Philosophy Now Forum

Obvious Leo wrote:Scott. I've seen you write quite knowledgeably on mathematical questions before but your understanding of mathematical philosophy is appalling. Get you mind into the thoughts of the great Persian philosopher/mathematicians and learn to make the distinction between a mathematical object and a physical one. You've done this over and over again and it's making your posts look rather silly. A DIMENSION IS NOT A PHYSICAL THING. It is a co-ordinate system used in mathematics.

Speak for yourself, Leo. I don't care whether this appeals to other past peoples or not by your interpretation of their views, only to whom I'm communicating directly with. You keep defaulting to assert some wiser connection to select 'others' to which I'm too stupid to get. I already assured you of my own investments in history and intensively in logic. The philosophers/scientists of the past also disagreed with each other and still do to this very day.

But even if I'm some perfect loner on my views, I don't think no amount of band wagoning is sufficient to diminishing my arguments. What precisely above do you have difficulty with? Calling me merely 'wrong' is not enough.

Scott Mayers wrote:Calling me merely 'wrong' is not enough.

I quite agree but this is not what I'm doing. All I'm doing is pointing out the mainstream position of conventional mathematical philosophy and simply calling this band-wagoning does not constitute a counter-argument. By adopting the logical positivist stance of physics it is you are placed in the unenviable situation of attempting to defend a minority position. The convention in philosophy is that in such cases the burden of proof lies with you and not with me. What is so uniquely privileged about the Cartesian space that you assume the right to define time as one of its co-ordinates? I'll readily grant that you're probably more proficient with the tools of mathematics than I am but why couldn't time be a co-ordinate of a de Sitter space, or a Hilbert space, or an anti de Sitter space, or any of the vector spaces or topological spaces or fuck knows what other spaces? If the Cartesian space is physically real then why aren't these other spaces?

Please explain why you aren't doing what Minkowski did and assuming that which you would seek to establish and thus defining a self-referential and tautologous model for reality.

Scott Mayers wrote: I'm not in disagreement. The point was that I was showing Leo is how we could not resist using models to demonstrate reality other than actually witnessing the reality directly all the time. But even witnessing them are based on internal models of our minds through the senses. Regardless, at least some models can represent some part of something with as much detail as necessary to describe it. No one has to confuse the models for the reality as long as we share the same initial denotations for learning the symbols we use to model the realities. Even this is difficult but not impossible.

Yes. I suppose you are right.

My problem is much more intractable than I thought. I usually describe it as everyone knowing everything but they'll never forget what they know to listen to me. Maybe if I could express it as poetry or lyrics in a song People could get it on an emotional level.

People model reality using words that are models while seeing only what they already know. There's no room left over to see the meaning of what other people are saying. Everyone already has his own reality and doesn't need any stinkin' new reality.

The language to express nature's reality no longer exists and we are stuck with language where even reality is questioned and premises remain unexamined. We're left with a language that assumes a shared perspective that can't exist while people, ideas, and language continue to fragment.

There's no fulcrum to change a mind and no wedge to get into one. We're each adrift with no anchor and no horizon.

Scott Mayers wrote: Let X be 'true'; If such an X is perfectly void of content, then while presuming 'true' it is also false such that X = 'untrue' as well. If you think of this as a box to which you label it with an 'X', it acts variable in that you can put anything into it or not.

Thus when container is empty it's false that it isn't empty.

Scott Mayers wrote:If you place something in it, you know that you placed it there and so are able to be confirmed this by putting something in it. On the other hand, if you don't, while you may not actually be placing anything in it, you still know from your inability to determine what may or may not be already present there, the act of NOT placing anything in it acts as an opposing value to placing something in it.

I put some money in my wallet, or, if I don't there might or not be money already in there but this is still the opposite of putting some money in.

Scott Mayers wrote:Let the act of placing something in the box = Y and the act of not placing something [nothing] in the box = -Y. You realistically recognize that you can either do Y, as an act, or -Y as both equal possibilities. Recognizing this possibility alone is enough to represent that what you can place in the box is as meaningful and real as not doing so.

Either I put the money in or I don't; both have meaning.

Scott Mayers wrote:Therefore, the box's content represented as the one with an, X, is real because if it wasn't, no X meaning no actual box = -X exists!

My wallet exists if I can put the money in, because if I can't then it's true that I have no wallet.

Scott Mayers wrote:This logically proves that for any minimal concept of reality is necessarily one thing and nothing at the same time. Just note that to place something in the box requires displacing the potential of something else being there as you try which defeats your ability to do Y. Thus all you can be certain of by default is -Y until you try. This is a type of rewording of QM's Uncertainty Principle as an application to reality itself.

I can only be at first be certain that I can't put money into my wallet, as a default, until I try to do so.

Well, an Absolute Nothing/Nonexistence still can't exist, so 'it' can't have any properties, quantities, etc; making it totally bankrupt, that is, if 'it' could be an 'it'.

Ludwig Wittgenstein has never been my favourite philosopher but he certainly knew his stuff when it came to the philosophy of language. He reckoned that many so-called philosophical questions were not in fact philosophical questions at all but merely examples of the improper use of language. I reckon "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a good example of such a non-question.

Nothing does not exist because something does and attempting to dig beyond this simple statement of the bloody obvious is self-indulgent navel-gazing because the answer to the question is contained in the definition of the words. Why is there no such thing as a square circle?

So, what are some more "questions that we'll never solve" that turn out to be readily solvable?

PoeticUniverse wrote:So, what are some more "questions that we'll never solve" that turn out to be readily solvable?

I don't buy the idea even as a possibility, PU. Certainly we live in a Rumsfeldian world of known knowns and known unknowns. As scientists we accept the certainty that the universe must also contain a vast suite of unknown unknowns, the questions we haven't yet thought to ask of nature. But as philosophers we must never ever acknowledge the existence of the unknowable. When we draw a veil across human knowledge and declare that beneath this veil we cannot peek then we mock ourselves by defining our own existence as preposterous.

I for one will not have my life reduced to an exercise in Sisyphean absurdity and as long as there remains a single unanswered question on my horizon then I've still got a bloody good reason to continue looking for the answer to it.

Obvious Leo wrote:

PoeticUniverse wrote:So, what are some more "questions that we'll never solve" that turn out to be readily solvable?

I don't buy the idea even as a possibility, PU. Certainly we live in a Rumsfeldian world of known knowns and known unknowns. As scientists we accept the certainty that the universe must also contain a vast suite of unknown unknowns, the questions we haven't yet thought to ask of nature. But as philosophers we must never ever acknowledge the existence of the unknowable. When we draw a veil across human knowledge and declare that beneath this veil we cannot peek then we mock ourselves by defining our own existence as preposterous.

I for one will not have my life reduced to an exercise in Sisyphean absurdity and as long as there remains a single unanswered question on my horizon then I've still got a bloody good reason to continue looking for the answer to it.

Does this mean you don't accept Gödel's proof which implies there are math theorems that will never be solved? Does this also mean that the standard model of physics will be the final frontier for you and there is nothing beyond?

PhilX

Philosophy Explorer wrote: Does this mean you don't accept Gödel's proof which implies there are math theorems that will never be solved?

No it doesn't. I feel sure that I've understood Godel's diagonal arguments well enough to accept them as being valid. However I don't for a moment accept that maths theorems can tell us anything at all about the nature of physical reality. All mathematics can do is model a pre-defined narrative of reality but NEVER reality itself. This I learnt from the Persians and enfolded into my own Rubaiyat.

Philosophy Explorer wrote:Does this also mean that the standard model of physics will be the final frontier for you and there is nothing beyond?

I presume you're taking the piss, Phil, because every word I've ever uttered on the subject of physics claims the exact opposite.

Leo said:

"No it doesn't. I feel sure that I've understood Godel's diagonal arguments well enough to accept them as being valid. However I don't for a moment accept that maths theorems can tell us anything at all about the nature of physical reality. All mathematics can do is model a pre-defined narrative of reality but NEVER reality itself. This I learnt from the Persians and enfolded into my own Rubaiyat."

In math, there are innumerable models (e.g. we have Euclidean geometry along with the Lobachevsky model and the Riemannian model of geometry). For math purposes, one model is as good as the next one so in terms of geometry, the Euclidean model is what's taught in grade school as it's the simplest to learn and effective for demonstration purposes in ordinary situations. If something were discovered in physics that relates to one of the other two models, then the Euclidian model would be dropped and switched over to the other model.

So I disagree that a math model can't tell us anything. If it can predict what may occur (such as it did predict the exact bending of light under GR at the time of an eclipse), then it must say something about reality as long as you have the right math model (and there are plenty of them out there to pick from to match up with and if it's wrong, then you just have to look for another model that can predict). Again one math model isn't superior to another. It's a matter of matching the right model to the situation at hand and if all the predictions match up with the model, then you may indeed have an idea what the reality is for the situation is at hand.

The curious thing about QM and relativity is that you have two accurate models which are most effective in respect to the size you're talking about, i.e. subatomic and macroscopic and the only failure (if you want to call it that) is the inability to unite the two theorems into one, mathematically speaking. Maybe a better mathematical model exists waiting to be discovered.

PhilX

Philosophy Explorer wrote:If it can predict what may occur (such as it did predict the exact bending of light under GR at the time of an eclipse),

A prediction is not the same thing as an explanation. Gravitational lensing is open to a far simpler explanation than that implied by the 4 dimensional manifold. Why should the bending of light by gravity be any more complicated than the bending of light by water, a phenomenon with which nay high school science student is familiar? We already know perfectly well from GR that gravity slows down light as surely as water does. Gravity slows EVERYTHING down.

16. Why did the universe have such low entropy in the past, that is, very high order, with but one arrangement of matter versus antimatter, instead of the high disorder of many, many arrangements, the low entropy resulting in the distinction between past and future and the second law of thermodynamics?

Assuming this low entropy beginning is true, I suggest that this seemingly rare, unlikely state (just one out of so many others possible) must rather be very likely, even as to be the only way a universe can begin, since the universe began as such.

Why, though, does whatever brought on this universe, end up with this initial state for the universe to be of the highest possible grouping order? And is it in any way related to the proposed end of the universe being a featureless blend of dispersal?

PoeticUniverse wrote:Assuming this low entropy beginning is true,

Which is absolutely the most ridiculous assumption imaginable and in utter contradiction of every scrap of evidence. The universe is evolving from the simple to the complex and NOT the other way around. Not much is known definitively about about the first moments following the big bang but what everybody seems to agree on is that it was a state of minimum order. There wasn't even any matter.

PoeticUniverse wrote:And is it in any way related to the proposed end of the universe being a featureless blend of dispersal?

As always they got it back to front, Austin, as one might expect when we look at reality backwards down the arrow of time. It is at the big crunch that the universe reaches its lowest entropy state and transitions back to the new beginning. Think of the Moebius strip.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Philosophy Explorer wrote:If it can predict what may occur (such as it did predict the exact bending of light under GR at the time of an eclipse),

A prediction is not the same thing as an explanation. Gravitational lensing is open to a far simpler explanation than that implied by the 4 dimensional manifold. Why should the bending of light by gravity be any more complicated than the bending of light by water, a phenomenon with which nay high school science student is familiar? We already know perfectly well from GR that gravity slows down light as surely as water does. Gravity slows EVERYTHING down.

It's true that a prediction isn't the same as an explanation.
However they are closely related in that they always seem to be together in connection with some phenomenon.

You're implying Occam's razor in connection with the bending of light. I would say that gravity and water are two very different phenomena where one is solid and the other is energy. In fact how does one energy influence the other? If you mean that gravity bends the space that light travels through, I can buy that one. But if you mean that it's gravity directly bending the light, then you better look for another buyer.

PhilX