Notable Quotes: Do not worry about other people or what they think about you

Don’t worry about what other people do or who they are. Be who you are. (John Malkovich)

YouTube: John Malkovich on Being John Malkovich - A conversation with John Hodgman. 09 May 2020. 26m. youtube.com/watch?v=UwYV9JKOWaE

 

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. (Anonymous)

 

Apart from this, what goes on in other people's consciousness is, as such, a matter of indifference to us: and in time we get really indifferent to it, when we come to see how superficial and futile are most people's thoughts, how narrow their ideas, how mean their sentiments, how perverse their opinions, and how much of error there is in most of them; when we learn by experience with what depreciation a man will speak of his fellow, when he is not obliged to fear him, or thinks that what he says will not come to his ears. And if ever we have had an opportunity of seeing how the greatest of men will meet with nothing but slight from half-a-dozen blockheads, we shall understand that to lay great value upon what other people say is to pay them too much honour. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

 

The Wisdom of Life, pg 61 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/The_wisdom_of_life_-_being_the_first_part_of_Arthur_Schopenhauer's_Aphorismen_zur_Lebensweisheit_(IA_cu31924029073513).pdf)  

 

I am a stone / unaffected (Demon Hunter)

 

John 21 (NRSVUE): Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them . . . . When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, "Lord, what about him?" Jesus said to him, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!"

 

What an abundance of leisure the person gains who is not looking over at what his neighbor is saying, doing, or thinking, but only at what he himself is doing, in order that he does what is just and respectful of the gods. As Agathon said, do not peer into the darkness of another's character, but run straight toward the finish line without straying from your path. (Marcus Aurelius)

 

4.18, trans. Jacob Needleman & John Piazza

 

I have often been amazed at how every person loves himself more than he loves others yet places less value on his own judgment of himself than on the judgments of others concerning him. (Marcus Aurelius)

 

12.4 

 

Matthew 7: "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

 

Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you."

 

You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. (Idiom)

 

There's a world within me that I cannot explain (Daft Punk)

 

I made you with an everlasting glory that only you have, and only you can have. Every creature has unique glory. (Joshua and Rachel Rasmussen)

 

When Heaven Invades Hell, 192. 

 

You will show them / you're blessed with an unlimited supply (Disturbed)

 

I got a gold mine, it's all mine / nobody can touch this gold of mine (Kimbra)

 

I'm bigger than my body / I'm colder than this home / I'm meaner than my demons / I'm bigger than these bones (Halsey)

 

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. (Anonymous, attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt)

 

Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer. (Rick and Morty)

 

Why are people in America wooed by unnecessary forms of affirmation? If you are right, if you are fighting against evil and fighting against lies, you don't need to belong to any other club. Even if it was just you, the club of one would be the only one worth being in. (Douglas Murray)

 

YouTube: The Eric Metaxas Radio Show. 26 Oct 2020. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. 32:40. youtube.com/watch?v=XNq3Ykr9nhU (No longer available).

Project: Autism and Philosophy

Final contents:

I: Epistemology and Metaphysics

1. Intellectual Virtue
2. Mistakes, ‘Should’ Statements, and Normativity
3. Truth, Properties, and Reference
4. Essence Facts and Justification

II: Value Theory

5. Saving Goods and Depriving Evils
6. Morality and Reason

III: Religion and Human Nature

7. ASD
8. Mitigated Cynicism and Human Nature
9. Bundle Theory and Personal Identity
10.  No Free Will
11.  Challenges to Christian Belief

IV: The Problem of Evil

12.  The Problem of Unjustified Evils I: Apparently Unjustified Evils
13.  The Problem of Unjustified Evils II: The Failure of Theodicies
14.  The Problem of Unjustified Evils III: The Failure of Skeptical Theism
15.  The Logical Problem of Hell
16.  The Nightmare God of Love
17.  The Problem of Unbearable Suffering

V: Aftermath

18.  The Case for Pro-Theism
19.  Mitigated Pessimism and the Meaning of Life
20.  Virtue and Despair

Graham Priest on Capitalism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDAJDN57tXM

 

43:45 - "Well it's clear that [capitalism] makes a lot of people pretty miserable. I think it'd be better if we had a socialist configuration that didn't do that."

 

Bonus:

 

49:40: "A lot of people I'm afraid aren't terribly thoughtful; they never really think about what they believe and why they believe it."

 

Bonus 2:

 

1:01:58: "Some people think that changing your mind is a sign of weakness; I think it's a sign of intellectual strength."

Michelle Liu and Philip Goff – revelation and phenomenal definitions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4lxt2Hhc0k

 

28m

 

Michelle Liu gives these test sentences: 

 

"I know what gold looks like but I don't know what gold really is."

 

Sounds fine. 

 

"I know what an itch feels like but I don't know what the feeling of an itch really is."

 

Sounds contradictory. 

 

"We have all seen diamonds, but do you know what a diamond really is?"

 

Sounds fine. 

 

"You have experienced toothaches, but do you really know what the feeling of a toothache really is?"

 

Sounds like a self-answering question because if we have experienced toothaches then the answer must be yes, we really know what the feeling of a toothache really is.

 

When we're talking about appearances themselves, the appearance/reality distinction collapses and you have phenomenal / noumenal collapse where the thing-as-it-appears and the thing-in-itself are one and the same.

 

So I have the intuition in favor of revelation. 

 

Revelation is the theory that just by having an experience, the nature of that experience has been revealed to you. Or as Goff puts it (4m): "A feeling is defined by how it feels, and you know how it feels when you feel it." Or, "We grasp the nature of the feeling just by attending to introspectively." (14m)

 

Goff mention's Ned Block's idea of overflow where we can be blind in the peripherals of our experience, and change blindness apparently provides some empirical evidence of this. However, "insofar as we grasp what it is like or how it feels, to that extent we grasp the essence."

 

Goff and Liu mention that while the word 'essence' or 'nature' might sound mysterious to non-philosophers, it's an entirely unproblematic notion. If you accept that words have definitions, then you accept that things have essences. A triangle is defined as a closed shape with three sides. So having more or fewer than three sides would get you kicked out of the triangle club so to speak. Being a non-shape would also get you kicked out. While being a shape helps you get into the triangle club, it's not enough by itself because you can be a shape without being a triangle, so that's a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a triangle. Having exactly three sides is also necessary but not sufficient, because you could have a square with one side removed. Only a closed shape with three sides is allowed in the triangle club.

 

Argument against physicalism:

 

Structure (modus tollens): 

 

1) If P, then Q.

2) ~Q.

3) Therefore, ~P. 

 

Argument: 

 

1) If physicalism is true, then to know the nature of a feeling is to know the physical mechanisms of that feeling.

 

2) To know the nature of a feeling is to not know the physical mechanisms of that feeling.

 

3) Therefore, physicalism is not true.

 

The controversial premise here is premise 2. So why believe premise 2 is true?

 

Structure (modus ponens):

 

1) If P, then Q.

2) P.

3) Therefore, Q.

 

1) If revelation is true, then by experiencing a feeling we know the nature of this feeling just by feeling it.

 

2) Revelation is true.

 

3) Therefore, by experiencing a feeling we know the nature of this feeling just by feeling it.

 

(Note: To know the nature of something does not require that you know the underlying cause of it. You can know that an ingot of gold is in fact gold without knowing where that ingot came from.)

 

If it's true that when we experience our feelings, we know the essence of this feeling, then it's also true that when we experience our feelings we don't know the physical mechanisms behind them, supporting premise 2 in the first argument.

 

If premise 1 of each argument is accepted, and they both seem uncontroversial, then the physicalist will have to deny either premise 2 of the first argument or premise 2 of the second argument.

 

Goff asks Liu (33m) how to respond to the demand of defining something phenomenal. What is the essence of pain? What is the essence of red?

 

The answer is that phenomenal definitions are not propositional. Liu mentions how know-how knowledge often cannot be put into words, but you still have the knowledge. Maybe know-how knowledge is a kind of phenomenal knowledge? Though I suppose know-how knowledge is also bundled up with thoughts of goals, success, and step-wise instruction.

 

A hint that you've stumbled onto a phenomenal definition is whether trying to define the thing in question leads to a circular or restated definition. What is an itch? It's that itchy feeling. What is pain? It is that painful feeling. What is red? It's that red color.

James Miller, Words and Other Linguistic Entities

Miller, James (forthcoming). Words and Other Linguistic Entities. Oxford University Press.

 

Abstract: 

 

Linguistic entities play a major part in almost all elements of our lives. Despite this, relatively little work exists in philosophy that considers what such entities are. In the work that does focus specifically on the metaphysics of words, the dominant view is type-realism, which posits that words are abstract types, instantiated by concrete tokens. This book argues, however, that type-realism faces a range of problems and that positing abstract types cannot help us to explain a range of ordinary everyday linguistic phenomena. In its place, this book argues in favour of a novel version of nominalism about words, holding that ordinary claims about words are in fact claims about collections of word-tokens only. Through combining nominalism with a trope-bundle metaphysics, this book proposes a 'bundle-nominalist' metaphysics of words, in which word-tokens are analysed as bundles of particular properties, which cluster in repeatable and predictable ways due to the acting of various homeostatic mechanisms. This view is then extended to other linguistic entities, such as morphemes, phonemes, sentences, and languages. The result is a unified metaphysics of linguistic entities, which is argued to be both consistent with linguistic theorising and highly explanatory. Words and Other Linguistic Entities outlines how this 'bundle-nominalist' metaphysics can provide new insights into a range of linguistic phenomena, including linguistic mistakes, linguistic change, and the nature of offensive language, and can help illuminate ongoing debates over the subject matter of linguistics and the evolution of language.

 

I gasped when I read this. Bundle theory mentioned!

Traceability in property reference in a bundle theory of propositions

Josh Rasmussen gives a kind of bundle theory (in terms of arrangements) of propositions. ("About Aboutness", Metaphysica)

 

Inspired by this I write the following, but I won't attribute any of the following, and any mistakes it contains, to Rasmussen's view.

 

Property: A direct, indirect, or modal experience. By 'modal experience' I mean something a person would experience if they were situated in the right context. 

 

Concept: A concept is a reference to a property. So, concepts reference direct, indirect, or modal experiences.

 

Word: A word is a combination of sounds, symbols, or both, and refers to a concept or bundle of concepts. By transitivity, words refer to properties or bundles of properties.

 

The words 'fire' and 'feu', while different words, both refer to the same concept(s) (or close enough), and thus are bundling the same properties.

 

Proposition: A combination of concepts that designates, by predication, what is being referred, and thus can be true or false.

 

Sentence: A sequence of words governed by grammatical rules that references a proposition.

 

The sentences 'Fire is hot' and 'Le feu est chaud', while different sentences, refer to the same proposition (or close enough).

 

Truth: Reference to non-fictional properties.

 

Falsity: Reference to fictional properties. 

 

Problem: You can take a single word like 'unicorn', which refers to fictional properties, and yet this singular word cannot be true or false. But if falsity just is reference to fictional properties, and 'unicorn' references fictional properties, then 'unicorn' is false.

 

This is where predication comes in: Only by designating what is being referred to can you evaluate whether something is true or false. While 'unicorn' refers to fictional properties, we don't know what is being said about unicorns. If you say:

 

    Unicorns are everywhere.

 

This is false. But if you say:

 

    There are no unicorns.

 

This is true.

 

So referring to false properties isn't enough to reach falsity; to reach falsity you need to make an existential claim, which means attributing non-fiction to fictional properties, or attributing fiction to non-fictional properties. But abstract objects like propositions don't make claims; people make claims. So how do I capture the claim-like nature of propositions?

 

Maybe attribution is enough – attributing fiction to non-fictional properties, or vice versa? Or maybe propositions have a representational aspect, and false propositions contain misrepresentation?

 

But that's beside the point here. The above definitions are rough and need revisiting, but the task at hand is to focus on the concept of fiction.

 

Fictional properties: Properties (or bundles) that can be traced to an act of imagination.

 

Non-fictional properties: Properties (or bundles) that cannot be traced to an act of imagination.

 

Problem: Someone could, by luck, or by educated prediction, use their imagination to combine properties and stumble upon a true proposition that nonetheless traces back to an act of imagination. And despite these properties being non-fictional, they can be traced to an act of imagination. Is this a fictional proposition, or non-fictional?

 

The answer is that it is non-fictional, requiring the fix: 

 

Fictional properties*: Properties (or bundles) that can only be traced to an act of imagination.

 

Examples: Golden mountains, unicorns, wizards.

 

Note: If 'unicorn' itself is something like: horse + horn + magic + rarity, or something roughly like this, then the properties of horse, horn, etc., are not fictional. What's fictional is the bundle of the properties. Same with gold + mountain: two non-fictional properties that together make a fictional bundle. Even magic probably can be reduced to real properties, with the bundle being fictional. If all acts of imagination depend on experience, then all fictional properties are ultimately fictional bundles of non-fictional properties.

 

Non-fictional properties*: Properties (or bundles) that cannot be traced in all cases to an act of imagination.

 

'In all cases' applies to modal cases: If everyone only ever imagines wormholes, but wormholes end up being real, wormholes are still non-fictional because it's not in all cases that wormholes can be traced to acts of imagination; if someone were in the right situation, they would experience wormholes (even if only indirectly through scientific instruments), and in this case the wormhole properties could not be traced to an act of imagination, but must be traced to experience.

 

(Also, it's almost certainly the case that what is being imagined is not quite what is real; imagination is never perfectly successful. But imagination can still be successful enough in a broad sense to enable this traceability objection.)

 

And that's what we're getting at with falsity versus truth: Can the proposition only ever be traced to acts of imagination even given modal cases (falsity), or can the proposition be traced to experience, at least modally (truth)?

 

The modality can be restricted. It might be that wormholes are impossible in our universe, but possible in a different universe. To say wormholes are fictions is to say that an omniscient observer restricted to our universe would not experience wormholes (though they would experience our thoughts and stories about wormholes).

 

But maybe there's a simpler strategy: If properties are experiences (including modal), then fictions are non-experienced bundles of properties traced to acts of imagination. "Fictional property" becomes an oxymoron, with only bundles being fictions. While ‘magical’ sounds like a fictional property, again magic could be reduced to a fictional bundle of real properties (of agency, power, etc.)

Red Button, Blue Button

You find yourself teleported in a room. There are two tables, one with a red button and one with a blue button. Above the red button is a sign that says, in whatever language you are most fluent in, MURDER BUTTON. The same for the blue button, except that sign says SUICIDE BUTTON.

 

In whatever language you are most fluent in, a sign between the buttons reads the following:

 

Hello! I am a Djinn who has teleported you into this dream world. Don't worry, time outside has been stopped. All other able-minded adults in the entire world aged 18 and up have also been teleported into this dream world at this time.

 

If 50% or more of participants press the red button, all participants who press the blue button will be killed. So, if you press the red button, you are guaranteed to survive, but you might be guilty of murdering however many people press blue.

 

If 50% or more of participants press the blue button, all participants will live. You are guaranteed to be blameless of participating in anyone's death, but you might die.

 

Which button will you press? 

 

For those who are thinking of pressing red, please consider: It's statistically guaranteed that at least a small number of people will choose blue. So if red wins, you will be guilty of killing these people.

 

When pressing the red button, you might disagree that this is the MURDER BUTTON. After all, those who choose blue are willing to die; they are killing themselves. The rational choice is to guarantee your survival, and if everyone chooses red, everyone survives. Who cares if a few irrational people die? If irrational people take themselves out of the gene pool, isn't that a win for humanity? "I'm not killing anyone by pressing red; the Djinn is the real killer here! I didn't choose to be here. I'm just guaranteeing my survival, which is the rational thing to do, and everyone else has just as easy access to their own survival as I do, so it's their own fault for choosing to risk their lives for no reason." So, you might figure that pressing the red button does not constitute murder, or even homicide.

 

For those who are thinking of pressing blue, please consider: You may trust your own culture to choose blue with you. But how confident are you that most humans in the world will choose blue? Won't most people follow the above logic about self-preservation and rationality? Maybe only a small percentage will press blue, and your vote never would have made a difference, and you will have died for nothing.

 

When pressing the blue button, you might disagree that this is the SUICIDE BUTTON. After all, if only 50% or more choose blue, everyone survives; no suicide here. Most importantly, you know that some people will press blue to ensure their own blamelessness, guaranteeing some blue votes. You are risking your life to save these people by pressing blue. Isn't that the noble thing to do? Who could live with themselves knowing that they helped cause the deaths of those noble enough to press blue? If red barely wins, nearly half of everyone will die. Are you willing to risk this?

 

I will give all of you one hour to decide which button you will press. At the end of the hour all of your fates will be decided. During this hour, if you press one button, you can press the other button to change your vote. If neither button is depressed within the hour, you die, and no vote will be cast on your behalf. Any deaths will be instant and painless.

 

***

 

It's interesting to see this thought experiment articulated in different ways, and to see on Twitter how different articulations can yield different results. With this articulation, I'd press blue, but not necessarily because I am a "good person", whatever that means, but because doing the blameless thing makes me happy. Participating in the deaths of blue voters would make me lose self-respect, and while red voters would call this irrational, because you shouldn't feel bad for those who take unnecessary risks, their arguments are weak enough that I don't see my mind changing soon. For example, voting blue is a necessary risk if feeling blameless is very important to you. Arguably, voting red is the unnecessary risk – of becoming an accomplice to mass murder.

 

Additionally, voting red incentivizes you to take on a callous attitude towards dead blue voters to cope with your choice, exposing either your own moral insecurity or indifference. I prefer to avoid that.

 

One final note: Some folks want to apply expected value calculations to show that pressing red is the correct choice. But if these calculations fail to incorporate the value of being happy with oneself, the cost of self-hatred, and the cost of lives lost, then they are incomplete.