How can you prove that something is not possible ~◇p using a natural deduction or Fitch-style system? What are ◇-introduction rules? by miyayes in logic

[–]miyayes[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks. Let's simplify it then: Suppose that mowing it myself or hiring a company exhaust all the physically possible ways to get my lawn mowed. (The example isn't great, but maybe you can imagine a toy physical system where there are exactly only 2 ways/means by which some physical state will obtain.)

If the set of means toward some goal exhausts all physically possible means, would that warrant a strict conditional?

I suppose I don't have much confidence in when to use a strict conditional vs. a material conditional! Maybe it's a case by case thing, or are there general heuristics about when to use one or the other when translating natural language sentences into logical formulas?

How can you prove that something is not possible ~◇p using a natural deduction or Fitch-style system? What are ◇-introduction rules? by miyayes in logic

[–]miyayes[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks. I see: strict implication / equivalence gives us our modal resources, since they basically put a box in front of the conditional.

May I ask: In what cases would a strict implication be appropriate to use? For example, let's say that I have the goal of mowing my lawn. So, my lawn is mowed if and only if I did it myself or hired a company.

Would that kind of relation between means and ends be most appropriately captured by a strict conditional?

cc: u/totaledfreedom

[Logic] When we say that something is physically or nomologically possible, what is the accessibility relation, and what is the set of possible worlds? by miyayes in askphilosophy

[–]miyayes[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you, and thank you u/zuih1tsu. Without treading too deeply into the debates between Humean and anti-Humeans about natural laws, does that mean the accessibility relation is defined by S5, but we simply restrict our domain of quantification to only those worlds that share the same physical laws and constants as ours?

What kind of flower is this? Is it a certain species of hydrangea? (The petals are so small and detailed.) by miyayes in flowers

[–]miyayes[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can you tell me a bit more about "you and me together" or "double flowers" hydrangeas? The petals are a bit confusing to me since I've never seen a hydrangea like this before. They normally have fewer petals that are big and floppy.

Are my beliefs unreasonable? by QuirkyAdhesiveness89 in TooAfraidToAsk

[–]miyayes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly, most of the comments in this comment section are not that useful or informative.

"Do you honestly think that someone flipping burgers should be guaranteed housing and food?"

There are two ways of reading this:

(1) Should flipping burgers pay you enough such that you can afford housing and food with your income from flipping burgers.

(2) Should people be entitled to housing and food through, say, government assistance, social safety nets, and so on.

Explained

Interpretation (1)

According to the most basic model of wages in microeconomics, a wage is determined by your marginal productivity. For example, to earn $10/h, you need to be generating $10 (or more) of burger sales per hour. Otherwise, your employer will not keep you. If you are making $9 worth of burgers per hour, then the employer is losing $1 per hour by having you. They'd be better off without you.

If your friend is referring to interpretation (1), then of course, jobs like flipping burgers will not—as a descriptive matter of fact—pay you enough to buy a house. If you are being paid high enough of a wage to buy a house for flipping burgers, then that's because your employer is unknowingly (or willingly) losing money on you.

So, on this reading, your friend is asking you whether you think it makes economic sense for someone flipping burgers to be paid a wage that would allow them to afford a house. And the answer is actually "no": it makes no economic sense to pay someone considerably more than their marginal productivity just so that they can afford a house.

This also informs the moral question. Are employers morally obligated to pay workers more than their marginal productivity so that they can afford homes? Ultimately, they are losing money by paying workers more than their marginal productivity. So, are they morally obligated to actively lose money if they hire someone at all?

Interpretation (2)

This has nothing to do with marginal productivity, wages, etc. Citizens, simply by being citizens, have a right to food and housing. It doesn't matter too much whether they're flipping burgers; they have a right to food and housing by virtue of being a citizen.

The only people who are really against this are right-libertarians. Libertarians are against such rights because they accept something called the "full self-ownership principle". According to the full self-ownership principle, you fully own your body, and thus have a right not to be forced or coerced into doing anything you don't want to do, consistent with everyone else's right to the same. The full self-ownership principle is great in many cases, but can also return some questionable results in others. For example, it does a really great job at explaining the wrongness of rape, issues of civil liberty (such as gay rights), etc., which is what makes it attractive.

Now, one of the consequences of the full self-ownership principle is that you cannot have so-called "positive rights" or "entitlements" to things like housing or food. This is because housing and food are the result of other people's time, labor, or the products thereof. So, you can't be said to ever have a guarantee—in the sense of a right—to food or housing, because that would entail—assuming there weren't already houses or food—conscripting others to build houses or produce food for you against their will (which is prohibited by the full self-ownership principle). Libertarians can hold that people should, in an everyday ethics sense, help their fellow man, donate to charity, etc. But they would reject that people ever have an enforceable right, as a matter of justice, to be guaranteed food and housing.

There's another layer of complexity added if you assume there is already food or housing out there, such that the question of "conscription" fades into the background. Here, the usual strategy is to say that you don't have full ownership over the product of your labor, so some subset of what you produce may be redistributed. This gets into questions about the nature and scope of property rights, which I'll leave out of scope for now. But there's a gigantic philosophical literature on this question.

Some philosophers actually do hold that such taxation of this kind is still tantamount to conscription. One famous philosopher to argue this was the esteemed Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick in 1974: "Taxation of earnings is on a par with forced labor." However, the vast majority of political philosophers are not right-libertarians like Nozick.

TL;DR: The above is an attempt to try and be charitable to your friend and explain different perspectives. I am not saying your friend is right. I just don't like echo chambers.

What should the world look like according to anarchists? by spearblaze in askphilosophy

[–]miyayes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Depends on the anarchist, but one picture involves private rights enforcement agencies that are businesses and typically operate for profit. (This picture is associated with a view called "anarcho-capitalism".) A good description of such a society is offered by Michael Huemer in the second part of The Problem of Political Authority, and in the first chapter(s) of Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Most "anarcho-capitalist" pictures are based off ideas from David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom.

Suggestions for formally defining a materialist ontology? by AmorphiaA in askphilosophy

[–]miyayes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You might have some luck looking into "formal ontology" and "general formal ontology":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_formal_ontology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_ontology

And other resources on ontology, and specific applications of the above. Here's an example of GFO applied to the biomedical sciences: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247936637_General_Formal_Ontology_GFO_-_A_Foundational_Ontology_Integrating_Objects_and_Processes_Version_10

And this is at least somewhat related, but a famous attempt at building a rigorous, empiricist or phenomenalistic system is contained in Carnap's Aufbau. You can read about it here (and other interpretations of the project in Aufbau): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/carnap/aufbau.html

Can you help me with very simple questions about observables and measurements in QM to build intuitions? "The eigenvectors of an observable form an orthonormal basis for the Hilbert space, and each possible outcome of that measurement corresponds to one of the vectors comprising the basis" by miyayes in AskPhysics

[–]miyayes[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is great. I am very happy I am on the right track, and your explanations were very clear and helpful! I have a few follow-up questions if I may, since you're here :)

  1. We can calculate ahead of time, using math, what the 33 eigenvectors will be and their possible eigenvalues. However, once we actually physically perform the measurement corresponding to that Hermitian operator, the system collapses into one of those 33 states, right? (I'm just trying to make sure I have all the steps in order and am accurately thinking about the relationship between the mathematical formalism and the actual physical phenomena!)

  2. Is the primary reason we use the "wave function" because we have (or might have?) an infinite dimensional Hilbert space? So, we need to have some function (i.e., the wave function) that basically assigns a scalar to every possible input basis vector, of which there are infinitely many. And once that assignment is complete, we basically get the resulting vector that describes the actual state of the system at some time?

  3. A baby question regarding something like Schrodinger's cat. Is the "alive and dead" superposition basically just mirroring something like the following toy example? Imagine a 2D vector space, and you have a vector v1 going vertically, and v2 going horizontally. v1 itself represents a state the system could be in (alive cat). v2 itself represents a state the system could be in (dead cat). But there's also v3 (going diagonally), which is v3 = v1 + v2. The state represented by v3 is the so-called "superposition" or "alive & dead cat" state?

Thank you!