The gent scholar types want to think that understanding principles of science, and applications in technology provide some inherent meaning. — schopenhauer1
Does the fact that there is a can be useful information derived through mathematical-scientific methodologies make people feel there is meaning inherent in this? — schopenhauer1
For some the 'inherent meaning' just is the 'useful information.' The utility is objective compared to that of art or music. For the most part my opinion isn't valuable to others who already have their own opinion. On the other hand, they might need a tech person to fix their internet so they can share their opinion or design a memory card so they can record their child's first steps on their smartphone. — old
Is part of the charm of science is distance from the endlessly personal? I think so. Exact, testable knowledge can be created and shared. Relatively unambiguous progress is possible. In the world of Twitter and Facebook, it's nice that there's a realm where wishful thinking comes up against a resistance that filters out much of the delusion, confusion, and ambiguity. — old
The notion that science is useful, makes it better in some value or axiological sense. I welcome any ideas relating to that theme. The very use of its products speaks for itself, despite what comes out of the mind. But is there something missing here from its supremacy by pragmatic default? — schopenhauer1
What about science makes itself immediately something to be embracing as a topic of focus and reverence? Its resistance to completely being collapsed into subjectivity in its outcomes and uses. However, does this create a default meaning? Does this make it better in some way? Does it make those who are immersed in it better as a result? Is there something superior about it, more meaningful, etc.? — schopenhauer1
The notion that science is useful, makes it better in some value or axiological sense. I welcome any ideas relating to that theme. The very use of its products speaks for itself, despite what comes out of the mind. But is there something missing here from its supremacy by pragmatic default? — schopenhauer1
I like Schopenhauer, by the way, especially the essays and aphorisms. Recently I read Schopenhauer and the The Wild Years of Philosophy, which is pretty great. I enjoy various German philosophers who basically tried to make a rational, quasi-atheistic 'religion.' At the same time, none of them quite convince or convert me. So I don't have a system. — old
I think you nailed it with its resistance to completely being collapsed into subjectivity in its outcomes and uses. While this doesn't give it an 'absolute' meaning, it's good enough often enough within the life of 'ultimately meaningless' mortals. At least in my opinion. I think we like building better and better mousetraps. Beavers probably like to build dams. Even this conversation seems to me like the attempt to build a better mousetrap. Ideas are a kind of technology. Exact, falsifiable, applicable ideas are the only ones of value, but they are perhaps the most reliable and esteemed. — old
Anyways, look at this example of scientific/technological complexity about how a computer processor is madel — schopenhauer1
Does this ability to even comprehend the world in such a rigorously refined and exacting way, analyzing very difficult information in such a way, make life inherently more meaningful? — schopenhauer1
Information and probability are dual notions; wherever you have a probability distribution you have an entropy. The connection between the two is particularly intimate for discrete random variables - like when there is a given probability of being in one of countably many eigenstates of an operator. Quantum entropy measures the degree of mixing in a state; how close it is to behaving in a singular eigenstate (unless I'm misinterpreting, I am both rusty and mostly uneducated here). Information measures are derivable from probability distributions, but the process of mapping a distribution to an entropy value is not invertible - so the two notions can't be taken as inter-definable. As in, if you have an entropy, you have a single number, which could be generated from lots of different quantum states and probability distributions.
I'm sure there are problems, but I think there are good reasons to believe that information is just as much a part of nature as wave functions. — fdrake
That isn’t a complex equation, some idea contributing to inventing, not about the minute mathematically derived model regarding some complexity of the natural world or synthetically engineered device or process.While much is made of Nietzsche’s Dionysian desires, it is the Apollonian maxim: know thyself, that is central to Nietzsche. But to know yourself you must become who you are. It is not about discovery but creation. Yet one does not create ex nihilo. — Fooloso4
Doesn’t that count for something? Doesn’t the fact that the process to create a microchip being so complex yet some people can construct and engineer one mean something? All the people who can comprehend, analyze, and make new technologies, aren’t they the ones keeping society going? Aren’t the ones who make the very things we use, who can translate scientific principles into complex equations...aren’t they somehow doing the real shit? The shit that matters? The hard shit? Isn’t it the people who wheel and deal in equations and scientific complexities the real ones? Isn’t it the capitalist entrepreneur who bring the resources together..aren’t they the real ones, providing meaning with their USE and their grasp of mathematical and the complexities of scientific theory and application? — schopenhauer1
Doesn’t that count for something? Doesn’t the fact that the process to create a microchip being so complex yet some people can construct and engineer one mean something? — schopenhauer1
All the people who can comprehend, analyze, and make new technologies, aren’t they the ones keeping society going? Aren’t the ones who make the very things we use, who can translate scientific principles into complex equations...aren’t they somehow doing the real shit? — schopenhauer1
What they do is impressive. Whether it's the real shit is a matter of opinion. Some of them probably think so. And I respect them and work in that field myself. Is the inventor better than a great actor or doctor or reliable auto mechanic? I don't think so. An actor is as concerned with the details as an engineer. The difference is that success is more ambiguous in the aesthetic realm. Those who are paid well and admired in their own lifetime in the aesthetic realm are probably higher on the hog than a respectable but mediocre engineer. I don't see how it goes any deeper than that, though others might. — old
Nothing matters more than a mathematically derived formula that “works” in predicting a physical event or creating a useful technology. You can put that on a t-shirt! — schopenhauer1
Recently I read Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, which is pretty great. — old
The gent scholar types want to think that understanding principles of science, and applications in technology provide some inherent meaning. — schopenhauer1
It spooks me out to see these adults fawning about the beauty of the cosmos as if it "speaks" to them (through the "poetry of math" or some stupid shit like that), or has "secrets" that we must discover, or that only a select few "intellectuals" can truly understand what it all means. Did not the mystics believe that God spoke to them, that God held the all-important secrets, and that some truths were esoteric and hidden from the masses? — darthbarracuda
After all, has the world ever been more crammed with opinion, opinion, opinion? Some 'metaphysically' minded science types may indeed wax poetic, but maybe a taste for facts as opposed to interpretation is more important here. The personality I have in mind and relate to no longer bothers with grand, vague narratives that can be debated endlessly. Why does it all mean? Don't know. Prolly nothin'. Let's build something cool. — old
In light of that, I think your analysis is actually off the mark, because the ‘gentlemen scientists’ of the modern epoch proclaimed loudly and often that the universe revealed by science was actually quite devoid of meaning, and that whatever meaning we might seek and find, was surely of the individual’s own devising. Of course, even today scientific intellectuals speak of the awe of the vistas that science delivers us, but the underlying sensibility is worlds apart from the grand tradition of philosophy. There, causation was understood as strictly ‘top-down’, and the attraction of mathematics and reason was the insights they provided into the incorruptible realm of the perfect Ideas. So whilst Platonism admired mathematics, it never depicted mathematical knowledge (dianoia) as the ultimate, but only a pointer towards the even higher truths of noesis. (My spell checker wanted to change ‘noesis’ to ‘onesies’, a type of pyjama, which is kind of like a cyber-Freudian slip. :-) )
But I do agree with your analysis of the subordination of science to ‘what works’. — Wayfarer
Indeed this is very close to what I'm getting at. The de facto nature of being able to DO the hard maths and science that WORKS being deemed as superior and more meaningful in its default nature of de facto WORKING. — schopenhauer1
The actual DOING and KNOWING fully of what one is doing in hard-to-grasp concepts that are mastered and used to create new technologies or contribute to the research that can then be applied or used for predictive purposes- that is something these people will offer. They will by default win by the de facto nature of the ability to create things which "work", and are governed by principles that cannot be argued due to the fact that they in fact do work as technology. If I wax on about Schopenhauer, and fdrake waxes on about equations of probabilities that actually map to processes of entropy, and he can back this up with equations that "work", his is the superior topic by default.. at least to a cadre of people who may judge what is meaningful. — schopenhauer1
You can have Plato or Crowley or Icke or Buddha or Schopenhauer or Peterson or Wittgenstein or... On other shelves there are machines that work whether you believe they work or not. They promise less but deliver what they promise to all consumers. People still prefer their Plato or Jesus or Trump or Warren to gadgets, but they all meet in their need for the gadgets, which they can then use to broadcast the superiority of their spiritual products on social media. — old
From this perspective, the 'equations that work' are superior in a practical context to religious/philosophical musings. I probably don't care about my electrician's religion or philosophy. That's not what he's selling. Technology has a kind of independence from philosophy and religion that's being neglected here. On the other hand, if you are some other metaphysician tell me exactly what I need to hear to feel at home in the world, I and other consumers/voters might make you rich or elect your president. Maybe we'll even drink poison to catch a ride on a UFO. — old
The internet, the product, the device, the software, the hardware, and all that surrounds it to make it come about. THAT is what matters. Everything else is just noise. — schopenhauer1
Aren't you forgetting what people use that stuff for? To surf porn, watch Peterson videos, see how Game of Thrones ends, or argue politics? Customized horoscopes, conspiracy theory videos, life hacks, interviews with rappers, funny sermons from John Oliver.
Speaking loosely, science is not the truths that people want. It's the truths that get in the way of what they want. It's the annoying truths that they have to deal with either directly or by paying someone to do so. What they want is poetic theories of everything made of words that guarantee them cosmic justice, an afterlife, the correctness or superiority of their values and politics, a deep explanation of why we're here and not just a description useful for prediction and control. And they also just want to be entertained with a good story, laugh at a good comedian, enjoy a song and dance from a pop star in his or her underwear. — old
Riemann is constraining his discussion to metrics, means of measuring distances in continuous manifoldnesses, which ascribe distances independent of the location on the manifoldness. Note that this is a way of assigning a notion of size to a notion of geometry, rather than measuring a specific shape. This notion is what sets up the meaning of length in a geometry, rather than an instance of measuring any particular distance within it. To be sure, objects (sub-manifoldnesses, neighbhourhoods etc) will have their sizes expressible through this notion of size, but the notion of size itself is a characteriser of the geometry rather than of any particular shape.
When you say the length of lines is independent of their position, what this means is that the distance notion applies the same everywhere in the space - there are no partitions acting on the size notion that create regions of distinct size ascriptions. To make this clear, consider two notions of interpoint distances in our usual 1 dimensional Cartesian coordinates, the real line:
(A):d(x,y)=(x−y)2−−−−−−−√(A):d(x,y)=(x−y)2
the usual distance notion
and:
(B):d2(x,y)={0↔x2+y2<1d2(x,y)=d(x,y)↔x2+y2≥1(B):d2(x,y)={0↔x2+y2<1d2(x,y)=d(x,y)↔x2+y2≥1
(A) computes the distance between the number 2 and the number 1, d(2,1) by sqrt (2-1)^2 = sqrt(1)=1, which is the usual distance between the numbers, and behaves exactly the same over the entire real line. (B) computes distances as 0 if x^2+y^2<1, and computes them exactly as in (A) if x^2 + y^2 is greater than or equal to 1. The picture here is that if we pick two numbers x,y that give a coordinate within the unit circle centred at the origin in the plane, the distance between them is 0, if we pick two numbers that give a coordinate outside of the unit circle, the distance between them is the usual distance on the real line. (A) is a metric in which the size of a line is independent of the position, (B) is a metric in which the size of a line is dependent upon the position.errata.
However, the distinction between this 'global sense' of the metric is that (A) operates on the entire embedding space whereas what Riemann's after is a localised version. In order to set up this localised version, however, we still need to have a localised coordinate system (n-ply extended magnitude) of appropriate dimension for the manifold (of n dimensions). — fdrake
Yes but that's what makes these guys superior. I call it "minutia-mongering". Those who not only tolerate, but REVEL in complex mathematical formulas, theories, and applicable functions of physical materials. These are ones doing the superior things. All else is blather and noise. — schopenhauer1
You presenting a position that is not your own, correct? — old
I think it's safe to say that religious people value their religion more than science and therefore give their religious authorities a higher status than physicists or instance. It's only a certain kind of a philosopher (something like a positivists or a pragmatist) who wants to dismiss non-science as 'blather and noise.' Or that's how it looks to me. I am open to correction. — old
But the pragmatist-scientist would say just kind of have an amused mild laugh and roll their eyes.. — schopenhauer1
At the end of the day, religion doesn't make the human world do anything outside of extremists and/or ways to alleviate boredom with the mundaneness of modern life. Rather, THEY are the ones who are deriving useful equations and concepts from the universe and applying it such that humans can use it to their wants and needs (through avenues of commerce and trade of course!). Look at extremist Islamic terrorism.. For all their talk about going back to the 600s, they use modern technological means to achieve it. Hypocrites to say the least. But that is the way technology dominates human pursuits. It is ready-at-hand, and people will take every opportunity to use it. — schopenhauer1
A certain amount of identity-bolstering blather seems to be an important part of a balanced intellectual diet. Some kind of philosophical scaffolding seems necessary. An anti-religion is still a religion, that sort of thing. — old
But that's the thing! The minutia-mongerer doesn't care (or need!) intellectual underpinnings. Their formulas and applications speak for themselves. That is what moves the world. That is actually doing the work. The printing press, not the content in them (unless it's about building things like printing presses). That is the useful stuff! — schopenhauer1
The tech people (in this context) are those who make millions selling shovels during a gold rush. Let others dig for Truth. The truth is that digging for Truth requires a shovel. — old
Yes, that is it. When you want to talk about "big boy" things, you talk about the "work" you do. — schopenhauer1
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