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Joe Biden (+General Biden/Harris Administration)
:lol:“Sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of THE SAME PEOPLE WHO SAID TRUMP DEFEATED ISIS demanding that we deploy more troops to Afghanistan to kill ISIS.” Angry Staffer — James Riley -
Why Was There A Big Bang
I've criticized you for the (frankly rather ridiculous) things you've said. Not for any items of personal trivia. And as a self-admitted crackpot (points for honesty btw), I'm just not interested in what you've got to say any more, on this or really any other topic. Not because you're wrong, necessarily, I just don't care. Life's too short to bother with crackpots, even if broken clocks are still right once in a while.
Sorry/not sorry. -
Why did logical positivism fade away?(I'm definitely guilty of conflating logical positivism with verificationism, partially because Ayer was the one I was most familiar with... though obviously the verification criteria of meaning was pretty central to the whole LP project, such as the rejection of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, etc on the grounds that it is literally meaningless according to the verification criteria)
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Why Was There A Big Bang
It it just that the party line too often feels like the party members papering over their own divisions and confusions so the general public/taxpayer funders don't catch on to what a mess they might be in.
Oh yeah, this is definitely the case. Physics is.. sort of broken right now (cosmology and particle physics at any rate), but that's not a story that gets broadcast to the public. After all, they might be less inclined to throw money at e.g. the next bigger and better particle accelerator we need to continue chasing the supersymmetry dragon (and we can't have that)!
Another awesome post btw, think I'm going to have to print this one out so I don't have to read it on the computer (damn thing gives me a headache after a while). Going to check out the Koelmann blog too, looks like some good stuff there as well. -
Why Was There A Big Bang
It could be the case that Universe didn't start at the "point in time" that is its Planckscale event horizon. It could be true that there is a lengthy pre-bang story along the lines of Linde’s eternal inflation or Big Bounce cosmology. It may well be that QG is a theory that sees beyond the Planckscale and finds some kind of spacetime/energy density story that pushes the origin of that spacetime/energy density story into realms that are simply just smaller and hotter.
But these ideas are speculative, simplistic, and don't even tackle the essential questions about why there are these things of spacetime and energy density. Again, we pull folk up who ask what space our Universe is growing into, yet seem untroubled by bouncing cosmologies or branching inflation fields that presume a familiar notion of passing time as the place in which our Big Bang universe appears as just another material development.
I don't really have any objection to any of this. I actually think its a really good point that we should be suspicious of proposals that appeal to our sense of a sequential narrative (like cyclical cosmologies), and if/when we finally break through this impasse its going to be in a way no one foresaw (and I think this also applies to particle physics). If the current projects/paradigms (string theory, supersymmetry, etc) were going to bear fruit, you would have hoped it would have happened by now... and that just hasn't happened, we've been spinning our wheels for decades (then again, nature isn't too interested in our time schedule so who knows).
But as a hobbyist (my background is in philosophy not physics), I tend to be a bit more conservative in sticking to what is the widely held view of people with actual formal expertise on the subject, hence my comments here sticking to what I guess is sort of the party line on the topic RE quantum gravity and early Big Bang cosmology.
Great posts, btw- very interesting commentary. :clap: -
Why did logical positivism fade away?
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that Popper is irrelevant or whatever. It's just that popular accounts of science tend to portray him as being the be-all-end-all of philosophy of science, and particularly his falsificationism as being almost consensual when that is far from the case in the philosophy of science. I mean, maybe it should be consensual, but as a sociological observation, I don't think it is.
Isn't it pretty widely agreed that falsificationism is, at best, far too simplistic if not outright wrong? Sort of ironic that many scientists and non-philosophers seem to regard falsificationism as definitive when the view among philosophers is... somewhat more complicated (at least, this was my impression of the scholarly consensus). Not that falsificationism was useless or anything (far from it- obviously a hugely influential and fruitful idea), but that it turned out to be, at best, not the whole story.
Great posts, btw. :strong: -
Why did logical positivism fade away?
I'd suggest, again, that this was merely a symptom of the more fundamental failure: observational verification is not a descriptively adequate account of linguistic meaning (it simply doesn't capture how we actually use words), which had the result that the verification criteria could not satisfy itself, despite the fact that the criteria was clearly perfectly meaningful (albeit empirically/descriptively wrong).
If we can understand the verification criteria as a meaningful proposal (which we clearly can), but the criteria cannot satisfy itself as a meaningful proposal, then clearly this criteria is not a good one for linguistic meaning. Ayer might have had a case for verification as a principle for scientific theories or factual claims or something like this, but his aim drastically exceeded his reach. -
Why Was There A Big Bang
QG might be regarded as a project that restores linearity to the physics in a way that will let us punch right on through the Planckscale event horizon and see what lies "beyond" ... as some extrapolatable continuation of a spacetime extent and its energy density content. But as with the Hartle–Hawking imaginary time proposal, everything we know and love as the metaphysically taken-for-granted might just curve into each other and thus vanish up its own collective arse.
Sure, that's perfectly fair. I'm mostly just stating what is the conventional wisdom, and I'm aware that the hope in QG allowing us to peek behind the curtain and tell the rest of this story is only one among many. I think there's a lot of value to the suggestion that we've pushed this type of program to its limit, and we have to think outside the box to really move past the present stalemate. We're well past holding our breath for string/superstring theory to yield any testable (let alone actually confirmed) predictions, so may as well bang our head against a different wall, for something new and different if nothing else.
But I do object to the suggestion that there's anything "dogmatic" about pointing out that the parts of the BBT which are widely-accepted and observationally-corroborated don't include any beginning or origin of the universe. We can't test the relevant physics, can't re-create the relevant conditions even at the LHC (not by several orders of magnitude), so we're purely shooting in the dark in those earliest stages of the universe. And I'm not claiming that there was no beginning or origin of the universe; I'm certainly not ruling that out at all. My only purpose is to counter the familiar and misleading talking point (found mostly in popular-level content on cosmology/BBT) that this is a generally accepted or observationally well-established part of the standard cosmological model accepted by most cosmologists, or that the BBT is primarily a theory of the origin of the universe (rather than of its development). It just isn't. -
Why did logical positivism fade away?I'd suggest that it wasn't so much a lack of an ethical theory, as the fact that the ethical theory was built on the same faulty foundation the rest of it was (i.e. this extremely limited conception of linguistic meaning as observational truth-conditions).
And its not nothing that you can trace a thread from LP to contemporary moral non-cognitivism/error theory/etc, so LP's contribution to moral philosophy wasn't entirely worthless. LP turned out to be completely wrong (and a bit wrong-headed), but it certainly did help get some more productive conversations moving along. -
If the brain can't think, what does?:strong: :up: :ok:
Good call on Nietzsche, too (he was definitely ahead of the game in his suspicion of any supposed unity/transparency/etc of consciousness and the self) -
Why did logical positivism fade away?A huge part of it was that it was just empirically inadequate as a theory of meaning; see Wittgenstein's PI for a good antidote to the LP's view of linguistic meaning.
The tl;dr is that asserting factual/empirical propositions is only a tiny subset of what humans do with language (we also: exchange greetings, make requests, make jokes, and all sorts of things that have nothing to do with any empirical truth-conditions), and so the verification criterion of meaning just falls woefully short in describing what we do with language. -
Why Was There A Big Bang
What bothers me is why did cosmologists stop the extrapolation at, to quote Wikipedia, "...hot dense state..." They could've simply drawn the trajectories of all the galaxies back to a point just as William Lane Craig and I thought. It's not that there was a law against it, right?
Because that's where our theories cease to be good descriptions of physical reality. As we rewind the clock backwards and the universe gets smaller and hotter, eventually we reach a point where quantum effects become significant, and general relativity ceases to be a good theory. General relativity is a classical theory, it does not include quantum mechanical effects, so once we reach the point where gravitation dominates on the quantum scale in the very early universe, we need a quantum theory of gravity to describe what is happening... which we don't have. So we can't rewind any further, as we have no description of how physics works in those extreme conditions.
And the fact that GR spits out an evident absurdity- the "Big Bang singularity", where all the mass in the universe occupies a 0-dimensional point where density, temperature, and spacetime curvature run to infinity- in precisely the situation where we expect it to cease to be applicable is no doubt why the overwhelming majority of cosmologists don't believe there was any such thing- the singularity is an artifact of a theory pushed past its breaking point- and that a successful theory of quantum gravity will remove such singularities (which is exactly what happens in candidate theories of quantum gravity like string/M-theory and loop quantum gravity/loop quantum cosmology). -
Metaphysics Defined
Wayfarer/Jeeprs has been posting the same handful of quotes, posting the same silly strawmen and deliberate misrepresentations for years. Like, literally, years, going back to the old forum. It gets aggravating after a while, because it is not a productive contribution to any philosophical discussion, and amounts to spreading misinformation. What does posting the same decades-old strawman of Daniel Dennett, or dropping red herrings about scientism (in an unrelated thread) add to any discussion in 2021? Nothing. He should just change his username to "materialism makes me cry" and save us all the trouble of his actually posting in threads on those topics because that's all his contributions amount to, at least, provided you've already read his favorite Thomas Nagel quotes before. -
Why Was There A Big Bangin the case of Craig, I think its quite clearly deliberate, not a good faith misunderstanding. He goes to great lengths to misconstrue contemporary science, despite having received responses from the very scientists he's misquoting/misrepresenting asking him to stop mischaracterizing their work (this happened with his misuse of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem).
But I don't think this is generally true. Many people just hear the popular science TV shows or Youtube channels refer to the Big Bang as the "beginning of the universe" and so just assume that must be true. But Craig knows better, and does it anyway. -
Does Buddhist teaching contain more wisdom than Christianity?Yeah I think its safe to say that Christianity very routinely fails to deliver on its promise of facilitating good behavior or happy living (its been responsible for, or at least complicit in, some of the most horrible actions of our species, and there more devout its followers happen to be, the more horrible they tend to act), so Buddhism probably beats it in that regard as well.
Again, there's always exceptions, and its not like Buddhism is perfect by any means, but in general or on average it seems way ahead here as well. -
Currently Reading
yeah he's written quite a few fantastic responses to various parts of the causal/cosmological argument, and in particular he had one of the best arguments RE infinite/eternal past that I've seen, so I'd be super interested in that book. May have to check it out on Kindle here. -
Why Was There A Big Bang
And it continues to this day; William Lane Craig is a particularly egregious case, he continues to deliberately misrepresent contemporary cosmology as providing support for his Kalam cosmological argument, specifically the premise that the world/universe began to exist (and no doubt other apologists/theologians follow his lead here).
Maybe it did. Maybe it didn't. No accepted or established scientific theory tells us anything either way. -
Why Was There A Big BangSure; dark energy. But that's about all we know, its called "dark" mostly because we have no idea what it really is or how it works :razz:
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Why Was There A Big Bang
the prevalence of the misconception also probably has something to do with the rather aggressive propaganda campaign on the part of theists/Christianity/the RCC in particular to speak into existence an equivalence between and/or corroboration of the Christian creation myth by Big Bang cosmology.
Maybe the universe did have a discrete beginning or creation, but its not a part of any accepted or established physical theory. -
Metaphysics Defined
I mean, sometimes you just can't help but remark or observe when someone is being evasive or dogmatic. It might not be polite (though it may well be accurate and warranted), but its not necessarily fallacious. Fallacies are invalid inferences (i.e. premise -> conclusion), and calling a personal remark that doesn't form a premise in an argument or inference "ad hominem" is just a category mistake. -
Why Was There A Big Bang
Its an extremely common misconception/error, and one that science educators/communicators and popular science journalism is constantly propagating. Lots of popular-level articles and videos that casually refer to the Big Bang as the creation, origin, or beginning of the universe, when the accepted theory simply does not include any such thing. -
Can we know in what realm Plato's mathematical objects exist?I think the idea that there is a Form for every conceivable thing under the sun is unwarranted. Different Forms would be perfectly capable to combine to form virtually any perceptible object.
Plato agreed. In the Parmenides, he disavows the idea that there are Forms for low or gross things (I forget the specifics examples, but iirc "dirt" or "mud" may have been given), he tended to think that there were only forms for things like Truth, Beauty, Justice and so on. The problem is, his theory didn't really provide any basis for such a distinction (once again this seemed more motivated by non-logical or philosophical considerations, like aesthetic or religious ones), and so this certainly was a problem/inconsistency with his picture.
And as far as the reducibility/redundancy of certain Forms, I thinks that's also a very valid objection- where do we draw the line? Is there a Form for Square apart from the Form of Rectangle? Maybe Forms for geometrical shapes or objects all reduce to more fundamental concepts like the Form of Line Segment or Angle? This seems somewhat arbitrary and subjective, and contingent on our particular purposes or context or what sort of conceptual schema we happen to be using, which undermines the notion of a separate, independent, objective realm wherein these Forms exist/are located. -
Why Was There A Big Bang
Its not about the "creation" of space. Its about the expansion of space. The BBT, at least the parts that are well-corroborated and widely-accepted, doesn't include anything about a "beginning of the universe" or "the creation of spacetime". Its not a theory of origins. Its a theory of the universe's development from a hot dense early state, to the expanding/cooling state we presently observe.
Compare it to how evolution isn't a theory of how life began, but how it developed from some prior state to the currently observed state. -
How does a fact establish itself as knowledge?
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How does a fact establish itself as knowledge?
But again this is just a matter of definition- facts are not only always truth-apt, they're always true. We might ask when or how, say, utterances are truth-apt (because utterances are not definitionally truth-apt whereas facts are), or we might ask when or how we know whether something is true or is a fact... but asking whether something is a fact is usually just to ask whether its true, and so we always know, trivially, that facts are true because that's just how the term "fact" is typically used. -
Does Buddhist teaching contain more wisdom than Christianity?I don't know about "wisdom", sort of a slippery and subjective term, but there's certainly more truth in the basic tenets of Buddhism (i.e. the Four Noble Truths) than the fundamental tenets of Christianity (which are, almost without exception, false- i.e. the existence of a transcendent creator-god, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, etc).
Also probably less prone to abuse -> violent fanaticism, though obviously there's always exceptions to any rule (like the "Buddhist Bin Laden" who is a raging Islamophobe). -
Can we know in what realm Plato's mathematical objects exist?Yet these words or ideas express an objective similarity between concrete objects, so the abstract objects can also be understood as being in a sense "dispersed" in concrete objects.
But for Plato, this isn't exhaustive, he routinely distinguished between:
- the object in which a property is instantiated (the apple, the yield sign)
- the property concrete instantiations share (the redness of an apple, the triangle-ness of a yield sign)
- the Form in which these objects participate by sharing a given property (the Form of Apple, the Form of Triangle)
most later and certainly contemporary realists dispense with the 3rd one, which was sort of Plato's signature, and may have been more motivated by other concerns (aesthetic, religious, cultural, etc) than strictly philosophical or logical ones -
How does a fact establish itself as knowledge?
But surely facts aren't a priori true, but rather synthetically a priori true.
There's probably some terminological schemas where facts are defined as contingent, experiential (a posteriori) truths (and so, for instance, truths of mathematics and logic are not facts), but that's mostly semantics. But it is "a priori" or analytically true that facts are true, because again this is just truth by definition, a tautology.
What criteria does the justification adhere to for a fact to be "true"?
Again, this isn't really a sensical question- a fact is true of necessity, else it isn't a fact. An untrue fact is like a married bachelor: a contradiction in terms. But what constitutes truth, or epistemic justification, is a separate (and rather big/complex) question. -
How does a fact establish itself as knowledge?
Its definitionally true. A fact just is something that is true. Asking how we know facts are true is like asking how we know that bachelors are unmarried: its just what the term means.
And on the JTB story of knowledge, a fact becomes knowledge when A. it is believed B. it is true and C. justification is available (i.e. there are good and sufficient reasons for supposing it to be true). -
Metaphysics Defined
Is there a more widely misused term on the internet than "ad hominem"? If there is, I'd like to know what it is. People cry "ad hominem" any time a personal remark is made... but its only fallacious if its intended as an argument, i.e. "person X is a dummy-head, therefore the thing they're arguing for is false" -
Currently Reading
Maybe. Probably. Still interesting, and its not like you have any clue either way, so why pretend? -
Currently Reading
How was that? Penrose is a treasure, and his CCC is super interesting. Guy is just a machine (90 years old now!!!) -
Is agnosticism a better position than atheism?Its a simple question. But you're evidently not prepared to have a meaningful discussion on this topic, so I'll stop wasting my time.
Seppo
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