Hal

It depends on how you want to define the terms 'discovered' and 'invented'. Given a set of axioms and inference rules, all of the theorems which follow from them are, in a sense, immediately determined (ie we could program a computer to succesive churn them out). But this says no more than the fact that given some natural language with a finite number of words (such as English), all possibly 400 pages books are determined in advance (there are only finitely many different sequences of words which can fill 400 pages). But noone would say that a particular novel was discovered rather than invented, even though it was, in a sense, already present in the 'state space' of possible English language books. Having said that, there are certain things in mathematics where the word 'discover' seems to make more sense than 'invent' - the Mandelbrot set (which was found by mistake) would be a good example, along with a lot of complex analysis, where making a single addition to the real numbers managed to produce a truly amazing amount of theory which noone could possibly have predicted in advance. The imaginary number 'i' was 'invented' for the purposes of solving certain equations, but introducing it had consequences which went far far beyond this. I'm not sure what youre asking here. If you want to know how a particular theorem was discovered/invented, then read a history of mathematics book that describes the details. But I suspect this isnt what you mean. I think that this is a bad example, but when it comes to mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, we can say they would exist without humans in the sense that alien mathematicians on a planet millions of lightyears away would be able to find the same object. Once you have defined the rules for complex numbers, its always 'there'. I think this is generally correct. There are infinitely many ways of defining the addition function '+' on the integers, so the choice of which one to use is giong to be determined by our pratical needs. Defining '+' so we get that 2+2=4 is useful in a world where most natural objects obey this law, but if the world were other than what it is, a different definition might be more appropriate. Geomtery is a good analogy here - there are many different possibly geometries, but we use Euclidean in day to day life since thats the one which is best suited to describing the world around us. The reason people want to say math was discovered is because of the tendency it has to produce surprises, and 'link up' in unexpected ways. There are some things in maths which are truly amazing, and saying that they were 'invented' and that the deep structure is just 'coincidence' seems inadquate. Focusing on examples like 2+2 = 4 is misleading beacuse theres nothing deep or interesting going on there - you really have to consider more advanced topics to get a feel for the sort of thing that makes mathematicians tend towards Platonism.

What does 'faking happyness' even mean? Surely the criterion for being happy is just feeling happy? The reason short-term pleasure pursuit is often immoral is because it can have negative long term effects on your life, not because the feeling you get from it is fake (whatever that means).

This isnt true, unless you are talking specifically about manual labour. Men tend to be stronger than women, but that is only an issue in a small percentage of jobs. Women are only in labour for 9 months at a time, so I dont think it would get in the way that much. I would say that the main issue here is our cultural stereotype of women being the childraisers whereas men go out to work, and this doesnt stem from physiology alone. Well, would you say that blacks were responsible for slavery? I think the standard feminist answer to this would involve false consciousness and hegemony, although I dont think de Bouvoir was a marxist.

I read his post as "men and women arent equal...because of our cultural history", which is a fairly accurate statement of the standard feminist position (in as much as there is a 'standard feminist position'). If this is a misreading I'm sure Styles2112 will correct me.

I dont know why feminists would be angry at you because of that - this is essentially what most of them are (correctly) arguing anyway. Our present attitudes towards masculinity and feminity are largely a result of our contingent "cultural history" rather than being derived from nature in any objective sense. Theres a lot of feminist literature out there arguing that our gender/sexual categories have been historically constructed, unfortuately most of it seems to stem from Marxist frameworks that views the current attitudes we have as being 'oppressive'.

Yeah, I agree. I dont understant the cultural myth we have where alcohol is meant to be some sort of queer magical potion which turns people into completely different entities. If you are a sane and fairly well balanced individual, then you arent going to start shooting random people just because youve had a few drinks. Perhaps if you already have aggressive tendencies then alcohol may heighten them, but its silly to make absolute statements like 'alcohol makes people do X'. Ive never had much of a problem controlling myself on alcohol, and I'd guess that most of the arguments people are using in this thread are based on induction from a biased, uncontrolled N < 50 sample size, which isnt particularly meaningful.

See "On Seeing Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue", Hewitt D. Crane; Thomas P. Piantanida, Science > New Series, Vol. 221, No. 4615 (Sep., 1983), pp. 1078-1080, which I assume is what he's talking about. There's an online copy here but the formatting is fairly poor. JSTOR has a better version if you have access.

Fairly so. Your best bet to get a quick overview of where Dennett is coming from would be the above paper I linked, along with perhaps "Quining Qualia", "An Overview of my Work in Philosophy", and "The Fantasy of First-Person Science" from here. However his most influential doctrine is probably that of the Intentional Stance, where intentional systems/mental states are defined in terms of the attitudes we have towards them (if I say that some object, be it a person, computer or thermostate 'believes' X, then this just means that it is convenient/natural to use the discourse of 'beliefs' in order to explain its behavior. Theres nothing more involved in 'having beliefs' than being capable of being described using words like 'believe'). In other words, hes a philosophical behaviorist, strongly influenced by Gilbert Ryle and Wittgenstein (who he misinterprets utterly). Along with Paul Churchland, he's probably been the most influential champion of materialism within academic philosophy during the last 30 years. Your best bet to learn about Dennett would be to read the book that you have by him. Dont let the opinions of others prejudice you - Dennett has a very clear writing style and doesnt use academic jargon, so theres no excuse not to base your evaluation of him on primary sources alone. But bear in mind that what youre getting is probably the most extreme and uncompromising statement of the materialist/neo-darwinian position out there.

I dont think its that simple. Have you ever felt incredibly bored - not because there was nothing to do, but because you simply didnt want to do anything? There were activities which you normally participated in but, in your current mood, you simply couldnt derive any pleasure from? This sort of boredom is, in a sense, entirely in the mind - even if you were placed in a situation where you would normally be very excited/happy, you still would be unlikely to respond to it simply because of your mood. I would assume that this is what severe depression is like - its not that 'life is hopeless/meaningless' in any objective sense; its more that youre unable to derive any pleasure/meaning from life. It's no good saying that these people should do X, for the same reason that it would be pointless telling the bored person to just 'do something interesting' (or telling someone whose wife had just died that he should do something fun to take his mind off it). The only real option is to wait until the mood has passed and youve returned to 'normal'. But if the depressed person didnt recover after several years, despite trying various different things (eg medical drugs), then suicide might become an option.

That's a misleading way of phrasing things. The point of paraconsistent logics isnt to accept contradictions as true - its to create a system which doesnt fall apart the minute you get a contradiction. In classical logic, having an inconsistent system is catastrophic because it allows you to prove anything whatsoever (since anything follows from a false statement). But this is very unrealistic: humans are generally able to function perfectly well even if they believe contradictory things - the error is isolated to some degree. Hence paraconsistent logics (once which 'fail gracefully' like humans do) can be useful when designing reasoning agents (eg robots) which function in real world environments and might pick up errors by mistake. Its not a case of saying 'contradictions are good!' or 'lets throw out identity!' - its a pragmatic decision to accept that some contradictions are likely to occur in reasoning, and to prepare accordingly. Theres a decent article on platostanford about paraconsistent logic which gives a fuller explanation than wikipedia, along with describing the motivations: etc

Imagining an empty space doesnt imply that youre imagining an existence without existents. Also, how do you know that the space you are imagining is really empty? There might be (eg) quantum fields and vacuum fluctuations in it which you just cant see!

It depends what you want to use it for. If its for something 'day to day' like evaluating your emotions or values then sure, introspection is a good method. However when it comes to doing scientific psychology, more objective methods should be used to supplement it where possible. A research paper which was nothing but a scientist describing his introspective experiences might not be capable of producing anything repeatable or verifiable. But at the same time, the value of introspective works like Aldous Huxley's "Doors of Perception" shouldnt be understated. If someone is good at describing things and noticing fine details, then a description of their subjective experiences can certainly be worthwhile. The biggest problem with introspective reports is that they are necessarily mediated by language. People generally arent very good at describing their experiences, and our forms of expression can often mislead us - the words that a person uses to 'translate' his experience can be heavily influenced by his worldview, and this presents a barrier to objectivity. The 'do we observe volition?' debates on this forum are excellent example of this sort of thing. Both sides are under the impression that they are simply giving a description of their experiences, yet they produce descriptions which are diametrically opposed. This is a language problem. Here are 2 specific things which illustrate the limitations of introspection in philo/psychology: 1) it is intuitively obviously that we can make colour discriminations over our entire visual field. However, this is wrong. People generally cannot discern the colour of objects that lie outwith a 45 degree angle directly in front of them, even though they can 'see' the object. 2) Imagine a blue sky, or someone's face. What is it youre actually doing? Most people will say they 'see' the sky in their minds eye. This is an example of a metaphor leading us astray. 'Seeing' things with your mind is very different from 'seeing' things with your eye. I look at my computer monitor in front of me, yet I am also 'aware' of a persons face in my mind. But the perception of the face doesnt in any way obscure my perception of the monitor (the face isnt in my visual field). So where exactly IS the face? How do I see 2 things at once, without either of them being 'on top' of the other? The language which we are tempted to use to describe this sort of thing leads to the idea of there being a face existing purely 'in my mind' , which leads to 'cartesian theatre' viewpoints. edit: <rant> the problem with Dennett's 'heterophenomenology' is that its absurdly pointless - it closes off perfectly valid lines of research simply to satisfy his strange philosophical biases. There are certainly pitfalls to using introspection, but theres no reason why a scientist cant write about his own experiences as long as he can tell others how to reproduce them for theirselves. Again, Aldous Huxley's writing is a good example of this - if he had been describing something that had never happened to anyone before, then the scientific value of his work would be questionable. However, his experiences were repeatable in the sense that anyone is able to take mescaline, and the accounts of different mescaline (and other hallucinogenic drug) users exhibit a remarkable degree of cohesion. Dennett has a very strange idea of what it means for something to be 'repeatable'. If I find out that pressing my eye in a certain way causes me to see a red square, then 'scientific repeatability' doesnt require me to do an experiment where I get 100 people to press their eye and write up their reports. Instead, I could just write a paper explaining the effect it had on me, and tell others that they could experience the same thing by pressing their eye too. </rant> These questions might be interesting for you personally, but they are fairly irrelevant from the standpoint of philosophy/psychology.

What does it mean to imagine that 'no existents exist'? What are you actually doing in your mind's eye while you do this? When I try it, the best I can do is to imagine an indeterminate black patch of space, with the words "nothing is in here!!!" written underneath. I think that when doing philosophy, people are often too quick to assume that they can imagine/understand things. The fact that a group of words seem to form a grammatically correct English sentence isnt enough to ensure that they actually make sense.

If I knew that my neighbour was torturing his cat then I would have no problem taking the cat from him, and I certainly wouldnt class this as being theft. I'm not sure how to interpret this in terms of animal rights, but meh.

http://www.aynrandbookstore2.com/store/products.asp?dept=52 I havent read/heard any of this, so dont take it as a recommendation.

Do you have evidence for any of these claims? The question of whether (to use my former example again) feral children have conceptual consciousness is an interesting one, and blindly making assertions about what 'must' be the case is both unscientific and silly.

I think the claim that (eg) feral children have volition would be quite controversial, and I've no idea how you would begin to go about proving it. Personally, I would guess that developing volition (and perhaps even conceptual consciousness) requires some degree of socialization into a culture and the associated acquisition of language, however I couldnt prove this either. But in the absence of evidence either way, I find the idea of humans having volition/conceptual consciousness from birth, regardless of their upbringing and language skills, to be unlikely.

I'm about to start a weights routine (I currently weigh 145 pounds ). However, I do fairly intense martial arts training 3-4 days a week, which includes full-contact sparring at pretty much every session. I'm guessing that a program such as Mentzer's, which involves training to failure, would be a pretty bad idea given my circumstances - could someone more knowledgable than me confirm/deny whether this is true? cheers.

http://www.jp.dk/english_news/artikel:aid=3546222/ http://news.yahoo.com/s/cpress/20060208/ca...wings_holocaust Well, lets find out what happens.

I cant think of any new laws I'd like passed, although theres a large number I'd like repealed. Also yeah, this is ridiculous.

Yeah, you can define transfinite cardinals in terms of sets (aleph-0 is the cardinality of the set of integers etc), and then specify arithmetical operations on them in terms of the underlying sets. However, no operation of division is defined in standard cardinal arithmetic. For example in naive set theory, when you talk about multiplying cardinal numbers, what youre doing is talking about the cardinality of the cartesian product of the sets they represent. For example, lets say we want to multiply the cardinal numbers '2' and '3'. If '2' is a cardinal number, then there is some set A corresponding to it with 2 elements, say A = {a,b}. Similarly there is a set B = {x,y,z} corresponding to '3'. Then, 2*3 is defined to be the cardinality of the cartesian product AxB. The cartesian product is {(a,x),(a,y),(a,z),(b,x),(b,y),(b,z)}, which corresponds to the cardinal number '6' (ie there are 6 elements in it). This definition of multiplication can cover transfinite numbers - if you take the cartesian product of a set of 2 elements and a set of aleph-0 elements, then the cardinality of it will be aleph-0. So we can say 2*aleph-0 = aleph-0. The problem with defining division is that theres no obvious inverse operation to cartesian products. Hence it is generally not specificied. That isnt to say that it CANT be specified though - in some constructions of numbers such as John Conway's 'surreal number' idea, all numbers including transfinite ones obey the same rules. Theres a brief essay here about this. It does, but again cardinal exponentian is defined in terms of the underlying sets correponding to the cardinal numbers. If set A has cardinality '2' and set B has cardinality aleph-0, then 2^Aleph-0 is defined to the the cardinality of the set of all functions from A to B. This can be shown to have cardinality aleph-1. Despite all this, 'infinity' isnt a number. You can construct transfinite cardinals like aleph-0, but none have the name 'infinity'. For instance, 2*aleph-0 makes sense within cardinal arithmetic, but 2*infinity is meaningless. edit: theres a decent introduction to transfinite arithmetic here

You cant divide things by infinity, it isnt a number. 1/infinity makes no sense. You could write something like which would be equal to 0. Similarly, is true, since it reduces to 0=0.

I dont particularly want to defend Islam but assuming that you are talking about the 'sword verse', this has been refuted many many times over the last few years. The passage in question comes from a speech given by a general to his soldiers before a battle - it is not intended as a contextless statement about how to treat non-believers (compare to an American general telling his troops to 'kill all the germans' before a battle in WW2). Anyway, you cant judge a religion by its holy books alone - you have to look at how these books are being interpreted by a particular religious community. The Old Testement of the Bible is horrific for instance, but you cant really use it to derive a picture of Christianity because everyone ignores it these days (or interprets it in a benign way).

I didnt imply 'people' to mean 'the readers of this internet forum' - I was talking about the world in general. A lot of people who are condemning the Muslim reaction would probably react in similar ways if the cartoons happened to violate one of their personal taboos (eg, the Holocaust, racism, whatever). I wouldnt expect most posters here to support cartoon censorship (although given this thread on THE FORUM, who knows), but I think most non-Objectivists would under the right circumstance. This is both true, and important. However for me, the most important issue is how people in the West are reacting, rather than those in Islamic countries. The debate in Europe is being framed in terms of whether governments should allow the press to print whatever it likes. But this construction is misleading, because newspapers DONT have the right to print whatever they like - for instance, holocaust denial is illegal in France, and god knows what would happen if a mainstream British paper printed something explicitly racist against blacks. Generally speaking, there is no free press in the strict sense - the debate is really over which particular groups of people should be protected by the government. Currently, Jews and blacks are protected while Muslims arent. And in France, they get arrested.

This is a strange use of the word 'theft'. If I kill someone, am I stealing his right to life? If I rape a woman, am I stealing her innocence? I'm sure you could go through all kinds of bizarre linguistic contortions to describe every crime imaginable in terms of theft, but I'm not sure what the point would be.