However, you cannot escape the modernism of technology. You can deconstruct narratives all you want, technology, science, and the minutia needed to keep this going is here to stay. — schopenhauer1

Yes, I think that's fine. I don't think the original movers and shakers of postmodernism were attempting to undermine the practise of science, which is what conservative scientists accused it of and which pomo's inheritors and exploiters actually did. Lyotard's criticism of scientific knowledge was merely that it must coexist with others. For instance, science cannot account for itself scientifically: it must resort to narrative. So what he's saying here is that, even for science itself, scientific knowledge is insufficient: one must be pluralistic.

That pluralism seems a difficult burden. There was I think it was an IPCC report a few years back containing various perspectives on climate change. One was journalistic, another was social science. Climate change study is fundamentally scientific and, naturally, the social scientists didn't have a great deal of success wrangling ice flow stats into their narrative, leading the usual arrays of right-wing nutjobs to sing their usual songs of hoaxes, inconsistencies, and controversies. Clearly that is a case of non-scientific knowledge being given too much weight in postmodern approaches to what amounts to scientific reporting for governments.

The wiki site says it was emitted 13.4 billion years ago, but it could not have got far enough away in only 400M years for light to take that long. Of course, wiki isn't using inertial coordinates when making that statement, so kindly describe the situation in those terms. Where is the emission event? — noAxioms

Right. So, first, there was a supposed stupendous inflation period in the early universe that cannot be described by any inertial frame. Second, it is unexpected that the galaxy would have formed 400M years after the big bang, i.e. it is a cosmological and astronomical mystery but a) that doesn't stop it being 13.4 billion light years away from us when it did form and b) such a mystery can be a sign of an incomplete or faulty model. Cosmology is still in its infancy and while recent successes like gravity wave detection and the black hole image speak well of the underlying theory (general relativity), it is likely that the cosmological model has some kinks to work out yet.

One possibility is that there exist some regions where inflation carried on a lot longer than others. A longer period of inflation between us and GN-z11, for instance, might explain why it could have formed less than 13.4B LY away from us but still appear 13.4B years old. Or maybe it turns out 400M years is long enough to start making galaxies. I'm sure the answer will be profound.

I've caused confusion. The rock and the dropped clock are the same thing. The space station can watch it fall in, but if it reads time T when it crosses the event horizon, then the space station will never see the clock read anything after T. It will appear from the space station to slow and approach but never reach T. Event B is that clock when it reads T+1. — noAxioms

I understand, I think. There are two related effects going on here, and I was referring to the first with my magic blackholescope: from the observer's point of view, time slows down for the clock the faster it moves due to the BH's gravitational pull; light emitted from the clock is also redshifted by gravity.

So it is true to say that, if the clock were a regular emitter for instance, light from the clock would reach the observer ever more slowly. And it is also true to say that no more light will reach the observer once the clock passes the event horizon. But the second is not a continuation of the first because the clock will still have a subluminal velocity even at the event horizon, therefore its time will not have slowed to a standstill. Rather, the light from the clock is redshifted to zero frequency at the event horizon. The light will appear redder, go through infrared, then microwave, then radiowave frequency bands then, at the horizon, will disappear.

It's weird that I voted relationism pretty much on instinct. GR is obviously a theory that compels a substantive picture of spacetime... the stuff bends, for goodness' sake! And yet, deep down, I've often wondered if the wavefunction of the entire universe gives a crap that we have a positional basis set to describe it with.

(1) The communists really did largely industrialise the country eventually.
(2) Resource distribution was very coupled to status in the political hierarchy and extremely coupled to where one lived. It tended to keep the poorest the poorest, but...
(3) It created a network of industrial specialists that flowed freely (with some symbolic protestation from the state) within the state.
(4) Because the Russian economy was still import and export dependent for basic functioning, the state still had to play global capitalist macro policy. It played the resource extraction/subjugation game with other countries in the bloc.
(5) When the Soviet bloc fell, the Russian economy was already prefigured for capital flow, and this created the authoritarian state + oligarchy we all know and love today. — fdrake

Nice potted history! It made me smile, and it sounds right to me. With the caveat that Russia was never not an authoritarian state. Different political structure, same authoritarianism.

Bolshevism was ultimately another path from peasantry to capitalism.

I don't want to throw all the blame for the destitution on the communists, the trade sanctions had a huge impact. It's still worth considering a failure of communism for economic reasons as the eventual development was to capitalist oligarchy. It's even more worth considering a failure of communism for humanitarian ones (genocide, police state). — fdrake

Well I suppose the mirror image of what I said is also true: it isn't at all obvious that ceasing to be a communist country has helped. But there probably is little excuse for that. They have not helped themselves.

At the risk of derailing the thread, I think it does now. To quote the Big Lebowski; That's Just Like Your Opinion Man and That's The Stress Talking. If we're going to recognize the failure of unifying narratives as a societal feature; we already live in a relativistic chaos of filter bubbles - political representation in its default form is opinion management, how we socialise and are exposed to information is managed by external interests. Unifying narratives don't hold much weight, positive visions of the future are dead. Everything that remains is critique and political negation of manifest injustice; and you don't need a systematic world vision for that, you just need to grasp how a localised injustice is (re)produced. — fdrake

Now I'm depressed. It depends where you are, I guess. I think some ideologies are now fair game, yes. I think others are trickier. It would be difficult getting your well-thought-out alternatives to democracy heard anywhere, Islamic theocracy heard in many places, capitalism heard in the US. Postmodernism (yay, back on topic!) has been roundly rejected, and fifty percent of the reason seems to me that it criticised everything: rationalism, science, Marxism, architecture, literature. Half of its counter-criticisms are "It undermines us!" We have some sacred cows left in the field. But fuck it, dude. Let's go bowling!

The Big Lebowski... contender for greatest postmodern film ever? It was so postmodern, Pynchon pretty much reused it for Inherent Vice. (Probably not. I can imagine him working on that novel for six years, going to the cinema to see the latest Coens movie, and becoming extremely paranoid :rofl: )

I don't really have the expertise to properly address this (hopefully someone like Kenosha Kid can chime in here and give his input). — Mr Bee

I got lost at:

The rock is dropped from a hovering location outside, which shines light down on the dropped clock. — noAxioms

It's not clear what frame of reference we're in here. From the perspective of an observer outside the event horizon (with some magic blackholescope), the clock will accelerate toward the singularity and run slower and slower. Any photons emitted from the rock (which is getting further and further away from the clock) will still travel at the speed of light and catch up with the clock, because the clock cannot move at the speed of light. Effectively, there will be a time at the singularity in which no more photons can hit the clock because the clock has no future. From this perspective, the clock is part of the singularity at this point.

From the rest frame of the clock, it is in perpetual free fall. Eventually the rock will simply recede so far into the distance it cannot be detected. The limit of this is an event horizon for the rock after which no more new light can reach the clock. However! If we call Event A the first photon emitted that will reach the clock and Event B the last photon emitted by the rock that can reach the clock, there is still light emitted between A and B that the clock has not yet "seen". So the light ought to get dimmer and ever redshifted, but should never stop. The last photon emitted by the rock that the clock will ever see must be when the clock has no future, which is, in the clock's rest frame, at t=infinity.

If you were a Marxist (or left historicist philosopher) in the 60's and 70's you were living in the wake of a failed international project of overthrowing capitalism. A project that believed intimately in the feedback of theory and practice. They liked that intersection very much, "the most advanced Marxist science" (a trope in MLM) was a guarantor that "the revolutionary class" was adapted to the local conditions of the dialectic of capitalism.

It all failed. Catastrophically or with outstanding banality depending on where you live. Bang or whimper. — fdrake

I'm not so sure. The Russian Empire was already at the start of recession when the Revolution began; indeed, poverty was part of the momentum. It got a lot worse after, then swiftly recovered. Looking back, the Soviet economy continued more or less as the Russian Empire's would have done without that economic crises; i.e. just like most other economic crises, it didn't have a long-term effect. The fall of the Soviet Union did have a negative impact, lengthened with some well-deserved sanctions. On the whole, Russia has fared less well as a capitalist democracy than it did as a theocracy or communist hellhole. I suspect the poor stayed poor throughout.

To contextualise it philosophically, there's a quote from Sartre (in his Maoist phase) directed at Foucault; "Foucault is the last barricade the bourgeoise can erect against Marx". That poststructuralist stuff was not popular with the Marxist left. — fdrake

Yes, perhaps not surprising. Marx's scientific economic theory was a key component of modernism, not just in politics, economics and philosophy but in art, design, manufacturing and technology. While the West were winning the war against Communism, modern art museums would only accept mass-produced, cheap-as-chips, disposable machine-made ceramics, for instance, still humping the Marxist dream. Sartre discovered that there's no "should" in human existence, then somehow discovered this means we "should" all be communists.

Foucault was already a big deal when he abandoned Marxism, describing it as a 19th obsolescence in The Order of Things, and rejecting humanism as a mistaken belief that man is sovereign over himself in the light of how much power epistemes have over man's beliefs. [Archaic gender-biased pronouns not my own.] For Sartre, who had done the most unexistential thing in subscribing wholesale to an external ideology, this was blasphemy.

Ideology does not suffer relativism, pluralism, or criticism at all.

You've drawn flat Minkowski spacetime (with arbitrary inertial frame) in which light from any spatial location will reach any other location. That makes it an inappropriate model of the large scale universe where light that is currently say 17 GLY away will never get here, not in 17 billion years or ever.
Earth has an event horizon, and Minkowski spacetime does not. — noAxioms

It's perfectly appropriate for that: that's just light further outside the light cone. It being further away just means its further away. Minkowski spacetime is not appropriate for gravity, though.

You can still foliate reasonable gravitration in 'bent' Minkowski spacetime, but not black holes. — noAxioms

Not sure what you mean. Never heard of 'bent' Minkowski spacetime or anything in which that would make sense. Minkowski spacetime is, as you said, flat.

So for instance, a device measuring absolute time here on Earth would run apparently faster than one on the surface of Saturn due to the lower gravitational potential here on Earth. The same device on a ship with relativistic absolute speed would similarly appear to run faster (than the clock next to it) than it would if the ship had low peculiar velocity. — noAxioms

Is this what you mean? Well, this is exactly how you do GR in practise: you treat, at any given event, the spacetime as that of SR. That was Einstein's devised approximation.

1. Does black hole time travel increase or decrease Time ( I can't remember)? — 3017amen

Black holes slow down time, right to a standstill at the singularity.

2. Do black holes contribute to Multiverse theories at all? — 3017amen

Yes, Smolin's multiverse theory, also once forwarded by Hawking, is that black holes are baby universe that inherit laws of physics from the parent universe. This is cosmological Darwinism.

The brain has a general reward system with both innate and conditional capacities. For most compulsions, there is some feelgood chemical released by the body, e.g. dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin.

Innate reward systems tend to involve metabolism or reproduction. Heroin and nicotine, for instance, or fat and sugar. Availability would traditionally be a limiting factor so need for a shut-off hasn't generally affected our evolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system?wprov=sfla1

Some bad habits are conditioned, such as by validation. I don't know why people bite their nails, although I can see the evolutionary benefit of it once we stopped walking on our forelimbs.

If evolution is limited to what is possible on earth (earthlike conditions) then wouldnt it progress in a similar fashion on any planet if said earth-like conditions are essential to life? — Benj96

I expect that the starting conditions might be similar, even the importance of water habitats for complex life. And obviously the rules of natural selection would be similar. That aside, no, I don't see that. I think there are certain features, like you said, that would likely always be perfected if crude versions evolved: eyes, limbs for mobility, opposable thumbs for dexterity, etc. But I don't see why the details (number of eyes, number of limbs) would be constrained.

The evolutionary history of life on our planet owes more than anything to its habitats, especially catastrophic changes in habitat. Differences in natural history would be expected in different environments, just as species diverge in isolated habitats (Galapagos, Australia) here.

If such objects existed in our inertial frame, light from them would reach us in finite time, so these objects don't exist in that frame, and thus the frame doesn't foliate all of spacetime. — noAxioms

As you can see, any event can be located in an inertial frame, but only those events within our past light cone can be detected by us now. Events outside that cone are still in the reference frame but cannot influence us.

Gravitation can't be accurately described by inertial frames but require curvilinear coordinate systems.

There's been no actual progress on how non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness since Descartes. — RogueAI

This is obviously incorrect. There are entire fields of study dedicated to this that are pretty mature now.

He sure as hell bemoaned what came after. — StreetlightX

Yeah he hated the post-truth fallacy. He did not agree with the view that, since science is cultural, it's truths are no better than ideological ones or lies (same thing). But they all did. Derrida. Rorty. Even Latour in the end.

I was thinking about this earlier. I can't think of a perceived problem with postmodernism that doesn't reduce to an anti-postmodern methodology of the form:

1. Subject privileges X and not !X.
2. Therefore !X.

This is basically the post-truth movement in a nutshell, a systematic lapse in any kind of logic that itself privileges one binary value over another. Postmodernism is (1) by itself. Post-truth adds (2).

Yes - Lyotard was subtle enough to have critiqued both metanarratives and their dissolution, without acceding to any false choice between them. — StreetlightX

No, I mean he was critical of them in the sense that he thought they were bullshit. He did not bemoan their loss.

Lyotard was a theorist of postmodernity. He was incredibly critical of it, and the fact that he is often called a 'postmodernist' philosopher - as if he advocated or celebrated it - is not only wrong, it is practically the opposite of what he would have wanted. He bemoaned the end of the meta-narrative, which was coincident, for him, with the crisis of capitalism. — StreetlightX

This is not true. Lyotard was critical of universals and metanarratives in his work.

Begs to differ:

Because we have octopeds and they arent our direct descendants. — Benj96

That is not a reason why octoped descendants can't have freed-up arms. That's just saying that evolutionary pathway wasn't explored here on Earth. Evolution history is limited by what is possible, not vice versa.

Motion of a 4D object means moving wrt the 4D universe. — Luke

Then this is not kinematic motion e.g. dx/dt which merely requires a gradient of position wrt time.

I'm done. You have a fundamental contradiction in your argument and your preference is clearly to run around in circles forever lest you approach it. Your continued "Ah, but YOU said" approach, coupled with imagined contradictions between compatible statements, is tiresome, unproductive, and in bad faith. 17 pages of it are more than sufficient to satisfy me that you have absolutely no interest in the subject of your OP. Farewell!

What on Earth are you talking about? — ssu

I'm talking about the fact that you cannot have capitalism without some kind of wage labour, and you cannot have wage labour without economic inequality. You could move to a cooperative basis, where all workers have equal share in the company, as is being done successfully atm, but -- gulp! -- evil socialism!!!

How has the universal increase in prosperity from the early 19th Century to early 21st Century killed capitalism stone dead? — ssu

Again, that's not what I said. Universal prosperity would kill capitalism stone dead, i.e. capitalism is incompatible with global economic equality. We do not have economic equality, so capitalism prospers. This is one of the foundational principles of capitalism: you must have some kind of wage labour.

So let's break this down.
1. Thanks to capitalism, there has been a trend toward universal prosperity in the last 100 years.
2. There has been a worldwide population boom over the last 100 years.

And your conclusion from this is that capitalism-driven universal prosperity reverses population growth. Ab initio, I guess :rofl:

You're right, nations are more prosperous overall. Inequality-driven globalisation plays a big part, as does the fossil fuel industry, neither of which are sustainable. Capitalism is ever finding new ways of separating people with their money. The debt economy is booming. 61% workers worldwide are in the gig economy, 51% in the agricultural industry that you believe will drive population recession. House ownership in my country has been almost completely replaced by the rent economy in the space of one generation.

When people find a way to both generate and profit from poverty, what's good for the GDP does not equate to economic equality. Like climate change, the expectation ought to be that this will continue toward catastrophe. That is another feature of capitalism: it reflects the shory-term wants of a safe minority, viz. the global economic crisis paid for, as usual, by the poorer masses to the benefit of a few wealthy organisations and the global GDP.

So you think the World would be better when all manufacturing WOULD STAY in the rich Western countries? — ssu

You've made this point a few times now and I addressed it already. I have never said this. What I stated was that it depends on economic inequality between nations which is contrary to your universal prosperity pipe dream. It's the global equivalent of the dependence on wage labour: someone in capitalism must be taking the lion's share of the profits. Universal prosperity would kill capitalism stone dead.

It's quite a departure from what you said just a day or two ago — Luke

Can you pin down where you think the inconsistency is? These are not contradictory statements. The first says that it doesn't matter for motion whether you think of a 4D object as one thing or a continuum of different things. The second says that the concept of motion is the same in presentism and eternalism, they are just represented differently, which they are: time is not a dimension in presentism, so motion is not a gradient.

But I guess thinking of them as "a plenum of 3D spheres" must just be my crazy idea. — Luke

I'm not arguing against it, it's just not the killer blow for motion you assume it to be.

And I guess you're also back to talking about the motion of a 4D object without any qualms that this requires a 5th dimension. — Luke

I never left.

if it wants to be 《insert weird shit 》, that's what its going to be and we can either get hip with it or gtfo. — Enai De A Lukal

^ Modern physics in a nutshell.

Now think of The Simpsons — schopenhauer1

The Simpsons is a great example. I've never really given Seinfeld or the US The Office much of a shot. The UK Office is very embedded in realism, but yes The Simpsons is pure pomo: irreverent, disjointed, uninhibited by reality.

My pomo touchstones are two of my favourite authors: Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon. Beckett took as his starting point the poverty of language. He often put high and low culture on equal footing. And his characters were inescapably artificial, sometimes suspecting (as in Not I and The Unnamable) that they are fictional characters. Beckett associated the compulsion of characters to speak their dialogue with human compulsion, and particularly the artist's compulsion, to express.

Pynchon was very influenced by his WWII experience, the tendency of humanity toward chaos, loss of faith in nation and the ensuing paranoia, and the ability of circumstances to disintegrate human personality. Gravity's Rainbow, for instance, is about the decentering of personality when the fetishism of something like the atomic bomb turns it into a nominal moral good.

I think Pynchon more than anyone embodies the postmodern viewpoint: decentered perspectives, distrust of truth, distrust in what's real, equality of culture (all of his novels are musicals, for instance), dubiousness of the ordering capability of narrative. All of his stories are illustrations of what happens when your assumptions are shaken.

Why is physicality a requirement of an experiment. Why don't mental phenomena constitute that which can be studied by science? — Adam's Off Ox

In modern science, mental phenomena are not considered non-physical.

Moral law isn't supposed to be explanatory. It's not descriptive, but prescriptive. — Pfhorrest

Irrespective of what it's for, if it adds no understanding to moral behaviour, i.e. if morality is equally explicable without it, objective morality is at best redundant.

in 4D geometry there exist two non-identical 3D objects at t and t' (and at all times in between) — Luke

In Eternalism, a 3D sphere becomes a D hypersphere which is a geometric object. That geometric shape has a well-defined dx/dt. That dx/dt is called motion. It doesn't go away because you like to think of the hypersphere as being compromised of a plenum of 3D spheres. It's still there in the 4D geometry.

It's not. But this already depends on massive economic disparity between the trader and the place if production. This is not the universal prosperity dream you're selling.
— Kenosha Kid
Does it? — ssu

Yeah kinda. Companies don't outsource production because they want to spread the wealth. They do it because poorer countries have low production costs, especially human labour.

Economic history tells us a story what happened, but usually we don't want to hear it as we are obsessed about some righteous or ideological agenda. — ssu

I agree, some people are so smitten with an ideology that they'll believe it is a cure-all despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary :p

Starting from the most clear examples of when a countries have been divided into two with one part going with capitalism and the other with socialism. A better example could not be given. — ssu

So really you're political ideology is: not socialism! Okay we can agree we're not likely to solve the problem with socialism. Although for your several reminders about increased Chinese prosperity, it is worth remembering that it wasn't that which lowered their population growth.

You underestimate the competition. You think they would stand idle when they simply could copy your technology? You could bitch and moan about intellectual theft, of course. But no way you can buy a monopoly from all the power elites of the world. — ssu

Is that how HIV medication came to cost hundreds of dollars a pop in the US? Healthy, if slightly criminal competition? This is wishful thinking, methinks.

So why wouldn't you take the bold move to produce the batteries right there where the raw materials are extracted in the DRC? — ssu

You skipped over Madagascar! I'm a keen scuba diver, and I heard monkeys work for peanuts and lions can be trained.

So why would it be bad if one of the most poor countries in the World suddenly get an advanced and extremely competitive tech industry that uses domestic resources giving a headache to Chinese battery manufacturers? — ssu

It's not. But this already depends on massive economic disparity between the trader and the place if production. This is not the universal prosperity dream you're selling.

Completely true, but what is empiricism if not appeal to the things we have in common between our sensory experiences, and a commitment to sorting out why we sometimes have different ones? — Pfhorrest

Yes, so from belief to knowledge. The theorising, the methodology, the prediction, the measurement, the recording, the conclusion, and the publishing--the elements of scientific knowledge--are cultural, for sure. This is what pomo insisted.

But the holistic empirical evidence for a regular (even if just statistically so), predictable universe is not contained in one of these but in the totality of human experience of physical phenomena. That is the reason why it is simpler to assume an objective physical reality: it is the simplest possible explanation for the appearance of an objective physical reality.

Morality includes all of the cultural symptoms but it does not seem to obey objective moral laws. Moral trends are observable as in science, but their causes are evident. The similarity between progressively moral countries are most simply understood via the interactions of individuals and groups within them and between societies themselves. One can posit objective moral law, but it has little explanatory power compared to the assumption of an objective physical reality which obeys physical law.

Conversely, it would be difficult and certainly not simple to explain the appearance of objective physical reality purely in terms of scientific culture and innate capacity to science.

Are you referring to the physical objects, the mathematics that describes them, the observations that are purportedly shared between observers, or the predictions made by scientific models. — Adam's Off Ox

The objective reality I was referring to is that which the theoretical model seeks to represent, rather than the objective reality of particular measurements as published in journals, which is more a historical matter. We found X. They found Y.

If two scientists disagree on a conclusion drawn from a set of observations, is that conclusion still objective? — Adam's Off Ox

There's usually two ways of doing it. You either start from an unexplained observation and build theoretical models to explain it, or you start from a prediction of a model and perform measurement to verify or falsify the prediction. The conclusions drawn from the former are about how nature must be to produce the observed phenomenon, and from the latter are about how well the model describes nature. It would be premature to make any conclusions about objective reality in the first instance. In the second, we might conclude nature either is or is not much like the model. All of it is open to challenge. There are often competing models for the same phenomena, such as in cosmology, in which case, again, conclusions about objective reality are premature. The hope is to find a test that eliminates one or more competing theories.

If every data point has some error with respect to the model that is based on that data, is the error objective? — Adam's Off Ox

Error can cover uncertainty or instrument error. Neither say much about objective reality of, say, gravity waves. They do say something about the precision and/or accuracy of the experiment.

Besides that, would you be willing to describe what make up the constituents of reality? — Adam's Off Ox

No, the most I think we can say is that, whatever objective reality may be, if it may be, and it seems it may, it behaves a bit like theoretical models in the circumstances those models have been proven successful.

Is reality made up of physical objects? What about the mathematical formulas that describe those objects? — Adam's Off Ox

Every experiment is physical. It involves physical humans handling physical apparatus. Whatever phenomenon is being studied, it must have an effect on the physical apparatus and so is physical. Whatever objective reality causes those phenomena, if there is one, must be physical to cause physical phenomena.

Mathematical models of that reality are cultural artefacts. But they are real cultural artefacts. :)

Beliefs about reality obviously differ drastically between cultures, especially historically before the rise of science (look at all the different religions’ accounts of the nature and history of the world). — Pfhorrest

That's true, you can reject the theory of evolution in a similar way that you can reject a human right. The distinction is that, for those who investigate this putative objective reality, it does seem to exist or, as NdGT put it, "The great thing about facts is that they're true whether you believe them or not". It would be a lot harder for a biologist to disbelieve evolution than it would for a Louisiana pastor.

It is in empiricism that the explanatory power of objective reality finds its place, not in belief systems. You and I can in principle evolve a freshwater fish from a seawater fish or vice versa in laboratory conditions... we don't have to settle for belief, although it is also precisely this empirical criterion that makes science worth trusting. Empirically, physical law dictates phenomena, not vice versa.

The result of uniform prosperity is not to make the world as prosperous as the developed West, but to reduce the prosperity of the West down to some Goldilocks zone with everyone else, which in itself is fine.
— Kenosha Kid
Hence basically you are against the idea of more prosperity. You basically believe that poor countries today could not have it as good as we have it now. — ssu

Apparently not.

Because what on Earth would be that "Goldilocks zone" you would deem appropriate for us? The US of the 1980's? Western Europe of the 1990's? Even if we take the present as the goldilocks, is really the goldilocks zone a world where we still die from heart attacks and have corona viruses? — ssu

Would any of those meet the definition of the Goldilocks zone I gave of "uniform prosperity"?

Perhaps it's confusing to be both critical of the problems that capitalism has and do exist, yet acknowledge that many things have improved under our less than perfect capitalist system. — ssu

It's not confusing at all. Your ideal vision was to make the world prosperous. If you understand that capitalism is "less than perfect", how consistent can it be with this perfect world you believe possible?

Hence if you Kenosha Kid lets say invent a battery for smart phones that uses 50% less raw materials giving 80% more power with half of the production cost, obviously you could sell it at half price compared to other battery makers and people likely would opt for the cheaper far better battery. — ssu

This is a dream, not a plan. The reality is that I put my competitors out of business by undercutting them, making them poorer and me richer. My next move would be to do a Shkreli and hike up the price of my battery. Because I am a capitalist. That is my job: to take money from the many and put it into my hands.

And presumably I'm not hand-making these personally, right? To undercut my competitors I'm probably going to rely on the economic disparity between my prosperous country and somewhere much less prosperous in East Asia somewhere. And if not, I'm certainly going to have to rely on wage labour.

Economic inequality is built into every capitalist venture from the start, and its ends are to maximise personal profits. It is not that people don't understand capitalism, it's that they know it far too well and don't believe in capitalist and right-wing fairy tales anymore.

I’m not sure what you mean here by top-down and bottom-uo. I would describe science as a bottom-up process the way I mean those words: it’s a decentralized, fallibilist operation, rather than some authority handing down truths from on high. You seem to think that an objective morality would have to be that kind if from-on-high approach, but my point is that science doesn’t do that and yet is still objective about reality, so we can do likewise toward morality too. — Pfhorrest

Science interrogates what appears to be an objective reality out there through indirect observation and modelling. While the means (knowledge, funding, technological capability, reigning paradigm, political amenability) are human all too human, it interrogates phenomena that don't seem to depend on those means other than their availability to us by those means. It seems to be mind- and culture-independent phenomena that minds and cultures are interrogating. In that sense, it is top-down: objective reality is assumed to exist (although the perspectives on it are relative) and we are probing its reactions.

Morality does not seem this way. Moral capacity appears to be genetic, passed from individuals to individual, and application of that capacity appears to have some bits that are universal, some that are local. For instance, pretty much everyone wants to be good to their mother, but few are bothered about being to strangers, especially if those strangers are vulnerable. These distinctions seem to arise from culture: conformity within social groups. These cultures do seem to converge as well, but not spontaneously, rather through mixing with other cultures. For instance, abolition of the death penalty in Chad this year does not represent an independent trend toward moral rightness but instead is "aimed at harmonising our laws in line with all the countries of the G5 Sahel Group" (Djimet Arabi).

The spread of moral ideas is bottom-up: it grows out of interactions of individuals within a social group and interactions between social groups. Whereas an objective reality is the best and simplest explanation for the perception of a regular, predictable universe, objective morality is not. At best, it makes no difference whether it exists or not, because bottom-up self-organising morality has all of the explanatory power and seems like what actually occurs.

Okay, so on bipedalism, the benefit for us was that it freed up our hands in an environment conducive to upright mobility, particularly useful for carrying babies, hunting and gathering. This is because we evolved from quadrupeds: we couldn't just evolve a new pair of arms; evolution had to work with what our ancestors had.

Obviously freeing up our hands was important for developing more diverse technology, and we might assume that alien visitors also had this requirement in their evolutionary history.

But I can't think of a reason why they must have evolved from quadrupeds and not, say, an octoped. Quadrupedalism goes back through our evolutionary heritage to common ancestors of amphibians and reptiles: fish with bony fins, essentially. There's no obvious reason why four is better than six or eight, or why even here on Earth, by fluke, the first bony-finned fish mightn't have had more limbs.

What exactly is the relevance just out of curiosity? — Benj96

Just that the characteristics you cited weren't unique to humans but you were asking if aliens might necessarily have those characteristics and be like us. If the characteristics you had in mind were things like a head, eyes, skin, facial and bodily hair, why would you expect the result to be necessarily human-like and not gorilla-like or chimp-like or even sheep-like? What differentiating characteristics are you thinking of?

Is there anything particular you have in mind that differentiates humans from other apes?

That was excellent!

What? You have said both that a 4D object "sometimes moves" wrt "its own temporal axis", and that a 4D object "moving wrt the 4D universe would be moving wrt a 5th dimension". As I pointed out earlier, you've contradicted yourself. — Luke

No, motion is the gradient from a hyper-cylindrical (for a sphere) 4D geometry. You are conflating this gradient with movement with respect to the 4D block.

If you are understanding me as you claim to, then you have read me as saying that a mountain literally lifts up from the horizon, rather than grading up wrt it. And yet somehow this goes unmentioned by you.

As I've suggested many times now, your approach fails to address the principle problem it faces even obliquely: that motion in 4D is an inevitable feature of geometry, that you cannot have shape in 4D without kinematic motion.

Your approach instead is very clearly about getting someone to explain the same thing over and over and over again in an as many different ways as they can muster in good faith, then claiming those difference approaches to be contradictions according to some bizarre logic.

If you face the actual problem head on, there is a discussion to be had. But this is just 17 pages of utterly pointless repetition.

So... how can a 4D object have geometry and not kinematic motion? How can dx/dt be zero or undefined?

Exactly, which is why I'm questioning your statement that a 4D object "sometimes moves". — Luke

Then you are defining motion in 4D to be 5D, which is not standard kinematic motion. (We're going round in circles here.)

How can that be? — Luke

I don't think this demands explanation. You are perfectly familiar with 3D objects changing position with time. That is everyday experience.

If you're asking how it can be the same thing as geometry in 4D, do the maths: v=dx/dt in both representations. In 3D, 'dt' does not refer to a dimension. In 4D, it does, making motion a geometric feature.

So I do have a lot of misgivings whenever I hear physicists talking about infinity. And when I take the trouble to dig deeper into the details, I generally find that they're not using the word the same way mathematicians do.

But these are just impressions, and as I say I don't know much about speculative cosmology. — fishfry

Even well-accepted cosmological theory is future eternal. That's not speculative, it's consistent with empirical evidence.

In a nutshell, then, your solution to the overpopulation problem is to increase agricultural supply to meet the demands of an overpopulated world in the hope that population goes into recession afterwards.

Consumer capitalism does depend on having winners and losers. Profit always has to be at someone's detriment. The neat solution to this for increasing prosperity overall has been globalisation: exploiting the existing wealth disparities across nations to their mutual benefit. This possibility disappears when that disparity disappears.

The result of uniform prosperity is not to make the world as prosperous as the developed West, but to reduce the prosperity of the West down to some Goldilocks zone with everyone else, which in itself is fine. By your own logic, while this might decrease population expansion in developing nations, it would increase it in developed ones.

The optimum sustainable population under feasible conditions is likely not a number equal to or greater than the current world population, even taking into account scientific optimisation of resources. The world population is three times what would be currently sustainable if we were all middle-income Europeans. Science can reduce that ratio but it's not a magic wand. Focussing on meeting the demands of the current population and bringing everyone to prosperity does not strike me as an answer.

Maybe global coordination really is an impossible situation to bring about — Janus

Global coordination has to be executed by leaders. Leaders who seek environmental reforms tend to get democratically replaced by leaders to wish to reverse them. Ultimately the problem is in convincing a stable majority that the good of their great grandchildren is their concern. Unfortunately you can't convince a stable majority of Americans that access to life-saving medical care for their immediate family is a good thing. How on Earth do you convince them to care more about relatives they'll likely never meet?