"NYPD To Replace Motor Fleet With Electric Scooters" should read, "NYPD to Test Electric Scooters." No no, see, this is Slashdot... the headline is just a typo. It was supposed to read:
NYPD To Replace Motor Fleet With Electric Scooters?
Unfortunately a (growing?) segment of the population has little respect for concepts such as law and order and societal stability. They do respect the force of a gun, however, and as such a certain amount of perceived intimidation is useful. While I agree completely with the gist of what you're saying, I would phrase it a little differently.
People are losing what little respect they once had for each other and for themselves, such respect being the foundation of law and order and societal stability; and they are now more and more turning to (and bowing to) the use of force instead, where in more civilized times their respect for each other or for themselves would have prevented them from turning to (or bowing to) such shows of force.
Right, that was my point. Instead of just true and false being allowed, some statements have no truth values at all, like "The Persians will invade next week."
While I don't think your example is uncontroversial (if determinism or even of certain forms of indeterminism are true, then it IS true xor false that the Persians will invade next week), I agree with you in spirit; but I disagree that such situations strictly violate the principle of bivalence, which does not say "the truth~value of all statements is either 1 or 0", but rather "the truth~value of all statements is either 1, or it's not 1". Now granted, the spirit in which that law is usually expressed is usually meant to convey that truth values are boolean, either 1 or 0; but even granting that, my encapsulation of "P is true" statements into logical functions allows you to keep boolean truth~values in your mathematical logic, without committing you to saying that all describable states of affairs evaluate to "true" (1) or "false" (0).
I sort of glossed over the way my logical truth function works, but I'll explain in a bit more detail here. Rather than "T(x)" reading as "it is true that x", which in a disquotational understanding of truth means nothing more or less than simply "x", "T(x)" should be read something like "the state of affairs described by 'x' obtains" in some substantial way - my preferred substantial theory of truth is a flavor of verificationism, but you could perhaps substitute another if you like. For any statement "x", if x then T(x); but this is merely because our natural languages do not usually have grammatically valid ways of simply describing a hypothetical state~of~affairs without asserting something about whether they obtain or not. (e.g. "all ravens being black" is not by itself a grammatical sentence in English). Using strictly my own logic system, "x" would be a quantified conjunction of predicates, describing but not asserting a state of affairs wherein there exists (or not) some thing(s) with (or without) such~and~such qualities, and the truth function would in turn assert that that state~of~affairs obtains; e.g. "x" might translate as something like "a state of affairs of all ravens being black", and then "T(x)" would assert the truth of state state of affairs, as in "all ravens ARE black". But when you just import my truth function into standard logic, which has only assertions and not pure descriptions, it has to first extract the description of the state~of~affairs from the assertion "x", and then assert that it obtains, in the end adding nothing over and above the "x" of standard logic, which already asserts that what it describes obtains.
However, while for statements that do not actually describe any state of affairs (i.e. nonsense) or otherwise do not conform to the substantial standard for truth you wish to use (which may include statements about the future, for an indeterminist) "T(x)" evaluates to a truth~value of 0, that does not entail that "T(~x)" evaluates to a truth~value of 1; rather it means that "~T(x)" evaluates to a truth~function of 1. (If we're sticking to boolean truth~values in our formal logic). For an example using my verificationist criteria for truth, if "x" is not verifiable - that is, if there is no test anybody anywhere could possibly run to tell whether or not the state of affairs described by "x" obtains - then "~x" is just as unverifiable and so "T(~x)" evaluates to a truth value of 0 too. But still... either it's true that the Persians will invade next week or it's not true that the Persians will invade next week, even though, if indeterminism is correct, it still may not be true that the Persans will NOT invade next week.
This is a huge wall of text already, I know, but I'd like to share further that the most recent incarnation of this logic I'm working on actually does incorporate non~binary truth values into the logic, to allow for statements of "approximate truth", e.g. when someone asserts something which is not entirely correct and so in th
No, because the particle is NEITHER here nor there when in a state of superposition; it does not have a definite position. So all statements about its position are false (or at least non-true), and by the principle of bivalence no statements about its position are true. There are other, probabilistic statements that can be made about its wave function, but none of these are quite statements about its position in a classical sense. It's something like how true greys do not have definite hues, but that doesn't make them both red and blue at the same time, or further still, red and non-red. Which is actually the point I should be making: being here and there is not the same thing as being here and not being here. If quantum physics shows us that something can be in two places at once, that doesn't contradict bivalence, because it's still not claiming anything to be somewhere and also NOT be there; it's just somewhere and also elsewhere.
You said
The law of non-contradiction is non-temporally bounded - it's contextual. In response to a post in which I said
for any proposition P (a proposition being what is expressed by a sentence in a given sense and context), either P or not-P. When you say "my cat is 4 years old", you're using at least one explicit indexical (referring to your cat by way of its relation to yourself), and so another person saying that same exact sentence would be express a different proposition, one about his cat rather than yours, and thus when you say that it could be true while when another person says it it's not, without violating non-contradiction, because you're using the same sentence to express two different propositions, one about your cat and one about his. Likewise, uttering that sentence at different times expresses different propositions; only at one moment (the moment your cat turns four years old) is it true in an exact literal sense, and only for a short period (during the fifth year of your cat's life) is it true in a more colloquial, approximate sense.
As for facts about the future, if determinism is correct, or even if the future is undetermined but with only a limited range of outcomes from this moment, then it may very well be true now that your cat will never be 5 years old, even though this cannot be practically tested until that time comes about, because *if* we knew everything about the present *and* all the laws of nature perfectly *and* could compute more quickly than the universe itself does (as time passes by), we could tell right now whether or not your cat will ever live to be 5 years old. The problem of testability is this instance is merely a practical one; the information may very well be there in the universe right now, we just have no way of getting at all of it and processing it to our ends before that moment comes along and we can just look and see if it happens. It's something like statements about minor geographical features of distant astronomical bodies, or minor events in the distant past like what Julius Caesar ate for lunch three days after his sixth birthday. The information is there, or might be barring certain indeterministic hypotheses being correct, but even if it is there, it's a damn bitch to get at it. Doesn't make it both true or false, or neither true nor false.
Although, neither-true-nor-false (but not both-true-and-false) does follow for some cases if those indeterministic hypotheses are correct, as it does for nonsense, like you mentioned. I just wrote something elsewhere in this thread dealing with such cases. While I only used the example of nonsense there, undetermined features of the universe can be accounted for in the same way.
Actually what I defined there was the principle of bivalence (P xor ~P), which encompasses both the excluded middle (P or ~P) and non-contradiction (~(P and ~P)). But good catch anyway, I slipped up there, just not quite in the way you thought.
As for how I deal with things like the (at least epistemic) possibility of undetermined facts about the future and other apparent "middle facts", I just wrote something about that in this post elsewhere in this sub-thread moments ago. Short version of it: I treat truth and falsehood as functions in the logic itself, and in the process define falsehood as something stronger than simple non-truth, so while everything is true xor non-true and false xor non-false, you can have something be non-true and non-false (though not both true and false, as truth implies non-falsehood and falsehood implies non-truth; those just aren't bi-implications).
Yes, statements like "neither good or evil" are nonsensical.
Oh wait, they're not.
That's because "good" does not mean simply "non-evil", nor does "evil" mean "non-good". The relationship between good and evil is the same as the relationship between necessity and impossibility, as between obligation and prohibition, between all and none, etc; this opposed-but-not-just-negative formal relationship is found all over the place.
The negation of "nothing" is "something", not "everything". The negation of "prohibited" is "permitted", not "obligatory". The negation of "impossible" is "possible", not "necessary". And the negation of "bad" is "not bad", or perhaps "acceptable", but not "good".
A little mathematical logic will clear up how these terms work without violating the principle of non-contradiction. Take whichever of the first of these groups of terms (nothing, prohibited, impossible, bad, etc) and represent it with the function F(x), so that "F(x)" means "nothing is x" or "it is prohibited that x" or "it is impossible that x" or "it is bad that x".
The second term in each group (something, permitted, possible, acceptable), the negation of the first term, is "-F(x)", the minus indicating negation, and thus meaning "not nothing (i.e. something) is x..." or "it is not prohibited (i.e. it is permitted) that x" or "it is not impossible (i.e. it is possible) that x" or "it is not bad (i.e. it is acceptable) that x".
The third term (everything, obligatory, necessary, good) is the equivalent to "F(-x)". This is very different from "-F(x)". This means things like "nothing is not-x (i.e. everything is x)" or "it is prohibited that not-x (i.e. it is obligatory that x)" or "it is impossible that not-x (i.e. it is necessary that x)" or, the example you gave, "it is bad that not-x (i.e. it is good that x)".
Joint denial ("nor"), disjunction (inclusive "or") and conjunction ("and") are like this too. The negation of the joint denial "neither A nor B" is the disjunction "A or B", not the conjunction "A and B". But the conjunction "A and B" does means the exact same thing as the joint denial of two negations "neither not-A nor not-B".
Incidentally I've got a novel theory of my own (previously unpublished as far as I'm aware) that things can be "neither true nor false" without violating the principle of non-contradiction, if we define truth and falsehood in this sort of way. (Strictly speaking, the novelty of it is doing so without violating the principle of bivalence, which is really what I defined in my earlier post, and which is more fundamental than non-contradiction. Non-contradiction just means it's not both P and not-P; but it could perhaps be neither, according to that law. Bivalence, which is the real core of truth-functional logic, is what tells tells us that not-not-P if and only if P, or equivalently, either P or not-P but not both).
In my theory, we formulate "it is true that x" with something like the function T(x). Then, keeping to the principle of bivalence, either T(x) or -T(x) but not both or neither; everything is either true or not true. However, falsity in this theory is more than mere non-truth; falsity is the truth of a negation, T(-x). Everything which is false is non-true, but not everything which is non-true is false (just as everything that is prohibited is non-obligatory, but not everything which is non-obligatory is prohibited; there are plenty of things that you are not required to do, but you are still allowed to do, even though you are required to not-do anything which you are not allowed to do). The prominent example of this is meaningless nonsense which doesn't actually indicate anything, and thus is neither true nor false for it makes no claims to be substantiated or discredited in the first place. (Some earlier proponents of ideas like this, such as the logical positivists, put all religious, metaphysical, and ethical statements into this category). It is non-true, and it is non-false. And that's not a problem for bival
Do the propositions stand true on their own? They are true only by virtue of their meaning in the language.
Sentences are true only by virtue of their meaning in the language; that is, in virtue of what propositions they express. But propositions are not arbitrary, invented linguistic constructs; propositions are what our arbitrary, invented languages attempt to encapsulate. Propositions are ideas or concepts, they are what sentences mean, they are the states of affairs connoted by the sentences used to express them; and they are true or not only inasmuch as such states of affairs obtain or not. (I should be clear here that I'm speaking of "propositions" as abstract objects merely as a linguistic idiom: I don't mean at all to say that there exist some metaphysical things called "propositions", for that would be little better than the Platonism I'm condemning). The sentence "schnee ist weiss" is true if and only if "schnee ist weiss" means that snow is white (which it does, to German speakers) and snow is, in fact, white. The sentence "snow is white" likewise is is true if and only if those words indicate something that actually obtains in reality, such as snow being white; and ultimately, there's no way we can talk about what words mean just in terms of other words, we just have to say that by "snow is white" we mean ---> that sort of thing over there ---> is happening; empirical, phenomenal experience is the ultimate referent.
On that note, however I will agree with you to some extent that (some) things are true in virtue of their meaning; I hold that that is just what it is to be a necessary truth. I hold mathematics to be like this, as well as logic. This is not logicism, the failed foundation of mathematics that held that mathematical truths are necessarily true only because that's how we define the terms. A definition gives the meaning of words only in terms of other words; but until you understand the meaning of some such set of words in terms of something other than more words - in terms of empirical phenomena - the definition will remain empty. Once you understand the meaning of the words in that way, once you can conceive of and imagine the thing being talked about and not just the words used to talk about it, then certain truths become indisputable, and these are necessary truths. For an example in mathematics, as soon as you understand what the (cardinal) numbers two, three and five mean, and what the operation of addition means, it becomes obvious that two plus three must necessarily equal five; for when you conceive of a set of two things and a set of three other things, and count the two and then continue on counting the three, you'll count to the same number that you would if you counted a set of five things.
I tried to avoid this conceivability=possibility topic in my original post because it ties in closely with phenomenalism, which a lot of people think is looney, but I find it to be the most scientific and realistic of all ontologies, doing away with all spooky metaphysical "substances" and "universals" and dealing solely in describing the observable world. That is my justification for the equivalence of conceivability and possibility: the verifiability theory of meaning, the cornerstone of the positivists' phenomenalism. The meaning of an expression (an indicative one at least; imperative expressions are a different but parallel story) is what sort of empirical phenomena it calls to mind; such expressions are true if what they call to mind is something that one would actually observe under the indicated circumstances (that is, in conjunction with the other observations indicated). Conception, or imagination, is limited only to the sorts of things that could be observed, as it is pieced together from the sorts of things which have been observed, broken down and abstracted into their constituent features. Thus, if something is conceivable it is the sort of thing that could be observed, and thus the sort of thing that could be true, that is, it is p
The entire argument as framed by the article seems to take for granted the assumption that for there to be universal, absolute, necessary truths, there must exist some sort of "thing" in which they are "written", some ontological entity to grant them their truth. This assumption seems entirely fallacious to me (and to entire schools of philosophy opposed to such Platonic realism).
Take, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction. This is a law of logic, you might even say THE law of logic: it says simply that for any proposition P (a proposition being what is expressed by a sentence in a given sense and context), either P or not-P. That's an exclusive OR there, so it's one or the other but not both. This is not just a law of language, of our way of expressing things, as Platonists often portray their opponents as claiming. Those who believe this law (which is almost, but not quite, everybody, Platonists and others alike) aren't just believing that, due to the arbitrary rules of all of our languages, it doesn't make any sense to say things like "both P and not-P" or "neither P nor not-P". They're saying that, completely independent of anybody speaking or even thinking anything, whatever state of affairs is described by "P" either obtains exactly as described, or it does not obtain exactly as described.
This is a necessary truth; one of the most, if not THE most, fundamental of them. (All other laws of truth-functional logic can be reduced to this one law, really). Necessary truths could aptly be described as laws, in the same sense as laws of nature: necessary truths are true everywhere always and there could not possibly be a universe where they were not true.
Now tell me, where is this fundamental law written (aside from our logic textbooks)? What is it that makes it true? Do we really need to posit some abstract metaphysical entity in Plato's heaven which is the ideal form of the Law of Non-Contradiction, in virtue of which our utterances of that law are true? Or can't we just say that it is necessarily true? Why must such laws be inscribed somewhere in order for them to be laws? This (along with the strawman "nominalism" that Platonists object to) is the metaphysical counterpart to the ethical position that things are only good or bad because someone (God, society, etc) says so, which completely destroys the idea of absolute, universal, and non-arbitrary standards of justice (justice dealing with duties or obligations, obligations relating to goods the same way that necessities relate to truths). Why must things be either decreed by heaven (whether there is a God there or just "Ideas") or by popular convention to be true? Cannot truth stand on its own?
but that would involve freedom, liberty and less control by others over our lives.
Not likely to happen anytime soon if the majority has its say. More importantly, that would involve taking responsibility for our own lives, and that's precisely why the majority will most likely always be against freedom and independence. Everybody wants a big strong mommy and daddy to protect and care for them; but nobody realizes that "mommy and daddy" are no more grown-up than the rest of us...
I think the point of such comment that "anecdotes are worthless, my experience was just the opposite of yours..." is like if one person were to say "look at these two data points, there's an obvious pattern" and someone else responded "two data points are not enough to plot a curve from; and look, this data point is completely off of the curve you plotted..."
Speaking of which, the future needs the following three Star Trek items to solve everything all at once: Teleporters (solves all transportation issues) Replicators (solves hunger) Holodeck (solves sexual ten... I mean, makes simulation much easier. Yes, that's it) Which are really all just applications of the same core technologies: perfect observation, matter/energy conversion, and perfect manipulation. Convert energy into matter and perfectly manipulate it into whatever form you want? Replicator. Perfectly observe something, convert it to energy, and elsewhere convert energy into matter and manipulate it into the exact form you observed? Transporter. And the holodeck is really nothing but a lot of fancy replication going on on the fly (and some cheaper parlour tricks for the lower-LOD parts of the scene). (Ok, there's a fourth technology going on here too: the holodeck also has a lot of really fancy AI).
The problem is that while matter/energy conversion may theoretically be possible, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle renders perfect observation and perfect manipulation impossible even in theory. So while we may in the future be able to roughly approximate the sort of magic that goes on in Star Trek, unless we discover that our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe is seriously (not just a little bit) off, then we'll never have those sorts of technologies, and nobody ever will.
You're right though, that if we could do that, it would truly solve absolutely everything. If you can do what it takes to run a holodeck, you have the ability to manipulate the physical world as easily as we manipulate virtual worlds, and if anything is "sufficiently advanced technology" (i.e. indistinguishable from magic), that is.
You're absolutely correct that the opposite of a right is a privilege. To have a right to something (at least a claim right, see below) is to have something which others are morally obliged to give (or do) to you; the opposite of obligation is supererogatoriety, and having something supererogatory is a privilege, by definition.
However, I was not looking for the opposite to "right", not trying to describe privileges, which I think everyone agrees that "free music" and "free movies" are. No one argues that anyone is obliged to create media for you or to transfer it to you for free, or even to sell it to you; people only argue that if you happen to have some media that's already been created and transferred to you, it's perfectly fine to make and transfer copies of it to others, and likewise it's fine to receive such copies.
Rather, I was looking for the opposite of "basic human right"; that is, some sort of right, which is not basic to all humans but somehow a contingent right (which seems as absurd a notion to me as "contingent necessity"; rights are like moral necessities). I'm boggling about that because people seem to use the term in negation to mean "sure that may be a right, maybe there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that, but even so it's not an important right and there's no crime in forcing people to refrain from doing that." Which again sounds like nonsense to me: presuming people have a basic right to liberty, then it absolutely is a moral crime to force anyone to refrain from doing ANYTHING, no matter how trivial, that they are morally permitted to do.
There are two senses of "right" to distinguish between here. "Liberty rights" are moral permissions to act (or not act) in certain ways. "Claim rights" are moral obligations that other people owe toward you; a positive claim right is a moral obligation upon other people to do something to you, and a negative claim right is a moral obligation upon others to refrain from doing something to you. To say that people have a fundamental right to liberty - which seems to be something most folks in the western world would agree to, on paper at least - is to say that people have the negative claim right that others must respect their liberty rights; that is, that others must refrain from forcing people to do (or refrain from doing) things that they are morally permitted to do (or refrain from doing).
The assumption that people have a fundamental right to liberty seems pretty broadly accepted in the modern world (at least in the west), at least until people start thinking about governments. I think everyone would agree that I can't start dictating what sort of clothes you can wear (and enforcing my edicts with violence as necessary), even though it's not really important for your life that you be able to pick your own outfits. So saying that you have a right to wear what you want is asserting that you are morally permitted to wear what you want, and (assuming that you have a claim right to liberty) that everybody else is forbidden from forcing you to do otherwise. The second part there is the important bit: it's not about whether or not the freedom to choose your outfit is a "basic human right", as in something really important that you need like food and shelter; it's about telling me to fuck off, that I have no authority to use violent force to coerce your fashion decisions, as I broadly have no authority to use violent foce to coerce you at all, unless perhaps you're doing something morally prohibited like trying to murder someone.
When we demand that governments respect people's rights, in this sense, we're usually demanding that they respect people's right to liberty, and refrain from using violence force to stop people from doing things they're morally permitted to do (or to force them to do things they're morally permitted to refrain from). It's not at all about the significance of the act: I have a right to pick my nose every Tuesday at noon or not as I deem fit, and if someone passes a law requiring that I do pick my nose
The court decision was that since copyright was extended before the Sonny Bono Copyright law, it was not against the constitution to do so again. And this is what drives me most nuts about traditionalism and the whole notion of case law: "that's the way we've been doing it, so it can't be wrong". It's nothing but rationalization. I recall for example that the only reason corporations are legally considered people is because of some early perversion of the 14th Amendment, where some judge wrote in his opinion something like that he thought corporations ought to be considered legal people even though he believed constitutionally that they weren't, and a later judge used that opinion as the basis of a ruling that corporations legally are people, and since that ruling was made, corporations legally are people, even though the whole foundation of that notion has more holes than a block of swiss cheese on the firing range. All it takes is one judge somewhere making one shitty ruling that doesn't get challenged before it becomes a reference for later rulings, or one law that doesn't get overturned before further laws are made in its image, and then the whole shebang is irreversible, because to overturn or challenge the current laws or rulings would require that we admit that those on which they were based were wrong... and heaven forbid we admit that we were ever wrong.
Same reason drug laws authorized by the interstate commerce clause will never be overturned; because to challenge those would require challenging the legitimacy of the extent that that clause has been stretched to, and in doing that you challenge the basis of large chunks of the legal system. The whole thing is just too much effort... and why should our judges and legislators care to do that much work? They get paid the same either way...
I understand your point, but where it breaks down is that going outside is considered to be a basic human freedom. Whether or not someone becomes a martyr for it is indeed not relevant. Downloading and watching a movie that someone else created is nowhere near a basic human right. Rather than spending hours downloading a movie -- against the wishes of its creator -- just to spend more hours watching it... one could instead, for example, go outside and enjoy the fresh air. I get tired of this distinction between "basic human rights" and... what? Make-believe rights? Unimportant rights that it's OK to trample on?
If it is not morally prohibited to do something, it is within your "basic human rights" to do it. That doesn't mean you are entitled to the things you need to do it - nobody is arguing that people are entitled to free movies and music and whatnot, that actors and singers must perform for free if their audiences demand it - it just means that nobody else is permitted to use violence force (which is what the law is backed by) against you to stop you from doing it. The most basic human right is to be free from physical violence; laws are well-supported public threats of violence in retaliation for certain acts or omissions; so the enforcement of ANY law against something that is not morally prohibited is a transgression of peoples' most basic human rights.
Now, granted that, we can still argue all you want about whether copyright infringement is morally right or wrong, permissible or prohibited... but whatever your answer to that question, it still doesn't change the fact that if there's nothing wrong with doing X, and some organization (e.g. the government) is threatening me with violence if I do X, then that organization is violating my "basic human rights".
Your downloading of copyrighted materials is not an act of civil disobedience unless you do it publicly "I want to secretly do X because I'm opposed to anti-X legislation" does not mean "I want to do X to protest anti-X legislation and, because I'm stupid, I don't realize that protests have to be public". It means "I want to do X; there is legislation saying I can't, but I oppose it and think I should be allowed to do X, so I'm going to do X anyway and try to avoid getting caught."
It's possible that people just want to do things that (they believe) there is nothing wrong with, but that they don't want to be martyrs for the cause and stand up and fight The Man; they just want to be left alone. There's nothing wrong with that, provided that there's nothing wrong with what they want to do.
Your parallel between drug addiction and copyright infringement is just a straightforward attack on the practice of copyright infringement. But if there's nothing wrong with copyright infringement, then there's nothing wrong with doing it in secret despite copyright law, without engaging in public civil disobedience. Likewise, if there's nothing wrong with doing heroin, then there's nothing wrong with doing heroin in secret despite drug laws, without engaging in public civil disobedience. If there's nothing wrong with doing X, then there's nothing wrong with doing X in private or in secret to evade those who would want to stop you from doing X.
Say, for example, that it was illegal for women to go outdoors without a man, as it is in some countries; and some women rightly disputed this law, but didn't want to put their lives on the line to engage in an act of public civil disobedience, so instead they dressed up as men and secretly went out to conduct whatever business they had. They would be breaking the law, but not flaunting the law; they would be secretly breaking it. But if such a laws are unjust, as I hope you'll agree they are, then would you say that those women who sneak out are just like heroin addicts, "addicted to going outside alone", and only do so secretly because they know it's wrong and are ashamed? Or would you acknowledge that, just maybe, they rightly believe that there's nothing wrong with it, and are only hiding it because a lot of powerful people do think there is something wrong with it and would hurt them if they got caught?
How you do combine social liberalism, such as universal health care, a good welfare program, and other socialist ideas with low taxes? Those things aren't social liberalism, those things are (as you said) socialism, which is economic "liberalism" (if you use "liberal" to mean "leftist" and not its literal sense of "free", which today would be considered economic conservatism). Social liberalism is the idea that people should be left alone if they're not hurting anyone; it's against the war on drugs, censorship, and other such moralistic legislation, in favor of privacy and civil liberties, gay rights, civil rights (e.g. for non-whites and women), and all the generally "libertarian" notions that go along with things like that. The economic side of "liberalism" (I'm using quotes because I dislike the corruption of the term to mean what we're taking it to mean here) is that it is a good thing for the government to take people's money to fund "social" programs like health care, welfare, etc.
So to answer your question, you combine social liberalism and low taxes by leaving people alone in their private lives, AND leaving them alone in their economic lives, i.e. not taxing them. Which is what libertarians advocate. Of course, doing so involves doing away with state-owned socialist programs like those you describe...
Just about everyone outside the US views libertarianism as some sort of extreme anarcho-capitalism being economically far right, and socially conservative (Small government). I think you guys in the old world must have a different definition of "socially conservative" than we do, too, cause over here it means being in favor of traditional institutions and ways of life and opposed to anything which threatens or competes with them, and as such is strongly opposed to personal liberty and in favor of pervasive government intervention in people's personal lives to make sure they are living "morally". That is, the complete opposite of the libertarian position, which holds that people should be left the hell alone unless they're hurting someone else (or their property). Libertarians over here sometimes describe themselves as "economically conservative, socially liberal".
ObRant: liberal and conservative are not antonyms, "conservatives" are in many ways more liberal than "progressives" who in turn are in many ways more authoritarian than "conservatives" (though as I see it both the "left" and the "right" are really incoherent mixes of liberty and authority). A true liberal is anyone anti-authority; a true conservative is anyone happy with the way things are now (and as such "conservative" is a temporally relative term; today's progressives may be tomorrow's conservatives, if the win the battle today). A better term to pair with liberal or libertarian would be "social" or egalitarian, though I'd argue even those aren't rightly opposed to one another but two separate axes of orthogonal but interdependent concerns (see "libertarian socialism" and most of the anarchist movement). But "conservative" and "progressive" are really the oddballs of political terminology, because they don't rightly pick out any particular political stance but generic support for "the way things are" (at least right here and now) or "the way things should be" (but what way is that, exactly?).
Clean water, hot or cold, at my whim! Garbage picked up twice a week! Streets swept! The city bus rolls around predictably for out convenience...
My nation's standards of living are pretty fucking awesome, I just walked to the fridge to get some frikkin' milk and honey for my coffee, my feet warm on a cold autumn day: It's like I'm living in the promised land of legends! I dunno about you, but I buy water (and the gas to heat it with) directly with a portion of my paycheck AFTER taxes have already been taken out; same deal for garbage service and bus rides (though I wouldn't be surprised if the latter was tax-subsidised as well). I also pay for my milk and my honey and my tea (not a coffee person myself), and the gas that heats my house, and the house itself (well OK, I pay somebody else for the privilege of temporarily living in his house, which I'm not so happy about, but that's another rant).
You're right that times are pretty nice for us in the modern world; but don't give the government credit for all that. A lot of the things you praise are paid for voluntarily by peoples' hard-earned dollars completely apart from money taken by force as taxes; and while some of the tax money does go to fund some nice projects as well, I'm not entirely convinced that people wouldn't pay for such things voluntarily, if faced with the harsh alternatives. Just as when kids grow up and move out on their own they learn to voluntarily do all the chores they used to be coerced into doing at home, simply because having a filthy stinking house with dirty dishes and laundry piling up isn't very pleasant, I think that society, if "kicked out of the house" so to speak, and no longer under the "parental" supervision and care of the government, might grow up and learn to take care of itself. Then again, when kids really mature to that point, they usually move out voluntarily... so maybe the fact that so many people still support paternalistic governance is evidence that we, on average, aren't ready for independence yet.
Of course, even given that, there's the further problem that the "parents" we've got are all just as much "children" as the rest of us, so really any "parenting" going on will be of the "hey you seem smart, can you help me with my homework?" type (yeah right), or the "yes sir mister bully sir whatever you say sir please don't hurt me" type.
(Please note I'm not meaning to agree with the "you'll be a conservative when you grow up" notion of the quote a couple levels up. I don't consider myself a conservative at all. I am an anarchist; or a "libertarian socialist" if you can wrap your head around that turn of phrase).
I'm not trying to say that some things can be both true and false at the same time, or that there are fuzzy values somewhere in between true and false, where something can be kind of true, or that truth is relative, or anything like that. I'm also not arguing here for either the verifiability criterion of meaning or indeterminism, though I will happily argue for them if you want, and I came up with my logical notation in part to be able to logically express some things that you'd want to say about such theories without having to sacrifice bivalence in logic. Which is, whether or not you know it, what you're so forcefully trying to preserve here; the notion that for any logical assertion, either it is correct or its negation is.
To be explicit, I'm making a distinction between "deflationary truth" and "substantiative truth" - that is, between "truth" in the sense that "P" is true if and only if P and "P" is false if and only if not-P, and "truth" in the sense that "P" is true if and only if some sort of criteria are met (my preferred criteria being something like verifiability, but another substantiative theory of truth will suffice). In the former, deflationary sense, I agree with you 100%: for any proposition P, either P (= "P" is true) or not-P (= "P" is false).
In the latter, substantiative sense of truth, however, I'm saying that there can be some cases where the neither the proposition "it is true that P" (= the state of affairs described by P obtains) nor the proposition "it is true that not-P" (= the state of affairs described by "not-P" obtains) is correct ("true" in the deflationary sense of truth). Both of those statements can be incorrect ("false" in the deflationary sense of truth), if "P" is not the kind of thing to which the attribution of truth pertains (not a proposition), or if P is a proposition about which there just is no fact of the matter. In my logical notation, I do this by having formulas which resemble the formulas of predicate logic but do not themselves assert the existence of a certain state of affairs, but rather only describe a state of affairs, about which something is to be said; rather than saying "this raven is black" they say "the state of affairs of this raven being black", which is not itself a complete proposition, any more than "this raven" is a complete proposition. To complete the proposition, you must say something ABOUT the state of affairs of this raven being black; you must assert that it obtains (that it "is true" in a substantiative sense), or that it ought to obtain (that it is good), or that you believe it, or that you desire it, or whatever mode of expression you want to apply to the described state of affairs.
But back to the sorts of cases where neither a proposition (or properly speaking, the state of affairs described by a proposition) nor its negation is "true" in any substantiative sense. The first sort of problem, where truth just does not apply, is when you spew nonsense sentences like many of the one's you've been saying, sentences that are not grammatically correct. "Bird" is not a complete sentence, it does not assert or express anything; gesturing while pointing at a bird and saying "bird" may be taken to express the same proposition as "there exists a bird at that location", which can be true or false; but just the utterance "bird" cannot itself be true or false, and birds themselves cannot be true or false; only propositions about birds (which you could express by gestures and incomplete utterances) can be true or false. To say that anything other than a proposition is true or false is nonsense; this is called in technical jargon a "category mistake".
Lets say I ask you about the values of various properties of various entities. I ask you what the height of Jon is. I ask you what the color of your car is. I ask you whether the number 3 is odd or even. You can answer all these sorts of questions; or at least, they have answers. Now lets say I ask you what the color of the nu
Have you considered that you are looking at it from the point of view of a member of a specific society and that the "if it's not white then it's black" approach to morality is a learned trait specific to your own society, though not necessary other societies?
I bet you live in the US... I do, and I'll readily admit that that kind of mentality seems from my perspective more common here than some other places right now. However, don't pretend that this is a uniquely American sort of irrationality; extremist, "if you're not with us then you're against us" mentality is as old and widespread as the human race.
Also, I hope you noticed that I was not advocating the "if it's not white then it's black" mentality but commenting on the common (in my observation) logical ERROR of concluding that since it's not white it must be black, so to speak. I am not a fan or proponent of that mentality at all, and find that it (along with conflation of modalities, e.g. truth and necessity, goodness and obligation, actuality and opinion, "is" and "ought", etc) is the source of most religious/political/philosophical/ideological errors that people make.
Your position, I take it, is that the irrationality involved in retrospectively rationalizing the choice (i.e. coming to dislike blue) is not logically required Hmm... I'm saying that the rationalization is being done irrationally, but not that rationalization per se is irrational. I'm not saying that deciding that x must be good because you've chosen x before and liked it is irrational; I'm saying that deducing from that that non-x alternatives are bad is irrational. In this context I'm saying that the monkey doesn't have to rationalize the choice by BOTH upgrading his opinion of red and downgrading his opinion of blue; one or the other would do, and deciding that he is pro-red does not mean he has to decide to be anti-blue. However, I've been assuming that the logical choice would be to upgrade his opinion of red to rationalize his choice, in which case also downgrading blue is unnecessary and leads to an irrational preference of green over blue in the next test; but given what you just said about maybe he has good reason for disliking blue, it occurs to me now that maybe he is (for good reason or not) simply downgrading his opinion of blue and leaving his opinion of red alone, in which case every step of the process is perfectly rational.
Well... except that he preferred them all equally before and then for some reason decided he doesn't really like blue so much, in which case I'd say the irrationality is in rationalizing the decision negatively (I didn't choose it, therefore it must be less desirable) rather than positively (I chose it [and nothing bad happened], therefore it must be desirable). In other words, it seems to me that coming to like things that are familiar (foods you usually eat, etc) is perfectly rational, but coming to dislike things that you've never tried, just because they were available options in previous decisions (and yet you didn't choose them), is not so rational. But given a good reason for avoiding blue, obviously the outcomes of both tests are perfectly rational decisions; only the downgrading of blue for no reason is irrational. The more rational rationalization process would be "I chose red [and nothing bad happened] therefore red is good", leaving his opinion of blue untouched and equal to green; I had just assumed the monkey had made this inference and irrationally deduced from it that blue is bad, leading to the irrational preference of green over blue.
No books off the top of my head, but the wiki article on modal logic is a good place to start, and has a number of links to external sources, e.g. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is another great source for such topics.
There's not anything there about a modal logic for "true" and "good" - as far as I'm aware that's my own invention - but the principles of pretty much all modal logics are the same, just variations on a theme.
Slashdot Mirror
NYPD To Replace Motor Fleet With Electric Scooters?
They just missed the question mark
People are losing what little respect they once had for each other and for themselves, such respect being the foundation of law and order and societal stability; and they are now more and more turning to (and bowing to) the use of force instead, where in more civilized times their respect for each other or for themselves would have prevented them from turning to (or bowing to) such shows of force.
Right, that was my point. Instead of just true and false being allowed, some statements have no truth values at all, like "The Persians will invade next week."
While I don't think your example is uncontroversial (if determinism or even of certain forms of indeterminism are true, then it IS true xor false that the Persians will invade next week), I agree with you in spirit; but I disagree that such situations strictly violate the principle of bivalence, which does not say "the truth~value of all statements is either 1 or 0", but rather "the truth~value of all statements is either 1, or it's not 1". Now granted, the spirit in which that law is usually expressed is usually meant to convey that truth values are boolean, either 1 or 0; but even granting that, my encapsulation of "P is true" statements into logical functions allows you to keep boolean truth~values in your mathematical logic, without committing you to saying that all describable states of affairs evaluate to "true" (1) or "false" (0).
I sort of glossed over the way my logical truth function works, but I'll explain in a bit more detail here. Rather than "T(x)" reading as "it is true that x", which in a disquotational understanding of truth means nothing more or less than simply "x", "T(x)" should be read something like "the state of affairs described by 'x' obtains" in some substantial way - my preferred substantial theory of truth is a flavor of verificationism, but you could perhaps substitute another if you like. For any statement "x", if x then T(x); but this is merely because our natural languages do not usually have grammatically valid ways of simply describing a hypothetical state~of~affairs without asserting something about whether they obtain or not. (e.g. "all ravens being black" is not by itself a grammatical sentence in English). Using strictly my own logic system, "x" would be a quantified conjunction of predicates, describing but not asserting a state of affairs wherein there exists (or not) some thing(s) with (or without) such~and~such qualities, and the truth function would in turn assert that that state~of~affairs obtains; e.g. "x" might translate as something like "a state of affairs of all ravens being black", and then "T(x)" would assert the truth of state state of affairs, as in "all ravens ARE black". But when you just import my truth function into standard logic, which has only assertions and not pure descriptions, it has to first extract the description of the state~of~affairs from the assertion "x", and then assert that it obtains, in the end adding nothing over and above the "x" of standard logic, which already asserts that what it describes obtains.
However, while for statements that do not actually describe any state of affairs (i.e. nonsense) or otherwise do not conform to the substantial standard for truth you wish to use (which may include statements about the future, for an indeterminist) "T(x)" evaluates to a truth~value of 0, that does not entail that "T(~x)" evaluates to a truth~value of 1; rather it means that "~T(x)" evaluates to a truth~function of 1. (If we're sticking to boolean truth~values in our formal logic). For an example using my verificationist criteria for truth, if "x" is not verifiable - that is, if there is no test anybody anywhere could possibly run to tell whether or not the state of affairs described by "x" obtains - then "~x" is just as unverifiable and so "T(~x)" evaluates to a truth value of 0 too. But still... either it's true that the Persians will invade next week or it's not true that the Persians will invade next week, even though, if indeterminism is correct, it still may not be true that the Persans will NOT invade next week.
This is a huge wall of text already, I know, but I'd like to share further that the most recent incarnation of this logic I'm working on actually does incorporate non~binary truth values into the logic, to allow for statements of "approximate truth", e.g. when someone asserts something which is not entirely correct and so in th
No, because the particle is NEITHER here nor there when in a state of superposition; it does not have a definite position. So all statements about its position are false (or at least non-true), and by the principle of bivalence no statements about its position are true. There are other, probabilistic statements that can be made about its wave function, but none of these are quite statements about its position in a classical sense. It's something like how true greys do not have definite hues, but that doesn't make them both red and blue at the same time, or further still, red and non-red. Which is actually the point I should be making: being here and there is not the same thing as being here and not being here. If quantum physics shows us that something can be in two places at once, that doesn't contradict bivalence, because it's still not claiming anything to be somewhere and also NOT be there; it's just somewhere and also elsewhere.
As for facts about the future, if determinism is correct, or even if the future is undetermined but with only a limited range of outcomes from this moment, then it may very well be true now that your cat will never be 5 years old, even though this cannot be practically tested until that time comes about, because *if* we knew everything about the present *and* all the laws of nature perfectly *and* could compute more quickly than the universe itself does (as time passes by), we could tell right now whether or not your cat will ever live to be 5 years old. The problem of testability is this instance is merely a practical one; the information may very well be there in the universe right now, we just have no way of getting at all of it and processing it to our ends before that moment comes along and we can just look and see if it happens. It's something like statements about minor geographical features of distant astronomical bodies, or minor events in the distant past like what Julius Caesar ate for lunch three days after his sixth birthday. The information is there, or might be barring certain indeterministic hypotheses being correct, but even if it is there, it's a damn bitch to get at it. Doesn't make it both true or false, or neither true nor false.
Although, neither-true-nor-false (but not both-true-and-false) does follow for some cases if those indeterministic hypotheses are correct, as it does for nonsense, like you mentioned. I just wrote something elsewhere in this thread dealing with such cases. While I only used the example of nonsense there, undetermined features of the universe can be accounted for in the same way.
Actually what I defined there was the principle of bivalence (P xor ~P), which encompasses both the excluded middle (P or ~P) and non-contradiction (~(P and ~P)). But good catch anyway, I slipped up there, just not quite in the way you thought.
As for how I deal with things like the (at least epistemic) possibility of undetermined facts about the future and other apparent "middle facts", I just wrote something about that in this post elsewhere in this sub-thread moments ago. Short version of it: I treat truth and falsehood as functions in the logic itself, and in the process define falsehood as something stronger than simple non-truth, so while everything is true xor non-true and false xor non-false, you can have something be non-true and non-false (though not both true and false, as truth implies non-falsehood and falsehood implies non-truth; those just aren't bi-implications).
Yes, statements like "neither good or evil" are nonsensical.
Oh wait, they're not.
That's because "good" does not mean simply "non-evil", nor does "evil" mean "non-good". The relationship between good and evil is the same as the relationship between necessity and impossibility, as between obligation and prohibition, between all and none, etc; this opposed-but-not-just-negative formal relationship is found all over the place.
The negation of "nothing" is "something", not "everything". The negation of "prohibited" is "permitted", not "obligatory". The negation of "impossible" is "possible", not "necessary". And the negation of "bad" is "not bad", or perhaps "acceptable", but not "good".
A little mathematical logic will clear up how these terms work without violating the principle of non-contradiction. Take whichever of the first of these groups of terms (nothing, prohibited, impossible, bad, etc) and represent it with the function F(x), so that "F(x)" means "nothing is x" or "it is prohibited that x" or "it is impossible that x" or "it is bad that x".
The second term in each group (something, permitted, possible, acceptable), the negation of the first term, is "-F(x)", the minus indicating negation, and thus meaning "not nothing (i.e. something) is x..." or "it is not prohibited (i.e. it is permitted) that x" or "it is not impossible (i.e. it is possible) that x" or "it is not bad (i.e. it is acceptable) that x".
The third term (everything, obligatory, necessary, good) is the equivalent to "F(-x)". This is very different from "-F(x)". This means things like "nothing is not-x (i.e. everything is x)" or "it is prohibited that not-x (i.e. it is obligatory that x)" or "it is impossible that not-x (i.e. it is necessary that x)" or, the example you gave, "it is bad that not-x (i.e. it is good that x)".
Joint denial ("nor"), disjunction (inclusive "or") and conjunction ("and") are like this too. The negation of the joint denial "neither A nor B" is the disjunction "A or B", not the conjunction "A and B". But the conjunction "A and B" does means the exact same thing as the joint denial of two negations "neither not-A nor not-B".
Incidentally I've got a novel theory of my own (previously unpublished as far as I'm aware) that things can be "neither true nor false" without violating the principle of non-contradiction, if we define truth and falsehood in this sort of way. (Strictly speaking, the novelty of it is doing so without violating the principle of bivalence, which is really what I defined in my earlier post, and which is more fundamental than non-contradiction. Non-contradiction just means it's not both P and not-P; but it could perhaps be neither, according to that law. Bivalence, which is the real core of truth-functional logic, is what tells tells us that not-not-P if and only if P, or equivalently, either P or not-P but not both).
In my theory, we formulate "it is true that x" with something like the function T(x). Then, keeping to the principle of bivalence, either T(x) or -T(x) but not both or neither; everything is either true or not true. However, falsity in this theory is more than mere non-truth; falsity is the truth of a negation, T(-x). Everything which is false is non-true, but not everything which is non-true is false (just as everything that is prohibited is non-obligatory, but not everything which is non-obligatory is prohibited; there are plenty of things that you are not required to do, but you are still allowed to do, even though you are required to not-do anything which you are not allowed to do). The prominent example of this is meaningless nonsense which doesn't actually indicate anything, and thus is neither true nor false for it makes no claims to be substantiated or discredited in the first place. (Some earlier proponents of ideas like this, such as the logical positivists, put all religious, metaphysical, and ethical statements into this category). It is non-true, and it is non-false. And that's not a problem for bival
Do the propositions stand true on their own? They are true only by virtue of their meaning in the language.
Sentences are true only by virtue of their meaning in the language; that is, in virtue of what propositions they express. But propositions are not arbitrary, invented linguistic constructs; propositions are what our arbitrary, invented languages attempt to encapsulate. Propositions are ideas or concepts, they are what sentences mean, they are the states of affairs connoted by the sentences used to express them; and they are true or not only inasmuch as such states of affairs obtain or not. (I should be clear here that I'm speaking of "propositions" as abstract objects merely as a linguistic idiom: I don't mean at all to say that there exist some metaphysical things called "propositions", for that would be little better than the Platonism I'm condemning). The sentence "schnee ist weiss" is true if and only if "schnee ist weiss" means that snow is white (which it does, to German speakers) and snow is, in fact, white. The sentence "snow is white" likewise is is true if and only if those words indicate something that actually obtains in reality, such as snow being white; and ultimately, there's no way we can talk about what words mean just in terms of other words, we just have to say that by "snow is white" we mean ---> that sort of thing over there ---> is happening; empirical, phenomenal experience is the ultimate referent.
On that note, however I will agree with you to some extent that (some) things are true in virtue of their meaning; I hold that that is just what it is to be a necessary truth. I hold mathematics to be like this, as well as logic. This is not logicism, the failed foundation of mathematics that held that mathematical truths are necessarily true only because that's how we define the terms. A definition gives the meaning of words only in terms of other words; but until you understand the meaning of some such set of words in terms of something other than more words - in terms of empirical phenomena - the definition will remain empty. Once you understand the meaning of the words in that way, once you can conceive of and imagine the thing being talked about and not just the words used to talk about it, then certain truths become indisputable, and these are necessary truths. For an example in mathematics, as soon as you understand what the (cardinal) numbers two, three and five mean, and what the operation of addition means, it becomes obvious that two plus three must necessarily equal five; for when you conceive of a set of two things and a set of three other things, and count the two and then continue on counting the three, you'll count to the same number that you would if you counted a set of five things.
I tried to avoid this conceivability=possibility topic in my original post because it ties in closely with phenomenalism, which a lot of people think is looney, but I find it to be the most scientific and realistic of all ontologies, doing away with all spooky metaphysical "substances" and "universals" and dealing solely in describing the observable world. That is my justification for the equivalence of conceivability and possibility: the verifiability theory of meaning, the cornerstone of the positivists' phenomenalism. The meaning of an expression (an indicative one at least; imperative expressions are a different but parallel story) is what sort of empirical phenomena it calls to mind; such expressions are true if what they call to mind is something that one would actually observe under the indicated circumstances (that is, in conjunction with the other observations indicated). Conception, or imagination, is limited only to the sorts of things that could be observed, as it is pieced together from the sorts of things which have been observed, broken down and abstracted into their constituent features. Thus, if something is conceivable it is the sort of thing that could be observed, and thus the sort of thing that could be true, that is, it is p
The entire argument as framed by the article seems to take for granted the assumption that for there to be universal, absolute, necessary truths, there must exist some sort of "thing" in which they are "written", some ontological entity to grant them their truth. This assumption seems entirely fallacious to me (and to entire schools of philosophy opposed to such Platonic realism).
Take, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction. This is a law of logic, you might even say THE law of logic: it says simply that for any proposition P (a proposition being what is expressed by a sentence in a given sense and context), either P or not-P. That's an exclusive OR there, so it's one or the other but not both. This is not just a law of language, of our way of expressing things, as Platonists often portray their opponents as claiming. Those who believe this law (which is almost, but not quite, everybody, Platonists and others alike) aren't just believing that, due to the arbitrary rules of all of our languages, it doesn't make any sense to say things like "both P and not-P" or "neither P nor not-P". They're saying that, completely independent of anybody speaking or even thinking anything, whatever state of affairs is described by "P" either obtains exactly as described, or it does not obtain exactly as described.
This is a necessary truth; one of the most, if not THE most, fundamental of them. (All other laws of truth-functional logic can be reduced to this one law, really). Necessary truths could aptly be described as laws, in the same sense as laws of nature: necessary truths are true everywhere always and there could not possibly be a universe where they were not true.
Now tell me, where is this fundamental law written (aside from our logic textbooks)? What is it that makes it true? Do we really need to posit some abstract metaphysical entity in Plato's heaven which is the ideal form of the Law of Non-Contradiction, in virtue of which our utterances of that law are true? Or can't we just say that it is necessarily true? Why must such laws be inscribed somewhere in order for them to be laws? This (along with the strawman "nominalism" that Platonists object to) is the metaphysical counterpart to the ethical position that things are only good or bad because someone (God, society, etc) says so, which completely destroys the idea of absolute, universal, and non-arbitrary standards of justice (justice dealing with duties or obligations, obligations relating to goods the same way that necessities relate to truths). Why must things be either decreed by heaven (whether there is a God there or just "Ideas") or by popular convention to be true? Cannot truth stand on its own?
Not likely to happen anytime soon if the majority has its say. More importantly, that would involve taking responsibility for our own lives, and that's precisely why the majority will most likely always be against freedom and independence. Everybody wants a big strong mommy and daddy to protect and care for them; but nobody realizes that "mommy and daddy" are no more grown-up than the rest of us...
I think the point of such comment that "anecdotes are worthless, my experience was just the opposite of yours..." is like if one person were to say "look at these two data points, there's an obvious pattern" and someone else responded "two data points are not enough to plot a curve from; and look, this data point is completely off of the curve you plotted..."
Teleporters (solves all transportation issues)
Replicators (solves hunger)
Holodeck (solves sexual ten... I mean, makes simulation much easier. Yes, that's it) Which are really all just applications of the same core technologies: perfect observation, matter/energy conversion, and perfect manipulation. Convert energy into matter and perfectly manipulate it into whatever form you want? Replicator. Perfectly observe something, convert it to energy, and elsewhere convert energy into matter and manipulate it into the exact form you observed? Transporter. And the holodeck is really nothing but a lot of fancy replication going on on the fly (and some cheaper parlour tricks for the lower-LOD parts of the scene). (Ok, there's a fourth technology going on here too: the holodeck also has a lot of really fancy AI).
The problem is that while matter/energy conversion may theoretically be possible, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle renders perfect observation and perfect manipulation impossible even in theory. So while we may in the future be able to roughly approximate the sort of magic that goes on in Star Trek, unless we discover that our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe is seriously (not just a little bit) off, then we'll never have those sorts of technologies, and nobody ever will.
You're right though, that if we could do that, it would truly solve absolutely everything. If you can do what it takes to run a holodeck, you have the ability to manipulate the physical world as easily as we manipulate virtual worlds, and if anything is "sufficiently advanced technology" (i.e. indistinguishable from magic), that is.
You're absolutely correct that the opposite of a right is a privilege. To have a right to something (at least a claim right, see below) is to have something which others are morally obliged to give (or do) to you; the opposite of obligation is supererogatoriety, and having something supererogatory is a privilege, by definition.
However, I was not looking for the opposite to "right", not trying to describe privileges, which I think everyone agrees that "free music" and "free movies" are. No one argues that anyone is obliged to create media for you or to transfer it to you for free, or even to sell it to you; people only argue that if you happen to have some media that's already been created and transferred to you, it's perfectly fine to make and transfer copies of it to others, and likewise it's fine to receive such copies.
Rather, I was looking for the opposite of "basic human right"; that is, some sort of right, which is not basic to all humans but somehow a contingent right (which seems as absurd a notion to me as "contingent necessity"; rights are like moral necessities). I'm boggling about that because people seem to use the term in negation to mean "sure that may be a right, maybe there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that, but even so it's not an important right and there's no crime in forcing people to refrain from doing that." Which again sounds like nonsense to me: presuming people have a basic right to liberty, then it absolutely is a moral crime to force anyone to refrain from doing ANYTHING, no matter how trivial, that they are morally permitted to do.
There are two senses of "right" to distinguish between here. "Liberty rights" are moral permissions to act (or not act) in certain ways. "Claim rights" are moral obligations that other people owe toward you; a positive claim right is a moral obligation upon other people to do something to you, and a negative claim right is a moral obligation upon others to refrain from doing something to you. To say that people have a fundamental right to liberty - which seems to be something most folks in the western world would agree to, on paper at least - is to say that people have the negative claim right that others must respect their liberty rights; that is, that others must refrain from forcing people to do (or refrain from doing) things that they are morally permitted to do (or refrain from doing).
The assumption that people have a fundamental right to liberty seems pretty broadly accepted in the modern world (at least in the west), at least until people start thinking about governments. I think everyone would agree that I can't start dictating what sort of clothes you can wear (and enforcing my edicts with violence as necessary), even though it's not really important for your life that you be able to pick your own outfits. So saying that you have a right to wear what you want is asserting that you are morally permitted to wear what you want, and (assuming that you have a claim right to liberty) that everybody else is forbidden from forcing you to do otherwise. The second part there is the important bit: it's not about whether or not the freedom to choose your outfit is a "basic human right", as in something really important that you need like food and shelter; it's about telling me to fuck off, that I have no authority to use violent force to coerce your fashion decisions, as I broadly have no authority to use violent foce to coerce you at all, unless perhaps you're doing something morally prohibited like trying to murder someone.
When we demand that governments respect people's rights, in this sense, we're usually demanding that they respect people's right to liberty, and refrain from using violence force to stop people from doing things they're morally permitted to do (or to force them to do things they're morally permitted to refrain from). It's not at all about the significance of the act: I have a right to pick my nose every Tuesday at noon or not as I deem fit, and if someone passes a law requiring that I do pick my nose
Same reason drug laws authorized by the interstate commerce clause will never be overturned; because to challenge those would require challenging the legitimacy of the extent that that clause has been stretched to, and in doing that you challenge the basis of large chunks of the legal system. The whole thing is just too much effort... and why should our judges and legislators care to do that much work? They get paid the same either way...
If it is not morally prohibited to do something, it is within your "basic human rights" to do it. That doesn't mean you are entitled to the things you need to do it - nobody is arguing that people are entitled to free movies and music and whatnot, that actors and singers must perform for free if their audiences demand it - it just means that nobody else is permitted to use violence force (which is what the law is backed by) against you to stop you from doing it. The most basic human right is to be free from physical violence; laws are well-supported public threats of violence in retaliation for certain acts or omissions; so the enforcement of ANY law against something that is not morally prohibited is a transgression of peoples' most basic human rights.
Now, granted that, we can still argue all you want about whether copyright infringement is morally right or wrong, permissible or prohibited... but whatever your answer to that question, it still doesn't change the fact that if there's nothing wrong with doing X, and some organization (e.g. the government) is threatening me with violence if I do X, then that organization is violating my "basic human rights".
It's possible that people just want to do things that (they believe) there is nothing wrong with, but that they don't want to be martyrs for the cause and stand up and fight The Man; they just want to be left alone. There's nothing wrong with that, provided that there's nothing wrong with what they want to do.
Your parallel between drug addiction and copyright infringement is just a straightforward attack on the practice of copyright infringement. But if there's nothing wrong with copyright infringement, then there's nothing wrong with doing it in secret despite copyright law, without engaging in public civil disobedience. Likewise, if there's nothing wrong with doing heroin, then there's nothing wrong with doing heroin in secret despite drug laws, without engaging in public civil disobedience. If there's nothing wrong with doing X, then there's nothing wrong with doing X in private or in secret to evade those who would want to stop you from doing X.
Say, for example, that it was illegal for women to go outdoors without a man, as it is in some countries; and some women rightly disputed this law, but didn't want to put their lives on the line to engage in an act of public civil disobedience, so instead they dressed up as men and secretly went out to conduct whatever business they had. They would be breaking the law, but not flaunting the law; they would be secretly breaking it. But if such a laws are unjust, as I hope you'll agree they are, then would you say that those women who sneak out are just like heroin addicts, "addicted to going outside alone", and only do so secretly because they know it's wrong and are ashamed? Or would you acknowledge that, just maybe, they rightly believe that there's nothing wrong with it, and are only hiding it because a lot of powerful people do think there is something wrong with it and would hurt them if they got caught?
Need to keep their noses out of sovereign individuals' businesses. This history of illiberal governance is really scary, and offensive.
So to answer your question, you combine social liberalism and low taxes by leaving people alone in their private lives, AND leaving them alone in their economic lives, i.e. not taxing them. Which is what libertarians advocate. Of course, doing so involves doing away with state-owned socialist programs like those you describe...
ObRant: liberal and conservative are not antonyms, "conservatives" are in many ways more liberal than "progressives" who in turn are in many ways more authoritarian than "conservatives" (though as I see it both the "left" and the "right" are really incoherent mixes of liberty and authority). A true liberal is anyone anti-authority; a true conservative is anyone happy with the way things are now (and as such "conservative" is a temporally relative term; today's progressives may be tomorrow's conservatives, if the win the battle today). A better term to pair with liberal or libertarian would be "social" or egalitarian, though I'd argue even those aren't rightly opposed to one another but two separate axes of orthogonal but interdependent concerns (see "libertarian socialism" and most of the anarchist movement). But "conservative" and "progressive" are really the oddballs of political terminology, because they don't rightly pick out any particular political stance but generic support for "the way things are" (at least right here and now) or "the way things should be" (but what way is that, exactly?).
Garbage picked up twice a week! Streets swept!
The city bus rolls around predictably for out convenience...
My nation's standards of living are pretty fucking awesome, I just walked to the fridge to get some frikkin' milk and honey for my coffee, my feet warm on a cold autumn day: It's like I'm living in the promised land of legends! I dunno about you, but I buy water (and the gas to heat it with) directly with a portion of my paycheck AFTER taxes have already been taken out; same deal for garbage service and bus rides (though I wouldn't be surprised if the latter was tax-subsidised as well). I also pay for my milk and my honey and my tea (not a coffee person myself), and the gas that heats my house, and the house itself (well OK, I pay somebody else for the privilege of temporarily living in his house, which I'm not so happy about, but that's another rant).
You're right that times are pretty nice for us in the modern world; but don't give the government credit for all that. A lot of the things you praise are paid for voluntarily by peoples' hard-earned dollars completely apart from money taken by force as taxes; and while some of the tax money does go to fund some nice projects as well, I'm not entirely convinced that people wouldn't pay for such things voluntarily, if faced with the harsh alternatives. Just as when kids grow up and move out on their own they learn to voluntarily do all the chores they used to be coerced into doing at home, simply because having a filthy stinking house with dirty dishes and laundry piling up isn't very pleasant, I think that society, if "kicked out of the house" so to speak, and no longer under the "parental" supervision and care of the government, might grow up and learn to take care of itself. Then again, when kids really mature to that point, they usually move out voluntarily... so maybe the fact that so many people still support paternalistic governance is evidence that we, on average, aren't ready for independence yet.
Of course, even given that, there's the further problem that the "parents" we've got are all just as much "children" as the rest of us, so really any "parenting" going on will be of the "hey you seem smart, can you help me with my homework?" type (yeah right), or the "yes sir mister bully sir whatever you say sir please don't hurt me" type.
(Please note I'm not meaning to agree with the "you'll be a conservative when you grow up" notion of the quote a couple levels up. I don't consider myself a conservative at all. I am an anarchist; or a "libertarian socialist" if you can wrap your head around that turn of phrase).
I think we're still talking past each other here.
I'm not trying to say that some things can be both true and false at the same time, or that there are fuzzy values somewhere in between true and false, where something can be kind of true, or that truth is relative, or anything like that. I'm also not arguing here for either the verifiability criterion of meaning or indeterminism, though I will happily argue for them if you want, and I came up with my logical notation in part to be able to logically express some things that you'd want to say about such theories without having to sacrifice bivalence in logic. Which is, whether or not you know it, what you're so forcefully trying to preserve here; the notion that for any logical assertion, either it is correct or its negation is.
To be explicit, I'm making a distinction between "deflationary truth" and "substantiative truth" - that is, between "truth" in the sense that "P" is true if and only if P and "P" is false if and only if not-P, and "truth" in the sense that "P" is true if and only if some sort of criteria are met (my preferred criteria being something like verifiability, but another substantiative theory of truth will suffice). In the former, deflationary sense, I agree with you 100%: for any proposition P, either P (= "P" is true) or not-P (= "P" is false).
In the latter, substantiative sense of truth, however, I'm saying that there can be some cases where the neither the proposition "it is true that P" (= the state of affairs described by P obtains) nor the proposition "it is true that not-P" (= the state of affairs described by "not-P" obtains) is correct ("true" in the deflationary sense of truth). Both of those statements can be incorrect ("false" in the deflationary sense of truth), if "P" is not the kind of thing to which the attribution of truth pertains (not a proposition), or if P is a proposition about which there just is no fact of the matter. In my logical notation, I do this by having formulas which resemble the formulas of predicate logic but do not themselves assert the existence of a certain state of affairs, but rather only describe a state of affairs, about which something is to be said; rather than saying "this raven is black" they say "the state of affairs of this raven being black", which is not itself a complete proposition, any more than "this raven" is a complete proposition. To complete the proposition, you must say something ABOUT the state of affairs of this raven being black; you must assert that it obtains (that it "is true" in a substantiative sense), or that it ought to obtain (that it is good), or that you believe it, or that you desire it, or whatever mode of expression you want to apply to the described state of affairs.
But back to the sorts of cases where neither a proposition (or properly speaking, the state of affairs described by a proposition) nor its negation is "true" in any substantiative sense. The first sort of problem, where truth just does not apply, is when you spew nonsense sentences like many of the one's you've been saying, sentences that are not grammatically correct. "Bird" is not a complete sentence, it does not assert or express anything; gesturing while pointing at a bird and saying "bird" may be taken to express the same proposition as "there exists a bird at that location", which can be true or false; but just the utterance "bird" cannot itself be true or false, and birds themselves cannot be true or false; only propositions about birds (which you could express by gestures and incomplete utterances) can be true or false. To say that anything other than a proposition is true or false is nonsense; this is called in technical jargon a "category mistake".
Lets say I ask you about the values of various properties of various entities. I ask you what the height of Jon is. I ask you what the color of your car is. I ask you whether the number 3 is odd or even. You can answer all these sorts of questions; or at least, they have answers. Now lets say I ask you what the color of the nu
I bet you live in the US
Also, I hope you noticed that I was not advocating the "if it's not white then it's black" mentality but commenting on the common (in my observation) logical ERROR of concluding that since it's not white it must be black, so to speak. I am not a fan or proponent of that mentality at all, and find that it (along with conflation of modalities, e.g. truth and necessity, goodness and obligation, actuality and opinion, "is" and "ought", etc) is the source of most religious/political/philosophical/ideological errors that people make.
Well... except that he preferred them all equally before and then for some reason decided he doesn't really like blue so much, in which case I'd say the irrationality is in rationalizing the decision negatively (I didn't choose it, therefore it must be less desirable) rather than positively (I chose it [and nothing bad happened], therefore it must be desirable). In other words, it seems to me that coming to like things that are familiar (foods you usually eat, etc) is perfectly rational, but coming to dislike things that you've never tried, just because they were available options in previous decisions (and yet you didn't choose them), is not so rational. But given a good reason for avoiding blue, obviously the outcomes of both tests are perfectly rational decisions; only the downgrading of blue for no reason is irrational. The more rational rationalization process would be "I chose red [and nothing bad happened] therefore red is good", leaving his opinion of blue untouched and equal to green; I had just assumed the monkey had made this inference and irrationally deduced from it that blue is bad, leading to the irrational preference of green over blue.
No books off the top of my head, but the wiki article on modal logic is a good place to start, and has a number of links to external sources, e.g. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is another great source for such topics.
There's not anything there about a modal logic for "true" and "good" - as far as I'm aware that's my own invention - but the principles of pretty much all modal logics are the same, just variations on a theme.