The philosophy thread general discussion

Does anyone have the full edition of this?

Not sure if this is the right place, but I'm hopelessly confused as to the meaning of probability; neither the frequentist nor the Bayesian definition really satisfies me. I just wrote a piece about it here. Any input/answers/theories would be much appreciated!

edited 7th Sep '15 6:41:43 PM by MidnightRambler

Probability is a huge topic, too big to cover in a forum site like this. If you have any specific questions, I can probably answer them (heh). But I can address some things you mentioned in your link:

"Suppose I settle for 6000 rolls and roll 991 threes. I write down that the chance of rolling a three is 991/6000. The next day, I roll the die another 6000 times and roll 1012 threes. I write down that the chance of rolling a three has mysteriously increased to 1012/6000. I’m wrong both times, because this is in fact a perfectly weighted die, whose probability of rolling a three is exactly one in six: 1000/6000."

"One in Six" is the probability due entirely to the die alone. There are other factors involved, obviously- the air currents that you toss the die through, the surface of the table, how you held the die. If you could comprehensively know the total influence of all factors affecting the tumbling of the die, right down to the atomic level, there would be no probability involved- the term "probability" refers entirely to our inability to ever comprehensively know all the factors that influence an event, thus preventing us from perfectly predicting events ahead of time.

That's an important philosophical point, actually: above the quantum level, the universe doesn't function randomly, it acts according to cause and effect. But we can't know the sum total of all causal influences acting on a body, so, we default to probability theory. It's really nothing more than a very complex estimation tool.

"Another problem is that a parameter defined as “the limit of x as y approaches infinity” doesn’t seem to tell you anything useful about the outcome of a single die roll."

That's perfectly correct, and by now you understand why. It's our inability to predict single die rolls ahead of time (or anything else for that matter) which forces us to estimate the odds governing a single event based on the average outcome of similar events over time. We can never know more about anything than what happened in the past- if a certain type of atom has always decayed at a particular rate until now, we presume that it will continue to decay at that rate into the future. But there is no way to know beforehand what a particular atom will do (short of inventing a time machine).

"And it goes further. Engineers make cost-probability tradeoffs all the time: if a system (like a plane, or a train, or a nuclear power plant) has a potential for catastrophic failure, how high do we allow the probability of such a failure to be? How much money are we willing to spend to drive it down by a factor of z?"

That's what mathematicians call "arbitrary". There is no theoretical "best" ratio of risk to reward, that's an entirely subjective judgement call based on how much risk we are willing to tolerate. People vary from extremely cautious to extremely bold- ultimately evolution makes the decision. You only know that you have taken on too much risk after it blows up in your face.

As for Bayesian reasoning, that's yet another subject much too big to comprehensively cover here. There are good online resources, however (just Google "Bayesian Probability"). It's basically a way of determining which of a limited number of hypotheses regarding some state of affairs in the world are true, given the outcomes of a set of sequential tests. It has some limitations- you have to be able to specify specific alternative hypotheses, and you need some method of testing them that will allow you to update the probability that any one hypothesis is true. Then you can calculate the odds that "A is true given test outcome B." This is primarily useful when there is no single way to unambiguously determine the outcome of something (i.e., to test the roll of a die, you just roll the die, Bayes theorem isn't needed- but to test whether or not someone has an early form of cancer- you often cant see the cancer, so it has to be estimated based on a series of tests).

Hopefully that didnt completely confuse you.

edited 8th Sep '15 4:56:40 PM by DeMarquis

Random rambling.

Some people seems to be under impression that hating your own kind is anything of noteworthy; hating your own gender, hating your own countrymen, hating your own family, etc.

I don't see why it is, though. People hate other people, with good reason or not. If hating your own kind is a strange thing, hating other people would be a strange thing as well.

Not that I advocate hatred, oh no. I suppose you need healthy amount of hatred from time to time, but that amount tend to be very hard to measure.

The presumption is that the in-groups one belongs to are an important, key source of self-identity- amplified by the fact that society often treats people as little more than members of their demographic category. To hate "one's own kind" therefore is tantamount to hating oneself, which is the real problem.

edited 11th Oct '15 3:45:57 PM by DeMarquis

I see.

According to my philosophical system, hatred of people (including yourself) is evil. You can hate things people do or ideologies, but not people themselves.

As for say, hating your own ethnicity, that would be racism, which is immoral whether or not you're a part of that race.

edited 11th Oct '15 9:16:51 PM by Protagonist506

The boomerang type, to boot.

Good point.

Humans tend to hate anyone that isn't in their group. Also, I suspect survival and fear may play a role in it.

I'm finding the concept of "intersubjectivity" to be tremendously more interesting than that of subjectivity, to the point of making the latter seem like a cognitive error.

Our relationship to others is the basis of our concept of self.

I made a typo; I meant objectivity instead of subjectivity. Namely, the Thing Unto Itself is unknowable, and Science does not resist the Problem of Induction, and we cannot communicate our intuitions and experiences perfectly to each other, so there's no such thing as "objective truths" or "The Truth". What there is, is stuff that is non-controversial to a sufficient. Stuff that we can share and that we can agree on.

So, again, "intersubjectivity" becomes much more interesting than "objectivity".

Are you talking about the process of modeling another person's mind, so that in some sense you share subjective mind-states?

That's not precisely the same thing as sharing similar sensory impressions. We can agree that an object we are viewing is a person. We can also agree that this person is funny. I think that those are two different things, although I suppose either could be termed "intersubjective".

It is, evidently a complex subject.

Whoa, you went for the big fish, there. Unfunny is generally easier to nail than funny when it comes to reported intersubjective experiences.

How I look at objectivity is what I call "Distorted Frame Theory". Basically, objective reality exists, but we do not directly perceive it. Instead, we perceive distortions of reality. Each person's distortion is slightly different, though they have a common source.

And then we can all agree on solid criteria for an object actually being there.

To maybe move this thread along, here's some humor:

edited 22nd Nov '15 5:08:10 PM by Achaemenid

So this is like a philosopher's version of The Aristocrats?

No, its a parody of the liberal professor copypasta that's been circling chain e-mails for years.

edited 22nd Nov '15 5:18:39 PM by Achaemenid

Oh.

Bah.

I thought it was a joke about academia philosophers being petty, pompous, and egotistic, more focused on seeming intellectually impressive and one-upping each other than in actually advancing humanity's understanding

Well, that's one of the layers of the onion, yes.

Slowly, a little sadly, an overlooked shad of a teaching assistant who had been huddling in the corner all this time timidly raised his hand.

"What is it now, Kant?"

Four hundred hours later, every other person in the room had died of a brain hemorrhage. Kant had still not finished explaining the premise of his question.

edited 24th Nov '15 11:05:37 AM by DeMarquis

(sheepish happiness) I understood that reference.

Is it healthy to aspire to approach life so positively that you feel no guilt over anything you do, but at the same time feel no grudge towards anyone who does anything bad to you or others close to you?

edited 27th Nov '15 11:23:33 AM by nervmeister