Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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AverageBozo
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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A mood which is elevated.
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

Post by Pattern-chaser »

AverageBozo wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 3:00 pm A mood which is elevated.
Is that really enough to define "happiness", do you think? It's a better attempt than I could've made, but I'm not sure that it clearly reflects the meaning of happiness. Perhaps I'm being too finnicky? 😉
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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Pattern-chaser wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 12:44 pm Many apologies. I got the quoting all wrong, and confused the dialogue as a result. 😊 This is how it should've appeared.
Pattern-chaser wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 10:07 am Yes, of course. But the human-created concepts of "dark", "cold" and "happy" cannot meaningfully exist without their conceptual 'twins', "light", "warm" and "sad".
Consul wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 10:12 am In a world where nobody has ever been sad, the people there may have a concept of happiness without also having a concept of sadness.
OK, let's make the point crystal-clear, as you've obviously missed it:

Please offer a definition of happiness that doesn't include or require "sadness", or any synonym thereof. [Nor should it define happiness by using synonyms for happiness, without saying what they mean.]
PC!

Just thinking loud. I'm wondering if you could reconcile your question through the concept of logical necessity? For instance, "there is at least one true proposition". If that is true out of logical necessity, can the concept of happiness be necessary too without an opposite of sadness, I wonder.

When a baby is born, it seems like it knows only one thing, crying... . In that case, it is logically impossible for there to exist something other than crying because it knows nothing else. That's probably not a good example but perhaps a starting point...
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” "Spooky Action at a Distance"
― Albert Einstein
AverageBozo
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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Pattern-chaser wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 3:03 pm
AverageBozo wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 3:00 pm A mood which is elevated.
Is that really enough to define "happiness", do you think? It's a better attempt than I could've made, but I'm not sure that it clearly reflects the meaning of happiness. Perhaps I'm being too finnicky? 😉
A mood, emotion or feeling that exists as a state of mind, which provides its bearer with pleasure beyond a characteristic level; often desirable as a steady state; thought by some to be elusive; sometimes attained by listening to music or by viewing works of art.

(I prefer the simpler definition. The rest of the longer definition is indefinite descriptions.)
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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AverageBozo wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 3:00 pm A mood which is elevated.
Hah! Hoisted by my own petard! I think I may have posed (slightly) the wrong question. I didn't make my point clearly. Here's why.

In our everyday world, the one we call RL, your definition is fine. But in a world where "nobody has ever been sad", as Consul describes, it means nothing. After all, if Consul's world is the new RL, everyone's mood is only and always "elevated", yes? So it means nothing to say so, accurate though it might be.
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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Pattern-chaser wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 4:51 pm
AverageBozo wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 3:00 pm A mood which is elevated.
Hah! Hoisted by my own petard! I think I may have posed (slightly) the wrong question. I didn't make my point clearly. Here's why.

In our everyday world, the one we call RL, your definition is fine. But in a world where "nobody has ever been sad", as Consul describes, it means nothing. After all, if Consul's world is the new RL, everyone's mood is only and always "elevated", yes? So it means nothing to say so, accurate though it might be.
It looks to me as though you would have it that elevated moods cannot exist without depressed moods. Elevated moods would simply indicate moods that are not neutral.

There could be a world with elevated moods and neutral moods. In our world, we call the neutral moods normal or normophoric.
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

Post by Pattern-chaser »

AverageBozo wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 3:00 pm A mood which is elevated.
Pattern-chaser wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 4:51 pm In our everyday world, the one we call RL, your definition is fine. But in a world where "nobody has ever been sad", as Consul describes, it means nothing. After all, if Consul's world is the new RL, everyone's mood is only and always "elevated", yes? So it means nothing to say so, accurate though it might be.
AverageBozo wrote: August 3rd, 2021, 7:16 pm It looks to me as though you would have it that elevated moods cannot exist without depressed moods.
No, my point is that it is pointless (😉) to describe a mood as "elevated" when everybody's mood is only and always elevated.
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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But some moods are not elevated but merely flat or neutral. So, not all moods are identical. Since there are varying degrees of happiness, the characteristic of being happy must have meaning. Else no one could understand what it means for one person to be happier than another,
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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For that reason, I am saying that to describe a mood as elevated is to define happiness.
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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I wonder if we are playing with semantics or if my position is wrong-headed. In either case, I should yield to your tenet that a quality cannot be understood without a meaningful opposite.
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

Post by AverageBozo »

One last point (for your position or for mine?): if happiness cannot be meaningful without sadness, which cannot be meaningful without happiness, and sadness, or happiness, can only be meaningful by understanding itself per se, how can it matter whether or not sadness exists for the sake of making happiness meaningful?
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

Post by Steve3007 »

The philosopher Ken Dodd sang: "I thank the Lord that I've been blessed with more than my share of happiness" which I suppose made him something of a Utilitarian, in the sense that he clearly believed that happiness could be quantified.
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

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AverageBozo wrote: August 4th, 2021, 9:02 am I wonder if we are playing with semantics or if my position is wrong-headed. In either case, I should yield to your tenet that a quality cannot be understood without a meaningful opposite.

Honestly? I'm not sure. One thing I am reasonably sure of is that happy/sad is a bad example. I think this subthread is about eternal complements, like light/dark and so on. They are not opposites so much as complements, so that yin lacks meaning without yang, its complement. Each needs the contrast of its complement to properly reflect its own meaning.

What point has the word "dark" in a world where there is no light? Darkness is universal, and thereby 'invisible' too, so there is little point referring to it. Just as no-one would say, as they entered a room, "hey, this room is filled with air!" Such statements lack useful meaning.

A final, and minor, point: I don't think this reasoning does or should apply to all opposites. I think it applies only when we can safely say that the opposites are also complements?
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

Post by Terrapin Station »

Yes, of course. Absence of evidence is ALWAYS evidence of absence.

The mistake here would be to equate evidence with "proof." "Evidence" doesn't imply "proof." Evidence is a reason, above mere possibility, to believe that something is the case. The more evidence there is for something, the stronger the reasons for belief.

As mentioned above, if we're dealing with something where the totality is easily checkable, it should be more than clear that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. For example, if we're wondering if our car keys are in the jacket we wore yesterday, we'd check the pockets, and if our car keys are not there, that absence of evidence is clearly evidence of absence of our car keys being in that jacket. We don't continue to believe that our car keys are in that jacket. We have good reasons to believe that they're not. So we look elsewhere.

If we're instead wondering if there's a set of car keys to a Rolls Royce, where our name is engraved on the keys, somewhere on Earth, then unlike with our jacket, we can't easily check everywhere. But the more places that we check for this without finding the keys, the better the evidence we have that there isn't such a set of keys, and that becomes even stronger as we check in lieu of a good reason to believe that there would be such a set of keys on Earth. We have very weak evidence when we've only checked in one jacket. We have much stronger evidence when we've checked millions of locations over tens of years. We never have proof, but that's not the idea of evidence in the first place. Empirical claims are not provable. They're simply provisionally verifiable in lieu of falsification, and the more evidence we have, the stronger the reasons for belief that we have.
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Re: Is Absence of Evidence ever Evidence of Absence?

Post by AverageBozo »

Terrapin Station wrote: August 4th, 2021, 9:59 am Yes, of course. Absence of evidence is ALWAYS evidence of absence.
Evidence is something that is evident, not just something that increases the credibility of something unknown.

Evidence is something that is objectively experienced or observed.

The absence of evidence is not a thing; it’s the absence of a thing.
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