Intentionality and the illusion of agency.

Reiterate idea that searching for intentions, as part of our evolutionary heritage as social apes, leads to a cognitive bias towards seeing agency where there is none.

The reason to combat certain terms is the intellectual, social and emotional baggage that we all carry with the term. eg god.

The gestalt construct based on sensory input. How to defeat your illusions with information ( you can't dispel them, only learn the shape and how to navigate within).

Perhaps the greatest driver to brain development was social order. It may have been sexual selection or just the ability to cooperate. But the magnification of the human mind beyond that of the other primates cannot really be called into doubt. It is this device, this intentionality engine that drives our exploration. We must learn to temper our thought and language to differentiate between explanatory reasons and willful design. The difficulty is that we at e using a tool that seeks the risings of other minds like our own. This failure of he imagination is one of tremendous impact.

If this stands true we should see some ties between pattern seeking behavior and the rise of false pattern. There may be a certain trait that leads to conspiracy theories and paranoia as well as gods and angels.
This might be the same thing that leads us to the repeat failure of bad explanation trumping no explanation. explanation I already have trumping new explanation is the conservation of brain power to no relearn he world at every moment. It instead adapt the world to fit our model. The term cognitive dissonance is to describe when we hold contradictory thoughts but there should be a special term for the confrontation with information that demolishes our old understanding. This is the eureka moment plus the loss of the familiar.



We can call part of this problam the Intention bias

The added value Problem.

That an idea or body of ideas can be tested
That ideas have ascendent consequences which may be tested
that connections between ideas can be ascribed the labels of either; necessary or probabilistic
that the test of one part can help determine the value of another under the assumption of the connection.




One of the key criticisms leveled against the type of world view I suggest is that of "scientism". Which is often associated with reductionism and a lack of appreciation for the arts and humanities. I trained as an artist and musician. I regularly attend events of this type, they are an important part of my life. (non sequitur you are making Phil)


The issue seems to be one of criticizing certain views as not reality based or not thorough. I want to narrow the focus and say that the test of an idea or body of knowledge is that of added values. What does the knowledge enhance? In he case of science there are many examples of improvements in hygiene and medicine. In communications and agriculture. This is not to say here are no drawbacks, no potential risk. Added value certainly exists. If we turn then to art and music we can see that it is emotionally enriching and has some function socially as well. Keep in mind that these are reasons of added value and not the thing themselves or an indication of objectives.

If we turn specifically to bodies of knowledge we can ask if they cross-pollinate. Critical thinking and doubt certainly do. What about post modernism? Or theology? Do they interface and enhance other ways of thinking at the basic level? Do they even add to the conversation they are supposedly engaged in?
How is it of added value to assume or assert the appeal to authority beyond what would be considered a tautology. We know that the thing is true (or seems to be) but we have no proof of a source. Why take this next jump into a fallacy why not do what you accuse me of and stop at a tautological point? This is not my actual belief but it is how you represent me. So what is wrong with it by your own argument.
My point is there are certain assumption that we make as can be considered pragmatically. And held as probably true but potentially not. We do not know that math, logic, physics, etc are universal but the pragmatic utility breaks down as we discard them. It may be that they are some function of the mind that we cannot escape but is not universal. A kind of perceptual event horizon.

It is interesting to engage in this type of discussion. And the questions demand that we seek answers. It might be that by their very nature these questions are meaningless or unanswerable. It might be that try have a real and definite solution. The important thing is to avoid a hand wave. A pretend answer. Be happy with the statement that we don't have enough information, rather than distracting from the search by offering an answer that will avoid empirical test or is so ill defined that it is a mask to there being a question at all.



When a god is offered as an answer. We must test to see if it is actually explanatory.
It becomes a question of enhancing he conversation. Does the assumption of a god really add anything?
If you want to say that morality exists because god wants it to. That doesn't actually tell you what to think about morality or what actions are permissible or required. It does open the door to seeking wisdom in ancient books that at best equal what we could come up with now. And more often are horrific and fail any modern moral test.

Does theology offer any serious ideas that increase knowledge of any other sort? It seems like it can't because it starts with some claims that are considered unimpeachable. They must never be tested or even examined instead all other things are examined in light of them. And these claims are not that reality exists and can be understood but that some specific revealed doctrine is true.
I suppose the counter argument is that we must assume something. But I think we are better off presuming the minimum and doing so pragmatically.




Utilization 2

A structure for comparison.

You can create a connection from one model to another, depending on the strength of the connection oh can measure the first one indirectly by testing the others.

If you find that these connections do not exist or that the do not lead to ideas that can be tested. Then the model can be said to add no value. This is not to debate if it is true or false onl if it is possible to determine if it is. We can dismiss these ideas on grounds of utility. Or judge them as interesting and aesthetic but meaningless in relation to all other things.

If you have such a model it is either gauge or detached. If it is gauge you can refine it until it is specific enough to test. If it is detached then no action can attach it excluding a completely new branch of thought which may attach it or render it merely vague.

The merits of this is that it can be done on a few assumptions. Ones that most do not wish to contest. Proving these assumptions may fail due to incompleteness theory.

We need to be clear of the difference between an assumption and an assertion. One is taking ideas as either pragmatically true or describing the degree of certainty with the degree of probability assumed. An assertion is a statement that is not only taken as a given but said to be necessarily true or maybe to be better phrased as a probability of 100%. This distinguishes it from the formal way of defining necessary truth.




The necessity of a fact or idea putting constraints on your expectation.  If it doesn't; you either don't believe it or don't understand it (in the operational sense)

A few Base Assumptions

All this time I have been talking about the nature of discourse and how to formulate an argument. There are some implied premises in this and it's worth discussing what they are.

1 Statements should be logically coherent. (link)

2 Judgement should be reserved for when there is enough information.

3 No explanation is better than a bad explanation. We are very bad at holding to this and should not worry to much if we are creating incomplete models but we must be able to adapt and/or abandon them.

4 We should except our incomplete explanations and views pragmatically (understanding the limits to which they work and what is wrong with them)

5 There must be a certain amount of assumption for any given statement. These are the unchallenged premises. It can only be things that are either necessarily true or that all involved in the discussion agree to (at least hypothetically).

6 The difference between assertions and assumptions.

7 Our limits both a reasoners and the limit of our view points lead. To certain consistent mistakes that we must compensate for.  OR  Avoid Fallacies.

The strength of doubt.

It is often in discussion about fringe ideas that the following type of statements are made; "science doesn't know everything" or "everyone used to think the world was flat". These are often presented as bolstering the claims put forward, or attacking my critique of certain suggestions that are (thought to be) physically impossible. I do my best to not dismiss these statements as the appeal to credulity that they are often presented as and see them instead as an expression of the desire to expand knowledge.

When taken seriously we can see that of course science doesn't know everything. It hardly knows anything. But this isn't some secret it is an important aspect. Science is a way of knowing, not a body of knowledge. The body of knowledge that is associated with it is a collection of observations and logical constructions to be drawn upon but are by no means science. Alone on an island with no access to this information you would be able to perform basic science.

The second type, about everyone knowing that the earth was flat etc, always strikes me as funny. The observational data from those that tested their beliefs against the world has shown that it is round for thousands of years. It was only when science was not performed that it was thought otherwise.

At times the use of Einstein to replace Newton is put forth as the suggestion that we don't know anything and whatever fresh bullshit is being put forth is true. I like to take this and use it to fertilize ideas rather than allowing the person to think it fruit. When a new theory overturns old, we do not dismiss the old version. Instead we learn it's limits and the new idea is some form of refinement. At least in the case of scientific ideas. If only one is based on observation and experiment then it may well overturn another showing it to be very wrong.

But even the flat earth model has a use. If you are calculating the physics of a baseball game, or car crash you can treat it as Newtons physics on a flat earth. Quantum effects, relativity, and the curvature of the planet are not going to be needed for getting results. This information becomes relevant if you refine your scale enough or if you expand your view enough.

If we can say anything about the world it's this; We create a gestalt hallucination based on faulty sense data and feedback mechanisms, this is guided by events beyond our control, and thrown together in brains evolved not to grasp the universe in her majesty, but to grasp a stone to kill a rival or a lion. Still, we have developed a system of charting beyond our own individual failings. We can turn this tool upon anything and have used it to rid the world of horrific diseases and shorten the distance around the world to a days travel. We have used it to probe the very stuff of reality and find it stranger than words can describe. That our view is narrow and our comprehension limited is of no doubt, but it grows. There are many things beyond our purview, and many more that we may never come to know that we don't know.   

How we support ideas

Richard Feynman explains some of the key points to scientific reasoning.  This is the best way that we have for evaluation of claims.  If you notice it is somewhere between induction and abduction, but the key point is the testing against experiment.  This testing is how we form impressions of the world, that we can say are correct (for a given value of correct).

He also demolishes the appeal to authority, citing the test against evidence as the only arbiter of fact vs fiction.

He then goes on to discuss the idea of proving or disproving something.  And states the pragmatic idea: "We must always try to guess the most likely explanation keeping in the back of the mind that if it doesn't work, we must discuss the other possibilities."

The importance here is that we can think of this process as an effort to define and eliminate types of ignorance.  We can attempt to explain the world, but our statements of absolute certainty must be reserved for what has been repeatedly shown to be false. Other ideas must be discussed in a manner of what the limits to the information we have are, and what test would prove our idea conclusively wrong.

This is not to discount positive evidence or say that we can know nothing, it is only to temper our claims of certainty with doubt.  And while there may be some indication that we humans favor the certain over the uncertain and flock then to demagogues, we can train ourselves through understanding and vigilance to resist this baser impulse.

This link contains some great quotes from scientists as they struggle to define the term science. Which is the process that I attempting to describe here. An idea that is so simple that it almost refuses clear definition. But following through on defining terms so that we may be understood is a goal of those that wish to discuss things clearly, without retreating to fallacies or vague assertions.

Triumvirate

Rhetoric, Grammar, Logic.

To speak well, To write well, To think well.

For some reason these were given equal weight in the system. However mastery of either of the first two ( or both) will allow you to fake a competency in many things mastery of the third will allow you to attain that competence. Of course skill in communication and the beautiful assembly of language are still to be valued as they will better allow the expression and transition of ideas.

A quick note on communication from Randall Munroe

  http://xkcd.com/1028/

Grounding of Morality

I hadn't heard of Shelly Kagan before but this is interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiJnCQuPiuo&feature=related

Lane uses a definition of god here that makes it the basis for moral values by describing it with moral values.  It seems like in this case we could then remove the god and leave moral values as the basis for moral values.  I am not saying that I think this is sound, just that by the reasons he is using I can see no real objection to doing so.

The real question that Lane seems to ask is; How if they not universal can we say rights and ethics and morality truly and objectively exist?  I must recycle my previous answer that I think we tend towards emergence.  Replace ethics with consciousness or oxygen based metabolism and you should see the point I am trying to make.  It may simply be a part of our nature.  Conversely it may be a construct that could have developed differently under different circumstances.  We then have to wonder if the circumstance is unique to humans, unique to certain types of consciousness, or unique to conscious beings of any kind.

Some of my own ideas from prior to watching this debate

http://newsoldsandopinions.blogspot.com/2012/02/objective-values.html

http://newsoldsandopinions.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-basis-for-rights.html

http://newsoldsandopinions.blogspot.com/2012/02/pragmatic-empiricism.html

http://newsoldsandopinions.blogspot.com/2012/02/re-arguments-for-existance-of-god.html

 from Game Theory

http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-the-savior-of-us-all

2 ways of moving from a premise

You have a premise you can reason out what is necessary for the premise to be true ( either the premise is a direct consequence or shares ascendant cause with these ideas), and you can reason out what is a consequence of the premise. While these two types are in most respects the same, I find that it is useful to address the time domain; where the first would be hints already in place and the later being things that follow after. This distinction is one of personal preference for addressing causal determinants.

Truthiness and critical thinking.

I made an earlier post about truth and lying but I thought that it would be worth mentioning this article and exploring the idea of cognitive bias a bit more.

I reference fallacies quite a bit. But they are more about specific structures that are incorrect. Certain cognitive biases are more about the way we handle information in an intuitive manner. And why we are so bad at it. Going with how you feel about an idea is not typically a good criteria. Relying on the impression is only useful towards the end of a concentrated training and if that overlaps with specific areas of bias we may never be able to rely on instinct but only its second guessing.

Color for other physiologies

If we imagine a different spread like for bees which see UV but not red.
If we imagine an extra set like for pit vipers or octopus 4primaries to match receptors or directional color for polarization.

We must remember that color and our visual field is a psychological construct based on our physiology and evolutionary adaptations in the way our vision was used by our ancient ancestors.

We must also not make the mistake of simply applying additions to our own gestalt constructions and ascribing these to other (alien) minds. There may be some basic overlap in the availability of sensations from certain physical phenomena but there is a variety of qualia available to construct a seamless enough representation to imagine worlds that do not overlap aesthetically from the same set of stimulus.

There may be certain necessary ideas in the development of intelligence that require structural overlap. While at the same time the stimulus conditions exclude agreement in what we might call "harmonious".
Reference to the intense olfactory experiences of most mammals And the auditory experience of bats may be of use here. Without a better understanding of how the cortices map sense data into a representation we can only speculate about the muliarray of colors beyond 3

A quick reference to the difference between place (location) and direction (polarization). Does our own experience have an analog for this? Perhaps in the directionality of hearing, we find it. This would suggest that polarization would be more akin to our atmospheric blue shift but colorless.

The conjecture of this entire article is only to begin the speculation. We may not be able to answer this until we communicate with a being that has different sensory apparatus; even then without the language and mental constructs in place we may not comprehend their view.

Sensation and Perception

Notes from my morning commute in obvious need of development.  

The illusion of a continuous reality. Gestalt the feeling that we have complete and discrete experiences unedited at the time but ultimately prone to the distortions of memory, or do you think that too is concrete ?

Count the passes video (take the test)
Magic tricks
Optical illusions
Hearing your name at a party
Touch your nose touch your toes
A shot in the dark (random firing of nerves )
The visual blind spot
The "event window" .1ms-10mins
The shifting baseline or what it means to be adaptive.

Sensation is not perception perception is not understanding understanding is not action.

The physiological responses of our sensory apparatus are regulated by a feedback loop with our brains. Nowhere is this more clear than in hearing. A person with normal hearing at a noisy party is still able to concentrate on a nearby conversation but if your name is spoken a cross the room there is a good chance you will pick it up all while hearing very little of what is going on In-between.

The important thing about this gestalt is that it is seamless until it breaks down. Showing someone a blind spot is fairly easy. But no matter how many times you see things vanish into it you will still not see that it is there. The amount of time it takes each of your senses to reach your brain depends on where the sense takes place. There is a recent example that should become as famous as the blind spot. We will call it the temporal continuity illusion. Touch your toes, now touch your nose (like in the children's song but without the rest) now touch them both. Funny didn't it feel like you touched them both at the same time when you touched them both at the same time? Bu there is a difference in how far that sense data must travel. So either the graininess of your sense is such that you can't feel things below that threshold (a measure of your perceptual present and its limits) or your experience of time is being rewritten to make the sense data synchronize.

You don't have the ability to interpret the information you don't have.

I will give you both.

When discussing a topic it's important to have some information on it. More important still is the ability to interpret and produce similar data.

In a recent debate on climate change a friend challenged me that they could cite many articles that referenced figures in comparison to the two that I gave them. The difference between the articles was clear to me and I challenged her on this. It seems that it was not clear to her.
The two articles I supplied were both of a scientific nature; the first described a simple experiment and somewhat more complicated math to demonstrate that carbon emissions lead to global warming. The second was a scholarly article including its data set. She supplied, in return, three opinion page articles from popular online news sources, one of which had an image of a chart in it.
I could spend some time debunking each of the claims in each of these articles but my experience suggests that this just leads to dropping those articles and not the ideas. (also great debunking is likely already on offer, links?)

My focus instead should be supplying the tools to analyze the information in these articles and an explanation of how to find the full data sets. If this sounds more like an introduction to the scientific method than a conversation about climate change that is because it is. The title suggests, rather rudely, that my opponent does not posses the
Requisite skills to discuss this topic; these are general skills that will be useful in dealing with any information that you wish to present or that has been presented to you.
There are some basic things that you need to start. Since discussions of this kind often involve charts I will start there.
Charts are tools to make data easier to interpret they are a form of info-graphic. The important things to know about graphics is the scale and data set used.
What is important is a continuous representation that Enhances the intuition of the situation. If the chart is misleading or obfuscates the information than it can give a bad intuition. Additionally if it extrapolates too much from too little information then it may mislead due to graininess.

It's relevant to mention Nyquist Theorem here. The essential part is that you need to take samples at least twice as often as the period of the thing sampled. Imagine a sine wave that you sample at the same period as the wave. You will end up with a line.
If you over extrapolate from this limited information you may end up drawing the wrong conclusions.
There are also various ways to graph information. Depending on what you are comparing and how much data you have you will want to pick a specific type. Bar graphs are useful for comparing relative points and do well with limited data. Pie charts should only be used when representing the percentage of something when all the numbers are known (if you are projecting say so). Line graphs are very useful when you have enough information to not smear out the important trends.

The next key to making informed choices is understanding information sources. How do you separate good information from bad? How do you know when you have enough data to successfully model a given instance? There are a few strategies that we can employ. The first simply being if we trust the source ( this of course can lead to lots of creeping errors if we trust the wrong source so let's put a low information value on this). The second being the availability of said information ( how difficult is it to check for yourself? How many independent sources can provide this?) troubles arrive in this verification process and you may be in a situation where there is only one source of good information. But in a free and open society you should have multiple places to view the same basic information from. If the information is experimental are you viewing the whole result or just part, can you recreate the experiment? If you have multiple confirmations from independent sources and you are unable to reproduce the result (historical results for instance) then you must weight the value of your sources and the story they are giving you. We should use the idea of attempting to fit to the simplest explanation for the information at hand. If his contradicts something known we should seek more information on both the new idea and the known one. If only one can be true we should take the one which is better supported. The principle of simplicity and elegance in explanation is called Occum's Razor. This is he assumption that given otherwise equal evidence the description with less "moving parts" is the least likely to break down. This can be seen in reasoning the premises from the conclusion ( my practice of determining what is required to be true for a given belief, the domain of necessary truths given a certain set of premises).

What is the basis for rights?

This is a continuation of some of the other previous posts.  But the content stands on its own.

What is the basis for rights?  (framing the question)

Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are "endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights"  Can we state this without the appeal to authority? Isn't inalienable rights would be that more so if they are not granted by some force but are instead intrinsic?

It then becomes a question of if we can find a more rational basis for deeming them rights other than considering them intrinsic. For psychological reasons I think that it is important to consider them intrinsic even if they are instead something we developed as a culture. This is because I suspect that they are necessary for flourishing and the danger in considering them mutable is in revoking them at convenience. This is he role that the state takes on to greater or lesser degree with criminals and dissidents. The degree is equivalent to the amount of freedom inherent in that society.

So what else might we ground this idea in? Does it need to be grounded or is it enough to call them immutable and inalienable? Can we assume a natural aspiration to freedom in societies or is it a chance occurrence?
I have suggested before that our ethical intuitions may be evolutionary holdovers in combination with cultural reinforcement. I see no reason here to not continue that idea. In fact, w may have developmental ideas that can point out pitfalls we may encounter in creating true freedom and equality.

Let me be clear that when I refer to things as developmental from the evolutionary point of view that I am attempting to reconcile what we think about our own ethical live with what we know about our past. Additionally I am NOT suggesting that evolutionary heritage should be the basis for morality any more than waiting to see if people die from whatever happened to them should be the basis for medicine. Evolution brought us to culture and its tools, a powerful one called rational thought has developed. We can now discover what we evolved doing and decide if it's worth carrying over. With the admission that some things may be difficult to rid ourselves of without rewriting our biology.

Intuition and its limits

In regard to a conversation I had about my objective morality post:

We may have in our selves certain moral ( and psychological and physical) instincts. I would like to break these down into two sets the evolutionary intuition and the cultural intuition. The difference should be simple to explain yet examples will be much more complicated to discover. We might want to call the evolutionary "universal" but I am avoiding this for two reasons: these ideas may only apply to us, and we may find cultural ideas that have spread everywhere that are not necessarily evolutionary.

The definitions are as follow; evolutionary intuition is that which rises from the nature of our animal selves the ability to love and recognize distress in the faces of others, the ability to know about how far you can jump etc.

The cultural intuitions are things you are taught either implicitly or explicitly by the groups you are in while growing (and to a lesser extent while grown) The best example I have of this is the reaction we share to power outlets.

Sometimes the cultural can override the evolutionary and sometimes it can't
These limits to our evolutionary psychology can de described. We have a sort of "Paredolia of action". If we are running a trail in the woods and a tree root trips us there is some degree of wanting to ask the tree why it tripped us. When really we just didn't notice the root. We also tend to ascribe complex intensional agency on other inanimate objects or simple animals. We also reserve certain traits as distinctly human when they may be apparent in other creatures.

Our evolutionary physics serves us well for playing baseball but does not help us when discussing quantum mechanics or relativistic ideas. It also would need to be retrained for living on a space station. Playing catch in a rotating reference frame and remembering we have our mass even without our weight.
Our evolutionary morals will likely have similar defects when dealing with a world different than that from which they were derived. Some carryovers may be of a benefit others of a detriment but most will likely carry a mixed bag of behaviors into our current and future culture.

Still there may be realms of inquest for which our current intuitions are not equipped or non existent. Probability and statistics do not seem to have an evolutionary correlate nor do they seem to be well represented culturally. Naturally then we must create a form of them that can be taught to children and teach this to voters.

This begins to lead us to the ideas of literacy in a subject. I will deal with that idea in another post or this won't ever be published.

Source and the acquisition of knowledge

Being trained to recognize and create good argument, and to recognize and critique the bad is only the first step in being a participant.  Having a wide berth of knowledge and the skills to again more is particularly important for evaluation of premises. This is the only way to determine valid false statements from valid true ones.

What then can be said of knowing and it's methods? We cannot ground the experience of knowing on some abstract idea; it is an intrinsic part of our development and must be dealt with As part of the knowing whole. Knowing is part of the function of brains (minds). We can store information in a book but the book does not know anything about its contents. This is what I referred to earlier as a self referential learning system. Knowledge in its simplest sense is a form of Pavlovian conditioning (however abstracted it may be from simple impulses)
This does not tell us how to know or solve he issues of epistemological concern. I merely want to suggest that knowledge must be in reference to a knower. There are certain things that may exist in a world with no animus but knowledge is not one of them.

Reduction and Granularity

At what point does it make sense to model the activity? Certain molecular properties will effect the behavior of a system in ways a different elemental combination would not.

The question, for example; 'does morality come from the benzine molecule?' is a failure in this type of analysis.  The description of fluid dynamics vis-a-vis the propagation of wavefronts in a large body of water will likely only gain small benefit from discussions of hydrogen and oxygen reactions (at best). Instead things that require a statistical description will after a certain threshold only be burdened by details.
The question then becomes one of picking the right degree of reduction. Below which the information is lost to granularity and above which the involved factors become either irreconcilably large or in other ways of retraction to the system.
This will require a degree of sensitivity to the data set as well as the goal of the inquiry; lacking this information only the grossest of descriptions will be made available.
Again it becomes one of defining a question, allowing for a recursive development to treat the data set will at some point lead to diminishing returns. But should always be considered if there is time and processing power to spare. Otherwise it may be more useful to open multiple conflicting models and look for best fits within each constraint base.
If data is ill-defined, then some form of self referential learning system will be required.

Pragmatic Empiricism

Incompleteness tells us that we can't have a self describing system that is internally consistent. This means that any claim must be grounded ultimately in some other idea. Often people chose some fallacy (appeal to authority) for this. My personal preference is for one of building on the facts at hand and using the results to build better definitions. This starts with statements such as "I am here and it is now" After which it is a question of methods.

Why do I think a Starting point such as this is a good one?

 It seems impossible for a thinking being to not posses that statement in some form. It is nearly tautological in its description.

Why then do I choose to say pragmatic empiricism?
This is the resultant idea of a best guess given the available evidence.

The next question is one of methodology and construction; What can we say of the ways in which we make our. Choices? What means suit the situation? What is the most appropriate way to deal with the given information set?
The methods of knowing are laid out in other of the available essays and should be referenced as need be.

Objective values

Really enjoying writing on the train.  Here is this mornings commute notes.

Morality is often referenced in objective terms (I think this is good for psychological reasons) with the idea of a godless world being said to lack any place for this notion.

The failure of he imagination here is one of treating morals as an abstract notion rather than a practical one. If we are to assume that the existence of morals is a result of our evolutionary and cultural development, then we should treat it as a biological fact.

Another example of a biological fact about humans is the existence of opposable thumbs. You can metaphorically substitute the existence of thumbs for any inference about the development,or platonic nature, of morality.

Do animals have thumbs?
Well some do and some don't it depends on their evolutionary heritage. More over we can see that there are different variations and levels of sophistication to thumbs.

What do we do with people who have no thumbs or under-developed thumbs?
We try to give them assistance.

Would intelligent extra terrestrial entities have thumbs?
We imagine so, but they may have developed a different method of gripping things.

 ____________________________________________
 The focus becomes different here, more general. This may be a great topic to explore in more detail.

We are then left the question of whether certain types of things are inherent in their materials or if they are one of a possible group of strategies that might be deployed.

The two types of objective ideas are the Platonic ideal and the developmental solution. These may be in full philosophical conflict or may exist in some synergistic form. With certain ideas being inherent and discoverable while others built from reaction to constraints of the past.

We can also see that when applied to mathematics we have systems that might be inherent in the definitions of things while other ideas are tools developed to deal with a limited realm of information.

We see that systems are to some extent a simplification of something greater. We have from incompleteness the understanding that any single system we create will fail to describe itself and be self consistent. This is overcome to some degree by overlapping separate exclusionary systems. And may be the result of trying to describe the universe in terms simpler than itself. We have then (if true) reached then limit of the "thing in and of itself"

Unstated premises

Trains of thought number two.  Where I see how much use and sense my free form notes written on a train ride make.

In most statements there are supporting ideas that are never directly addressed. These are called unstated premises. When we evaluate truth. Maims we should be aware that there may be certain intermediary steps or fundamental ideas that are not explicit in the argument. It is a good exercise to determine what these are, or might be. If an unstated premise conflicts with any of the stated premises it should be used as a consistency test and if found to not be a necessary condition ignored. If the premises as stated are insufficient the arguer must either state additional premises, restructure the argument, or abandon their rational claim. Premises that are left unstated should only be done so in a formal situation if the argument would be needlessly cluttered by them, or If they are not required for a particular section of the argument ( and will be stated later). In informal argument premises may be left unstated if they are thought to be implicit, for elegance, brevity, or simplicity. If an argument is. Challenged on grounds of insufficient evidence, then unstated premises may be brought to bear.

Necessary and sufficient. With and without the Oxford comma.

Notes from my evening commute.


 We must understand that for a proposition to be true there are certain minimum requirements that must be met. These must be true in ALL Cases and we call them necessary conditions. When you are making or investigating a truth claim it may be helpful to determine what these are. If any of these fail to be true you may dismiss the claim as having false premises or conclusions (deductive).  If the necessary conditions are met, we then may ask if there are sufficient conditions. These differ in that a failure of necessary conditions negates a claim but does not support it, while sufficient conditions suggest that it may be true. To rephrase we may see that falsification may be deductive while truth is inductive at best.  Holding a position based on the necessary alone is week for positive. Claims. While meeting the minimum requirements it is not a guarantee. Sufficient reasons are selected after the necessary, we can use such tools as elegance and simplicity as well as best explanation.
To suggest a belief is rational is to say that it has covered both the necessary AND sufficient conditions of that conclusion. If sufficient conditions are not met you have at best an appeal to pragmatism or some other form of wish thinking. Agnostics can be separated into two claims; that a thing cannot be known in principle or that a thing is unknown given the current information ( but is knowable). I suppose we could be agnostic about agnosticism but that road seems short and while diverting it is beyond the scope of this essay.