> So what good does it do me what the objective truth is?

I don't disagree that true propositions that aren't known to me, aren't useful to me.

I just don't draw the conclusion that "true" and "possible to know" is the same concept. Maybe that depends on what possible means. Like "theoretically possible" vs "practically possible".

> There might in fact be an objective Truth [...] assuming the objective Truth is the red ball is there [...]

This looks to me like you agree that unknowable truths can exist.

You say there are propositions that can be true without anyone knowing them as it happens to be, such as a particular person is a philosophical zombie - a biological robot, or there being water on a planet beyond the observable universe.

You say that there are no true propositions without anyone knowing them because they are impossible to know, by principle, such as undetectable ghosts existing or them not existing.

Is that correct? That would be less controversial than if propositions of the first category couldn't be true either. I'm not sure, maybe the philosophical zombie belongs in the second category. Consciousness is weird anyway.

Can you think of good examples that people really care about in the second category - principally unknowable, and therefore impossible to be true or false claims?

Supernatural claims often just propose alternative physics. People say that ghosts act against the laws of physics, but they could theoretically exists and if they turned out to exists, the written laws of physics would need to be adjusted to accomodate them.

The existance of the judeochristian god is a weird claim. It depends how he is actually defined. Maybe god according to an unfalsifiable definition would occupy this space of neither true or false.

Is god's existance an example of unknowable claim? Does it make the claim neither true nor false or just false?

You can ignore the rest if you don't have much time.

"Possible" is an interesting word. I have a theory that possibility as opposed to certainty always has something to do with incomplete knowledge. In a universe without conscious humans with blind spots, there is no "possibility". It's not an inherent property of a shuffled deck of cards to be random. It can just be random to an observer. That's my weird theory.

If I'm correct then there is no difference between a fact that is impossible to know and a fact that I just happen not to know. Everything that is not actually the case, is impossible and everything that is the case, is impossible to be different. Possibility only arises when you don't know some facts or ignore them.

Well, maybe there are levels of impossibility. I can get to late to work, because I didn't set an alarm. Given that fact, it is impossible to arrive on time - but this excuse won't impress my boss. If I had to break the laws of physics or even logic, that's an arguably deeper level of impossibility.

> Everything Einstein said is true.

In many programming languages you can write:

while queue.hasValues():
    process(queue.first())

Beginners are often introduced to loops as grammaticallically requiring a comparison, because a comparison is less abstract to think about, then a truth-value. In school you only learn to do math to numbers. That's why they often write this:

while queue.hasValues() == True:
    process(queue.first())

In logical notation you can write one of those:

• Forall (reverse A) s in Einsteins-statements : s.
• Forall s in Einsteins-statements: s = T.
• Big-And (reverse V) Einsteins-statements.

Only the second phrasing has an analogue in natural language - "All Einsteins statements are true." It seems that unlike in mathematical or most(!) programming languages, this kind of sentence requires a comparison in English. "All <set> are <individual-comparator>".

There could be a natural language where you could indeed just say something like "All Einsteins statements." without "are true" and have it make grammatical sense. English just doesn't happen to be that language.

Actually, I have encountered "What he said." as an expression of agreement on Reddit.

This reminds me of Russel's teapot. I'm not completely sure what the point of it is. Maybe: If you believe in god without any evidence (some believers do, some don't), then you might as well believe in a teapot in space.

A teapot in space isn't usefully true without evidence. You might as well say it's existance isn't true at all. This also sounds like "pragmatism" from the video.

I think it doesn't hurt to say that there could be a teapot in space. It would be wrong to say for certain that there is no approximately teapod shaped asteroid in the asteroid belt.

A god that doesn't interact with the world is certainly irrelevant. A god that only punishes or rewards people in the afterlife is still unknowable but also very relevant. I still agree insofar that you shouldn't worry about that possibility, given you have no evidence now.

So there are three levels: true or false, eventually knowable, relevant.

It's also evolutionary beneficial if people influence each other by communicating and so the personal morality of a human can be influenced socially, which is indirectly evolutionary.

Human babies are relatively uncapable in comparison to other animals and they learn important skills by copying. It's like IKEA furniture that is easier to produce and ship, because there is still some assembly required.

Let's say I have a box with a window and I see a red ball in it.

I also have a second box without a window. Would you say it's even wrong to say: "There could be a ball in this box or maybe there is no ball in this box."?

I'm kind of proposing a fact that I can't check.

If there was a ball in the box, it would be a fact that there is a ball in the box. Then there would be a fact about something that I don't know anything about. The same holds if there is no ball in the box.

If we assume there is no truth without knowledge, then the box can neither have a ball or not have a ball inside it.

If I understand correctly, you and /u/LifeOfAPancake would say that this neither-true-or-false state only occurs when no conscious being knows about it. So if I put a ball in the box without you watching, it would still be true that it's in there. But if I throw a dice in a cup and then I shake the cup again, then the dice has no true number on the upper side, because noone can check it afterwards.

This also leaves the question open whether it can be true that someone or something is conscious. If an AI is conscious and nobody besides itself knows about it, it is obviously true that it is conscious - in your and my opinion.

But as an outsider, I couldn't even entertain the possibility that it's conscious, because in case it's unconscious, nobody knows that it's unconscious and you say that it's not allowed to entertain the thought that propositions are true or false, when nobody knows about them. (I could have misunderstood you.)

In my intuition things can happen without anyone watching, even indirectly. Isn't that more "parsimonous"? It's more mentally efficient to assume the world exists without anyone watching. I have no better argument than that.

Well, maybe you could also say that a truth without knowledge is thinkable and as words are all about thinking, the word "truth" should be independent of the concept of "knowledge".

Schrödinger's cat experiment is often misunderstood to mean that just because we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive, it is actually half-dead and half-alive.

This has nothing to do with quants though. The same could be said about the shell game: I don't know whether there is a pearl under this shell or not, so it's half-there.

The point of Schrödinger's cat is to connect the actual half-facts (according to popular interpretation) of the quantum world to the macro world.

So, what is my opinion on the shell game? I'd say there is an actual reality independent of my knowledge. I can look under the shell afterwards and learn whether there was a pearl even before I looked. I mean - that's certainly the most popular, "naive" interpretation of reality, isn't it?

Would you say that "the universe" has no opinion about whether there is a pearl under a shell, or about how many fingers I'm holding behind by back, as long as you don't know anything about it?

I admit, it wouldn't cause any problems. It's unfalsifiable whether things really happen that nobody will know about or whether only things happen that people directly or indirectly observe.

Another game: In Germany it's called "Topfschlagen" - "pot hitting". One person gets blindfolded and the other people have to guide them to a pot by shouting "hot" and "cold". The blindfolded person doesn't know where the goal is (if we assume that the others don't help them). I think that means that at least things can exist when one person doesn't know about them - because other people still do. It could theoretically be the case that the pot stops existing once everybody puts on blindfolds.

I agree that there is no universal moral truth.

I heard once the story that Moses went down with the ten commandments and when he saw that the Isrealites worshipped a golden cow, he destroyed the stone tablets out of anger. Then he wrote down the ten commandments again, but slightly differently.

I don't know if that's true. He definitely destroyed the tablets once. It was surprisingly difficult to find the respective parts in the bible - I'm going to try again. The story might very well be not true!

The point is: Moral laws only matter if people know them and agree with them, so in the end what people think is the only thing that matters.

That's not the intentended meaning by the bible passages, they were probably just written by different people, or the author has forgotten what he has written the first time.

Edit: The relevant section is Exodus 34. God says that he will write the same words as on the first tablet. Then he goes on to state some commandments, which aren't the classical "10 commandments" but it's not clear to me which of them will go on the stone tablets or whether they are maybe just some additions that are not important enough to be written in stone.

The bible is not important to my point though - only subjective morals matter.

When we talk about ethical thought experiments like, would you take the organs out of a living person, to save the lives of five other people, the fact that in daily-life situations most people agree and in thought experiment situations there is disagreement and small changes make a big difference could be explained by the idea that human moral intuition is not based on a few ground pricinciples, like "don't murder" or "maximize happiness", but instead on many ideas, formed in practical daily life.

That's one critique of ethical thought experiments: They presuppose there is an elegant set of a few universal moral ground-laws and those moral axioms are connected to moral intuition.

Wikipedia says it is proven to be impossible. I'm sorry, I'm too lazy to check the proof.

Mathematics is one area, where you don't have to trust the experts, but I would probably have to devote a large amount of time to understand the proof. Mathematics is not it's own field of study with professionals that do nothing else without reason. There is always a level of math that you can only understand by dedicating more time to it.

Maybe I could suggest examining where your intuition comes from, that Hilbert's tenth problem is possible to solve (i.e. there is a certain method to find solutions). Would it have weird implications if it couldn't be solved?

The naive algorithm would be to try different numbers for x, y and z until you find a solution. But you'll never know whether you will eventually find a solution or if you'll keep searching for infinity.

0² + 1 ≠ 0, (-1)² + 1 ≠ 0, 1² + 1 ≠ 0, (-2)² + 1 ≠ 0, 2² + 1 ≠ 0, ...

That's interesting! Does the sum of the atomic swerves determine the will - which doesn't sound free to me - or does the will determine the sum of the atomic swerves?

This has nothing to do with epicureanism, but I always thought micro-phenomena determine macro-phenomena - that seems more obvious to me - but you can also think about the possibility of macro-phenomena determining micro-phenomena.

For example in video games, sometimes when a character walks over rough terrain or stairs, the legs are positioned such that the body in a specified position is supported by them. Keyword "inverse kinematics" How Link's Climbing Animation Works in Breath of the Wild (10:48)

Maybe it's impossible to determine if the real world works "process-oriented" bottom-up or "goal-oriented" top-down. It might be impossible to determine empirically. When you assume a bottom-up physics, you will find a bottom-up physical laws (~ forward kinematics). In games, the apparent laws of physics are sometimes broken when no satisfying reason for a desired goal state can be found. That's when a character hovers in the air, "because" their feet aren't long enough to reach the ground or when a character is too far away from the place he is supposed to be, he is yanked there by invisible rubber bands.

I was talking about literal strings. (When people say they aren't monkeys or machines, they are also thinking about literal monkeys and machines with metal cogs.)

Some constraints are felt as restricting, for example literal strings attached to your limbs and other constraints, like scratching your head, because it's itching or listening to music you like, don't feel restricting. They are both 100% determined, but they make a pragmatic difference in life. (That was phrased weirdly...)

Your home can never be 100% clean, but it still makes sense to say that a home is clean. "Clean" means that you can stop cleaning.

Maybe you could say that "free will" in a juristic sense is defined by it's consequences. Whenever it makes sense to punish someone, you say they acted on "free will". Whenever a condition should be medically treated, you call it a "sickness".

Then you can't say that someone should be punished because they acted on free will, or that a condition should be treated because it is a sickness, because that would be circular reasoning.

I absolutely agree that you could very well define "free" as "not determined" and as it is determined, it's not free. There is just an alternative definition of free will, that makes sense.

> The same works for the question of whether you do what you do due to your soul's desire or due to neurons firing - both are true, but work on different levels.

Even if someone knows nothing about neurons, they could argue that free will doesn't exist, because it determined either by randomness or by reasons. "I choose strawberry icecream because I like the flavor. I like the flavor because I'm born that way, or maybe because my mother fed them to me as a baby." (nature/nurture)

> Since the freedom worth talking about is the one that affects our lived experience, the only constraints that matter are those we actively feel, or know about.

This is a good idea that I haven't thought about before! We say that a glass is empty, even though there is air inside it. Language is practical. There is probably a practical distincion between some causes of will (or actions?) and others.

Let's say there is a human string puppet. It's wants to move a certain way, but the strings (or an exoskelleton) forces it to move another way.

It feels intuitive that a human that isn't tied to strings is freeer than a human that is.

The will may still be determined, so I wouldn't call it free will, but the untied human is free to act according to his will.

A short while ago someone argued that the term "free will" is also used in juristic contexts. I'd say at least they are talking about something, whether you should call it "free will" or not.

I suggest "free to act according to your own will".

People think of string-puppets when they feel uncomfortable with entertaining that they don't have free will.
On the other hand people also would say that a hypnotized person is not acting on free will, although they are free to act according to their will - which happens to be manipulated. Not all types of manipulation are considered as taking away free will. If you ask nicely or buy a service, that is also manipulating will.

What I'm saying is: There might be something what people call "free will" that exists and something different, that other people call "free will", that doesn't exist.

Gödel proved his incompletenes theorem. Of course that only means something when the proof is actually correct.

It's a big proof. It has something to do with the proposition "This sentence is not provable." It turns out that this sentence is neither provable nor unprovable.

Gödel also associated propositions in formal languages with Gödel-numbers. I don't know why that's necessary. You can mathematically reason about words just as well. Something with avoiding self-referenciality?

Well, Gödel actually talks about a number that represents that weird sentence.

more...

This reminds me a bit of Macchiavelli. Of course I haven't read Macchiavelli, but it seems to me that he wants to achieve his goals optimally, even if it means making decisions that are immoral in the eyes of the public. A bit favoring the end over the means, like in the trolley problem, when you are killing people in war to prevent a greater evil. Goal-based over principle-based ethics.

In terms of strategy, you could look at game theory. The prisoner's dilemma is about waging cooperation against betrayal or competition. Peace might be better for both countries, but if you are in a war, it's better when you do the first strike. It's still possible for cooperation to be strategically better, for example when you build up a trustworthy reputation over time in the "repeated prisoners dilemma".

Some countries are torn by corruption or civil wars. That might be just because they haven't had a chance to build a trustworthy reputation with each other.

The "Golden Rule" or Kant's similar categorical imperative say that you shouldn't do to others, what you don't want them to do to you. That would mean that you shouldn't start wars. I think this doesn't work then the other party is either evil or irrational or weak. You wouldn't want your kid to send you to bed at seven o'clock, but you can still do that to your kid. You can also imprison an insane murderer.

If you threaten violence, you might be able to control more people than if you actually exert violence. If you have one nuclear bomb you can hit destroy one enemy country but you can threaten to destroy multiple countries.

Practically speaking, in international politics you also have to consider the opinions of every other state. When you are an aggressor, they might ally against you. International law works similar to national law. Abiding to laws is often advantageus. Thomas Hobbes said something about that without laws, humans are wolves. But we have international laws or at least conventions, so states shouldn't be wolves either.

On a battlefield it is of course sometimes better to be defensive. I think Sun Tsu said, that you should only engage an enemy army, when you are stronger (like twice the number of soldiers or something). When you are behind a wall or on a hill, you don't leave your advantageus position. A chess move that takes a piece is not always better than one that doesn't. This is probably not what you meant, is it? "Always take the more aggressive tactical option!"

I agree that we should use words how they are used in daily life and not redefine them.

I think the judges shouldn't call that "free will" based on the usages of "free" and "will". Basically, I personally like the definition of libertarian free will better, because it's about a will that is free.

I'd call what the judge called "acting on free will", "acting based on your own will". If the judges definition is more common, it becomes the correct definition.

When it's hot in a room, then you don't have to fix the air-conditioning system, when there is a power failiure. The air-conditioniner wasn't "responsible". I think punishing criminals is like fixing or calibrating machines.

> We’re just extremely complex machines, so the reasoning is obfuscated to the point that it gives the illusion of free will.

That's interesting. You say you have an illusion of free will, but you have seen through it. I don't even have the illusion of free will. I just have a will, which is inherently subjective, so it can't be an illusion.

Maybe historically free will meant something different then how I'd define it today. Maybe "someone is free to act according to their will". (Maybe not that though. I'm not sure.) A judge said "I'm punishing you, because you acted on free will, i.e. you weren't directly coerced by other peoples wills."

Then over time the meaning of free will evolved to something like "will, at least partially independent of everything", but people still claim to believe in it, because they are thinking of the older, pragmatic definition.

There are many people who don't believe in free will, it seems to me and they still follow laws. I don't know what the percentage in the general public is, mabye 25% don't believe in free will 25% do and 50% have never thought about it.

It's like shuffling a deck of cards.

Randomness is a weird concept. I think you can replace it with "unpredictable".

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Predictability depends on an individual perspective. When physicists say that quants are random, they say that noone will ever be able to predict their behaviour.

I don't know where I stand on this. I'd have to read more.

I do have respect for "martyrs". Of course not, when they do something evil for a god that doesn't exist, but when someone sacrifices something for a good cause.

I suppose Nietzsche would regard martyrs as weak. I think when someone pays a high price for something, they are taking a risk. They are offering something that is regarded highly by many people, like time, money or health, for something else that has an even higher value to them, personally.

You know: Some people don't buy things on principle if they are expensive - that's a good rule of thumb, a heuristic - but occasionally it's more rational to pay a high price for something that is actually worth it. "I'm not buying these shoes, they cost $300!" - "Well yeah, but they last as long as four cheap shoes and they correct your bow-leggedness."

I think sometimes when evil bosses of companies accept the suffering of exploited child workers, for example, that is a sign of weakness. They might feel some empathy towards them, but they suppress it, because the rule of thumb is "money is good", "morality is too expensive", "eat or be eaten" and they don't dare to go against that rule. At their death bed, they might regret their life.

I'm making it easy for myself in assuming I'm and probably most people are altruistic at heart, so being strong and being nice is aligned but on the other hand, someone who is a sociopath would be strong if they act evil and weak if they act moral.

> You’re a person who gets irritated by the smallest things, things outside your control like a person loudly crunching chips in the cinema. Accept everything about this situation, your own responses included.

Personally, I'm actually not that irritable. You could say I'm more "stoic" than people are kind of "socially expected". I don't know if "socially expected" is the right term. In movies, people are easier to affect than I am in reality, for dramaturgic reasons and I feel like other people try to emulate movie-behaviour.

Just because you can talk yourself into being angry about something, doesn't mean that's your most natural and honest mental state towards it.

I'm all for honesty towards yourself. That's what I like about Nietzsche. Sometimes being honest can mean that you aren't as emotionally affected as society expects you to.

Being honest towards yourself can sometimes be tricky. For example imagine a grandma who likes to bake cake and knit sweaters for her grandchildren. People might say to her that she should listen to her own desires and she might be tempted to invest less work in others to achieve that, but in truth the might be happiest when she actually makes other people happy.

I'm not sure what Nietzsche meant by the slave-mentality. Does this grandma have a slave-mentality? I guess some people think on a surface level that they should endure and please others but a deeper, surpressed, level they know that they are sacrificing their own happiness. That doesn't apply to all altruistic people. You would expect humans to be evolved to be altruistic to the extend it benefits your genes.

I also like these "strangely satisfying" Youtube videos, like where someone pops bubble wrap. You only get to feel satisfaction from these weird things if you are very honest to yourself, because society won't suggest it to you. Weird sexual fetishes are the same. People who aren't honest to themselves would rather eat at an expensive restaurant or visit a popular tourist destination, for example. (On the other hand society very much suggested to kids to buy fidget spinners and push pop, so it's not that clear cut either. The honest option is not necessarily the less obvious option and it's not necessarily the option that goes against social pressure.)

Sometimes you can choose how you feel about something. For example when you watch a race and you don't know any of the competitors, you might choose to invest your "heart" into anyone arbitrarily and feel good when they win and bad if they loose. There is this other youtube channel where they race marbles. I guess it would be anti-stoic to feel emotions when watching a marble race.

On a darker side of that, I can choose to "dehumanize" people and then I don't feel empathy towards them anymore. I can "dehumanize" a spider when my sister asks me to kill it and I can "humanize" another spider in a terrarium that my friend asks to to care for, while they are on vacation.

In these cases you can't choose based on what is most honest.