> As Salmieri notes in his response, throughout her piece Cleary takes it for granted that Rand’s views are wrong and expects that refuting them should be straightforward. Notably, she never offers any attempted refutations of Rand’s actual positions.

If that doesn't sum up the entire intellectual/political discourse in current year then I don't know what does. People scream Nazi and run away from real discussion as fast as they can.

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A better place to post this would be /r/askphilosophy. There are tons of resources, so if you could say a bit more about what you're looking for that would be good too (e.g. if you want a general overview or something on eating animals).

I would absolutely not bother reading the Peikoff that the other person recommended.

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Do you believe man is capable of generating meaning from nothing, or that man is capable of finding meaning where it previously did not exist? or neither?

I've been reading philosophy since I was a child, and I've always imagined how awe-inspiring it would be to converse with philosophers from the past.

Well, advances in deep learning and natural language processing have made this possible in some ways, and I've set a goal for myself to create a small project as proof of concept.

This project is titled "Speaking with Plato - A Deep Learning Approach to Philosophy." Plato is a favorite philosopher of mine, and his philosophy is still very relevant today.

Plato's Theory of Forms can be seen in the field of pattern recognition. Here we see issues when it comes to training AI algorithms that are easy for humans.

When it comes to image pattern recognition, for example, we can easily train a child to recognize a tree. We can also train an AI to perform this task, but it will fail when presented with a fake tree.

The above problem that AI revealed to us was masked by our meaning-making capabilities. Mainly, our embodied brain, which is dynamically coupled with the environment, can render things obvious to us. Therefore, we think that the explanation comes from that obvious.

Two deep-learning models are used in the project. One is a Chatbot that simulates a conversation with Socrates, while the other is more creative and generates text in an attempt to imitate Plato. All of his work is also explored as part of an EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis).

Here's a sneak peek:

User: What is virtue?

Socrates: A thing which is taught by a certain master, and which is rightly taught by him; and he who taught it, and has taught it also, is good in so far as it is taught?

More can be read in this blog: https://dataspiral.blog/speaking-with-plato/

Hi, hope this thread qualifies for the open discussion - if not, maybe I was not lucky enough and it should be moved somewhere else.

Anyway, I’d like to discuss Gettier problems. It seems I don’t appreciate the depth of the problem enough, as the solution appears to be on the surface to me, so I’m hoping you could point at my logical error here.

Context: Gettier case intends to challenge JTB (justified-true-belief) concept of knowledge. Classical example is of Smith believing that whoever will get the job has 10 coins in their pocket and being “mistakenly right” with reasoning as follows:

1. Company president tells him that Jones will win the job
2. Smith believes that Jones will win the job
3. Smith observes that Jones has 10 coins in his pocket
4. Smith infers that whoever will get the job has 10 coins in their pocket

In the end, Smith got the job instead, but as he by chance had 10 coins in his pocket too, he was right.

The problem as I see it is in answering the question whether by fulfilling the JTB, we could say Smith indeed knew that the winner had 10 coins.

In my opinion (and I humbly accept it’s only one incomplete and likely wrong perspective), the problem doesn’t really pose a challenge to the original definition, and could be invalidated if we take a closer look at step 4 of the above reasoning.

Following Wittgenstein, what the author really saying is “Smith thinks that [Jones] who has 10 coins in his pocket will win the job”. Whether or not Smith was right a posteriori is irrelevant - step 2 of the reasoning (that Jones will win the job) does not satisfy the truth requirement, and as step 4 can be reduced to step 2, it is therefore not knowledge regardless. In other words, the equal phrase of the challenge could be “Smith thinks that Jones will win the job”, and it should take precedence over a more complex one.

In other examples (e.g. looking at a dog disguised as a sheep and concluding that there’s a sheep in the field when indeed there’s one outside of sight of the viewer) the problem is the same - by introducing a false belief and further expanding it with additional unjustified statement that leads to a true statement. However, if we look closely, the actual statement is “The viewer thinks there’s a [dog that he thinks is] a sheep in the field”, which is not the same as “The viewer thinks there’s a sheep in the field”. Again, since it’s possible to break down the “chain of knowledge” to simpler steps and discover an error there (that what he saw was a dog and not a sheep), the chain as a whole fails to become knowledge but doesn’t really void the original definition of JTB. The reduced statement for which JTB is still valid would be “The viewer believes that what he sees is a sheep” (which is not true).

Now, I know that this problem will celebrate its 60th anniversary soon, but I fail to see what I miss in my attempts to solve it. I’d appreciate your comments and help in improving my logical thinking. Thank you.

Yes there is. I can stablish a clear boundary between me and my environment, that doesn't mean I don't interact with it.

I can clearly see how "I" am different from "you". We have different thoughts, different needs, different objectives and values. That doesn't mean we can't team up. In fact, in order to efficiently team up, I need to understand that you're different from me, and be able to recognize points in common (and differences), to convince you, to treat you well according to what you expect.

> Are there situations in today's world where it's impossible for a person to consent to the social contract

I have never seen anyone consent to a social contract and it's by definition impossible for anyone to do so.

Why Human Beings Come First lectures by Leonard Peikoff

Interesting. Then has a person really realised fundamental interconnection and interdependance?

As if there is a choice between indiviual imposition and interdependance within right view. Right view doesn't entertain the idea that the individual has priority over the collective, becuase right view is that the individual really doesn't exist as a seperate entity. That would be a selfish individualist point of view, rather than no self or selfless.

In much the same way that a leaf is part of the whole tree. Or an acorn is even seperate from the tree it fell from, because these thing are not things at all but rather dynamic happenings. A fundalmatally different view of matter in that, no thing is static but rather flowing from state to state. Even mountains, and universes change over time and are subject to interaction and interconection.

There is no way to separate the self from the whole in the same way that a conscious self is distinct from it.

Yeah it's important to understand that individualism is not against teamwork.

why

Just want to point out that individualism does not oppose the fact humans are interconnected and interdependant. It just states that the subject of rights is the individual, that the collective shall not impose itself over it.

Are there situations in today's world where it's impossible for a person to consent to the social contract, if following a "a contract must be consensual in other to be legitimate" theory?

I'm thinking about a situation where someone is born in a country where something they do or something about how they are is illegal.

For example, a situation where a left-handed person is born in a country where left-handed people are considered evil and locked in sanatoriums. In order to be able to consent to a social contract, one has to have the option to be able to agree to it without be coerced. The person would have the option to either consent to the authority of their state (and be locked in a sanatorium), or to leave their state. However, in today's world all territories that allow for human subsistence are the property of states. If they left their country, they would have to live the territory of another country. Other countries might not allow them to become citizens (due to their citizenship laws), or might share laws that force left-handed people in sanatoriums. Wouldn't this situation be a situation where there are people to which no state is able to have legitimate authority?

Another example that is much more likely would be one like this. Someone wants to do something, but no countries a person can become a citizen of allow them to do it. For example, the person is in an interracial relationship and is unable to marry their partner in any country, they want to have an abortion but it's forbidden everywhere, or they smoke weed and the consumption of weed is forbidden in all countries they can become a citizen of. Since the entirety of the Earth's resources that are necessary for human survival are taken up by states, the person would be unable to consent to the social contract of any country, as they would be coerced into giving up their liberty to (marry their partner/have an abortion/smoke weed/walk), having no other option if they want to survive. Therefore, no countries would have legitimate authority over them. What is it that stops this from being true regarding today's world

Animal Ethics Media Recommendations

Hi everyone! I’m currently looking at the area of animal ethics and would like to know if any of you have any recommendations of media for me to read/listen/watch. Any podcasts, films, books or other related media you would recommend?

Thank you!

I wonder whether a particular line of reasoning against the multiverse theory is effective. I don't have a background in physics, so I may well be way off here (in which case I'd be grateful if people explain why), but as far as I understand, the idea is that certain parameters in our universe happen to be just such that matter and life can exist in it. This would be incredibly unlikely to happen by chance. Therefore we probably exist in one of the many universes in existence, and predictably, in one that happens to have conditions for life to exist. Therefore, there are most likely multiple universes.
The usual retort in case of such theories is to say that they are the case of selection bias: people argue, for example, that intelligent design must be true, since it is incredibly unlikely that our solar system has exactly the parameters for intelligent life to exist. However, that's just selection bias: since we are here to ask questions, of course it is true that conditions happen to be hospitable to life where we are. We may well have been asking such questions on Mars, or in another galaxy, and then it would be necessarily true that conditions were hospitable to life there. So what you would have to be saying is: it is incredibly unlikely for conditions anywhere to be hospitable to life, which is just not true, given the myriad of stars and planets in existence.
However, this doesn't really work in case of the multiverse: while it is true that since we are here to ask questions the universe must have had the conditions for life to exist, what is unlikely is for the only universe to happen to have both conditions for life and life as there are many more configurations of physical constants in which it wouldn't. So to level an analogous objection, to say that it is not surprising, you would have to assert the same conditions - that there have been multiple shots at a universe, so to speak, and one of them happened to have these exact parameters and it is the one we are in (again, predictably). But that is exactly what the multiverse apologist claims.
People have found the idea of the multiverse problematic since it may well be in principle unverifiable, which does not go well with our understanding of what a scientific theory must be. However, it seems to me that this particular objection is like an objection to those mathematical spoof proofs that show that 1 = 0: sure, you can just dismiss the conclusion, because 1 does not equal 0, but what is also true, and perhaps more interesting, is to find a mistake in the proof: if the conclusion is unintelligible, there must be a mistake.
So, what I think is the mistake is our misunderstanding of what can or cannot be 'surprising'. Because we may say: it is very surprising, if there is only one universe, that it happens to have these very parameters. But what is surprise? The practice of surprise language is such that something is surprising when it disagrees with our background models. If I have a model 'all swans are white', then seeing a black swan would be surprising. If I have a model 'heavy objects fall towards the ground when dropped from high altitudes', an object not doing that would be surprising. There must exist a model for anything to be surprising. Otherwise, black swans, or levitating objects, would be just there, nothing would be surprising.
And what I think is the background model in case of surprise about parameters of the universe is that they should be random. If they were allocated at random, it is very unlikely for a single allocation to result in precisely such parameters that are hospitable to life. So then to rescue that model we say: there must have been multiple allocations. But, why assume such random allocation? I think we are groundlessly generalising from our everyday practice: when no-one deliberately arranged something to be a certain way, the results usually appear random to us. And thus we say: well, if no-one arranged everything that ever existed with deliberation, the result should be random. But this transitions a practice to a context it is not designed for. It is the same mistake as when a question of 'what is the purpose of everything?' is asked as a supposedly logical question. Purposes exist in localised contexts: the purpose of going to school is to get an education, the purpose of buying food is to eat. But the purpose of everything is an incoherent notion since there is nothing in principle outside the system that could be a candidate answer. And in the same way, to say that 'since nobody has deliberately arranged everything that exists, it should be random' misapplies the useful picture of intentionality and presence of patterns we know to be useful within the universe to the whole universe, which is not a context in which we know or could know it to be useful. So the model against which surprise arises is flawed - when we fix that, and accept that we cannot know whether there is some RNG-like process behind every universe, we lose the framework to be surprised by the particular parameters our universe displays and thus lose the need to postulate multiple universes.

Yes. You can alter your unconscious mind. Conscious thought and stimuli flows into the unconscious. Even though it isn't under direct control, gaining awareness of what the unconscious contains and altering consciousness thought through mindfulness and awareness techniques brings it to alignment with your conscious will. Gaining awareness of your complexes, resolving traumas and gaining awareness of your true self is the only way a completely free will exists. Some of the methods available are also dream analysis and meditation. Also choices that one makes in the media that they consume is a key factor. Closely monitoring thoughts that occur spontaneously during a quiet moment of attempting a clear mind reveals unconscious contents. Closely monitoring physiological responses and not acting on them reveals unconscious thought because physiological responses are originated in the unconscious mind and pushed through.

Reading recommendation: Strangers to ourselves by Timothy D. Wilson. Aware by Daniel Siegel. The Undiscovered Self by C G Jung.

> But in fact, supposing that an objective reality exists, it has to go through the filters of our perception to be perceived, and language to be expressed in concepts and theories.

In turn generating more objective reality, except this kind is directly derived from subjective experience making a sort of hybrid reality end product.

> What would the natural state of humanity be?

Delusion, unrealized.

Out of curiosity, do you happen to keep a database of reviewed authors and works, and maybe even a cross reference of various topics that have been covered across books and authors?

remindme! 8 hours

*Pontius Pilate. As for truth there is no general agreement whatsoever but a lot of competing theories. I recommend you take a look at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/ to get some overview.