Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Known unknowns and unknown unknowns!

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uwot
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by uwot »

Dalek Prime wrote:...I see conciousness, the jumble, as me. And that's my certain starting point, whatever else I may be. That's what I meant, though I misunderstood Descartes. Is that clearer?
Actually, you understood Descartes perfectly well. He too saw the jumble as himself. What he was looking for was an absolutely certain foundation for knowledge, the idea being that everything that was deduced from this absolute fact would be 'true'. What happened, much as happened with Parmenides 2000 years earlier is that the first thing they built on their foundation didn't follow logically and within a few premises they were talking utter nonsense, Parmenides spectacularly so, and there is a school of thought that maintains that Descartes only introduced a non-deceiving 'God' into his argument to appease the Vatican.
Dalek Prime wrote:Btw uwot, have you read The Ego Tunnel by Metzinger? He talks about that jumble.
I haven't, but thank you; I shall look it up.
dionisos
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by dionisos »

Lawrence Crocker wrote:Of course many things are certain in the way that we ordinarily use the word “certain.” It is certain that you are reading this now, that you do not have five heads, that 2 + 2 = 4. I argue, however, that in a more demanding sense, the sense that should be applied when we are evaluating the effect on our beliefs of new evidence using Bayesian updating, nothing should be regarded as absolutely certain. “2 + 2 = 4” is necessarily true, but it is not certainly true – Bayesian pioneer Lindley to the contrary notwithstanding. The detailed argument is in my blog LawrenceCrocker.blogspot.com.
What is the difference between "necessarily true", and "certainly true" ?
dionisos
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by dionisos »

uwot wrote:In the classical world, the demarcation point between Pre-Socratic philosophy and that guff by Plato and Aristotle, was, arguably not Socrates, but Parmenides. He came up with the first recorded proposition that is absolutely true. Often translated as 'Being is.' it is the observation that it is self-contradictory to argue that nothing exists.
It takes a rare breed of idiot to proclaim 'I do not exist.' This was the conclusion reached by Rene Descartes. He assumed he was the stream of consciousness that seemed to describe a fairly coherent narrative. The point has been made many times, initially by Malebranche, that although it might seem as though there is an 'I' responsible for the thinking, it doesn't actually follow logically; there might just be thinking. If you can get your head around that, congratulations, you can do philosophy, but we owe to Descartes the understanding that not only is there something, but there is perceptions of it. (Although as Berkeley noted, there may be nothing but perceptions.)
That's it as far as absolutely true things go:
1. There is something.
2. There is thought.
Apologies to those who are bored of me repeating myself.
I am of this breed of idiot :D
Or more precisely, i consider i am the thoughts, i am not something that does the thoughts, nor something that contains the thoughts.
It follow i don’t think i am persistent in time, i am only here and now. In the future and in the past, it is another.
uwot
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by uwot »

dionisos wrote:I am of this breed of idiot :D
Or more precisely, i consider i am the thoughts, i am not something that does the thoughts, nor something that contains the thoughts.
I don't know whether to congratulate or commiserate. As I said to Dalek Prime:
uwot wrote: 'you' might simply be a passing disembodied thought that will disappear in a puff of logic in two seconds...
dionisos wrote:It follow i don’t think i am persistent in time, i am only here and now. In the future and in the past, it is another.
That's the point Heraclitus was making. The best known example is one Plato attributed to him, that you can't step into the same river twice. The reason being that the body of water that 'is' the river changes continually as rain falls and the river flows into the sea. Then again, maybe 'The Ship of Perseus' is the best known example. Whatever, you believe 'you' are some state of flux and you are in good company. But it takes a breathtaking nincompoop to assert that they are not even that.
Obvious Leo
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by Obvious Leo »

I think you might be referring to the ship of Theseus, uwot, not Perseus. It shows us that our concept of the "object" is a myth. The object is in fact a dynamic process and as a man with some physics you might wish to consider the implications of this at the sub-atomic scale.
dionisos wrote: I am of this breed of idiot :D
Or more precisely, i consider i am the thoughts, i am not something that does the thoughts, nor something that contains the thoughts.
It follow i don’t think i am persistent in time, i am only here and now. In the future and in the past, it is another.
Don't let anybody tell you that your command of English is wanting, dionisos. This is as exquisite an expression of a simple truth as a process philosopher could dare to wish for. Descartes is guilty of putting des cartes before des horse. "I am therefore I think" makes a hell of a lot more sense than it does the other way around. However uwot may also have a point in suggesting that Descartes had an agenda to appease the church. His sycophantic acolyte Isaac Newton most surely did.
uwot
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by uwot »

Obvious Leo wrote:I think you might be referring to the ship of Theseus, uwot, not Perseus.
That's the one. Thank you OL.
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Lawrence Crocker
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by Lawrence Crocker »

dionisos wrote:
Lawrence Crocker wrote:Of course many things are certain in the way that we ordinarily use the word “certain.” It is certain that you are reading this now, that you do not have five heads, that 2 + 2 = 4. I argue, however, that in a more demanding sense, the sense that should be applied when we are evaluating the effect on our beliefs of new evidence using Bayesian updating, nothing should be regarded as absolutely certain. “2 + 2 = 4” is necessarily true, but it is not certainly true – Bayesian pioneer Lindley to the contrary notwithstanding. The detailed argument is in my blog LawrenceCrocker.blogspot.com.
What is the difference between "necessarily true", and "certainly true" ?
Good question. Necessity is a concept at the intersection of metaphysics and philosophy of language, and certainty belongs to epistemology. Necessity is a kind of super-truth. Not only is reality such as to make a proposition true, but any reality would have to do so. At least on any moderately Platonistic theory of math, "2 + 2 = 4" would be both true and necessary even if there never was anything like a mind in reality, and so was no one to be certain. (There would be metaphysics in such a world, but not epistemology.) We can fail to be certain of things that are necessarily true as a result of the same sorts of failings that leave us in ignorance about the truth of some necessary truths, e.g. whether the googolplexth prime has 7 as its second digit. The failings have to be more severe as the problem gets simpler, of course.
dionisos
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by dionisos »

uwot and Obvious Leo, thank you, what you just said make me truly happy, i am sensitive to that kind of compliments.

Lawrence Crocker, thank you, a really interesting distinction.
I still need precision for it to be perfectly clear:
You said: "Necessity is a kind of super-truth. Not only is reality such as to make a proposition true, but any reality would have to do so"
And : ""2 + 2 = 4" would be both true and necessary even if there never was anything like a mind in reality, and so was no one to be certain. (There would be metaphysics in such a world, but not epistemology.) "

I have hard time to put "there is something", in one of the two categories. "there is something" is not true in any possible reality, not like "2+2=4".
"2+2=4" is true in any reality, because it is not about reality, but about good reasoning rules. (we should use good reasoning rules, even when we think about a reality where there is nobody to use these rules).
"there is something", is about the reality where we are.

Then, does "there is something" would be certainly true, but not necessary true ?
I nothing is certainly true, how would you call this kind of truth, that are more certain that "2+2=4", but not necessarily true ?
Obvious Leo
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by Obvious Leo »

dionisos wrote:"2+2=4" is true in any reality, because it is not about reality, but about good reasoning rules.
Yes. This statement does not meet the required form for consideration as a truth statement because it is essentially a merely definitional expression of a mathematical abstraction. A circle is always a continuous line equidistant from a point in a 2D plane, but although this is true this is not a truth statement about the nature of reality. It is merely a statement of definition and thus tautologous. Such self-referential statements are commonplace in symbolic logic systems such as mathematics.
uwot
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by uwot »

The thing about 'There is something' and 'There is thought' is that they are not necessarily true in the way that analytic/mathematical facts are. 'All unmarried men are bachelors' is true by definition. 2+2=4 is true, because whatever you have two twos of, if you put them together, you will have four.
'There is something' is contingent; it isn't logically necessary, it just happens to be the case that there is a 'universe' in some shape or form, possibly illusory. Likewise 'There is thought' cannot be uttered or perceived without it being true, though there is no logical reason why there should be thought and it is quite easy to imagine a universe in which there are no sentient beings. They are the fundamental empirical facts, all others are more or less theory laden.
dionisos
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by dionisos »

I think they are the ultimate empirical facts, not the fundamental empirical facts.

You don’t build anything on top of "there is something", aside from "there is something".
And you don’t build anything on top of "there is thought", aside from "there is thought", and "there is something".
It go in the opposite direction, every empirical facts, every "there is X", is a subset of "there is something", and then imply "there is something"
It’s like that, because "something" is the ultimate abstraction, everything is something.

It’s not a start point, it’s a end point, it’s misleading to call it "fundamental empirical facts", it make it seem like we could build on top of it.

A fundamental empirical facts, would be something like "the 'picture' i see just now".
In fact, fundamental empirical facts are pretty hard to describe, not as the abstraction that contain them all.
One abstraction to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. :D
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Lawrence Crocker
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by Lawrence Crocker »

dionisos wrote:Then, does "there is something" would be certainly true, but not necessary true ?
On standard possible world theory, "there is something" is not necessarily true because there is an empty possible world.

So if you think "there is something" is certain, you would believe that this is a certain, contingent proposition. Many have believed there are such.

My own reluctance to call "there is something" certain, even for me, now, is largely a matter of the content of the proposition. I have concerns about both vagueness and ambiguity. What must something have to count as a something? Where and when is it? Is there a non-ambiguous way of specifying the where and when? If I am very wrong about the nature of things, will what I think I am asserting with "there is something" miss the mark? This might be the case even if there were other disambiguations that would be true.

If I were trying to stay clear of such problems but hold to your general idea, I might go with "not empty universe here now" but I still see the possibility that this is defective, perhaps for reasons I will always be beyond me. Remember that the possibility of such a defect only need be one in a googolplex to undermine the very demanding sense of "certain" I am examining.
dionisos
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by dionisos »

Lawrence Crocker wrote:What must something have to count as a something?
I should admit i don’t understand your question.
Where and when is it?
It would totally break the certainty to answer these questions, where assume space, and when assume time.
in "there is something", you don’t have to assume space, nor time.
"not empty universe here now"
This proposition is a lot less certain, you have to assume:
- The category of all things that exists (the universe), is meaningful.
- There is a "here".
- There is a "now", surely assuming there is time.

"there is something", assume a lot less.
You could have something without time, and without space, and without thought, and without any concept you could think of.
And if you have time, or a "now", or a "here", you have something.

"there is something", is certain, because "something" is the ultimate abstraction, it is the vagueness that give the certainty, not the vagueness of the meaning of the sentence, but the vagueness of what the meaning refer in the reality.
PoeticUniverse
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by PoeticUniverse »

Lawrence Crocker wrote:What I have doubts about is the special sense of "certain" required to give a flat 0 to "the moon is made of green cheese" instead of a probability of .000000000000001.
The moon is crusty, hard, dusty, and cratered. Well, this is exactly what happens when you leave cheese out!
PoeticUniverse
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Re: Absolutely Nothing is Absolutely Certain

Post by PoeticUniverse »

dionisos wrote:I am of this breed of idiot (to proclaim "I don't exist") :D
Or more precisely, i consider i am the thoughts, i am not something that does the thoughts, nor something that contains the thoughts.
It follow i don’t think i am persistent in time, i am only here and now. In the future and in the past, it is another.
Yes, in the sense that we don't 'do' anything, for rather the Cosmos does us, and also in the sense that the results must come after whatever does the analysis to produce them.
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