Did it work?

In my humble opinion it's math following nature and not nature following math, non? Math is a description. Not an explanation. The velocity of a falling stone doesn't increase linearly with time, v=at+c, because that follows from F=ma, but the formula follows because of the way the stone falls.

Sure, one can start in the middle, as usually happens. Then what? Depends on what the objective is, I suppose.

Sure, one can start in the middle, as usually happens. Then what? Depends on what the objective is, I suppose — Mww

I started out with free will and determinism, trying to understand why they're both correct, but opposing.

Or I started out with potential and actual.

Or beginning and end.

Or top and bottom. That was actually my first one. Which was your first one?

If that's the quality of reply you're reaching for just a few posts in we'll leave it there. — Isaac

But the moment you claim - the rule is "all balls hitting the line are declared out", you're no longer demonstrating an understanding of the rule, you're declaring a belief of your about the rule. — Isaac

If the ball lands outside the designated lines, it is called out and the player who last hit the ball loses the point. There is nothing more to understand about the rule.

There are two possibilities here; either you are talking crap, or what you say is true but beyond my comprehension. If the discussion was about QM, I would probably concede the latter. In either case, and in different senses, what you have been saying would be, for me, an embarrassing load of crap.

I'd measure in the same way that curvature is normally measured, classically, relative to a central point. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, that will work if you live in a flat world. But the flatness of the world itself is what we want to check here.

You missed Quine and Kripke.

There is nothing more to understand about the rule. — Janus

Well, that's not quite right.

There's that the ball was shit by a racquet comprised of a handle, a frame, and strings that are bound in a crisscross weaving pattern. A racquet’s frame should not exceed 32 inches in length, with a handle no longer than 12.5 inches in width, and a surface no more than 15.5 inches in overall length or 11.5 inches in width. There can also be no objects or devices on the racquet except for ones that prevent vibration and wear and tear...

And that the tennis ball is white or yellow in colour for tournaments, with measurements of 2-1/2 to 2-5/8 inches in diameter and weighing anywhere from 2 to 2-1/16 ounces. The elasticity of the ball and the uniform outer surface are also determined by approved specifications...

There's that this all takes place in a marked space, as follows:
Baseline – The baselines are the lines on either end of the court that determines the boundaries of play going lengthwise. They are also where a player serves behind.
Center Mark – The center mark determines the two halves of the tennis court. It mainly helps with service to determine where a player should stand prior to serving.
Center Line – The center line divides the two service boxes into a distinct left service box and right service box on either side of the court. Landing a serve on the line is considered good.
Net – The net stands 3 feet and 6 inches high where the posts lie while the middle of the net is 3 feet tall, with the posts 3 feet outside of the court on either side. Hitting a ball into the net is considered an out while any ball that hits the net cord and falls onto the other side is considered good except for a serve, which allows for a re-do, or let.
Service Line – The service line separates the forecourt from the back court, and it also marks the length of the service box.
Singles Sideline – The singles sideline is the innermost line running lengthwise and determines the boundary of play for singles matches as well as the width of the service box.
Doubles Sideline – The doubles sideline is the outermost line running lengthwise and is only used in doubles matches...

Also,

A ball must land within bounds for play to continue; if a player hits the ball outside of bounds, this results in the loss of the point for them.
Players/teams cannot touch the net or posts or cross onto the opponent’s side.
Players/teams cannot carry the ball or catch it with the racquet.
Players cannot hit the ball twice.
Players must wait until the ball passes the net before they can return it.
A player that does not return a live ball before it bounces twice loses the point.
If the ball hits or touches the players, that counts as a penalty.
If the racquet leaves the hand or verbal abuse occurs, a penalty is given.
A serve must bounce first before the receiving player can return it.

And so on. It's a form of life, if you like; and the rule for "out" only has a use within that form of life.

Oh, and oddly, the site I am reading says "Any ball that bounces on the lines of boundary are considered good".

What's the relevance of al this to the OP? Have a read of the Anscombe article mentioned therein. Logical necessity and physical causation are also "forms of life".

I started out with potential and actual. (...) Which was your first one? — frank

For me, sheer interest. Nothing more or less. Simply put.....how do I know stuff. What explains how I know stuff. What is the knowing of stuff? Any fool can learn practically anything, given enough time, which I was already pretty good at, but....what happens between my ears that explains how that happens to me?

Simple, really.

Sure, that will work in you live in a flat world. But the flatness of the world itself is what we want to check here. — apokrisis

No, that technique I described definitely would not work in a flat world, because the thing being measured is assumed to be curved. The curve is what is being measured. Only the measuring tool, the ideal, is flat or straight, not the curve which is being measured with the use of the straight lines and angles.

And, the flatness of the world is clearly not what we want to check, (unless you give credence to the flat earthers), because we already know that the world is not flat. We've come way beyond this assumption of flatness in the world, so there is no need to check it. We know that flatness is an ideal only. Yet flat, or straight measuring devices, and flat or straight ideals, like vectors, are still very useful. We just need to know the proper techniques of application, to apply straight measurement principles to a curved world, and how to compensate if a real world measurement instrument, turns out to be not as straight as it was thought to be.

Oh lordy! Once you get set to digging yourself a hole, you never give up on the project, do you? :up:

You say that a lot. — Wayfarer

Yep.

[thread successfully re-colonised by plain language theorist] — Wayfarer

Indeed; a brief respite from nonsense.

more like, a return to the quotidian.

quotidian — Wayfarer

As it should be.

"quotidian" is a cool word. You've used it a few times recently. Nice.

Perhaps you might comment on the Anscombe article? You listed it, so I presume you found it interesting? I think it shakes the obtuse Kantian notions out of their high perch. But it is in the end, quite literally, a criticism of Davidson, in whom I am well-pleased. I have not been able to reconcile to two.

But such nuance is lost in the background noise from the likes of the bread-maker in this forum.:wink:

"quotidian" is a cool word. You've used it a few times recently. Nice.

Perhaps you might comment on the Anscombe article? — Banno

It was a forum nickname of mine on some other forums. Always was a word I liked.

I read the Anscombe article before I posted it. I didn't think it really nailed the central issue but she certainly discusses it. I think the relationships between determination and causation are interesting, and also that she at least acknowledges the influence of non-determinism in contemporary physics.

But I should own up to the original impulse behind my interest in this question. I'm interested in the argument from reason - something Anscombe also commented on in her response to C S Lewis. The argument from reason is essentially that reason itself is built on the foundation of valid inferences, and that valid inferences are not susceptible to naturalistic explanations; or rather, if they can be explained in terms of natural causes, then this explanation undermines the sovereignity of reason.

And if indeed physical causation and logical necessity operate for the most part in separate domains then this is an argument against neural reductionism. After all, neural reductionists, of whom there are always plenty on this forum, will always claim that thinking is reducible to or caused by the brain, as if this is a strong argument for physicalism. But if logical necessity is separable from physical causation, then this claim can't be maintained. A logical inference is, in very simple terms, "that if this is the case, than that must be so". And here the 'must' is that of logical necessity. But that has to stand on its own right. It can't be said to be 'caused by or 'dependent on' some configuration of neural matter, because to do so is a conflation between physical causation and logical necessity. It is ascribing to the (presumably physical) causal chains operating in the brain a level of abstraction and generality which properly only pertains to the domain of logic.

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel

Oh lordy! Once you get set to digging yourself a hole, you never give up on the project, do you? — apokrisis

I'll dig as deep as necessary, until you recognize your mistakes. And from my experience, that will be very deep.

Always was a word I liked. — Wayfarer

I like the word "Uzbekistan".

C. S. Lewis?! Ah, another gem of which I was unaware. Now I have to find out more. Thank you. At first blush your account of Anscombe's comments on rationality sounds off - not what I would expect form her.

Let me have a read.

But I doubt you'd like the place. The Anscombe-Lewis debate was the former's criticism of the latter's presentation of the Argument from Reason. You'll find a detailed account here.

That wasn't my account of what Anscombe said, it is my paraphrase of the import of the argument from reason, followed by a supporting quote from Nagel about the same topic. I would be dissappointed if it went by you.

And if indeed physical causation and logical necessity operate for the most part in separate domains then this is an argument against neural reductionism. After all, neural reductionists, of whom there are always plenty on this forum, will always claim that thinking is reducible to or caused by the brain, as if this is a strong argument for physicalism. But if logical necessity is separable from physical causation, then this claim can't be maintained. — Wayfarer

Well stated. The key here is that logical necessity is about rule-following or syntax. And that puts it in a tricky place regarding semantics. It leaves the business of interpretation in limbo.

And then physical causation might be modelled by us in terms of laws - the syntax of differential equations - yet what we really mean by those laws is that the world is structured by sets of constraints.

Constraints are quite different from rules. A constraint is a limit on uncertainty and hence only a relative thing. It is not a prohibition on uncertainty - which is what logical necessity would want to claim.

So if you are imagining the world as organised by constraints rather than rules, it is easy to see why indeterminism or local degrees of freedom might exist - indeed, must exist. If possibility is merely limited, then anything which is not being restricted is left free to happen. And that is why the Cosmos contains both structure and accident. If someone frames some "rules" then now everyone else knows "how to break them".

Thus there is a mirror confusion created by having these two notions of logical syntax and material constraint.

The logicist begs the question of how rules are interpreted - how the electron knows to follow the Maxwell equation. As an ontology, logical necessity seems to demand a faux agent. And this is where artificial intelligence gets itself in trouble. It is indeed why machines wouldn't seem capable of consciousness.

But material constraint then needs to be reduced to the simpler description that differential equations and the mechanical conception of nature offers.

The cosmos is a material structure that had to evolve its habits through some self-stabilising history of dissipation. It became "lawful" as the result of a complex and holistic process of development. To model such a world, we must break it down into some simple epistemic system of rules and measurements - differential equations that we "bring alive" by plugging in variables.

The world is reduced to a computation. And that is useful. It is the most efficient view - the one which discards the most information by simply ignoring all the messy historical development that made the Cosmos what it is.

So you do have this clash of ontologies - the logicist push rules, the materialist pushing constraints.

And then when you get to talking about organisms - creatures with life and mind - then you have the further thing of them being in fact world modelling systems. They exist by applying a mechanical approach to the holism of a physico-chemical realm that operates purely by material constraints.

Thus the two stories combine in the organism. We get the actual semiosis of a material system being organised by its concept of logical rule following. We get physical systems that interact with their worlds by using syntactic mechanism - codes like genes, neurons, words, numbers - and indeed gaining agency as that semiotic interaction is, holistically, a state of interpretance.

Oh, I wouldn't want to go there. I just like the word. Nice mosques, though, I hear.

I'm looking at This.

Odd, that I should have been unaware of this discussion. Or did I just forget about it? Memory. SO fickle.

I don't see a source for Anscombe's reply to Miracles, outside her collected writings.

I'll dig as deep as necessary, until you recognize your mistakes. And from my experience, that will be very deep. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sounds like a plan. :clap:

Thus the two stories combine in the organism. We get the actual semiosis of a material system being organised by its concept of logical rule following. We get physical systems that interact with their worlds by using syntactic mechanism - codes like genes, neurons, words, numbers - and indeed gaining agency as that semiotic interaction is, holistically, a state of interpretance. — apokrisis

:clap: (You should have a look at this week's edition of PBS Spacetime. Excellent presentation on Wheeler's participatory universe. )

The cosmos is a material structure — apokrisis

You mean, the 4% of it that we can account for.

Sounds like a plan. — apokrisis

There's method to the madness.

There's method to the madness. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not really if you simply confirm what I argue while denying you confirm what I argue.

We just need to know the proper techniques of application, to apply straight measurement principles to a curved world, and how to compensate if a real world measurement instrument, turns out to be not as straight as it was thought to be. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. That’s fine up until the point where you fail to deal with how we measure the measuring device.

That is where it all comes back to defining a reciprocal relation between bounding extremes.

The example I suggested you look at was hyperbolic geometry where the dichotomy of angle-line is replaced by the more general non-Euclidean dichotomy of spread-quandrance.

You have to go up a level of abstraction or idealisation to see a world in which line and curve are fixed in mutually relative terms.

We are no longer talking about just this line vs that curve in a flat metric. We are talking about the flatness vs curvature of the embedding metric itself.

This takes us beyond Galilean relativity to General relativity. Beyond first degree idealisation to a higher level of ideality.

So quit digging and start climbing. The view is better.

Matt is great. But not had time to catch up on that one yet.

G. E. M. Anscombe’s Reply to C. S. Lewis’s Argument that “Naturalism” is Self-Refuting
https://matiane.wordpress.com/2020/10/01/g-e-m-anscombes-reply-to-c-s-lewiss-argument-that-naturalism-is-self-refuting/

As far as I can tell, nature seems to follow mathematically describable laws. I think you've got it back to front!

You mean, the 4% of it that we can account for. — Wayfarer

The dark matter can be black holes. Dark energy is no matter or energy at all. It's empty spacetime itself that has inherent negative curvature. If matter is confined to three spatial dimensions, and if these three dimensions are embedded in a negatively curved 4d space, the matter in the 3d space will accelerate away from each other. Repulsive gravity.

As far as I can tell, nature seems to follow mathematically describable laws. I think you've got it back to front! — Agent Smith

In my humble opinion, that's a matter of taste. Does the thrown stone follow the parabola or the parabola the stone? What comes first, the parabola or the trajectory?