Posts by Martin

I noticed with other PD's, too, that Saint-Andre's translation appears to be the most consistent with Epicurus' philosophy as a whole as we usually interpret it here with quite some consensus.

Welcome AGB!

The video is impressive, especially when the feathers, after falling with the same speed as the ball, bounce off the target to a considerable height, which they do not do to a visible height at atmospheric pressure. However, Brian Cox misrepresents the difference between Einstein's take on gravity and Newton's. Actually, Einstein concluded from his theory that we cannot distinguish the effect of gravity from that of an accelerated reference system locally from the movement of test masses, but not that there is no force.

Martin started a new event:

Event

International festival of philosophy phil. Cologne 2021

The international festival of philosophy phil. Cologne is schedules for September 2 - September 8: https://www.philcologne.de

The "international" is quite exaggerated because the program indicates that all events are held in German language.

Most of the events are on current problems and overlap more or less with politics.

Most events cost up to 19 Euros, so attending several will become costly. Even on-line attendance needs payment.

None of the events appear interesting enough for me to attend.…

Thu, Sep 2nd 2021, 2:30 pm – Wed, Sep 8th 2021, 5:00 pm

Martin

August 28, 2021 at 5:25 AM

Quote

The international festival of philosophy phil. Cologne is schedules for September 2 - September 8: https://www.philcologne.de

The "international" is quite exaggerated because the program indicates that all events are held in German language.

Most of the events are on current problems and overlap more or less with politics.

Most events cost up to 19 Euros, so attending several will become costly. Even on-line attendance needs payment.

None of the events appear interesting enough for me to attend. Epicurus is not even mentioned in the program but might very well be mentioned by some presenters. (I had to use the not fitting category "Epicurean Events" to get the post submitted.)

Among the many presenters, Richard David Precht is the only philosopher with whose name I am familiar.

Let me know before September 2 if you see something of particular interest in the program. I might reconsider to attend and report about it here.

Display More

Except for the "No", I agree with Godfrey's comment #61.

In my comment #43, I used "map" in a loose meaning in the sense of a model just because I was referring to a quote using the word "map" and did not notice that my statement becomes wrong when applying a proper definition of the word "map". A model could be anything, e.g. a set of markers.

Regarding syllogisms, I meant the internalization such that we do not need to write down a truth table every time we consciously apply logic. My personal observation at the end of #43 is an indication that we cannot subconsciously perform logic in a reliable way while we are not fully conscious. Logic is apparently performed in a part of the brain which actually turns off when we are not fully awake.

When (binary) logic is taught, it is usually exemplified by combining statements which are obviously true.

Logic works only with crisp (100% true) and timeless statements (or statements on events of the past or present). If any of the premises is not 100% true but only with some probability, the conclusion is not reliably true.

In fuzzy logic as applied technically in designing control loops, you can still get a conclusion with a high probability of truth if the examined system is linear.

In (practical or philosophical) cases which are not obvious, the premises are typically not crisp, their probabilities of truth are not known and it it is not known whether the probabilities of truth of the premises are linearly connected with the probability of truth of the statement to be proven.

Epicurus knew that proponents of dialectics misrepresent the reasoning as crisp while it is actually not, was aware that logic may not fully apply to future events and saw that rhetors can confuse an untrained audience with paradoxons.

Therefore, it makes perfectly sense that he excluded logic from the canon of truth regarding daily life and philosophical discussion.

Nevertheless, he did use logic in his syllogisms and in what he called "true reasoning".

Quote

"if the premises are false, the conclusion is going to be false."

No.

If the premises are false, the conclusion is not necessarily false.

Otherwise, you could "refute" a true statement by presenting it as the conclusion of false premises.

The truth table of a syllogism looks like this (you can verify by thinking it through line by line):

You can see from this table that the conclusion may be true if any or both of the premises are false.

Quote

"We don't consider maps necessary to our being able day-to-day to navigate in reality, and we shouldn't consider syllogistic logic to be a requirement of our being confident in our day-to-day thinking either."

No.

We don't consider maps necessary to our being able day-to-day to navigate in reality because we have internalized them and use them intuitively without realizing it.

Similarly, we have internalized "syllogistic" logic such that we use it in our day-to-day thinking when fully awake without realizing it.

Interestingly, when I am very tired but still awake, logic does no more work but the results from the associative thinking which continues are often lousy because no logic has been applied as a sanity check.

Welcome Philia!

When my father crashed his car in a mass pile-up in 1970, it was reconstructed that all involved drivers went too fast for the rainy weather and got fined.

So yes, even if there is no formal speed limit or if drivers stay below an existing speed limit, they can get fined and get judged to have caused an accident because they went too fast for the circumstances.

Most likely, Hossenfelder means someone from Hossenfeld. I do not know whether there is or was a village with that name.

Malte Hossenfelder was a German professor of philosophy (1935 - 2011). Among his works are publications on Kant, Epicurus, the history of Hellenistic philosophy. Wikipedia claims that he identified imperturbability as the common goal of Epicurus' philosophy, the Stoa and Skepticism.

Sabine Hossenfelder was born in 1976. Her father died at the rather young age of 42, so he was not Malte.

I found no information on whether Sabine is a relative of Malte or whether she knows about him.

Here is my first response to the video of Sabine Hossenfelder on free will:

Reductionism combined with hard determinism excludes the possibility of free will. It seems that is essentially what she correctly presents in the video. She knows math and physics much better than I. Therefore, it surprises me that she makes a number of contradictions/mistakes which mislead her into reductionism and hard determinism:

Science has provided what is probably our best methodology to understand the world and act in it by applying scientific models in analogy of using maps to find our way. However, she is promoting reductionism, which means in that analogy that she is confounding the map with the territory.

She follows hard determinism by claiming that everything has been predetermined since the big bang. Later on, she correctly refers to quantum indeterminacy but overlooks that it contradicts the hard determinism she just claimed before.

It seems she implies that there is no evidence that free will exists because we cannot turn back time and make a different decision. However, that same reason constitutes no evidence that free will does not exist.

I have repeatedly read claims by professors of theoretical physics that classical thermodynamics already rules out hard determinism but I do not understand the reason. I guess that lack of understanding is why the reference to emergent properties to justify the existence of free will does not convince me. She does not address that path to free will. Therefore, it seems that she does not know that reason either :-).

One of the statements where I agree with her is that quantum indeterminacy does not directly support free will because we cannot influence quantum indeterminacy. In my view, quantum indeterminacy breaks hard determinism and thereby may enable free will but it is not obvious how beyond that precondition that hard determinism is ruled out.

One aspect which she does not cover is that free will has connotations of a supernatural soul. Therefore, agency is a much better term for what we claim in Epicurean philosophy based on the observation that different individuals take different actions even when all circumstances appear to be the same. Once we put our mind into something we put in a lot of effort in making the goal happen. A person who has resigned to a predetermined fate is less likely to put in a lot of effort. Agency seems to be compatible with Hossenfelder's differential equations determining the immediate future from the presence if a random term from (quantum) indeterminacy is included.

I did not watch the video on Noam Chomsky. I agree mostly with what is quoted from his interview when using free will in the sense of agency except that I expect that eventually, neurophysicists, neurologists or the like will eventually come up with a good model and possibly a suitable redefinition to describe what we feel like Chomsky to be free will/agency.

I will pronounce them during our Sunday call.

In German, -ist is a a very common ending for a person who belongs to a particlar group or has a particular characteristic, similar to scientist, physicist, chemist and so on in English, whereby, however, the German words for those have the in German more common ending -er for members of a profession.

Nietzsche's rhyme is there but it is nothing deeper than just a pun.

Hi Jack!

I enjoyed the session last Monday. As mentioned then, this Friday was a regular working day for me, so I could not attend. Monday, August 2nd, is the first day of my annual time-out from work, and I should be able to attend.

Welcome Macario!

Yes.

Welcome Will1776!

Welcome Jo.!

Welcome Paquin!