HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: lee@wang.com (Lee Story)
Subject: Re: A Brief History of Tripe
Organization: Wang Laboratories, Inc.
Date: 22 Jul 92 16:18:52
	<1992Jul18.233946.13851@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu>
	<1992Jul21.194143.25575@crash.cts.com>

In article <1992Jul21.194143.25575@crash.cts.com> snodgras@crash.cts.com (John Snodgrass) writes:

		 Hawking is what he is, as we all are. Everyone is crippled in some
   way, if you choose to look at it like that. My bone to pick with Hawking,
   and with the ideas he is a proponent of, is not because he's 'a cripple',
   though as I said, I feel his particular disability is too rich a metaphor
   with what is wrong with the new physics to pass up. That's all. I think the
   whole subjectivist movement is the disolution of science into pathos.

This is the most technical of the regular philosophy newsgroups, and
as such I would think that John Snodgrass would either present his
specific objections to some of Hawking's ideas or theories, or would
move the diatribe to talk.religion.misc or alt.flame.  That is not at
all to say that recent cosmological theories are without fault, or
that their hidden assumptions (philosophy, pre-rational choices,
intuitive fundamentals) are without error.  It's simply impossible to
understand from his posts what Snodgrass considers the errors to be,
except that he apparently dislikes the tendency to proceed from a
basis of subjectivism (which, for once, both Merriam and more
specialized dictionaries roughly agree on: "theory that limits knowledge
to conscious states and elements..." or "theory that stresses the
subjective elements...").

Some of my favorite examples of questionable parts of the recent
philosophy-of-physics: The specific subcult (for lack of a better
word) of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM which insists on the
relevance of conscious observation seems, because of its probable
circularity, rather suspect to me.  On the other hand, those theories
which account for the surprising presence of life on Earth, and its
apparent absence elsewhere within our telescopes' reach, by arguments
about us being observers in an observer-poor universe (anthropic
principles) seem alright despite their surface circularity.  If the
claims which Snodgrass dislikes involve more technical matters than
these, I'm certainly willing to stick my nose in MT&W and improve my
weak background in gravitation and cosmology---and there are other
readers here who, I feel sure, are prepared without any such
refresher.

So how about some light in place of all this smoke?
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Lee Story (lee@wang.com) Wang Laboratories, Inc.
              (Merrimack Valley Paddlers)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: ric@hpspdla.spd.HP.COM (Ric Peregrino)
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 01:31:54 GMT
Subject: Re: Re: Free Will?
Organization: HP Stanford Park - Palo Alto, CA
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech



Regarding free will I wrote:

>>In essence, does free will preclude a deterministic physics?

to which Jeff Dalton responds:

>There are a number of "compatiblist" arguments in philosophy that say
>no....  Of course, not
>all philosophers think these arguments are correct, and there is some
>dispute about just what "determinism" means.

I think the language is very clear, but let me make some simple definitions.
A deterministic physics is one in which the outcome of an event can be known
before the event. Free will is the ability of a being to choose their
actions whithin the realm of possibility (ie. I can't choose to fly to
Mars today, but I can choose to post this note). Clearly a deterministic
physics thus defined precludes free will, and vice versa.

>>Or does it preclude an exact description of the state of the entire
>>universe? Or does it preclude the calculation of outcome in less time
>>than the outcome will arrive?

>That the calculation would take too long would also make actions
>unpredictable, but that hardly means they were free.  Nor would the
>impossibility of completely describing the universe mean that
>actions were free.

Agreed.

>>What about a QM type of solution where a probability of a human's
>>choice is all that could be calculated? Even still, if told the 
>>probabilities, Adam could always choose the lowest probability just
>>to spite God.

>He could, but it's unlikely that he'd do it very often (assuming, as
>we do, that God is right about the probabilities).

But he could do it always if he had free will.

Thanks for the references.

How about this. Hire a human to make a choice between two outcomes:
drink one coke or one pepsi, every day. As the days go by, I'd gain
a knowledge of this humans state function:

A |coke> + B |pepsi> , where  A^2 + B^2=1

Now, after many days I can say with what probability I expect the
human to drink coke, namely A^2. Let's say this human always drank
coke. Then I'd get A=1, and make the prediction that he'd drink 
another coke today. But what if I tell him this fact? What if I
told a lie and said I expected him to drink pepsi today? In either
case I think this transfer of information will perturb his state
and alter the coeffecients A and B. Thus if I can know what a human
is going to do, then I can't tell him, otherwise it alters the outcome.

In this case the physics is probabilistic, not deterministic, with
the additional constraint of not interacting with the observee to 
maintain the probabilistic results.

ric@spd.hp.com
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: snodgras@crash.cts.com (John Snodgrass)
Subject: Re: How can people write like that?
Organization: Crash TimeSharing, El Cajon, CA
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 20:07:34 GMT

In <1992Jul18.022130.26716@tamsun.tamu.edu> e343mh@tamuts.tamu.edu (Michael Hand) writes:


>Who licked the red off this guy's candy?

      Actually, a pit bull ate my face. Want to make something of it?

>B-o} Michael
>_______________________________________________________________________
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Michael Hand                     phone (409)845-5660, fax (409)845-0458
>Dept of Philosophy, Texas A&M Univ, College Station TX 77843-4237 U.S.A.

      SnOdGrAsS
From: luden@lehigh.edu (Dean E. Nelson)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Kant and the synthetic a priori
Date: 23 Jul 92 18:10:10 GMT
Distribution: sci
Organization: Lehigh University Computing Center

In article <RV.92Jul23001550@cslab8a.cs.brown.edu> rv@cs.brown.edu 
(rodrigo vanegas) writes:

>Just a quickie question for which i'd like a quickie straightforward
>answer.

>Much of Kant's theory rests on the notion that there is a class of
>truths which are both "a priori" and "synthetic".  Are these truths
>"necessary" or "contingent"?

Contingent; necessary truths are analytic, the complement of synthetic.
There has been a resurrection of Kant's a priori synthetic in recent
work in evolutionary epistemology, where synthetic truths about the
world are inherited as part of our evolutionary heritage.  Yet, they
are in a sense a priori, at least to individuals, because they are innate.

Dean Nelson  den0@lehigh.edu
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Free Will?
Date: 24 Jul 92 16:02:37 GMT
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

In article <14900001@hpspdla.spd.HP.COM> ric@hpspdla.spd.HP.COM (Ric Peregrino) writes:

>Let's say God created the universe and Adam. God, being perfect, knew
>the exact (no uncertainty) condition of the universe and Adam, and also
>knew the "true" laws of physics. God then calculated what Adam was
>going to have for dinner, went down and told Adam, "Adam, you will have
>spam for dinner". Now Adam hates spam.

Of course, hating X doesn't mean you won't have X for dinner, even
if you make great efforts to avoid eating X.  It might turn out that
you end up having X despite everything you've done.

>Does Adam have a choice for dinner?

Not clear.  (See below.)

>Must he eat spam or can he have lobster?

If God is omniscient, and he knows Adam will eat spam, then that's
what Adam will eat.  If God has to perform some calculations, I'd
say the situation is more or less the same, assuming (as you do
above) that the calculations can be performed.

>In essence, does free will preclude a deterministic physics?

There are a number of "compatiblist" arguments in philosophy that say
no: free will is compatible with determinism.  Some similar arguments
might be used to argue that Adam does have a choice.  Of course, not
all philosophers think these arguments are correct, and there is some
dispute about just what "determinism" means.

>Or does it preclude an exact description of the state of the entire
>universe? Or does it preclude the calculation of outcome in less time
>than the outcome will arrive?

Uunpredictability would preclude such things.  Whether free will
would preclude them depends on whether or not free will is compatible
with predictability (a difficult question).

In any case, it's important to distinguish between unpredictability
and free will.  For instance, suppose your choices were determined by
a random process.  You'd be unpredictable, but you still wouldn't be
choosing what to do.

That the calculation would take too long would also make actions
unpredictable, but that hardly means they were free.  Nor would the
impossibility of completely describing the universe mean that
actions were free.

>What about a QM type of solution where a probability of a human's
>choice is all that could be calculated? Even still, if told the 
>probabilities, Adam could always choose the lowest probability just
>to spite God.

He could, but it's unlikely that he'd do it very often (assuming, as
we do, that God is right about the probabilities).

>Could an uncertainty in predicting human behaviour
>manifest itself as free will? What would be conjugate to a human's decisions?

See above.

You'll note that I haven't actually presented any of the compatiblist
arguments, though.  You can find some in Dennett's _Elbow Room_.
A good starting point for the free will literature in general is
the collection edited by Gary Watson (Oxford University Press).

-- jd
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
From: David_Shaw@uow.edu.au (David Shaw)
Subject: Chaos and Technology
Organization: Centre for Research Policy..University of Wollongong
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 92 03:32:56 GMT

Hi

I'm a PhD student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies here.
one of the things I'm looking at is Chaos theory as a competitor to Systems
theory a La Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, Fred Emery, Thomas Parke Hughes et al,
and also as a competitor to Actor-Network theory a la Michele Callon,
Bruno Latour et al.  I was wondering if anyone out there knows any sources
on Chaos theory applied to large scale technological systems?.
Has anyone attempted this yet.  It's an obvious to do but as yet I 
can't find anything on it. Any thoughts, discussions on this would also 
be most welcome by the way.

Thanks
From: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Having to believe
Date: 27 Jul 92 12:50:45 GMT
Organization: SAS Institute Inc.
Originator: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com


In article <1119@kepler1.rentec.com>, andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt) writes:

|> What's at stake here is not the necessity of philosophy, but the added value
|> of philosophy. And when you look at the lives of modern philosophers, I
|> don't see a convincing pattern of well being emerging. 

Surely you don't mean to suggest that this is peculiar to *modern* philosophers!
In addition, there is a *great* deal of latitude in possible interpretations
of "added value".  For example, it may well be that the added value of, for
example, Bertrand Russell's efforts in philosophy is to be found in its
contributions to various fields in both the humanities or sciences (ranging
from logic, foundations of mathematics, relativity, etc. to ethics and
political philosophy) even though it can be argued pretty strongly that these
efforts did not make Russell a "better person" or a happier one.  (Or perhaps
I have completely misread your implication here?)
-- 
Gary H. Merrill  [Principal Systems Developer, C Compiler Development]
SAS Institute Inc. / SAS Campus Dr. / Cary, NC  27513 / (919) 677-8000
sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com ... !mcnc!sas!sasghm
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: tucker@mitre.org (William Tucker)
Subject: Re: Having to believe
Keywords: Re: Having to believe
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, USA
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 16:50:24 GMT


Tagi says:

>It seems more important to me that there MAY be people (those who
>have so merged, harmonized with their environment) who do not need
>to formulate mental models in order to engage society.  I am thinking
>of people who go about in a sort of 'aware trance state', intuiting
>from short-term memory and metaphorical, contextual 'feelings' about
>things.  Such a person needs to know nothing.  They could be illiterate
>and yet function quite well.

Leo answers:

Yes: This is a very Zen sort of thing. I would say that this is more
a question of having internalised a model to such an extent that you
are not cosnciously aware of it :-)

I (William T.) think:
Rather than having an STATIC internal model, you have patterns and you
continually update your mapping to reality based upon your need(s). Reality
holds it's own shape, what you need instead is a means for ordering and 
controlling your perceptions.............a personal set of patterns, tools
of perception as it were, not involved with thinking per se. I 
simply disagree with the use of the term model, it implies coherent view
of the overall stucture.........one that could block growth. Growth occurs
most easily when change is a normal way of being, if it's not something
that you have to start and stop. That's why "seeing through the eyes of a 
child" is a mode rather than an incident. If you constantly change by having
to rearrange everything once you learned something new, you wouldn't bother.
It's too much work, which is why so many metaphysicists would rather spout old
b.s. rather than make some of their own, aside from the ego thing of being
recognized as being right by "appealing to authority," not to say all 
references to others work is laziness and ego, but I can only get so
much in a sentence. 

I would like to refer to the immortal words of 
L.M.P. McPherson:

"If we are intellectual explorers, we strive towards truth, holding beliefs
only tenatively as we leave our minds open to other possibilities that might arise from evidence that contradicts a currently held set of beliefs, evidence
that suggests that the nature of reality is other than we thought....This 
process of shedding beliefs has long been considered, in esoteric circles, to be a key to wisdom, and it explains the use of the snake -- who periodically sheds
his skin -- as a symbol for wisdom (or "knowledge" in the Genesis story)."


Just my opinion.

Wm T.

.standard disclaimer
Xref: sparky sci.philosophy.meta:1320 alt.society.futures:213
From: caleb@cbmtoruucp (Caleb J. Howard)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta,alt.society.futures
Subject: Re: Call for Articles -- ASCENT
Date: 21 Jul 92 18:49:21 GMT
Followup-To: sci.philosophy.meta
Organization: Commodore Business Machines (CANADA)

A rapidly evolving mind in no way implies that the brain is evolving in a
similarly rapid manner.  From childhood to adulthood, our conceptualizations
and reality models evolve constantly with no similar evolution of the brain.
I feel that the evolution of the species IS an evolution of mind, and that
evolution is one of scale.  As communication connections are improved, we
are organizing ourselves macroscopically into meta-minds of thinking capab-
ility.  Here, for example, groups of people who would generally never be
expected to meet regularly for discussions of this topic are all participating
in this forum from the domain and at the convenience of every participant.

By this, we are able to communally persue the topic of mutual interest with
greater speed due to the fact that we are all considering the same questions
from different perspectives concurrently.  We are able to process the thoughts
much more efficiently as a group than we would be able to individually.

This is how I view the evolution of man.  I think that the problems we face
as a species now will be overcome when we learn to work together on solutions.
We must leave the capitolist tendencies of secrecy and competition behind, and
learn to function as individuals within the single consciousness of mankind.

"I have found an ocean of mind" - Enya

-caleb

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The key to surviving as an egoless entity within the computer industry is to 
                                 be insidious.
From: oispeggy@ubvmsd.cc.buffalo.edu (Peggy Brown)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Having to believe
Date: 23 Jul 92 14:57:00 GMT
Organization: University at Buffalo
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

In article <Brqpqw.IEG@unx.sas.com>, sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill) writes...
> 
>In article <memo.533140@cix.compulink.co.uk>, shaman@cix.compulink.co.uk (Leo Smith) writes:
>|> 
> 

[stuff deleted...]

>I'm not sure what the multi-valued reality stuff is, nor what other
>contexts you have in mind where this assumption fails.  I have a vague
>feeling that what is lurking behind these questions is old phenomena/
>noumena or observation-statement/theoretical-statement distinction
>together with the usual non-uniqueness problem in saving the phenomena.

>Anything else?

[stuff deleted...]

A label for everything....how nice and comfortable...

- Peggy -
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill)
Subject: Re: Having to believe
Originator: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 13:31:54 GMT
Organization: SAS Institute Inc.


In article <denmckinnon.1.712262892@halls1.cc.monash.edu.au>, denmckinnon@halls1.cc.monash.edu.au (NEIL MCKINNON) writes:
|> Gary Merrill writes:-

[Stuff about Putnam and Dummett deleted.]

I don't recall anything about Dummett's stuff (perhaps I never read
it, perhaps it came out after I left academia), but I think you
probably have characterized these things pretty accurately.  I
also don't recall (at the moment) many of the details of Putnam's
views, and so I'm not sure about your analysis of his view of
truth.  But let's assume it's correct (your analysis, not his view).

I think it is wrong to "make truth epistemic".  The danger here,
of course, is that it then turns out that there are no unknowable
(and perhaps no unknown truths), and this is just pretty far from
the classical concept of truth and our intuitive and common sense
one as well.  Further, one need not do this in order to maintain
an anti-realist position.  You can introduce the purely epistemic
notion of truth, but you are still stuck with having the *other*
one as well -- it doesn't just go away because you'd rather not
use it.

We do not have ideal theories.  The crucial question is not "What
is an ideal theory?" but "What is a good theory?" and "What makes
one theory better than another?"  The bottom line is not "What is
true?" but "What is it most reasonable to believe?"

|> Putnam's and Dummett's views seem 
|> to me to reduce to a coherence theory, since there may be many internally 
|> consistent theories which equally satisfy all constraints on acceptance and 
|> yet are inconsistent with each other.

I think you are wrong here.  Remember, (at least for a lot of us)
one of the minimal constraints on acceptability is "saving the
phenomena"  -- a correspondence constraint.  *Each* of these theories
must satisfy this constraint, but this constraint alone is not
strong enough to pick among those in the class.

|> 
|> I was hoping someone could give (or direct me to) more information on 
|> the topic of realism/anti-realism, if they feel that the above is a 
|> misrepresentation of anti-realism.  As it stands I cannot see the sense of 
|> an anti-realist position.
|> 
|> Neil.

Again, to both you and Tom Price, I recommend starting with the
following:

	_The_Scientific_Image_
	_Laws_and_Symmetry_

both by Bas Van Fraassen.  In the latter, Van Fraassen spends quite
a bit of time considering such alternative positions as David
Lewis's realism.  If you (or anyone else) wants to e-mail me your
normal mail address, I could send one or two old papers of mine
that deal with some of the fundamentals.  But Van Fraassen's stuff
will be more up to date and complete.
-- 
Gary H. Merrill  [Principal Systems Developer, C Compiler Development]
SAS Institute Inc. / SAS Campus Dr. / Cary, NC  27513 / (919) 677-8000
sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com ... !mcnc!sas!sasghm
From: denmckinnon@halls1.cc.monash.edu.au (NEIL MCKINNON)
Subject: Re: Having to believe
Organization: Halls of Residence, Monash University 
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 18:48:12 GMT

Gary Merrill writes:-

>There are many (non-isomorphic) mappings that may be used successfully.
>It does not follow from this that *any* mapping is "correct".  The
>anti-realist does not believe that *anything* goes, but rather that
>there is no particular mapping with a special claim to preferred status.
>The world is really out there -- under one or another description.
>There are a number of "right" descriptions you may pick.  But there are
>*wrong* descriptions as well.  Choose one that is wrong enough and you
>are dead meat.  In this sense, indeed, "Right thinking or bust."
>-- 

I was wondering what the important differences are between your anti-realist 
position here and a realist position.  My reading on this topic is probably 
fairly limited, but as far as I can see the anti-realism of, say, Dummett 
and Putnam is ultimately based on intuitions that truth ought not be non-
epistemic.  Their semantics for truth seemed quite similar to me.  For 
Putnam, a sentence is true only if it is part of an Ideal theory (i.e one 
that maximally satisfies observable evidence and maximally satisfies our 
constraints on theory acceptance, like simplicity).  For Dummett a sentence 
is true only if it is conclusively verifiable (which comes to it being a 
sentence in an Ideal Theory of the Universe).  Once you make truth 
epistemic, what you are left with is some sort of coherence theory of truth, 
whereby any consistent set of beliefs is true.  The objection to this is 
that there may be sets of internally consistent beliefs which are 
inconsistent with each other, and this contravenes another strong intuition 
about truth, i.e (~A & A) cannot be true.  Putnam's and Dummett's views seem 
to me to reduce to a coherence theory, since there may be many internally 
consistent theories which equally satisfy all constraints on acceptance and 
yet are inconsistent with each other.  This is so because an ideal theory is 
not something we have epistemic access to any more than an "external 
reality".  Consequently these semantics do not make truth any more 
accessible than a realist conception of truth.  

I was hoping someone could give (or direct me to) more information on 
the topic of realism/anti-realism, if they feel that the above is a 
misrepresentation of anti-realism.  As it stands I cannot see the sense of 
an anti-realist position.

Neil.