'You got no cards, Zelenskyy' ~ Donald Trump, Oval Office, April.

...assessing the engineering feasibility... — karl stone

So, do you have any information on the results of that assessment?

“Hey boss we’ve melted another drill head!”

“Don’t tell me that, that’s five in the last three months! And they’re $13 million a piece. You gotta do better!”

“Look it’s hot down there even without the gas explosions and plate fractures. It's like trying to tap into hell."

there are multiple deterministic interpretations of qm too so we can keep the beauty of determinism anyway. — flannel jesus

As a matter of free choice!

I didn't say them. — flannel jesus

That was what I took this to mean:

I think a surprising amount of physics is based on abstract, apparently-subjective judgements of physicists. — flannel jesus

In a deterministic system, every event has its place in the system, every event has a clear explanation and follows from the way the system is. In an indeterministic system, there's chaos because "stuff just happens". — flannel jesus

But as I’ve said, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. As I said already, if the PSR says that everything happens for a reason, that reason might be something like the boundary conditions of a system, or the lawful structure that constrains the range of outcomes—not necessarily a single, fully specified event that had to happen and no other. Like, something will fall down, not up, but where it falls might still contain an all-important element of chance.

In other words, the reason why something happens might be that even though a system is lawful, it might still be open-ended, rather than strictly deterministic. There is sufficient reason why some outcomes are possible and others are not, but that doesn't mean every outcome is rigidly predetermined. Otherwise how could novelty ever enter the picture? How could anything happen?

I read it decades ago but I’ve only recently come to see what it’s about

You might find a schoolbook example of a platonic riddle relevant in the context:

A man (not a man)
Throws a stone (not a stone)
At a bird (not a bird)
On a tree (not a tree)

And the answer to the ride is that a eunuch throws a piece of pumice at a bat hanging on to a reed - everything in it is not as it appears.

That was given in Russell’s HWP as example of Socratic essentialism and not being taken in by appearances.

I’m quite familiar with Freudian terminology. It’s simply that it’s misplaced in the context. The paper you cite states or implies that it’s a ‘feasibility study’ into magma energy. Presumably subsequent papers might have shown that despite the abundance of that energy, the cost of converting it, storing it and transmitting made it unviable. I often read that enough solar energy falls on the earth every day to meet all possible power needs, but likewise the cost of converting and storing it have to be taken into account (although obviously considerable progress has been made.) But overall, can’t see the point of the op - if it is that geothermal energy is an abundant energy source that could solve the entire world’s energy problems, but hasn’t, because of our collective ‘death wish’ - then sorry, not buying. I’d pick another topic.

My question is why? — karl stone

Well I’m not sure but pretty certain it ain’t due to Freudian repression. Probably more to do with cold hard economics.

If you google ‘geothermal energy’ there is plenty of information around, with live projects in many countries. On cursory reading, the main obstacle is, as always, cost per unit of useable energy. As for the NASA/Sandia Labs instance, the oracle saith: ‘Geothermal energy is a proven source of constant, clean, and potentially very large-scale energy. Sandia National Laboratories and other institutions, including those with NASA collaborations, have been at the forefront of geothermal research and development for decades. However, the idea of "demonstrating the feasibility of practically limitless quantities" in 1982 as a single event by NASA/Sandia is an oversimplification. The feasibility of geothermal power had already been established, and the ongoing research was focused on advancing the technology and expanding its reach. What was being explored and advanced by institutions like Sandia and the Department of Energy (DOE) in the 1980s was improving the efficiency, expanding the types of geothermal resources that could be exploited (e.g., Enhanced Geothermal Systems - EGS), and reducing costs.‘ And that work is ongoing but all indications are geothermal is by no means a silver-bullet solution to energy requirements.

What any of this has to do with either Freud or Schopenhauer is beyond me, though.

I think the key is, that it has to mean something. We have to have some skin in the game otherwise what does it matter? Who prevails in an internet debate?

Your suggestion to redefine knowledge as simply “true information” is understandable—it sidesteps Gettier problems by removing belief and justification from the equation. But I think the cost of doing so is too high. What we lose is the whole human dimension of knowing.

To know something, in any meaningful sense, is not merely to possess a piece of information that happens to be true. It’s to grasp it, to stand behind it, and if needs be to to act on it. That’s why belief and justification were part of the traditional definition: not because they’re philosophically tidy, but because they reflected what it means to know in actual life. We’re not passive containers of truths—we’re engaged agents who must assess, trust, challenge, and risk loss in the pursuit of knowledge.

That’s why Gettier cases are troubling. They show that something can check the boxes—justified, true, believed—and still feel wrong. The problem isn’t just with the definition; it’s with how knowledge is entangled with our perspective, our stakes, and our vulnerability to error. You can’t just treat it like a Boolean switch.

Consider real cases, like the Boston Globe’s investigation of abuse in the Catholic Church (Spotlight, 2015), or the exposure of toxic chemicals by whistleblowers (Dark Waters, 2019). These were not about sorting information into “true” or “false” categories. They were prolonged struggles against doubt, suppression, and institutional deception with large likelihoods of failure. In these cases, the truth mattered because the truth had been hidden, and people had to believe in it, justify it, and fight for it. That’s not just “true information” but also deeply meaningful (indeed, we’re learning we’re all likely to have PFAS chemicals in our bloodstream as a consequence of the latter.)

So yes, your revised definition may dodge Gettier problems. But it does so by eliminating the very thing that gives knowledge its urgency and its value. It’s like solving a paradox in ethics by redefining “good” to mean “pleasurable”—it may simplify the problem, but it abandons what was at stake.

there are multiple deterministic interpretations of qm too so we can keep the beauty of determinism anyway. — flannel jesus

I'm flummoxed as to why you or anyone would find deteminism beautiful. But then, you just said that physics is 'determined by subjective requirements'.....

Philosophy is limited to discourse, and so must be the subjects of its questions. Yet a third version would insist on a distinction between "answer" and "subject": thus, we can answer a philosophical question within the realm of philosophical discourse, but that doesn't mean that the subject of such discourse is also necessarily linguistic. — J

The most direct way of responding would be that truth can be distinguished from delusion or falsehood. That truth is what remains when delusion is overcome.

I don't know how many persons of Indian descent you know, but a common name in India is 'Satya' (I worked for one as a tech writer for a few years. I suppose Latin equivalents for such a name might be 'Felicity' and 'Verity'.) Of course many individuals thus named do not therefore exemplify or embody 'truth' but what the name denotes or conveys is the lived quality of truth, 'one in whom delusion no longer holds sway'. It conveys something of the virtuous quality of truth, which is hard to discern, not because it is a difficult concept, but because of the all-pervading and taken-for-granted existence of delusion. According to ancient philosophy, delusion is kind of the default for the human condition, and philosophy the pursuit of the antidote.

Those were the days.

most people can count up to ten, but only a few can deal with infinities & differentials. — Gnomon

But any normal human can converse in rational language, which relies on abstractions.

as you implied, Universals may be an overarching third class of knowables, and yet we only know them via rational extrapolation from objective observation. They are not obvious, but must be discovered (revealed) by means of rational work. — Gnomon

I've quoted this previously but it bears repeating:

Forms...are radically distinct, and in that sense ‘apart,’ in that they are not themselves sensible things. With our eyes we can see large things, but not largeness itself; healthy things, but not health itself. The latter, in each case, is an idea, an intelligible content, something to be apprehended by thought rather than sense, a ‘look’ not for the eyes but for the mind. This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. “Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes?—In no way … Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality [οὐσίας, ouisia] of all other things, what each thing is” (Phd. 65d4–e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by reason. — Eric D Perl, Thinking Being, p28

So much of this has actually filtered through to the way we understand the world today - after all the Greek philosophers are foundational to Western culture. So to understand principles, to see why things are the way they are, is to see a 'higher reality' in the sense that it gives you a firmer grasp of reality than those who merely see particular circumstances. Indeed the scientific attitude is grounded in it, with the caveat that all of Plato's writings convey a qualitative dimension generally absent from post-Galilean science.

He was - but don’t you think there’s something essential about spontaneity? Democritus had to introduce the famous ‘swerve’ to allow for the unpredictability of nature. C S Peirce had his ‘tychism’ which he thought of as the ‘sportive’ side of nature. And as I said, spontaneity is also bounded by constraints. But being constrained isn’t the same as being completely determined. There are ranges of possibility - another aspect of QM that Einstein didn’t like, but he was definitively proven incorrect by subsequent science

Following this path, we treat possible worlds not as metaphysical entities but as stipulated language games within which we can evaluate the truth of particular propositions, of how things might otherwise have been. And essential properties are not discovered, nor the attributes of Platonic Forms, but are decided by virtue of keeping our language consistent. They are a thing we do together with words. — Banno

If philosophy becomes merely a matter of keeping our language games internally consistent, then it risks becoming a kind of syntax-policing—about saying what can or can't be said, not about what is or must be. That’s a long way from asking what is real and how it might be known.

I would have thought that the existence of necessary truth, and questions as to what that implies, or why they are necessary, are fundamental philosophical questions, about more than simply 'what we can say'.

Musk is officially out of Government. By any objective account the entire episode was an abject failure. But spare a thought for the many careers ruined, services eviscerated and aid programs destroyed by DOGE.

The heart is often referred to as the "eye of the nous," the inner-most part of the mind that receives the highest forms of intelligible illumination in the Patristics (gnosis). It is not primarily a symbol for "emotion" or "sentiment," but often instead of the deepest possible sort of knowledge. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's a similar term in Buddhism, namely 'citta' which means both 'mind' and 'heart', depending on the context - the organ of knowledge or insight. In Mahāyāna Buddhism 'bodhicitta' is the aspiration for the enlightenment of all beings.

So here's one interesting question: could one say that the ability to make a negative self reference means having subjectivity? — ssu

There's an aphorism from the Upaniṣads that I'm fond of quoting, to the effect that 'the eye can see another, but not itself, the hand can grasp another, but not itself'. It relates to the problem of reflexivity, that what is ordinarily considered knowledge is always considered in the subject-object framework, but as to the nature of the knowing subject, that is always outside the frame, so to speak.

By the same strict argument Popper's idea of falsifiability eliminates itself, since it is not itself strictly falsifiable. — Janus

But it wasn't intended as an empirical theory. It was intended as principle which was to be used to identify what was or was not in principle an empirical theory.

Appreciated! Polanyi covered a lot of the same territory as Thomas Kuhn even though he wasn't as well known. I always really liked his work.

Plato’s so-called ‘Forms’ might be better understood as principles of intelligibility —not ghostly objects in another realm, but the structural grounds that make anything knowable or what it is. To know something is to grasp its principle, to see what makes it what it is.

And they’re neither objective - existing in the domain of objects - nor subjective - matters of personal predilection. That is why they manifest as universals

Your depiction of the forms is something of a caricature. All I can say is, do more readings.

Beats me why they’re getting so much media attention. It will be good when Parliament resumes and there’s some actual legislative action to talk about.

Objectivity has logical rules which simply limit just what can be accurately modeled.

Here is the problem: many of our most important and critical questions about reality cannot be modeled accurately with a totally objective model, because objectivity demands an external viewpoint of the issues at hand. Yet we ourselves are part of the universe and when this fact needs to be in the model, then we cannot make an accurate model. We cannot just assume an external viewpoint, somebody observing reality / the universe outside it. — ssu

Completely agree! I think the ‘meta-algorithm’ you refer to might be close to what Roger Penrose was getting at in his Emperor’s New Mind. But overall in agreement with your post.

we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind.

That’s a philosophically pregnant phrase if ever there was one. I’m fascinated by that idea.

Philosophy Now magazine (April 2025) presents the Question of the Month : Is Morality Objective or Subjective? And one writer said "Objective moral principles are necessary to reconcile worldviews". So, it occurred to me that his theory of universal Forms might have been an attempt to objectify-by-edict ("thus saith the Lord") mandatory ethical rules that would otherwise be endlessly debatable. — Gnomon

In a culture of revealed truth, the Commandments weren't simply 'objective' principles to be observed from a distance, nor were they subjective wishes. For the believer, they had an existential weight that transcended the subject-object divide. They weren't just rules about reality; they were constitutive of reality itself for those who lived under their sway. They were experienced as demands - on one's being, shaping identity and defining the very framework of a meaningful life.

To violate a Commandment wasn't just to break an external rule; it was to commit an act of self-alienation, a rupture with one's fundamental relationship to God and community. It was a failure of authenticity within that revealed framework, akin to what an existentialist might describe as choosing 'bad faith' – not by denying one's freedom, but by denying the profound, revealed truth that defined one's moral landscape.

While modern existentialism often grapples with a lack of pre-given meaning, it highlights the profound personal commitment required for moral choice. In a similar vein, for those living under divine revelation, the Commandments weren't just intellectual propositions; they were existential imperatives that demand commitment. It’s very hard for us to see that, as embedded as we are in the ‘Self-Other’ paradigm of modern individualism.

While Moses's revelation is of eternal commandments, Plato's noetic apprehension of the Forms (especially the Form of the Good) is more intellectual ascent. Both have a profound, transformative impact on the individual's moral and epistemological landscape, but the path to that is different. Moses's commands are given; Plato's Forms are apprehended through rigorous, self-cultivated effort.

For Plato, too, the "seeing" of the Form of the Good transcends the simple subject-object binary. The individual intellect (subject) doesn't merely observe the Form (object) from a detached distance. Instead, the intellect must become attuned to the Form, participate in its nature, and be transformed by it through participatory knowing. The boundary between knower and known is transcended in this insight. The Form of the Good isn't just "out there" to be observed; it's something that, once "seen," reorders the entire internal landscape of the individual.

This is all very much part of what used to be the Western cultural heritage of Christian Platonism.

So it seems we must accept them on Plato's authority, or by agreement of our own reasoning with his. Similarly, the ancient Hebrews were presented by Moses with a compendium of ethical rules, that were supposed to be accepted as divine Laws. And violations would be punishable by real-world experiences, up to and including death & genocide. — Gnomon

Many would say that Plato and Moses were completely different historical types. After all Plato’s dialogues are meticulously rational albeit with some mythological elements. But Plato’s academy, which operated for centuries and was re-constituted in various ways over nearly a millenium, was the precursor to the modern university. Students were expected to master a comprehensive curriculum of which philosophy was only one part - there were also athletics and other subjects. In any case, rational argument and rhetoric was a major part of it, even though in other respects Platonism seems religious by today’s standards.

Moses was part of the Biblical prophetic tradition relying entirely on the truth revealed by God in the Burning Bush. And there is an inherent tension between those two traditions, one religious, the other rationalistic. (Although early in the Christian era there was a school of thought that somehow Plato had learned from or was an inheritor of the Abrahamic tradition.)

So - I wouldn’t at all agree with this ‘similarly’.

I guess you’re right. Still I’m flummoxed as to why Hamas continues to hold those hostages. I can’t see how they’ll gain from it.

I’d suggest that there really isn’t a “classical form” of the law of identity in the sense you seem to mean. Aristotle doesn’t formulate such a law as a formal axiom—his concern is metaphysical, not symbolic. The modern statement “A is A” or “x = x” comes from a much later tradition, shaped by formal logic and set theory, not Aristotle’s ontology of substance and form. To read Aristotle as if he were simply asserting the self-contained identity of particulars is to read him through a modern lens that doesn’t fit.

According to Aristotle's Metaphysics, each individual thing has a form which is proper to itself and only itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Aristotle's position is that form is what makes an individual intelligible as a member of a kind. It’s not that each individual has a completely unique form proper to itself, but rather that many individuals share a common form—what we’d call a species or essence. What individuates one member of a species from another is matter, not form - matter is what individuates them. To suggest that each individual has a form unique to itself closer to nominalism.

That's as far as I'm going to go. You've been on about this for years, as some kind of self-designated expert, but I'm never persuaded by your polemics, even while I don't claim to be an expert myself.

What do you mean by a mountain's measurement of time, if not sensory information? — wonderer1

It is a 'thought experiment' intended to impart the idea that the concept of time is inextricably linked to the subjective system of the relevant beings. Of course mountains don't perceive time or anything else for that matter. (I can see why you refer to that 'flicker fusion' idea.)

Surely not. Your intuitions can't be that bad. — Banno

Yes, acknowledge that they're not true a priori. Still struggling to see how the laws of motion would dictate that the Earth couldn't have two satellites, when other planets do.

It's Aristotle who designated the identity of the individual as within the individual itself, commonly known as the law of identity, "a thing is the same as itself". This identity supports the reality of primary substance. I think we discussed this before, and you didn't accept that Aristotle recognized the identity of the particular. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, the law of identity (a=a) is a logical principle—a tautology that belongs to the structure of thought and language. It tells us something about the consistency of our terms, but not about the ontological self-sufficiency of particulars. To read it as a statement about the intrinsic metaphysical identity of beings is to conflate logic with ontology.

When Aristotle discusses primary substance in the Categories, he's not saying that the identity of the individual particular is simply in the particular in some absolute sense. Rather, he's marking it as that which is neither said of nor in a subject—that is, the individual concrete thing, like “this man” or “this horse.” (ref). But even so, its intelligibility depends on form, not on its specific particularity.

Moreover, Aristotle’s deeper metaphysics—in the Metaphysics and De Anima—makes clear that a substance’s what-it-is is grasped through form, not through brute particularity. So it’s not that the individual grounds its identity in itself, but that its being is composed of matter and form, and its intelligibility lies primarily in the formal principle, not in the sheer fact of its being “this one.”

The law of identity is a logical framework that presupposes ontological grounding—it doesn't establish it.

Sure, right on both counts. My bad for introducing it, as quantum weirdness is a gauranteed thread de-railer, except for its undeniable relevance to questions of determinism.

The law of identity, "a thing is the same as itself" indicates that there is an identity ("correct construal" if you like), which inheres within the the thing itself, therefore independent of interpretation. — Metaphysician Undercover

In classical philosophy—especially in Platonic and scholastic traditions—particulars are not intelligible in and of themselves, but only insofar as they participate in or receive a form or essence. Their identity is not something they generate, but something they manifest - in the theistic traditions, bestowed by the Creator.

This contrasts with modern metaphysical assumptions, which often treat particulars as having an independent reality. Eckhart: “creatures are mere nothings”. From within this perspective, the mind doesn’t impose identity, but recognizes it through a kind of intellectual illumination that reveals a deeper metaphysical order (by recognising the form or what-it-is-ness of the particular being.)

It’s tempting to draw parallels between Plato’s Forms and modern physics—especially when figures like Heisenberg make explicit reference to Platonic ideas. But we should be cautious about pressing these analogies too far. The concept of Forms in Plato is not about invisible particles or mathematical abstractions per se, but about the intellect’s ability to grasp stable, intelligible principles that underlie the flux of experience.

This ability—what Plato would associate with the logistikon, the rational part of the soul—is foundational to reason itself. The Forms are not hypotheses about what “really exists” in some otherworldly sense, but expressions of the truth that the rational mind is oriented toward what truly is, not just to appearances. We can only recognize something as a tree, as just, as a triangle, because our minds can apprehend something universal, not merely register a bundle of sensations.

This whole conception of reason—as the faculty that “sees” the intelligible—is central to classical philosophy but has largely fallen out of favor in modern thought, due in no small part to the cultural and intellectual impact of empiricism. When knowledge is reduced to sensation and association, the idea that the mind participates in intelligible being comes to seem obscure or mystical - even if we're actually doing it every moment! And then when attention is drawn to that, we can't see it for looking.

But perhaps the real insight in Plato—and what Heisenberg may have been reaching for—is that the intelligibility of nature is not something we impose on the world, but something we discover because of the rational capacity to see what is. That’s a metaphysical claim, not a physical one, but it's crucial to any deeper understanding of what Plato's forms are supposed to mean.

Oh - and welcome to the Forum. :clap:

I haven't been following this thread too closely, but like everyone, am appalled by the bloodshed and suffering of the Palestinians we see on news bulletins every day. This morning, there was a report that Hamas had agreed to release 10 more hostages in return for a 70-day ceasefire - quickly denied by Israel and the US negotiator Witkoff.

So the question I have is, why isn't Hamas releasing the remaining live hostages, and returning the remains of the others? What advantage do they hold by retaining them in captivity? If they were to release them, wouldn't that pressure Israel to relent?

Are things (e.g. cats, trees, clouds, etc.) "in the senses" or are they "projected onto the senses," or "downstream abstractions?" Empiricism has tended to deny the quiddity of things as "unobservable," but a critic might reply that nothing seems more observable than that when one walks through a forest they sees trees and squirrels and not patches of sense data. Indeed, experiencing "patches of sense data without quiddity," — Count Timothy von Icarus

All due respect, I think you’re complicating the picture a little. John Locke, who was the emblematic British empiricist, was of the view that the mind is a blank slate, tabula rasa, on which impressions are made by objects. The term ‘quiddity’ is from scholastic philosophy, is precisely the kind of thing that Locke wouldn’t appeal to. He is associated with representative realism, whereby images represent objects, and general ideas are abstracted from the perception of many similar objects. J S Mill took a similar view.

‘Such subtle enquiry’, indeed.

Thankyou :pray:

Trump says Putin ‘has gone absolutely CRAZY!’ “Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever,” Trump says.


So DJT seems suddenly to have become aware of the fact that Putin is groundlessly and indiscriminately firing missiles and drones and killing Ukrainian citizens - three years after the invasion started. I would say 'better late than never', but you don't know what he's going to say next.

But the point at issue is, whether time is real independently of any scale or perspective. So a 'mountains' measurement of time will be vastly different from the 'human' measurement of time.

Sensory information doesn't really come into it. Clearly we have different cognitive systems to other animals, but the question of the nature of time is not amenable to sensory perception.

Anyway - I can see we're going around in circles at this point, so I will leave it at that. Thanks for your comments.

Still don't see any justification for the claim that the Earth could have only one moon as 'a matter of natural law'.

You'd have to assume random things happen for no reason, contrary to the PSR. — Relativist

Just remind me again why Einstein said he doesn't believe that God plays dice?

I am nit sure what the thought experiment conveys. — Apustimelogist

You said, 'So if something is mind-dependent, it co-varies with the state of your subjective state of mind.' The 'mountain' thought experiment shows how one's sense of reality is dependent on the kind of mind. Hence, mind-dependent.

The image needs to be put on a media, but the media doesn't change the image, or it is not necesdarily the case that it does, it seems to me. — Apustimelogist

Right - one of the points that I often make, which is the symbolic or representational or semantic level is separable from the physical.