will be listening for the god story, looking for a clue to something profound. Hint: I don't think they made us. Nor did we make them. It is a conspiracy and we are both in on it — Constance
What if someone theorized in a way that violated the principle of causality? Putting aside that someone has in fact done this, ask your self how well this sits with your understanding. It is a blatant absurdity, apodictically impossible. — Constance
To know at all is to take up the world AS this knowledge claim is expressed. Taken APART from the knowledge claim, pure metaphysics. The cup on the table, e.g. is qua cup, a cup, but qua a palpable presence not a cup at all. — Constance
Of course. But we also have to condition the subject, i.e, us. There is no such thing as "an observation". Thats already a theoretical claim. How and what we observe is not theory-laden but a theory, a story on its own. Space can have an objective existence, like the bending of it. A bend space(time) is a physical reality. The GW hunters at LIGO don't wanna chase metaphysical ghosts! — EugeneW
Well, they made the universe, with all life evolving in it. I don't think we made them.
You mean it's a conspiracy that both the gods and life are involved in? — EugeneW
In 1912, Bertrand Russell wrote "On the Notion of Cause" in which he makes the argument that causation is not a useful way of thinking about the world. In 1943, R.G. Collingwood wrote "An Essay on Metaphysics" in which he wrote something similar. My point? It is not "absurdity" to deny the principle of causality. — T Clark
To know at all is to take up the world AS this knowledge claim is expressed. Taken APART from the knowledge claim, pure metaphysics. The cup on the table, e.g. is qua cup, a cup, but qua a palpable presence not a cup at all.
— Constance
I don't know what this means. More evidence you and I do not have the language to talk to each other about this. — T Clark
That's a questionable assumption... — EugeneW
You can't bend space like a stick. You bend it with mass. — EugeneW
Is bending curving? Space can have curvature. The metric can change. — EugeneW
Much, no, most that we casually understand has to be dismissed. — Constance
space cannot move unless it moves In something else. — Constance
Casually yes. Non-casually, after deep contemplation ("out yonder, is this huge world, which exists, independently of us human beings, and which stands before us, like a great eternal riddle; the contemplation of beckons, like a liberation"), no. — EugeneW
Space dont move. Only the objects in it. It can expand or contract but has no speed. The metric is the just the metric of GR. — EugeneW
But this is just what I say space cannot have. Try to conceive of something bending without a medium in which something can bend. — Constance
A building contains far more materials than the "blueprints, scaffolding and tools" (logic) used to build it. If your point is that, by analogy, "a map of the territory" (concept) does not exhaust the territory (object), I agree; but that does not mean that the latter is occluded or "falsified" by the former, only that one is (narrowly) interested in the latter (object) at a given moment in terms consistent with the former (concept). An astronomer, as you mention, does not project his "observational protocols and astronomical models" onto the stars anymore than wearing glasses with corrective lenses "corrects" whatever lies in the wearer's visual field. Logic, IME, is simply a way of seeing, so to speak, commensurable (to varying degrees) with the ways nature shows itself to itself (e.g. its 'intelligent' participants); this is so because, it seems, whatever else nature is, it is also logical (i.e. structurally consistent ~ computable (though, I think, not 'totalizable')). — 180 Proof
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