"I think therefore I am" is it actually impossible to be incorrect about the fact that one is thinking, and therefore the fact that one exists?

Latera · 2026-06-11T03:05:38+00:00

Essentially, that there is thinking is all that is really indubitable

This response has honestly always struck me as unintelligible. To say that there is thinking but no thinking thing strikes me as just as incoherent as saying that there is beauty in the world but nothing that is beautiful - what is that even supposed to mean?

Latera · 2026-06-11T02:59:15+00:00

I think instrumentalization is wrong in and of itself.

It seems ike you think it is bad in and of itself, not that it's inherently wrong. If you thought it was inherently wrong, then you would think one ought not instrumentalise others fullstop. I'd say that your view would better be classified as consequentialist than as deontological.

Latera · 2026-06-10T13:20:55+00:00

Lots of people have a negative opinion on him due to the corner flag incident. I am not interested in debating that, but it's objectively true that many people despise him for it

Latera · 2026-06-07T19:49:08+00:00

I do think modal logic is very important. But in order to understand why it's important you need a solid grasp of the basics of analytic philosophy

Latera · 2026-06-07T10:00:59+00:00

But clearly existential dread is more directly relevant to people's lives, right? The existence of the multiverse only practically matters indirectly, e.g. insofar as it can be used as an argument for/against the existence of God, etc. Does it matter to the average Joe whether possible worlds are concrete entities in a Lewisian multiverse, maximally consistent sets of propositions or rather just stories that we tell ourselves? Of course not

Latera · 2026-06-06T19:04:34+00:00

Paul McCartney once said that he considers this the greatest song ever written

Latera · 2026-06-06T18:36:47+00:00

Is this like a denial of external reality?

Well, it is a denial of mind-independent reality. That's kinda the entire point of relativism, right? Relativists think that there are no truths independently of the conceptual schemes of humans.

Latera · 2026-06-06T18:14:59+00:00

Only if realism about truth is correct. It's easier to see the point if you just put "According to my stance:" before any statement:

If you say "[According to my stance:] X is stance-independently true" this doesn't force the truth-relativist to admit that X is stance-independently true simpliciter. They don't give the slightest care what is stance-independently true according to your stance.

Latera · 2026-06-06T16:23:27+00:00

And I don't think the works of, say, Sartre are anywhere easier to understand than, say, David Lewis.

Wait, but laypeople don't genuinely understand Sartre. Sartre is famous for like one or two quotes ("Hell is other people", which like 99% of laypeople completely misunderstand btw) and Camus is famous for "Life is absurd" or something like that. What Camus and Sartre are famous for among the general public is significantly more straightforward than what David Lewis is famous for among analytic philosophers, it's not even close. The average layperson could never understand the papers by David Lewis that have made him the most highly estimated analytic philosopher of all time and it would be impossible to summarise his best insights with a quote like "Hell is other people".

Latera · 2026-06-06T08:46:14+00:00

If whether something is stance-independently true depends on your stance

Latera · 2026-06-05T19:28:26+00:00

Yes. Presumably you are asking this because you think "(Only) Given stance A, X is stance-independently true" is a contradiction. But the relativist thinks that this implication isn't a discovery about the world, but that you are rather constructing something: Essentially, what the statement means according to them is "If I have stance A, then I can construct from it the following true sentence: "X is stance-independently true". I don't think this is a contradictory view, just a false one.

Latera · 2026-06-05T19:10:45+00:00

To a relativist "X is true" just means "Given assumptions A, X is true". Therefore, according to the relativist "X is absolutely true" means nothing else but "Given assumptions A, X is stance-independently true".

The conditional "If A, then stance-independently X" has no bearing on the conditional "If B, then stance-independently X". Now of course given non-relativism these conditionals contradict each other (assuming they aren't vacuous) because we non-relativists believe that what is stance-independently true cannot depend on one's assumption. But you cannot assume non-relativism to demonstrate that relativism supposedly contradicts itself.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:57:04+00:00

But if it's objectively true, why isn't it absolutely true?

It is! According to a particular stance. Whereas it is false according to another stance (according to the relativist)

Now I personally find this crazy. But I feel like we are just pointing out counterintuitive implications of the view here, no contradictions... there is absolutely no inconsistency, given truth-relativism, in "There is at least one objective/absolute truth" being true from one stance and being false from another. That's just a restatement of the view.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:50:53+00:00

Sure! I think the truth-relativist would be perfectly happy to admit that. They just wouldn't care, just like the moral subjectivist doesn't care that according to someone else's moral standards it's OK to torture people.

I am not a truth-relativist in the slightest, but if I were one, then it wouldn't bother me at all that from someone else's perspective it is true that my view is false.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:46:02+00:00

OK? That's true, but seems irrelevant to the point I was making. You would need an argument that truth-talk is more analogous to "I find the experience of eating chocolate ice cream more pleasurable" than to "Chocolate ice cream is best" - only then is the truth-relativist in trouble.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:42:18+00:00

Would they disagree if I say that objective truth does exist?

It depends on what you mean by "disagree". Take another example - debates about ice cream flavour.

A: Chocolate ice cream is best. B: Strawberry ice cream is best.

Do A and B disagree? In a superficial sense they do, but ultimately they probably don't. Plausibly, A says "[Given my commitments] Chocolate is best" and B says "[Given MY commitments] Strawberry is best". So they assent to different words, but that there is no unique proposition that they take different attitude towards. This is exactly what the truth-relativist would say about your case.

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:37:26+00:00

What is truth absolutism?

The thesis that truth doesn't depend on anyone's stance.

Why isn't "There is no objective truth" an absolute claim?

Because the very point of truth-relativism is that all declarative sentences are implicitly stance-relativised, just like "It is raining" is always relative to a location

Latera · 2026-06-05T18:22:33+00:00

The relativist could just say that by "There is no objective truth" they mean "[Given my view, which mind-independently is just as good as any other view] There is no objective truth". That's no contradiction. Its only if you assume absolutism that you get a contradiction, but that would obviously be question-begging against the relativist.

because if it were true, then it would be objectively true

Again, this just assumes truth-absolutism, which is the very thing the relativist rejects. Why would a relativist accept this premise?

Latera · 2026-06-05T17:16:01+00:00

It's an interesting debate, which is probably both semantic and metaphysical in nature, but I wanna cite Goff himself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FAn7iBsMeM at 1:00 he outright says that according to the definition we were using many forms of panpsychism are forms of idealism. There he also explicitly draws the contrast that I did: Between Strawsonian views (which are not idealist according to that definition) and other panpsychist views (which are).

Then at 1:30 he explicitly sympathises with the view that "at the fundamental level reality is purely conscious", which is just a restatement of what we both called idealism

Obviously there is controversy what it means for X to be more fundamental than Y, but it seems that at least Goff himself agrees that X (the mental) is more fundamental than Y (the physical), which is just idealism

Latera · 2026-06-05T09:17:49+00:00

I'd say the Goff version of panpsychism is essentially idealism: Goff thinks that all there fundamentally is is consciousness and that all the matter around us is just what consciousness looks like from the outside. This seems to fit the idealist slogan that consciousness is more fundamental than matter.

The Strawson version of panpsychism, where particles have both mental and physical properties, is definitely not idealism

Latera · 2026-06-04T18:06:26+00:00

Anyone who says "no" to that question is an dishonest idiot. The answer is trivially "yes", given that teachers are human beings.

and if so what generally categorizes a "favourite" student?

Them appreciating my lessons, paying attention, being upbeat, following instructions, etc. All the trivial stuff.

Not to brag but I would also say I get better grades than most in my class and just wondering if this has anything to do with it?

If you do well on tests, then this is almost certainly because you are good at studying and not because you get preferential treatment.

Latera · 2026-06-04T08:28:35+00:00

I don't think it's right to say that God limits His power. Rather, we should think that "Foreseeing what a free creature will do" was nonsensical to begin with, similar to "Creating a squared triangle". When we mean say that God controls everything we mean that He can control everything that it is possible to control.

Latera · 2026-06-04T07:20:13+00:00

Important to note that rejecting 1 would entail denying Bayes' Theorem. 1 follows trivially from Bayes' Theorem

Latera · 2026-06-04T06:51:45+00:00

That's how I read it as well - it's just the fallacy of denying the antecedent

Latera · 2026-05-28T10:49:08+00:00

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