrought with needlework:
......and their pillars shall be four,
......and their sockets four.

And the house, that is, the temple before it, was forty cubits long.
......And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops and open flowers:
............all was cedar; there was no stone seen. And the oracle he prepared in the house within,
......to set there the ark of the covenant of the Lord. And the oracle in the forepart was
twenty cubits in length, and twenty cubits in breadth,
......and twenty cubits in the height thereof:
............and he overlaid it with pure gold;
......and so covered the altar
which was of cedar.

............Two and twenty years old
......was Ahaziah when he began to reign;
......and he reigned one year in Jerusalem.
............Forty and two years old
......was Ahaziah when he began to reign,
......and he reigned one year in Jerusalem.

Who are you to darken counsel by words without knowledge?
......Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
............Declare, if you know. Who laid the measures thereof,
......if you know: who measured out the ground?
And on what ground did the foundations rest?
......Who laid the corner stone thereof, when
............the morning stars sang together,
......and all the sons of God
shouted for joy?

............My God, my God, why
......have you forsaken me? As the hart pants
......after the water brooks, so my soul pants
............after you, O God. My soul
......thirsts for God, for the living God: when
......shall I come and appear before God?

And the rain descended,
......and the floods came, and the winds blew,
............and beat upon that house;
......and it fell:
and great was the fall of it.

............Nevertheless we, according
......to his promise, look for new heavens and
......a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness.
............And I saw a new heaven and
......a new earth: for the first heaven and the first
......earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

Is my Red your Blue?

Prima facie such a question is unanswerable in principle, because we cannot look at things through others’ minds. And yet, suppose there is at least one telepath in this Universe who can, and who could tell us the answer. Or suppose that God exists (unlikely as that may seem) and that He shows us the answer. Or, if it could be shown that the nature of perceived colours is (probably) due entirely to their use by evolved brains, then we might learn enough empirically to (scientifically) know the answer. And so forth. All very speculative, but I’ve noticed that whereas orange is quite like red (e.g. orange dyes often look red), green is relatively unlike blue. So if there are those who find green and blue to be more similar than orange and red, then perhaps their red is my blue. That is, an increased likelihood of their red being my blue might be deduced, especially if they also find red rather than blue to be more like grey. If your red was my blue then you might think that dark yellow was orange rather than green (whereas I see that as a golden green). (And ain’t it odd that adding blue to yellow is like adding grey to yellow, whereas adding blue to white makes it look whiter?)

A Thief in the Night

Friar Tuck spent the day buying fruit bread in Nottingham, with money taken from the rich and corrupt. He was buying fruit bread for the poor to enjoy during the feast days of May, and it took him all day because he was also eating all day. Still, he was carrying a lot of bread as he headed home, and was feeling merry enough until Stalwart, a deputy of the Sheriff of Nottingham, approached, wanting the bread for himself.

Stalwart: Where did you get so much bread? Did you steal it?

Tuck: Would I, a man of God, have stolen bread?

Stalwart: Perhaps you thought that you were taking back what was rightfully yours. Perhaps you think that Normen like my lord Sheriff stole everything in England from you.

Tuck: But we have the same kings, Richard and the Lord whose man I am.

Stalwart: Of course; so tell me, how come you by so much bread?

Tuck: All things come from our Lord God, so you could say that these are His loaves.

Stalwart: But that means that they belong to you no more than they belong to me!

Tuck (starting to get indigestion): I am only a poor servant of God, but these loaves are destined for poor peasants, by God's charity; so, they belong, by God's will, to the Normen whose poor peasants shall enjoy them. You would be stealing from those Normen were you to take these loaves.

Stalwart: Why talk of taking? I am myself but a poor deputy. Could you not give me some of your fruit loaves?

Tuck (feeling a bit better): These loaves are not mine to give. They belong to our Lord and, by His charity, to those Normen whose peasants shall enjoy them.

Stalwart: Perhaps our Lord wants me to have some of them, though. I am, after all, but a poor deputy of my lord Sheriff, tasked as he is by our earthly king to keep this town safe from thieves and murderers.

Tuck (feeling more nauseous): I am glad that we are safe from thieves and murderers. And I do not claim to know infallibly the ineffable will of our Lord God. Do you think that that is indeed what He wants?

Stalwart: Yes, yes I do.

Tuck: Well, I suppose that our Lord might want you to have a few of these loaves; why else, I wonder, would He have had me standing here talking to you, as the night draws in around us, with its thieves and murderers?

Stalwart: Why indeed! And were you not tucking into a few fruit loaves yourself earlier? It seems to me that our Lord may well want a variety of poor people to have these loaves. After all, He gives us all our daily bread, does He not?

Tuck (seeing his way home at last): He does indeed, and so here is some more bread for you.

Stalwart: Thanks.

Tuck: Thanks be to God.

Tuck leaves with most of his fruit loaves, and a bitter taste in his mouth, and the thought that stolen bread was tastier.

The Bounds of Love

Today's post will be a bit long, but it's my first serious written foray into theology, and I know too little (and have too much else to do) to attempt a longer piece elsewhere. Where to begin? Well, I guess that facts are aspects of reality, but are also the elements of our mental maps of reality—what makes a fact objectively true is not that one’s mental map is a perfect representation, but that the reality that is being modelled sufficiently well by that map objectively exists. Similarly beauty is in the eye of the beholder (as is colour, etc.) whilst also being a property of the beheld—and perhaps what makes some perception of a beloved’s loveliness (of moral goodness, etc.) a veridical perception is the existence of God (linguistically male below, for convenience). Now, that would of course depend upon the details of such perceptions; but let us suppose that someone might somehow have come by a justified belief in the existence of this Universe’s Creator, much as we come by our beliefs in the existence of this Universe. After all, the divine creation of a man who naturally believes in his Creator’s existence might also give that belief some justification. So, can we say much about this Universe’s possible Creator?
......Well, something like omniscience would seem to be indicated, since an author will know all there is to know about her works, on which she is the authority. But the question arises, must the Creator know now all that we will actually do? Such would seem to contradict our directly known freedoms, few and limited as they are. A recent argument in Alanyzer shows that from plausible assumptions it follows that the Creator also exists within time. And after all, there being an act of Creation in the first place would seem to presuppose something like temporality on the part of the Creator. Open or Process Theism is not so much a limitation as a positive freedom—if the Creator did not exist within something like time (with future possibilities, and past actualities) then there would have been no free choice to Create, so there could have been no real motivation for Creation, which would make it all pretty pointless (and this argument for a Creator was the absurdity of his absence). There are problems with Open Theism, e.g. how are we to understand either the time before God, or else God’s infinite past. But time is a great mystery anyway (about which I shall post eventually), so let us move on.
......There are many conceivable motivations, and the real one may well be inconceivable, but prima facie quantum mechanics seems like a good way to put reasoning beings into a world of prescribed possibilities. Living beings exist as they do—being aware of changes and making choices—because they exist during the present collapse of the future possibilities into the past actuality that we perceive all around us. Why would that be a useful thing to do? Well, maybe the Creator knows that He does not know what He does not know, and in particular He does not know for sure whether or not there are others of His kind. How could He? (Maybe He could, maybe not; this is only a conceivable possibility.) So, maybe this Universe is a means of finding out more. One problem with that hypothesis could be that God’s infinite past becomes more of a problem—we have to imagine God not being motivated, for an infinite time, to find out what He is now so interested in. But still, perhaps there were infinitely many other things to find out about (and infinity is another great mystery anyway), so let us press on.
......Fortunately the infamous problem of evil is not a problem for this possibility. Maybe we did choose to be born (clichés notwithstanding). Maybe in a previous, more Heavenly existence (following our Creation as minds) we were asked if we wanted to participate in such an investigation, and we bravely said yes. Maybe the point of it all is therefore (paradoxically) the facilitation of the presence of other gods. We just don’t know; there are just so many possibilities. But therefore we can see each such possibility, not so much as a reason to believe in that motivation, as a reason for not being presumptuous. If the point of our existence in this Universe were the facilitation of the presence of (or more generally, the finding out more about the possibility of) other gods, then such activities as paganism and polytheism might even cohere with the Creator’s intention. That is, monotheism and multiculturalism need not conflict.
......That possibility may well seem too odd, but after all, why is there so little direct evidence for the Creator’s existence? Presumably Heaven is full of such evidence, so why were we not Created there in the first place? If the point of life is to be with and to love our Creator, then why are we here? Furthermore various people have noticed how lazy the Creator seems to have been, from (all the evidence for) natural laws to natural selection, whereas with a motivation like this one He would actually require a minimal support for minds (one that facilitated complicated structures without specifying too much about them). In short, the possibility of fleeting evils may have been the acceptable price of a useful space for free will, within an orderly, lawful cosmos; a price that we may even have chosen to pay, before we were born here (those of us who are not divinely animated, or machines—and perhaps we should not presume without good reason that none of the atheists are machines). Our ignorance (if we are honest) of the precise nature of evil may just be part of the whole point of our existence.
......Would it be so bad, that our existence had some point to it, beyond hopes of being the Creator's lap-dogs in Heaven? Perhaps in Heaven things are lovelier and more perfect, but perhaps also divine plans are laid there, plans to bravely find out more about the unknown. (And note that I'm not suggesting that we could find out about such things, only that our lives may have some ultimate point to them.) Anyway, in short, far from there being no way to make sense of what little data we have, there are actually too many live possibilities for us to be too dogmatic about, e.g., the unlikelihood of a Creator (about which I shall post more eventually).

You Are Reading This

As you were reading those four words, what you read
was clearly true if the first of those words meant you;

does "You" mean you?

A written "you" usually means whoever is reading it

(unless the "you" is occurring inside some quotation marks)

but this post is now going to continue like this:

You, Bob, are reading this.

Perhaps you are surprised that I know your name, but you are probably not called Bob. The thing is, even if you are called Bob, you would probably not think that the first of those five blue words meant you (if you were called Bob you would probably assume that I meant a different Bob, someone with whom I am acquainted). And whatever your name is, I might have chanced upon that name to add after the first word of "You are reading this." So, the question is:

Would adding your name have made you less likely to think that I meant you by "You"?

The natural assumption is that adding people's names after "you" would make it clearer that it was those people who were meant, because the meanings of simple words like "you" are learnt by hearing them spoken (not by reading them), and while the meaning of a spoken "you" is usually obvious (it is usually whoever the speaker is looking at), when it isn't obvious the addition of a name would usually make it obvious.

When does "you" mean you?

That question is basically a request, for a list of contexts in which "you" would mean you, but I intend it to be more of a talking point than a request.

Questions seem like requests, to me, because if you asked me "what is that?" I would hear you saying something like "please tell me what that is, if you know." A lot of philosophers regard questions as incomplete propositions, though (and because they like to define their terms in terms of artificial languages, I am not even sure what they mean by "proposition").

How does an answer complete a question?

Well, replacing "__" by "a cat" does turn "that is __" into an assertion that answers the question "what is that?" correctly when a cat is being indicated. But I think that "what is that?" could, no less logically, be regarded as a request for most of the contextually relevant assertions of the form "that is X" to be eliminated in light of some indicated information and the remainder presented very concisely. The very similar question "is that a cat?" does seem like a request for one of "yes" and "no"; or, in other words, for as many of the assertions of a certain kind (assertions like "yes, that is a cat," "no, that is not a cat," "no, that is a skunk," "no, that is a cat," and so on) as possible to be eliminated in light of a view of something like a cat and the remainder presented very concisely.

Is "is that a cat" a question and "that is a cat" a proposition?

If that is what you think, then you might find the question "that is a cat?" surprising. And philosophers have read a lot of books, and they do like their definitions written down, so it is easy to imagine them being surprised by the fact that our words get a lot of their actual meaning from how they are spoken. For myself, I just wonder whether music is the closest thing we have to the first human language.

When Sir Paul sang "you know I love you" to camera, the meaning of his "you" was a complicated thing created, for the most part, by those watching him, even though the meaning of a spoken "you" is usually whoever the speaker intends it to mean. When someone says "you" to camera, it normally means anyone watching (not unlike the written "you" without quotation marks). But of course, a song is like a poem, which is like a fiction (so you could expect quotation marks). And some of the viewers would already have heard Paul's song on the radio, or via vinyl, maybe with their eyes closed, as though dreaming. In short, we have, for generations, been watching TV as we learnt our languages. And because we naturally read the current meanings of our words into records of how people used to talk before the invention of the camera, it is bound to be a bit mysterious how the meanings of our words have changed since then. Still, we can always look at how they are changing.

When does "she" mean she?

When some people say "she thinks she's a girl," they might mean what I would mean by saying "he thinks he's a girl." My use of pronouns might make it harder for him to live as he has chosen to live, but saying "she" when I and many other people would say "he" goes against the grain of ordinary language and biological fact, so it might put a lot of people's backs up, and so even that new approach to such pronouns might end up making it harder for him to live as he wants to. Am I being intolerant or disrespectful? No: I can tolerate and even respect people that I disagree with. But should we not say what we mean, while we can? The loudest voices of God's creatures do tend to express intolerance, but God's voice is still and small.

I'm referred to

therefore I am.

That is what I thought when I saw myself referred to in Philosophy of Logic (the chapter on Infinity). I'm a very bookish person. The editor's chapter on the Liar paradoxes was more interesting, though (my view of his view is here). Any logical paradox will be showing us that something in our logic was not logical enough. Different logics have different paradoxes, and the ideal logic would have no paradoxes. But if our logic told us very little, then we could easily have no paradoxes. So presumably we want our logic to tell us as much as possible without also giving us contradictions. Now, we start with our innate logics, and we learn how to be more logical by solving logical puzzles. But the logic in Philosophy of Logic is a million miles away from that natural process. Why? The history of logic indicates that the answer has a lot to do with the history of infinity (not that you would guess that from the chapter on the history of truth).

I think, therefore...

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

That’s from Duffy’s Education for Leisure, 1985

Popper's Probabilities

Commenting on Basic Sets, I replied to Torbjörn’s comment (#49) that in most parts of theoretical physics they use frequentist probabilities (in connection with my new argument against standard set theory), as follows—I repeat myself in order to refer to this post in my defence of Popper (sections linked to below).

50 years ago, I noted (in comment #52), Popper noticed that many scientists were not really frequentists, for all that they might call themselves that. While they took certain real numbers in the equations of QM to be probabilities (i.e. they took QM, quantum mechanics, to be saying something that could be tested against observed frequencies) they were not frequentists because, basically, frequentism is either finite or infinite. If it is finite then probabilities cannot be real numbers (see §2 for more reasons). But if it is infinite (as it is usually) then such probabilities actually say nothing about our finite observations—they cannot be tested against observed frequencies because each value for the limit frequency is compatible with any initial values (cf. §3 and §5).

So, most of those scientists who regarded themselves as frequentists, but who were also realists about QM (unlike Lewis for example), actually believed in single-case propensities (see §4). The propensity bit is the idea that the QM equations model something real, something chancy that is tested via frequencies. The single-case bit is the idea that even a single particle behaves probabilistically, e.g. in 2-slit experiment, and that widely separated things might be causally independent. Note that by QM I mean nothing too technical, just the QM of chemistry, and of 2-slit experiments. Such elementary experiments do appear to be telling us that the underlying stuff of reality is well modelled by Schrödinger's equation. And I take it for granted that there is some such stuff. But of course, I hope that there are some coherent objections to some of that, for me to think about...

The St. Petersburg Paradox

The St. Petersburg paradox is nearly 300 years old, but it can tell us something about rational decision making. Imagine, for example, that God wants to play a game with you. Suppose that you can tell that it is God talking to you. You can believe everything that He tells you (or They tell you) and He will pay you an amount equal to the entire wealth of the universe to play the following game:

He will repeatedly toss a fair coin, in a perfectly fair way, until it lands heads up. If it lands heads up straightaway, then you will just owe Him two cents (which you could return to Him from the vast wealth of the universe). If it lands heads up on the second toss, you will owe Him four cents. If it lands heaps up on the third toss, you will owe Him eight cents. And so on: the amount doubles with each toss.

Before you decide, God shows you that the wealth of the universe includes alien medical technology that can prolong your natural life indefinitely, and also teleportation devices, enabling you to spend whatever wealth you have after the game on trillions of inhabited planets. He also shows you that were you to be extraordinarily unlucky in the game, He could make you pay Him arbitrarily large amounts by having you work for Him at a very reasonable rate of pay in some relatively pleasant part of purgatory for arbitrarily long amounts of time. So, would you want to play this game?

Note that your chance of owing anything to God because of playing this game is extremely small. Even if God threw 47 tails before throwing his first head, you would only have to return a paltry trillion dollars to Him from the enormous wealth that He will have already given you to play this game. Your chance of having to do any work in the afterlife because of this game is negligible. What would actually happen if you played this game? You would become the master of the universe!

Because the chance of God getting a tail on the first toss is 50%, or 1/2, and the chance of Him also getting a tail on the second toss is 25%, or 1/4 (there being 4 equally likely possibilities for two tosses, one of which is two tails), and the chance of Him getting a third tail is 1/8, and so forth, God's mathematical expectation is 2/2 + 4/4 + 8/8 + … cents. That is 1 + 1 + 1 + … cents, an infinite number of cents. But God's realistic expectation was of you doing no work for Him. And there was no chance of you working for Him forever in purgatory because of that game (unless your having the vast wealth of the universe increased your chance of ending up there for other reasons). So, this fictional God created infinitely many universes, and offered one person in each universe the chance to play that game. Each of those people would of course decide to play, and with infinitely many of them playing, God's realistic expectation was the mathematical expectation.

What can that tell us about rational decision making? Well, note that there would still be a paradoxical game even if, after a number of tails equal to, say, ten times the wealth of the universe in cents, there were no further coin tosses. God's mathematical expectation would still be of a massive gain. And for that to be a realistic expectation, there would not need to be infinitely many games. So, it would not even need to be God playing. This is a paradox, not of infinity, but of rational decision making in large and complicated betting environments.

Plato was right

                                            Plato was right to banish
poets from the Republic. Once they try to go beyond the
colours and shapes, they only ever fail, miserably –
some more gracefully than others.

That's from Harwood’s Plato was right though, 1968