ahem....philosophy forum..... :angry: — Wayfarer
Kant is now classified as a German Idealist, who trafficked in transcendental notions & a priori concepts. — Gnomon
Physicists just take Laws & Constants for granted, without further explanation. — Gnomon
The Buddha always told his disciples not to waste their time and energy in metaphysical speculation. — Gnomon
Ain't this the place? — Haglund
There's nothing inherently the matter with that. It's only since science popularises like Krauss and Dawkins started to claim that science somehow 'disproves' God that natural science has itself started to be taken as a metaphysics. — Wayfarer
Every particle process can be explained. Proton decay is easy. The basic group is SU(3)XSU(3)XU(1). — Haglund
But isn’t that what we would say about the running of a computer program?
So it is the other way around. The problem is the need to amend the usual notion of material cause so that it ain’t so robotically determined. — apokrisis
Bear in mind that the Cosmos exists to serve the second law and thus its aim is to maximise entropy. So even without the inherent quantum uncertainty, the Cosmos is committed to the production of uncertainty at every turn. — apokrisis
I'm sure nobody here other than yourself and Apo would know what a 'preon' is (or a Mexican hat, for that matter :roll: ) — Wayfarer
That's the point. The preon model isn't even considered. — Haglund
The muon's magnetic moment is larger than thought. Which happens if three charges circulate wider. — Haglund
I'm sure nobody here other than yourself and Apo would know what a 'preon' is (or a Mexican hat, for that matter — Wayfarer
The noumenal is not. The very term ‘noumenal’ is a ‘phenomenal’ (both technically and literally!). — I like sushi
Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is the way to refer to the absence of something somewhere not nothing nowhere (because that is meaningless drivel much like ‘potato on yellow under the is and but of it one two trousers’) — I like sushi
Is reality little atomistic lumps of matter in motion or instead a mathematics of structure and relation? — apokrisis
You tell me. I don't claim to understand what the superstrong force might be, let alone how it could apparently lack the essential strong force feature of asymptotic freedom — apokrisis
but there's a difference between discussing the philosophical implications of physics, and the kinds of debates going on inside physics, which are pretty well by definition only intelligible to those trained in it. — Wayfarer
Where do you see me using math? — Haglund
Would it be possible, though, to unpack "the philosophical implications of physics", without understanding "the debates going on within physics"? — Janus
It's not a matter of using maths explicitly, but that most of the concepts in mathematical physics require a grasp of the maths in order to understand. The concept of the Hilbert space can't be understood except through the mathematics. So it's not that there's anything 'wrong' with them, only that unless you have that training, then it's not intelligible — Wayfarer
I'm not clear on what you're saying; can you explain? I wasn't asserting the idea of strict determinism, just outlining it, and pointing out that there is no logical contradiction in the idea that it doesn't obtain. — Janus
How do we know that this is not just the way it appears to us, time-bound creatures that we are? — Janus
Also why could entropy not also obtain under the dominion of strict determinism wherein the only uncertainty would be epistemic? — Janus
But as physics moved from Europe to the USA and increasingly under the patronage of the military-industrial complex then it became much more a matter of shut up and calculate — Wayfarer
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